Blood Run – The Complete Trilogy – First Promise, Two Riders, Last Chance

by Dougherty, Christine

  Promise dismounted and hissed as her feet hit the ground. Her legs were still sore. It was more the cold stiffening her muscles than the riding itself. But each day got a little better as she acclimated to the long hours on horseback. She put her hands to her lower back and stretched, groaning involuntarily. Embarrassed, she joked to cover it up.

  “Whoo…never thought I’d get tired of horseback riding, but geez…” She let her sentence trail off, smiling in the direction of the Guard soldiers.

  Billet smiled back, and Miller looked up distractedly.

  Evans snorted. “Poor little Princess! Tired of your pony already, precious?” His words were so filled with acid, Promise could nearly feel them sink into her one by one, burning as they tore through her heart. Her face reddened in embarrassed anger, and she opened her mouth to contradict him, but a sharp thunk distracted her attention.

  Peter had jumped from Snow, and now he flew past Promise in a blur. Evens’ eyes widened, and he brought his hands up defensively, but he was too slow–Peter was on him in an eyeblink, in half a breath. He put his hands on Evans’ shoulders, the fabric of his uniform bunched in Peter’s tight fists.

  Peter pushed Evans back against the Humvee, pulled him forward, and slammed him back again. The entire vehicle shuddered with the force of the blow. Evans’ breath left him in a wheeze even as anger suffused and tightened his features. His hands came up to Peter’s arms, and he struggled to break Peter’s hold on him. “Get off me, you shit, you–”

  “Hey!” Miller yelled and stepped around the Humvee, coming toward the clenched pair. “Break it up!”

  Billet stood dumbly, mouth hanging open, and Lu turned in surprise from where he’d been digging through the food.

  Peter’s face was inches from Evans’, and Evans stopped struggling as a wave of cold fear chilled his heart. Peter’s eyes blazed hot orange as though fire had filled his skull, and he pulled Evans even closer. Peter’s grip was like a vise, like iron; Evans was powerless to break the hold. He’d never felt so small or so weak in his adult life.

  “I’ve had enough of you, Evans,” Peter said, and his voice was calm but rough with heat. The breath that fell on Evans’ face was hot and dry as a desert wind. Evans turned away from it, his eyes squeezed closed.

  Miller put a hand on Peter’s shoulder, trying to pull him back, but it was like trying to shove a rock, a boulder. She tried to pry Peter’s hand off Evans shoulder and could not. “Billet! Lu! Help me!” Her voice was twined panic and anger.

  Peter put his mouth to Evan’s ear. “If you want a fight, I’ll give you a fight,” he said, the words quiet with menace. “But you leave her out of it–” he said, and his grip tightened. Evans’ shirt pulled free of his pants. “Or I’ll kill you.”

  He released Evans and stepped back abruptly. Evans slid, stumbled, and fell onto his hands and knees on the road, eyes still closed, panting. Miller knelt beside him and put a concerned hand on his shoulder. He brushed her off and scrambled up.

  Peter turned to see Lu standing fifteen feet from him, an arrow notched in the crossbow, aimed at his chest. Peter raised his hands, palms up. “He started it, Lu. You heard him.”

  Lu didn’t lower the arrow, but he blinked. His eyes slid to Miller. “Is Evans okay?” he asked her.

  Miller was already standing, brushing the knees of her uniform, her face set in careful lines of neutrality. “He’s fine. Not a mark on him,” she said and looked at Peter. “Are you okay, Peter?”

  They all knew she wasn’t asking him whether he was hurt–they’d all seen what had happened. Evans hadn’t had a chance to fight back. Technically, there hadn’t even been a fight–Peter’s hands hadn’t strayed from Evans’ uniform, and yet he’d held him as easily as though Evans were a kitten.

  Peter looked at Miller, and his eyes were clear of the hot fire that Evans had seen. He nodded and said he was fine. Miller nodded to Lu, and Lu lowered the crossbow. “What was this all about?” she asked, addressing Peter. Peter glanced across at Evans and then shrugged and turned away, disinterested, looking for Promise.

