The Innocents

by Riley LaShea

  “You didn’t really think I would let him do anything to you, did you?” The question sounded as sincere as Slade ever got.

  “You weren’t there.” Fiona couldn’t control the tremor in her voice, or the thickness of the tears that never made their way to the surface where Slade would see. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. He thought they were alike, because they did the same thing, knew all the same ways to kill, had both taken their share of bone-breaking beatings. In so many ways, they were. It was impossible for him to grasp there was always one thing she had left to fear when all other fear was gone. “Then, when you were, you weren’t exactly rushing to stop it.”

  “As I recall, you got a pretty good right hook in and didn’t need my help.”

  “Because you scared the shit out of Sean when you came in,” Fiona stated. “I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t expecting you back. You know, at the very least, I would have thought you would be pissed he tried to fuck me.”

  “Hey.” Slade’s head shook again. “You have your own mind. It wasn’t for me to get pissed if you wanted to fuck someone else.”

  “Someone else or Sean?” Fiona countered. Because that was how it felt, as if, when it came to Sean, Slade was simply willing to share her. “And, for the record, I didn’t want to fuck anyone else. All I wanted was him gone.”

  “Which wasn’t fair, Fiona.” The fact that Slade thought that clear from the outset, Fiona didn’t know why it still pained her. Nothing else to do but laugh in acceptance, she realized she shouldn’t be surprised anymore by anything Slade did or didn’t do when it came to protecting Sean. “The shit we do, it messes you up. You know that. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

  “I think you’re right.” Fiona stared down at the constellation of balls on the tabletop, picking out the six easy shots to game over. “It does mess you up. I think it makes it harder to tell who the bad people really are.”

  “He’s had my back on a lot of missions.”

  “And it was then I knew your back was the only one you were worried about,” Fiona responded, and the statement actually silenced Slade for a moment.

  “I wouldn’t have let him hurt you,” he said again.

  “You chose him over me,” Fiona declared. “It wasn’t exactly in my best interest to stick around and find out what would happen next.”

  Reality scattered on the table between them - of why she had been looking for someplace else to go, of how she ended up embedded in Garcia’s world of rhetoric and indoctrination, where the weapons were primitive, but the intention, at least, sincere - it eased neither of their burdens. Fiona had so hoped it would.

  “Obviously, you’re not here to reconcile.” Slade came to his conclusion, both right and wrong. In honesty, Fiona would love nothing more than to be back on the team with the equipment and the payroll. As long as Sean was around, though, she would be anyplace else. “So, why are you here?”

  Realizing the purpose of her visit had come down to what Garcia wanted after all, Fiona watched as Slade lined up a shot, so drained she couldn’t even feel the satisfaction as it went awry and he cursed beneath his breath.

  “I need to know how you killed a deraph,” she said, with no concern about the ears around them, all too cotton-stuffed with drunkenness to cause any trouble, and, when Slade grinned, Fiona could see braggarty and bravado jockeying for position. “And I need the truth, so please spare me your superhuman strength and unnatural skill.”

  “Why?” Slade didn’t like being called on his crap before he could fling it. “So, you can run back and tell your boyfriend? Or is he waiting outside? Might as well bring him on in.”

  “I thought it wasn’t for you to get pissed off about who I want to fuck,” Fiona countered, and, liking being called on that even less, Slade slumped back over the table. “He’s not here. And he is not my boyfriend. He’s as much of a prick as you. But at least I can trust his crew not to try to rape me when my back is turned.”

  Declaration pressing the frown deeper into Slade’s face, he shifted around the corner of the table, disgruntled with his options.

  “Why should I help you?”

  “Because you owe me,” Fiona declared. As much as she felt it, though, she knew that alone would never convince him. “Or, I don’t know, Slade, how about you just do a good turn for once?”

  “Why?” He glanced up with disinterest. “To save my soul?”

  Fiona knew well that didn’t matter to him. For all she knew, Slade didn’t have one. There were times, she wasn’t sure she did anymore.

