by Seth Eden
For the time being.
Loren's head rang with the violence, the pleasure, the kill, the fear, the sense of fullness of being part of a pack larger than himself.
It wasn't until he started back, man again rather than beast, cooling in the cold night, carrying the head of his victim to demand of the prisoners an identity, that he found himself wondering at his own pleasure. His own capacity for violence.
State dependency. Away from the hunt, he felt as if that had been another life. He remembered his pleasure in the act but didn't share it, as if he were a different person. He wondered if his nature had changed.
And whether or not letting Kiera go would be safer for her than breeding her as his own.
Twelve
He'd been gone for close to a month.
The weather had broken, once, as if an early spring might come and then, as if determined to make her as miserable as possible, the clouds had socked in the city again. The sun had vanished and the snow had begun to blow slantwise with the winds. Inside the crèche, the vampires that came to the girls were maddened, their attentions vicious. The wizened woman who was their task mistress and minder, the woman with no name she'd ever given them, handed out painkillers like candy after the visits of the vampires to the girls. She patrolled beds late at night or just before dawn when sometimes the sun would rise briefly. She checked on bleeding and torn flesh, took girls out of service, provided analgesic creams, opioids and lies meant to hearten.
Nothing worked. The girls stopped working out, stopped getting together for crafts or stories or anything that passed the time constructively.
They began to fight amongst themselves, petty arguments about petty, unimportant differences. Who had taken a longer shower. Who had eaten something someone else wanted.
Who had fucked the kindest of the Vampyren and taken the easier task for the night.
It was a whorehouse, Kiera thought. Maybe the crèche hadn't started that way, but as winter wore on, driving all of them mad in some way or the other, they were there to service, to fuck and be fucked, not to breed. There were no new pregnancies. At least there were no new deaths.
Kiera ate her meals with Lily, Michelle and Davida, the four of them huddling close to one of the fireplaces only because Sydney and her crew couldn't be in every room at once. Sometimes they got nearly all the way through a meal before they were accosted. On their own they still went to the once-corporate gym downstairs and worked out, lifting weights, kickboxing and running on treadmills. They wanted to defend themselves against attacks that seemed certain to be coming and possibly from others within the crèche rather from without.
Though that was possible. The Vampyren were becoming crazed. The weather was driving them daily into deeper insanity and it was only February. The time change and spring were too far away to hold out hope.
"It would be easier if we were all together," Kiera said as they huddled by the fire one early night. Three weeks now since Loren had gone and she still missed him. At the start she'd tried to tell herself it had been some version of Stockholm Syndrome, that he had been the first man to care for her in any way for so long that of course she developed feelings for him. She felt safer with him there.
She hadn't been.
Now she talked with her roommates.
"You're going to suggest we do something again, aren't you?" Davida asked. She'd run her hands through her afro until it looked like something had nested in it.
None of the rest of them were faring well either. Michelle's long dark hair had become so matted and greasy she took a razor to her head, only to discover she had a lumpy, unevenly shaped scalp and now it was also bloody in places. That was never a good thing when you were trapped by blizzards in a corporate skyscraper filled with vampires.
When she'd said that, they'd all hesitated for an instant, then burst out laughing, which angered Sydney who was sitting across the room from them.
Not that everything didn't anger Sydney but it was hard to tell what had bothered her the most – their sudden burst of laughter, the volume of their voices, or the fact that they were friends.
This time, with her roommates, Kiera had her arguments set and ready. "Look, we know there are resistance cells forming." She looked from Michelle's dark eyes to Davida's darker eyes to Lily's pale blondness.
Nobody blinked or argued. They never did. They just let her say her piece, then in some polite, girl’s solidarity way, let her know she was crazy and would get them all killed.
"Most of the cells are forming in the rural areas." She swallowed over that thought, thinking about her family. Her phone had worked briefly three days earlier but she hadn't been able to reach her family, which frustrated and frightened her. Hopefully by now they had gone to a rural area, more than the suburbs they'd been in. It had been the plan and there was no reason Will and Kate shouldn't have taken their parents and gone.
"You want to go country bumpkin in this?" Davida gestured over her shoulder towards the windows with one thumb.
"It would be better," Kiera insisted. "Rural households are used to losing power. They're used to surviving. There will be generators."
She'd thought that would get a response. The electricity almost always held for their building because the Vampyren were behind a lot of the failures for the city at large: Yet another way to control the humans, with the fear of losing power in the brutal winter.
But the corporate building the crèche and administration was housed in was huge and full of high ceilings where heat dissipated. The girls spent a lot of time either showering or huddling around the fireplaces when they weren't being bred, or whatever it was the vampires were doing at this point, and the power failed for real sometimes, leaving them in as much darkness as anyone else in Chicago.
"Generators, and freezers and pantries stocked with food. Because they're used to being cut off by weather." She looked from one face to the next, realizing with a jolt that she really did consider these women friends now. "If we went rural, if we fought back from a place where survival wasn't the only thing we could think about – "
She broke off because a shadow had fallen over them. Before she could even make an identification, horror flowing through her that she might have been overheard by the invaders themselves, Sydney's voice said, "Get out of my seat, bitch."