  Evans struggled to tuck his shirt back into his pants with angry thrusts. “He tried to kill me,” Evans said. His voice was tight, and a slight tremor ran through it, but it was hard to tell if the tremor was from fear or rage. He looked at Miller and then Lu. “And neither of you did anything about it.” Then his eyes found Billet. Billet hadn’t moved in the fifteen seconds the entire confrontation had taken. “Not even you helped me out, did you, friend?” Evans’ voice was laced with sarcasm. He lowered his head, shaking it. “We have a damn half-and-half riding with us, and nobody cares. He tries to kill me, and still nobody cares. Well, maybe when he kills one of you, then we’ll care, right? Then we’ll do something about it, right, Miller?”

  Miller laughed. “Kill you? Where are you even hurt, Evans? Show me!”

  Evans shook his head again and crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s not the damn point, Miller, and you know it. We should have dumped these two after Riker was killed. They’re bad luck, and they’re slowing us down!”

  “That’s my decision, Evans, not yours,” Miller said, and her tone was hard. Her eyes on him were even harder. “You don’t like it? There’s the door.” She threw her arm back, indicating the road. “Otherwise, keep it to yourself, got it?”

  Evens stared at her, tense with fury. She watched as he fought an internal fight, trying to decide whether to accept her terms or not. All at once, he relaxed and looked away, giving in. He nodded.

  It wasn’t enough.

  “Have…you…got…it?” she asked, and each word was distinct and filled with menace. She had to make him say it, to make sure he knew who was running this outfit.

  His eyes grazed hers angrily then dropped. “Yeah. Yeah, I got it,” he said. His voice was barely audible, little more than a mumble.

  Miller put a hand on his shoulder and lowered her voice. “We gotta stick together, Ev, you know that. I’m not gonna dump two civilians for no good reason.” She squeezed his shoulder and then turned away, her voice rising as she addressed everyone. “Okay, let’s eat and get our asses back on the road. I want to get to Netcong well before sunset.” Miller failed to see Evans’ head come up behind her, his eyes filled with disgusted fury.

  Chapter 5

  They made it to Netcong by mid-afternoon. Promise was glad the horses would have an extended period of rest overnight. Snow, especially, was still looking worn out. Promise knew Peter was worried about her. He was with both horses in the backyard of the small Victorian where they would stay overnight. Ash and Snow picked through the house’s extensive backyard garden; although it was winter, they’d managed to dig up soft carrots and potatoes along with eating the cold bean pods that still clung in dispirited clumps to a wooden trellis.

  Netcong reminded Promise very much of Wereburg, and she wondered why it wasn’t an outpost. It was an ideal size in an ideal location. She stood at the intersection of Main and Rt. 562, the Victorian two blocks over, and looked up Main toward the cluster of small businesses. She was troubled. Something about the town bothered her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It had a sadly deserted feeling, somehow different from some of the other towns they’d been through. It was ghostly. A voice behind her made her jump, and she turned, her hand going instinctively to her throat.

  “You okay?” It was Lu. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” He had his crossbow by his side, and his protective neck covering was pulled up and fastened tight. “You might want to get inside,” he said and glanced at the buildings around them. “I don’t know if it’s safe here.”

  “What happened? Why isn’t this town an outpost?” she asked, making no move toward the Victorian.

  “It used to be,” Lu said, and there was a shade of something in his voice…reluctance or maybe fear, Promise couldn’t tell. “It fell last year. Someone got careless. Sometimes I wonder if we’d all be better off scattering instead of gathering together in big group
s. The big groups are so vulnerable.”

  Promise nodded. It made sense, now that he said it. The town looked deserted, yes, as all towns did now…but this one looked somehow more recently deserted. She looked down Main Street again, the new information making it look even sadder, even more deserted than it had before. She thought about Wereburg and how it seemed so permanent, as though it would always be there, no matter what. But how could it? Her life before the plague had seemed permanent, too. Her parents, her little brother, high school…all of it had seemed as unchanging as the rising and setting of the sun.

  At one time.

  The people here in Netcong, the survivors, had probably thought of their outpost as permanent, too. Her stomach tightened uncomfortably. Whatever the opposite of butterflies in your stomach were, she had them…bats maybe, or clawing rats. What if Wereburg wasn’t there when she and Peter got back? What if Chance wasn’t there?

