Kneeling there in penitence for a sin from which she could never be absolved, the girl from the desert began to sob.
Chapter 8
A Stunning Success
“We are presently located fifteen minutes away from the target by car, and we have two hours to get set up before the sun sets,” Vanessa Harper told her people, glancing around the room to ensure their attention. “Our trackers have assured me that the target is in her building. Their reports show common behavioral patterns, and while we don’t expect her to deviate much from them tonight, we’ll need to be prepared if she does. We don’t know whether she’s armed, but she’ll be dangerous even hand-to-hand.”
“She alone in there?” Janus asked.
“That’s what the scouts say. Just the girl. For a while she was spending her nights with someone, another vampire, but he’s been out of the picture for a few weeks. He headed back to the city.”
“Weird,” Connors said. “Why’s she out there all alone?”
“Does it matter? We’re going in tonight and when we’re done, whatever it is she’s doing, well, she won’t be doing it anymore.”
There were chuckles at this. Even the Captain smiled. Vanessa continued.
“Park and Brennan will handle exterior surveillance and communications. The Captain, Janus, Connors, and I will be at the front line. Burke and Oliveira will handle the bungalow’s two entrances and deal with anyone who comes along. Lethal force is acceptable for any encounter, but if they’re human, at least try to avoid killing them.
“This woman is quick and likely very strong. She may have mental abilities that we’re not aware of. Rely on your training. Finally, everyone in this room is under strict orders not to attack her unless the Captain explicitly requests it, no matter what happens, even if it seems like the Captain’s in trouble. That’s correct, Ma’am?”
“Yes,” Captain Perrault said, nodding. “I want her on my own.”
There were some raised eyebrows at this, but no one objected. Muttered remarks and bad jokes aside, none of them doubted her abilities in combat. She was faster, stronger, and more ferocious than any of them by a wide margin.
Vanessa resumed her speech. “Your dossiers include a full floor plan and an area map. She’s staying in a posh resort up in the foothills, and there’s a lot of space between each bungalow without much security. Unless there’s shooting, we don’t expect to be noticed.”
“When do we hit her?” Carrie Brennan asked in her typical, quiet tone.
“We move into position one hour after dark, and the forward team will enter via the rear door as soon as Park has everyone located on the scanner. She usually starts her nights slow. The scouts have never seen her leave the building before ten or eleven.”
“Why aren’t we doing this during the day?” Janus asked, and there were murmurs of agreement.
“Her type can handle the sun,” Vanessa replied. “She doesn’t sleep through the day – they’ve seen her moving around. So there’s not much advantage. Plus, the place is big and flat and there’s not much landscaping … we show up in combat outfits and someone there calls the police in about ten seconds. The night helps her, sure, but it helps us more.”
There was a moment of silence, and when it became apparent that no one had further questions, Vanessa wrapped things up.
“We leave in ninety minutes. Go on, get dressed and study your maps. This should be easy … in, out, and the Captain’s doing all the work. But assuming it’ll be easy is the best way to make sure it’s not, so I want everyone prepped. In the event that shit hits the fan, we rendezvous back here by any means possible. If this location is compromised, make your way back to HQ on your own. Any more questions? No? Good, dismissed then.”
Her crew headed off, and Vanessa went to the room she shared with Carrie to change into combat fatigues. It was only once they were both inside, with the door closed, that the other woman spoke up.
“Can I ask you something, Ness?”
“Go for it,” Vanessa said, pulling off her jeans.
“You think the Captain can handle this?”
Vanessa was pulling on what she thought of as her work pants. She brought them up over her hips and buttoned them, then looked over at Carrie. The other woman, short and pale with straight black hair cropped just below her ears, was looking back in expectation.
“You weren’t on the mission in Chicago, or you wouldn’t have to ask that. The Captain is a hell of a fighter, Carrie.”
Vanessa belted her combat fatigues and sat down to pull on her boots. Carrie pulled her shirt up and off, her ribs clearly visible under the skin beneath her small, freckled breasts. All of the Children soldiers were in peak shape, and Carrie was no exception, but she bordered on too thin for her own good.
“No,” Carrie said, pulling on a black turtleneck. “It’s not … I know she can fight, but this bat we’re going after is a big deal, right? Are you sure the Captain won’t decide to go back to playing for her original team?”
That will forever be the question, Vanessa thought. Out loud she said, “The Captain hates vampires as much as you or I do.”
“But she used to be one of them.”
“Sure, and I used to be a Catholic. Wouldn’t stop me from gunning down a nun if she grew a set of fangs and started drinking blood.”
Carrie grinned, swapped her pair of khaki shorts for combat fatigues, and shook her head.
“Once a vampire, always a vampire. That’s what I think.”
“It’s not what the Emperor thinks.”
“That’s why I’m here. You know I’ll do anything he says. But this girl we’re going after … it’s not like she’s some dipshit Burilgi who just made the change and thinks she’s a superhero.”
“No, she’s not. That’s why there are eight of us going, instead of one or two. Carrie, if the Captain turns … then she turns. If it looks like that’s going to happen, I’ll put a bullet between her eyes myself, but I don’t think it will. She hates them. Only person I know who hates them more is you.”
