Antithesis: The Vampire Alliance Book Three - FIRST DRAFT COMPLETED

Antithesis Chapter 14: Eve Blakethorn-Sullivan June 2013

Eve Blakethorn-Sullivan, May 2013

As always there are a number of people waiting for us when we return to headquarters. Among them is Felicity, Craig’s girlfriend. Her eyes meet mine with dismay as we walk into the reception area, after briefly counting off which of us had returned. Tears well and even though she tries to blink them back I know the dam will break eventually.

“What happened to him?” She asks very softly, her voice a pained whisper.

“We’re using your office,” I tell Johan, before trying to lead Felicity away from the crowd of spectators. She had a right to know but I personally didn’t feel like announcing the existence of zombies to the entire congregation. How would I even begin to handle that? Didn’t we have enough problems?

Felicity shakes her head though, “No, just tell me straight, is he dead?”

Managing to nod is all I can do. I don’t know how to give her the full truth, the ghastly, unbelievable truth. She sways on her feet and would have fallen if I hadn’t been there to catch her.

“I’ve loved him for years, you know, although he only noticed recently.” With that admission she buries her face against my shoulder, a sob finally escaping as her body shakes in my arms.

My experience of comforting other people has been incredibly limited. Unsure of what to do I simply let her sob, holding her as she cries piteously. I barely know Felicity; the longest conversation I’ve had with her was at Van’s girly night and that conversation had been all about Craig. I’d liked Craig though, after we got over him threatening to shoot Tul in the heart. I’d come to like him enough for it to be a struggle, holding back my own tears, as the woman who loved him cries on my shoulder.

“How do I do it?” She asks me despairingly when she finally raises her head again, “How do I go on? You kept going after... after...” her gaze flicks briefly to Rob. “How?”

She couldn’t have asked a less appropriate person for advice in that respect. Before finding Tul my existence had been just that, an existence. I hadn’t lived. I hadn’t coped at all, not really. My survival methods had been substantially less than safe or healthy. My experiences are irrelevant to her and I’m completely unable to offer up anything constructive as I shake my head, not sure what to say. I can’t help her and I hate that.

“Did he die properly?” Felicity asks eventually and I understand her meaning. “He won’t come back as anything bad?”

It’s not surprising that she can read my expression and the guilt and pain in my scent. As anguish causes her face to twist with grief there’s nothing I can do to comfort her.

“Do you know he’ll be a Paladin?” she whispers, her voice a ragged croak. Receiving no answer she presses, “It’s written in you expression, something worse. But what can be worse than being their puppet?”

I don’t want to say it. Voicing the truth might make it more real and I’m not sure I want to believe. It’s too atrocious to believe, to implausible to be real. Yet there’s no denying what had taken place and these people, my colleagues, need to know and so I take a deep breath and tell them. “There is something in the vaults. They’re what came before the Paladins, dead things that feed on life. They’re insatiable. One of them bit Craig and he changed, he died and then his body became something else. Not alive.” The truth is all I can offer Felicity but what a nightmarish truth it is. Glancing at Johan I ask, “Did you get in touch with Gary?”

He shakes his head, “I couldn’t, I can’t contact him. We have reports from other infiltrators though, saying that the Science Facility is on lockdown. They’re evacuating a number of departments but it seems like even the Senate are unwilling to open the area around the vaults.”

“Good. Those doors must never open. Those things cannot be allowed out. Not ever. They’d destroy everything.” Those around me look astounded at my tirade but they can’t appreciate the danger. They can’t see what I can see; streets filled with blood, littered with the limbs of dismembered bodies where the walking dead rot, as they wait to feed on the living. “Those things aren’t like us. They’re dead, their only need is to feed and feed until they’ve devoured all life. They won’t be reasoned with or controlled. They don’t think or feel affection or guilt or sorrow or joy. They will destroy the world because all they do is hunger...”

