Authors: Laken Cane
“How is she doing?” Rune asked, staring down at the sleeping child.
Elizabeth stood stiff and silent, her hands at her sides. “She’s excellent.”
“But?”
Elizabeth looked at Rune, her eyes blank. “She’s determined to go wherever she went when she was locked inside the net. She will only say she belongs there. I see the longing in her eyes. She wants to be there as much as I want…” She trailed off and shook her head.
Rune didn’t prompt her to continue. She knew what Elizabeth had been about to say.
“As much as I want her to stay.”
“I’m sorry,” Rune said.
“I
love
her.” Elizabeth’s cool façade cracked, and sorrow oozed through the gap. “I shouldn’t have allowed myself to love her.”
“Of course you should. We all do.” She patted Elizabeth’s arm. “Fie needs all the love we can give her.”
Rune understood Fie completely. She felt the call too, and it was strong enough, at times, to take her breath. Fie was a child and not equipped to understand or handle the disappointments of not getting what she so desperately needed.
Fie wanted to go. Rune did not.
Rune had talked with the child once when Elizabeth had gone to get lunch.
“Why don’t you just go there, Fie, like you did when you were in the net?”
Fie’s look had been one of scorn. “I don’t want to leave my body here. I need all of me to go. I have to go with
you.
”
“What if I can’t go?”
“You can if you want to. Don’t you want to?”
No. No, she didn’t want to.
And Fie had known that.
Her cell rang and she answered it, glad to have a distraction from Elizabeth’s misery.
“Rune,” Bill Rice said, “are you close?”
“I’m in the building. What do you need?”
“Come see me.”
She hung up, said goodbye to Elizabeth, and left the room. Bill had coffee waiting when she walked into his office five minutes later.
Bill nodded at the television screen on his wall, and she turned to watch after grabbing a coffee off his desk.
“Nothing new?” she asked.
“Not exactly new,” he answered. “Just worse.”
“Tell me.”
“Fifteen human infants have been taken from hospitals, clinics, and from new parents just arriving home. Seventeen pregnant women were abducted. From Ohio. Since
Tuesday.
”
She closed her eyes. They’d known it would come to that. The human unborn and newborn babies were not infected.
The vampires needed them to feed from.
And new groups of human garbage were taking and selling the infants and pregnant women to the vampires.
Not just in River County.
All over the world. It had spread that quickly.
“Last night,” Bill continued, “six vampires entered the Spiritgrove hospital and stole four newborns.”
“Fuck,” Rune muttered.
He nodded.
“Now,” she said. “
Now
we’ll have to purge the fucking bloodsuckers.”
“Yes. We can’t wait for the sickness to annihilate them all. Not when they’re taking human children to feed from.”
“They’re desperate. Starving, dying, rotting—”
“Are you defending the vampires, Rune?”
She shot him a sharp glance. “Fuck you, Bill.”
He sighed and rubbed his temples. “I’m sorry. It’s…unimaginable. Things are changing too quickly. There’s no time to try to fix it, because the world is going crazy too fast.”
“Yeah. Chaos.”
“Eugene is going to send you after Kelic and his children. Tonight.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at the television screen with its horrific images of piles of rotted Others, dead human women, their wrists still cuffed, found in ditches after their full-term babies had been cut from their wombs.
Girls were being abducted and impregnated by human men, then sold. No matter if the girls or the seed donators were carriers of the sickness, the infants would not be.
It had been discovered that no child under one year old carried the sickness.
Infants were in high demand.
Fear and panic had taken hold of the country, and it wasn’t letting go anytime soon.
“Though the Others are rotting,” Rice said, “they are forming alliances to stay alive, to protect each other until…”
“There is no until.” She shook her head. “Nothing will ever fix this. They will never be forgiven for what they’re doing now. No matter what. You could find a cure tomorrow and the Others will still be hunted for the rest of forever.”
“No,” Bill disagreed. “It will only seem like forever. You know how people forget. How history repeats itself. Eventually, the Others and humans will live once again in a strange sort of harmony.”
Chaos.
Chaos and doom.
The world, in a few short weeks, had completely changed.
“Still no word from Strad?” Bill asked, his voice tired.
