The Shadows

FIVE

In the training center’s medical suite, Luchas, son of Lohstrong, lay on his back in a hospital bed with his torso and head propped up on pillows. His broken body was stretched out before him, rather like a landscape raked by bombs, scars and missing pieces transforming that which had previously functioned normally and well into a hodgepodge of painful, debilitating dysfunction.

His left leg was the biggest problem.

Ever since he had been rescued from that oil drum the lessers had imprisoned him in, he had been in a period of “rehabilitation.”

Odd word for what was really going on for him. The official definition, as he had looked it up on a tablet, was to restore someone or something to its former state of normal functioning.

After so many months of physical and occupational therapy, however, he was confident in concluding that the nightly mental and bodily grind of movements both small and large was getting him no closer to his former self than it was successfully turning back time. The only things he knew for sure were: he was in pain; he still couldn’t walk; and the four walls of this hospital room, that were all he had known since he had been locked in that cramped stasis, were driving him insane.

Not for the first time, he wondered how his life had come to this.

And that was stupid. He knew the facts oh, so well. The night of the raids, the slayers had infiltrated his family’s regal home, as they had so many others. They had slaughtered his father and his mahmen, and done the same to his sister. When they had come to him, they had decided to spare his life so that he could be used as a guinea pig, a test for whether a vampire could be turned into a lesser. Incapacitating him, they had packed him away in an oil drum at some location and had stored him in the Omega’s blood.

There had been no experimentation, however. They had lost interest in him, or forgotten about him, or some other outcome had transpired.

Unable to get free, he had suffered in the black viscous void, living but barely alive, waiting for his doom to come, for what had felt like an eternity.

Unsure whether he had been in some way turned.

His mind, once a thing he had held with great pride for its scholarly achievement and capacity, had become as crippled as his body, twisting in on itself, once clear pathways of thought tangling into a dark nightmare of paranoia and terror.

And then his brother, the one he had never had time for, the one he’d looked down upon, the one he’d always felt so superior to . . . had arrived and become his savior. Qhuinn, the deviant with the blue eye and the green eye, the family embarrassment with the critical defect, the one who had been kicked out of the house and therefore not at home when the attack occurred, had turned out to be the only reason he had gotten free.

That male had also turned out to be the strongest member of the bloodline, living and working with the Black Dagger Brotherhood, fighting with honor, defending the Race against the enemy with distinction.

Whilst Luchas, the former golden boy, the heir to the mantle that no longer existed . . . was now the one with the defects.

Karma?

He lifted his now-mangled hand, staring at the stubs that were all that were left of four out of his five fingers.

Probably.

The knock upon the door was soft, and as he inhaled, he caught the scents on the other side. Bracing himself, he pulled the sheets up higher on his thin chest.

The Chosen Selena wasn’t alone, as she had been last evening.

And he knew what this was about.

“Come in,” he said in a voice he still didn’t recognize. Ever since his ordeal, his speech had been huskier, deeper.

Qhuinn came in first, and for a moment, Luchas recoiled. Whenever he had seen his brother previously, the male had been in civilian garb. Not tonight. He’d clearly come fresh from the theater of conflict, black leather covering his powerful body, weapons strapped on his hips, his thighs . . . his chest.

Luchas frowned as he noticed two particular fighting implements: His brother had a pair of black daggers upon his sternum, the handles facing down.

Strange, he thought. It was his understanding that such blades were reserved only for members of the Black Dagger Brotherhood.

Mayhap they allowed their soldiers to wear them as well now?

“Hey,” Qhuinn said.

Behind him, the Chosen Selena was silent as a ghost, her white robes floating around her slender body, her dark hair woven up high on her head in the traditional style of her sacred order.

“Greetings, sire,” she said with an elegant bow.

Glancing down at his leg, Luchas wanted desperately to get out of bed and pay her the respect she was due. Not an option. The limb was, as always, wrapped up tight in white gauze from toe to knee, and underneath that sterile dressing? Flesh that would not heal, the heat of the infection simmering like a pot of water on the verge of breaking into a boil.

“So they tell me you’ve stopped feeding,” Qhuinn said.

Luchas looked away, wishing there was a window so that he could feign distraction.