  Then again, she thought back to the time before Sean, the time she tried not to think about too often, because it was over and there was no going back, it occurred to her Slade did have a soul after all. He just didn’t realize where he kept it.

  “Because you have a kid,” she said.

  “Halfway around the world that I’ve never seen,” Slade responded.

  “Still…” He couldn’t pretend it didn’t matter with her. They had too many nights - genuine nights - between them. She had heard Slade talk about the kid too many times as if she was the Holy Grail, this divine fascination he knew existed, but was never going to put eyes on.

  That was the thing about being a man without a cause of his own. Mercenaries never made enemies - the only enemy was whoever one was paid to hurt or kill, and an enemy today could be ally tomorrow - but they made no friends either. Once a job was done, they could never be trusted not to switch sides for a larger paycheck. They’d all had people, confidantes, lovers, friends, even those who treated them as family, over the course of jobs. The instant the contract expired, though, they were cast back to the periphery, left to bide their time until they were useful again, embraced more by violence than affection.

  In Slade’s case, he just happened to leave some DNA behind in a world that didn’t want him once he had no longer had purpose.

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t mind there being a few less bogeymen in the world for her.”

  Eyes on the table, hands paused on the cue, Slade tried, Fiona could tell, but he couldn’t ignore his heart completely. Even if he didn’t keep it in his own body. “What are you asking for exactly?”

  “How did you do it?” Fiona asked. “How did you kill a deraph? They hear us coming. They smell us. They know when we’re there.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “If I didn’t believe you,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here.”

  Assurance rapidly cooling Slade’s overheated pride, he sunk his shot and slid the cue onto the felt, before grabbing his beer from the corner of the table, and leaning back against the bumper.

  “It was luck.” He shrugged after a moment’s consideration. “Billy and I managed to get one alone.”

  “That isn’t easy to do.”

  “That’s why it was luck,” Slade returned. “He was newly turned, I think. Uncoordinated. Confused. Drunk maybe. Maybe got some bad blood or something. Anyway, he took a wrong turn, got himself trapped in a dead-end, and he hesitated. He hesitated to go up where we couldn’t get at him, and, at that first shot, he hesitated. You can’t hesitate when you have a ticking bomb inside your chest.”

  “Do you think you could do it again?” Fiona knew what Garcia would want her to ask.

  “Shit.” All Slade’s cockiness was knocked out of him in a question. “I don’t know. I had a bigger crew then. The deraphs made a helluva point after that kill. I was trying to rebuild, but, as you know, things went a little sideways. It seems I’ve expended all the friends I have left.”

  “You’ll have a crew.” Fiona said, ignoring the rest. She would regret Sean’s interruption of what had been a pretty decent thing for a while, but she wasn’t going to apologize for protecting herself.

  “You’re going to work with Sean?” Slade’s head tilted in doubt.

  “I don’t have much of a choice,” Fiona returned, hating both him and Garcia for putting her in such a position. “Just make sure he knows, if he com
es anywhere near me, I will not hesitate to shoot him.”

  “I think you made that point pretty clear earlier,” Slade said.

  “Good,” Fiona countered. “So, can we do it?”

  “Right circumstances,” Slade hedged. “Maybe. It’s won’t be easy.”

  “I didn’t think it would.”

  “It’ll take some serious coordinating.”

  “Does that mean you’ll help us?”

  “I’ll help you.” Slade’s gaze felt far too concentrated, and Fiona was glad to have an answer and be given her leave to go.

  “I’ll let Garcia know.”

  “Fiona.” She didn’t make it nearly as far as she would have liked. Turning back, she watched Slade stand up, something oddly unsure in his posture. That was another thing about people like them. All the shit they saw, it was bizarre the stuff they couldn’t handle. “What if Sean really was just playin’ around? Did you even consider that?”

  Furious as she wanted to be at the question, goading as it felt, Fiona couldn’t dismiss the fact that, for once, Slade wasn’t trying to be an asshole. He was sincerely asking, truly believed it a possibility.

  “Slade, what if it had been your daughter on that table? Even all grown-up and capable of defending herself? Would you still have thought Sean was just playin’ around?”

