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  “Mainly I fight, as most Ay’Araf do. I was trained first as a swordsman, then later I traveled to Asia for a time to learn martial arts. This century I’ve focused primarily on boxing and firearms, though I keep my other abilities honed.”

  “Who do you fight?”

  “Anyone who’s interested. Mostly sparring and shooting competitions with other Ay’Araf warriors. Occasionally an Ashayt or Eresh will come in for some training, but there are few of them. Sometimes when one of the Burilgi groups goes berserk, we’re permitted to hunt them.”

  “Hunt? Like animals?”

  “The Burilgi are animals, and barely that. They’re leeches. Our race would be better off if we exterminated them all. I … shoot, shoot!”

  Two was desperate for information, but she was still weak, tired from the blood loss and the events of the evening. Her head was spinning from all of the new knowledge. She let Stephen watch his game in silence and, when it ended, went out for another cigarette.

  “Game’s over. I’m done shouting for the evening,” Stephen said as Two lay back down on the couch. He was flipping through a magazine.

  “So what now?”

  “Now I go and meet some friends at one of our clubs. Then perhaps fighting.”

  Two sat up, eyes wide. “Take me!”

  Stephen shook his head. “Not until you’ve seen the Kharas. The council.”

  “Please!”

  “Two, there’s nothing there for you. They would consider you food, as I did. This is not your world, not yet. Naomi will help you get it back, and when she does I will be happy to take you wherever it is that you would like to go.”

  Two considered this, asked, “Is that a promise?”

  “Aye. Now go to sleep. You look like the walking dead and, trust me, I’m intimately familiar with what that looks like.”

  “I’ll wait for Naomi,” Two told him, lying back on the couch. When Stephen glanced over at her five minutes later, she was asleep.

  Chapter 9

  Sixteen Stitches

  In the dark there was breathing, and the sound of cloth on metal, and footsteps.

  “Who’s there?” Sarah asked. “Who are you? Please … who’s there?”

  “You are no longer in danger.” The voice, male, was young but ancient. Sarah couldn’t explain it, but Two would’ve recognized the quality immediately. She would have thought of Theroen.

  “Please, I … is Rhes OK? I’m scared.” Sarah hated this, feeling like a rabbit caught in a snare, blind and trapped and so afraid. Not for the first time in her life, she cursed her lack of sight, convinced that things would be better if only she could see.

  “He is breathing. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Jakob.” He pronounced the first syllable with a zha sound.

  “Did you … kill those other people?”

  “It’s best that you not think of them as people. Burilgi povromos chappati.”

  “But did you kill them?”

  “I did.”

  Sarah considered this. She knew that it was no less than they had planned for her, but it was hard to find pleasure in their death nonetheless. What she mostly felt, in addition to the fear of this unknown man, was an overwhelming sense of relief.

  “Are you hurt?” Jakob asked her.

  “No, but I need help. I’ve lost track of where I am in the room. I’m … I’m blind.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I suppose it could be a fashion statement, but you’re wearing a pair of sunglasses in a darkened room.”

  “Oh. Right. What happens now?”

  Jakob’s hand grasped hers, and he helped her to her feet. “You could start by telling me your name.”

  “Sorry. I’m Sarah. Thank you for saving us.”

  “Think nothing of it. The things that attacked you are garbage, and I’m glad they gave me an excuse to put them out of their misery. The one on the floor – you said his name is Rhes? – he fought well, all things considered.”

  “Yes, Rhes. Is he hurt? Will he be OK? Rhes, can you hear me?”

  She heard coughing from a spot perhaps fifteen feet to her left, and realized after a minute that Rhes was laughing.

  “No Sarah, I’m not OK. I feel like I just got worked over by Lennox Lewis.”

  Sarah let go of Jakob’s hand and made her way slowly over to Rhes, stopping when she felt him reach out and touch one of her feet. She knelt down and touched his face. Rhes hissed, took her hand, and moved it away from his split lips.

