But which way would he have gone? For a few seconds she turned back and forth, mired in uncertainty. Then something on the ground caught her eye, a thin, gold object shoved against the wall over by the entrance to the lower subway tunnels.
Her bracelet.
Violet didn’t bother to pick it up as she dashed into the tunnel—she probably wouldn’t live long enough to go shopping again, anyway. It wasn’t that long of a distance, but it seemed like miles, pushing through more and more people, dodging around shopping bags and briefcases that were probably full of business papers relevant to a world in which she no longer belonged. But the boy wouldn’t be here, not in the midst of this crush of people—although his life span had been short so far, he had learned too much for that and he was smart enough to know that out in the open like this he was nothing but machine-gun fodder, a target easily locked on and eliminated. No—he would go for something more clever, something hidden and not so easily accessed. Something small—
The catwalk.
With a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching or following her, Violet slipped onto one of the concrete catwalks that ran on either side along the track and headed deeper into the dirt-encrusted darkness of the train tunnel. Stretching ahead of her for as far as she could see were evenly spaced lights, but they did little to break the long, gloomy expanse of the train tracks. Each light, nothing more than a dull, bug-filled dome over an energy-saving bulb, was positioned over an alcove large enough for a worker to slip into as the train passed; inside each alcove were iron handrails set into the concrete walls, and the workers needed these to hang on to since the train’s momentum could easily suck a man right off his feet. Violet figured that some of the alcoves would have doors leading to maintenance tunnels or storage areas, but she had no idea which ones actually did. That didn’t matter; if she had to, she would check every single one in case Six was hiding inside. The distance between alcoves wasn’t far because there was damned little time from when a person first heard the train coming and its actual arrival, and safety—survival—depended heavily on how fast you could get to those precious handrails.
But Violet needn’t have worried. There was no sign of an impending train by the time she’d sprinted her way around several curves and finally spotted the boy several blocks ahead. Yes, he was definitely smart—there was no way the security teams’ trackers could lock on him this deeply beneath the earth and the thick layers of concrete and metal overhead.
Of course, there were always the manholes.
As Violet moved faster to try to close the distance between them, she saw Six suddenly pause beneath one of the metal coverings. She frowned and tried to step up her pace, but it was difficult—the catwalk was narrow and slick with dampness and layers of old mold. She felt like she was slipping backward with each step, or at least going in slow motion, and when the child came to a full stop and craned his neck to see upward, she knew something was dreadfully wrong. He was standing in a shaft of hard, white light, almost like a spotlight. But there shouldn’t be any light coming down from the manhole cover, those were supposed to be closed, and as Violet desperately tried to stretch an extra inch or two into her stride and slipped precariously on the thin ledge, she found her voice and called out to him—
“Six, please!”
And, as so often happens when the nightmare that’s called life is at its most difficult, something so much worse manages to take place.
Nerva.
Although Violet had used her own Gravity Shifter any number of times, she’d never been in a situation where one had essentially been used against her—she hadn’t even known Nerva had developed one that could process so much weight. Now, stunned and still too far away to be able to do anything about it, all she could do was keep lurching forward as she watched Nerva calmly crawl through the open manhole, walk down the rounded side of the subway tunnel, and yank Six off his feet. It was a horrifying thing to see, like Nerva was some kind of giant, predatory spider in the darkness, but Violet wasn’t sure who was more frightened—Six or her. The child must have been paralyzed with fear, because he made no sound at all as he hung from Nerva’s grasp for a split second, legs and arms dangling limply over the tracks; then he was dragged up and through the manhole, and he disappeared into the circle of brutal, overhead light.
“Six!” Violet screamed.
She closed the final yards just in time to look upward and see Nerva’s dark and not at all remorseful grin centered in the light of the street, silhouetted by the daylight behind it. “Sorry, V.”
