Lovers Sacrifice

by R. A. Steffan

  The sofa dipped as Duchess sat next to her. “Petite soeur,” she began, and Oksana hated the careful quality in her friend’s normally haughty voice. “We can see that something about this is hurting you terribly, even if you will not tell us what it is. But you cannot ignore the prophecy. Not after what we have all seen over the past months.”

  “Watch me,” she said, knowing as soon as the words passed her lips that they were a lie.

  The Council of Thirteen. It was like a taunt echoing in her mind.

  An assemblage of thirteen of Bael’s greatest failures, and the only force that could hope to stand against him. With the addition of Della and Trynn to their ranks, Eris was more convinced than ever that prophecy referred to vampires.

  So… not only was Oksana supposed to relive the night that had turned her into this sad and broken thing every single time she looked in Mason’s eyes; she was also supposed to condemn the soul of the man she loved to that same sentence of almost-death. The invisible walls closed in a fraction tighter around her.

  “I’m not having this discussion right now,” she said again. “End of debate. Move on to crisis number two.”

  Silence stretched, broken only by Duchess’ unhappy huff of breath.

  “Fair enough,” Xander said eventually. “So. Undead children. We’re stopping this—how, exactly?”

  If Oksana allowed herself to examine the fact that she was relieved to be discussing this new subject, she would probably break down weeping on the spot.

  Duchess had no such compunctions. “It seems likely that Bael has a human or undead agent here on the island. Find that agent and reduce him to his constituent molecules. Problem solved.”

  “Direct and to the point,” Xander stated. “Next problem—how do we find him?”

  “Talk to the same villagers le docteur spoke with,” Duchess said immediately. “The ones who originally tipped him off to the presence of the undead.”

  Xander nodded, thoughtful. “And, of course, the quickest way to find those villagers is—”

  “—to have le docteur take us to them and perform introductions,” Duchess finished.

  Oksana’s stomach dropped. “Mason?” she asked incredulously. “You’re joking, right? This is just a really bad joke?”

  “Of course we’re not joking,” Xander said, rubbing the back of his neck in thought. “It’s not a terrible idea, you know.”

  “Uh… yeah, it kind of is,” Oksana insisted, anger flooding in to fill the hollow left by shock. “You’re trying to force us together—both of you are! I already told you, I can’t do this.”

  Duchess stood rather abruptly and Oksana rose to match her, standing toe to toe. Well… toe to prosthesis, at any rate.

  Duchess’ blue eyes flashed. “I’m trying to rescue innocents from Bael,” she said in a cold tone. “It’s not immediately obvious what you’re trying to do, beyond having an existential crisis while elsewhere, children are being condemned to a fate worse than death!”

  Taken by surprise, Oksana reeled back a step, the words more painful than a slap across the face would have been. Hands closed on her shoulders from behind, steadying her. She hadn’t even seen Xander move from his spot across the room.

  “A little more tact, perhaps, Duchess?” he suggested, sounding tired.

  Duchess’ eyes still snapped fire. “Tact will not save lives. The truth will.”

  Shame flooded Oksana, tears stinging ridiculously against the backs of her eyes.

  “Shit,” she said, her voice thick. She pulled away from Xander’s support and practically threw herself at Duchess, who caught her and held her tight. “Shit, I’m sorry, cheri mwen. I’m so sorry—I can’t think, everything’s just this big, dark blur and I don’t know what to do. But we have to save these children. Of course we do.”

  Duchess spoke into her hair. “We can’t help you if you won’t talk to us, mon amie,” she murmured.

  Oksana pulled back and wiped surreptitiously at her eyes, turning her face away from both of them. “No, I’m… I’m all right. I’ve got it under control,” she said, pushing everything down and back, into the dark space behind her ribcage.

  “You won’t thank me for this, Oksana,” Xander said, “but it’s fairly clear that it hasn’t occurred to you yet. Whether you’re ready to deal with Mason or not, you coming into contact with him means that a vortex of evil and chaos will be closing in around him over the coming days. Like it or not, the safest place for good old Dr. Oz will be with us.”

