Nerva only grinned more widely at her. “Gunfire will attract the human security teams,” he reminded her. He jiggled the rope again and although Six didn’t make a sound, Violet’s heartbeat jumped for him in sympathy. “You might win the battle, but you’d lose the war, V.”
He was right, of course—and she’d thought the very same thing less than two minutes earlier. Besides, if she got pissed and shot the bastard just for the fun of it, he’d let go of the rope and Six would be killed anyway. Without taking her gaze from Nerva’s, Violet grimaced and tossed the gun aside in exasperation. For a long moment, she just stood there and stared at him. Her mind worked furiously, turning over option after option like a computer working out the moves in a chess match. She had never been so trapped before, never so caught in a battle she couldn’t find a way to win.
Well, except for when she’d been told she was infected with the Hemophage virus.
Damn it, if Six was going to die anyway, if there really was nothing she could do to save him, then why not die trying? And she would take Nerva and as many of the others with her as she could, her way, without intervention or misguided assistance from the humans who so despised her and those like her. The way of blood and steel rather than firepower.
This time, when she reached inside her coat, Violet’s hand came back out with a long, carved steel katana in it.
The response from the Hemophages stationed around the chapel was instantaneous—swords sang out all around her, the blades glittering in the muted light from the high, stained-glass windows along the chapel’s side walls. Ignoring them, Violet focused on Nerva, but before she could leap for him, he held up his free hand. “V, wait.” He sounded almost pleading. “Don’t you realize what this child has in him?”
Her fingers gripped the sword’s handle, trembling with anticipation, with the urge to kill. The metal warmed in her grip, thrumming with the energy bleeding off her body. “I don’t care what he has ‘in’ him,” she growled.
“It’s not a vampire antigen,” Nerva said quickly. His gaze flicked from left to right, making sure his soldiers stayed put. Violet knew he could call them down upon her with the merest blink of his eye. It was inevitable. “It’s a human antigen,” he continued. “Lethal enough to kill every human on the planet!”
Violet’s eyes narrowed until they were nothing more than slits. What kind of talk was this? Trash, that’s all, just more bullshit to stall the eventual bloodshed. His bloodshed. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Why would humans create a human antigen?”
Nerva smiled but it was edgy, trembling nervousnessly. Even so, his fingers playing idly along the rope that controlled Six’s life . . . or death. Whether he convinced her or not, he knew he held Six’s life in his hands . . . literally. “Sweetheart, humans have been busily devising more and more effective ways to kill each other since the beginning of time.” He licked his lips, his tongue momentarily probing the ends of his incisors in an oddly erotic gesture. “Why do I or even you care why? I just intend to help them finish the job.”
Violet stared at him, unsure. Even now, after all this time, it was so . . . strange to think of life as her against them, against the “humans.” What Nerva was saying now just fortified that—he talked as if humans and vampires had been warring for millennia, but she had been human less than ten years ago. He had, too. Did he truly want to kill all the humans? If he did, that would effectively end humans, uninfected or otherwise, as a life form on this planet. It was unthinkable. Because really, wasn’t she still just that—a human, but one with a disease? To kill off all the humans couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be. If he did that, their existence—everyone’s existence—would suddenly shorten to a mere ten years, and that was assuming the vampires were unaffected by this ultimate weapon. And didn’t people have a right to live longer than that?
“Why . . . didn’t you tell me then?” she asked. It wasn’t much of a question, but she was desperately trying to stall for time. God, she needed time to think, to work this out in her head and try to figure out the right thing to do. What was right and what was wrong, who should live and who should die—how had the responsibility to decide this on such a grand scale fallen on her shoulders?
“Because, darling, I didn’t know.” Nerva lifted his chin haughtily and gave her an oily smile, then shook his head. His long, curly hair flew around his head, making him look like an unruly wolf. “In the form of Daxus, the humans have offered us a most tempting proposal,” he continued. “One that would finally even the odds for us.” His gaze was piercing and the hint of a sneer tugged at one corner of his mouth. His expression said she should have known better. Violet’s stomach twisted; she just hated to be in a position where this bastard could lord it over her. “So just walk away, V. Walk away.”
