The Fugitives, A Dystopian Vampire Novel: Book Four: The Superiors Series

by Lena Hillbrand

  He covered his eyes with a shock of pain and waited again until the brightness faded. When he uncovered them, the sun had gone, and only the sky glowed with its reflection. Though the sun had left an ache behind his eyes, something of the picture had leached away without its direct rays. Now the tones were muted, and along the river, colorless shadows crept, swallowing daylight’s hues.

  They left the river and moved south over the farmland, pushing on until morning, when they reached the forest. This was a real forest, unlike the sparse trees they’d encountered on the riverbank. The bright, yellow-green grass along the edges of the forest burst from the earth with unbearable vigor. In the forest, the leaved trees grew close, then tapered off, replaced with bare trees that reminded Draven of his time in the mountains.

  They set up camp on a bed of needles under a towering pine. When Draven awoke that evening, he went in search of food, though he did not stray far from Cali. Within an hour, he returned with a rabbit and lit a fire from downed limbs and bark from nearby trees. As Cali stared into the flames, he watched her with such longing, watched the golden light flicker across her face and gleam off her hair, watched the flames reflected in her eyes. How much he wanted her.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked at last.

  “So hungry,” she said, her voice almost faint with longing. She only wanted warmth and food. That’s how he should look at her, with the longing of hunger alone. But he hungered for much more.

  He rose suddenly, angry at himself for wanting what could not be. He knelt and began to open the rabbit along the middle to clean it.

  “How do you know so much about human food?” Cali asked, watching Draven clean the rabbit with swift movements.

  “How do you know about Superior food?” Draven asked, frowning as he peeled the skin away.

  “I am Superior food,” Cali said with a laugh. “But really. If you’ve never had a human, how do you know all this? You can’t even eat it. I’m going to eat it, and I’d have no idea how to do what you’re doing.”

  Draven shrugged without looking up. “I was once human, too.” He’d finished cleaning the carcass before he noticed how long it had been since either had spoken. He glanced up to find Cali staring like he’d grown an extra set of teeth.

  “You used to be a human?” she asked slowly.

  “Well…yes.”

  “How is that possible? I knew you’d evolved from humans, but I thought it took hundreds of years. How—when were you human?”

  “A hundred years ago, give or take a few years.”

  “So when you say you evolved…”

  “Evolution only takes days. By our definition.” Draven slid the rabbit onto the spit, propped it over the fire, and stepped away to wash his hands with a flask of river water. When he returned, Cali continued to study him with wary curiosity.

  “I hope I’ve not upset you,” he said. “I forgot you wouldn’t—didn’t—know.”

  “How would I know?” Cali asked. “Does anyone know?”

  “We know, of course. A few humans likely know.”

  For a time, they sat listening to the rabbit sizzle over the fire, letting the sound take the place of conversation. Cali couldn’t take her eyes off the food. Draven pierced the meat, letting juices and oil trickle over the crispy outside, blackened in places and golden pink in others. As it cooked, it released a wonderful aroma. Combined with the smoke and pine needles around them, it smelled like nature itself. When he estimated it done, he removed a bit of meat with his fingers.

  “Doesn’t that burn?” Cali asked.

  “A bit,” he admitted.

  “Then why’d you do it that way?”

  “I’d forgotten it would hurt.”

  “You didn’t know touching something that’s cooking would hurt?”

  “How would I know before I’d done it?” Draven began separating the meat from the bones.

  Cali leaned forward and watched closely, as if memorizing his technique. After a bit, she said, “How long were you human?”

  “Twenty-three years.”

  “That’s how old you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you never age,” she said. “I always wondered how you knew, since you never change. So if you evolved when you were five, or fifty, you’d always be that age?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when you were a human, you learned how to do all this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you live? How different was everything?”

  “Not very,” Draven said, turning the rabbit. “I lived on a food farm.”

  “Then how’d you learn to do all this survival stuff? I’d never know how to catch a rabbit, or how to get food or cook it.”

