In the white blind moonlight, Sam's pale hair and bared arms gleamed. She crouched next to him and fingered the stain as well, then smelled the blood and tasted it. He tasted it too, savoring the thick half-bitter tang of it.
She laughed, and some part of his brain said this is crazy, we can't be doing this, but then she was running, and he was chasing, and the blood glowed like beacons leading them on. Running released ecstasy into his veins and made him breathe faster, deeper. The bloodsmell grew stronger, along with the taint of metal and oil and sweat. He knew that smell, although he couldn't have said why.
It's your own smell. Humans. Earth.
Sam's smell, flavored with something extra, made him run faster. He wasn't sure if he was chasing the prey, or Sam... either one would do, here in the moonlight. Blood and flesh and hunger...
He lurched to a halt as he rounded a comer. Sam was nowhere in sight, but someone else was. A tall woman, dressed in a short white chiton that swirled in a wind he couldn't feel. Dark hair and dark eyes, and eyes that pulsed whiter than the moon as she smiled at him.
Something in him screamed no, run, get away, but then she was extending her hand and touching his sweating hair, running her cool silver fingers down his cheek, and he realized that she was wearing a hand device, like Ra and Apophis.
A Goa'uld hand device.
"Another stranger," she said, and tilted his chin up to look at him. "Pretty." Her hand traveled down to stroke over the moonstone collar. "And receptive. Something in you calls to me, you know."
He had never wanted to kill more in his life. The urge to rip, tear, destroy was overwhelming, and if he'd had the chance...
But he didn't. The hand device was glowing an anticipatory orange.
"You look like my wife," he said.
"Do I?" That smile, that terrible smile. "How lucky for her. And you."
She bent forward and kissed him, and he could taste something on her like poison, like madness. Something stirred behind those lips that wasn't a tongue.
"Do you want to serve me, pretty stranger?"
"No."
She pushed him away. His foot caught a loose stone and he fell, breathless, back on the rubble-strewn pavement. Her sandaled feet walked slowly toward him as he crawled back, and then she leaped on him, crouched over him, and threaded her fingers in his hair to drag him back upright.
He gagged on the kiss, but something inside of him couldn't deny her; she tasted like blood and violence and he wanted that, wanted it so badly it was like starvation.
She's doing this to me. That couldn't stop it, just made it more sickening that he let it happen, let her hands move over him with jealous, greedy excitement.
That he touched her in return.
When he opened his eyes, she was Sha're. Sha're's abundant curly hair, veiling them both. Sha're's dark, challenging stare. That odd glint of humor, as if she found everything he did funny, and wonderfully entrancing. He felt a kind of drugged, sluggish wonder. A need to accept it, to believe the miracle...
"I am here," she whispered to him. "You see? I can be here for you, Dan'yel. If only you will let me."
She released her painful hold on his hair and let him drop back flat. His hand was next to the M9, still backward in its holster. His fingertips brushed it but it felt cold, alien, part of another life...
And he clearly heard Sha're - not this Goa'uld copy, but Share, real and immediate as the sweat on his skin - whisper, now, do it now, don't let her take you away from me.
As Apophis had taken Sha're, with Teal'c looking on. Taken her screaming, fighting to hang on... fighting to come back to him.
He fumbled the pistol out.
"You're not my wife," he gasped, and fired blind.
The sound of the shot was muffled but still deafening, and the smell of her was wiped out by the hot bum of cordite. The shell ejected and burned as it struck his throat; he yelled and fired again, two more times, and the weight on him, the weight that looked like Sha're but wasn't, moved away.
He was blinded by orange pulses of light, and when he blinked them away he saw that Artemis was herself again, standing, not a spot of blood on her white tunic. Her eyes were wide and dark and furious. No, no, I couldn't have missed, I couldn't have... ! But he wasn't even sure now if he had fired at all. Maybe that was a dream, maybe it was all a dream... nothing was clear now, except the wrenching agony pounding behind his eyes. His forehead felt charred.
"You will be punished for that! Run for me, little fool," she spat. "I will have your blood hot as I drink it!"
