The Prince of Cups (Villainess Book 2)

by Melos,Alana

  Red hot pain raced through my chest as a soldier shot me, to the left and below my heart. My concentration wavered. I screamed, but didn’t fall. I strived to ignore the pain as much as possible because this had to be done and no one else could do it. The missile completed its arc, and when another bullet hit me in the shoulder this time, I let go of the tube, unable to maintain it any longer. The missile streaked back towards the enemy. It hit the far wall, exploding upon impact. It wasn’t quite where I wanted to put it, but I rocked back and fell, blood spilling from my lips. I tried to breathe, but all I got was a mouth full of blood and a death rattle in my chest. One of my lungs had been hit as well as my shoulder. It was so strange. I didn’t feel the heat of the wound… I shivered with cold. The pain throbbed, but it was far away from me. Clawed hands grabbed me and pulled me towards the portal. I looked up and saw Rory above me, his own chest and abdomen bleeding again. He struggled to drag me up to the way home.

  Someone else shoved Rory out of the way. Rebekah was there, and she lifted me, brought me up to my feet. They didn’t seem to want to work right, but as she propelled me forward, they found their way. I struggled to keep up with her long, quick strides.. “Jeez, come on,” she said, her face a mask of white and red. “We’re almost there!”

  Another wolf helped Rory to his feet, and I reached out to him, thanking him silently. I coughed, and it hurt, all the way down to my bones. My breath rattled again. I couldn’t seem to draw a clear breath. The wolves had begun to fall back, and the vampires moved forward to help cover them, disappearing as the Siren had, and reappearing near the people they attacked. It seemed less effective now. I could see them moving as ghostly apparitions instead of shadows. I looked out the open door. Sunlight had begun to crest the hill, and a shrill scream brought my attention to the front again. Adira raced past us, her arm on fire. She wasn’t a vamp any longer, but human, having switched back when the light’s rays hit her. Another further back screamed, bursting into flames the instant the sun touched them. It hit them that fast… the first rays brought death for those not quick enough to get to the shadows. More than just that one had been slow, and they shrieked in pain, completely immolated in unholy flame, dancing blue and purple light over the battleground to mix with the sun’s yellow rays. They didn’t scream for long.

  Rebekah forced me up the ramp, and I heard the shattering of glass from above. Regulus sailed through the window to land heavily on the ramp, kneeling as he absorbed the force from the impact, denting the ramp beneath him with the rough use of his telekinesis. He straightened, and looked me over, assessing my wounds with a single glance.

  “You don’t look so good, Reece,” he said.

  “I’ll live,” I croaked, but I wasn’t so sure.

  “Through the portal, now,” he instructed, reaching into the bag he carried with him. Without further talk, he began to set the charges he’d brought with him around the base of the silvery ring. One minute to go! he announced to our allies.

  “Wait,” I said weakly. Regulus didn’t register my voice, so I reached out to him. Wait, what about Nosferatu?

  What about him? he asked as he set the last of the charges. Rebekah started to move to the silvery light, intent on going through the portal, but I pulled on her jacket.

  “We can’t leave him,” I said, panic welling. “We can’t. I can’t.”

  “Can’t leave who?” she asked, dragging me along with her. I resisted, and she stopped on the threshold. “Regulus is already here. There isn’t anyone else.”

  I saw Rory being lifted through the portal by one of his companions. Other wolves moved in past us, not even sparing us a glance as they moved into the interdimensional portal. The few remaining vampires left us as well, fleeing the sunlight which would kill them near instantly if their heads or chests were exposed. But I didn’t see Nazferatu.

  Logically, I knew since I had let everything drop to turn the missile, the enthrallment took root in me again. Emotionally, I needed to find him. I needed him. I tried to scan for him, my mind fumbling after the vampire. Surprisingly, I found him, and very nearby, lurking in the shadows. Relief surged through me. I didn’t even care that I was his. I couldn’t spare the energy to care.

  Come with us! I sent to him. Just step through.

