The Guard

by Harri Aburrow-Newman

  “Oui, but that’s Glen all over,” she smiled at me, “you need to convince Michael that you… no, we, can still be trusted… and if I were you I’d go while the memory of us helping this morning is still fresh in his mind.”

  I squinted my eyes at her, “we’ve only just got in and you’re already kicking me out? Pff. Charming.”

  “Mm… I know I am. Now get lost and let me drink my coffee in peace.”

  “You know I might get shot on sight?”

  She flapped a hand at me dismissively, but I saw her lips tighten as she suppressed a smile…. Chuckling, I headed for the door, brushing my fingers lightly across the back of her neck as I went.

  I landed a fair distance away from the base and walked the last quarter of a mile, having no desire to be shot by a nervous soldier if I flew right up to the fence. I walked slowly, with my hands in my pockets, careful to keep to a steady, human pace, and stopped well clear of the fence, raising my hands above my head. I heard someone shout and the distant click of guns’ safety catches and crackle of walkie talkies as the guards scrambled for orders and probably back up. Only a couple of minutes had passed before Michael appeared on the tower, joined by Nathan and Glen.

  “what do you want?”

  Michael’s voice carried easily over the distance, although he had barely bothered to raise it. I shouted back, loud enough that everyone on the guard tower would hear without straining.

  “Just to talk. I assume you want to know how we knew where you were?”

  “Actually, I assumed that your spies told you.”

  I frowned at that,

  “We don’t have any spies…”

  I saw a brief but fierce argument break out on the tower, all of them hissing at each other so I wouldn’t hear. Michael called again,

  “Come in. I’m not spending all afternoon shouting at each other over the fence.”

  I followed them into the base to the small building where most of our planning meetings took place. It was just the three of us – Michael and Glen had immediately dismissed Nathan’s suggestion of having some of the heavily armed guards come with us. Glen was leading, and to my surprise, walked past the small, bare room that I assumed we’d go in to, and instead went into the kitchen. Michael raised an eyebrow at his choice, but didn’t comment beyond telling him to put the kettle on. Nathan huffed,

  “As much as I’d love to have coffee with a bloody vampire, I actually have work to do. Try not to get killed, Michael.”

  He finished sarcastically then stalked out. I let out a slow breath as he did, not realising that I’d been holding it.

  “Beth,” Glen asked me, “you want coffee?”

  “Please,” I answered quietly, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “Do you even get thirsty?”

  Michael’s voice was arched, his question snappy, and I resisted the urge to be sarcastic.

  “Not as you’d imagine it. I like the taste though.”

  “Hmpf,” he cupped his hands around the mug of tea that Glen had handed him and gestured for us to sit at the slightly wobbly old Formica table.

  “Why are you here?” he still hadn’t looked me in the eye.

  “Maybe she just missed my awesome coffee making skills…” Glen shot me a small, sly smile over the rim of his own mug. Michael frowned slightly at him.

  “This isn’t really a laughing matter.”

  Glen cleared his throat and managed to respond with the only the barest hint of snark,

  “Sorry, sir.”

  He looked at me expectantly, Michael kept his gaze on his tea.

  “I owe you an explanation,” I started, “more than one I suppose… you may not believe it now, but I have come to regard both of you as my friends, and you deserve to know the reasons behind my very necessary deception.”

  “Ysabel already gave us your reasons,” Michael responded coolly.

  “So she explained everything you want to know? You have no questions?” I raised an eyebrow at them.

  “Shit, Michael, if you don’t have questions, I sure as hell do. Just let her explain herself.”

  I smiled at Glen.

  “Thank you. You can ask me anything, either of you, and I swear I’ll answer truthfully. At least as long as I don’t believe the answer will put my people in danger, in which case I’ll just tell you that.”

  “How do we kill you?” Michael finally looked up, his eyes cold and flinty.

  “Well that’s a good start…” Glen muttered.

  “It’s fine,” I aimed at Glen. Then to Michael, “same as the ferals. Destroy the heart then destroy everything else. Preferably with fire. You’ll find us rather tougher than the ferals though.”

  “How much tougher?”

  “Than the 4th through 2nd generations, infinitely. First generations and Archer could give us a run for our money though.”

  “So if I shot in the heart right now...?”

  I laughed incredulously,

  “If you actually managed to do it, you’d just have an extremely pissed off Ysabel crashing in and healing me. So it’s probably not worth the trouble.”

  “OK…” Michael mused slowly; I could feel him turning over information, wondering where to start.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I broke the silence, both of them looked at me expectantly, eyebrows raised.

  “Why did you say we had spies?” I asked,

  “Well, as well as finding us this morning, I had a visit from a friend of yours a couple of nights ago. As she managed to get all the way onto a secure base and up to my apartment, I assumed that we had a mole in the unit.”

  “ah, Lexi?” I shook my head slightly, “she failed to mention that she’d been to visit you in the many, many messages she’s left me over the last week. I honestly have no idea how she got in though. I’ll find out, if that will ease your mind.”

  “Yes, please. We’ve already had more than enough security breaches.” Michael looked up at me again, his eyes scrutinising my face, looking for some sign of my vampirism.