He scrambled to his feet, and ran.
She wasn't alone, he saw; dark shapes in the moonlight, loping after him, and no matter how fast he ran they closed the distance. Moonlight glinted on armor. Jaffa. A staff weapon blew the night open and exploded a pile of rubble to his right; he used Jack O'Neill strategy and darted toward the explosion, not away. The smoke would cover him, and they'd expect him to dodge away...
Sure enough, more staff blasts destroyed columns to his left. A tottering building rumbled and collapsed in a thick, choking blanket of dust; he used the cover and kept running.
Jack...
He was alone. Nobody was coming to help him this time.
Carter paused, frozen, by the alien sound of weapons fire in the night. She'd paused to taste blood again; she knew the prey was close, probably hiding, but her attention was caught by the noise behind.
Daniel. Less a name than an image, a feeling, a sense of connection. He'd been behind her. No sign of him now.
Carter rose, looking back, and saw fires burning. Someone was running, many chasing; she felt her blood catch and bum with the desire to join the hunt.
But the fresh blood was better. More immediate.
She slowly padded forward. The heavy, ugly metal around her neck felt awkward, but she kept her hands on it, holding it steady. It would serve, she knew. Not as good as the knife, not as sure, but it would bring down prey for the kill.
She heard a dry rattle of rocks ahead, and froze to crouch in the shadows. Wind brought the smell of sweat, metal, oil... male.
She raised the MP5 to her shoulder and flowed forward, keeping to shadows.
He stepped out into the full fierce glow of the moon, and she went motionless again. Did he sense her? Would he run? Anticipation of it caught in her throat...
No. He didn't sense her. She could take him, take him with such ease and speed, crippling him first, then closing with the knife, to rip and tear the flesh from his bones.
He moved on, limping awkwardly. Now. Now. NOW! It beat wildly in her temples, but somehow she held on, trembling, sweaty, poised on the knife-edge of violence with the taste of terror and blood thick in her mouth.
And then she saw the child.
It crept out of the shadows in his wake, a ragged shadow with a moon-white stone in its collar marking it as prey. The sight of it made her blood boil in her veins.
The child was following her quarry for comfort and protection. One of Laonides's starving, hollow orphans, sent out to gather food. Lost in the dark. The boy was rank with fear, sweet-hot with despair, and she breathed in his scent and felt saliva fill her mouth and the hunger was like nothing she'd ever known.
She let the MP5 slide out of her hands to hang heavy on the strap around her neck, drew her knife, and glided forward to take the prey.
It saw her and screamed, high and thin, and scrambled backwards for the shadows. She grabbed it by one thin, dirty leg and pulled the boy into the cold glow of moonlight, and brought the knife down, screaming out her victory -
-- and her wrist was caught by another, larger hand.
"No!" the man roared, and threw her back, off-balance. The preychild scrabbled to hands and knees and darted away, into the shadows. She tried to follow. The man lurched into her path to block her. "No! Captain Carter!"
She fell back a step, startled by the name, the face, the sudden flash of sanity that vanished in the next cold stroke of moonlight. He'
d knocked her knife away, but she still had the metal weapon around her neck, and hands that knew how to use it. They closed around the MP5 and aimed, and she knew just how it would look when she fired, how his blood would mist the cold pale air. How his death would smell, blood mixed with terror and burning powders.
He could see his death coming. He had to see it coming. Now he would run, and the hunt would begin...
He didn't run. "Carter," he said raggedly. "Put it down. Don't do this."
She understood him, and felt her muscles trembling with a desire to obey, but the heat surged through her again at the thought of pulling the trigger, seeing his blood spill hot on the stones.
"Captain. Put down the weapon. That's an order."
Can't, she wanted to whisper, and almost did, but moonlight locked her in silence. Something kept shifting inside of her, trying to escape. Part of her that screamed in horror at what she'd tried to do, and still wanted to do.
"Captain, I'm not going to tell you again, lower the damn - "
She saw someone lunge at his unprotected back. A knife glinted.
She instantly shifted aim and fired a rattling burst.
