The Warrior - Initiation Driven Subversive Redemption Justice

  “Don’t mention it. The wife makes me three a week. She’ll be glad it could help you.”

  I cleared my throat. “I don’t think I’ve ever met her.”

  “She’s not one of us. Outside of myself, other Warriors tend to make her nervous.”

  I knew exactly what he meant, and my smile fell. I’d seen it nearly every day of my life on the other side of the habitat. They looked at us like we were freaks, which maybe we were. But we were freaks keeping them all alive.

  “That must be hard sometimes.”

  He shrugged. “I get to see the stars. She never will. If you live through your first years, you’ll come to see, like the rest of us, that as hard as it is to do what we do, it’s also a gift.”

  I couldn’t deal with any more talk about what would or wouldn’t be in my tomorrows. I just needed to get going.

  “Well,” I said with a smile. “Thanks for the mask.”

  “You’re welcome.” He rocked back on his feet. “Whenever you get back, day or night, we can let you back down. Only the sentries have the codes to get into the elevator.”

  This was information I hadn’t had before, and it did not fill me with confidence. I assumed, obviously wrongly, I would be able to get in just by pushing the button.

  I tugged on my jacket. “What happens if you’re all killed?”

  “Then we blow up the elevator before they can take us all down. That keeps the Vampires from getting down there to the people in Genesis.”

  “How do they get back up?”

  “There’s a system for handling that down there. Don’t worry; it’s all been worked out.”

  If it wouldn’t have been terribly rude, I would have rolled my eyes. Don’t worry? Yeah, that’s going to happen.

  “Thanks for the information. I’d better get going.”

  He nodded and turned his back on me. Frank had never been one to talk very much. This was the most I’d ever heard him speak in one sitting. His classes had consisted more in pounding each other than in conversation.

  I pulled the map I’d been given out of my pocket and using the pen light that I knew I could only rely on sparingly at best—Vampires and Wolves could see the glow the light gave off—and oriented myself. I was about ninety-percent sure I knew where I was going. Up here, with all the background noise from the wind and some kind of insect chirping, I would be lucky if I didn’t end up completely turned around.

  I steeled my back and as I pretended to be brave, I walked forward into the night. This would have been so much better if I’d had other Ones or Twos with me. Micah’s strong face appeared in my mind’s eye, and I pushed it away. If I got through this, maybe they would let me go up with the others next time.

  My feet crunched on something beneath my feet. I bent over to pick up the strange stuff, which was causing the noise. I held it close to my face and smiled as I realized what it was. The guys had brought them down a few years ago. They were leaves, and they fell off the trees in the fall leading the way to winter.

  I tried to resist the urge to hum at my discovery. I continued through the overgrown trees in the direction of the water. I knew there were hours to travel before I accomplished my goal, and hours after that before I could reach the Outpost. Nothing would get done if I felt overwhelmed. It was better to keep my head down and keep moving forward.

  I sighed. Nothing was easy for me. Ever.

  I crumbled the leaf in my hand, and even through my quasi-freezing fingers, felt it break up in my fingertips. It must be late fall. All of the classes about the seasons on the earth above us didn’t seem so useless now.

  I ducked beneath a branch as I stepped forward, loudly, thanks to the leaves, when I felt the sensation. A shiver up my back. I’d already been feeling cold, but this was different. This was ice over my skin, on my back, cold that permeated from the inside of my body. I wanted to vomit.

  I whirled around, conscious of a change in my breathing that I had never felt before. It was faster, in and out of my lungs, like I was running even though I stood still. I blinked several times. There could be no mistake and, unlike those who had been surprised forty-six years ago, I knew exactly what made my body feel like this.

  I’d been trained to know.

  Vampire.

  The other thing I knew? If I felt it, there was a very large chance the Vampire had scented my presence as well. Or, I admitted, heard me crunching the leaves. My hands shook. I tried to force myself to remember that my senses still gave me an advantage over ninety-nine percent of the human population. They wouldn’t know the Vampire was around them until it was too late to even run.

