by P. T. Hylton
“This is it?” Owl asked, staring down at him skeptically. “This is how you sleep all day?”
“You learn not to be picky after a few hundred years. This will be fine for today. It may look uncomfortable now, but you won’t have any trouble falling asleep once the sun comes up.”
Owl didn’t feel tired, but she laid down on the floor next to him, and stared at the ceiling, taking stock of her new situation.
Jaden was her master now. She could not even attempt to kill him. Something inside her wouldn’t allow it. She would do anything that he commanded. Still, there seemed to be some small measure of freedom. Her thoughts were her own. Jaden couldn’t make her like him or agree with him.
After laying there for an hour, she noticed a faint light coming from under the door, and realized it must be morning. She turned her head toward Jaden. “This is the daysickness that you’re always complaining about? I feel just fine.”
“No, this isn’t right.” He sat up and turned toward the glow of light coming through under the door. “This isn’t right at all.”
He stood up very slowly. He opened the door, and they saw that sunlight filled the hallway, coming from the open door of the room to their left. Small particles of dust floated in the soft light. Jaden stayed close to the wall and crept toward a beam of sunlight in the hallway.
Owl sat frozen as she watched him. He was like a man approaching a sleeping tiger. He looked more than cautious; he looked afraid.
Finally, he stopped a foot from the beam of light and slowly raised his hand. His fingers entered the beam, and a look of astonishment appeared on his face. Cautiously, he moved a little farther, putting his entire hand into the light. Then he let out a little laugh.
He stood there for a long while, silently staring at his hand. Owl joined him, not saying anything, just watching to see what he’d do next.
After what must have been minutes, Jaden closed his eyes and stepped through the doorway and into the room with the window. He opened his eyes and saw his first sunrise in a thousand years.
4
Firefly stared at the wall in front of him. Once, it had been a huge, forty-foot tall, floor-to-ceiling window. Now, it was nothing more than a gaping hole.
“Well,” Hector said, “I guess we know how they got out. But you really should step back, Captain.”
Firefly ignored the sunlight that was creeping toward his feet through the window, and the mounting daysickness rising within him. He was too angry to sleep. He drew a breath in through his nose, smelling the sharp tang hanging in the air. It was similar to the one left behind by the GMT’s away ship. There were other telltale scents, too. The rubber of the aircraft’s tires. The bitter, almost sterile smell of the vampires themselves.
Now it made sense why Jaden and his team had been so desperate to make it to this particular building the previous night.
He frowned as he took in the scene. Twenty-four hours ago, he’d watched Jaden and five of his loyal Agartha vampires disappear into this warehouse just as the sun was rising. When he’d woken at sunset, they’d been gone. Firefly and his vampires had quickly discovered the shattered window on the other side of the building, and they’d spend the entire night searching. But, the truth was, he’d had no idea where to begin the search. While he could smell the weak scent of Jaden and his crew lingering in the warehouse, it wasn’t nearly strong enough to track. He could sense the faint smell of human blood somewhere to the east. They could potentially follow that, but he was almost afraid of what he’d find if he did. If he could smell the humans, Jaden must have been able to, as well. And if Jaden had found them, there might be nothing left of the GMT. He’d tried to hail them on the radio, but there’d been no response. Alex and the GMT were either out of range or…
No, he wouldn’t let himself think like that.
He looked down at his hands. Alex had asked him for one favor: to keep Jaden contained for a single day. To keep him away from the GMT, so that they could finish their job and go home. And once again, he had failed. He’d let down Alex, and he dreaded seeing the results his failure had caused.
Hector stood beside him, quiet for a long moment, his arms crossed over his chest. Finally, he spoke in a soft voice. “We’ve got a problem, Captain.”
Firefly raised an eyebrow. “You think? We’ve lost Jaden. And his team. And his ship.”
“Well, there is that. But that’s not what I meant.”
Firefly turned toward him. The last thing he wanted right now was another problem, but he could hardly afford to ignore it, either. “I’m listening.”
“It’s the troops.” Hector cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable with what he was about to say. “They’re a little freaked out. I think it’s dawning on them that if the GMT is dead, Jaden’s our only chance at receiving blood supplies, and we just thoroughly betrayed him.”
Firefly turned back toward the window. “That’s just now dawning on them? And here, I thought they were bright.”
Hector shifted his feet uncomfortably. “It’s not just that. Some of them are pretty worried that Jaden will catch up to us long before we go feral.”
He sighed, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll talk to them.”
Hector put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not sure that’s the best idea. You should let them sleep for now. Some of them have been talking about how they were only following orders. How it was you who really betrayed Jaden. Nobody’s said the word yet, but mutiny is a very real possibility.”
Firefly gritted his teeth. Even his own people were turning on him. Not that he could really blame them. He’d let them down again and again, starting with the night he’d brought them to the surface and allowed them to be turned into the creatures they were today.
Before he could respond to Hector’s news, the radio on his chest crackled, and Jaden’s voice came through. “Firefly, you there? We need to talk.”