  “I was never good at being a good human.” Draven smiled and shaved off a slice of meat with his knife. “I suppose I’m not good at being a good Superior, either.”

  “I think you’re good at it,” Cali said. “Maybe you’re just not good at…doing what everyone else wants.”

  “That in itself means I’m no good at being a Superior.”

  The firelight played over Cali’s face, made her hunger lovely and simple, gave her a depth she didn’t seem to possess in artificial light. “Do you ever miss it?” she asked.

  He chuckled. “Of course not. What is there to miss?”

  He had to stop watching her like that, thinking about the ways she looked like a woman. The ways in which he wanted her to be a woman.

  He busied himself with the meat. “I miss daytime, the warmth of sunlight,” he said. “I saw you…you were lying on the shore. I wanted to lie next to you.” Draven glanced at her, but she stared into the fire without reaction. “I miss food sometimes. Being able to eat different things, to try new things. I wish I could share this new experience with you.”

  “You’re part of it,” Cali said, hesitating only a moment before accepting the piece of meat he held out to her. “Besides, what would happen if you ate it?”

  “I’d get sick.”

  “You couldn’t even taste it?”

  “If I swallowed it, I’d be sick later.”

  “How do you know? Have you tried it?” She leaned forward and held the meat against his lips, somehow soft and challenging at once. Grasping her wrist, he plucked the meat from her fingers. He held it against her mouth, and after a moment, she opened her lips and he slipped it inside.

  “I’ll taste it later in you,” he said, bringing her fingers to his mouth to lick the oil from them. She watched, her eyes shining in the firelight, her lips glistening with oil. A fleck of black clung to the corner of her mouth. He dropped her hand, leaned in and pressed his lips to hers.

  Her lips were hot and slick from the fat of the rabbit.

  She pulled away. “Please don’t.”

  “I won’t hurt you,” he whispered. “I’ll be soft with you.”

  “No, please.” Her eyes were wide and frightened like the rabbit’s, her heart beating nearly as rapidly.

  Draven turned back to the fire. “Of course not. It was wrong of me to do that.”

  He handed her the sheet of foil upon which he’d piled the meat. She ate it in silence. Afterwards, he took the bones away. When he returned, their eyes met, and the moment hung between them, suspended on the lines of their gaze.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was…not thinking clearly. I was remembering what it was like to be human. It had nothing to do with you.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, okay. That’s good.”

  “Forget it happened.”

  “I will.”

  “We should go on. It’s full dark now.” They had wasted too much time already. But she had to eat so he could eat. Still, he felt strange asking for sap, as if he’d lost that privilege when he’d kissed her. It hadn’t been much of a kiss. And yet, it had been one. He had crossed some invisible line, and he was afraid he couldn’t undo the crossing of it.

  CHAPTER tWENTY-eight

  Cali watched Draven cover t
he fire with dirt and dump the bloody, greasy wash water over it. He avoided looking at her. Had he kissed her? Had a Superior really kissed her?

  She knew he had.

  She didn’t have much experience with kissing, but she’d done it a few times. She’d kissed boys at the Confinement when she’d been small, and a girl at the restaurant. Once, she’d kissed Shelly in an attempt to make him desire a woman. She’d been kissed by one of the breeders who had tried to impregnate her. A smashing of lips together. Her sisters had talked about how much they liked it, but Cali didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very exciting, either.

  Draven’s kiss hadn’t been hard, just sudden. His lips were cool. Hers had been hot and oily. When his slid against hers, it had shocked her.

  “I would like to eat before we leave, if you do not object,” Draven said, standing to face her as if making a formal request.

  Sometimes Cali had to fight the urge to laugh at the strange way he worded things. She wanted to try to talk like him, but she didn’t feel comfortable with him tonight, not now that he had kissed her.

