The II AM Trilogy (Book 3): The Children of the Sun Read online

  There was a bang from the far end of the room as the stall door opened and the girl in the silver dress stumbled out, looking bleary-eyed.

  “Can you have your stupid dyke-fight somewhere else?” she asked. “I’m trying to piss.”

  Two whirled on her. “Get your bridge-and-tunnel ass the fuck out of here before you get hurt!”

  “PMS much?” the girl said, giving Two an exaggerated eye roll, but she made her way out of the bathroom. Naomi gave an incredulous laugh and rubbed at her face with the back of her arm.

  “I’m so drunk,” she muttered.

  “Christ, Naomi,” Two said. “Why did you have to go and do that?”

  “I don’t know!” Naomi said. “I wasn’t thinking. I just … Mother Ashayt went to California and … and … I’m alone. I was so happy to see you, and I started thinking about London.”

  Two closed her eyes, resting a hand against her forehead for a moment. She hated this. She hated that she had done this to Naomi, and she hated that she couldn’t fix it. All she could do was tell the truth.

  “What we had in London is over,” Two said. “It’s done, and I’m sorry, but it’s done for good. You’re beautiful and brilliant, and I feel so fucking bad that I hurt you the way I did, but I don’t love you. Not the way you want me to.”

  “And you never, ever will,” Naomi said, her voice bitter. “I know, but thank you for making sure to say it yet again.”

  “Don’t you try to lay this shit on me,” Two replied.

  “I’m going home,” Naomi said. “I’m stupid and pathetic, and you’re not interested, and I don’t even want to look at Theroen. I don’t want to watch him sit there and not say anything and f—fucking judge me.”

  “Nobody’s judging you. Naomi, come on …”

  Two stepped forward, reaching out to put her hand on Naomi’s shoulder, but the vampire girl pulled away. “Don’t touch me.”

  Two felt anger welling up inside her again. Fine, she thought. I’m not the one who tried to use her magic powers to get some cheap bathroom sex.

  “I’m going back to the table,” she said. “You should come with me, sit down, and sober up. You were already drunk when we got here.”

  “Fuck you,” Naomi said, and now she was crying again. “Fuck you, and fuck him too.”

  Two clenched her teeth, took a deep breath, and said, “OK, Naomi. Do what you want.”

  “I tried,” Naomi said, and before Two could respond to this, Naomi pushed her way out of the bathroom. Two knew she would leave by the side exit, sparing herself any questions from Theroen.

  Two took a moment to compose herself and left the bathroom as well, passing a laughing gaggle of women who were headed in to relieve themselves, or do drugs, or possibly both. Two didn’t know or care. When she sat down next to Theroen, he gave her a curious look but didn’t speak.

  “Not going to ask where I’ve been?” Two prompted.

  “I had assumed you and Naomi were in the bathroom.”

  “Yeah. She went to find some dinner and asked me to come with her. I should’ve known better, but … I dunno. I went. She tried to kiss me.”

  Theroen considered this, looking at her in silence for a time lengthy enough that Two grew uncomfortable.

  “If you’re reading my mind, I’ll save you the trouble. I shoved her away. Then I told her it was over, like it’s been from the minute I found out we could bring you back.”

  “I am not reading your mind, Two, I promise. If I doubted your faithfulness, I would say so.”

  Two sighed, picked up her new glass of bourbon, took a large swallow, and grimaced. “Naomi went home.”

  “Yes, I gathered.”

  “She’s drunk and lonely, and now I’m pretty sure she thinks we both hate her. I’m damn sure she hates herself.”

  “Not because of what she did, though,” Theroen said, and Two shook her head.

  “No, not because of that. She hates herself because she hates loving me and she can’t seem to stop.”

  “Perhaps it would be best if the two of you broke off contact for a time,” Theroen said, and Two gave him a bitter laugh.

  “You’re not getting out of council meetings that easily,” she said.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “It was a joke, hon. Just a joke.”