“Well?” Qhuinn demanded. “Is that true?”

“Chosen,” Luchas murmured. “Will you kindly permit us a moment alone?”

“But of course. I shall await your summoning.”

The door shut silently. And Luchas found that all of the oxygen in the room appeared to have departed with the female.

Qhuinn pulled a chair over to the bedside and sat down, propping his elbows on his knees. His shoulders were so wide, the leather jacket he had on creaked in protest.

“What’s going on, Luchas?” he asked.

“This could have waited. You shouldn’t have come in from fighting.”

“Not according to your vital signs.”

“So the doctor called you in, did she?”

“She talked to me, yes.”

Luchas closed his eyes. “I had a . . .” He cleared his throat. “Before all of this, I’d had a vision of what I would be doing, what my future was going to be. I was . . .”

“You were going to be like Father.”

“Yes. I wanted . . . all the things I had been taught defined a life as worth living.” He lifted his lids and glared at his body. “This was not it. This . . . I am as a young is. People tending to my needs, bringing me food, washing me, wiping me. I am a brain trapped in a broken vessel. I do nothing for myself—”

“Luchas—”

“No!” He slashed his mutilated hand through the air. “Do not placate me with promises of some future health. It’s been nine months, brother mine. Preceded by a captivity in Hell that lasted a century. I’m done with being a prisoner. Done with it.”

“You can’t kill yourself.”

“I know. Then I do not enter the Fade. But if I don’t eat, and I don’t feed, that”—he jabbed a finger at his leg—“will get the best of me and carry me off. Not suicide. Death by sepsis—isn’t that what Doc Jane is so worried about?”

With a sharp motion, Qhuinn took off his jacket and let it land on the floor. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Luchas put his hands over his face. “How can you say that . . . after all the cruelty in our household . . .”

“Not your doing. That was the ’rents.”

“I participated.”

“You apologized.”

At least that was one thing he’d done right. “Qhuinn, let me go. Please. Just let me . . . go.”

The silence lasted so long, Luchas began to breathe easier, thinking that his argument had been accepted.

“I know what it’s like to not have hope,” Qhuinn said roughly. “But destiny can surprise you.”

Luchas dropped his arms and laughed bitterly. “Not in a good way, I’m afraid. Not in a good way—”

“You’re wrong—”

“Stop—”

“Luchas. I’m telling you—”

“I’m a fucking cripple!”

“So was I.” Qhuinn pointed to his eyes. “All my life.”

Luchas turned away, staring at the cream-colored wall. “There’s nothing you can say, Qhuinn. It’s over. I’m tired of fighting for a life I don’t want.”

Another silence stretched out. Eventually, Qhuinn cursed under his breath. “You just need to feed and get your strength back—”

“I will e’er refuse her vein. You might as well accept this now and not waste any further time on arguments I find unpersuasive. I am done.”

As Selena waited in the corridor, exhaustion cloaked her in heavy folds that were no less real for being invisible.

And yet she was antsy. Fidgeting with her robing, her hair, her hands.

She did not like time that was unconsumed by her duties. With nothing to occupy herself, her thoughts and fears became too loud to contain within her skull.

And yet she supposed there was a utility in this solitude. If she could stand to take advantage of it.

What she needed to do as she stood out here was practice her good-bye. She should try to compose the words she wanted to speak before she ran out of time. She should get up the courage that was going to be required to say aloud that which was in her heart.

She was going to follow through on the impulse to tell Trez good-bye.

Of the many people she would leave behind, the Primale and her Chosen sisters, the Brothers and their shellans, Trez was the one whom she mourned already. Even though she hadn’t seen him in . . . many, many nights.

Even though she hadn’t been alone with him in . . . many, many months.

In fact, after they had ended their . . . relationship, or whatever it was, he had all but moved out of the mansion. No matter what time she had come or gone, she had not seen him face-to-face, and only on occasion caught a glimpse of his big shoulders as he headed in an opposite direction from her.

That he was avoiding her had been a treacherous relief at first. It was going to be hardest leaving him, and harder still if they had continued their assignations. But lately, as her time grew shorter and shorter, she had come to decide that she needed to tell him. . . .

Dearest Virgin Scribe, what was she going to say?