Self-preservation instinct kicked in and she dived for safety, narrowly escaping the sudden spray of machine-gun fire he sent through the hole. She flattened herself against the curve of the filthy wall, then jerked around the edge and into the nearest alcove as the bullets chewed up the concrete surface and sang off the metal train tracks. She’d pocketed her dark sunglasses back on the platform so she wouldn’t seem odd to the other passersby, and now bits of concrete mingled with the bullets’ spark showers and sent little star blossoms of light against her painfully sensitive eyes. By the time Violet rubbed them away, Nerva and the boy were gone.
And the hunt was on.
SEVENTEEN
Violet didn’t give it much time—less than sixty seconds—before she decided she was clear, then she found and activated her own gyroscope. Sixty seconds . . . only a minute, but as she was scuttling up the side of the tunnel, then pulling herself out of the manhole, she was acutely aware that every second counted. Was Nerva going to kill the boy outright, or take him somewhere else? Nerva was already a wanted man and would be shot on sight if the security forces ever caught up with him, so why not just go on and do it? The notion of secreting Six away didn’t seem logical—back in the conference room, Nerva had proved his intent when he’d pulled out his laser pistol and, he thought, killed the boy right there. If he truly wanted to murder the child, why hadn’t he simply leaned through the manhole and gunned the boy down where he stood? No, something had changed—there was something else going on here, something she didn’t know about.
Nor did she care.
Right now, all she wanted was that child. What happened after that . . . well, it could be negotiated.
Standing sideways on the subway wall, Violet jammed her sunglasses into place, then catapulted out and onto the street. A careless thing to do, and for her trouble she nearly got run over by a motorbike; the driver swerved and cussed her soundly, shaking his fist as he sped away. Violet ignored him and frantically scanned the street, but Nerva and Six were nowhere in sight.
She spun helplessly, feeling her anxiety spiral to the point where she wanted to simply fold in on herself. She wasn’t sure how far they’d gone underground, or even in what direction. At least she’d been out here long enough for her eyes to adjust a bit; the sky over the intermittent buildings was a merciful shade of gray, layered in clouds that made the whole light-sensitive thing a bit easier to take. One side of the street was virtually empty—industrial, in fact. Somewhere along the seemingly directionless turns of the catwalk in the subway the world overhead had gone from bustling downtown to dirty manufacturing, a change that wasn’t at all uncommon in the larger cities where rich neighborhoods could border on noisy airports and the seedier areas, such as this one, could be the backyard to cemeteries.
Such as the one across the street.
Nerva was headed into it now, dragging the boy along with him. Six wasn’t fighting . . . but he wasn’t cooperating, either. He was letting Nerva drag him along like some kind of life-sized, tangled-up marionette. The two figures twisted through the poorly maintained tombstones, all marked with the yellow and black biohazard symbol that identified them as victims of the Hemophage virus.
Violet started to dash across the street, then gasped as the boy surprised Nerva by suddenly twisting out of the vampire’s grasp. He spun and ran for it, but he didn’t get far. A pair of Nerva’s soldiers—Violet had thought she’d taken care of a
ll of them, but like flies, they seemed to come from nowhere—slipped in front of Six and blocked his way. With vicious speed, one of them reached out and slapped the boy, hard; he reeled backward into Nerva’s outstretched hand and Nerva buried his fingers in Six’s collar and hauled him along like a misbehaving dog.
For a moment, Violet’s fury at the way the child was being treated blotted out everything—reason, sight, the world. When the red cleared from her vision she was already on the move, pounding across the pavement straight for the three Hemophages and Six. She didn’t get very close, though—when they spotted her, one of the ’Phages yanked out a machine pistol and sent a deadly spray of bullets toward her, forcing her to duck and roll along the chilly, rock-strewn ground. The gunfire sounded like high-speed, pounding drums, the sound bouncing from building to building in the deserted industrial area. When Violet dared to raise her head again, the vampires and the child had once again disappeared into the sea of headstones.