  Theroen nodded, smiled, picked up his scotch and sipped at it. At last he spoke.

  “Life is beautiful, is it not?”

  Two rolled her eyes but gave him a tired grin. “Fucking gorgeous.”

  Chapter 2

  First Strike

  The man’s name was Matthias Vanden. He was an Eresh vampire, more than six hundred years old, and he had come to visit America at the request of his two fledglings. Thus far he had enjoyed it; the three of them were staying in a luxurious apartment that took up the entire top floor of its building and offered views of Lake Michigan, the Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium, and Soldier Field. They had been in the city for six months and had not yet tired of it. When and if they did, he thought, perhaps they would try Los Angeles or New York.

  The two younger vampires, both Dutch and both in the middle of their second century, were in the living room now, entertaining two women and a man. The humans had become frequent guests, happy to provide their blood to the vampires in exchange for the ecstasies that came with being bitten. Matthias wasn’t worried by this; at the end, the humans would remember little of their time with the vampires except that it had been extremely enjoyable.

  He sighed, filled with the pleasurable melancholy that came with reminiscence. He no longer needed the blood in such volumes, no longer yearned for it with the passion of an insatiable lover. The centuries had left him able to subsist for weeks on but a few mouthfuls, and he rarely interacted with humans. Still, though, he could recall how it had been, the blood pouring forth in hot torrents as he drank and drank, fighting against the swoon. He envied his young fledglings the experience, even while he appreciated his freedom from the need for it.

  He was reclining now on the gigantic bed in the apartment’s master bedroom, watching the television with the volume turned off and the closed captioning on, aware of but not really listening to the music from the other room. He and his fledglings had spent the early evening walking along Navy Pier, enjoying the throngs of people around them. Then there had been the bar, a curious place in a mostly commercial downtown area, specializing in martinis and playing lesbian pornography on its many screens. Matthias could remember a time, not long ago at all, when the bar would have been burnt to the ground for such things. He had found it deliciously scandalous, and his fledglings, more comfortable in the modern age, had in turn found his reaction highly amusing.

  Matthias leaned back on the bed, grinning, remembering their laughter. He looked up through the skylights, where he could see a thin crescent of moon and a few bright stars. He could also see the lights of a nearby office building and a flashing red beacon he thought was meant to warn airplanes and helicopters of a radio tower. He could see something else, too – something that he did not immediately recognize. It seemed to be getting closer, however, and in a moment more Matthias realized that he was looking at a human form, plummeting down from a great height and angled directly at the glass windows above him.

  He leapt from his bed as the body came through the skylight, and even as he was thinking that this must be some sort of suicide attempt, he realized that the person was not crashing to the floor in a jumble but rather landing on its feet, absorbing the impact with its knees and springing forward. He saw long, blonde hair streaming out behind it, and there was a bright flash of metal. Matthias heard a woman’s snarling cry as the figure grabbed him by the neck and threw him up the wall, pressing the tip of a blade to the soft spot below his chin.

  “Move an inch and I will cut your head off,” the woman told him, and Matthias stared at her in surprised awe. He knew few people who could have performed that landing and the follow-up leap, and all of those were vampires.
This woman was not a vampire, though he did not know if she was exactly human, either. She was certainly a trained professional of some sort, dressed head to toe in black combat gear.

  How truly remarkable, he thought to himself, but he said nothing, afraid that if he moved, she would cut his throat and let his blood out all over the exquisite Oriental rug upon which he stood.

  There were crashing noises now from the living room and a woman’s scream that was cut short by a loud thud. Someone – Matthias thought it was the human male – voiced a protest at this, but his cry was choked off. In another few moments, there was a knock at the door.

  “Enter,” said the woman who was holding him against the wall, and Matthias watched with a kind of horrified curiosity as the door opened and a young, dark-skinned woman stepped in. She too was clothed in black. Rather than blades, she carried in her hand a silenced pistol, and at her side, hanging like fruit, were two hand grenades.