O'Neill dropped, rolled, and came up with his own weapon pointed at her.
Behind him, a black-robed attacker swayed and collapsed with the knife still in his hand.
She couldn't get her breath. She wanted to keep firing, turn her commanding officer into bleeding dead meat, and it took everything in her to toss the MP5 down on the street and sink to her knees, hands locked behind her head in a position of utter surrender.
Run, the moonlight urged her. The burning in her turned toxic. Run! The hunt is leaving you behind!
She had a sudden vivid image of Daniel, bleeding, running and dodging, of something terrible behind him.
Even the hunters are the hunted.
"Help," she gasped, and knew she was crying. She tasted blood from a bitten lip. "Daniel. In trouble. Help him - "
She didn't know Colonel O'Neill's face could look like that, so bitter and tired and cold.
"Teal'c's on it," he said. "Stay down, Carter."
"Can't." She was shaking all over with the pain, the need, the burn. "Help."
He came, limping, and painfully went down on his good knee. "How?"
"Tie me-"
"Need to be able to move. We're not safe, Carter."
"Can't -
"You will." His eyes held hers, merciless and utterly cold. "You will. That's an order."
She wailed inside, wordlessly. The moonlight burned like acid, and her shudders got worse. She felt a small, tortured moan work its way free, and felt her eyes flood again with helpless, raging tears.
Help me.
He was helping her.
He wasn't running.
Teal'c did not dream, but he remembered with a vividness he suspected most humans could not achieve. Nobody remembers pain, Jack O'Neill had told him a week before. We just remember that we had pain. That's how we cope with it.
Such was not the Jaffa way. His memory of pain was exact and exquisite, as was his memory of everything else. He could recreate, with perfect detail, how it had felt when he had taken a staff bum to the side. He could remember how it had felt to watch Apophis slaughter his brothers for a defeat in battle, though they had retreated with honor and protected him with their blood.
He could remember, with precision, the hallucination that he had experienced two nights ago, of running in the moonlight with predators on his heels.
Tonight, it was coming true, except in one critical regard: he felt no panic, no shame, and he was not helpless. O'Neill had given him that, by example and steady, ironic endurance. So long as O'Neill endured, he would be himself. He knew the tricks of the Goa'uld, and rejected them with the same conscious, bitter anger that he had felt in the dungeon on Chulak, watching his men advance to slaughter another group of victims on the world of a false and faithless god.
I can save these people! O'Neill had shouted, and he had recognized in him someone worthy of his trust.
Tonight he had said, Go after Daniel, and in his dark, wounded eyes had been the same burning purpose. I'll take Cartel. Even though Carter was the more dangerous, even though O'Neill was wounded. Even though O'Neill was not prepared to kill.
And Teal'c had obeyed, because he believed.
He ran, lungs filling and emptying with fast, regular breaths, and felt his muscles stretch in welcome to the challenge. The streets were stark-lit with white moonfall, black shadows, but he sensed others watching. Following. He was not concerned with the Dark Company; their spears and arrows could be dodged, or blocked.
The Jaffa ahead were a different matter.
Daniel Jackson was running with all his strength, all his heart, but Jaffa were bred and trained to endure, and these were honed by service to a merciless god with a thirst for death. Teal'c was gaining, but ahead he knew that the man would be tiring and growing clumsy.
They had been running for nearly an hour, and even the endurance granted by the power of Artemis's collar could not keep a mere human at the level of a Jaffa much longer. Muscles would seize and rip, deprived of rest. If not, stressed bone would shatter, or ligaments break.
Or the tough fabric of his heart would tear itself apart.
Teal'c adjusted the balance of his hold on his staff weapon and increased his speed. The human uniform of the SGC he wore was lighter and more flexible than the Jaffa's armor; that worked in his favor.
He heard more explosions ahead, saw the raw orange bursts, and had a flickering glimpse of Daniel Jackson darting aside from the new attack. Slower now. Still running.