She shook her head.
No. No word from Strad.
“He’s gone to battle his personal demons, Bill. I don’t know if there will ever again be any word from the berserker.”
He stood and went to stand beside her. “Rune, I’d like to tell you something about love.”
“Love?” she said, and snorted. But damn if she didn’t have to fight to keep her bloody tears at bay.
From the corner of her eye she saw his lips move as he smiled. “Strad Matheson loves you more than I’ve ever seen a man love a woman. And I know a little something about love. It might not be smart, or good, or right. It just
is.
”
He paused and waited until she looked at him before he continued. Maybe he wanted her to not only hear his truth, but to see it in his eyes. “Love like that will always come back, Rune. No matter where it goes or how long it stays away. Always.”
“Damn you, Bill,” she whispered, and dug her fingernails into her thigh. “What you’re calling love is just obsession. Need.
Addiction.
”
“My dear,” he said, his eyebrows high. “What do you think love is?”
She couldn’t reply.
He patted her shoulder with a heavy hand then went back to his desk. “Let’s put love on the back burner and worry about evil.”
She squared her shoulders. “Yes. And what we’re going to do to defeat the son of a bitch.”
“After the purge is successful, Eugene has plans to send Shiv Crew to do takedowns of known traffickers. You’ll have kill orders.”
“Good. Those are some kills I’ll look forward to.”
“When don’t you?” Then he shrugged before she could retort. “He’s also sending you to do purges and extract human babies and women from vampire clans all over Ohio.”
“What? Leave River County?”
“After the purge.”
“Shit.”
“Why are you reluctant to leave the county?”
“Because we’re needed here.”
“You’re needed everywhere, Rune. Humans are being slaughtered. Human
babies.
”
“Yeah. I know. But every county has its own fucking crews. If we’re not here to defend ours, you know what can happen.”
“Talk to him. Tell him your concerns. He can send other crews. Not,” he said, smiling slightly, “as good as your crew, but good enough to hunt vampires.”
He watched her with a sharp, knowing expression.
And damned if excitement didn’t uncurl in her stomach at the words
hunt vampires.
Hunt.
She wanted to go. Wanted to go hunt the bad guys, stake vampires, get back into the routine of the good old days.
She needed to forget that she might be sucked into another world and lose her crew, her life, her
self
.
She wanted to forget that she was so fucking afraid.
She would take her crew and end the bloodsuckers.
There was no hope for them. They couldn’t survive without blood, and she couldn’t allow them to torture women and children to get what they needed.
Eventually, the world would create a way for the vampires to live once again with humans. In the meantime, they had to go.
Yes, they were rotting and would die anyway, but not quickly enough. Not before they killed—and turned—more humans.
Once again, the vampires were hated, hunted, and killed on sight.
Even the Annex, pro-Other, couldn’t see another way out of that.
Not then.
Maybe not ever.
“What do you want us to do?” Lex asked. “Are we really going to purge Simon and his children today?”
“Do you know of a better way to stop them?” Rune stared moodily out of her kitchen doorway, into the mean desolation of the Moor. “We have no other choice. They’ve
given
us no other choice.”
“I know,” Lex murmured. “But it’s not their fault, really. I’m devastated for them.”
Me too.
“We have no other choice,” Rune repeated, but her voice was softer.
“There are people working on synthetic blood,” Levi said. He took a cup off the countertop and poured himself some coffee.
“That might take forever,” Rune said. “Labs tried making it before and it didn’t sustain the vampires.”
“They didn’t try hard enough,” Denim said. “And funding was low. No one thought it would be a money maker. Now they do.”
“Maybe,” Rune said. “But synthetic blood won’t keep the sick vampires from rotting.”
“It could keep the vampires from feeding on humans and getting infected in the first place,” Denim said. “And it could stop them from abducting humans.”
“They’ve become wild animals,” Lex said. “The vampires.”
The vampires hated the humans for poisoning them, and once taken, the humans did not fare well under the vampires’ care.
The corpses found lying in ditches and in the woods showed chilling proof of abuse the abducted humans—children as well as adults—suffered at the hands of their captors. Whatever positive changes Simon Kelic had created in River County had evaporated almost overnight.