She scurried into the cemetery, moving low and fast and working her way through the tall, desolate grave markers. It was such a depressing, soul-depleting place, a small but powerful testament to the millions who had fallen victim to the Hemophage virus, and the overcast sky just added to the morose atmosphere in the cemetery. Everything around Violet was a bitter reminder of the fate of her brethren and of her own impending death, and had any of the uninfected—those with the power and the money and the resources like Daxus and the ArchMinistry—worked to combat it? To find a cure? No . . . they had only exterminated. In another ten or twenty years, unless a miracle happened, the Hemophage virus would be eradicated like so many other diseases. That, in itself, was not a bad thing, but did they have to murder all of its victims, too?
Violet swung around the corner of a double tombstone and abruptly stopped, melting back into the concrete camouflage provided by the wide stone wings of the double-angel display on the top of the grave markers. There, at either side of an overgrown, narrow rock pathway, were Nerva’s two Hemophage soldiers. She had never seen these two before, and they were grinning widely, showing their confidence that she was nothing to be bothered with when faced by the two of them. One was tall and thin with long, lank dark hair, the poster child for a nearly anorexic cocaine addict. The other was like his negative image—platinum-blond hair cut short and spiky; washed-out blue eyes peered at her above his black sunglasses and his skin was so white it seemed transparent in the gray light of day. Both of the men had let their incisors grow long enough to hang out below their upper lip. They curled their lips at her now and showed their teeth, bright white and sharp like young, ignorant puppies. In Violet’s eyes, they were next to useless—immature and foolish men more in love with the vampire lifestyle than with survival, more concerned with their carefully stylish hair and designer clothing than reality. They wouldn’t care about either for much longer.
“Where are they?” she demanded. It would be stupid to beat around the bush.
The taller of the two lifted his lip even more, creating an exaggerated sneer. “As if we’d tell you.” When she stepped toward him, he lifted his chin arrogantly. “Think what you’re doing, V.” He spoke like he knew her, but she wasn’t lulled by the false camaraderie. Soon this baby vampire would be nothing more than the next statistic in the long line of today’s deadly tally. “It’s not Blood Chinois you’re dealing with anymore.”
The second one nodded and lifted a finely shaped dark eyebrow. “We’re as fast and as strong as you.” His voice was full of smugness.
Violet’s mouth stretched into a dangerous, mocking smile. “Yeah . . . but are you even one-tenth as pissed off?”
But he had other things in mind than trading words. The roundhouse kick he sent toward her head was like lightning . . . but it still wasn’t fast enough.
Fueled by rage and her inexplicable desire to protect Six, even as much as she didn’t understand it herself, her retaliation was vicious, even for a vampire. She didn’t care if she got hurt—there was little anyone in this world could do to her physically that would equal what had been done to her emotionally, anyway. That utterly callous attitude came with certain advantages: if she took a blow, it didn’t matter; if she hit someone so hard she hurt herself, she didn’t feel it. A flurry of strikes, a series of rapid-fire kicks, and it took her all of thirty seconds to wipe out both of them. When the fighting was done, Violet stood over their broken, bloody bodies, victorious but breathing hard and knowing that each time she did this, she lost a little more of herself and what small amount of time she had left in this world. But that didn’t matter either—it was fitting even if it didn’t make sense to spend that time and body energy trying to gain a few more hours of existence for a doomed human child. A person had to fight for something in his or her life, and it had been too long since she’d been fighting for a doomed cause. She had thought she’d lost everyone worth loving a long time ago; finally she again had someone for whom she could be a champion.
