Lovers Sacrifice

by R. A. Steffan

  After a long moment, Eniel relaxed. Never taking his eyes off Mason, he lowered the gun slowly towards the ground. As soon as it was resting on the dirt path in front of the clinic, Mason carefully rose to his feet and gestured Eniel towards the steps.

  Thank God for crisis intervention training.

  The boy stood still and watched suspiciously as Mason crossed to the steps and sat down, his legs and feet still numb from his awkward, crouched position.

  To further put the boy at ease, Mason made quite a show of removing one of his shoes and massaging life back into his foot. He guessed that Eniel would feel more comfortable moving nearer if he wasn’t faced with uninterrupted eye contact.

  To Mason’s relief, the boy took a few faltering steps towards the stairs and lowered himself down against the railing, as far away from Mason as possible.

  “Thank you, Eniel,” Mason said. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the boy chew on his lower lip thoughtfully. The gun lay abandoned in the dirt in front of them.

  “Now… you were telling me about your friends?” he prompted, pulling his sock back on and brushing the sand and dirt off the fabric.

  Eniel was silent for several moments before he spoke, watching Mason carefully adjust his shoe and retie the laces.

  “We camped at night in a line, a long line of men and boys. Some had guns, some did not,” Eniel began in a hoarse whisper. “My place was near the middle of the line.”

  Mason nodded to show he was listening, though he looked out through the palm trees dotting the landscape in front of the clinic. His fingers mindlessly found a stone stuck in the crack of the wooden stairs, and he pried at it with a fingernail just to give himself something to do while Eniel spoke.

  “I could not sleep, so I stayed awake and watched the stars. The fire in the camp flickered, throwing many shadows. There was no noise except the wind in the grass and trees. Then, I heard screams from the far end of camp. I ran to them, but they were already gone. I raised the alarm, but it was too late. They disappeared.”

  “Other soldiers?”

  “Other boys. Their sleeping places were empty, and their shoes left behind. This happened many times while we traveled, and even though we searched, we could never find them afterward. Never. They are gone… lost in the hills.”

  Mason breathed out slowly through his nose. Must have been the government forces taking the boys in secret, he mused. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense. If they were all sleeping except for a handful of lookouts, why not just capture the entire band of rebels, or kill them? Why just take a few?

  He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. He would never understand the ways of the military, and he knew better than to start raising questions that might embarrass the people who held the fate of his clinic in their hands.

  Turning his attention back to Eniel, Mason tried to regain the thread of the conversation.

  “It sounds like you did everything you could though, right? You kept watch, and you raised the alarm when you knew something had happened.”

  Eniel stared at his hands, which were cracked, scabbed, and dirty. He nodded, but a frown still marred his features. “James was lost,” he said quietly.

  “Who was James?” Mason asked.

  The frown grew deeper. “My friend. We were together from the very beginning. He was very tall, so his place was near the end of the line. He was taken during the night and I never saw him again.”

  Eniel’s shoulders trembled and he wiped his nose on his arm once more.

  “I’m sorry Eniel, I lost a friend not so long ago myself,” Mason said. It was true—one of his friends from uni had recently been killed in a suicide bombing in Sydney. Admittedly, the two of them hadn’t been terribly close in the years since they’d both graduated and had gone on to different medical schools. Still, Mason knew that he needed to establish a rapport with Eniel, and this was one way to do that.

  Eniel turned towards him with glittering eyes. “You did?”

  “Yes, and it hurts me very much.” Also not a lie. Bess had been like the sister he’d never had growing up. Thinking of her brilliant spark being extinguished during a pointless act of terror made him ache, even months later.

  Eniel nodded and set his head down on his arms, which were propped up on his knees. “I am tired of fighting. So tired.”

  “You fought bravely for a long time. You deserve to rest now,” Mason told him. “Think of it as military leave, if that helps.”

  Eniel snorted. “I was traded by my commander to the government, and they sent me here.” He muttered something under his breath that Mason didn’t understand, but by the tone of his voice, Mason guessed it was expletives.

