Even though she said, “I’m not a shallow person,” her pout turned into a small smile at the idea of bedding a cut and shredded husband once again.
“I know you’re not.” He nodded in agreement. “And this will be the last time.”
“No matter what happens?”
“No matter what. Partly because I’m getting too old and partly because, if we can’t find a way to get the problem under control, it’s the end of the world anyhow.”
“Wow. Don’t sugarcoat it.”
“Never do.”
“Are you exaggerating to get me to give in easily?”
“Wish I was.”
“You really have to?”
“I don’t have to. I need to.”
“I’ll kill you if you get hurt.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me, too.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Right after I exhaust you with mindbending coitus so that you can’t help but think about me while I’m gone.”
She grinned. “I’ll put on some music.”
He fake groaned, but didn’t try to hide his smile knowing that their lovemaking would be driven by the hard four-four beat of eighties club disco.
When B Team reassembled at Jefferson Unit outside Glen’s office, Litha materialized next to them. Storm opened his mouth to ask what was up, but closed it when he realized she was there to see Elora.
“You’d better make sure nothing happens to him.”
“I’m not with him every minute, Litha,” she said. “Kay is his partner.”
“Well, maybe it’s time to shake things up.” She turned to Storm and Kay. “You two have been partners long enough.”
Kay looked at Storm who, once again, opened his mouth. Since he couldn’t settle on something to say, he closed it again.
“Paddy,” Ram said, looking away and shaking his head.
Turning back to Elora, Litha continued, “Work it out however you want. Just make sure this doesn’t end badly.”
Elora didn’t want to make light of Litha’s fear. She related to it completely. After all, fear for her mate was the biggest part of the reason why she was back at Jefferson Unit looking at the duty roster.
“Don’t worry,” Elora told her best friend quietly. “We got this.”
Litha’s shoulders slumped. She took another long look at Storm then disappeared.
The four teammates looked at each other after Litha had gone. Twice before they’d thought they were retiring only to be brought back for some save-the-world reunion. They’d put in their time and were generously compensated for the risk, the scars, the near misses. They had enough money to devote the next chapter of their lives to raising families, watching sunsets, wearing Hawaiian shirts and flip flops or whatever else would make retirement enjoyable.
They each knew that within a week they’d fall into routine and the time they’d spent away from Jefferson Unit would start to feel like a dream that hadn’t really happened.
“You ever wonder if we’re really gonna make it out alive?” Kay mused.
“That what you told Katrina?” Storm said.
Kay looked grim when he chuckled. The juxtaposition of those two emotions was odd, but every one of them related. “I had to lie like linoleum tile. Told her there was zero chance I wouldn’t be back.”
Storm was staring at the duty roster when he said, “Did it ever occur to you that they made dupes out of us?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Elora said.
Storm looked at her. “Not you. You’ve got your own reasons and I’m betting they’re firmly couched in feminine practicality. Protect your man. Right?” She gave away that he was right on target by glancing at Ram. “Yeah. Of course, I’m right. But the three of us? They submersed us in the culture of duty and honor to the point where now all they have to do is wave it in front of us and we come running like…”
“Pavlov’s dogs,” Ram said.
Storm nodded.
After a brief silence, Elora said, “But it’s not like they’re making it up. The crisis, I mean. It’s not like you’re not really needed.”
“No,” Storm said. “I’m sure the crisis is real, but I’m beginning to wonder if there won’t always be a real crisis. Some catastrophe that can only be held at bay by us.”
A deep gravelly voice came from somewhere behind them. “You think you’ve got it bad? They’re using me as a sub.” Rev said it like it was a dirty word.
“Did your voice get deeper since the last time I was here?” Elora asked.
“My voice is my voice,” he said.
“Um, no, it’s not. You sound more like…” she began.
“Whatever.” He cut her off. “Somebody gets sick? I have to partner up with some kid I don’t even know.”
“Paddy. That’s tough,” Ram acknowledged.
Storm laughed. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of feeling pity for his sorry ass. Did he ever feel bad for you when he was Sovereign?” Storm held up his hand. “Don’t bother to reply. I can tell you the answer is no. He was a tough, heartless old son-of-a-bitch and I’ll bet dimes to dollars nothing’s changed.”
“Sorry, man. He’s right,” Kay said. “You’re not getting any sympathy here.”
“But you can get a drink with us if you want,” Ram offered.
Rev shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
They started toward the elevator, but Glen poked his head out of his offices and stopped them before they’d gone far.
“Rev, you’re up tonight. Westmoreland’s pulled a hamstring.”
“See what I mean?” Rev said.
“You’re with F Team. Whisterpad in fifteen minutes,” Glen clipped.
“That kid acts like a tyrant,” Rev grumbled.
There may not have been a lot to laugh at in that particular moment. The world was being taken over by vampire, and retirement had been put on hold for a second time, but Rev calling a Sovereign a tyrant was laughable under any circumstances. So they laughed as he walked away.
“I can’t go for a drink anyhow,” Kay said.
“Why no’?” Ram asked.