Owl looked around the cockpit of the ship as Jaden spoke into the radio. Despite the truly bizarre situation in which she found herself, her pilot’s instincts were beginning to kick in. The vehicle was damaged—Jaden had rammed it square into the hospital, after all—but not as badly as she would have thought. If she put her mind to it, she could probably have the ship in flying condition in a day or two. Maybe faster, if her vampire master ordered her to hurry. She’d need to run some diagnostics to be sure, but based on everything she was seeing, the ship seemed to be in need of only minor repairs. The radio was certainly working.
“Firefly,” Jaden said again. “I know you can hear me.”
There was a long pause before the staticky sound of Firefly’s voice came through the speakers and filled the cockpit. “I’m here, you son of a bitch. Tell me what happened. What did you do to the GMT?”
The anger that had been almost constant in Jaden’s eyes ever since they’d woke in the morgue flashed brightly now. “You want to know what happened to the GMT? Before or after they released the corrupted virus that I explicitly advised them not to?”
“They released the virus?” Firefly asked. There was a momentary pause, then he laughed. “She did it. Alex beat you.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. Another perspective is that an unstable biological weapon has been unleashed upon the Earth.”
“Wait, if the virus was released, how are you still alive?”
“That’s a very good question. One that I’m still working on, in fact. The virus killed my team.” He glanced at Owl. “Yet, it spared some of us. And it appears to have had no effect on the Ferals, as of yet.”
“You didn’t answer my question. What happened to the GMT?”
Jaden paused a moment before answering. “Patrick is dead, though not at my hands or that of my vampires. Owl has turned and she survived.”
“Turned?” Firefly asked, his voice close to panic. “You made her like us?”
Jaden ignored the question. “The rest of them are gone. Presumably, they returned to New Haven after releasing the virus.�
��
“Jaden, what did you do?” He was shouting into the radio now. “Where’s Owl?”
Owl took a step forward, wanting to call out to Firefly, to let her old friend know she was still alive, at least in the same way that he was. But Jaden held up a hand, clearly signaling for her to stop, and she froze, unable to move or speak.
“This is a courtesy call,” Jaden said into the radio. “Whatever has happened between us, I thought you deserved to know the virus has been released. It’s on the wind. I suggest you and your soldiers lay low until we figure out what this virus actually does.”
“Will that help?”
“Probably not. But I thought you should know.” With that, Jaden disconnected the radio.
Owl struggled to reach out, to get to the radio, but her body was betraying her. She still couldn’t move.
Jaden glanced up at her. The fangs protruding from his mouth shaped his face into a snarl. “As we are the only two survivors of the virus’s ground zero, I would very much like to trust you. However, I’m finding that a difficult hurdle to cross.” He saw her struggling to speak. “You may talk.”
She opened her mouth, stretching her jaw for a moment to ensure it was under her control. “You’re my master, right? Why’s trust even come into play? I have to follow your orders.”
“True. But you’re free to do anything I don’t explicitly forbid.” He paused. “Other than hurting me.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “As a rule, I’m against the vampire master-slave relationship. For the last five hundred years, I’ve freed every vampire I’ve turned from my control the instant they awoke. For you, I’m making an exception.”
“Lucky me.” Owl glared at him. “Maybe you don’t trust me. That’s fine. Completely understandable. I sure as hell don’t trust you.”
He looked at her for a long moment, something like sorrow on his twisted face. “Come with me.”
He led her off the ship, pausing for a moment in the sunlight and shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was experiencing. Through the door, they spotted a single Feral in the entryway to the hospital, caught in the thin area protected from the light and not covered in silver.
“I’m going to teach you to trust me.” Jaden stepped near the open door to the entryway. “I order you to make no movement unless I tell you to.”
At his words, Owl felt her body seize up and freeze. She was suddenly unable to move a single muscle. It was a good thing she no longer needed to breathe, since her chest refused to rise and fall.
“Walk into the entryway and slap the Feral in the face,” he said.
Owl began to move. It was a surreal experience, her body moving as if on its own with no input from her. She stepped into the entryway, drew back her hand, and slapped the Feral.
Immediately, the trapped creature turned toward her, its misshapen lips pulled back in a snarl. Then it slashed at her with its right hand.
“Left arm, block!” Jaden shouted.
Owl’s left arm went up as fast as he spoke, blocking the blow.
“Right knee, groin. Right hand, face.”
Her right knee shot up, catching the Feral in the groin. As it responded to the blow, her right fist delivered a solid punch to its face.
The Feral’s head snapped back, and Jaden spoke again. “Right to the face. Left to the face.”
Bam, bam! Her fist slammed into the creature’s nose, one after the other.
“Hit it as hard as you can until it’s dead,” Jaden ordered.
Owl’s fists shot out, twin alternating pistons of destruction. She didn’t will the punches, nor could she have stopped them if she’d wanted to. Again and again, she smashed her fists into the creature’s face. Its nose crumpled under her blows and soon, it was unrecognizable.