  “Oh, baby,” Sarah said, and began to cry. She ran the tips of her fingers over the puffy flesh around his eyes. His left eyebrow was tacky with drying blood.

  “That cut is bad,” Jakob said from behind her. “It will require stitches.”

  “Yep. I think the one on my leg is worse. Something sharp got me there. Fingernails, maybe … or teeth. They were vampires, right?”

  Sarah nodded. Jakob said, “Yes.”

  Rhes looked up at him. “You too?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not the same.”

  “No.”

  “OK. Sarah, honey, it’s OK. I’m not dying. I’m just banged up. Here, help me sit up.”

  “You’re too heavy for me to lift and you’re way more than ‘just banged up’ and I can’t even see you and I hate this!” Sarah’s voice was miserable. She yanked her glasses off and rubbed furiously at her eyes with the back of her sleeve, as if the tears were something filthy that needed to be scoured away.

  Rhes glanced up at Jakob, little more than a shadow in the dim light. The vampire extended his hand. Rhes took it and struggled to a sitting position.

  “Can we have, like … two minutes alone?” Rhes asked him. “I appreciate your help. Seriously. I am scared to death of you, but I’m pretty sure you saved our lives. I just need to talk to my girlfriend for a minute. Believe me, we’re not running anywhere. I don’t know if I can even walk.”

  “Take your two minutes, but then we must go,” Jakob said, and wandered over by the broken windows, looking out at the city.

  Rhes turned to Sarah. She was still crying, staring down at her lap with her blind eyes. He touched her cheek.

  “I thought they killed you,” Sarah said.

  “They didn’t.”

  “No, they just … just broke you. I want to hold you and kiss you, but I’m afraid I’ll hurt you.”

  “You probably will. I don’t care. I don’t ever want to hear you screaming like that again. I thought I was listening to them murdering you. I thought …”

  At a loss for words, Rhes took her face in his hands and, very gently, kissed her. She wrapped her arms around him, and Rhes tried not to flinch back at the sudden pain that lanced through his body from what seemed a hundred different sources. Eventually, Sarah took her lips away from his and pressed them into the space between his neck and shoulder.

  “I’m worthless,” she said. “All I could do was lie there and scream.”

  “All I could do was get the shit kicked out of me.”

  “If I could see, we could’ve run.”

  “No. Jakob saved us, period. It wouldn’t have been any different.”

  Sarah sighed and let go of him. She rubbed her eyes again and put her glasses back on.

  “I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t know where Two is. I don’t care. We’re not going to find her.”

  “Whoever Two is, if she’s the one the Burilgi were here for, there is a good chance that she is already dead,” Jakob said, walking back to where they sat.

  Rhes looked up at him. “You might be surprised, but we’ll worry about that later. I need to go to a hospital and get some stitches. And some painkillers. Then I’m going to go home and sleep for three days. Can you help me to my feet?”

  Jakob nodded. “If need be, I will carry you. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  There were sirens in the distance, but the trio encounter
ed no one in their flight from Two’s building. Leaning against Jakob, Rhes was able to limp along. Sarah followed, slightly behind, holding Rhes’s hand and trusting him to lead her. Jakob took them down the stairs and out the rear exit of Two’s apartment building. From here they cut through an alley and out onto Sixth Avenue.

  “Do you have a car?” Rhes asked.

  “Not here. I can make arrangements for transportation as soon as we are far enough away from the building to not risk an encounter with the police.”

  “OK.”

  “Rhes, what’s wrong?” Sarah asked, her voice strained with concern and frustration. “Why are you breathing like that?”

  “Don’t know. Everything hurts.”

  “His ribs are broken,” Jakob told them.

  “Those fucking … stupid … I wish I … if they …” Sarah was incoherent, unable to form a sentence in her anger. Rhes found himself laughing at her.

  “They’re dead, baby. Think they got what was coming to ‘em. Please don’t make me laugh.”

  “How can you laugh at this?” Sarah exclaimed.

