The II AM Trilogy Collection Read online

  They were cutting over west, again, now on Route 17, following it along the lower border of New York State. Theroen left the highway sometime before Binghamton and raced off on a back road, through the woods, in the dark. The Ferrari was now the only car around, traveling fearlessly, speedometer hovering at more than double the posted fifty-five speed limit. Two, filled with fear, energy, and a strange excitement that had something to do with the car and even more to do with its driver, lay back, eyes closed, feeling the wind rush through her hair, dragging it out behind the seat.

  “Faster?” Theroen questioned, and his voice was a whisper cutting through the noise of the wind, the sound of the engine.

  “Yes!” Two cried, knuckles white against the hand-hold molded into the door. Theroen stepped on the clutch, shifted rapidly, stomped again on the gas pedal. The Ferrari’s engine roared to life, throwing Two back in her seat. Terrified, unable to stop laughing, she tried to watch ahead for curves, deer, other obstacles, but couldn’t help peering at the speedometer, watching it rise.

  And rise. And rise. The needle moved past 150 miles per hour, and Two, still laughing, still terrified, shut her eyes. We’re going to die, she thought. We’re going to die and I don’t care, because I’ll be in a beautiful Ferrari with good food and wine inside of me, and I’ll be with Theroen. I’ll die with him, and then it won’t matter. No one will know. I’ll just be the girl who died in the Ferrari.

  But they didn’t die, and finally Two felt the car losing speed. Theroen was easing off the gas, bringing the car down to a normal level. No more danger, but the joy remained. Two wanted to kiss him. She felt warm in her belly, between her thighs, places she’d sometimes thought dead since starting to work for Darren. Theroen looked over at her, as if hearing these thoughts, and Two gave him a radiant grin.

  Was he ready? She asked him with her eyes. Told him with her eyes: It didn’t matter that he had paid for her. She wanted it, badly. Her clothes seemed hot and scratchy, cumbersome.

  Theroen stopped the car at the side of the road, nothing visible for miles but trees and sky, and Two’s first, confused thought was: But … there’s no back seat? Then she laughed at herself. Theroen was already getting out of the car. Whatever this was, the Ferrari was not a part of it.

  * * *

  The woods were pitch black. Two felt smooth ground under her feet: a path. She held Theroen’s hand, and he led slightly, apparently unfazed by the total darkness. She could feel wind on her face, and now it seemed as though there was a faint glow up ahead, the trees ending. Another minute, maybe two, and the silhouette of the surrounding forest was visible, backlit by something up ahead.

  Theroen stepped out and to one side, turned, beckoned to her.

  “Oh my God,” Two said under her breath, stunned. Before her, in sharp contrast to the urban cityscapes she’d looked at all of her life, was a massive valley, filled with trees, a small town marked only by a few illuminated windows at its center. They were standing hundreds of feet above this, fifteen feet from the edge of a steep cliff carved out of the Appalachian foothills by the force of passing glaciers, tens of thousands of years ago. It was a sight unlike anything she had ever seen, and Two took it all in with eyes wide like a child’s. She could see forever, a universe of trees, stars clearer than she could possibly have believed.

  “Theroen, this is beautiful,” Two whispered, looking around. She felt him shift behind her, closer, a hand on her shoulder, turning her. His eyes looked down at her, luminescent, catching the light from the moon and holding it.

  “Did you enjoy the evening?”

  Two nodded. “Oh, yes.”

  Theroen studied her a moment. “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

  Two pressed herself against him. “Why don’t you go ahead and start, and I’ll let you know if we get to that point.”

  Theroen smiled and kissed her. Two wrapped her arms around him, her breath and his breath twining together as one. It was an eternity, an instant, and seemingly over before it began. She took a deep breath, let out a shuddery sigh, head against his chest. They stood like that for a moment, and Two reflected that of all the possible directions this night could have taken, this might well have been the least expected, the most unlikely.

  And then his fingers, gently under her chin, raising her lips to his again.

  They lay together in the soft grass, clothes in a jumble to their sides, forgotten, his lips at her mouth, her throat, her breasts. Two felt on fire, out of breath, flashes of heat and cold, goose bumps running in rippling waves down her arms, legs, back. Theroen caressed, teased, her body registering the contact of his fingers, the touch too gentle to satisfy. She twisted her fingers into his hair, bringing his head forward, wanting once again to share breath with him, to be connected.

  Hard, against her, and Two soft, ready, wanting. Open thighs, arched back. Theroen entered her and for a time her past ceased to exist. She was brand new, every nerve ending electrified, feeling everything for the first time. Two couldn’t have explained what had brought her to this state, nor did she care. She was content to live in the moment.

  They found rhythm, moved against each other, soft on hard, delicious friction. Two gasped, strained, clutched her fingers into the skin of his back. It had never been like this, building to this pleasure so quickly. As they neared the height of their passion, Theroen bent his head as if to whisper into her ear, but instead, as Two took a deep, gasping breath, he drove the sharp points of his eye teeth into the soft flesh of her neck.