Selena looked up and down the corridor, as if the perfect little monologue might obligingly march on by, at a pace leisurely enough so that she could memorize it.

For all she knew, he had forgotten their time together. By his own admission, he was well versed in finding female diversions of the human variety.

No doubt he had wiped the slate well clean.

And then there was the reality of him being promised to another.

She dropped her head into her hands. For her entire life, she had taken comfort and purpose from her sacred duty—so it was a shock to discover that as she drew closer and closer to her demise, the one thing she was driven to get right was her departure from a male who was not her own. With whom she had had an affair of the very shortest duration.

There had been many nights that she had spent in her bedroom up at the Great Camp, attempting to convince herself that what had happened with Trez was pure folly, but now, as time was running out? A strange clarity was focusing her. It mattered naught the why. Only that she accomplished the goal of telling him how she felt before she died.

She did not want to approach him too soon, however—rather embarrassing to pour out her soul to a potentially indifferent vessel and then linger for nights, weeks, months.

If only her expiration came with a date, as if she were a carton of milk—

Qhuinn emerged from the hospital room, and the tight expression on his harsh face cleared away her tangle of preoccupation.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “He is refusing again?”

“I can’t get through to him.”

“The will to live can be complicated.” She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “Know that I am here for you both. If at any time he changes his mind, I shall come.”

“You are a female of worth, you really are.”

He gave her a quick, hard embrace and then stalked off down the corridor, as if he were leaving the facility. But then he paused in front of the closed door to Doc Jane’s main examination room. After a moment, he pushed through.

As she prayed there was a solution for the two brothers, another wave of exhaustion, the bigger brother of the one that had swept her off-kilter in front of Tohrment, shambled through her body, making her throw out a hand to the wall lest she fall down.

Panic o’ertook her, her heart beating wildly in her chest, her head flooding with do this, do that, run away. What if this was an attack? What if this was her final—

“Hey, are you all right?”

Training her wild eyes toward the sound, she found that Tohrment was coming out of the exam room.

“I . . .”

All at once, the whirling sensation receded unexpectedly, as if she had been approached by a mugger who, having been confronted by the Brother, had reconsidered his attack.

Beneath her robing, she lifted one leg and then the other, finding none of the deadly resistance she was so terrified of.

“Selena?” he said as he strode toward her.

Leaning back against the wall, she went to brush over her chignon, and discovered that her forehead was damp with sweat.

“I believe I shall tender myself up to the Sanctuary.” She blew out her breath. “I shall refresh myself there. It is needed.”

“That is a great idea. But are you sure you’ll be able to—”

“I’m just fine.”

Closing her eyes, Selena concentrated and . . .

. . . with a twirl of the world and a spin of her molecules that her brain, rather than something in her body, initiated, she was relocated up to the Scribe Virgin’s sacred, peaceful place.

Instantly, sure as if she had taken a vein, her body was both eased and strengthened, but her mind did not follow suit—in spite of the lovely greens of the tree leaves and the blades of grass, the pastel colors of the tulips that were perpetually in bloom, the resplendent white marble of the dormitory, the Treasury, the Temple of the Sequestered Scribes, the Reflecting Pool, she felt pursued even though she was in arguable safety.

Then again, having a mortal disease of indeterminate duration made it difficult to tell the difference between symptoms that were on the “normal” spectrum, and ones that had greater portent.

She stayed where she arrived for quite some time, fearing that if she moved, she might trigger the expression of her disease. But eventually, she went upon a wander. The temperature of the still air was perfect, neither too hot nor too cold, and the sky overhead glowed a blue that was the color of a cornflower sapphire, and the baths gleamed under the strange ambient light . . . and she felt as though she were alone in a dark alley in downtown Caldwell.

How much time? she wondered. How many more promenades did she have left?

Shivering, she pulled her robing closer to her body as a familiar sense of sadness and impotence barged into her, crushing her chest, making it difficult to breathe. But she did not give in to tears. She had cried them all out some time ago, the why-me’s, what-if’s, and need-more-time’s over now—proof that even boiling water could be gotten used to if you stayed within it long enough.