  “We’ve got the other two bats contained, and the humans have learned to shut up and mind their manners,” the black woman said, and the blonde nodded.

  “Good.”

  “You want us to bring them in here?”

  “No. We’ll be out in a minute. Go make sure they don’t get any stupid ideas.”

  The black woman turned on her heel without another word and strode back into the living room. The blonde turned to Matthias, and he saw that her eyes were a clear and brilliant blue.

  “We’re going to walk now,” she told him. “You first, me behind you. If you try to run, or attack, or do anything else that upsets me, I will ram this blade between your shoulders. It will come out just above your collarbone, it will leave you alive, and it will be excruciating – especially when I start twisting it. Are we clear on this?”

  “Yes,” Matthias said, still mindful of the metal point pressed into the flesh below his chin.

  “You’re an old Eresh, so you must be pretty fast. Do I need to tell you that I’m faster?”

  “No.” Matthias had seen her move. He knew she was quicker than him.

  “Good,” the woman said. She took the blade away from his skin and held it unsheathed at her side. “Go.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” Matthias asked her.

  “If you don’t start walking, yes. If you do exactly what you’re told and stop asking stupid questions, you might get through this.”

  “Please,” he said. “You can kill me if you must, but please leave my children. They’ve hurt no one.”

  The woman gave him a disgusted laugh and pointed toward the bedroom door. “Get moving.”

  Matthias did as he was told, moving slowly and deliberately so that this woman holding him hostage would know that he intended no trickery. Matthias had never been much for fighting; that sort of thing was best left to the Ay’Araf. He was Eresh and not a warrior, though he thought he might soon be put in a place where there would be no alternative.

  His fledglings were sitting on the large sofa, flanked by two black-clothed human men. Adrianus, the younger of the two vampires, looked disgusted and angry. Mikel, older by twenty years and more even-tempered, seemed to be in control of his emotions. He was looking at one of the human women. She was lying on the floor, a trickle of blood running from her nose to the carpet. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, and her bare breasts were not rising and falling. Matthias realized she was dead.

  The other two humans were each being held with their hands behind their backs by another member of this strike force. Both were still fully clothed, though the man’s shirt was unbuttoned. He had a black eye and livid red marks around his neck, just below the edges of his dark hair. The one next to him, a tall woman with a large mass of tightly curled red hair pulled back into a ponytail, was weeping quietly but seemed unharmed.

  The black woman was standing at the far end of the apartment, looking out at the city. She glanced over her shoulder as they came into the room, watching Matthias’s slow progression forward, and then resumed looking out the window.

  “What a lovely scene,” the blonde woman commented from behind him, and Matthias could hear the sarcasm in her voice. He came to a stop in the middle of the room, and she didn’t object to this.

  “Girl wouldn’t shut up,” said a tall, burly man with brown, crew-cut hair.

  “So you thought you’d break her neck?” the blonde woman asked.

  “I got a little overzealous, Captain,” the man admitted.

  “Right. Next time, wait for my orders.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you the one in charge here? What the fuck do you want?” Adrianus demanded in his thickly accented English, and the blonde woman turned to him.

  “Speak to me like that again and I’ll have them kill another one of your blood whores.”

  Adrianus said nothing, merely glared at the woman. The human girl’s sobbing had redoubled at the confirmation that her friend was dead, and for a moment it was the only sound in the room.

  “Please,” Matthias said. “We wish to avoid any further trouble. Tell us what it is you want from us.”

  “Normally, you’d already be dead,” the blonde-haired woman told him. “But that’s not what I’m here for tonight. Instead I’m here to send a message. You’re going to deliver it for me.”

  “A message to whom?” Matthias asked her.

  The woman moved in front of him now, holding her blade at her side. “You’re going to tell the American Council of Vampires in New York that the day of reckoning has come.”

  “I do not know anyone on the council. I am not from this country,” Matthias said.

  “I don’t care,” the woman replied.

  From the couch, Adrianus muttered something under his breath. The blonde woman turned to him.

  “Say that again.”