I feel breathless, my heart hammering in my chest as my lungs refuse to expand. My body doesn’t require a huge amount of oxygen, I could survive for hours without it, but even so the sensation is uncomfortable as I relive what it feels like to die and change. The texture of a person’s flesh in my mouth is easy to remember too, the sensation of muscle, sinew and skin being ground between my teeth. Looking down, my arms and clothes are soaked in blood that only I can see and I want to lick it, to suck it from my fingers. The craving tears at my gut, relentless and agonising. “They hunger...” I whisper again.

Then my vision dims, the world growing black. Somewhere in the distance I hear my name but I feel disconnected as my knees hit the tiled floor and the pain of impact barely registers. It’s possible there are arms around me as existence fades entirely but I can’t be sure. Briefly my mind focuses on one thought; how un-vampire it is to faint.

What a useless thought.

When I manage to swim back to awareness I’m finally in Johan’s office, stretched out on his desk with Tul and Rob eying me in concern. I feel weaker than I have in a long time. Fragile, I feel fragile. These visions are taking so much out of me and they distract me. They are, as Aemiliana had warned, a curse.

“Are you alright?” Tul asks and the question grates on me; it’s asked too often.
“I’m as fine as I can be considering what I’ve seen and felt.” Sitting up causes my head to pound and it’s something of a shame that painkillers will have no effect on me.

Johan’s eyes bore into mine, gauging my reaction. “If they do get out how far will it spread?” He questions me.

“The world.”

My words hang in the air, despite the weight of them. It’s incomprehensible, what I’m saying should be unfathomable. A zombie apocalypse is impossible. I laugh at the idea of impossibility; what right does a vampire prophetess descended from an extinct vampire clan have to declare anything impossible?

“No, it takes hold too fast,” Rob argues. “The bitten change so quickly they’d never be allowed on planes or ships. Britain will be quarantined, yes, but it won’t spread.” Rob’s insistence is beautifully optimistic considering what he’s been through. It’s also painfully foolish.

“They’re dead.” My observation draws a shudder from each of us. “They don’t fear drowning, Rob. They could walk out into the English Channel and be washed up on the shores of France.  If they get out they will spread through Europe, through the Middle East and Asia. They’ll go everywhere.

They’ll only die once they run out of food and they decay away to nothing. The planet will be overrun long before that happens. Everything we’ve fought to save, everything we’ve dreamed of creating, it’ll all disappear if they escape, all because Craig wouldn’t shut that bloody door when I told him to.” My head drops into my hands, “And I was too busy having a stupid vision to do it for him.”

“This isn’t your fault.” Their hands take mine, my husbands offering up their useless reassurance. “The Senate did this.”

It’s true but it’s also not that simple, “Ultimately yes, they did. However, if the zombies get out we’ll still be the ones who released the Senate’s creations on the world. We freed their monsters and nothing will be able to take that back. We walked into that vault and we opened the doors and the streets could echo with screams as civilisation falls.

My only hope is that the Senate know how to contain their monsters. Currently the apocalypse is only one of many futures. If someone makes a mistake though...” There’s no need to expand, we know what will happen, we’d seen it on a tiny scale in the corridor outside the vaults.

“And the three of us? Thanks to my blood, when everyone else is dead, converted or eaten, we’ll still be here. We’ll just keep going until starvation drives us to suicide.”
Tul sits beside me, watching me intently. “How are we immune? Why don’t they want us?”

“Because they think we’re like them. They smell it in our blood. They were meant to be what we are. The,” I pause, not yet comfortable with the word I’m about to use. “The zombies, they were the Senate’s first attempt using Andrea’s blood and synthesised venom. They are the precursor to the Paladins, to their version of Strix. It didn’t work though.”

Hesitating, my mind sifts through the facts that I shouldn’t know but do, “Andrea wasn’t me, she didn’t have so many dominant Strix genes. Her blood created those creatures, gave them our hunger for life but didn’t allow them to live. No matter how much they take they never live and so they always hunger. We feed and are sated but they feed and still ache for more. We have control, they have none. Still, it’s in their blood, the knowledge that they’re from the same line as us and so they don’t attack us.”