  “I am so fucking happy that we’re both alive right now, you have no idea. I’d dance if I could.”

  “Rhes, they broke your ribs! They bashed in your face. Who knows what else they did to you?”

  “Yeah, I can feel the ribs. And the face. And the leg, both arms, something in my back … even the place where Two’s friggin’ coffee table got me in the back of the knee. My body is a symphony of pain!”

  Rhes began to laugh again, the noise sounding more and more like a disturbed giggle than real humor.

  “He’s in shock,” Jakob said. They were well away from Two’s building now.

  “Can’t people die from shock?” Sarah asked.

  “People can die from a lot of things.”

  “I don’t want him to die.”

  Sarah could hear the smile in Jakob’s voice as he said, “If he seems headed in that direction, there are things I can do to help.”

  “Don’t you even fucking think about biting him!”

  Rhes had stopped giggling. “I bow to her authority on that one,” he said. “Part of the whole ‘soul mates’ deal.”

  Jakob laughed. “I won’t do anything without consulting both of you first.”

  “Good,” Rhes said. “Ouch. Jesus Christ, this hurts so bad! Can we stop walking yet?”

  “Yes,” Jakob said. They stopped by a news stand, and he helped Rhes shift his weight to the wooden wall.

  “Never a cab when you want one,” Rhes muttered. He touched his eyebrow and winced.

  “Stay here. I’m going to make a call.” Jakob pulled a cell phone from his jacket pocket, dialed, and wandered away as he began to speak. Rhes got his first decent look at the vampire who had saved them. Jakob was perhaps five-eight with dark brown hair cut to shoulder length. He had heavy brows, dark eyes, and olive skin that made Rhes think of the Mediterranean. He was powerfully built, and wore a long, dark trench coat. Rhes assumed that whatever blade the vampire had used was housed underneath to avoid arousing suspicion.

  Sarah brought Rhes’s hand to her lips and kissed the back of it. “How you doing, soul mate?”

  Rhes smiled. “I’m all right, soul mate. A little loopy. He’s probably right about the shock … I feel like I did the one time I dropped acid in college, right before it really kicked in and I spent the next five hours staring at the wallpaper. You OK?”

  “No, not really. I’ll survive.”

  “You don’t have to beat yourself up over this, hon.”

  “We’ve still got a date to talk about how much I hate, hate, fucking hate being blind. For right now, let’s worry about you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. I’ve been dealing with this for almost twenty years. One shitty night isn’t going to change anything. It’s just a shitty night.”

  “OK. You want to change the subject?”

  “Yes.”

  “You suppose Molly’s OK?”

  “I told her we’d be out late, and not to worry unless we weren’t back in the morning and hadn’t called. She asked if we were helping Two, and I figured the truth wouldn’t hurt, so I told her that we were trying.”

  “Good. She’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah.”

  They were quiet for a moment, resting against the news stand.

  “Sarah, will you marry me?” Rhes asked.

  He couldn’t look at her, was afraid of the expression he might see on her face, but he heard her pull in a sharp breath of air that wasn’t quite a gasp. Her grip on his hand tightened.

  “Yes. Yes, I will.”

  “I’m sorry to ask you here, like this. I have a ring at home and I wanted it to be special, but I … I needed to know the answer now, in case anything else happens. I don’t trust our friend on the phone.”

  “I understand. It’s not exactly how I imagined it either, but I’ll take it.”

  “I don’t care if the rest of my life lasts five minutes or fifty years, I want to spend it with you.”

  Sarah was crying again. “Let’s shoot for fifty years, OK? Or maybe eighty.”

  “OK. Sarah, I’m so sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Everything. All this bullshit that you got stuck with when you decided to get involved with me. Prostitutes and heroin addicts and vampires. Jesus, I thought you were going to say ‘no.’ I really did. I feel like all I’ve done is fuck up your entire life. I’ve been scared to ask you.”