Half a dozen thoughts flashed through Kiera's mind in the time it took her to blink up at the other woman.
The first was gratitude. If all Sydney wanted was this particular seat by the fire, then she wasn't about to go running to their wizened chaperone, running to tell Marybeth she needed to find a council member or a guard and reporting Kiera and the others for sedition.
The next thought was fear. Sydney was probably a borderline personality, Michelle had said --- whether she wanted friends or not, she would turn on anyone, including her own clique, at any time. She was unpredictable and tended to be vicious. Kiera had enough run-ins with her. This needed not to happen, especially given that Loren had once thrown Syd casually across the room and threatened, possibly within earshot, to kill her.
Loren wasn't here right now.
The next was fury. That a small, happy minute had passed between friends and instead of ever working to have the same thing with her girls or be a part of a different group, Sydney only wanted to destroy what she couldn't or wouldn't let herself have.
The other thoughts were a jumble, nothing clear and definitely nothing that smacked of trying to understand Sydney's twisted personality. She thought, Don't call me bitch! And she thought that she wanted to vanish and she thought that this was less like a beauty pageant – after all, she'd never been in one – and a lot more like what she imagined boarding school would be like: You were stuck forever, day after day, with the worst of your high school enemies.
She thought most of all that the fact that they couldn't work together even now might be what brought down humanity forever. People were afraid. They were afraid to take steps that might fail and might
bring them to the attention of the invaders. They were afraid of each other, that if they took a chance and took a step or a stand, someone else – a Sydney, say – would go running to the invaders and get them killed. They were afraid for themselves and they were afraid for the people they loved and she couldn't fault that because all of that was true for her too.
Before she'd thought that the advent of the Vampyren in their wormhole technology ships appearing in the skies over Earth and being there to conquer had been the first thing to finally bring humanity together. It had felt like a cynical thought, kind of a We're all different and xenophobic as fuck until we're all threatened and then it's better to get along despite hating and fearing each other than not being around to be able to hate and fear at all.
…probably that was still cynical. But now she was afraid that if even a worldwide threat like the Vampyren couldn't cause people like Sydney to be tamped down or to find a place with others even if it was only to survive, then what chance did any of them have?
And she didn't want to feel that way.
I'm no better. She'd not stood up directly to the Vampyren. She'd begged, she'd presented her case, she'd made trades: Me, for my family. Don't hurt this person and I'll… things that she probably could have been forced to do anyway only she did it as a barter system.
She thought she was making progress but maybe all she was doing was keeping herself and her loved ones safe. Maybe that wasn't enough to get the Earth and all its peoples – all its peoples – out from under the grip of the space vampires.
She didn't know how to do that. Not necessarily. It wasn't like she could march into the Council chambers and insist that while she didn't have anything specific that she could even think to demand at the moment, still she needed to demand something.
But she could stand up to Sydney. Not that she hadn't before. But this time was different. This time maybe what she needed to do was fight for the kind of life she wanted.
Whatever that meant.
"Get. UP," Sydney shouted into her face. She was bent at the waist, screaming at Kiera, and around Kiera her friends became restive, starting to shift, to look at each other, and to look pleadingly at Kiera.
Sorry, she thought at them. I can't do this.
With a studied calm she didn't feel, Kiera looked Syd in the eye and said, "I'm not in your seat. There's no assigned seating and we were here first tonight. If you want to be by this fireplace, we can shift our chairs to make room." She subtly underscored "our chairs," which was probably her mistake. Because before she could get to the next part, If you'd like to join us which she didn't even want Sydney to take her up on, the other woman had yanked her out of the chair by the t-shirt she wore and was snarling into her face as she dragged Kiera closer.
"I didn't ask for your opinion."
"Good," Kiera said, and hated that her voice shook. "I wasn't giving you my opinion."
Sydney's eyes were wide, the rage inside them so evident and so mixed with crazy that only someone as seriously crazy as she was – or maybe as Kiera was quickly becoming – would have kept going.
Kiera kept going.
"That wasn't opinion. It was fact. We can sit anywhere. So can you. If you want this chair that badly, ask me nicely. Maybe I'm too warm over here. Maybe I'll move. Maybe I'd move just to be nice."
Sydney was looking at her like Kiera was speaking Martian. And abruptly she didn't care what Syd understood or didn't, or whether the girl was borderline and mentally ill. She was cold now, tired, angry and tired of being scared.
"Or if you're totally incapable of understanding an olive branch when it's extended to you – or even what the expression means, I guess – then fuck you, Sydney. Go away. We don't want you here."
The blow came out of nowhere. Kiera hadn't considered that a human being could move that fast, but Sydney was motivated.
It was a roundhouse punch, something Kiera should have blocked in her sleep. She had never taken a martial art but her brother had and he'd evolved along the belt rankings, teaching Kiera along the way without intending to. He had first used her as a target, theory being that he would stop each kick or punch just short of making contact.