She had come to terms with the reality that not only had she not been granted a full life, she had not really lived much a’tall—and so, yes, of course she must tender a good-bye to Trez. He was the closest she had gotten to something that was hers, something private rather than prescribed, attained, for however briefly, rather than assigned.

In saying farewell to him, she was acknowledging that part of her life that had been her own.

She would approach him on the morrow.

To hell with pride . . .

After a while, she discovered that her feet had taken her to the cemetery, and given the direction of her thoughts, she was not surprised.

Chosen were essentially immortal, brought into existence long ago as part of the Scribe Virgin’s breeding program where the strongest males were mated to the most intelligent females to ensure the survival of the species. In the beginning, the female breeding stock were quarantined up here, with the Primale serving as the sole male for insemination. As millennia passed, however, the role of the Chosen evolved such that they served the Scribe Virgin spiritually as well, recording the history of the Race as it unfolded upon the Earth, worshiping the Mother of the species, and serving as blood sources for unmated members of the Brotherhood—for whom some broke rank, and accepted mortality in exchange for love, freedom, the chance to bear young who would not be condemned to rigid roles.

And then the current Primale had come along and relaxed even further the roles.

Selena looked in through the graveyard’s arched trellis; the marble statues of her sisters managed to loom o’er her in spite of the fact that they were quite some distance away and sequestered within their verdant bordering.

For all the good the ancient breeding program had done, there had been one treacherous result from it, one prison that, however modern-thinking this Primale was, he could not exempt Selena and her sisters from.

Deep in the cells of the Chosen, there lay dormant a critical weakness, a defect that came about precisely because of the limited pool of breeding that was supposed to make vampires invincible.

A sacrifice to the intention of strength. Proof that the Mother of the Race could, and would, be curtailed by Mother Nature.

The statues beyond filled her with terror. The elegant figures within the encircled acre were not actually made of stone—not in the sense that they had been carved from blocks. They were the frozen bodies of those who suffered from the same disease she had.

These were dead bodies of her sisters who had walked the path her own feet trod upon, frozen in poses that they had chosen, sealed in a fine mineral plaster that, coupled with the strange atmospheric properties of the Sanctuary, preserved them for eternity.

The trembling came over her anew as a wave—

—and once again, the quaking did not last.

This time, however, the cessation did not usher in a return to normalcy.

As if the sight of those frozen in the final stage had been some kind of inspiration for what ailed her, the large joints in her lower body locked tight, and then so did her spine, her elbows, her neck, her wrists. She became utterly fixed in place, immobile whilst fully aware, her heart continuing to beat, her eyes undimmed, her panicked mind hyper-aware.

With a shout, she attempted to shake herself free of it all, tried to pull her legs up, fought to move her feet, her arms, anything.

There was but a slight give on the left side, and that rendered her off balance. Upon a pitch and spin, she landed face-first on the ground, the fine filaments of grass getting into her nose, her mouth, her eyes.

Knowing she was in danger of suffocating, she put all the strength she had into wrenching her head to the side so that her air passages were clear.

And that would prove to be the last move she made.

From her vantage point, she was a camera overturned, the odd-angle view of the Sanctuary like something projected upon a screen: blades of grass close-up and big as trees, with the Reflecting Pool’s temple far in the distance, nothing but the roof showing.

“Help . . .” she called out. “Help . . .”

Straining against her bones, she tried to remember the last time she’d seen any of her sisters up here. It had been . . .

Too many nights ago. And even then, no one came this far into the landscape, the cemetery being rarely visited at its peripheral site save for sacred remembrance rituals—that were not due to occur for months.

“Help!”

With a colossal pull, she fought against her body. But all that transpired was a twitch of her hand, the fingers dragging against the lawn.

That was it.

Tears flooded her eyes and her heart hammered and she wished absurdly that she had not e’er asked for an expiration date . . .

From out of the depths of her emotions, an image of Trez’s face—his almond-shaped black eyes, his cropped black hair, his dark skin—came to the forefront of her mind.

She should have said her good-bye sooner.

“Trez . . .” she moaned against the grass.

As her consciousness receded, it was a door that shut softly, but solidly, blocking out the world around her . . .

. . . such that she was unaware, sometime later, when a small, silent figure approached her from behind, floating above the grass, a brilliant light spilling out from beneath flowing black robes.