Suddenly, something high on the wall behind Nerva lit up. Violet’s gaze shot to the source of the light, then stopped. It was a clock that she hadn’t noticed before, its mechanism built across a window of stained glass that matched the ones on the side walls. The clouds outside had finally parted and the sun was now bathing the clock window at just the right angle to throw Violet into a bright, multicolored spotlight. She turned her attention from the clock back to where Six dangled over the well and he caught her eye, then looked down at his feet. To the other people in the room, it looked like nothing more than her giving the boy a visual farewell before making her exit; only Violet saw him quietly push off his left shoe. It dropped unnoticed into the dark hole of the well and Violet’s gaze cut back to the clock. Time seemed to slow and she counted in her mind—
One one-thousand
Two one-thousand
Three one-thousand
Four one-thousand
Five one-thousand
There was a faint smack as the boy’s shoe finally hit water somewhere out of sight. It took her three more seconds to estimate twenty-seven armed Hemophages between her and where Nerva was holding Six’s rope over the well.
Without a word, Violet brought her sword up and spun it expertly in the air in an outright challenge.
Nerva’s mouth dropped open and his eyes widened. “Are you insane?” he asked incredulously.
As he had done only a few moments earlier, Violet lifted her chin with more confidence than she actually felt. “You need him more than I do,” she said flatly. “You won’t drop him.”
The dark Hemophage’s lip curled and his fingers went white around the rope in his hand. “End her,” he hissed.
A dozen of the Hemophages in the chapel charged her, springing from the long shadows against the wall like greased streaks of black. As they closed around her, Violet spun in the midst of them almost lazily, letting her mind and body go on instinct, parrying blows and striking in return with an almost ethereal precision. The kernel of doubt she had felt a few seconds ago bled away like water escaping a sponge. Such foolish, foolish brethren she had; by now she would have thought they’d known they could never win. Or maybe, like her—until she had found Six—they fought because they had nothing else left to live for. What a shame that your existence was so cheap that you could find no reason not to die.
The fight was over quickly, almost too quickly—she hadn’t even worked up a sweat this time. Violet raised her head, then looked at Nerva from beneath half-lowered lids, and she knew, she knew, what he was going to do. He didn’t disappoint her.
The vampire’s teeth drew back in a grimace that was nothing short of vengeful and his face contorted with hatred. He knew she would be too fast for him, so he wasn’t stupid enough to think about it or give her time to get ahead of his actions. He just . . .
Let go.
Six cried out as he disappeared below the lip of the stone wall surrounding the well. The rest of the Hemophages in the chapel lunged at Violet, swords slicing through the air all around her. Now that she knew it was there, now that it consumed her whole world, Violet could hear the damnable clock ticking over her head as each second went by. It sounded m
ore like cymbals in her brain than anything muted or soft, like huge waves crashing against rocks—
Tick—
Crash!
Tick—
Crash!
TICK!
CRASH!
—with each one getting louder than the one before it.
She ran through the remainder of Nerva’s Hemophage soldiers like a shark churning in a sea of bloody chum, taking down one group, then another, then another, each more viciously than the last, never forgetting the clock and the timing of it all, how absolutely crucial it was for her to be at the precise spot at the precise moment—
And finally, at the very last instant, only Nerva stood defiantly before her.
His blade whipped forward to meet hers and Violet easily swept his steel away with a strike that twisted her wrist and yanked the sword from his hand. It clattered off and was lost amid the bodies; Nerva spun and stared at her, his face twisted with more hatred than she had ever seen even as he realized he was looking death in the eye. In a final act of rebellion he spit at her face, but even that was denied him as Violet yanked her hand up and caught the saliva. His eyes bulged, then she slapped him, smashing his own spit against his cheek—
Right before Violet turned her sword and nearly decapitated him with its edge.