Tul looks up at Rob and I can see his thoughts in his expression, feel the relief in his emotions; Rob could have shared the zombies’ fate. But no, he never would have shared their fate, I know it. “Can you remember?” I ask him, “Becoming a Paladin? Waking up?”

“No.” He answers forcefully, too determinedly, perhaps. “I don’t want to either. The flashes are enough, the rest is best forgotten.”

“Flashes?” Probing is unfair, cruel even. Unfortunately my gut tells me to push, to dig and dig until I can find the truth.

“Sometimes, in my dreams, I see things which might be memories.” He searches my intense and pointed gaze before sighing, resigned, knowing I can’t let it go. “I can remember waking up, day after day, in the residential block of the science facility. I don’t know how long I was there, the further back I look the blurrier it gets. Before the blur there are flashes, just flashes. Blood, screaming, listening to my heart beat start and then stop. Then before that,” he looks ill as his fingers go to his throat and fear grips him, “before that...”

Tugging his hand from his neck I kiss his fingers, “It’s alright, you don’t need to go that far. You don’t need to remember.” What I need to know comes after his execution and there’s no reason for him to relive the experience. I can see just fine, after all.

Frowning, Rob tries to step away as I place my hands on his cheeks and he realises what I’m going to do. “You don’t need to see either.”

His protestations don’t faze me, though.

“I need to understand, love.”

He shakes his head at my persistence, but there’s no use letting him dissuade me even as he murmurs, “You shouldn’t need to see. You see too much as it is and it hurts you.” Concern radiates from him and into me. I wish there was a way to comfort him, to make him believe it’s ok. It’s not ok though, I’m not ok, but this is my curse to bear.

“This is what I was born to be.” With that I focus on him, pushing all other thoughts from my mind as I open it up to the visions.

I have no problem bringing on the visions, not with Rob. I’m so close to him the images are easy to find but it still starts as a tangled mess. It proves difficult to locate the correct memory. I see so many things, including myself as he sees me, with so much love and so much anxiety and so much guilt. Tul is there too, in his head, seen with so much love and so much anxiety and so much guilt. While I’d like to explore his affections and alleviate his guilt, right now they’re a distraction.

Pushing past those memories I search. Searching, searching, until I find 1352’s confusion. That part of Rob’s existence is the thread I grab onto, following it back through his confusion over loving me to a place before that. Wandering through tests and training and nights on patrol I finally find what I’m looking for, the moment a dead man opened his eyes for the first time.

He’d been different from the moment he awoke attached to the Senate’s perverse dialysis machine. Rob had woken up with a scream, “Keep! Save her!” He vocalised his last thought. He’d remembered me then, he’d remembered our history and his death. Those memories weren’t his to keep, however, not until I restored them.

The scientists had been surprised at his cry. They were stunned, in fact, to hear anything more than a groan. It raised their hopes but in the end Rob had followed the usual pattern. His heart had raced, faster and faster, and then it stopped. His memory failed, his reasoning faltered and he’d been consumed by the hunger. Parched and thirsty he was in agony as the usual fit gripped him and shook his body. Just as with the others the scientist had fled. Just as with the others Rob had torn through the chains, unaware of who he was or where he was or how he came to be. He’d charged at the woman bound in the trap they’d set for him, just as his captors had speculated he would.

Wincing, I wait for the sights and sounds that will depict Rob behaving like every other zombie. But he hadn’t. Where the others had torn apart their victims Rob had a very vampire response. His fangs had descended, just as they always had, and he went for the woman’s throat.

Yes, he’d still killed her, and I have no intention of sharing that fact with Rob himself. However, when the scientists had peered in through the reinforced bars of their trap’s door they found a vampire and the body of a girl, a girl with perfect puncture wounds at her throat. That had never happened during previous experiments. Before Rob there’d always been spilled blood and a pile off bones, bones which had been picked clean.

Rob had looked at them then, aware and sated and asked a very simple question. “Who am I?”