“We all hate them,” Carrie said. “I’m not special.”
“No, but …” Vanessa paused, unsure how to continue.
“Are you trying to figure out how to ask me why I’ve got a glass eye and big scars all over my face, and why my talking’s all fucked up, and why everyone thinks I have a snake tongue?” Carrie asked. She cinched her boot-laces and looked up, a cold smile on her face.
“Figure you’ll tell me if you want me to know,” Vanessa said. “And I didn’t think you’d heard about the tongue thing.”
“It’s amazing what people will say when they think you’re not listening, even when you’re in the same room,” Carrie said. She stuck her tongue out at Vanessa. Like her face, it was deeply scarred, and a chunk of it was missing on one side, but it was not forked.
“OK, so no snake tongue,” Vanessa said.
“No. It’s partially paralyzed. I can’t bring the tip of it up the way I’m supposed to, so that’s why I can’t say T-H sounds. Doctors said I was lucky to keep it at all. Also, I can barely taste food, so that’s why I’m built like a twig.”
“Yeah, so … now I have to ask what happened, and you’re not allowed to get mad at me for it.”
Carrie sighed. “No, I brought it up. But I’ve never told that story to anyone. Not even Charles. Not the whole thing, anyway.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
Carrie shook her head, bit her lower lip, and took a breath. “Six vampires, all dressed in gang colors, high on God knows what, broke into our house one night. They rounded my parents and me up in the master bedroom and flipped a coin to see which adult to kill first. It came up tails, so they took turns feeding off my mom, and when they were done they shot her in the head. She actually lived, if you can call what she ended up as ‘alive.’ The brain damage was so bad that she was on life support for almost eight years, just an empty shell. I couldn’t visit, of course, but I kept track. I was twenty-o
ne when they gave up and pulled the plug.”
“Jesus,” Vanessa said.
“Yeah. That would’ve been enough, right? Would’ve been plenty for me to hate them. But then they got the idea that it would be funny if they … if they held a shotgun to the back of my dad’s head and told him to f-fuck me.”
Carrie’s voice was shaking, her breath hitching, and Vanessa put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to,” Carrie said. “I want someone else to know, and I like you. I trust you. It was … they told my father if he did it, they’d let us go. They put the gun against his head and two of them held me down and pulled up my nightgown, and they made him take off his boxers. I was thirteen, so I had a pretty good idea of what to do, and I told him it was OK, that he should do it, and I opened my legs. They all started laughing, telling him that I was a slut and a hoochie and a puta, that I wanted it, and he knelt down …”
“Christ, did he actually do it?”
“He couldn’t get it up! He tried for like ten minutes, begging them to let us go, but they weren’t interested. I don’t think … now, I don’t think they’d have let us go even if he’d done it, but back then I believed them, and I was trying to encourage him, and I think that made it worse for him. So finally he’s crying and apologizing … he’s apologizing because he can’t make himself fuck me. And I said, ‘It’s OK, Daddy,” and the vampire holding the gun goes, ‘I am so fucking bored of this’ – I remember it exactly, the words, the tone, like he couldn’t believe he had wasted his precious time – and then he pulls both triggers.”
“Fucking vampires,” Vanessa said, her voice hoarse. “Then they cut you up?”
Carrie was crying now, but she laughed at this. “Oh, I wish, Ness. I wish that was what did this to me. That would’ve been so much better, but they never touched me. It was pieces of my dad’s skull that did all of this. Shrapnel. I got to have surgery after surgery so they could dig little bits of my father out of my face. There’s probably still some of him in there even now, and every time I look in the mirror with my one good eye, I get a nice reminder that I’m only alive because when they blew my dad’s head off, I took so much of the blast that they just left me for dead.
“No one even believed me, either. Not about the vampires, anyway. They figured I’d dreamt that shit up while lying half dead in a pool of my own blood. Tim – you know, Colonel Palowski? – came to me in the hospital after and asked whether I wanted to go live with my aunt, or ‘disappear’ and come learn how to kill the things. I mean … I don’t even have to ask what you would’ve chosen. You’re here for the same reason I am.”
Vanessa, who had not actually watched her parents die but only heard it from another tent, shook her head. “Not exactly the same.”
“No, but close enough. I didn’t even feel like there was a choice, you know? I couldn’t talk, because of the surgeries, so I wrote on my pad, ‘How many do I get to kill?’ and he goes, ‘As many as you want,’ and I wrote ‘I want to kill them all,’ and underlined it twice. He just took my hand and smiled like it was the best thing he’d heard in weeks.”
There was silence for a time. At last, Carrie gave an embarrassed laugh, wiping the tears from her face.
“So that’s why I hate vampires so much, and why I never got drunk and hooked up with anyone, even though pretty much everyone with the Children has banged at least one other member. I don’t … I don’t think I’m ever going to have sex with a guy. I don’t think I want to. Not really into girls, either.”
Vanessa, who had slept with three male members of the Children, plus a handful of civilians, kept her mouth shut.