  “How did you find us this morning then?”

  I tapped my temple, “psychically. We’ve spent the last week familiarising ourselves with the mental signature of everyone on this base. We can find any one of you easily now. A large group of you together, away from the base…” I shrugged, “it had to be a raid. Then once we were close enough we just tuned into your radio frequencies.”

  “Psychically… that is so cool!” Glen grinned at me, “you can actually read minds?!”

  “uh, yes. It’s hardly like reading a book though.”

  “Did you read our minds?” Michael asked, “all the time you were here pretending to be human?”

  “Occasionally, but I doubt it’s in the way you think. We don’t just hear everyone’s thoughts all the time, it takes concentration to do that. We get feelings mostly, and sometimes if someone is thinking about something extremely hard, or thinking about us directly, we’ll get snippets of that thought. Having said that, my psychic abilities were, um, turned off for much of the time I spent with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I had to appear human. I couldn’t risk accidentally responding to something you’d thought or felt.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell us what you are? We trusted you, you could have trusted us.”

  Glen spoke quietly, the edge of hurt clear in his voice, and I felt it reflected by Michael. I sighed, leaning forward slightly as I answered,

  “You trusted Beth the human girl, who was relatively unthreatening and clearly on your side. Can you honestly tell me that if I had told you I was a vampire, you wouldn’t have immediately panicked? Starting second guessing everything I told you, or withholding information from me?”

  They looked sideways at each other, briefly, but I felt their doubt.

  “We need you, just as much as you need us. The ferals are a common enemy, and if we don’t work together then both our species will be lost. Yours will be relegat
ed to cattle-status, and mine will be exterminated.”

  “From what Ysabel told us, you’re already nearing that.” Michael looked into my eyes for the first time without radiating anger,

  “I guess I understand why you didn’t tell us. You’re right, even now I’m wondering about whether this meeting should be taking place at all. Whether I shouldn’t just shoot you, and Ysabel too when she ‘comes crashing in’”.

  “That’s a very normal, human response. You have the same fear of predators that all animals have, but you also have the technology and the brain power to dispose of those threats, so you do. I’m sure if zebra developed the power to kill all the lions in the world, they would. Not because the lions are evil, but because everything wants to be top of the food chain.” I reached across the table and laid a hand on his, feeling him tense slightly,

  “But you have to understand that we aren’t like animals either. And we aren’t like the ferals. We aren’t mindless, unfeeling killing machines. Sixteen years ago, scores of people I had known and loved for decades were murdered in just one night.” My face twisted into a scowl, the memory of that night hitting me again like it was yesterday. “They were murdered in cold blood by the ferals, and since then even more have been hunted down and killed. My people are scattered and helpless against Archer, and Ysabel and I, we were supposed to be their protectors.”

  I sucked in a deep breath, pulling back again to cross my arms, reeling in my feelings.

  “What would you have done?” I asked them, “Yzzy and I are the last hope of our entire species. What would you have done if you were in our position?”

  Michael sighed and rubbed a hand over his eyes, looking defeated.

  “Exactly the same.” He muttered, “so help me, I would have done exactly the same thing. I still don’t know how to trust you again though. How much other information have you withheld?”

  I frowned, thinking.

  “Nothing. At least nothing that would have made any difference to you.”

  “What about the weakness?” piped up Glen.

  “What are you on about?” Michael scowled at him.

  “Ysabel told us that the vampires, you guys, anyway-“ he gestured at me “- have a weakness. But she wouldn’t tell us what it is.”

  I blew us a slow breath and tried not to glare at Glen,

  “That’s because it’s not relevant.”

  “Well maybe it should be,” Michael said.

  “A show of faith” tagged on Glen.

  “Oh really? Even though your first question was how to kill us?!”

  They didn’t say anything; just looking at me steadily, waiting. This was their price then.

  “Fine, fine.” I cast about for how to begin, how to make it make sense to their human idea of relationships.

  “When vampires find a mate, it’s for life. We have a ceremony called the bonding, which is our equivalent to marriage, except unlike marriage, it really is, well, binding. The bond links the two vampires together inextricably, and can’t be broken. If the bond is severed, for example, if one mate is killed, the other will die too.”

  “Wow, seriously? That’s a bloody big commitment. And dangerous.” Frowned Glen.

  “Well exactly,” I agreed, “that’s why the high vampires needed the guard.”

  “Are you and Ysabel bonded?”

  I scowled, letting my bitterness at the situation Ysabel and I had found ourselves in leak through.

  “The guard are not allowed to bond. The punishment for doing so is death, and not a very pleasant one either.”

  “That seems unfair… why not?” Again, Glen carried the conversation on, leaving Michael to brood over his tea.

  I shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant.

  “The guard need to be focused. A bonded pair are constantly aware of each other, and will sacrifice others if their mate is in danger, without even thinking about it. Vampires are very much slaves to instinct sometimes. Also, it’s not a very good army if you can quite literally kill two birds with one stone.”

  “So you and Ysabel…” I shot Glen a warning glance as I sensed the direction of his thoughts, and he raised his hands in surrender. “I was just wondering something, that’s all!”