  I will not, he replied. I could practically feel him breathing, though I knew he wasn’t on the platform. I just knew what it would feel like, that cold wind upon my neck, and I longed for it. This is my home, he sent. I will not leave it in the hands of these traitors.

  Nos…. I sent, hearing Erick’s frothing rage deep in his head. You can’t fight this battle alone. I’ll stay with you.

  He chuckled at that. No way for you to hide until nightfall, he replied. I would rather you live and be there when I finish. Then, I will turn you and we will rule the night together.

  I was about to say more, but at Regulus’ insistence, the Siren hauled me into the portal. The light enveloped me and the connection I had with Nazferatu was lost. My heart wrung for the loss of him, but only for a moment as the interdimensional traveling turned me inside out, and rightside up as it had before. When we were ejected from the tunnel, it was onto a rooftop during night time. I stumbled, but Rebekah caught me before I spilled onto the graveled roof. A quick look told me I was in Imperial City, and I knew it was my home dimension. That weird squeezing sensation stopped, and I tried to breathe a sigh of relief, but I coughed up some blood instead.

  “What’s that… oh jeez, you need a medic,” the Siren said, in German.

  “English now,” I said, trying to focus on sealing my wound so I wouldn’t bleed out. I tried, but it wouldn’t form. It didn’t matter that much. I had internal bleeding, and I couldn’t stop that. I did need a doctor, or a metahuman, or… well, vampire blood. However, I wasn’t quite sure on how vampires were made exactly, so I was a little leery of that. Undeath would still be better than death though.

  “Lay her down,” Regulus said, stripping off his jacket. As the Siren laid me on the ground, he used his jacket to stop up the blood.

  “Where’s Nosferatu?” I whispered.

  Regulus sighed. “Reece…” He shook his head.

  I looked up into his youthful face. “I’m tired, Ger,” I said. My chest was burning. I couldn’t draw a decent breath, and it always felt like I was on the verge of drowning. Yet what hurt most was being without the vampire. I was too tired to give a shit anymore if I had been manipulated. What I felt, I felt.

  The portal blinked out of existence behind Regulus, and I saw a good many of the wolves and nearly half of the vampires had made it over. There were, perhaps, a hundred or so souls standing on top of the roof, all aliens from another dimension. The wolves began to shrink, shedding their fur, and losing teeth as their human ones grew back. I wished I could watch the reverse process, but Gerard kept me focused on him while he inspected the depth of my wounds.

  “Doctor’s near by,” he said, looking up to Rebekah. “We had business there anyway, now it’s just more pressing. Pick her up and follow me. I’ll show you.”

  “Don’t have money for the Doctor…” I mumbled, coughing out the words.

  “Money’s not a problem, Reece,” Regulus said, jumping down to the fire escape on the side of the building. Rebekah followed him easily, even while holding me. “Just shut up, and don’t die.”

  When we hit the ground, I recognized the area. He was right; we were right next to the Doctor, smack dab in the middle of gang territory. Which gang held it changed week after week, but the Doctor was never trifled with. They strode across the way, each step resounding in my ears.

  “We did it,” I said, that fact just sinking in. We had stopped the invasion. Just a few of us against a whole legion of the Reich’s finest. “They’re not coming… we did it.”

  Rebekah heard me and shook her head and said in her lightly accented English, “For now, yeah. But not for long.” She sighed, and hefted me, trying to get me into a more comfortable position fo
r her. “That was only one ring. They have three more of that size.” She paused, glancing over at her father, “It’s halted, for now. I heard that much over the comm before we left, but it won’t stay that way for long.”

  All that… and for nothing? As Regulus opened the door to the Doctor’s office, I could have hit something in frustration. What an idiot I’d been. I thought that was all they had, but to hear there were three more forces gathered? That they were waiting to see what the devastation was before renewing their plans? It was too much, too frustrating.

  As Rebekah laid me down on the surgery table, the Doctor’s plain face loomed over me. “Sleep now, Capricious Whim,” he said. “You will be perfect when you wake.”