  I stepped forward, grabbing Keith’s stake off my leg. Sweat formed at the base of my neck and my heart beat fast in my chest.

  It dropped down in front of me. Before I could gasp, I jumped back two feet, clutching the stake so hard in my hand that my fingers shook.

  It cocked its head to the side as it regarded me silently. I unfroze only long enough to put on my small lantern attached to my arm. I’d never seen a Vampire up close before, only in pictures, and they hadn’t done it justice.

  Pale with red-lined veins crisscrossing its face, it had huge red eyes to go with its pointed ears. The creature’s nose was long and so straight that it seemed to jump off its face in comparison to the flat, dead look of the rest of its features. Its hair was short, and although in the darkness I couldn’t be sure, I thought it was blond.

  Something about it screamed male to me, but I wasn’t even sure that mattered once a person became an Undead. The really old ones, the ones who had been alive since before Armageddon, they couldn’t speak anymore. At least not aloud in any way we could understand them.

  He was so much taller than I was; I had to crick my neck to stare at him.

  In front of me, in the dead of night, was one of my nightmares come to life. So far neither of us had uttered a word.

  The Vampire decided to alter that. “Human.”

  His voice was rough, growling, and I was relieved to find I didn’t feel enchanted by it at all. Some people reported feeling drawn to the voice of a Vampire, like they wanted to do whatever it wanted. All I wanted to do was either kill it or run away. I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to do more.

  He sniffed the air in front of me. “Young human.”

  I arched an eyebrow, wishing I had something witty to say at a moment like this. But I didn’t. I absolutely did not have anything even remotely coherent to say back to the thing.

  “Cat got your tongue?” It hissed as it opened its mouth to reveal its own tongue, long red, and split in the front like that of a serpent. I was also able to get a really good look at its elongated fangs. Those are what it would pierce my neck with and, hopefully, end my life. I really did not want to be one of those things. Death was preferable to becoming a Vampire.

  Finally, I found my voice. “You want to have a conversation, or you want to do this?”

  “They don’t usually let the young ones wander around by themselves.”

  All of his sounds were lisped, like a snake speaking English. I wasn’t sure if that was because of the fangs or the tongue. Truth was, I didn’t care about the logistics of its physiology. I just wanted it gone.

  It moved forward and extended its hand to me. I stared down at it dumbly. Did it think I was going to take it?

  Suddenly, there was an element to this drama that was downright funny. In fact, I’m fairly certain I laughed. It looked startled, as its lips formed a round ‘oh’ expression.

  “Do you think I’m going to take your hand?” I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m holding a stake. You do know what I intend to do with it?”

  “You’re a child. You will not beat me in hand-to-hand combat.”

  “I’m a Warrior. I was born to kill your kind.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Those are petty titles human beings give to themselves to feel better about the fact they are food to us, prey at best.”

  “If that was true, you
would have wiped us off the planet years ago. Admit it, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  A noise behind me was the only indication I wasn’t alone. I swung around to face three Werewolves—full size Werewolves. They leapt from the forest onto the Vampire. They growled and tore as they took down the Vampire I’d been talking to in a flash.

  I jumped backwards, prepared to be attacked. I tried to pull my machete off my back, but it was stuck. I couldn’t unjam it, and with each second I pulled, I knew I moved one second closer to death. As soon as they finished with the Vamp, they were going to turn around and decide they wanted a human meal. One of them looked up, his mouth holding part of the Vampire’s head. His eyes, as they stared at me, looked…almost…human. I guess I’d never imagined a wolf with blue eyes, the color of the paintings of the sky I’d seen. I think that scared me the most, seeing those eyes and knowing that part of that creature could look human.

  It was that fear that made me move.

  I screamed as I ran. It wasn’t particularly brave, but I didn’t want to be wolf snack, and at that very moment, I was completely unable to defend myself from them.