  He said he’d been thinking of something else. Maybe it had been that. He said he’d be soft with her. Did he mean another kiss or something else? Sometimes, she caught him looking at her with a strange hunger, a longing so deep it made her bones shiver.

  When she’d given her consent for him to eat, he strode towards her. She took one small step back, half afraid of him when he had that purposeful, almost mean look about him. If he noticed her hesitation, he didn’t correct her. She never expected to have to treat a Superior like a Superior again. Somewhere along the way, they had stopped thinking they’d go back.

  He usually ate from her neck now, which she’d grown to enjoy, though she would never let him know that. Knowing it herself made her feel funny. But now he lifted her wrist to his mouth. He paused, keeping his eyes on hers as he kissed her wrist, a soft flutter of his lips that sent a chill curling over her skin. His lips were still a little slick from hers.

  Draven turned her arm and bit her. When his needle-sharp teeth punctured her skin, she sucked in a quick breath. He drew in a quick breath as well, through his nose, without releasing his hold. In the darkness, his eyes looked black, the same color as his soft hair. His lips were drawn back from his teeth that glowed white against her skin in the moonlight. Cali let out her breath, trying to still the quiver that was building inside her. Draven drew in a long, steady breath, pulling from her at the same time. His breath came out as a cross between a sigh and a soft moan. After he withdrew, he swirled his tongue over her wrist and then smiled, that smirk of a smile.

  “Thank you.” He pulled her to him so unexpectedly that she lost her footing and fell against him. He chuckled deep in his throat, that warm sound that both warmed her and made her shiver. With one arm around the small of her back, he took her hair in the other and pulled her head back. She thought he would bite again, since he liked that spot and held her hair that way when he ate. But when he put his mouth to her skin, he didn’t break through. Instead, he ran his nose lightly along her throat, breathing in and then out, a cool stream of air that tickled the fine hairs on her skin.

  “I’m burning for you,” he murmured into her ear.

  She shivered. “Burning what?”

  He gave a quiet little laugh and released her, then went to gather up the backpack. Why did he laugh at her? Did he mean she burned him? She touched her neck to see if she was warmer than usual, but she didn’t feel awfully warm. Not enough to burn someone. It must be one of the sayings that Superiors thought humans were too dumb to understand. It irritated her that she couldn’t prove him wrong.

  They traveled through the night in silence, through an area of rolling hills and rough terrain. While Draven walked, Cali dozed on his shoulder, waking with a start each time he boosted her up or jumped over a fallen log or off a rock. Towards morning, she woke from her doze to find Draven carrying her along a stretch of pale road.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “It’s an old highway,” Draven said, stepping over a wide ditch.

  “Where are we?”

  “We’re far from civilization,” he said. “Superiors don’t live in areas with so many trees.”

  “What about the road?”

  “A human road,” he said, climbing over a crumbling section where the road had risen and buckled, leaving small slabs of cement overlapping in a heap. “They used to say, I read, that you could judge a civilization on the strength of their roads. I can see why this civilization crumbled.”

  “But you said that was two hundred years ago.”

  “Roads can last for thousands of years.”

  “Really? That many?” Cali didn’t even know how many that was. More than she would ever see or be able to count.

  “Byron will find us soon,” he said.

  Cali glanced over her shoulder. “How do you know?”

  “My wounds have healed.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That his have already healed, and he’s had time to track us.”

  “But I wore the garlic…”

  “He’s trained for finding men.”

  “And killing them?”

  “And killing them.”

  Cali shivered and tightened her arms around Draven. He felt like steel, so strong he could never be broken. What would happen to her if Byron killed him? She pressed her face into his hair and inhaled his familiar non-smell. After only a few days, her hair smelled dirty, especially now that the soap was gone, but Draven always smelled like his surroundings. Sometimes dusty, or like dirt, or leaves if they’d slept in the leaves, or like fresh air and night.

  Maybe she didn’t mind that he’d kissed her. It had been sort of nice. If he died, if she died, would it have been so bad to have kissed him back? But what if he wanted more than that? She couldn’t mate with a man who drank her blood, sometimes with such obvious enjoyment that it embarrassed her. But who else was there?

