AfterAge (35 page)

"I won't feed on another person." Her voice was so low he almost didn’t catch her words.

"But you'll starve!" he exclaimed. "You'll end up like one of the outcasts, living in the subway—"

"I won't let it come to that."

Vic let his knees bend and lower him to the blankets on which he and Deb had slept. He ran his fingers over the soft surface, then picked up the little pillbox. Only one night; he'd been hoping for so much more.

He closed his eyes, then dropped his face to his cupped hands and stayed that way for a long, long while, thinking about all the nights of eternity and about a woman whose courage would give her the strength to do what he couldn't face.

She didn't say good-bye.

REVELATION 11:11

Life entered into them, and they stood upon their feet;

and great fear fell upon them which saw them.

~ * ~

The night held a terrible beauty

She'd never noticed it before and was loath to admit it, but the nightside had incredible advantages that seemed to exist for no other reason than enhancement. Night vision, for instance. At first, she'd assumed it was only to see things (
people
, her mind whispered snidely), yet the stars glittered like a spread of sequins on black satin, sprinkled from skyline to skyline. Never had she seen such a nightsky, even in open country. Scent, too, heightened to enable her to find prey; instead she concentrated on the other smells it brought: the damp smell of the river, the slight scent of green from the tiny buds on the trees, the dark stench of decay drifting up from Lower Wacker and the subways. She moved quickly in the middle of the street, avoiding the black pits of doorways and parked cars and the manhole covers that pocked the streets at regular intervals.

The doorway to the Daley Center was locked, of course. The subway on her right and the parking garage on her left made her nervous, the danger of being attacked from two sides at once tripping alarms in her head. She circled quickly to the north, slipping by the yawning darkness of the garage so swiftly she was only a shadow among a forest of others. Glancing around carefully, she began to climb. At the fifteenth floor Deb stopped and peered at the ground; for a second she thought she saw something move, but at this distance even her eyesight couldn't clearly distinguish anything in the blackness a hundred and fifty feet below. Her fingers gripped the smooth metal effortlessly, clinging to the steel as though each were tipped by an invisible suction cup. She let one hand drop to her face, and dangling from the side of the building like an oversized bat, inspected it in the darkness. She could feel its massive new strength, ugly by its own purpose. There was a new emptiness, too—the ulcerous pain in her gut had been replaced by a . . .
Hunger
. But she had existed with pain in her belly for a long time in life, and she could do the same in death. She tried to see her reflection in the window glass and nearly lost her grip when vertigo slapped her; it passed as soon as she looked up instead of straight ahead, and she wondered if a fall from this height would kill her or simply leave her as a pile of fragmented, twitching bones. There was no other way in and Deb broke the window as gently as possible, trying vainly to direct the shattered glass to the interior of the building.

Two floors below, she might find Alex. The mind block she had erected to avoid Vic's discovery of Alex's whereabouts had been an experiment with a new toy; now would come the true test of her will. She forced the fire door at the thirteenth floor, smiling ruefully as it screeched in the darkness. Was he even here? Surely not; the man would have to be as much a fool for staying as she was to think he actually had. Still, she followed the corridor, her shadow cutting through the strips of moonlight thrown by the sporadic breaks in the draperies. At the last corridor she stopped; suddenly she could
smell
him, his scent magnified a hundred times by the memory of their lovemaking only a few nights ago. The place smelled of other humans, too, and she raised a shaking hand to her forehead. What was she doing here? What did she
really
expect to happen? Would she
talk
to him? Her bitter laugh cut sharply through the room. It smelled like Alex had joined up with others; more likely he'd find a way to kill her. But that would be all right, too.

She took two more steps and someone dropped out of the ceiling.

She crouched and snarled reflexively, trying to back away before realizing someone else was behind her. "Deb?" Alex's voice was a mix of terror and longing; the sound of it filled her with more pain than she'd thought possible.

Another voice, young and unfamiliar. "Alex, don't go near.”

"Deb,
look out!
” Alex yelled. A third voice shouted angrily as something hissed viciously and leapt on her from behind.

She rolled with it on her shoulders, whipping her head back and forth to avoid the talons trying to puncture her eyes. There was a lot of pain, stinging sensations that surprised her in a detached way; she really hadn't expected pain in this new existence. She got a hand twisted in a hunk of filthy hair and the thing snapping at her neck shrieked as she yanked its head sideways and wrapped her other hand around a bone-thin arm slick with disgusting fluids, jerking the creature away and flinging it to the floor. It was on her again in an instant, clawing at her arms and ripping at the clothing covering her skin. Deb struggled with it more out of annoyance than fear, knowing it was too weak to survive a true battle with her.

Then it was—gone. Suddenly freed of its weight, she took a stumbling step backward and stopped. "Hey," she began, "where—"

The screaming started.

The beast was on top of someone else, a young man bellowing in agony as the thing chewed at his arm, wrist, wherever it could get a bite. Alex and two other men grappled it without success as the smell of blood filled the air and awakened a dark need that Deb ground her jaw against. She came up behind them and easily pushed the youngest one aside; he batted at her angrily before he realized who she was.

"Stay back!" he cried. "You—"

Alex howled.

The nightthing had bitten him, and rage exploded in Deb as she plucked the older man bodily from the fray and shoved him behind her. Fury reddening her vision, and she buried her fingers in the creature's scalp. It opened its mouth and squealed, and Alex, his wrist splattering blood, rolled aside, then dropped to his knees next to his companion as the other men scrambled forward and Deb jammed her other hand under the beasts jaw, the sound of Alex's agony still pounding through her mind. The rich smell of lifeblood was turning the outcast into a slavering maniac, and the realization that it had torn into her lover's flesh infuriated Deb even more. When the outcast tried to clutch at her, she roared and dragged the scrawny thing clear of the floor and brutally flung it against the wall. The instant it regained its feet, something faster than her eyes could track split the air and sank solidly into its chest. Pinned to the wall, the nightbeast gave a long, thin wail, shriveled nails scrabbling at the shaft in its sternum. It convulsed and howled again, then went limp.