  What if Chance caused it to fall?

  The thought was like a physical blow, and she turned sharply, her eyes finding Lu.

  “Do you now how?” she asked, and her voice was rough, just shy of desperate.

  Lu shook his head, but not in negation, he was confused by her question. “How what?” he asked.

  “Do you know how it fell? Or when?” she asked.

  Lu could see her distress, it was written into every tensed muscle in her face and body. But he didn’t understand it. “I don’t know when, exactly. One pass we made, it was here–the people were here. The next pass, about two months later–they were gone. As to how–” he shrugged, “well, you know as well as me. It was vampires.”

  “Yes. Of course it was,” she said. She reached for the scrunchie on her wrist and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. The activity served to calm her stomach. Nothing was permanent. She could do nothing about it but keep going. Even if the plague hadn’t happened, her old life hadn’t been permanent, either. She had to try to remember that.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Victorian’s kitchen was big, and even with the windows covered in plywood, there was still an air of coziness and comfort as the lanterns ticked light off the warm copper barn animal molds that decorated the walls. A big, white, cast-iron sink took almost an entire wall to itself, and the glass-fronted cabinets still displayed the homey plates and glassware of the family who’d occupied the house in happier times. The lower cabinet doors had all been yanked off at some point, though. Once again, Promise was eerily reminded of Wereburg…more specifically of Willow’s End and the safe houses that sat at the ready for travelers.

  “We did this, too,” she said and pointed to the stripped cabinet fronts. She, Peter, Miller and Billet sat at the table. Lu was upstairs, and Evans stood in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed over his chest. He didn’t look at Promise, but he seemed to be listening. “We have safe houses out in the suburbs, in Willow’s End.”

  Miller looked across to her. “That’s where a lot of the other outposts got the idea to seed safe houses into the surrounding communities–from Wereburg.”

  “Really?” Promise asked, surprised. “How did they know about us?”

  “Us…the Guard. We tell all the outposts what the other ones are doing right. Or wrong,” Billet said. He glanced at Miller. “Right?”

  Miller nodded. “Yeah. Wereburg is a bit of a legend among the other outposts. Your Mr. West seems tailor-made for devising vampire-survival schemes.”

  Promise glanced at Peter, and he nodded briefly and smiled. “It’s true. I heard about Wereburg long before we got there. I’d heard about Ash, too, of course.”

  “We’ve tried to get Mr. West to travel with us so he could teach other people what he’s put together in Wereburg,” Miller said. “He won’t do it, though; says he can’t leave his ‘kids’…was he a teacher?”

  Promise nodded, smiling. “Yeah, at the high school. When everything was first falling apart, he took a bunch of us in.” She remembered back to the day she and Chance got to the gym at the high school where everyone was gathering. They’d lost their parents the night before. Mrs. Anderson–a former neighbor–had turned her and Chance away, not even letting them put their cots near her and her family’s. But Mr. West had gathered them up along with all the other parentless children. Chance had been nearly comatose with fear and shock, and despite the chaos of the day, Mr. West had taken the time to talk with him, calming him down. In the end, it hadn’t mattered, though. Vampires had overrun the school that same night, and Chance had been…turned. Promise had no idea how to articulate that day and night to the group in the kitchen–how to describe her feelings for Mr. West and what he’d done for the new orphans of Wereburg–so she shrugged and finished with a simple, “He took responsibility for us.”

  Peter’s eyes were on hers from across the table. He already knew her story, of course, as she knew his. He smiled, and she smiled back.

  “He seemed like a good guy when we met him,” Miller said. “You have to admire anyone who steps up in these kinds of situations. Strange as it is to say, the whole thing has brought out the best in a lot of people.”

  “And the worst in others,” Evans said, his voice flat. “That’s what you mean, right?”