  The pain was immediate, exquisite, the sensation so overwhelming that it seemed if anything to enhance the eroticism of the moment. Pleasure and pain indistinguishable. Two’s gasp locked in her throat – she was unable to breathe, unable to scream, unable to move. Theroen fastened himself to her, powerful arms holding her in an embrace that Two could not have broken, even if she could have moved.

  As the draining sensation began, as the pain receded, as the world began to fall into black, she realized that her passion had reached its apex. Her body clenched over and over again, in time with her heartbeat, in time with her hips, which still moved against his. The pleasure coursing now through Two’s body was above and beyond anything she had ever before experienced.Her arms tightened momentarily around Theroen, and then fell away, her breath let loose in a soft sigh, muscles relaxing. Death, desire, acceptance.

  And then, darkness.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  The World Within the World

  Somewhere dark. Somewhere wet.

  Two woke to the sound of water. Droplets formed; it seemed she could hear them expanding, growing to monstrous size before gravity inevitably trapped them in its hold, pulling them to the earth. Every tiny splash an explosion, a single drop becoming many, many becoming infinite. It was as if she could hear the impact of every molecule, and for a brief moment she believed her mind might split, trying to deal with the sound.

  And then: just darkness. Just water dripping. Just her ragged breathing, the feel of cold, damp stone under her cheek. She could smell wetness and rot in the air, mold from the stones, the dim scent of sex still on her body. She was naked, cold, disoriented. Confusion gave way to fright, fright to panic, and Two scrambled into a sitting position, gasping.

  Dim, not dark. A candle guttered somewhere to her left. She could make out the area around her in vague outlines. As her eyes adjusted, she saw her clothes in a jumble on the floor to her right. This was something to think about, something to take her mind off of the questions, the fear. She crawled to the clothes, picked them up. Panties, jeans, shirt.

  Feeling more human, more herself, Two set about trying to remember how she might have arrived at this place. Slowly the events of the previous night pieced themselves together in her mind. The car, the restaurant, Theroen. Driving fast, taking her somewhere, doing something … but that piece wouldn’t come. In its place, everything was a dark red, filled with the noise of rushing water and the t
hud of some distant drum.

  Brighter now, her eyes adjusting, able to make out details where before there were only silhouettes. Two saw a table, a chair, a simple bed off which she might have fallen during her sleep. A toilet in the corner, behind a screen. A small sink with a mirror above. The walls in front, behind, to her right made of stone.

  And to her left, iron bars from ceiling to floor, forming the fourth wall of the cell in which she was being held.

  Two stared at these bars, unable to gain control of her limbs, let alone make any pretense of moving. Cold shudders of fear ran down her back. Trapped, her mind repeated over and over, I’m trapped. At last, with an effort of will greater, perhaps, than any she had ever made, she shoved these thoughts away. Forced herself to look around. Tried to find something to occupy her mind.

  The mirror. The sink. Two stood on shaky legs, a newborn colt attempting to walk, steadying herself on the table. She could feel tear tracks drying and tightening her face, though she could not remember crying. She ran the faucet, splashed water on her face, looked into the mirror.

  Terror. Recoiling with a cry, tripping over the chair, crashing to the floor, the skin on her palms shredding on the cold stone. The image in the mirror had been Two, and not Two. Her eyes, brilliant green to begin with, now glowed with that odd luminescence. Her pale skin had changed subtly, imperfections wiped away, bags under her eyes gone. Her teeth as she grimaced were sharper, more pronounced, particularly the canines.

  But worse, worse by far, and that which had truly caused her to recoil in horror, was the entirety of the reflection itself. It was not what she was seeing that brought Two to a sudden and full understanding that something was simply not right. It was how she was seeing it – the details her eyes were able to pick out even in this dim light were somehow finer than anything that human eyes should be able to process. She could see everything about herself, in a way that she had never seen before, and it was this evidence that something within her had been changed so substantially, in such a short time, that broke down the last remaining walls she had constructed against her rising fear.

  Two rolled back her head, let out a wail of utter horror and despair, and gave in to the panic that had been gnawing at the edges of her mind.

  She called to Rhes and Sarah. Molly. Theroen and Darren and even to her mother and father. No help came for Two. No explanation, no escape. She wept, she screamed, she threw herself against the bars.

  It was not until she saw the tears she was crying, wiped on her hands and tinted with red, that she regained any sort of composure. The sight was a harsh slap, stopping her in her tracks. Red tears. Bloody tears.

  And with that, Two remembered it all, in minute detail. The car, the kiss, the sex. She remembered Theroen bringing her to the delicious moment before that final peak, and pressing his teeth against her neck. Her mind replayed the event in slow motion, those teeth hard against her flesh, nanoseconds of waiting spread out forever, the moment when the body tenses, begging for release. Waiting. And then her heart had throbbed, body climaxing, vein pulsing. Theroen’s teeth split her flesh asunder, and all that was left was the rushing, draining sensation, timed to the throb of her heart.

  Two let out a low, animal moan of terror and revulsion and lust as these memories flooded into her head, crowding out any concern for the present. The recollection was horrifying, the blinding white pain remembered all too well. Yet below, a dark fire awoke, a need she could not imagine existing in this time and place.

