Cheating Death

by April White

  “Tom!” Horror filled my voice, and behind me Mary cried out.

  Tom looked down at his chest and shoulder. The old wounds were disappearing back into the scars they had become, but blood still covered his chest and soaked through his shirt. He made a disgusted sound deep in his throat and yanked the shirt back over his shoulder. It was useless now, torn and stained with his blood, and he hurled it out the window. Suddenly the carriage was filled with his Mongerness.

  “You don’t get to fix this, Saira.” Tom’s rage was cold and hard. He ground the words out through clenched teeth, and his face radiated with his anger. “You can’t fix me.”

  Ringo started to say something, but I yelled at him. “Don’t!” Then I turned the full force of my glare on Tom. I was sick of his hatred, sick of his anger, and sick of being blamed for everything that had happened. “I don’t want to fix you, Tom. I can’t fix the anger and the hatred and the self-loathing you wrap around yourself like armor. But the thing I can do, the thing no one else in the world can do, is I can take you back to the moment right after you screwed everything up so you can fix it yourself!”

  Tom looked like he was about to launch himself at me, and his coiled muscles shook with the effort of controlling his impulse. “I could make you just like me right now.”

  Ringo moved as if to hold Tom back, but I shouted “No! Let him.” I didn’t take my eyes off Tom as I answered Ringo’s need to do something. “Let him turn me, if that’s what he needs to do. If that’s what it’ll take for him to fix the split so we can all get home, that’s fine. I can take it.”

  I finally tore my eyes away from the rage in Tom’s face, and when I looked at the anguish in Ringo’s, my voice softened and despair choked me. “Archer survived it. I can too. And then maybe if I’m a Vampire I’ll be strong enough to stop being afraid of losing him, and Archer and I can go away and spend the rest of time together.”

  “No, Saira,” Ringo whispered.

  Tom scoffed, and the sound tore through the carriage. “Archer’s dead.”

  Ringo whipped his head around and glared at Tom. “No thanks to ye!” he spat. “The only ‘ope they ‘ave of bein’ together now is in a future she can’t get to unless ye ‘ave the stones to fix what ye broke.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Tom with eerie calm. “In that future, Archer’s dead and buried under tons of rock.”

  I felt cold prickles of fear begin to creep through my chest. “No he’s not,” I whispered.

  Tom’s voice was like ice, and every word had a sharp edge designed to cut. “Remember I told you there was an explosion in the Underground? Adam was down there, and the little Edwards kid – the Shifter – he said he couldn’t find his brother or Archer under the rubble. He found a dead Monger, but not them.”

  My hand balled into a fist, and I cocked my arm back and imagined it smashing into his nose. For the first time in a very long time, I felt my Cat rise up … and I let her.

  “Saira?” Ringo warned, as he held my arm back.

  Tom smiled, and it was the smile that broke the leash.

  My voice was unfamiliar as I met his eyes and answered his hateful words. “You should have kept that to yourself,” I said enraged, “because now you’re screwed.”

  I exploded out of my skin and Shifted into the Cougar who lived inside me. She roared, and I heard the horses scream outside the carriage. We lurched to a stop and my Cat threw herself at the door, which burst open and sent me sailing out into the darkness.

  “Saira!” Ringo yelled after me, but I ignored him and bounded for the woods.

  I could sense him behind me, but I leapt rocks and over tree trunks as though the very act of running could let me escape pain and rage and … emptiness.

  It was the yawning emptiness in my heart that stopped me in my tracks.

  Do we turn and fight? my Cat asked me in a confused voice in my head. But there was nothing to fight – nothing to vent the rage on, no way to replace the emotional pain with something physical.

  My Cat stood in a little clearing in the woods, panting, confused, and drained of the fire that had burned so brightly just moments before. I heard running then, and I sensed Ringo’s approach at full speed, heedless of what might be left when he found me.

  The rage left me so fast that everything – every ounce of pain and anger and fear that had kept me upright – drained out of me in a rush.