Where to go now? She scanned the grim-looking tombstones, then her gaze stopped. About forty feet farther down the path, exactly in the center of the cemetery, was a small and picturesque stone chapel. Despite the neglect this gathering place for the dead had undergone, this tiny building was still a haven for anyone—doubtful—who might come here to mourn or visit those who had passed on. The outside surface was made of smooth, rounded river stones, the kind you didn’t see much in the more modern metropolitan cemeteries. The roof was made of heavy, iron-colored slate tiles, and it ran to a peak in the center, then up to a short steeple like an old-fashioned country church. At the very top of the steeple was a crucifix that in a burial place for Hemophages mocked the stupid old legends. Snowball bushes, their greenery ratty-looking but their flowers blooming magnificently, flanked the closed, unassuming wooden doors in the center of its front wall. She could smell their heavy, rich scent all the way out here, and it was to this little chapel, Violet realized, that the path she was on had led all along. Maybe her life had been designed to do just that—cycle around and bring her right here. Destiny wasn’t something that was always clear to the common person.
Despite her recent victory, Violet approached the chapel cautiously. She’d already once wrongly assumed all of Nerva’s henchmen were dead, and while she’d won the last battle, the war was far from over. The chapel itself wasn’t a big building, but looks meant nothing in the world of the dead—maybe it had an underground area, or passageways that led to catacombs much like those from the Ancient Ages, the ones that had been lined with the skulls and bony remains of thousands who had died centuries before. From where she was, Violet could only see the front—there might be a long, narrow extension in the back, an add-on built specifically to house coffins and which disappeared into the trees that backed up to it. As her hand closed over the tarnished, old-fashioned handle and her thumb pressed down on the latch, she knew she’d have to be very, very careful.
She pushed and the right door opened smoothly and silently, as if it had been recently oiled. An interesting concept, since it wasn’t safe for Hemophages to be seen in public anymore and no uninfected human would risk venturing into such a dirty place as a Hemophage cemetery. Once she was fully inside, it only took a few steps for Violet’s eyes to adjust to the darkness, maybe two more for her to realize that the statues lining the walls weren’t statues at all, but Hemophages, standing absolutely still, seeking refuge from her and the humans in the outside world. Really, it was the perfect place and the perfect type of camouflage.
She watched them with narrowed eyes, but when no one came toward her she went farther inside. There was something in the center of the chapel, something large and dark and round—a well, some kind of historical marker that had long since had the plaque denoting its original human history ripped away. The building had originally been constructed around it, but now it was going to serve a different purpose. There had once been a bucket hanging beneath the opening’s roof, probably a replica restrung on a new rope. The b
ucket had been ripped away and Violet glimpsed it off to the side, where it had been tossed against one wall after Nerva had sheared it from the rope. In its place was Six, the remaining rough hemp tied tightly around his waist; he hung there like a sack of rice, swaying slightly. The scene was disconcertingly close to a hanging, where the body sways gently back and forth, pushed by some unrealized breeze. The other end of the rope was wrapped around Nerva’s hand and he grinned and jiggled it playfully when he saw Violet. He’d pulled off his sunglasses in the dark room and a sort of manic glee shone in his ink-colored eyes. He jiggled the rope again and it slipped a couple of inches; Six gasped as he dropped slightly and Violet growled and automatically took a step forward.
“Huh-uh!” Nerva said sharply. This time he let the rope slide down a good half foot, stopping it with a jerk that made the rope dig into the boy’s stomach. A small, involuntary cry escaped Six’s lips, then Violet saw the muscles in his jaw grind together. Incredibly, the boy was trying not to show his fear as he shot Nerva a dark look.
Violet froze. If she rushed Nerva, he would let go of the rope and Six would likely plummet to his death—she had no way of knowing how deep the well was, but it was a good bet it went down at least sixty feet and perhaps as much as two hundred. There might be water somewhere at the bottom, and there might not. Even if there was, who could say the child knew how to swim? The odds were highly against it.
On the other hand, if she didn’t try for it . . . well, what good would it do to just stand here? Time—and life—was ticking away and Nerva was just evil enough to drop the child anyway. After all, hadn’t he wanted the boy dead all along?
Keeping her face carefully expressionless, Violet reached under her coat and drew a pistol out of a flat-space holster.
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