  Not waiting for a response, Fiona couldn’t stand being there anymore, in the place where she supposedly belonged. Smells twisting her stomach, it felt like she would suffocate before she found her way free, until she at last stepped into the night air and sucked the cold painfully deep into her lungs, feeling like it was the first breath she had taken all night.

  5

  The pulsating energy that thrummed the Museumplein could only radiate from the living. It meant something to them, the passing of another year. It was a sparkling new opportunity to make changes in their lives, to be better, or fail to be better. For better or worse, it was still three hundred and sixty-five days closer to the grave.

  Haydn had only a vague recollection of time having that kind of significance.

  Back then, deep in the throes of winter, a new year was marked by fire, songs and toasts. Watching a group of college students slosh cheap beer in plastic cups, it occurred to her things hadn’t changed all that much. Flint on wool had simply given way to pyrotechnics, and homemade ales to copious amounts of mass-produced alcohol.

  While she couldn’t be bribed into drinking anything that tainted the air around her, Haydn had to admit she found their enthusiasm infectious. This year, perhaps, she and her clan too had something to celebrate. Since the moment Indigo and Cassius showed up at The Rock with Vinn, she had expected more. Over a year since her clan’s first and only loss, the wound still wept. As, she was sure, did Slade’s. After the death of Jeremiah, they were far less inclined to show restraint when the hunters came after them, and it took Slade until he was the last man standing to accept the fact that, in the real world, Goliath always won.

  Of course - hand going to her chest, Haydn could feel the raised ridge beneath her coat - given the right weapons, David could become Goliath.

  “Look at him.” The appreciative comment pulling her from her pointless concerns, Haydn vowed to stop thinking so much. Ten days without further incident, any worries she had that Slade had discovered a sleeper substance, something that could be carried into their refuge to wipe them all out, had been eradicated.

  Glancing to Auris’ intended objective, Haydn could see the bulk of muscle beneath the man’s heavy coat. He wasn’t native. She knew by the way he looked somewhat unsure of himself, yet completely invested in the reveling at the same time. A tourist, most likely, come in for the party, about to get more of a party than he ever could have anticipated.

  “Looks fresh off the farm.” Gijon smirked, though it didn’t seem to diminish his own interest in the least.

  “Haydn?” Auris looked to her.

  “You go ahead,” she disappointed as always. “I’ll watch.”

  “You should probably go first.” Gijon tossed back the remainder of his drink. “It’s going to take some warming up.”

  It didn’t require any warming up. One touch, and Gijon could get the farm boy to go down on him in the middle of the nearby skating rink, if he so desired, but that wasn’t what Gijon desired. He wanted the muscle-bound farm boy to beg to be bent over and plowed from behind, inebriated, for sure, but still entirely in his own mind.

  Sauntering headlong into the challenge, Auris looked every bit the drunken party girl with her bottle swaying precariously in her hand. An irregular indulgence, at least as far as Haydn needed to know, the alcohol had the same basic effect. Though, it took more to get drunk and cost far more to stay that way long. Overindulgence tainted the veins to a point beyond repair. It was how deraphs became dross. A single night of fun here and there, however, could be counteracted in one good meal.

  “Hey,” Auris greeted the farm boy with her wide, irresistible smile.

  “Hey.” He looked cautiously optimistic. Gaze falling from blonde hair to striking blue eyes, Haydn was fairly certain the farm boy made it only as far as Auris’ lips before he was halfway in love.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Uh… Matthew.”

  “Matthew, it’s like this.” Auris’ hand slipped over his shoulder, pulling the farm boy down so she was closer to his ear. “I’m horny as hell and I think you’re sexy, so I was wondering if you’d like to fuck me.”

  Well, so much for the wooing, Haydn thought, hearing Gijon’s light laugh beside her. For all the deraphs possessed, they did lack subtlety when it came to their carnal impulses. But then, they didn’t exactly require it.

  “Are you serious?” Surely hoping he might get lucky on the streets of Amsterdam, Farm Boy Matthew looked like he just struck gold while digging for scrap metal.

