by Aya DeAniege
“The music?” I asked.
“It’s the music, but it’s something more than that. Like I’m looking at the pixels of the image instead of the image. Oh, and I don’t need contacts anymore. We thought there was something wrong with me, but took the second one out and I could see fine.”
“Wouldn’t the blast have shredded them?” I asked.
“Popped my eyes out, he put them back in because I wear contacts. Wore contacts, oh wow, come here.”
I moved to his side and hopped onto the autopsy table beside him. Troy leaned in and sniffed my shoulder, then he laughed and pulled away.
“You smell like something that makes me giddy.”
“Fear,” Quin said as he and Balor walked into the murder room. “The police are at our fake building and are searching it. Apparently, the Council is not protected from having the door busted in.”
“No one is,” I said.
“Would they do that to your Prime Minister?” Balor asked. “No! Like all politicians, they would help him cover it, not out him to the public. Mortals.”
“A shotgun blast?” Quin asked Balor.
“Dismantling this takes some time. Setting it back up properly could take months. I was taking advantage of the room while we still had it.”
“I wanna be shot,” I said.
Quin’s eyebrows rose almost to his hairline. He considered me for a long moment before refocused his attention on Balor. Who, in turn, folded his arms in front of him and scowled back at Quin, waiting for the damning words.
Sometimes Quin forgot that Troy was no longer his stock, and that Balor had more right to him than Quin did. I suppose it was hard to just shrug off decades of love and protection.
“Shotgun, though, Balor?” Quin asked finally. “Isn’t the police force armed with glocks or something?”
“They also have shotguns. Recall the first time you took a blast to your chest?”
“I’ve never had the misfortune of being shot with a modern gun,” Quin said, walking towards the cupboard along the wall. “Helen, stand against the wall over there, sweetheart.”
“Can I eat her?” Troy asked.
“No,” I protested.
“Not today,” Balor said. “Eating another vampire is like having sex with them, do try to recall that when you have those impulses.”
“Still happening,” Quin muttered, coming back with the shotgun. “Helen?”
“Huh? Oh, right,” I said, slipping off the table.
I walked to the wall and turned, opening my mouth to tell him where to aim. Quin was right there, and the sound of the gun going off was almost deafening in the metal box of a room.
The blast hit me square in the chest, knocking me back several steps as Quin lowered the gun. The sound caused a ringing in my ears. My feet seemed to keep moving and it took me a moment to get them under me properly and to get them planted. I straightened slowly and gave him a questioning look as the fog inside my ears finally vanished.
“Gunshots are best done without warning,” he said loudly, then winced and tugged on his ear. “Damn, this thing is loud.”
“Shouldn’t that have—” I looked down and ever so slowly slipped to the floor.
My chest was in shreds, blood everywhere. Until I had looked down, I felt fine. I had felt a pressure on my chest, but it was no more than having a hand on me. Nothing had felt amiss or wrong.
Looking down was a bad idea. Doing so made it feel like my heart dropped, my stomach swirled and the air seemed to whoosh out of my lungs. Have you ever had heart palpitations? That moment of wondering what that strange sensation was, then a sinking realization as your heart just seemed to stop. Only to have it sputter and shudder back to life, trying to leap from your chest while you struggled to retain control of everything else as you began to panic over the feeling alone.
That was how I felt. I hadn’t had many of those fearful moments, but when they happened, I always wondered if that was it, if that was how I would die. Even then, knowing that I was immortal, I felt like that was my end.
For a human, it was a mortal wound after all.
Quin’s wrist was there a moment later, his fresh blood filling my mouth as I drank in confusion.
Surely it should have—
I screamed as the pain finally hit me. It was the kind of pain that would have taken my legs out from under me if I had still been standing. There was an agony to it that made my whole body seize up, unable to comprehend the kind of damage I had just done to myself.
“Drink, or it won’t get better,” Quin commanded, his slit wrist pushed back against my lips.
I only did it because he told me to. The blood filled my mouth, but I had difficulty getting the rest of my mouth and throat to work. I ended up breathing the blood into my lungs, then coughing and choking on it, drowning in Maker’s Blood.
Quin knelt by me but didn’t touch me.
“What did we talk about, Helen?” he asked.
Get on your feet.
I had to think that several times, over and over like a mantra, but I got up and met his eyes.
“One of them shoots you. The weapon is still pointed at you. Now, you cannot, I’m going to repeat that to stress it, Troy, the two of you cannot eat a member of the government. So, what do you do?”
“Why can’t we eat them?” I asked, panting as my lungs righted themselves and finally became whole. “In this hypothetical, the jerk just shot me. I need blood. He’s a blood bag.”
“He’s doing his job,” Quin said.
“But if he shoots me, he’s murdering the victim he’s supposed to be charging you for eating,”
“Murdering,” Quin said. “And it’s because they think my Progeny, that’s you, murdered, well, you.”
“Well, who the hell told the cops that you had Progeny?” I asked.
“We did,” Quin said with a frown and a shake of his head. “Wraith, as Younger Council believed it would be best to declare new baby vampires. He wanted to do this legally.”