  Whatever questions she’d had, she soon knew the answer. When the sun rose into the sky and Draven had to stop, he piled a heap of musty-smelling leaves between two boulders and they lay down together. But when she turned towards him, instead of away as she usually did, he turned his back to her. That was not the way a man acted if he wanted another kiss, or more than a kiss.

  CHAPTER tWENTY-Nine

  For days, Byron had lain in the car healing from his wounds. Draven had sliced across Byron’s chest and shoulder, and once across his stomach, with a knife. Running around shooting after Draven while holding in his own guts hadn’t been the easiest thing Byron had ever done. But disembowelment, however painful, wasn’t fatal. And if Byron had worried whether Draven’s previous crimes warranted a death sentence, he didn’t have to worry anymore.

  The wounds were severe enough to stop Byron from pursuing the fugitives for a few days. He didn’t know where the backar chodu had gotten a boat, but he’d escaped across the river with his whore. It was also too bad that Thirds hadn’t evolved with a deactivation switch so Enforcers could go into the system and shut them off. As it was, Byron had to do things the hard way. So he’d dragged himself back to his vehicle and lain across the seat, drinking can after can of sap to replenish his strength and heal him. Then he’d slept.

  When he woke, he’d been surprised how long his body had shut down for repair. But when he checked his tracking device, he saw that Draven hadn’t gone far. He had to heal, too. Byron examined the grisly pink lines left by Draven’s knife. In a few more days, those would fade, and eventually, disappear altogether.

  His leg, which had sustained a shallow wound from the sapien’s blow, still throbbed. When he moved it, the muscle contracted in a spasm of pain. The pain had not abated, and blood had seeped out while he’d slept, staining his seat black. He hadn’t known what weapon she’d used, and he’d assumed the wound would heal with the others. In his agony that night, he hadn’t stopped to ponder the pain of a shall
ow gash. But now it hurt like nothing else could.

  The cuntscab of a human had stabbed him with a piece of wood.

  He tore away the leg of his pants to examine the unhealed wound. A clean cut, even from a wooden instrument, would have healed in five days. This was no clean cut. He could feel a foreign object screaming to be released from his flesh, though the skin had closed over it. Just touching it made him jerk his hand back. The skin was hard and tight, and a sharp pain drove through him when he touched the area. He fought through the panicky, animal urge to rip at his flesh and tear the pain away.

  The end of the piece of wood bulged grotesquely against his skin. Wood—the one element his body couldn’t expel. Steel could hold him, but once embedded in his body, it would work itself out over time. He knew that well enough from his years in the War. His body wasn’t equipped to deal with wood. Unable to recognize the foreign substance, it did nothing. He’d heard even the smallest splinter could stay in a Superior for years, carrying with it a nagging, constant pain. And this was not a mere splinter.

  Byron rifled through his lockbox and found a small, rather dull folding knife. He opened it, disgusted with himself for not bringing a sharper knife. He had, of course, the sleek wooden dagger he would use to kill Draven. But it seemed cumbersome for such a small task.

  Byron pressed the knife deep into his flesh before it broke the skin. For a moment, he sat frozen, the pain rendering him immobile. The muscle and tissue under the incision howled with pain as he delved beneath the strained, healing layer to where the end of the wooden shard protruded, staring out at him like a spiked, spiteful eye. He had to dig a pit in his flesh around the shard to get a firm grip. It wasn’t slick like a bullet that slid right out.

  When he finally dragged it out, it looked like such a small thing to cause such pain. It wasn’t much more than a twig, about half the length of his thumb and not much thicker, peeled and shaved to a dull point at the end. Here it was, the stake that she’d thought to kill him with. The sheer brainless, ludicrousness of it both amused and infuriated him. He ground his teeth to keep from screaming or laughing. If he started, he might never stop.