Four Fangs

Interlude - Astrid

"This childish game of yours needs to stop, Ein," I said.

The man in a gray coat looked away from his notes, one hand reaching down to pet the dull brown hair of the pale girl sitting as his feet. Nolla, the girl, stared blankly ahead, the dim lighting of the makeshift lab reflecting in her eyes and revealing the emptiness beneath.

"If you continue to refuse my request, I will stop making the drugs for her and take the Blue Moon myself."

He thrust a hand into his pocket and aimed a small cylinder at me, finger hovering over the trigger, a glowing purple touch recognition scanner. Though I hadn't cracked it yet, I was getting close. And once I do, you'll be my blood slave until the day you die. "Ask me one more time and I'll blow your head off. Not even you can come back from that."

Alerted by her master's voice, Nolla leapt up into a fighting stance, her tendrils waving threateningly in the cramped quarters.

My mouth watered, and I felt my pupils dilating as I imagined torrents of his blood gushing down my throat. Soon. "Have you forgotten what we're trying to do here? How are we ever going to progress if you won't let us study a type two?"

"But what about our work with the type ones and threes?" a small, female voice said from the corner.

"Shut the fuck up, Tatiana," I said, my hunger growing. "You should be grateful you're even alive. No one made me lug your body all the way to Russia and get a type one to turn you."

"Don't act like you did this out of charity. You needed one of us to continue our work, and Eric's body was burnt too badly to be of any use to you. I never wanted immortality, and especially not like this." Webbed, gnarled red patches of skin bulged around Tatiana's eyes, the only uncovered part of her face, and silver claws poked out through the ends of her long, black gloves.

Stalking over to her, I grabbed her by the waist and felt ribs beneath a thin layer of skin and sinew. "You better start eating more, or I'll lock you up. There's no way I'm risking you going berserk again."

"Well you should have thought about that before you turned me into a goddamn monster," she spat.

I let go, and she dropped to the floor, curling up in pain and hunger.

"Any progress on locating Sera?" Ein said.

At the mention of her name, I clenched my fist so hard my veins popped out. That bitch. She had taken everything from me in one fell swoop, and now my plan had been set back at least one hundred years, and likely much more than that. And that wasn't even the worst of it — the last thing Aurora predicted is that Sera would kill the world eater and destroy the earth. Thanks to Sera, the apocalypse had been moved up forty years. I had to stop her as soon as possible.

I tossed the chess piece in the air — a red knight. "No, she's completely gone off the grid. Probably has a fake id, fake everything. My program can't find her, not on the traffic cameras, not on anything. But she can't keep it up forever; we'll find her, eventually."

"We can't let her meet the Blue Moon."

"Yeah, I know." That would be the worst-case scenario.

"The Sycul won't pierce through her armor, and she's immune to heat. We don't have any good weapons to defeat her."

"Yes, we do." I said. "We have me. I never taught her all my tricks, and I should be the one to do it. I can win."

He shook his head. "It's too risky. She's not stupid — if you lose, she won't make the mistake of not making sure you're dead a second time."

"Well, no need to worry about that now. We have to find her first." I twisted a wiry black strand of hair around my finger. "Do we have any Amplifiers left?"

His eyes widened. "Yes, but... You remember what happened last time, right?"

"What of it?"

"But you'd go berserk. A type three like you going berserk... It'd be a repeat of Casablanca."

"Sacrifice a few million lives to save a few billion. Not a hard question; it's simple math."

"Who knows if you'd even go after her though? And she'd probably just run away."

That is a problem. "If only we could control the berserk state somehow."

"The military and government aren't backing us anymore." The squalid, two-story house was a far cry from the high tech BioPsi lab I had been working in months ago. "Your hacking can't get us enough money to research a new Amplifier."

"You're right, that's not an option. If I didn't have to search for Sera all day, I could take more jobs and get us a better setup."

Ein scribbled an illegible note into his tablet. "What about Limiters? How many of those do we have?"

"Enough, but injecting her would be the hard part. You have to get close."

He scratched out the note. "Does she sleep?"

"Unlikely," I said, "she barely slept before." And after what she did, I doubt she'd be able to.

Leaning back in his chair, he clicked off the tablet and put it on the desk. "That's all I have for now."

"We still have time. Keep thinking." I got up from my computer. "Watch my program, I'm going to eat." I yanked Tatiana's arm, dragging her off the floor. "You're coming with me."

"No," she growled, ripping free of my grip and scoring several gashes on the inside of my arm. I summoned my power, letting the corrosive acid collect in my palm. The smell of fear radiated off her and she froze, knowing the special variety of pain of your nerves being burned off and devoured. "Don't make me do this," I said.

She didn't fight me this time and followed me downstairs.

"Bring the bleach in ten," I called out behind me, ready to vent my frustration and fill my stomach. "We'll need it."