  “Yeah, I hear you, mate,” he said. “It sucks balls when you’re told what to do and have to obey sometimes.”

  “I am a soldier, not a child!”

  Mason blinked at the sudden rage and anguish that filled Eniel’s face, but he didn’t back down. “You are both of those things. And soldiers are no strangers to obeying orders, as I imagine you know very well.” He reached down and plucked a long strand of the pampas grass stubbornly clinging to life next to the steps. Absently, he weaved the grass leaf through his fingers.

  The motion mesmerized Eniel, who watched with wide, unblinking eyes.

  “Can I tell you what I want right now, and you tell me what you want?” Mason asked in a soft voice, still toying with the grass.

  Eniel’s lips parted, and it looked like exhaustion was crashing over him. Even so, he rallied enough to nod at Mason’s request.

  Mason nodded back. “Good. I want for you and I to go inside together, and check you out medically. We need to make sure you’re okay; then you can eat and rest. Now, what do you want?”

  Eniel jerked, as if taken by surprise. He glanced into Mason’s face and then back towards the ground. “To forget.”

  Mason sighed quietly. “I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple, Eniel—but I can promise you that the bad memories will start to fade, and things will get better with time.”

  For a second, Mason thought he could make out a tear trickling down the side of Eniel’s face. It was wiped away so quickly that he couldn’t be sure, though. He stood up slowly and watched as Eniel flinched, recoiling from him.

  “It’s okay,” Mason said, “I’m just going to make this gun safe—that’s all.”

  Eniel did not respond, but continued to watch with wary eyes as Mason carefully disarmed the weapon and pulled the strap over his shoulder, letting the rifle rest against his back. With the chamber empty and the magazine held securely in one hand, Mason walked past Eniel and pulled open the rickety screen door, which creaked loudly. He held the door open for the boy, who remained sitting on the front steps.

  Eniel’s gaze flickered back and forth between the packed dirt of the street and the front door several times, as if he was trying to make up his mind about something. Finally, he rose to his feet, his back straight, and walked into the clinic.

  *

  Many long, exhausting hours later, Mason sat down heavily at his desk, pushing aside the clutter of folders until he could power up the laptop he’d brought with him to Haiti. With the way things were in the capital these days, they didn’t have the option of reliable cable or DSL internet service. Thankfully, Doctors Without Borders had provided him a satellite uplink to ensure he could remain connected to their agency and the outside world.

  After carefully documenting the events of the day and sending an incident report to headquarters, Mason checked his watch.

  He frowned at it. Where had the time gone? Christ… his brother Jack would be calling any minute.

  Sure enough, within a matter of moments, and alert popped up on his screen that he had an incoming FaceTime request. He accepted it and smiled into the camera, his mood lightening immediately.

  “Sitting at home on a Friday night again? You’re getting old, Jack,” he quipped.

  “Greetings from Singapore, brother mine,”
Jack responded with a matching grin. “Age has its compensations, you know—we can’t all dwell in the youth of our twenties forever.”

  Jackson Walker was only four years older than Mason was, in reality, but the disparity was still a running joke between them. He and Mason both shared their father’s piercing blue eyes and light brown hair. At six-foot-two, Mason had a few inches on his brother, and he had been a bit more dedicated when it came to staying in shape after years of playing rugby.

  “No, I suppose we can’t,” Mason agreed.

  At twenty-nine, there were some days that he still felt invincible and on top of the world, but more and more of his nights were turning weary. Even if he had been living in a trendy first-world city somewhere, rather than the outskirts of the impoverished capital in civil-war-torn Haiti, he was beginning to feel like he wouldn’t have been able to keep up much of a social life after the toll his job took on him.

  He’d seen too much in the past few months. It felt sometimes as though he’d aged far beyond his years. These days, even the most studious of his peers were starting to seem shallow and vain to him, with their successful careers, posh houses, and expensive BMWs. Meanwhile, the horrors Mason had witnessed while volunteering in war-torn areas would be forever branded on his memories—and today, staring down the barrel of a gun held by a child who should have been playing ball in a schoolyard somewhere, was one of the days he was unlikely to forget.