“You are subject 1352.” One of the scientists answered him.

“How?” Another asked, flipping through the papers on his clipboard. “What makes him different? Especially him, of all people. There’s nothing special about his death or his storage.”

“He fed on her, the other girl, the sister. It must have altered him. Her blood is the key and it’s in his system. She’s what we need to bring about the rebirth of the Strix. For now she’s given us something else, our Paladins. We can use 1352’s blood, his venom, whatever markers the whore bestowed upon him. Mixed with what we have from her sister we can create an army.”

As I come back to the present I realise I’m responsible for each and every Paladin, just as I am for each and every Strix. It doesn’t surprise me as much as it may once have done. It’s not a pleasant realisation but it’s not as shocking to me as it would’ve been year ago. The prophets of antiquity had been correct, I am the destroyer, not necessarily by my actions but certainly by my blood.

“Well?” Rob prompts me softly, his fingers trailing tenderly over my cheek as he tries to asses my emotions. “What did you learn?”

Leaning forward so my lips brush his I breathe in his aroma, his fragrance, the scent of his life. How strange to be the reason for his death and twice over to have given him life as well. My blood had made him into a Senate puppet and I loathe myself for that. Yet it’s still preferable to me that he’d killed in the Senate’s name, that he’d tortured me, than for him to have been locked in that vault and left to rot away.

“You were the first. The first to cling to some form of life. You were the first Paladin and they used you to make the others.”

“How?” His frown is deep, his brown eyes locked on mine. He may not want to remember but he does crave understanding, just as I had.

Tilting my head I take his hand, pressing his fingers to the pulse point at my throat. “You lived for a century. You could have had your pick of so many women, vampire or human. Yet you claimed me as your Mina. In the years we were together how many times did you feed on me? How much of my blood did you take? It’s what made you react differently; I’d already started to change you.” An ironic laugh escapes me as I repeat words which had often been said to me while I was a patial-turned, “Even we don’t fully understand the change, how much is the blood and how much is the venom.”

“So anyone who’s fed on you could become Paladin, rather than a zombie, if they’re bitten?” There’s more to that question than he’ll admit to, the question of how many vampires I’ve fed.

“Theoretically,” I answer honestly, “but that isn’t an issue. I might have traded in sex but I didn’t ever sell my blood, Rob. Until Tul there’d only been one person I’d allowed to drink from me. As I’ve already made you both Strix there’s no one left to become Paladin that way. What I give to heal those I’ve fed on isn’t enough, so it won’t affect my human donors either.”

Rob grins, a charmingly boyish grin considering what’s going on around us. His joy is endearing, as pleased as he is that I’d retained some fidelity. “Only me and Keep?”

Looking down I don’t want to meet his eye as I admit, “And Geordie, when he partially turned me. I didn’t let him feed by choice; I just wasn’t strong enough to fight him off. Tul killed him for what he did though, so he’s not going to convert now.”

Still smiling, Rob tips my head up to look at me. “So, only me and Keep then?”

I guess Geordie doesn’t count for much. It’s enough for Rob that I’d only ever chosen the two of them. At my confirmation he kisses me deeply, “Good,” he murmurs as he pulls away. “And thank you.”

“You’re thanking me?”

“Absolutely. No matter what tomorrow brings, right now I’m alive. We’re alive. That’s down to you.”

It’s true. No matter what, right now I still have both of them. The adoration in my heart swells, strong enough that I could cry with the bittersweet ache of it. When I put my hand out for Tul he steps into my embrace immediately, his arm slipping around my waist to hold me close.

“We’re alive,” he repeats, “and I love you.” He echoes my thoughts, his emotions reflecting mine and adapting to match them in every way possible, just as Rob’s do. It’s perfectly natural when Tul’s hand slips into Rob’s, urged on by my emotions and possibly by something deeper we’re not ready to explore.  We’re alive. Right now that’s all that matters. And Johan doesn’t so much as blink at Tul’s display of affection.