The false female god ran with her Jaffa, silver in moonlight. An easy target. Teal'c leaped up on the unsteady support of a marble block, aimed, and fired; at the last instant, his support shifted, and he missed, bringing down one of the Jaffa next to her. She whirled, and he saw the white flare of her eyes even at this distance.
"Jaffa, kree!" she shouted, and pointed at him. He jumped before her dogs could fire on him, the marble support burst into melted shrapnel behind him. He landed, sure-footed, and dodged into the maze of broken buildings.
His last glimpse of Daniel Jackson had shown him that the human was dodging to the right, down a street that dead-ended in a wall of rubble. A killing trap. Teal'c scaled marble steps that led to nothing but ruin, threw himself over, and rolled up fluidly to his feet, heading at an angle to Daniel Jackson's position.
Behind him, the Jaffa were in confusion, but some were breaking off to pursue him. He found high ground and fired, never staying for more than one fast shot; each burst took down a pursuer. He knew the weaknesses of the armor.
Artemis continued in her hunt, single-minded with fury.
Teal'c caught sight of two Jaffa ahead; as he sighted to fire, blackrobed figures ghosted out of the shadows and set on them with knives and spears. One of the Jaffa went down. The other warrior won free, but Teal'c's shot caught him low, crippling him for the survivors among the hunters.
Cruel sport, this was. It sickened him, but he did not turn away from the need.
He threaded through the maze and found a two-story building still standing that faced down on the blind trap Daniel Jackson had fallen into; the ground floor was blocked with ruins, but the steps were still partly intact within. Teal'c vaulted the empty gap and threw himself up the crumbling, unsteady stairs; they collapsed when he was still two strides from the top. He rolled forward and clawed his way up as the support fell away, slid breathlessly on the gritty, groaning floor, and came up on his feet to lunge for the open, jagged window.
Daniel Jackson had reached the end of the street and found his way blocked. True to his nature, he had not given up. He was grimly attempting to scale the sheer cliff of rubble, but it shifted and shook him free in a hail of stones and dust.
As he fell, a thick stone column rumbled loose and slammed down over his legs. From his vantage point, Teal'c heard the sharp, agonized cry, and knew
Daniel Jackson was finished running. He risked a look, and saw his friend face down, pinned by the column across the upper part of his legs.
Artemis rounded the far corner, surrounded by a pack of seven Jaffa marked on the forehead with her sigil - a simple circle. The dark moon. They advanced, staff weapons at the ready, but paused as she paced forward toward the downed man, taut with rage and purpose.
Daniel Jackson's face was blank and focused as he watched her come for him. He would die with dignity, Teal'c knew. He would never surrender his life without a fight, even if that fight was in his mind instead of his body.
As his wife had fought, so hard, to remain herself.
Teal'c had failed Sha're. He would not fail again.
He fired on Artemis, but one of her Jaffa threw himself in the path of the blast as she extended her hand and bathed Daniel Jackson's face in poisoned orange light. She seemed not to even note his attack, and her Jaffa closed on his position. Teal'c shifted aim and fired at the looming ruin behind them, choosing the spot with precision.
It shuddered, leaned, and fell, crushing all four beneath its thick marble rush. On the ground, Daniel flinched, covered his head, and then Artemis stood alone in the smoking street, and her eyes were full of madness and hatred.
Teal'c faced her, and for the first time, he raised his hand directly to a god. Something in him cried out, shuddered, tried to turn away.
She extended her hand toward him. "Betrayer!" she screamed. "I am your god!"
"No god of mine," he said, and fired into her just as her energy bolt hit him with stunning force, throwing him back into broken, empty darkness.
Daniel saw Teal'c fire and felt a surge of fury as he saw Artemis's attack hit, liquefying the stone wall. Teal'c disappeared, dead or thrown back, he couldn't tell.
And then he realized that Artemis had been hit.
She stood still, staring down as if she couldn't believe it was possi ble - Daniel couldn't believe it himself, until he saw the black smoking hole in her stomach, and blood began to stain her white gown. Spreading fast. Dripping down her bare legs. Artemis staggered, holding both hands to the terrible wound.
Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon Page 18