Deb whirled. “
Alex?
"

"Don't move, lady." The teenager's voice was cold and emotionless. "If you do, I'll kill you." The weapon that had brutalized the outcast was aimed at her heart, a broadhead arrow already loaded.

"No!" Alex scrambled to his feet and reached for her. "Deb, are you all right?"

"Stay away!" she hissed. His hand was thick with blood and the scent of it crawled up her nostrils like the lure of hot soup on a frigid morning. Despite the arrow pointed at her, she retreated a few steps from the man she'd lain heart to heart with the night before last. "Don't come near me. I'm not . . .
safe
." He hesitated, then looked stupidly at his gore-covered hand and dropped it to his side.

Against the wall, the vampire thing's crusty skin was beginning its slow, smelly disintegration and Deb grimaced. The older man cleared his throat. "So you're Deb," he said. "I'm McDole, that's C.J. The fellow on the floor there is Elliot."

"What's next?" Deb asked sarcastically. “’Pleased to meet you'?" She glared at Alex and stamped her foot, furious. "What are you doing here? I would've expected you to have more brains!"

"Then why did you even come?" Alex snapped. "I suppose I was just your first easy dinner!"

His words hurt, as did the horrible probability that they could have been true. "I don't know," she whispered. She covered her face with her hands. "I guess I was hoping you'd kill me."

There was a stunned silence but McDole was quick to recover. "You could do a lot more good alive," he said. "You could help us, if you had a mind to."

"Help you what?" Deb's voice had turned hopeless.

Alex looked pained and averted his gaze to Elliot, who was watching them warily and meticulously applying a ripped piece of his shirt to the wounds on his arms and leg. Alex's bleeding had already stopped, the redness more like a black paint spill in the sparse moonlight.

"We're working on something," McDole offered finally. "Something that will even the odds a little."

"Kill us, you mean," Deb said flatly. Her laugh was brittle when McDole pressed his lips together and nodded. "And you want me to be your guinea pig? You know, for a moment I actually thought he came because he loved me—just one more girl in the harem, right, Alex?"

Alex winced. "You don't have to do this," he said in a low voice. "I won't let them force you." C.J. scowled at him, but Alex shook his head. "It has to be willingly or not at all."

"But we
need
her!" Elliot exclaimed. "The doctor—"

"Never mind," McDole interrupted tersely. "Alex is right. We don't have the right to force anyone."

"This doctor," Deb said curiously, "what would he . . .
do
to me? Or do you even know?" Her eyes, so full of red moonlight, sparkled with sudden interest. Or was it pain?

McDole hesitated and Alex jumped in. "Not much, I think. Take samples of skin to study, stuff like that. He's trying to . . . I don't know, make a disease or something."

Deb's gaze fell to her hands again, remembering their terrible strength and the guilt-free ease with which she'd forced her fingers through the flesh of the outcast’s head. If she refused their offer, she knew these men would do the unspeakable and let her go free, while her own kind killed at will and blandly accepted the depravities Siebold forced on the people at the Mart. Even Vic, the most misplaced of them all, had stolen her choice of eternities. So what was left? She could either feed or deny her Hunger and face the starvation Vic had warned would lead to the existence of a creature like the stinking mess sliding down the plaster to her right.

Better to die.

But not before this foul thing that had become her body did something worthwhile. She turned to face McDole.

REVELATION 2:2

And thou hast tried them . . . and hast found them liars.

~ * ~

Anyelet's face was a collage of fury and amazement.

"She didn't want to stay," Vic repeated. His arms were folded defensively across his chest; the other vampires were wearing shocked expressions and backing uneasily out of Anyelet’s reach. Even Rita, whose mind had crumbled since the gunshot wound to her face, had stopped hissing and babbling about revenge and retreated to a far corner to stroke the suppurating flesh of her face and mumble quietly.

"And so you granted her permission to leave," Anyelet said slowly.

"No," Vic replied patiently. "I didn't. But I didn't have the right to forbid it either."

"
But you DID have that right!
" The larger vampire stood his ground as Anyelet strode around the room. She spun back to him. "Tell me where she went!"

"I don't know." Vic kept his gaze carefully directed at her chin.

Her hand streaked forward and she slapped him, a blow that would have snapped the neck of a normal man; his solid body didn't quiver. In the recesses of the room, Gabriel, Ron, Jasper, and Warner, a young man pulled. From guarding the outside to replace Gregory, cringed and sighed.

"I don't
know
," Vic insisted. "She wouldn't tell me.”

“Then let me show you how you
should
have gotten the information!" Before he could jerk away, Anyelet wrenched his face up and snagged his eyes. Then she vas in him, searching, reading,
demanding
, and it was incredible how strong Vic's mind was, because even now he could feel him desperately trying to push her out. She gave an ugly mental chuckle as she found something, a tidbit to be saved for later, but the laughter died when she discovered he
really
didn't know the woman's whereabouts.

A fraction of a second after she pulled out, the cords of Vic's neck muscles relaxed and recognition flowed back into his eyes. "You, you—" He struggled with the words.

"Fool," she sneered. "Did you really think you could fight? Your bumbling alone should have told you to leave her to me." She pushed past him. "Stay away from me tonight,
Vito
. My patience is at an all-time low. And besides," her eyes glittered dangerously, "if something should happen to you, who will take care of Hugh?"