  Apparently, enough of this showed on his face to be obvious even over a pixelated video chat, because Jack sobered.

  “Something happened, didn’t it?” Jack asked, perceptive as ever. “Want to tell me what?”

  Mason sighed. Where to even begin?

  “Right, little brother. I don’t like that expression at all. Start at the beginning,” Jack said, as if reading his mind.

  Mason shook his head and relayed a concise version of the day’s events. “… and then I finally convinced him to come inside, where I got a nurse to help me with an examination. Let me tell you, that was a huge battle, all on its own. I don’t know if this kid has ever seen a doctor before, but there were times he screamed hysterically at us about spirits and curses—all sorts of superstitious craziness. He’s seriously emaciated, and he needed antibiotics for an infection in his lungs, but he fought like a madman when I tried to put in the IV.”

  Jack swore. “I don’t know how you do it, Mason. I’d tear my hair out if I had to deal with things like that.”

  Mason cocked an eyebrow, dredging up a brief smile. “No shit. That’s why you’re an engineer.”

  “Exactly my point,” Jack agreed. “I fix things that other people mess up, and design stuff that, ultimately, some crappy builder somewhere is going to end up changing without my permission so the whole system will fail to work. You deal with snotty noses, messed-up children, and having high-powered rifles pulled on you every other day. I deal with infuriating clients and impossible deadlines. Though I guess, when you look at it like that… it’s practically the same thing, right?”

  Mason snorted. “You always were the funny one.”

  “Damn right. The funny one… the good-looking one…”

  “The modest one,” Mason put in, still smiling. He sighed, sobering. “Really, though, they’re not bad kids, Jack. This little guy isn’t some spoiled brat. He’s deeply traumatized, starving, hopped up on drugs, and brainwashed.”

  The humor drained from Jack’s expression as well. “Jesus. I still can’t wrap my brain around the idea of stealing kids to fight in a war. It’s just… sick. I mean, how do they get them?”

  “Depends on the kid,” Mason answered, rubbing his tired eyes for a moment. “Depends on the family. Sometimes it’s revenge kidnapping; sometimes they come in after a battle and take the survivors away. Sometimes it’s just opportunity. They’ll grab a kid who’s walking alone.”

  Jack was uncharacteristically quiet for a moment. “Then they go to war and—”

  His voice trailed away. Mason did not break the silence for a moment but eventually took a breath and said, “And they’re soldiers. They carry out their orders and kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people over their years of captivity.”

  “And then they come to you.”

  Mason laughed—an ugly sound. “And then they come to me. The government realized that this was a tactic the rebels were using not long after the practice started. Whenever it’s feasible, the youngest children in the rebel forces are captured by the government soldiers, rather than being killed. They’re taken and matched with missing children reports, when possible.”

  “How often does that happen, though?”

  “Rarely,” Mason admitted. “Haiti is being torn apart at the seams. Any information from the smaller villages being held by the rebels is old, often inaccurate, or contains nothing useful. The rebels intercept most unencrypted messages, and they don’t want the government to realize just how many children they’re holding hostage.”

  Jack whistled behind his teeth and shook his head. “This is fucking depressing, Mason.”

  “You think?” Mason didn’t even try to keep the bitterness from his voice.

  “These kids are coming to you so messed up that they’ll pull a gun on you and nearly kill you?”

  Mason shook his head. “If you’d asked me a month ago, I would have scoffed and said it wasn’t that bad. That sort of thing never used to happen. Don’t get me wrong—these kids have problems. They’re sick, half-starved, full of parasites, and emotionally traumatized. We have all the problems you would associate with that kind of thing—fighting, bad behavior, nightmares, and so forth. For the most part, though, once we get them weaned off the drugs, they’re sweet and scared.”

  “If I’d asked you a month ago?” Jack echoed. “What changed in the last month?”