Kay slapped his stomach with the flat of his palm. “Got to hit the gym. I’m not in good enough shape to run down biters.”
Kay watched his teammates’ eyes lower and settle on his belly.
“Is that chicken fried steak with cream gravy I’m looking at?” Storm asked.
Kay smiled unapologetically. “Oh, yeah. Along with enchiladas, cheeseburgers and enough French fries to make me a happy man.”
“And a tubby man,” Storm said.
“You’re gonna hurt my feelings, partner.”
Storm looked at Ram and Elora. “I’m going to go oversee getting him into some kind of decent shape. I can’t have a partner who looks like the Pilsbury Dough Boy.”
“Hey!” Kay said.
Ram nodded. “Just as well. We’ll be at dinner tonight.”
Elora poked her head in Glen’s office. “Got time to play frisbee with Blackie?”
Glen snorted. “I wish. Tell him to pencil me in for Sunday.”
“You got it, boss.” She gave Glen a smile and a wink before she and Ram left to go spend the rest of the day with Helm, Aelshee, Aelmaev, and Blackie.
An hour later Wakey was standing in front of Glen’s desk. “You don’t understand. I can’t just cancel with this girl. She’s not the kind to give me more than one chance.”
Glen raised an eyebrow. “She’s not the kind to give you more than one chance? Do you hear yourself? You think that speaks well of her?”
Wakey barked out a laugh. “I’m not interested in speaking well of her. I’m interested in separating her from her panties. Come on. If you saw her, you’d never think of suggesting that I break this date. You should see her. She’s in an altogether different league of hotness.”
“We’re down a pilot and we need all Whisters shuttling back and forth. Sorry, but you’re goi
ng to have to pull double duty.”
“On what planet is that fair, Sovereign? And what’s the matter with Falcon?”
“It’s your turn. He filled in last time.”
“The Whister punishment is never ending, isn’t it?”
Glen cocked his head. “You’d throw your partner under the train for meaningless pussy?”
Wakenmann’s eyes went wide as he looked at Glen like he was crazy. “Hel yes! And for the record, no pussy is meaningless. It’s disrespectful to women everywhere for you to suggest such a thing and I’m deeply ashamed of you.”
“Right.” Without taking his eyes off Wakenmann, Glen pulled Falcon up in his contacts list and speed dialed him. When Falcon answered, he said, “I’m down a pilot. It’s your partner’s turn to stand in, but he has a date with meaningful pussy. So what do you say? Do you want to fly for him tonight?”
Wakey could hear Falcon laughing on the phone from across the room.
“That’s what I thought.” Glen ended the call and looked at the door pointedly. Wakey stomped away, making a show of displeasure that would rival the acting skills of Sir Lawrence Olivier. “And close the door behind you.” Just as Wakey was getting ready to slam the door so hard it would shake the building, Glen added, “Gently.”
Glen indulged in a deep sigh and wondered, for just a second, if he was growing lax. Perhaps ruling with an iron fist, as Sol Nememiah had, was the better choice. As he looked up at the map of Manhattan, his mood returned to dismal. He promised himself that he would revisit reflections on management style when there wasn’t a crisis afoot.
K Team stood waiting for cleanup. Sin and Spaz both looked like they’d been in a massacre because they’d staked two suckers who’d recently fed. The effect was exactly like popping a tick, except a thousand times worse. Blood went everywhere.
They were both good shots and could have taken the vampire out with green wood core bullets, if they’d had the chance, but those chances were rare. Mostly because of the stipulation that targets had to be confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt. Confirming that targets were vampire usually meant getting close. That in turn meant that, by the time judgment was conclusive, it was often too late to draw, remove safety, afix silencer, aim, and fire.
Spaz looked at Falcon and Wakey. “We can’t walk around like this. We’re not exactly inconspicuous.”
“Go ahead and get a ride with cleanup,” Falcon said. “We’ll call it in.”
Falcon dialed Glen. It was three a.m. Rosie groaned and turned over when his phone started buzzing.
He reached for it in the dark. “Yeah?” he said.
“It’s Falcon. Spaz and Sin were splotched. They hitched a ride back with cleanup. We’ll finish our shift and then head back.”
Glen stood up and walked out of the bedroom naked, closing the door behind him. “No. You will not finish your shift. Unless you have another team in sight.”
“We saw B Team a half hour ago. Five blocks over.”
“Stay there. I’ll call you back.”
Glen texted Storm.
Glen: Half of K Team adrift. Falcon and Wakenmann in your area. Confirm location.
Storm: 40th and 7th.
Glen: Stay there. You’ll be six tonight. Incoming ten minutes.
Storm: K.
Glen texted Falcon.
Glen: Meet B Team 40th and 7th ten minutes.
Falcon: Got it.
Glen tried not to wake Rosie when he crawled back into bed, but she was wasn’t asleep. She wiggled next to him until she’d found the exact right snuggle position then sighed. “You ever going to get a whole night’s sleep again?”
“Sure,” he whispered. “Just as soon as all the vamps are dispatched. We’ll throw the phone away, go to Paris, and spend the rest of our lives making love and dancing the tango by the Seine.”