  He moved to put me out, but I forestalled him. “Scars… neck… keep them,” I said. I wanted the reminder, not just of my Nosferatu, but of Nazferatu as well. The same monster in two different bodies… but I couldn’t bear the thought of not having the marks. I wanted something to show for my time there, not just the ache in my heart.

  “If you like,” he said, putting the mask over my face. “Sleep now.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Awake, refreshed, more or less cleaned up, and without wounds, I sat on a chair in the Doctor’s reception area waiting for Rebekah and Gerard to finish their business. I munched on an energy bar, though what I really wanted was rest. My body cried out for it. I hadn’t pushed myself too far, but far enough. If I hadn’t gotten shot, I would have been fine after a long breather. Instead, my body used all its resources to keep me alive, and I was fucking tired.

  Rebekah returned first. Her mask, goggles, and hat were on the seat next to me, and when she came back, she carried her jacket and a laminated cardboard rectangle. “Look!” she said. “I exist! I’m an American!”

  “What’s left of America is happy to have you,” I said. After the world government had failed, countries had pretty much gone back to their old borders and laws. Not America, oh no. Sure the eastern part stayed the same, more or less, but the southern quarter wanted to secede… and so they did. Texas, amazingly, stayed with the United States… but the west coast had had enough of the “easties” shenanigans and made their own country. Other portions followed suit, but the snooty old eastern seaboard had stuck to the name “the United States of America” when the country was anything but. The map was a crazy patchwork quilt of what was once a great and corrupt nation, but it’d be whole again sometime… maybe soon. There were talks about an alliance of the nine North American nations, including Canada and Mexico. So, who knew? Maybe one day.

  For now, when Rebekah brandished her new driver’s license--what scummy flesh hack was without a paper man to forge new ident cards for new faces?--it showed she belonged to the United States of America, and lived in the ruins of old New York, good old Imperial City. The folder under her arm probably had the rest of her paperwork, and she set all of that stuff down in an unoccupied chair, lumping her other equipment and clothing on top of it so she could sit down next to me.

  “This is wonderful!” she said, smiling.

  “It’s just a driver’s license,” I said. “I have one, and I don’t even drive.”

  “It’s a first step to freedom,” she replied, grinning.

  The door to the Doctor’s “operating” room opened, and a man stepped out instead of a boy. Both of us had to do a double take at the new Gerard. His hair was the same shade and cut, but now he had silver mixed in with it. Instead of the promise of a strong man in a handsome youth, he was now a man in his prime, just on the cusp of passing out of it. Though his face remained somewhat the same--the bone structure underneath the flesh was the same at least--age hung much heavier on him, making him look almost wise. When he smiled at us, the corners of his mouth and eyes crinkled, giving him a merry, almost disarming look, and despite myself knowing what he was, I was charmed. The extra baby fat was gone, and his face was now lean, sharp, but not rugged. No, the lines of his nose, jaw, and cheek were plainly visible, letting his aristocratic Germanic heritage shine through.

  “What do you think?” he asked, and even his voice was slighter deeper, more mature. Maybe that was just the perception of his voice coming out of the new face, but he could have had his voice altered.

  “You look like you should now,” I said. “I barely recognized you.” I don’t think I would have if I didn’t know this was my new mentor... if he kept up his end of the bargain. At least if people saw us together I wouldn’t have to explain that no, really, I wasn’t robbing the cradle.

  “Rebekah?” he asked, displaying himself for her.

  She smiled in response, a sunny, almost innocent smile. This was the father she’d been looking for. I watched her eyes sparkle as she got up and bounced over to him. “You look good!” she exclaimed, kissing him on the cheek. I thought about warning her about him, then I shrugged and let it go. She’d find out soon enough what he wanted to do to her. People had to learn that shit for themselves, and I figured she was tough enough to survive the lesson.

  I cleared my throat. “I got all the information for your new identity already in there,” I said. “They just need a picture. It shouldn’t take long.”