  “I am so serious,” Auris returned, holding the farm boy’s overly enthusiastic response at bay with a hand on his chest. “There is just one more thing.”

  “Okay.” He was ready to agree to any provision she made. Though, it was with renewed surprise that he watched Gijon strut up behind Auris, hand circling her waist as he grinned over her shoulder.

  “He wants to fuck you too,” Auris declared, and, as Gijon’s gaze moved over him, sizing up how much the farm boy could take, Matthew’s eyes went wide.

  “I, uh… I’m not… I can’t… I mean, I’ve never…”

  “Never say never, Farm Boy.” Hand drifting from Auris’ body, Haydn could see the restraint in Gijon’s touch - asking, not insisting - as it slid down the blue fabric of Matthew’s coat. “We can take it as easy as you want. Come on now, it’s a New Year. You only live once, right?”

  Touch continuing downward, Farm Boy Matthew did nothing to impede it, though it was obvious where it would end up, and Haydn knew he had already given into the experience. No tricks or enchantment required, Gijon and Auris just so desirable they could talk the pope into bed.

  The entire display a hedonic reminder of why she had chosen to sire them so many years before, Haydn suspected, when they vanished from their mortal lives, the people who knew them assumed Gijon and Auris had been victims of temptation, that they had been lured by the forbidden fruit. In truth, it was Haydn who had been seduced by them.

  Before she could witness Matthew’s fall to the same inexorable fate, she heard it, the pull lever of a crossbow. Primed for danger since the night of her near-miss and Vinn’s demise, the sound found Haydn even over the celebration around them, the music spilling from buildings, the overly-loud, alcohol-induced laughter. Sucking in polluted air, she could just distinguish his scent from the street food and sickly-sweet hemp. Not Slade, nor any of his crew, but, to her surprise, Jim, one of Garcia’s hapless associates.

  At the thunk of the trigger release, Haydn turned her head, senses so piqued, the world slowed to a hundredth its normal speed. Tip of the arrow entering her peripheral vision, her hand darted outward, closi
ng around the shaft to stop its flight toward Auris and Gijon, and both their gazes snapped her way.

  The sound of another arrow sliding through an ancient crossbow’s groove, Auris pushed Farm Boy Matthew out of the line of fire, flipping backward as the projectile sliced the air between them.

  The gunfire came next. Though Haydn could tell it was aimed toward the sky, the human crowd couldn’t. Screams rising into chorus, pandemonium erupted as the square’s revelers tried to flee in competing directions, rushing into each other and obstructing their own escape, so that at least Garcia’s crew could fire no more projectiles without putting their own kind in grave peril.

  “What in the bloody hell are they doing?” Glancing to the rooftop, Haydn saw Jim fall back from his position as Auris and Gijon made it to her side.

  When Gijon turned at once to go after him, Haydn reached for the lapels of his coat. “No,” she said. “These people have had too much of a show already. The last thing they need is to see you scale a building.”

  It was arrogant, she realized a moment later, to think she had any control over how the performance played out.

  The rest of her clan finding their way through the crowd, they stood in unity for only a moment before Brooks cried out and fell to the damp grass. Dropping down beside him, Layla ripped the bolt from his leg and tossed it into the air. Flying ten meters before it detonated, its shrapnel spread like confetti, and the smell of blood permeated the air as the shards of metal sliced and nicked those trying to flee.

  Looking through the thinning horde to see Slade and Sean coming toward them, bows drawn in clear sight, Haydn was surprised enough to hesitate. Though, her hesitation lasted only until the next trigger fell. Another bolt coming in, they dove apart, Cassius and Layla helping Brooks up as they all rose back to fighting positions.

  “Go!” Haydn shouted when Sean opened fire. Targeted this time, the bullets peppered the air around them, and Samuel jerked back as one ripped through his shoulder.

  “Run. Don’t fight.” Haydn pushed them into the crowd, and her clan took the directive, breaking into smaller groups to try to hide in plain sight.