  Ice crept down her spine at Xander’s words. She barely made it back to the couch before her knees gave out, as visions of everything that could happen to an unsuspecting human in a war-torn country with undead on the loose played like a movie reel behind her unfocused eyes.

  The panic that gripped her as she pictured it drove out any delusions she might have harbored about being able to walk away from him and never look back.

  “If he is with all three of us, we can protect him,” Duchess said.

  “All right.” The words emerged as a hoarse whisper. The thought of having to stare into the face of the past she had hidden away was terrifying. But the thought of something happening to the fiercely protective doctor who housed the soul of the man she’d once loved more than life itself? That was worse.

  “Well, thank goodness for that,” Xander said with false lightness. “Now, I’m calling you room service. You need to eat, and I don’t trust you to go out and do it on your own.”

  She sighed and scrubbed a hand over her face. “Fine. Have them send up whatever looks like it has the most sugar in it from the dessert menu, along with a bottle of merlot.”

  Duchess muttered something under her breath. Xander gave her that vaguely nauseated look that the others always flashed her when she said something like that. He shook it off abruptly and turned toward the room’s phone.

  “Whatever you say,” he agreed. “But—as you’re no doubt well aware—I was referring to the hotel staff when I said you need to eat.”

  She nodded, already resigned to the fact that she would need blood if they were about to plunge headlong into god-knew-what in the outlying villages. “Yes, fine. I’ll be a good girl and eat my Brussels sprouts before I have dessert. Are you two going out for a bite later?”

  Duchess waved a hand. “I fed before we left for the peristil last night.”

  “I’ll hit the bar downstairs in a few hours,” Xander said.

  “When the serious alcoholics start drinking, you mean?” Oksana asked, unable to resist the jab.

  Xander’s smile was tight, as were his words. “Too fucking right, pet.”

  Oksana breathed out slowly through her nose and curled against the arm of the couch. Her gaze focused on a threadbare patch in her dark jeans, where rubble from the clinic had weakened the worn denim. In the background, she was vaguely aware of Xander phoning for room service, while Duchess started pacing restlessly once more.

  Coping mechanisms, indeed.

  *

  Mason glanced at the late afternoon sky—a lovely cornflower blue vista that seemed at odds with the dingy surroundings of the overcrowded Red Cross camp. Still, it would have been churlish in the extreme not to appreciate his American colleagues’ generosity in allowing the children’s presence here after the loss of their clinic building.

  The youngsters were safe—at least, as much as anyone was in Haiti these days. Their injuries had been tended, and none of them was life threatening. They’d been fed and had blankets to sleep under. So far, there hadn’t even been any serious outbursts from the former child soldiers, whose behavior could be unpredictable, to put it mildly.

  Things could have been worse. So much worse.

  “Mason?” A familiar, gravelly female voice had him turning on the spot, craning to look over the heads of the people wandering around the camp.

  “Gita!” he called, catching a glimpse of rapidly approaching silver hair piled up in a messy bun. “You’re back safe! Thank heavens for tha
t.”

  Dr. Gita Belawan, Mason’s partner at the clinic, pushed through the refugees waiting in line for handouts of rice. She was a tiny woman—a stereotypical grandmotherly type whose head barely came up to his collarbone.

  “Yes, we made it,” she said by way of greeting. “Some of the roads were blocked by fallen trees, but we managed to get back around noon. Seeing the clinic roof collapsed gave me quite a shock, I have to say. Injuries?”

  “Several,” Mason replied grimly, “but nothing more serious than a simple fracture. Now that you’re back with us, everyone’s officially safe and accounted for.”

  Gita had been out in the field when the quake hit, trying to broker more meetings with the rebel military forces in hope of securing the release of more children. They had been taking turns with that duty since they’d arrived in Haiti, so that one of them was always available at the clinic to oversee their young patients.