  I’d turned the corner to the clearing when I stopped running. Something wasn’t right. All I could hear was the sound of my own breath. The wolves should have caught me by now. I whirled around and did the stupidest thing I could think of, I ran back to the fight.

  One of two things had happened. Either the wolves had decided to stalk me, which I doubted, or they had let me go. Why would three man-eating Werewolves let me run away?

  In a moment, I arrived back on the scene. The Vampire was, indeed, quite dead. His head separated from his body, I noted the wolves had taken the additional precaution of staking its heart. Could it live without its head? I really didn’t want to dwell on that question and, besides, my stomach flipped rapidly inside of me threatening to spill what little I had eaten in Keith’s office.

  I ran to the side and puked—hard—on the ground. So much for bravery. It was brutal. Death was brutal, even for creatures that were already sort of not living. I wiped my mouth with a tissue I had in my coat pocket and wished I could go home and brush my teeth. It wasn’t going to happen, not until I finished what I set out to do.

  Standing up, I had three majorly important questions to answer. The first, and most life threatening one, was where the hell the Wolves had gone. Were Vamps tastier than humans? I doubted that, or there would be a major war going on between them instead of us.

  I trudged forward and pulled the machete off my back. Why hadn’t it come off earlier? It was just my luck. Had a weapon and couldn’t use it. Now at least three Werewolves that could have been killed could roam around and cause havoc. Not to mention, it was one night away from the full Moon and it was next to impossible to kill a wolf during the full Moon. They were flawlessly dangerous then.

  I kicked a stone and stomped my foot. I knew I should be walking quietly but, hell, anyone who was out there and wanted to get me had heard me fight, scream, run, and puke by now. It was likely they were aware of my existence.

  The second problem was that I hadn’t felt the wolves at all. How long had they been there? Why didn’t my signal go off? I knew the Vamp had been around. Was I deficient? Did my wolf trigger not work properly?

  Leave it to me to be missing half of my Warrior abilities. All the Council would have to do now was send me into wolf territories, and I’d be dead. I bit down hard on my lip and stopped to kick a nearby tree. There had been three wolves hiding in the bushes and not only had I had not sensed them, I hadn’t even heard them. I wanted to bang my head into the bark instead of my foot.

  Instead, I kept moving. I needed to get this insanity done so I could get back to Genesis and see some kind of doctor about my wolf problem. Was there such a person?

  Could I have killed the Vampire? Even the sight of its remains had made me lose my dinner. Could I have put the stake in its chest and ended it existence?

  Why had I stood there talking to it when I should have been thrusting forward, stake in hand, to do my duty for mankind. One of us would have moved—probably the Vamp—and then I’d be that statistic. The Warrior who didn’t come back, just like the Council wanted me to be.

  And—darn it—I didn’t want to die tonight. If for no other reason than to piss off the Icahn family.

  But I did have another reason. I wanted to see Micah’s chocolate brown eyes again. I wanted to tell him I had a major crush on him. I wanted him to like me that way, too. Or maybe it was simple, maybe as a human I had a strong desire not to die.

  Which meant the next Vampire I saw was going to have to die by my hand. No more chickening out.

  Chapter Six

  I came to a clearing, having walked along what was once called the Hudson River—and we now simply referred to as the Water—all night. Other than the incident earlier in the evening with the Vamp and the Wolves, it had been a downright boring night. I was freezing, my feet hurt like hell, and I wanted to sleep all day.

  I had to assume the Outpost would have some place for me to lie down. I didn’t care if it was in a corner somewhere next to a garbage can. I just wanted to sleep. All of this was mixed with a slight amount of pride. I’d almost made it to the Outpost. I would deliver the darn message I’d been given to hand them and, I might add, had not even looked at because it was private. Tia would have looked. I’d won a silent moral contest because I hadn’t.

