“Why should I trust you?”
“You shouldn’t. If I were you, I wouldn’t either.”
“Well then,” he said.
She didn’t like the feel of the steel at her neck. She was sure she could disarm, even defeat this man. But something held her back. He knew things about Archaics. The guns she held felt heavier and different in her hands. Unlike other firearms she had handled before. And she’d seen them kill the Archaics. He also understood that decapitation would kill her. What if the blade he held was blessed with an elemental? With even a slight cut, she could be weakened or even killed before she had a chance to counter him.
She sensed a new threat. There were more Archaics stalking them, and those inside the saloon were growing restless, stirring, tired of waiting for Hollister to enter the saloon. She and Hollister were outnumbered. The only advantage they held were that these were new initiates. Freshly turned, they acted like predators, a pack mentality overcoming them, hunting and feeding their only thoughts. Not strategy. Not separating Hollister and Shaniah from each other, making it easier to overwhelm them.
She remembered her turning. It had happened on the steppes of Eastern Europe almost fifteen hundred years ago. Her family were peasant farmers, and Turkish raiders constantly preyed on her village. Her husband, Dimitri, had been killed in a raid two years earlier. She was eighteen years old. They had never had children and she was nearly past the age to marry.
The raiders came during harvest, the villagers were simple people, not fighters, and they had no chance- doubly so, when they discovered that these raiders were not like the others. There was something wrong with them. They didn’t just rape and pillage; their faces were strange-and God help her, but they tore at the necks of her parents, her sisters, and their children, and drank their blood. And one of them fell on Shaniah and she felt the fangs sink into her, and a bloody finger was forced into her mouth.
At first nothing happened, then, in a few hours, she began to change. Some of the people of her village could not tolerate the change and died as the raiders drained them of their blood. But she and some of the others became wild with blood lust. They joined the pack and they hunted. And since then, she had been an Archaic. Only, unlike her brethren in her homeland, she kept her human memories. This puzzled the Old Ones. No Archaic had ever remembered their human life. It made them believe she was ideally suited to deal with the oncoming encroachment of humankind. It was one of the reasons she had been chosen leader over Malachi.
Shaniah knew it took time within the change for primal urges to recede and for intellectual capacity to reassert itself. Shaniah remembered her first weeks as an Archaic. She understood that, right now, the newly turned Archaics in the saloon could think of nothing but killing and blood. With time, they would control it; and the longer they survived, the easier it would become.
The major still hadn’t moved. His eyes never left hers. Something in his look reminded her of Dimitri, her long-dead husband, a human she should no longer remember. Hollister’s eyes were dark, like his had been. He was beginning to show a faint growth of beard on his face, most likely because he found shaving unimportant. His duty came first. At least that is what she imagined. It suited him, giving a clearer definition to his chiseled features.
She snapped back to the moment, silently cursing herself for letting the human distract her.
“Major, please. I beg of you. Trust me,” she said.
“Why?” he asked again.
“If you look slowly to your right, just slightly, you will see that there are Archaics standing in the street. We’ve only got a few seconds.”
Hollister pivoted his head, just as she’d said. Sure enough, he saw three Archaics in the street in his peripheral vision. He could hear the rasp of their breath.
He made a snap judgment.
“Can you shoot?” he asked her.
She nodded.
“The gun in your left hand… aim for the heart.”
The three Archaics leapt at them.
Chapter Forty-two
The sound of the gunfire was impossibly loud in what had been a momentary calm. Jonas had to admit Shaniah knew how to fight. She shot two of the creatures dead center in the heart and they descended with agonizing screams into piles of ash. The third one was going to be trouble.
It landed on the wooden sidewalk in front of Hollister and reached for him. The knife was one of Monkey Pete’s inventions… a bowie that had silver inlaid in a groove along the blade. It had also been dipped in holy water before he left the train.
As the Archaic advanced, he slashed it across the arm and it howled in pain and drew back. Jonas lunged forward, driving the blade into the creature’s chest and twisted it through, leaving the creature in a pile of ash.
The sound of growls and footsteps could be heard coming from inside the saloon.
“Come on,” Shaniah said, stuffing one of the guns in her belt. Grabbing him by the arm, she spun him past her so she was between him and the doorway.
Five more Archaics burst through the door. She fired the pistol loaded with silver bullets and hit three of them, sending them spinning to the ground stunned and nearly unconscious.
One jumped at her and she somehow pulled a knife from her boot, pushing it into the chest of the creature. It died instantly. The fifth one stood there, eyes red, fangs snapping, studying the two of them. Shaniah raised the pistol, but before she could shoot, the creature darted back inside the darkened saloon.
Shaniah handed Hollister the pistols and he wasted no time reloading. She took the knife from the dead creature and used it to dispatch the other three, who had yet to recover from their wounds.
“Are they dead?” he asked.
“Yes. This blade is special. The reason why would take too long to explain. Right now it is enough to know it will kill either Archaic or human.”
“What do we do now-”
He was interrupted by a strange howl, loud and long, sounding like it came from inside the saloon.
“The one who escaped is calling the others,” she said, the worry evident in her voice.
“How many are there?” he asked.
“How many people were there in this town?” she replied.
He shrugged. “Not sure.”
“Most were killed,” she said. “Fed upon. But many were turned. Part of Malachi’s plan. There could be dozens of them.”
“Great,” he said.
She tensed suddenly, her head up as if she were straining to hear something.
“What is it?” he asked.
“They’re coming, Major.”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“Run!” she said.
Chapter Forty-three
It was sixty yards down the street, then down the cross street another fifty or sixty yards to the jail, but to Hollister it felt like miles. In the confusion it seemed easier to count the places where there weren’t Archaics than where there were.
She was fast. Far faster than he was, and he was not slow by any stretch. He fired as he ran, hitting his targets with the silver bullets, and after the first five or six went down screaming in pain, the others kept their distance. Yet, he and Shaniah were going to lose.