  “Any luck with the rebels?” Mason asked, already thinking ahead about how they might house any potential new arrivals after yesterday’s disaster.

  But Gita shook her head, her wrinkled face pulling into a frown. “None. They’re spooked, and that was before the earthquake hit. Things seem worse in the rural areas than they were last time I went out, which is saying something. There’s—I don’t know—an atmosphere around the villages. Like something big is about to happen.”

  A chill settled in Mason’s stomach.

  “Anyway,” Gita finished, “thanks for leaving that note about where to find you scrawled on the wall. I might’ve had a right panic otherwise.”

  “No worries, Gita,” Mason said. “Now, why don’t you grab something to eat? It’s just rice, I’m afraid—they ran out of beans last night and it’ll probably be another couple of days until the emergency shipments start getting through again.”

  Gita snorted. “Please. As if I didn’t practically live on rice for the first sixteen years of my life, you spoiled Australian.”

  She gave his arm a quick squeeze, belying her teasing, and let him show her to the mess tent. By the time they made it through the line and emerged again, the sun had fallen below the horizon and the generators were kicking on. Floodlights glared into life, illuminating the camp as the natural light continued to fade.

  Gita ate quickly before excusing herself to check on the children and let the staff know she was back safely. Mason lingered outside, curious to see if the three good Samaritans from last night would show up as they’d promised.

  He was leaning toward no, but a part of him hoped he’d be wrong about that. He tried to put it down to excitement over the idea of someone—anyone—giving credence to his worries over the reports from the outlying areas about children being… changed. And that was true, as far as it went.

  But it wasn’t the whole truth. The strangers had been oddly magnetic, with an undeniable charisma that intrigued him. In particular, his contrary streak drew him to find out more about a woman who would fearlessly dive into the rubble of a collapsed building despite suffering from claustrophobia. A woman who wielded a dagger as if she’d been born with it in her hand one moment, and calmed a young boy’s PTSD episode the next.

  And—good lord—she had been stunning. Though, of course, she had also acted as though being within ten feet of him made her want to cringe.

  Yep. Contrary, that was him.

  The other two strangers had landed somewhere on the spectrum between businesslike and congenial. Which made him wonder why the petite, dark-eyed beauty with the Cheetah foot prosthesis had seemed like she wanted to sink down into the ground and disappear whenever she interacted to him.

  He was ninety-five percent certain he hadn’t said or done anything too terribly offensive. Well, unless you counted giving her an accidental shock when one of them had brushed against an exposed electrical wire in the rubble, or whatever it was that had caused that odd jolt when their skin touched.

  So, yeah. He was curious. And possibly harboring a slight crush, because, well, damn. There was attractive, and then there was saving a kid’s life by risking your own levels of attractive.

  He wanted to hear her story, spoken in that honeyed Caribbean voice. How did she know the others? Her male companion was obviously a Pommy—that posh English accent wouldn’t sound out of place reading the BBC news. The blonde woman had sounded French. But she hailed from right here in Haiti, he was sure of it. She’d spoken Creole like a native, and the accent clung to her impeccable English as well.

  As if his thoughts had somehow conjured them, the trio appeared from the shadows, emerging into the central space adjacent to the tents that had been set up last night. Bloody hell. He certainly hadn’t been mistaken about her. She was goddamned gorgeous.

  She also still looked like she’d rather be pretty much anywhere but here. Which raised the question—if that was the case, why was she here? Even if her companions were curious enough to want to talk to Mason again, why would she accompany them if she didn’t want to be here? Again, he wondered what their connection was with each other.

  They came straight to him, as if they’d known just where to find him amongst the slowly dispersing crowd in the camp.

  “You came back,” he greeted. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

  The blonde woman—Duchess, as he recalled—wasted no time on pleasantries. “You described some very alarming reports from the outlying villages,” she said. “We wanted to follow up with you.”