“I still want to kill them all,” Carrie said. “Every single one, including her. I won’t ever go against the Emperor, but … that’s just how I feel.”
“It’s not like you’re alone,” Vanessa said. “She’s only got to get about five feet away before Janus starts in with his bullshit.”
“What about you? She almost seems to like you.”
Vanessa kept her voice carefully neutral. “I appreciate the Captain’s abilities and her dedication to the Emperor. I don’t know if she likes me … not sure she likes anyone. I’d say it’s more mutual respect.”
“That totally did not answer my question,” Carrie said, smiling, and Vanessa glanced over at her and shrugged.
“Closest you’re going to get, Sergeant. How about you worry a little more about memorizing those maps and a little less about whether or not the Captain and I are secret lovers?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Carrie said. She sat down on her bed and began flipping through her dossier. After a moment, Vanessa spoke again.
“Thank you for sharing your story with me.”
Carrie looked up, shrugged, and smiled again. “You never made fun of me, or called me names, or looked at me like I was some kind of freak. I’ve … I’ve wanted to tell the whole thing to someone else for a while, get it out, and I thought you were probably the someone. I just wasn’t sure how to bring it up.”
“Did you ever get to … you know, take care of those guys?”
“Colonel Palowski rounded up five of them. The sixth one was dead already. Took him about eighteen months to track them all down, but once he knew where they were, he gathered them up in just two nights. Then he brought them to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, and he chained them all up to posts. He set up a video camera, and then he doused them with kerosene and burned them alive. He never told them what they’d done, never told them what it was all about. He never spoke a single fucking word, just sat there while they screamed and burned, and smoked his cigar.
“He gave the tape to me on my sixteenth birthday, along with a fifth of whiskey. I watched it over and over again until I had to go puke from the booze. I ended up passing out on the bathroom floor, and when I woke up the tape and the rest of the whiskey were gone. It didn’t matter. It’ll always be up here.”
She tapped her forehead, and Vanessa nodded. “Sounds like a hell of a birthday.”
The woman across the room gave a short, harsh laugh.
“Best I’ve ever had.”
* * *
“Carrie’s got you all on the eye in the sky,” Soon Park said, his voice tinny in Vanessa’s ear. “I’ve got your vitals on the scanner. We’re ready to go.”
“Right,” Vanessa said. “Everyone in position? Count off.”
The numbers came in reverse order, from six to one. Vanessa spoke hers second to last and next to her, in a voice so emotionless she might have been ordering a combo meal from a value menu, the Captain said, “One.”
“That’s it, then. Let’s do this,” Vanessa said, and without further hesitation she kicked in the back door of the small bungalow in which their quarry was currently living.
She went in first, the Captain right behind her, Janus and Andrew Connors following. She could hear the crash in her earpiece as Burke kicked in the front door, where he would remain positioned until their withdrawal. Paulo would stay behind them at the rear entrance. The goal was to be in, out, and done before any security guards or other curious humans happened by.
The back door opened into the kitchen, a little-used room, dark and unoccupied. Vanessa turned on the flashlight attached to the end of her rifle. The others did the same, and they continued into the living room. It was well-appointed, filled with posh furniture and pieces of original art that the management company had secured. Vanessa felt a mild twinge of envy; the older ones were always so rich …
She pushed it out of her head, stepping out into the room. She could see Burke at the door; he shook his head once, indicating he’d seen nothing, and gestured down the hall. Vanessa nodded and took position at the edge of the wall with her weapon aimed at the bedroom door. Janus moved past her, checked the bathroom, and then positioned himself with his back against the wall. He glanced at Vanessa and then at the Captain.
“All yours,” he murmured into his headset, and th
e Captain made her move.
She wasn’t carrying a firearm; she never did. She was wearing all black, from her boots to her combat fatigues to the tight shirt made of leather with Kevlar reinforcements and darts of stretchy synthetic for flexibility. Her long, blonde hair was tied back and her forearms were covered with leather gauntlets girded in black metal rings. Hitched to her sides, as always, were her blades, and across the chest-plate was a bandolier filled with auto-injecting darts.
Captain Tori Perrault, former vampire and current elite soldier of the Children of the Sun, the Emperor’s Right Hand, strode up to the door at a pace almost leisurely. She stopped in front of it, took a single breath, and then shoved outward with both arms. The door did not so much open as blow inward in a spray of wooden chunks. What was left of it hit the doorstop so hard that the thin tube of metal punched into the wood of the door, stopping it from rebounding. The Captain stepped in, and Vanessa followed her.
Sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing a long and flowing gown of orange and turquoise and purple, was a woman who looked to be in her early twenties. She had dark skin covered in swirling tattoos and long hair pulled back in a high ponytail encircled with golden ringlets. She did not seem surprised by their arrival, nor did she look in the slightest bit concerned. If anything, she seemed to radiate a sense of serenity and peace, and Vanessa found it difficult to look at her for too long without becoming confused. Lightheaded.
“I wondered when you would come for me,” the woman said in a soft, melodious voice.
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