Theory sucked, but Kiera learned to take a punch. She didn't like taking punches, though, so she learned how to block.
Once she learned to block, William realized it might be more fun to spar than to just have an unmoving target. He began sparring with her and Kiera, after complaining to her mother, who was busy, and her father, who didn't think it a bad idea Kiera learn some ways to fight, began sparring in response.
She never joined a class or do-chang, never got a belt, never picked a style, never even wanted to do any of those things.
But because William didn't necessarily rein himself in when he sparred with her and definitely didn't manage to control every punch when she was a target, Kiera learned to roll with the punches which, apparently, was one of those clichés based in truth.
She also learned not only how to block.
But how to punch.
The roundhouse Sydney threw came from the left, because Sydney was left handed. An advantage for sneak attacks or even just getting punches in, because the majority of people anybody fought were right handed.
The punch connected with her temple on the left side and Kiera felt that initial bee sting of shock, the slapped feeling of adrenaline breaking all at once, and she rolled with the punch, the instant she felt the pain start up. She let the blow drive her down to her right, her energy collecting as she absorbed the blow and came back, using Sydney's energy against her.
She came up pistoning her right fist, not a roundhouse like Syd's that the other girl might have blocked if she had any kind of training, but a straight, fast punch the way William had taught her. Her fist flashed out, connected, snapped back to her side and both hands were up in defensive position.
Sydney didn't bother with another punch. She launched herself at Kiera, going all in, scratching, grabbing for hair, screaming as if she were the one being flayed alive while Kiera did nothing to attack but backed up, held her ground, gave ground, held her ground, blocked, blocked, tried to control.
And when the attack didn't wane, when Sydney kept screaming and coming at her and when it became evident that the lot of them could kill each other on this floor for all any kind of Vampyren intercession was going to take place, she hit Syd one more time.
She dropped her to the ground.
Sydney screamed, holding her broken nose. Blood spurted and the crowd around them, Kiera's roommates who'd been trying to stop it and Syd's crew who'd been trying to egg it on, all backed up hurriedly.
Now there was the sound of pounding, the footsteps outside their floor on the metal fire escape stairs, the sound of the matron startled up from her deep snoring sleep, the women who hadn't been in the common room, all of them running.
Kiera was grabbed from behind, her hands restrained, arms through hers and behind her back, half Nelson even after her hands were zip tied and she shouted, "I'm not resisting you!" but that didn't stop it.
Sydney was pulled up by hair and back of shirt, dangled so her blood dripped straight down, not splattering any of the Vampyren who stood around them.
The bored looking guard studied Kiera for a second, gave even less consideration to Sydney, and said, "Kill them. Make the others watch. I don't want a repeat."
Kiera's breath left her in a rush, like she'd been punched. Her heart beat so hard and so fast and so out of control she guessed she'd have a heart attack before they could do anything at all to her.
One guard, standing behind the shift leader, put a hand up to stop the one beside him. "She's Prince Loren's, leader."
There was a snort of disgust from the guard leader and he turned back, his glare going equally to both Sydney and Kiera.
"Which one?"
She'd never been on this side of prejudice, but she'd been at the council meeting with Loren and so had this guard. She remembered him, from the f
ullness of his beard to the new ring he had pierced in his ear, as if he'd come to Earth, found one thing he liked, attained it and now was ready to go back to spreading joy through the Universe.
She hadn't liked him then, either.
"I am," she said. Her head ached fiercely and she wanted to kick the Vampyren guards for being useless when they were actually needed. If everyone here was such prime breeding stock, why the hell didn't they take care of them?
"I am!" Sydney shouted from the floor.
Kiera thought the leader looked ready to shoot them both and let Loren complain if he liked, but instead he looked at the guards, who looked as flustered as men their size could.
Michelle, unexpectedly, stepped forward. Her voice shook, but she identified Kiera and girl after girl then did the same.
Up to and including Sydney's crew.
The leader looked at Kiera like he was trying to figure out why there was any kind of fuss about her, then he nodded and said to the other guards, "Kill the one on the floor. Burn the body."
And he was out of the room before the gunshot finished echoing.
Loren
It was late by the time they approached the administrative headquarters building, after ten at night which meant it had been dark for a lot of hours. The memory of the kill was still on his lips, on his breath.
He couldn't quite shake the pleasure of it. His blood still ran high with excitement and there was a trembling in his belly that made him want to do more. More hunt. More targeting. More cat and mouse. He'd liked the shooting, the test of courage and skill.
He'd liked the blood and the draining and the killing.
New moon that night, making the dark that much darker. Those Vampyren most affected by the bloodlust that came with this planet's nightfall and the cold of the winter hadn't even come back with them. They were his unit and he should have cared that they were running loose somewhere in the city, but the Council didn't care about such abuses. Humans were expendable. There were so many of them. Sport after such a long, cold, dark time could be excused.