She stepped calmly through the spray of Nerva’s blood and just barely caught the rope as it jerked wildly in the air. For a heart-stopping moment it ran through her fingers like a snake made of fire, then her hand closed around it, her skin smoking as she fought to ignore the pain and stop Six’s descent. It was agony against her palm, the flesh blackening and filling the air with the sickly scent of cooking meat. Violet’s teeth clenched and she squeezed her eyes shut; she would not give in, she would not let go no matter how bad the pain, she would not—
Until, mercifully, the rope finally yanked to a stop within her grip.
Without opening her eyes, Violet began hauling the child back up, hand over hand, ignoring the agony across her palm every time she switched hands. She could tell from the way the rope felt against her uninjured hand that there he finally was, rising above the edge of the well and swaying from side to side. When she opened her eyes, her gaze met his; his eyes were wide with fear and relief, and when Violet pulled him over the side and set him on solid ground, he threw himself forward and wrapped his arms around her, holding on as tightly as he could. She jerked and started to pull away, then just surrendered and held on with everything she had. Thirty-six hours ago she would have never imagined she would hold a child like this. “I’ll get you fixed,” she promised as he buried his face against her shoulder. Violet bent her head until her cheek pressed against his close-cropped hair, and she could feel his tears smearing against the skin of her neck. “I’m going to get you fixed . . .”
And, kneeling in the middle of the blood-soaked floor of the tiny chapel, Violet held him until his tears and sobbing finally stopped.
EIGHTEEN
Garth and the tractor-trailer were gone.
With Six at her side, Violet stood in the middle of the field where her comrade had been only a few hours earlier. “Gone,” she whispered to herself. Her fingers tightened around Six until the boy’s smaller ones squirmed in discomfort. “He’s gone.” On the one side, she couldn’t believe it, but on the other . . . of course he was gone. Hadn’t she called him herself and warned that there might have been a trace, telling him to move as quickly as possible? Garth was no fool. There was too much at risk. He would have taken her words to heart and moved out quickly, had probably had the tractor and trailer on the road literally within minutes. The fool here was her, for even thinking that he would still be here and . . . what? Waiting for her? Going to somehow fix everything at the risk of his own life and one of the extremely precious mobile lab and weapons storage units? Highly unlikely.
What now? Well, they would just have to move on themselves, keep going until . . .
Until . . .
Violet turned to look back at Six. The boy had pulled out of her grasp when it had become too painful and now she realized he’d dropped back a couple of yards, wandering off to the left. Her gaze locked on his face just in time to see him stagger slightly; his eyes met hers, then fluttered and rolled back into his head. She hurried toward him and got to the child’s side just as he sagged to the ground and started to dry heave. It was a heartbreaking thing to watch as he bent over and retched, but there was nothing Violet could do to help, nothing she could offer that would bring him any kind of relief, no medicine to stop the nausea. Her sad and sorry best was to drape her arm across his shoulder and feel his small body shudder as he tried uselessly to vomit up the nothing that was inside his stomach.
Finally, Six found the strength to raise his head and look at her. His red-rimmed eyes were watery and all the rest of the color had washed out of his face, leaving his skin as pallid and gray as the bottom half of the meta-crystal still hanging around his neck. The top half of the stone was a troubling shade of black that was rapidly moving downward. “What’s wrong with me?” Speaking was such an effort that his words came out in a gasp.
All Violet could do was shake her head and not respond. She didn’t have the heart to look the child in the face and tell him he was dying. Ages ago, when she had been a nurse, having a cold and detached bedside manner had never been her strong point. “Can you walk?” she asked after a while. His answering nod was weak but determined. “Come with me,” she said, and helped him to his feet. He stood on his own, eventually, but he was shaking at best and Violet wasn’t sure how long it would be before she’d have to carry him. She would answer his question—she had to—but not out here, not in the open where they were vulnerable to an attack from the human security forces at any time.