  Two glanced at her hands. The skin had already healed, cuts and scrapes from the fall just a few moments ago already turned to new, white flesh. Intricate spider webs of veins stood out on those hands, more pronounced against the pale skin. Two understood now what she was, or was becoming. Her mind attempted to shove the thought aside, fill with rationality, fill with excuses. But what excuse could there be? What possible rational explanation existed for this?

  When the hunger awoke inside of her, some time later, she knew instinctively that no ordinary food would cure it.

  * * *

  In the summer of her seventeenth year, Two and Rhes had taken a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two had never been, and it had been several years since the last time Rhes had been to the galleries. At his insistence she had gone along, not expecting to find anything of interest. To her surprise, Two had found herself absolutely captivated by nearly everything they had seen.

  Here, laid out before her, was a visual history of the world. Her rapture with this idea came from two nearly conflicting angles. On the one hand, all of this work lead up to her own creation. On the other, all of this came from beyond her, outside of her, cared not whether she ever existed, would go on existing long after her own life had ceased. She was everything. She was insignificant.

  Two had not been more profoundly impacted by anything in her life, save perhaps her decision to leave home. Rhes had finally been forced to drag her from the building, promising to return with her. She hadn’t read everything on the Egyptians. She’d missed the entire Roman wing. They took the train home in near silence, Rhes astounded and deeply pleased with Two’s appreciation of the museum. He did not ask her to explain, knowing that if she could, she most certainly would.

  Two had struggled with it for some time, attempting to put her feelings into words, attempting to express to Rhes how she’d felt, how delicious the merger of those two viewpoints had been. Two was neither stupid nor unlettered – a love for books had served her, in truth, far better in this area than a city school education probably could have – yet there was no word she knew, and perhaps no word at all, for how she felt.

  Two had made many trips to the museum that year, with Rhes and alone, absorbing all she could see. Trips to the Museum of Modern Art followed, galleries of new work in Greenwich Village, street artists in SoHo. Never any desire to attempt to create the work herself, only to immerse herself in others’ creations, to learn and experience what she could through them. To absorb some alternate view, as meaningful and inconsequential as her own.

  Art had brought Two a deep, abiding love for the complexity and magnificence of human life. Even in utter disgrace, trapped in horror, she had still found some grim beauty in the structure of it all.

  As the blood tears dried on her cheeks, her preternatural eyes staring out through darkness no human could have penetrated, Two felt truly and completely alone for the first time since Rhes had first brought her to the museum. That precious connection with the rest of humanity had been torn from her, and she had become something outside of the scope of those eons of art. Against her will she had been made an interloper, no longer welcome in the human world. It seemed as if those ties that she had found within the art had been severed.

  Sitting on the stone floor in the darkness, listening to the drip of water, Two wondered when she might see Theroen again. Clearly, she had been put here to ensure that she would not run away in his absence. There was no reason for him to continue holding her in a cell once he returned. She had not protested, had not attempted any type of escape.

  This, more than anything else, calmed her. If Theroen had intended simply to kill her, she would be dead. The altered physiology, the translucency in the mirror, the blood tears … these things suggested some further plan, one in which she joined him among the ranks of the undead. He would not leave her here to rot. She would see him again.

  But not that night.

  * * *

  Two rose from sleep in a manner entirely unfamiliar to her. Before, it had always been fuzzy, a gradual awakening. Now, she went from the deepest blackness to instant, total comprehension. It was startling. She sat up, looked around more from habit than from any need to clear her head. She was still in the cell, of course. Nothing had changed.

  Almost nothing.

  Before her was a bottle of water, and a note. Two took it, read it, crumpled it up and threw it out through the bars.

  Two, please accept my apologies for my absence, and for the ap
palling conditions of this cell. It is the only place in which I can be assured you will neither flee, nor come to any harm while I am away. I will see you later this evening. If you are thirsty, it should still be within your capacity to drink water for now.

  - Theroen

  No apologies for the bite, though. No apologies for the lack of warning. No apologies for whatever he had done that had begun this process without her permission. No apologies for taking away her connection with humanity, for making her some sort of monster.

  Two felt a crawling, tightening sensation in her spine, followed by sharp cramp in her abdomen and the muscles behind her shoulder blades. Her mouth felt dry, her skin hot, and a wave of panic flooded through her. She knew this feeling, and a small part of her brain was surprised that it had taken so long to come around. Her body had been without her drug for at least 24 hours now, and these pains she was feeling now were only a minor precursor to those on the horizon.

  “Oh, God …” Two fought against the panic, knowing it would only worsen the symptoms, and was able to push it back for the time being. The gnawing desire still sat in the back of her brain, and her muscles ached like she had the flu, but she was not yet in the horrible pain that she knew was the next stage.

  She uncapped the water, drank, felt it run down the length of her chest. It seemed as if her senses were amplified at times, and yet this occurred without warning or pattern. If she could control it, she had not yet learned how.

  Steps above her, the opening of some heavy door, and then Theroen was there. He looked paler still than he had the night before, and there were heavy bags under his eyes, but otherwise he was the same: the short dark hair and light brown eyes, the lanky body, the unnatural sense of stillness. She thought she could see the ghost of a smile at his lips.