Time lost all meaning for Owl as she rained down blow after blow. It might have been one minute, and it might have been ten. Her battered, aching fists simply wouldn’t stop moving.
Finally, she felt her fist break through the bone and sink deep into the creature’s brain. It twitched once and stopped moving.
Realizing she once again had control of her movements, she pulled back her fist, and it left the Feral’s caved-in skull with a sickeningly wet pop.
She slowly turned toward Jaden, her body shaking with rage. “You’re insane.”
Jaden shook his head. “I’m really not. Like I said, I don’t usually do this. But I needed you to know that you can trust me. Even if I’m controlling you, I will work for your survival. You and I, we are not Ferals, and we are not true vampires. We are something new. And in my long life, I’ve learned that anything new is precious. If we want to survive what I suspect is coming, we’ll need to work together.” He paused, then nodded toward the ship. “Come. We have work to do.”
5
Alex hated the rough feel of her dress uniform against her skin. The uniform had always seemed like a pompous waste to her, but today, she needed to play the part of a good soldier. She checked herself in the mirror and confirmed that she looked professional. The thought that this might be the last day of her command made her breath catch in her throat.
Alex was greeted by Chuck and Ed when she reached the bottom of her building. They, too, looked uncomfortable in their dress uniforms. “You two look nice when you’re cleaned up.”
“Thanks,” Chuck said. “If we’re going to crash and burn, we may as well look good doing it.”
“You’re looking pretty good yourself, Captain,” Ed added.
“Thanks. CB and Brian will meet us at the Hub.” She gave them an appraising look. Ed was clenching and unclenching his fists at his side, and Chuck was shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot. “Both of you will be fine. You were just following orders. Let me do all the talking. If someone goes down, it’s not going to be either of you.”
Chucked laughed out loud and put a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Alex, you may be the best when it comes to taking out Ferals, but if you do all the talking at the hearing, we may spend the rest of our lives in the brig. The only one who would do worse in front of the Council is Ed.”
Alex laughed a little, but Ed frowned. “Hey! I’ve been reading Shakespeare. I could talk in front of the Council.”
“Well, we can rely on CB to maneuver us through the politics of the situation. Let’s go face the music.” With that, Alex led the way to the Hub.
CB and Brian waited outside of the building, CB in his full dress uniform and Brian doing his best to look professional. His best looked like someone who didn’t know how to dress for a first date. He wore a button-down shirt, an odd jacket with sleeves too short for his arms, black slacks, and his lab shoes.
CB scowled at Brian’s shoes as the others approached. “Damn it, Brian, why didn’t you wear dress shoes? This is important. Everything matters.”
“I don’t own dress shoes,” Brian said. “These are my best lab shoes. A girl told me that they looked cute once, so I figured they would work.”
Alex, Chuck, and Ed walked up. “Don’t listen to him Brian. I think you look great.” Brian smiled at her, and she gave him a quick hug.
Ed looked Brian up and down. “Yep, that is a perfect outfit. The Council will be so distracted by your mismatched clothes that they might forget about all the shit we pulled.”
Brian turned a light shade of red at the comment. CB looked over the remaining members of the GMT. “Time to get serious; the Council will be. I’ll take point in there. I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing what the Council wants to hear. If they don’t ask you a direct question, don’t say a word. That goes for you, too, Alex. I don’t want to piss them off any more than they already are.”
The Council was situated behind a large half-circle table facing the GMT and Brian. The five of them sat cramped together at a small table at the open end of the half circle. Brian was at the end, only able to get one leg under the table, and it made him seem even more out of
place among these soldiers.
General Craig started things off. “We are here to discuss the actions taken by the officers and some support staff of the Ground Mission Team. They went against the orders of the Council and acted without thought of the rule of this city. This hearing will be to determine their punishment and their positions moving forward.” Craig looked from side to side at all of the other members of the Council and cleared his throat. “I would like to acknowledge that the team’s actions have brought us the best hope that we have ever had for long-term survival. I ask that the Council take that into consideration as we proceed.”
Councilman Horace started the questioning. “This hearing is not about results. It is about blatant disregard for the chain of command. I would like to know what caused the head of security for this city to steal a ship and risk our survival. Tell me, CB, what defense could you possibly have for breaking command?”
CB looked Horace in the eyes. “Thank you for allowing me to explain my actions. I take full responsibility for the chain of events. I did disobey this Council.” He gestured to the others at the table. “Everyone else was following orders. I’m their direct commander. I told them what to do, and they did it. The only person that should face reprimand is me.”
Alex took a breath and started to speak. CB put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head slightly. Alex stayed tense, but kept quiet.
CB continued. “Even though I disobeyed the orders of the Council and commandeered a ship without permission, I felt that I was acting in the best interest of the city. I saw that Jaden was keeping information from the Council and manipulating the facts through Ambassador McCready. I knew that there was a chance we could find a weapon that would kill every Feral on the planet. I was willing to risk my career for that possibility.”