  Sarah laughed through her tears. “Dummy. You could’ve asked any time in the last two years and I’d have said yes. I knew from the third month in. I was just waiting for you to figure it out. I don’t blame you for this, not for any of it.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  “The last person I saw in the mirror was this ugly little redhead eight-year-old with a bowl haircut and fucked up teeth. That’s who I still see when I think about myself. Just an ugly blind girl who never even had a date until she met her current boyfriend.”

  “You are the polar opposite of ugly.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that now here you are, beaten to shit by fucking vampires, and you’re more worried about proposing to me than you are about internal bleeding. That makes me so happy, even though it also makes me want to punch you. I’ve been waiting for this practically since I met you, Rhes, because I love you!”

  “Do me a favor then?”

  “Anything.”

  “Put your arms around me and kiss me and say ‘Yes, I will’ again?”

  “Won’t that hurt you?”

  “Probably. I really don’t give a shit. Will you marry me, Sarah Taylor?”

  Sarah grinned and gently embraced him. Trying her best not to hurt him, she kissed him, and said, “Yes, I will.”

  * * *

  “I hate to break up whatever is happening here, but I must,” Jakob said as he returned. “I’ve called a friend who lives not far from here. She will take us to the hospital.”

  “Why are you helping us, Jakob?” Rhes asked. He was pale and shaky, but the strange, drug-like confusion seemed to be receding.

  “You needed help.”

  “That doesn’t really answer the question. Why were you there? How did you even know we would be there to help?”

  “I didn’t. I was not there to help you – I was there to find this friend of yours. I’d heard that the Burilgi were looking for her, because she has been poking her nose into places where she does not belong.”

  “Were you there to hurt her?” Sarah asked.

  “You might say that I was there to determine whether she needed to be hurt or not.”

  Sarah frowned, not happy with this answer. She said, “Two was one of you, once. Do you know that?”

  Jakob raised his eyebrows in what Rhes thought was honest surprise. “What do you mean, ‘was’? There is no ‘was’ for us.”

  “Doesn’t that depend on the vampire?” Rhes asked.
>
  “Oh, I thought you meant one of my people specifically. Well, I suppose it might be possible for an Eresh, but I don’t—” Jakob’s eyes kindled suddenly, and he leaned forward. He seemed about to grab Rhes by the shoulders and then stopped himself, aware of Rhes’s injuries.

  “This girl … do you know what happened to her? Do you know her story?”

  “We know a lot of it,” Rhes replied.

  “Her sire, the man who made her a vampire … what was his name?”

  “Theroen Anders,” Sarah said.

  “God. Dear God …” Jakob’s voice trailed off as he searched for a lie in each of their eyes. When Jakob was satisfied, he said, “This is not good.”

  “Great. Does that mean it’s necessary to hurt us now?” Sarah asked. She didn’t sound afraid, but rather disgusted, tired with the entire affair.

  Jakob drew back, ran a hand through his hair, looked around as if trying to get his bearings. It was the first gesture Rhes had seen him make that looked fully human.

  “If the Burilgi catch her and find out what she is, it could be very dangerous for her, and for everyone she has told. You are in tremendous danger.”

  “You didn’t answer my question, Jakob. Are you going to hurt us?”

  “I don’t believe so. In fact, if she has been caught already, I may be your best hope of living through the week.”

  “That’s comforting,” Rhes muttered. “How do we even know we can trust you?”

  “If I wanted you dead, could I not simply kill you?” Jakob asked. “That course of action holds no interest for me. What is important now is determining whether your friend is still alive.”

  “That’s what we were trying to do. She’s not home,” Sarah said.

  “Did you see any evidence of a previous attack?”

  “No,” said Rhes. “The place was pretty much spotless. The windows were all still fine when we got there. I think the people … the things that you killed were the first ones there.”

  “Speaking of which,” Sarah said, “are we fugitives now? There are three dead people in the apartment, and our fingerprints are all over the place.”

  “It will be taken care of,” said Jakob.

  “You can just ‘take care of’ the NYPD?” Rhes asked.