  Mason nodded, falling into the same businesslike demeanor. “I appreciate that, believe me. You’re the first people who’ve shown an interest. But, much as it pains me to say it, I’ve already told you pretty much everything I know—which isn’t much.”

  The green-eyed Pom tilted his head. “So, you’ve not run across any of these children yourself, then? Just heard rumors?”

  “No, I haven’t. None of the boys who’ve come to the clinic have shown the kind of behavior the villagers describe,” he said. “They’ve been brainwashed and hyped up on stimulants, true—but at the end of the day, they’re just normal children who’ve undergone a terrible trauma.”

  A half-formed memory slipped into the front of his mind, and he went still, frowning.

  “What is it?” Oksana, the dark beauty asked—the first words she’d spoken since she arrived.

  He took a breath and held it for a moment before answering, new puzzle pieces coming together in his mind.

  “Sorry—I was just remembering something Eniel said, shortly after he arrived at the clinic. He talked about some of his friends being spirited away from the rebel camp in the middle of the night—just… disappearing, never to be seen again.”

  “I’d imagine desertions and raids would be a normal occurrence under the circumstances,” the man called Xander pointed out.

  Mason shook his head, still putting things together. “I thought that at first, too. But Eniel said that they would find the boys’ shoes left behind. If they were deserters, they would have put their shoes on before sneaking away. And if it were a case of night raids by government forces, why sneak away quietly with only a few children, when they could capture or massacre the entire group?”

  “So, you’re saying you believe these disappearances are tied to the appearance of the undead children?” the Frenchwoman asked sharply.

  Mason raised an eyebrow, taken aback. “Undead? Let’s be clear right up front—The Serpent and the Rainbow might’ve been an entertaining book, but zombies don’t exist.”

  The blonde and the Pommy shared a flicker of a glance that Mason couldn’t decipher. He put it aside and chewed his lower lip for a minute, trying to follow this new thread to its logical conclusion.

  “Honestly, I don’t know that Eniel’s report makes any more sense than anything else,” he concluded. “I mean, if the rebels are using some crazy new protocol on their child soldiers, why go to the trouble of sneaking them away under cover of darkness? Why not just march them off under orders in broad daylight?”

  “W
ell,” said the Englishman, “there’s only one way to find out.”

  Mason’s frown deepened. “And that is—?”

  Xander smiled, showing very white, very even teeth. “Why, we go see for ourselves, obviously.”

  “Uh, go… where?” Mason asked, feeling like he was missing something obvious.

  The French woman answered. “Go to whatever village you visited when you first heard the reports, of course. And, from there, to the source of the sightings.”

  Mason blinked, not having expected the strangers’ vague interest to escalate into a proposed field trip to the front lines in the space of less than ten minutes.

  “You’re serious?” he asked cautiously.

  “Very,” said the blonde woman, sounding it.

  “And we want you to come with us, to act as a guide,” added the man, as if it was an afterthought.

  Wait. They wanted him to go along with them? His knee-jerk reaction was to protest that he couldn’t; that he was needed here with the boys under his care, especially now that they no longer had a clinic.

  But Gita was back now. And while it was true that there were a lot of things that needed doing, it was also true that she and the rest of the clinic staff were eminently capable. In an operation like theirs, no single person was indispensable. They’d made certain of that. Stability was too important for these children to risk upheaval if something happened to one of them.

  “We completely understand if you’re too busy—” his mocha-skinned muse began.

  So, she was still trying to get rid of him, then. At this point, burning curiosity about what he’d done to offend her was nearly killing him. Maybe she had something against Aussies? His stubborn streak spurred him to find out, but it was his worry over the alarming reports from the front lines that finally swayed him.

  “I am busy, it’s true,” he said. “However, my partner at the clinic returned today, and I was scheduled to go out and meet with the rebels in a few days anyway. Given what’s at stake, it only makes sense for me to head out early and see if anything can be done for these lost children.”

  “Perfect!” the man called Xander enthused. “You can help me balance out all the estrogen floating around.”