  I don’t remember Shifting back. I don’t remember standing naked in the woods, quivering muscles around my spine unable to keep me upright. Ringo was next to me in a flash, his coat wrapped around me, and his hands supporting me carefully. Standing – even breathing – became impossible.

  Ringo lowered me gently to the forest floor. I wrapped my arms around my knees and rocked myself without conscious thought while I stared into the night.

  “‘E’s lying, Saira.”

  I shuddered. “Is he?”

  “Archer’s a Vampire. ‘E’d survive anythin’ to be with ye. And why would ‘e even be in the Underground. ‘E ‘ates it down there.”

  “Archer, Connor, and Adam were searching for the mixed-bloods.” My eyes couldn’t focus on the landscape in front of me. Instead I saw the bomb in the ceiling of the British Museum ghost station. “An underground ghost station would have been a perfect place for Walters to hide them.” I shuddered, and the motion was entirely involuntary. “If we hadn’t changed the past – if that bomb never exploded in 1944, it would still be lodged in the station.” My voice was as empty as I felt, and whatever strength I’d used to animate my body was slipping away. I relaxed my arms and loosened the fetal ball I’d curled myself into, letting my head loll on the ground. “I’ll take you whenever you want to go, Ringo. Just let me sleep for a minute. I’ll be okay.”

  I didn’t even have enough left to say the words – they came out as a strangled whisper. I could feel Ringo’s eyes search my face, but I didn’t look at him. I closed my eyes and let everything go.

  Archer – Present Day

  I opened my eyes to blackness. The sheer, impenetrable darkness was the same whether my eyes were open or closed, so I attempted to use my other senses to gather more information.

  The air was cold … and damp … and I lay on a stone floor. The smell of something like sewage was faint, but it wasn’t exactly that. It was more … animal, and slightly familiar.

  I tapped my hand on the stone floor next to me. The echo of the sound told me the space was small, but there was also a vastness to the air. I thought perhaps I was in a cell positioned off a larger cavern. I was certainly underground, but no longer in the London Underground, where the air was dry and smelled of oil and metal.

  I also wasn’t alone. Someone breathed nearby, and the sound was regular and even. The person was either asleep or had been awake much longer than I and was being careful.

  A vision suddenly shattered the darkness in my brain. St. Brigid’s School. Claire and Shaw together behind barricaded doors. Camille Arman pacing furiously behind them while a line of armed Mongers stood like watchful sentries outside the gates.

  And then it came back to me. An explosion. The sun. And Seth Walters.

  “Are you awake?” a young, male voice asked tentatively.

  Tam. With green hair. He was a mix himself, with Seer and something else. I listened hard for another breath – a Wolf, or another boy. There was none.

  “The Wolf?” I whispered. My voice was completely foreign to my ears, and I tried again. “What happened to the Wolf?”

  Seth and his goon had taken us from the collapsed passage. What had they done with Connor’s Wolf?

  Tam’s voice came from about five feet away. “I don’t know where he is. Hang on a second and I’ll try to let Tink know you’re alive.”

  He was silent, and I ran his words through my brain twice before I realized what he had actually said. “Who is Tink?”

  There was fondness in his tone. “A Seer friend of yours. Looks like a little blonde fairy, yo
u know, like Tinkerbell?”

  “Ava,” I breathed. “Ava Arman. You’re her leprechaun.”

  He snorted. “Because of the hair. I guess that’s fair.”

  I allowed myself a small smile at his tone. “You can talk to Ava?”

  “Not with words, only images. She’s not answering right now, but when she does, I’ll picture you opening your eyes. I already showed her how dark everything is here. Hopefully she’ll get it.”

  “Have you explored this place?” I asked.

  “We’re in a cell of some kind. The door is heavy wood, and from the feel of it when I kicked, it has a bar across the outside.”

  “And obviously underground, near enough to the water tables that this place floods occasionally.” I said quietly. “Have Walters or any of his men returned?”

  “I only woke up ten minutes before you did, and there’s been nothing.” He was silent another moment, then he moved and his voice came from a few feet higher. “You told me you injected a cure.”