  “Fine”, I ground out through clenched teeth.

  “So you and Ysabel might break up someday and get with other people? You’re not true… mates?”

  I sucked in a breath and tamped down on the surge of jealously that pulsed through me at the mere idea of Yzzy being with someone else.

  “No. I love Ysabel with every cell of my being, and she does me. We are mates, and we will live and die together. We don’t need the bond to confirm that.”

  Glen nodded slowly and turned to Michael.

  “So what?” he asked, “has she proven that she’s not going to kill us in the night yet?”

  “I never thought she would do that…” Michael spoke quietly, still looking down into his mug of now tepid tea.

  “You just felt betrayed.” I said, just as quietly. “I get that, I do. And I don’t expect you to just trust us again straight away.”

  “I know,” he looked up at me, “and I don’t. But you can work with us again. Only a fool would throw away two powerful weapons when they’re placed in his lap in the middle of a war.”

  “You lied to him.” Ysabel said accusingly as I walked through the balcony doors, “about us being bonded.”

  “I did not! I just evaded the question. Quite successfully, I might add. Everything I said was the truth.”

  “Including the part about loving me “with every cell of your being”” she chuckled as she walked through from the kitchen, pretending to swoon and fan herself.

  “Such beautiful words, my lady guard. I didn’t know you had such depth of feeling to you. All these years I still thought I was just an exciting tumble. After all, we’re not even married!”

  She sighed dramatically and pressed one hand to her heart and the back of the other to her forehead.

  “Oh my god,” I rolled my eyes, slumping on the sofa, “you know what? I take it all back. I have no idea what I ever saw in you. Maybe we should see other people.”

  A low growl came from behind me and then Ysabel vaulted over the back of the sofa, landing straddled across my lap.

  “Say that again,” she hissed menacingly, running her fangs down my neck, “I dare you.”

  I groaned, heat sparkling to life low in my belly, and leaned my head back on reflex.

  “As much as I would love to take you up on that challenge, you clearly didn’t hear the end of my conversation with Michael.”

  My sentence ended on a stuttering hiss as Yzzy’s fangs broke the skin of my neck, ever so slowly, and my thoughts scattered hopelessly. Abruptly though, she jumped back off of me and pulled her jumper down straight.

  “Actually I did,” she grinned at me, “he wants us back to help look through the paperwork they recovered from the house this morning.”

  I gaped at her, trying to slow my heart.

  “Consider that your punishment,” she smirked, before turning and taking off through the balcony doors.

  I groaned again, swallowing hard,

  “Twat,” I muttered, leaping off the balcony after her.

  The paperwork that had been recovered from the house had been thrown haphazardly into two cardboard boxes, which Glen, Michael and Nathan were just beginning to pick through. Nathan stiffened as we walked through the door, looking our way only to glare and then turning back to his task. I pulled a face at the mess, muttering to Ysabel as I did so,

  “I think I’d take your punishment over this one.”

  She rolled her eyes at me,

  “aww, poor baby. Should I tell them you can’t read?” she chuckled into my mind and I scowled back at her.

  “Where should we start?” I asked,

  “Here,” Michael shoved the larger box towards us. “You take that one and we’ll take the other. I’m assuming you read faster than us.�
�

  “Well thankfully, you would be right. Because this looks about as interesting as watching paint dry.”

  Glen flashed a grin at me, and even Michael tried unsuccessfully to hide a small smile,

  “never the less…” he trailed off, gesturing again to the box.

  We spent the next half an hour flicking through the mounds of paper. They were mostly invoices for various things – from shares in a blood bank, how cliché, I thought to myself, to a weirdly large order of rice.

  “Look at this,” I waved the rice invoice under Ysabel’s nose, “why are they buying rice?”

  She frowned at my mostly rhetorical question, but answered aloud anyway,

  “They’ve got humans holed up somewhere that they want to keep alive.”

  “Mmm…” I muttered in agreement.

  “Hey,” piped up Glen, “I have a question for you two,” he looked at Ysabel and I.

  I gave him a suspicious, sideways look.

  “Erm, oooh-kay…”

  “How old are you?”

  My eyebrows shot up at that, and I felt Ysabel’s amusement. I probably should have anticipated that question.

  “I thought you were never supposed to ask a lady her age?” I asked wryly.

  “Yea. A lady…”

  “Twat.” I responded mildly, “I was born in 1647, so work it out yourself. Try not to strain anything while you do though, I realise that’s a big sum for such a little brain.”

  Glen didn’t even bother with a snarky reply. All three men had stopped what they were doing and were staring at me, gobsmacked.

  “So, hold on,” said Michael, “you’re over 350 years old?!”

  “You didn’t really think we were 18 did you?”

  “Well no,” he swore under his breath, “but it certainly didn’t occur to me, at least, that you would be that old.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him, amused,

  “You might not want to think about how old Ysabel is then.”

  “She’s older??” Glen practically squeaked, and I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Hard.

  “Damn, man. If I’d known it would short circuit your smart mouth for five minutes I would have told you before.”

  He gave me a dead pan look.