  Darkness settled over Mason’s heart like a pall, and a shudder rolled down his spine. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the screen and see the concern in his brother’s face. Nor could he banish the sense of evil that seemed to be creeping over him like black oil. In his mind’s eye, he could see the same darkness covering all of Haiti, inciting bloodlust and insanity everywhere it went. It was like a heavy plume, billowing outwards across the land, blocking out all the beauty and light from the sky. A superstitious chill pierced his heart.

  “Mason?” Jack pressed, concern in his voice. “What’s changed?”

  Mason looked directly into the camera at the top of his computer, his mouth dry and his voice hoarse. “Everything.”

  TWO

  “WAIT,” XANDER SAID, looking down at Oksana as though he wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “You’re telling me they pour perfectly good alcohol onto the ground? And they do this on purpose?”

  Oksana blinked at him, even as Duchess let out a rather indelicate snort from her other side as the three of them walked down the street in Port-au-Prince.

  “Xander,” Oksana said, meeting his scandalized green gaze, “we’re in the middle of a war-torn nation struggling under a yoke of poverty and corruption. I’ve just explained about the ceremony we’re about to witness so that I can ask the vodou spirits—”

  “The loa, yes,” he interjected. “See, I was listening.”

  “So that I can ask the vodou loa for assistance in finding Bael’s next vortex of chaos,” she continued patiently. “And this is the part you’re worried about?”

  “When one is stuck in a war-torn, poverty-stricken land, one drinks the booze, Oksana. One does not,” Xander said very slowly and clearly, “spill it onto the dirt. Now, I have as much cause as anyone to respect the vodou gods—”

  “Sure he does. Just ask Madame Francine,” Duchess interrupted dryly.

  A smile of amusement tugged at the corners of Oksana’s lips, almost despite herself. She and Duchess had both heard the account of Xander’s rather humiliating run-in with the elderly New Orleans mambo in the days before he and Tré had called the rest of them to the Big Easy.

  Xander raised
a finger, leaning around Oksana to point it at Duchess without slowing his stride. “Excuse me,” he began, “but you know full well that we do not speak of that incident. Ever. Now, as I was saying, Oksana, I have every reason to respect these loa you worship, but the booze thing is just plain wasteful. Shockingly so. You can’t possibly expect me to approve of such a practice.”

  She rolled her eyes. “If the priest or priestess doesn’t offer the loa food and drink, they won’t come. Which would rather defeat the purpose of the exercise, don’t you agree? If it makes you feel better, there will probably be people smoking ganja, and maybe taking mushrooms. Just… do please try to be discrete? This is my home, after all.”

  Duchess snorted again. “Xander is always discrete, ma chérie. Well, except for that one time in Tokyo. And the one in Brisbane. Oh, and Montreal. We mustn’t forget Montreal…”

  “Duchess,” Xander said, “you know I adore you. But I’m not sure you’re the one to throw stones when it comes to the quality of discretion. Does the term glass houses ring a bell?” He scowled. “And I still have no memory of anything noteworthy ever happening in Brisbane.”

  “Yeah, you probably wouldn’t,” Oksana murmured under her breath, and smiled sweetly when his scowl turned on her. “Anyway, like I said, if you’re hungry, you shouldn’t have trouble finding someone suitable after the ceremony begins to wind down.”

  Honestly, it was no surprise that Xander was in search of a bit of chemically mediated oblivion—short-lived though it would be, given his vampire metabolism. Haiti was no holiday destination these days, but even compared to Port-au-Prince, all three of them had spent the last couple of months in hell.

  In fact, their friends were still back in that abyss of suffering, where they had all spent the first days after the detonation of the suitcase nuke in Damascus pulling survivors from the rubble under cover of darkness. After that, rescue had turned to recovery, only for them to find that someone—or something—had been there before them.

  The undead were rising en masse from the wreckage, spreading outward across Syria and into neighboring countries, to the accompaniment of growing hysteria from the human population. Tré, Snag, Eris, Della, and Trynn had stayed behind to monitor the situation and step in whenever doing so might make a difference without getting them all killed in the process.