Garth’s location, now forever history, had been on the north edge of the city, where the lakefront curved around to the north and looked back at the downtown area. That northern location had given them that spectacular nighttime view of the fireworks celebration, but it also hindered, too—now it took Violet and Six almost a half hour to get back to a more populated area so she could find a place for them to hide out. It was funny how the world had evolved—the urban sprawl had evolved out. Now there were overpopulated cities or desolate fields, and not much along the lines of a middle ground. It would have been nice to leave the people and the anxiety-ridden crowds behind but still be able to find a good place to hole up while they waited for the end, but that was nothing but a wild fantasy—in the real world, the best Violet could offer the boy was an abandoned tenement about six blocks into the city zone proper, just to the west of the old line of elevated tracks that hadn’t been used in decades. It wasn’t much but Violet couldn’t hold out for better; Six’s condition had gotten noticeably worse, and if she hadn’t been holding on to him, the boy would have been staggering at her side down the pitted sidewalk like an adolescent drug addict.
With a quick glance behind them, Violet kicked in one of the side doors and dragged the boy inside, hopefully, too quickly for anyone passing by to notice or care. There wasn’t much traffic around here, at least not of the desirable kind, but people were naturally curious . . . no, naturally nosy. Violet slammed the door shut again, then pushed Six in front of her and into the disused lobby area, where she could make him turn and look at her. It was a good-sized room that was filled with smashed-up furniture, old trash, and construction debris, but it was also blissfully quiet and empty of anyone else. Dust motes spun in the air where their footsteps had stirred up the layer on the floor, and off to one side was what was left of an old reception desk. It was curved and wide, with a cracked and pitted dark green granite counter, and in a previous lifetime it had probably been something special to see. Now Violet blew at the heavy mantle of dust on the surface, then picked Six up and sat him on the counter so she could look him in the eye. Gray light washed over them, diluted by the heavy layer of grime over the bank of high but unbroken windows along the ceiling line above
the entry door. Violet wished it were dark instead of daylight; she’d done so many difficult things in her life, but this had to rank up there with the worst of them. She almost couldn’t bear to meet his trusting gaze.
Six sat there in front of her, his shoulders slumped with illness and fatigue while his feet dangled limply over the counter’s edge. He looked so afraid and confused, yet at the same time she could see the hope in his eyes, the heartbreaking glimmer of light that told her he believed that somehow she might be able to fix everything. How could she tell him the truth? Where to begin to explain the unexplainable.
Finally, she said, “Don’t you see?” A foolish, incomprehensible start—of course he didn’t. She was dying now, not just her physical self, but her emotions. All on behalf of this small, strange boy, and she was so very, very angry. “Don’t you fucking see?”
But no, he didn’t. He only looked at her expectantly, silent and waiting. And as before . . . trusting.
“That . . . mechanism inside you,” she croaked. “The thing your father put in you. It’s an antagonistic protein, very precise . . .” The word “father” was bad enough, but the rest . . . Her words faded. He was so very young. Was she being too technical? Did he understand any of it? Violet wasn’t sure—her doubts about whether he was able to comprehend what she was saying went all the way back to when he’d finally started talking. But back then didn’t matter right now; but she had to keep going, had to try. He had a right to know, damn it, to know it all. “It’s . . . it’s going to shut you down, Six.”
Violet stared at him and he stared back, but still, he refused to say anything. He looked like an oddly blue-eyed rabbit frozen in the headlight of an oncoming motorcycle—paralyzed and terrified but physically incapable of doing anything other than staring at its impending death with huge, liquid eyes.
God . . . he was going to make her say it.
She took a deep breath, and the air rushing down her throat felt like it wanted to strangle her. “It’s going to . . . kill you, Six. Just like that boy in the station.” Did he remember who she was talking about? “It’s going to kill you, unless I . . .” Her voice cracked and Violet struggled to steady it again. She was the adult here; she was supposed to be the stronger of the two of them, no matter what happened. “Unless I can figure some way—” She spun away. The hurt was too great—she simply couldn’t meet his huge eyes any longer. “I just need a little time, damn it!” Her gaze flicked wildly around the abandoned lobby. “If I could have some time, just a little more time—” Abruptly she stood up straighter. “Wait here,” she ordered the boy, then strode away.
Ultraviolet Page 17
