Authors: Ryan T. Nelson
5
Long Beach, California: February 4, 2005
I pulled into the parking lot at Rachel’s college and parked my bike in a conveniently located motorcycle slot between a couple of hedges, right next to an exit out of the lot. Jumping off the bike I reached up to tear off my helmet and cursed when I remembered I hadn’t grabbed it in my leap out the window of my apartment.
Cursing in every language I knew I sprinted through the school, keeping my movements to that of a very fit human, I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself though I knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid it. As I ran I kept sniffing at the
air hoping to grasp a hint of Rachel’s scent, praying that she was still on the campus. If she’d moved on it would take me too long to track her and Vera would get to her first.
As I crossed the quad behind the Cafeteria building I caught a whiff of her scent, still mingled with mine after our night of drunken debauchery. Skidding to a halt I looked wildly about and spotted her about 100 yards away from me across the campus. I noticed as I ran up that she was sitting at a drawing easel and she was working on a very good two point perspective drawing of the art buildings.
“She would have to be on the other side of the campus practically from where I parked,” I muttered ruefully to myself as I walked up to her.
“Rachel.”
She turned when I spoke and pulled a set of headphones out of her ears. I could hear faintly the sounds of a Disturbed song playing through the tiny ear buds.
“Oh hey,” she said brightly, her eyes lighting up as she saw me. “What’re you doing here? I honestly wasn’t expecting to ever hear from you again.”
“What, you didn’t think your beauty and stunning wit made an impact on me?” I said, dropping my voice to a low purr and letting a smirk cross my lips. I was playing a role, and I was playing it to the hilt. I had to get her out of there and now. “How’d you like to join me for a little ride? I was thinking it’d be nice to get away from school and work and get to know each other a little better.”
“Love to sweets but I can’t,” she said, turning back to her drawing. “I’ve got too much class work to do, and besides,” she tossed a coy look over her shoulder. “What’s to tell me you’re not a stalker or something? You could be attempting to lure me away to kill me.” Her smirk told me she was joking.
I fought to keep my frustration from my face. Sometimes I really wished those vampire stories about being able to overcome the will of a human and force them to do my bidding was true. I could really use some help like that right now.
“Look, Rachel,” I said. “The truth is while I do want to get to know you better we need to get you out of here quickly. It’s important that you leave or you could get hurt.” I looked around again, expecting to see Vera coming towards us at any moment. Paranoid? Me? Of course I was paranoid. I was a good fighter and pretty damned strong but Vera was absolutely deadly and I didn’t have the time or the right type of weapons to put her down. At least not for any real length of time.
“What’re you talking about?”
“A crazy ex-girlfriend of mine was waiting at my apartment
when I got back. She saw us together, she knows you go to school here and she will try to hurt you. Please, you have to believe me. You have to leave now for your own safety.”
She looked doubtful, but she didn’t look like she completely didn’t believe me. I went in for the kill, so to speak. “Look, I don’t know what I can say to convince you that I don’t mean you any harm but I can promise you that if you stay here things are going to get very difficult. I promise that I won’t hurt you and I’ll do my best to keep Vera from hurting you but we have to leave right now.”
She looked at me for a moment, apparently weighing her options. I intentionally avoided reading her mind, I didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot with her. The next thing I knew she was nodding and getting up.
“Alright. I’m not sure why I should trust you but… something about you strikes pretty deep with me. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt in this case.” I felt a flood of relief wash through me but I bit down hard on it to keep from letting my guard down. I wasn't sure what had convinced her but I wasn't going to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth.
She gathered together her stuff and I took her hand, leading her rapidly across the campus towards my bike.
Within the course of a couple of minutes, which felt to
me like hours, we were within sight of my bike. Or, what was left of my bike. It had been torn into roughly twelve distinct pieces, and I think I saw a part of the exhaust pipe stabbed into the hood of a hummer parked nearby.
“Shit,” I swore. I continued to swear in Japanese, German, Russian, and Dutch simply because I was annoyed and didn’t want to completely freak Rachel out, even though I already was doing an admirable job of that.
“Is that your bike?” she asked when she saw the wreckage, fear beginning to enter into her voice. “What the hell happened?”
“Vera happened,” I snarled, looking around desperately. I could feel an itching between my shoulder blades and I knew that she was moments away from descending on us in a frenzy of claws and teeth and ripping flesh…
I shook my head violently to rid myself of those images. It would not do either of us any good to have a complete meltdown in the middle of the parking lot with Vera who knew where and time slipping away from us.
Rachel was looking at the remains of my beloved motorcycle a look of confusion and dawning realization running across her face. Confusion as to what happened, realization that she was in it up to her neck.
“How could a person do this? There are finger marks in the metal of the gas tank,” she said, turning to look at me. She turned just in time too. My fist struck her squarely between the eyes and she dropped like a rock, unconscious before I caught her. You might think that’s a little harsh, to knock out the girl I was trying to save, but that was exactly the point. I needed to save her, I needed to move fast, and I didn’t have time to answer questions or coax her into doing what I said.
Throwing her over my shoulder I rushed over to a nearby car and smashed my fist through the window. Unlocking the door I pulled it open and deposited Rachel onto the passenger seat. Running around I jumped into the drivers seat and ripped the paneling off the steering column. Reaching under it I pulled a few wires, and with a little tinkering soon had the Honda Accord roaring to life. I sat up, looked through the windshield and nearly bit my tongue as I looked directly into a pair of glowing golden eyes.
Vera smiled viciously at me and pulled back a fist to smash it into my face just as I tromped hard on the accelerator. The car jerked forward and she lost her balance tumbling over the side. I felt the vehicle lurch as I ran over some part of her body and tore out of the parking lot onto the street.