It began to rain, a cold drizzle that did nothing to help Rune’s frame of mind. The sun was hiding, the sky was overcast and gray, and she felt every bit of it in her mood.
She and her crew would begin the hunt for Simon Kelic, and when they found him, he would die.
More vampires would come. They’d sneak into the county and go to ground, then creep out during the nights to hunt.
It was going to be a long, hard war whether she killed Simon or not.
“What if we kill him and they find a cure next week?” Lex asked. “What if?”
“We can’t go on what ifs,” Ellis said, his voice brusque. He bustled around the kitchen, constantly moving, not looking any of them in the eye.
He didn’t want them to know how relieved he was that the humans were going to war with the vampires. Killing the vampires.
He didn’t want them to know.
But they knew. Of course they knew.
Rune sighed.
“Coffee, Rune?” Ellie asked, his voice a little too high.
“No, baby. My stomach sloshes when I walk.”
“Food, then. I’ll cook something up. You’ll need to eat before…”
“That’s good, Ellie. Make us some lunch.”
He was suddenly beside her, his arm around her waist. “I hate it when you’re depressed.
Hate
it.”
She drew back, a little, at the savagery in his tone. “I’ll be okay.”
“The world is screwed, Rune. You were right. It doesn’t matter what we do, does it?”
She frowned. “Ellie?”
“Ellis,” Levi said. “Don’t.”
“You’re dying this time,” Ellis said, ignoring Levi. “We all know it. It’ll take longer to destroy you than normal Others, but you’re dying. Maybe your brain will remain, and we’ll scoop it up out of the goo and plop it into a glass so we can—”
“Ellis,” Lex screamed. “Shut your motherfucking
mouth.
”
Ellis shuddered, then covered his face and started sobbing.
“Fuck me,” Rune said, and went back to staring out into the cold.
“Dammit, Levi,” Denim muttered. “Help him.”
Because Rune couldn’t.
Owen took Ellis by the shoulders and walked him to Levi, then went back to stand beside her. “You need to find your guts,” he said, quietly. “Let your anger out or your fear is going to control you.”
He was right. She
wasn’t
angry—at least not angry enough. She was afraid, yes. But what held her in a soul-crushing grip wasn’t the fear, it was the bleakness. The desolation.
The uncertainty.
“I need to reboot,” she murmured. And she had no idea how to do that.
“Get out of your own head,” he said. “That’s how you do it.”
She looked at him. He stood slumped against the doorframe, as unaffected by the cold as she was. His hair streamed over his shoulders, and his face was emotionless. Gun belts, holstered weapons, and silver blades decorated his lean body.
“Owen,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Who
are
you?”
He took a drink of his coffee. “I’m your friend, Rune.”
She smiled. “Yeah.”
He straightened and placed his cup on the table. “Come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to hunt for some traffickers to kill. I just got a lead. Then we’re going to find and purge the vampires while they’re still asleep. No sense in wasting any more time.”
Eugene had assigned other teams to the normal happenings of the county. Shiv Crew was to search out and destroy all vampires.
That was all. And that was everything.
She put it off. She didn’t really want to go after Simon.
But she’d decided to wait for night because that’s when the assholes would come out to feed. It’d be easier than the almost impossible task of finding the underground nests into which they’d gone to sleep.
She nodded and gave him a lingering look. “Okay. Ellie, forget the food. Call Jack and Raze for me. They’ll be here by the time I weapon up, and we’ll get started.” She strode from the kitchen, throwing back over her shoulder, “Wear your vests.”
She heard Owen begin to bark commands as she left the room.
“Levi, make sure the kill kits are stocked in the cars. Ellis, pack some sandwiches and a couple thermoses of coffee. Denim…”
His voice faded away as she made her way to her bedroom, but the feeling of hope in her chest grew stronger.
They’d been through bad shit too many times to count. For them, it was a way of life. It was even a comfort.
The hesitation and doubt were what killed her spirit.
Kill vampires? Rot into a useless puddle?
Lose the
berserker?
She let it go. What came would come, and she was going to do her best to kick its ass when it got there.
She found her guts.