  The words had no meaning for a moment, and then the memories slithered back. The vial Connor had given me, which I had injected as I lay dying from the accumulation of several lifetimes of injuries. I let my mind wander over my body as I tested for pain. It was there, and I was surprised that I hadn’t been consumed by it when I first woke. The fire of gunshot wounds, only partially healed before I injected the cure, the deep, fierce ache of impact injuries, the burning pattern of stabs and cuts seared my torso and back.

  I lay there long enough cataloguing my various pains that Tam asked again, “Did it work?”

  “I don’t know,” I murmured, even as I remembered the water and the touch of sunlight. I was afraid to hope.

  “You were in pretty bad shape. I did what I could, but that passage didn’t have a lot in the way of medical supplies. I was glad to find water at least.”

  Fear trickled through my veins. “You touched my blood?”

  He snorted without mirth. “You were dying. What else was I going to do?”

  “You could be infected …” I struggled to sit, and the pain was enough that I nearly didn’t.

  “It has probably been a couple of days, and I don’t claim to be any sort of Sucker expert, but don’t you think I’d have started to turn into one by now if I were going to?” The exasperation in his voice gave way to something cheeky. “And if I were a Sucker, I’d need you alive to feed from anyway, so my motives for helping you were completely self-serving.”

  I began to like this young man. He reminded me, in a way, of Ringo. My mind circled around what he’d said. “Tell me about my wounds. What bled?”

  Tam seemed to rearrange himself, and I pictured him sitting back against a wall. “Well, you’re a right mess of scars and old wounds, and it looked like you got shot someplace you’d been stabbed before – that was the worst bleeder. Another bullet went through and through, and I can’t tell whether the third is still in there or not. For a time right after you injected yourself, you seemed to bleed from all of it – every old scar and wound you had. But I could tell none of those was going to kill you. The dangerous ones are the new ones.” A wry smile entered his voice. “I thought Suckers were immortal, but you’re pretty much anything but that.”

  I struggled to pull myself up into a seated position, and every muscle, sinew, and bit of skin hurt doing so.

  “Do you need help?” Tam asked.

  I did, but I wouldn’t admit it. “Tell me what you have learned from Ava.”

  Tam rustled in a pocket, then groped his way across the floor to me. His hand hit my leg rather than my torso, thankfully. I reached for it, and he helped pull me forward. Then he pushed what felt like a water bottle and a plastic-wrapped bar toward my hand. “Here, I’ll tell you while you eat.”

  My throat closed with some emotion I wasn’t prepared to deal with, and then I realized how very parched I was.

  I picked up the water bottle and twisted off the cap, then put it to my mouth in an utterly unfamiliar motion. The water hit my lips, so oddly wonderful, and I very nearly gulped it.

  “Hey, slow down. You’ll make yourself sick,” said Tam.

  I pulled the bottle away from my mouth, astonished. “It’s been more than a century since I could drink water.”

  He stared at me. “You’re joking.”

  It was the last thing I felt like doing, but I tried to rise to the occasion with irony. “Vampires can only digest the platelets in blood, and we rarely have a sense of humor about it, so no, I’m not joking.”

  “You’re more than a hundred years old?” he asked, incredulous. “You look like you’re in your twenties.”

  I smiled. “I was born when Victoria was queen, and as remarkable as that may be to you, the fact that I’ve drunk water is far more remarkable to me.” I found I was indeed very thirsty, but I took Tam’s advice and drank slowly. I didn’t think my abdominal wounds would do well with vomiting.

  Tam’s voice was thoughtful. “Are you hungry?”

  I considered his words. Was I hungry? I felt the plastic-wrapped thing he’d pushed at me.

  “What is the bar you gave me?”

  “Granola. They had packaged snack foods in the passage where we were trapped, so I shoved some in my pockets.”

  I smiled ruefully. “Is there anything else? I haven’t eaten food in more than a century either, and a granola bar wasn’t really what I dreamt about as a first meal.”