Her chuckle was interrupted by a yawn. “I could do that for you. I think. Maybe. Get rid of the vamps.”
Glen’s concern wasn’t that she couldn’t do it. His concern was that she just might do it with unintended and unforeseen consequences that could unravel the very fabric of reality. Every reality in every dimension on every planet in every system in the universe.
He sighed. “You know what Kellareal said about that.”
“I know. But maybe he doesn’t know everything.”
“I’m not willing to take the chance. Are you?”
She was quiet for a while. “Depends on how long this goes on. If it starts to look like it couldn’t get worse…” She kissed the soft part of his shoulder. “There’s a certain appeal to your lifestyle alternatives. Paris…” She said it in a way that made it sound dreamy.
“Rosie, promise me that you won’t do anything drastic without talking it out with me.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I know!”
She agreed, but he didn’t think she sounded wholly convinced that doing nothing was the right thing and that worried him. Kellareal had told him that he was sleeping with the entity who could be the trigger for universal armageddon.
She certainly didn’t look like a goddess of chaos, at least not to Glen. And most of the time she didn’t act like one, but naturally it was always on his mind. That angel had laid part of the responsibility for the future of creation squarely on his shoulders.
As Ram would say, Great Paddy.
In addition to running Jefferson Unit during the worst epidemic of vampire activity in the history of The Order, he had to make sure that his bride’s absolute power wasn’t corrupted absolutely or even partially.
CHAPTER THREE
Jaxon became a vampire almost two hundred years before The Order was founded one cold and rainy night on the banks of a German lake that was famous for its population of black swans. Count Jungbluth and Dankvart der Recke set out to eradicate the monsters known as vampire from the face of the Earth. They didn’t suspect that there was another kind of vampire living in alternate dimensions, highly evolved immortals who couldn’t be more different from the enemy of the Count and the traveler who came to his door in the dark of night.
For four hundred years The Order of the Black Swan had believed that they existed for the purpose of defeating a single enemy called vampire.
It was only recently that Black Swan had learned about the immortals when a group of teenagers had chased Litha home for fun. The ‘discovery’ of the immortals was a big surprise to The Order. It created shockwaves throughout the organization that caused them to question some of the premises on which they functioned, just as the vaccine had caused a moral confrontation with the fact that vampire were not another species, but ordinary humans afflicted by a disease that turned them into fiendish creatures against their will.
What Black Swan still didn’t know was that there was a third kind of vampire. Like the vampire created in most dimensions by the immortals, the third kind of vampire retained both sentience and conscience. Like their creators, they didn’t kill for blood. They seduced for blood and gave donors such pleasure in return that they could hardly be called victims.
They could also move so fast that they could appear to vanish or blend into shadow like dark chameleons. They had no idea how long they’d live. They only knew that none of them had ever died. And they called themselves the Get.
Humans who had the pleasure of entertaining a Get vampire, weren’t allowed to retain the memory. They were instructed to forget while in a state that mimicked hypnosis. And they did.
If a fragment of memory surfaced in dreams, sometimes it made its way into popular fiction or art, but no one believed that the vampire of pop culture had a basis in fact.
The microbes that produce the vampire virus behave differently than most. The vampire virus consists of a tiny cluster of molecules of RNA. Under microscopic view they appear to be shaped almost identically to sperm. Speculation would be that, in some hosts, certain cells reject intrusion by the microbes, possibly because of a protein shell, or covering, that
surrounds the cell like a protective shield.
Unlike the vampire that he and his kind called “deadheads”, Jaxon retained appetites for many things. He required blood for sustenance, but he still consumed and digested food and drink as well. He reveled in the pleasures of sex, nice clothes, fast cars, and the luxury that centuries of money could buy. He never forgot about the hardships of rural farm life and that his peers had been lucky if they lived to be thirty.
Outwardly Jax appeared to be a handsome and athletic male in his early twenties. Inwardly he was a worldly pilgrim in his seventh century. There was little he hadn’t seen and little he hadn’t experienced. Consequently he was adamantly opinionated about everything from politics to personal tastes. Perhaps he had a right to be.
When it came to politics, he despised the wealthy who took more than they could enjoy and used the power that bought to further impoverish the poor. When he left his farm, the village had been owned by John of Gaunt, perhaps the most influential nobleman of the time, also known as the Duke of Lancaster. Though he was the third son of the king, he was far richer and not the least interested in sharing. The tax policies he’d implemented to pay for the Hundred Years’ War with France led to negative feelings ranging from hostility to riots and finally, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
Having heard the people’s grievances against the Duke, when Jax became a vampire, he first traveled south a hundred miles to Leicester. He killed the Duke, who was supposedly grieving over his son’s exile to Paris. Jax had slipped in as a silent shadow, suffocated the Duke with his own pillow, and stolen enough pounds sterling to lift the hardships of life from his family for generations. He left the money next to his mother as she slept and slipped away never to return. He wished he could write so that he could leave his mother a note, but since she couldn’t read, it would have accomplished no purpose.
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