“Only one place to go,” I said to Rachel as she lay
unconscious in her seat beside me. “Looks like I’m going to have to visit an old friend.”
* * * * *
“Open up Claus,” I shouted, pounding my fist on the door to his rather large hotel suite. “He would have to get the Penthouse at the Marriott.” I growled to myself. The trip into the Lobby with a young gothic looking girl tossed over my shoulder was not an experience I wanted to soon repeat. I raised my fist to knock again when the door opened on its own.
Claus stood inside the room, one hand on the door, a glass in the other and one eyebrow arched questioningly at me over his pale blue eyes.
“Don’t ask, just let me in and pour me a drink, or three,” I muttered as I brushed past him and into the suite. I walked through the front entry way into the sitting room and gently deposited Rachel on a very large and very plush couch.
“So what happened and who’s this?” Claus asked as he stepped over to the bar and poured a good amount of Bourbon into a bucket glass without ice.
“You remember,” I noted as I took the glass and gulped down its contents. I winced at the burn but savored the smoky aftertaste on my tongue as I walked over to pour myself another glass. “And I thought I told you not to ask,” I threw over my shoulder at him. He dropped into an armchair with a sigh and crossed one leg over the other, eyeing me over the rim of his glass.
“Did you honestly think that you could come in here with a very attractive young woman tossed over your shoulder less than twenty four hours after I last spoke to you and not have me question what happened? Especially considering I haven’t seen or spoken to you at all in the last thirty years or so, give or take a month or two?” He questioned dryly.
I grimaced and took a sip of my drink in order to stall having to answer that particular question. I knew I would have to but I didn't want to. Yes I was being childish but I didn't care and one thing I could always count on with Claus was his ability to tell me when I’d stepped in it, and right now I could tell that I had somehow managed to step in it up to my neck.
“Vera happened.” I muttered, eventually, sinking gratefully into a chair.
Claus let out a long, low whistle before he started laughing at my expense. “Damn have you ever stepped in it."
“How?” I asked, standing up as I did so. “How have I stepped in it? You know, it occurs to me that I had been off the radar
for at least the last century, give or take a decade, and I hadn’t heard anything from the Brotherhood save running into you in that train station in Nam thirty five years ago. Then all of a sudden you show up last night out of the blue, Vera is in my apartment today, she tears my bike to pieces,” He let out another wide eyed whistle at that, “and now here I am hiding out in your hotel room, trying to avoid having my head forcefully removed from my shoulders by a sadistic were-bitch from hell.”
I knocked back the rest of my drink and turned to pour a third, heedless of the burn tearing its way down my throat and into my stomach. I poured a heavy amount of alcohol into the glass, slammed down the bottle and slammed back the liquor.
It was going to happen, it was just a matter of time and a moment later it did. The moment Claus had been waiting for since I’d walked through his door.
The snap.
I spun and with an inarticulate roar of rage and frustration I flung the heavy lead crystal glass across the room where it shattered against the wall with a sound like a cannon blast. Pieces of glass rained across the floor like a spray of diamonds and I turned and slammed my fists onto the heavy oak bar, cracking the wood and driving a sharp splinter through my arm in the process.
“WHY!” I roared, rounding on Claus. “Why is he doing this to me Claus? Why now, why her? Why did he send her to drag me back? Why does he want me back in the first place?”
“I don’t know.”
It was quiet. In the face of my rage Claus’s voice was a gentle whisper on the wind. Somehow those three simple words cut through the center of my blinding rage and like a balloon that had been popped I was suddenly, if not calm, not raging anymore.
I stood there, blood slowly dripping down my forearm to collect at my fingertips, breath heaving in my chest, my eyes wild and I could tell that my hair had flown loose from its braid and the only thing I could think was. “Why’d I throw that glass?” I muttered.
I started looking through the broken bar and managed to find another glass. Sifting through the various bottles I found a selection of Bourbons and picked out a full bottle of Wild Turkey. Tearing off the cellophane with my teeth I opened the bottle and poured myself another glass as I dropped into a chair.
Looking up I noticed the questioning look on Claus’s face at my sudden turnaround in demeanor.
“What? Did you think that just because things weren’t going exactly as I’d hoped that I would have completely fallen apart?”
I asked.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure what I expected. The rage a minute ago I did expect, but this…” He gestured to me. “You don’t have a history for being calm and collected under fire,” he said. “I remember specifically a little incident in Budapest.”
“Hey that guy had it coming. He wouldn’t let me into the museum and I wanted to look at the suits of armor.”
“You were drunk off a three day drinking and feeding binge. It’s no wonder he wouldn’t let you in, but did you really have to feed his testicles to him? The poor man was only doing his job.”
I smiled fondly at the memory. “That was fun. I’d heard the threat before but I’d never actually seen someone get their own genitals fed to them after being ripped off with my bare hands.”
“I think we’re getting a bit off topic, Gabriel,” he said, glaring admonishingly at me. "Genitalia has little to do with the current discussion."
“Don’t pull that aged mentor bull shit with me,” I snapped. “I’ve been expecting something like this for decades. It’s just been so long that I'll admit to a certain degree of complacency. Probably exactly what Threntü has been waiting for, I bet.”
“So what does that mean?” he asked, leaning forwards in
his chair.
“It means, old friend, that I’ve made plans for just such an occasion as this. I’ve laid down contingencies for the Brotherhood actively searching for me. By the way,” I glanced around the room. “Does the Shadu still have you on their ‘untouchables’ list?”