Antithesis: The Vampire Alliance Book Three - FIRST DRAFT COMPLETED

Antithesis Chapter 16: Eve Blakethorn-Sullivan June 2013

Eve Blakethorn-Sullivan, June 2013

The Senate take more and more humans as slaves by the day. Truthfully I should be disgusted. I should want to step in. I don't though. I don't care about anything. I don't care about the way the Senate are still managing to control and terrify what remains of the vampire world. I don't care that ,while the zombies have not yet escaped, they still exist. All I feel is my own fear, my own blind horror at what I had seen. I'm sure Tess won't wait long to kill me and that knowledge is truly incapacitating.

"Eve? Eve? Are you listening? Eve!" Johan's voice finally focuses my attention. Truthfully I haven't heard a single thing he's said since taking my seat in the Briefing Room. Looking up, I notice that everyone in the room is watching me, curiously, accusingly, or in the case of my Rob and Tul with concern.

Under my hand my notepad is covered with sketches that I can't even remember drawing, images of Tess' face, swords, heads without bodies, death. How do these people expect me to just keep going? How do they expect me to focus on anything? "No," my whisper is hollow, forlorn, "I'm not listening. I can't do this." Rising to my feet my only desire is to escape back to solitude.

"We need you," Johan announces as I reach the door, "we can't survive this on our own."

"You aren't on your own," I remind him wearily, "I've given you two Strix; you don't need me anymore. You'll survive without me."

"They need you therefore I need you. Anyway, two isn't enough, you know that. Plus you are something no one else will ever be." His insistence irritates me. What does he think I can give him now?

"You'll have to come to terms with me not being around sooner or later." A sigh escapes me, "Sooner, rather than later."

"You don't know that," he uses the same arguments I've heard from Tul and Rob, as if coming from him they have more authority. "You've said yourself you don't know where or when you'll die. It could be ten, a hundred, a thousand years from now. The future could change."

"Not all futures can be changed, some of them are certainties." It's strange, to feel so world weary and yet be so unable to accept and cope with my fate with any kind of dignity. "I know who, I know how, isn't that enough?"

"Enough for what? Enough for you to crawl into a dark hole and wait for it to happen? Is that what you've become? Has Eve Blakethorn, the girl who took a vampire's place, the woman who took on the vampire nation, really become a terrified little mouse?" He spits the final word as though it were dirty. "It amazes me that Eve Sullivan, the same Eve Sullivan who gave herself to the Senate in another's place, knowing she would probably be tortured and killed, would be so cowardly."

"Johan!" A warning growl from Rob goes ignored.

"There is a difference, you know, between accepting death when there's nothing of value left to lose and accepting it when you have something to live for." What a simple truth. Every other time I had faced the possibility of death some part of me had wanted to die anyway. Right now I don't want to die. "It's not the same thing, to be ready to die easing the suffering of someone whose life you value more than your own is different to dying a stupid, pointless, death."

"Do you know it will be pointless?" demands Johan and I can't answer. I don't know any of the circumstances around my coming demise. I simply know it'll happen.

"We are dying," Johan continues forcefully, "every day more and more of our people go out for food, for weapons and don't come back. In the months since they started creating Strix we have lost ten of the people we've sent out for supplies. Yet the alternative to going out and risking our lives is to sit here and starve. Or wait for our ammunition to run out and the generators to fail so the electrified defences switch off and the enemy get in here and tear us limb from limb. Everyone in this room will probably face death soon. Yet they go out on mission after mission because it's necessary.

We're possibly about to start taking in humans too, at your suggestion, and eventually we're not going to be able to feed or protect everyone. There's no room for dead weight. If someone has the strength to help us but chooses not to then I see no alternative but to expel them and let them make their own way through this hell."