“Getting you across a border is simple,” Balor said. “Very simple, not hard to bribe people, and barring that, we just hack our way in and then black out the database. But, he’s right. We, the Council, need some transparency, or at the very least the image of transparency.”
“I was a flash in the pan over here while over there you were cleaning up Lu?” I asked.
Balor nodded, glancing at Quin, then to me. “But he’s right. You can’t attack a police officer for doing his job, even if he is trigger happy. The Council has forbidden it.”
“Clothing doesn’t heal when you get broken,” Quin said.
“So?” I demanded, looking down. “Oh, look, my nipples.”
“What happened that you’re so numb?” Balor asked. “Troy was screaming like he was a mortal who got shot in the head. The euphoria came on later.”
“My family is a bunch of jerks,” I grumbled, crossing my arms over my chest to hide my skin.
Having a Maker nearby healed us faster. Being given Maker’s Blood healed us even faster, a few minutes at most, but without that, we were subject to slower healing.
If I were wounded out in the field, I’d need Quin, and fast. My instincts would be to eat the closest mortal I could find, no matter the type of race. As in, human, witch, or other, I’d eat whatever was nearby. I would glut myself on whatever blood was available to get myself back to Quin.
Or, that’s what he told me.
Without that, my body was still subject to mortal healing timelines. Over centuries, I would heal faster and faster, but it was one of those things that the older vampires had forgotten. The closer to mortality you were, the slower your body put itself back together.
“Someone’s in the system,” Troy said, sounding confused. “That’s not a Canadian issue.”
“Mad scientists?” I asked. “Lock us up, secret project type of thing?”
“No, it’s an international type of thing. I think they might be working together,” Troy said,
slipping off the autopsy bed.
He walked to Balor and reached his hand into the other man’s pocket, pulling out a phone. Grumbling even while he gave Balor a small smile, Troy pulled away. He immediately began typing away on the screen, doing whatever it was that he did.
Balor watched his Progeny walk away, mouth open just slightly, lips turning upward and a blush creeping across his cheeks. There was very much a need to Balor as his breath shuddered out of him. The man gave himself a little shake and turned toward the door, I assume to watch for any trouble.
Troy had told me about his power. He knew he wasn’t supposed to, but he had wanted someone to talk to, and Balor just shrugged at his questions.
He could control electrical impulses. Which for the first week somehow made him into a walking, talking computer. He had upgraded the Council systems, then Quin’s and then Balor’s. He had set them all up to alert him if someone tried to access the system.
That part seemed to work still, but the rest of Troy’s power had faded to nothing. He needed the phone to do his work, but he had known how to do all that well before being turned.
“They’re in the main building, trying to access the security. I’ve blown the imagery, but they may have detected the ping back. A ping is a way two points communicate, which means they could trace it back here. There are enough cell towers to triangulate.”
“That’s a real thing?” I asked.
“You’re lucky you’re cute,” Quin said with a shake of his head.
Grumbling, I motioned towards my chest.
“Balor, how do we get out of here?” Quin asked. “Let’s assume the street isn’t an option.”
“There’s a tunnel.”
“Of course, the Council has a tunnel and escape plan,” I muttered.
“We have six escape plans,” Balor said. “The most amusing was letting Margaret release her flesh-eating bacteria into the building. But your Maker here went and killed her, so we can’t do that.”
“That would also kill law enforcement officers,” Quin said. “We can’t do that.”
Balor shrugged. “If we were in America, the Middle Council could claim Council chambers as a domicile and just shoot anyone who entered.”
“If we were in America, Council Chambers probably would have been lit on fire by now,” Quin muttered. “Imagine their entire defense budget spent to bring us in?”
“That’d be a waste of money,” Troy said.
“Anybody remember the tunnel?” I asked. “You know, the actual escape plan?”
“Right, this way,” Balor said, leaving the murder room.
“Shirt?” I asked Quin.
He made a motion then left the room. I trailed after him, not understanding why he couldn’t answer me verbally. Just outside the door, there was a closet. He opened the closet and selected a shirt, then jacket for me.
“Put them on, keep them on,” he said.
“Where do I change?” I asked.
He gave me a puzzled expression. Troy came out of the murder room and moved past us, motioning as he went.
“Change while you walk, or stay here long enough to get caught,” Troy called over his shoulder.
“I’ve seen it all,” Quin said as if to reassure me. “So get moving after Troy.”
I moved, but I still asked the question that nagged at me.
“Why are you behind me?”
“In case they attack,” he said. “I will do whatever is necessary to keep you from being taken.”
I made a sound and turned, handing him the shirt and jacket back as I continued to walk. Stripping and walking at the same time is not as easy as people make it out to be. While getting the shirt over my head, I nearly walked into a doorframe.
Only Quin’s hand on my shoulder stopped me, as he redirected me towards the middle of the hallway.
My bra was in shreds. I had to take it off as well. Grumbling, I looked around, then glanced back at Quin. He arched an eyebrow at me and then looked down.
So, I dropped the tattered remains and took the shirt, slipping it on as we stepped into a stairwell leading down. Accepting the jacket, I slipped it on, then sniffed the air.