  The Outpost looked just like I’d imagined it would. It was a shack. I wondered how they defended it from the monsters at night and decided I would ask them that question just as soon as I got something to eat and some well-earned sleep.

  I stopped in my tracks. I’m not sure how but I knew there was trouble. Or there had been. The door to the Outpost was open, hanging on ripped hinges. That couldn’t be good. My stomach churned with anxiety, and I walked forward pulling out my machete. The sun was going to come up any second. That meant it wasn’t likely to be a Vampire problem. I’d already proven I had no sense for the wolves.

  My feet felt heavy and I knew I wasn’t at my best. This was why the Warriors came back to the habitat every night looking like death, because they’d put in a full night. Everything hurt. I approached the door, looking around the corner to see if I could spot or hear any movement inside.

  Nothing. I knocked on the door. “Anyone there?”

  Silence met my call. Was it possible they were all out? When Patrick had told me no one had heard from them in days, I had assumed this was pretty typical. Leave it to me to be wrong.

  I walked a little faster as I moved into the Outpost. The front room really did look like a living room in a shack. Well, a shack from a horror movie. There was an orange couch that was torn in pieces, a bookshelf turned over on the floor, and a light fixture dangling from one bolt about to fall from the ceiling.

  I wondered if they actually had light or if it was just for show. I stepped over books and broken glass shards before I rounded the corner of the room. A small powder room was next to a room with four beds. I stepped into the bedroom. Someone…or something…had stripped the beds of all of their sheets and overturned two of them.

  But that wasn’t what consumed my attention. I’d thought the dead Vampire was awful; this was so much worse. Torn to pieces in ways my mind had never contemplated were possible, lay the body of a man I’d never seen before. A human man.

  Oh…heavens…the blood.

  I covered my mouth and nose with my hands to shut out the smell. Flies buzzed everywhere. How could I have not scented it when I walked into the house?

  I backed up to stairs feeling like I wanted to wretch again, knowing I had nothing in my stomach to lose even as my stomach protested that it could, in fact, find something else to throw up. My ears rang.

  He is dead.

  Whoever he was, he is dead.

  It had to be wolves….

  Are they here?

  I looked left and right, expecting to see a snarling, dr
ooling Werewolf, when someone grabbed me from behind.

  I screamed and bucked forward, but whoever held me was strong and in two seconds locked me stiff in his embrace. My machete fell to the floor with a clang as I screamed and bucked to be free.

  “Easy, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I didn’t recognize his voice, but his strong hands pressed into my arms as he tried to hold me still. I freed my right elbow and jabbed backwards, catching him square in the chest. He oomphed and loosened his grip just enough for me to twist around.

  I made a dive for the machete, but he caught me first. Face to face, we both breathed hard as I regarded him. I realized two things right away. He was young, like I was. I couldn’t be sure, but I wouldn’t have put him any older than eighteen year old Chad Lyons. Blond curly hair that seemed to go everywhere and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen…No, that wasn’t true. I’d seen that color before and just recently. In the woods. Heavens help me; those eyes had looked up at me as they’d eaten Vampire head. I dug deep inside of me as I tried to find the signal I was looking for. Nothing, absolutely nothing.

  I had to speak even though my mouth felt dry. “Are you human?”

  His smiled a half grin that spoke of amusement. Not an emotion I felt at the current moment. Terror, yes. Anger, yes. Confusion, yes. Amusement, no.

  “That depends on your definition of human.”

  I narrowed my eyes as my anger increased tenfold at his clever answer. “I think you know exactly what I mean.” I struggled in his hold and he gripped me harder. “Are you or are you not a monster? Did I not see you hours ago ripping a Vampire to shreds in the woods?”

  “If you didn’t smell so good in the midst of this mess in here I might take offense, but I find that I can’t seem to stop sniffing you.”

  As to prove his point, the monster in human clothing leaned down and took a good, long sniff at my neck. I shivered as it felt like he’d collected part of my soul and taken it into his body in that one inhale.