  “I said, ‘this is ridiculous,’” Adrianus told her. “I will not be held captive and given orders by a group of humans with delusions of grandeur.”

  “Adrianus, please …” Matthias began, but his fledgling overrode him.

  “You invade our home, murder our friend, hold our patron at swordpoint and threaten him … now you expect us to deliver your ridiculous message to a group of vampires we don’t even know? Go away, human. Go away before something terrible happens.”

  The woman frowned at him. “It’s a bad idea to try and give me orders. I serve only one master: the Emperor of the Sun. I am an instrument of his light.”

  “This is nonsense!” Adrianus snarled. He stood up, and the humans on either side drew their guns, pointing them at him. The black woman turned from the window, an odd smile on her face.

  “Put your guns down,” the blonde woman told the soldiers.

  “But, Captain …” one of them began, and she glared at him.

  “What part of the Captain’s orders didn’t you understand, Janus?” the black girl asked from across the room. The man who had spoken glanced at her and, after a moment’s hesitation, lowered his weapon. His fellow guard, the man with the crew cut, did the same.

  “Adrianus, you are making a terrible mistake,” Matthias said.

  “I do not fear these humans,” Adrianus told him.

  “That is the mistake,” Matthias replied, but Adrianus wasn’t listening. He was striding forward toward the blonde woman, gaining speed with each step.

  “You should have let them shoot me when you had the chance!” he roared, leaping forward. The blonde woman stood still, ready, and at the last possible moment she ducked. Adrianus’s arms passed over her head and he tripped on her outstretched leg, stumbling forward.

  Moving now with that same impossible speed she had shown before, the blonde woman stood and, even as Adrianus was falling, swung her sword in a downward arc. The blade chopped his head from his body and it rolled away, throwing fans of blood against the wall and coming to a stop near the bedroom door. Matthias watched as the corpse – a thing which had moments ago been his son – thudded to the ground, arms fluttering, spurting blood from its neck
.

  Matthias could hear himself screaming, but the sound was warped and distant, as if it was echoing down to him through a long hallway. He stood rooted to the ground, unable to move, unable to do anything but voice his horror. Mikel, too, was screaming, and he had leapt to his feet.

  Matthias didn’t know whether Mikel would have attacked or not, but the blonde woman didn’t give him the opportunity. Lightning quick, still crouched, she reached to a clip at her breast and pulled from it two darts, which she flung across the room in a single motion. One hit Mikel in the chest, another in the arm, and his cries became immediately strangled. He took one step toward her and pitched forward, twisting in the air as he did so, landing on his side.

  Matthias watched in horror as his fledgling’s limbs began to seize up and a great torrent of bloody foam gushed forth from his mouth. Even his eyes had begun to bleed, and he was making choked cawing noises of agony that pierced Matthias like knives.

  “Have mercy on him!” Matthias cried. Begged.

  The blonde woman, up on her feet now and striding toward Mikel’s shuddering, jerking form, glanced over her shoulder.

  “There is only one mercy for him now,” she said, and she held the blade up over her head for a moment before driving it down and into his chest, piercing Mikel’s heart and ending his pain. She stood, cleaning the blood from the blade with a dark cloth. Both humans were sobbing now, wrestling with the men that held them but making no real headway in their attempts to escape.

  “It’s a pleasure watching you work, Captain,” the black woman said, though Matthias thought he could hear distaste in her voice. The blonde favored her with a sardonic smile.

  “Thank you, Vanessa.”

  “Oh, God help me,” Matthias moaned. He was still rooted to his spot, standing now between the bodies of his two dead children, shaking and unable to move. The blonde woman turned to him.

  “There is no God,” she said. “Even if there was, He wouldn’t want anything to do with you.”

  Matthias felt a surge of rage and hatred run through him, and in that moment he almost threw himself at this woman despite her superior speed and obvious skills as a fighter. At least then it would be over; he would be dead like his children, gone to whatever afterworld awaited. He tensed and the woman tilted her head, studying him.