“Ew, what is that?” I asked. “And how did I not smell that before?”
“It seems there is a faulty pipe,” Balor muttered as he tossed a piece of piping away from himself. “Oh dear. There, Troy is already out. Helen, you next. You don’t quite understand the idea of not breathing, that'll get painful fast.”
“What about the artefacts?” I asked as I walked towards the tunnel. “Or the Mona Lisa?”
“Already moved,” Quin said.
I stepped into the tunnel and walked as quickly as I could, while breathing as little as I was able. Even with that, I felt light headed.
Behind me, the door closed. Balor pushed past, then grabbed my hand. I didn’t dare look back, for fear I’d stumble over my own feet and hit the floor.
“Come on, faster now.”
“Quin,” I said weakly.
“Wraith is doing his duty to the Council,” Balor said.
“Which means wh—”
A force threw us to the ground. In the startling moments after the blast, I struggled to get my lungs to work. My ears were ringing something terrible as hands grabbed me roughly and shoved me down the tunnel. I thought I heard a voice shout at me, but I didn’t know what it said.
The ringing in my ears was simply too much.
But I kept walking because I knew what I had to do, I had to get out of there. I walked until I found the end of the tunnel, where Troy was sitting against the wall, still breathing hard.
“Didn’t tell you the plan, did they?” he asked, his voice swimming in the air in front of me.
He pushed off the wall and moved around me, pulling something from my head and tossing it to the side. As the item clattered to the floor, sound slowly returned to normal.
I groaned as a pain began to throb through my head. Apparently, something had struck me.
Not sure if this not feeling pain is a blessing or a curse.
“Think you’re bad?” Quin growled, grabbing me roughly. “Stop questioning everything.”
“Wraith, Helen, Helen, Wraith,” Balor said loudly. “She’s allowed to ask questions when she has the tablet, recall. So. Now what?”
Except, that wasn’t how Wraith talked. That was how Quin spoke when angry with me. I supposed he had a right to be angry, considering the fact that my asking a question was probably what got me a step or two behind and close enough to be struck by whatever had hit me in the head.
Quin glared at Balor. For the most part, he looked fine. A little charred around the edges, but fine. When he growled, his teeth gritted, there was a ripple of pain through his body.
I’d ask to look at his back, but I was afraid of what I would see, that I wouldn’t be able to stomach what was left of him.
“We need a place to hide,” Troy said. “Someplace they won’t expect to find a vampire.”
“With minimal humans,” Balor said. “And no security cameras, I’m sure.”
“The Den,” Quin said. “We need to go to the Den.”
“Are you mad?” Balor asked. “The wolves don’t appreciate us going public. They certainly wouldn’t like us outing them to humans.”
“Oh, it gets worse than that,” Quin muttered, bringing out his phone. “Daisy. I’m headed to the Den with Balor and two fledglings. This is my decree by law. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
As he ended the call, Balor stared at him with an open mouth.
“Have yeh lost your mind?” Balor demanded, his accent suddenly so thick that it was almost impossible for me to make out his words. “Daisy? Why is she even in town? How long has she been here?”
“You two want to have this discussion around the corner from a burning building, when you’re wanted, men?” Troy asked.
“Seems like a completely rational thing to do,” I said, looking around. “How do we get there?”
>
“Walk,” Troy said. “Walk like you aren’t wanted.”
“Do you know who Daisy is?” I asked, following Troy as he walked away from Balor and Quin. “And where we’re going?”
“The Den is a werewolf club just down the street. Almost unmarked. Humans are welcome in, but if a vampire comes in, they close it down.
“The wolves don’t have a Council. Each pack has an alpha. He dictates the rules.”
“He?” I asked. “Sexist much?”
“Wolves are the only race to be purely male or purely female. They have no in-between genders. It’s my understanding their sexuality, and form, vary a great deal. Some are permanently wolves. Some have never been able to shift.”
“Doesn’t explain the sexism. A woman can lead a pack.”
“They might, but not in this generation,” Troy stopped at a light and sighed as Quin and Balor caught up with us. “The wolves have something above an alpha. They’re called Bitches. Only a woman can become a Bitch. No one knows how they earn the title, but normally she has to have led a pack, fought at war, and has had at least one successful pup. Meaning, she’s a mother to at least one alpha.”
“The pups of a Bitch protect their mother,” Balor grumbled.
“Let me guess,” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “There’s only one Bitch alive right now, and Quin just called her?”
“You would be correct on that,” Balor said.
I turned to Quin and just shook my head. He gave me a half-hearted shrug in response.
“She earned the title when she took me down,” Quin responded. “By herself. Lily owns the city and most of Eastern Canada. If you’re a wolf in the nation, you kneel to her, or her adopted boys make you kneel.”
“Adopted?” I asked.
“Lily grew up in a different world than you did,” he responded gruffly. “In her world, yes, she had to either adopt the boys or let them starve. Now all but one leads a pack. She will force her title on you, what with you being a fledgling and all.”
“Because?”
“Because mortal women believe that those of the female gender who strap on a backbone and stand against the men is a Bitch. It’s a bad and dirty word. She will throw it out there to make you uncomfortable.”