  Miller turned in her chair to look at him. He shifted, tightening his arms defensively. She considered him for a long, silent moment. “No, that’s not what I meant.” She turned in her chair again and clasped her hands together on the table. She looked at the dull, wooden surface, and her eyes became troubled as she struggled to frame her thoughts. “I think it’s done something different to each of us. I think all big events change lives, but this big event…it happened to everyone at once–relatively speaking. I think a lot of us struggle with making this new way of life fit in with our concepts and ideals of the old way of life; the life before vampires. But some people…like Mr. West…seemed to grasp more quickly that we need to adapt to the new life. Because the old one is gone.” She turned and glanced at Evans again, and her smile was brief and sad. “The past is passed, Evans, more than we could ever have imagined it being. We’re all going to have to step up to the truth of it at some point. Being pissed all the time won’t change it back.”

  Her words seemed to release something in Evans, and he uncrossed his arms and raised his chin. He shrugged. “Whatever. Yeah.” He hooked a chair with his boot and pulled it toward him, reversed it, and sat facing the table. His hands were tight on the back of the chair, his knuckles white and strained looking. A small muscle at his jaw worked as he clenched his teeth.

  Promise still didn’t like Evans, but she felt a small pulse of compassion for him. He had a history, too, a story of his own. It was more than likely that he’d lost someone or many someones. But his odd state of vulnerability wasn’t enough to make her comfortable with him.

  Ash snorted from the living room, two rooms away, and it broke the uncomfortable silence at the table. “I’m going to see if he needs something,” Promise said, standing.

  Beside her, Evans’ chair scraped abruptly as he stood. “I’ll help you.”

  Promise glanced from Evans to Peter, and Peter offered her a small shrug: it’s up to you.

  She nodded, her eyes grazing Evans’. “Okay, thanks.”

  She was uncomfortable with him behind her as they walked down the hall. She felt he was too close; his eyes too heavy on her, his tread too intense. She thought she could even hear his breathing: too rough–almost a ragged pant.

  She turned abruptly, and he was not nearly as close behind as she’d feared. He raised his eyebrows.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  She surveyed him for a minute more and then nodded and turned. She was freaking herself out. This town, the conversation earlier with Lu…she’d be happy to ride out of here tomorrow.

  They turned into the front living room. It was on the small side, but the horses fit comfortably. High ceilings with thick, scrolled moldings were barely visible in the lantern light. Two, tall front windows were securely covered in p
lywood, and a side door that had at one time let out onto the wraparound porch had been nailed shut.

  Ash stood with his head raised, his ears swiveling, but Snow was nearly asleep. Her head hung over an old sofa, and her eyes were tired slits. Promise was glad to see that she was not lying down.

  “If she lies down, we’d have a tough time getting her back up,” Evans said from behind her. Promise jumped, startled, as if he’d read her mind.

  “I was just thinking that,” she said, and then a realization bloomed into her brain–she didn’t know why she hadn’t seen it before. From the start, Evans had been agitated by the horses. He knew about horses, their limitations and weaknesses. She turned to him. “You had a horse. Before.”

  His eyes on hers dimmed. His features drew down in anger and something else she couldn’t place. Regret, maybe. “Let me ask you something,” he said, and his voice was angry, but quiet. “Was he yours?” He nodded at Ash. “Before the vampires?”

  Promise didn’t understand Evans’ anger, but she also found she no longer feared it. He was like fire or lightning–burning and passionate but not consciously malignant. Fire and lightning could also be put to good use, she thought to herself, if you used them wisely.

  She shook her head. “No, I found him later. He’d been hurt, maybe attacked. You can see across his chest. The scars.” She lifted the lantern higher, and a twisted gray seam stood out across Ash’s black, shining chest. He stomped, and Promise ran her hand down his neck. “Shhh, Ash, it’s okay,” she said, and he quieted under her caress.

  Light glittered through Evans’ eyes as Promise lowered the lantern.

  “You love him,” he said, and it was a flat statement.

  Promise looked at him steadily and inclined her head, her face grave. She’d never been a squealer, a gusher, and was glad now, because she realized that it was her very calmness that would convince him.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  “When you joined up with us, back in Wereburg, I didn’t know if you…” he trailed off, and his eyes dropped. “I didn’t know if you knew what you were asking of that horse; I didn’t know if you realized the toll it would take on him. I thought you were…you were, I mean, you are so pretty, and I thought…” he sighed, and his shoulders dropped. He raised his hands palm up and shrugged apologetically. “I thought you were a spoiled princess.”