  His voice betrayed his wince. “Yeah, that wouldn’t be my choice either.” He rummaged, then groped for my hand again. “Will almonds do?”

  They were in an individual package, but there was at least a handful. “Remarkably well. Thank you.”

  Despite the fact that the nuts had been preserved in plastic for who knew how long, they were more flavorful than I could have imagined. There were moments that I actually struggled to concentrate on Tam’s words because I was so delighted with the sheer overwhelm in my taste buds.

  He told me what Ava had shown him before Walters found us, when we were still buried in the Underground. Adam had gotten the mixed-bloods out through the tunnels, but they’d had to spend a full day in a crossover passage before they could travel far enough down the tracks to escape the Mongers who now roamed the streets in packs. Seth Walters had wrested control of London through liberal use of the Monger ring. He now had Scotland Yard reporting to him, and had apparently been seen with select members of Parliament. Much worse, though, were his speeches to the regular citizens on street corners and in city squares, beginning with the night of the bombing. His messages had begun with condemnation of the terrorists who had bombed English soil, and then grew to define who the “terrorists” were.

  Ava had shown Tam that anyone with Descendant blood who wasn’t a Monger was at risk of being called out as a terrorist. The only reason Bob Shaw and Claire Elian weren’t in custody was that they’d barricaded themselves behind new wards Miss Simpson had set around St. Brigid’s, along with Adam, the mixed-bloods, and the rest of the Arman family.

  So, it had been a vision I’d Seen. Fascinating. My Sight had previously been spotty at best, and those images had been crystal clear.

  I interrupted Tam frequently for as much detail as he could remember from the pictures Ava had shown him. The MacKenzie Shifter Head had fled back to Scotland with one son, leaving the other behind somewhere in London. Millicent had also gone to St. Brigid’s, and Jeeves had stayed behind at Elian Manor with Liz Edwards. Apparently, Walters wasn’t touching Liz because a grieving mother searching for her child in the bomb rubble suited his purposes well.

  “You’ve told Ava that Walters found us, and that Connor’s Wolf was with us?” I asked.

  “I did – just now when I woke up. She’s gone to tell her parents.”

  Connor’s Wolf needed medical attention, but we had no idea if he had managed to escape when Walters took us. He was strong though. He would pull through this. I had no room for any other possibility.

  “Did Ava have
any news of Saira and Ringo?”

  Tam cleared his throat. “Saira’s your wife, yeah?”

  The new memories of everything that had happened in France, from our walled garden wedding to the confrontation with George Walters and Tom Landers on a ghost station platform, were burned into my brain.

  The last time I saw my wife, I had just pushed Ringo into her and sent them both through a spiral. She screamed, and my heart had torn in two. I shoved past the images of fire, blood, and oblivion, and instead, found the picture of Saira’s eyes gazing back at me with so much love it drowned out the horror. I absently rubbed the bare spot on my finger where my family’s ring had once been and felt an overwhelming sense of peace that it was now on Saira’s hand.

  “Yes, she is,” I said.

  “You spoke to her a lot while you were unconscious. A little raving, a little moaning, but always to her.”

  “That’s not surprising,” I said. “She’s the first person I want to talk to every morning and the last one every night.”

  Tam was silent for a moment. I heard a drip of water hit the stone floor somewhere in our cell. “That’s what love should be I guess.” He opened a packet of something plastic and spoke through a mouthful of crisps. “Tink hasn’t seen your wife. She did see her cousin though, right after the bomb exploded.”

  “Tom? Tom was here?” That surprised me, though I wasn’t sure why. Saira had sent Tom through the spiral on the ghost station platform right before the shooting began. I’d assumed he’d gone backward in time, but he could have just as easily gone forward.

  “He scared Tink. Apparently there was a moment she Saw the violence in him. But when he went in search of her brother in the tunnels, the violence quieted.”

  “And did he find Adam?” Tom had been Adam’s best friend, but the cousins hadn’t seen each other since Tom had been turned by Wilder.

  “Yes, but Adam won’t talk about it. Tom’s gone though. He went back to find Saira.”