  Gerard gave Rebekah a squeeze, “Wait for me, cutie?”

  I groaned, but she beamed. “I’ll be right here!” Yeah, it was going to be devastating to her when she learned what he was really like. I watched her watch him exit the room, and she came and bounced on back to me, plopping herself down in the chair like the child she was. This killing machine… was a child. It was weird. I would have thought she’d have been serious and stone cold over in Axis, but whatever she had seen there hadn’t dimmed her spirit at all. Now that it was allowed to soar wherever she wanted it to take her, it was impossible for her not to spread her wings. If she became a hippie spreading the message of love and peace, I was going to stab her. So far, she just seemed delighted in the most mundane things, as if everything was a breath of fresh air. I guessed, for her, it was.

  Life would take care of that soon enough. Though I usually wasn’t envious of people for anything, jealousy gnawed at me. My experiences had changed me, twisted me into something dark and bitter, full of rage. Whatever she had seen hadn’t changed her in the same way. I wished I knew how that happened.

  “What are you going to do now?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “Father said I could live with him until I knew where I was going to go.”

  The German accent hung heavy on the word ‘father’, making it sound more like fadder. “Well, you’ll have to make a living somehow,” I said. “I think Ger’s springing for this, the new ident card for you and the mistake-fixing for me, but he’s had a lot of time to build up a reserve.” Plus, he had kept a low profile for a long time, and more than likely mind controlled bankers and investors into giving him stock tips or account numbers over the last couple of decades.

  “I will find something,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to be a thief, or a spy!” She grinned, “I’m pretty good at sneaking, so I think that would work out.”

  “There are a lot of companies who hire metas for corporate espionage,” I told her. “You might be onto something.” I paused for a moment, remembering how she had punched through that guy’s jaw. It would be worth being nice to stay on her good side, especially if I needed someone to back me up for a job somewhere down the road. “I know some fixers in the Underground. They’ll get you started, if you want.”

  Rebekah grinned and let loose a small excited sound. She hugged me tightly as we sat there, and I just sort of… patted her on the back a little. “Oh, thank you!” she said, letting me go, much to my relief. I brushed myself off as she went on, “I am so grateful that I have you for a friend!”

  I resisted the urge to arch a brow at that, and smiled instead. “You’re welcome,” I replied, my voice light and chipper, matching her mood. “They can also hook you up with some quality armor. I don’t think leather is going to cut it for too long
.”

  “Armor? No,” she said, shaking her head definitively. She brushed her black leather coat, thumbing the patch over her left breast pocket which denoted either some rank or organization within the Reich army. I hadn’t bothered asking. “This is the best of the best,” she said. “Enchanted. It will resist any damage to it.” She patted her knee, “This too. Flexible, durable, and strong. It is… ah, a first one.”

  “Prototype?” I asked, not quite understanding what she meant. She’d learned her English the hard way, so there was bound to be some mistakes here and there.

  “Yes, prototype,” she said, sounding it out carefully. “My glasses, mask, hat, boots… all of it. Designed for me. It’s a one of a kind. They were experimenting with what would work the best with my abilities and powers.”

  “I see,” I murmured. “That’s really… interesting.” Magic? I hated magic. But she didn’t seem to have to say anything weird to make it work, so maybe objects were different than slinging spells. It would be something to look into, at the very least.

  “It took a lot of research and--”

  “JERALD?!” Regulus’ voice cut through our conversation like a well-honed knife. Rebekah jumped, but I started laughing at the sound of incredulous anger in his voice. When I looked up, Gerard was standing in the middle of the dingy reception area, glaring daggers at me. “You put my name down as Jerald?”

  “What’s wrong, Jerry?” I asked him sweetly. “You can’t keep using Gerard after all. New name for your new look.”

  He scoffed loudly, and I laughed. Rebekah looked back and forth between us before hopping up and looking over his shoulder. “Jerald Prince,” she said. “Look, mine is Rebekah Prince. So we’re related!” She smiled at him, her brows up showing her hopefulness at ending this without any more yelling.