“No, I meant the other part,” Alex said, grinning. “I think maybe I forgot my rape whistle back with my other pants.”
Katya laughed, long and hard, and Alex felt good about it. He was pretty sure it was the first time he’d really ever gotten her approval.
“Cute, but I’m afraid you aren’t at all my type,” Katya said, digging in her pocket, and then tossing him something. Alex caught it in midair and examined it. It looked like a hacky-sack knitted from red and blue colored yarn with something heavy and dense at the core. “Present from Eerie for the big winner.”
“Really?” Alex asked, examining the object closely. He was starting to think it was maybe actually a small pillow, or something similar. “Wait a minute, Katya. You know Eerie?”
“Did you think the sewing needles were an affectation?” Katya asked, looking surprised. “Never underestimate the power of the Academy’s Sewing Circle. We are a force to be reckoned with, and Eerie is a charter member. She taught me to cross-stitch, so I owed her a favor. She asked me to give you that before we left.”
“Great. Um, what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Katya said. “But it comes with two instructions. She said to put it underneath your pillow, when you sleep if you miss her. Isn’t that too cute? And she said that if you are ever in deep trouble, and you need her help, you’re supposed to squeeze it really hard.”
“Okay…” Alex said thoughtfully. He held it up close to his face, and it smelled vaguely familiar, some kind of heady incense. He weighed it thoughtfully in his palm, wondering what was inside it, wondering what Eerie had thought when she had made it, if it had been before their fight, if there was in fact something for him to come back to at The Academy. By the time he finished considering, Katya had replaced the water in the damaged glass out on the step and was shaking her red cup at him expectantly.
“Okay, big guy, whenever you’re ready,” she said, grinning, “I need a refill.”
Alex sighed, stretched out his arm, and started to range in on the target.
Most of the time, when a day went completely wrong, Chris only realized the problem in retrospect. Looking back on the day, often from bed, he would think to himself, ‘That was a very bad day,’ and catalogue the various mistakes that had made it so. But on this particular day, he knew the precise moment the day went bad without a shred of doubt in his mind. It would require very little preamble in his daily report, assuming he managed to survive to submit it. It would read simply:
‘Alice Gallow walked around the corner while we were still in the outskirts of Portland, hours before the plan was supposed to start.’
And that would be an exact record of the events as he watched his chances of having the kind of day that ended comfortably in the arms of his favorite Slovakian prostitute fall into the ground, through the crust of the earth, and stop somewhere uncomfortably close to hell.
“You fucking piece of shit,” Alice snarled, starting toward him, clutching her shotgun. “Christopher Feld. You undead asshole. How is it that you are walking around and nobody told me?”
Chris wasn’t stupid enough to try to argue. He ran, which, upon further reflection, was almost as stupid. He went tumbling through his own shadow, and then fell out of one in front of Alice, but about five feet off the ground. He hit the ground hard, right on his tailbone, and he had barely started to writhe before Alice got her hands on him.
“Explain,” Alice hissed through gritted teeth. “Explain good or I gut you right now.”
“Do you even remember, Alice?” Chris asked, laughing like someone with nothing to lose. Which, at this juncture, was probably an accurate description of his present circumstances. “You cried over my body, you know. It was a very touching scene, even if you didn’t know why you were doing it.”
Alice lifted him by the lapels of his very expensive jacket, pulling him close to her there-and-then-gone-again smile.
“I remember, you son of a bitch,” Alice said, shaking him back and forth. “You were supposed to kill me, but you didn’t do it. You died, fighting right next to me. You don’t have to remind me about any of that shit. Why don’t you skip to the part where you’re still alive, or whatever you vampires call it, before I decide to skip to the part where I show you what your insides look like?”
“It’s so cute,” Chris said, beaming, “the way you think that you’re angry with me. If you remembered what I had done to you over the years, I guarantee you would tear me limb from limb without hesitation. You hate me and you don’t even remember. Hell, you won’t even remember this, so what’s the harm in telling you? I’ve made you fall in love with me a dozen times, and you don’t even know how much that would disgust you.”
“You have such pretty eyes,” Alice said admiringly. “It would be a shame to have to dig them out of your skull.”
“I like it when you say things like that,” Chris said, leering. “I’ll think about that the next time we fuck.”
Mitsuru stepped forward nervously, putting one hand on Alice’s shoulder.
“Alice, be careful,” Mitsuru warned urgently. “He’s trying to get under your skin, make you lose control.”
“It won’t work,” Alice said, pinching Chris’s face between her fingers.
“The boss decided to let you run around for a little while, but I guess eventually even he lost interest,” Chris continued, his face white but his eyes full of laughter. “Since you developed your convenient little memory problem, we’ve been passing you around like the last cigarette in the pack.”
“Actually, maybe I am going to kill him,” Alice said through gritted teeth.
“No,” the girl said, from somewhere right behind them. “You won’t.”
It wasn’t possible, of course. Mitsuru was running a telepathic surveillance protocol that gave her something of a sixth sense; nothing that had even a vestige of thought could approach her without her knowing about it. She did notice the girl at the last moment, but by then it was far too late to react.
She went for Alice first, not that it mattered. Mitsuru didn’t see anything other than a blur, long blond hair whipping through the air, and then a series of impacts with Alice that sent the shotgun spinning away on the ground and left the Auditor on her knees, clutching her head, bleeding from her shattered nose.
Mitsuru caught the first blow on her forearm, a wide strike coming in high for the head the she could barely see. The force behind it was terrific, and Mitsuru’s arm went numb on impact. She finally got a good look at her then; a girl, no more than seventeen, blond hair hanging wild and long, baggy grey pants and a midriff-exposing tank top. She looked as if she could be going to play an intramural softball game. But she moved like quicksilver, and hit so hard that Mitsuru thought she might have broken her arm. The kick the girl threw was a straightforward push kick, delivered from the hips, normally a simple attack to avoid, something Mitsuru should have seen coming. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had landed that strike on her, even in training, but this girl did, slamming her foot into Mitsuru’s solar plexus hard enough to bruise her sternum, knocking the air from her lungs and sending her tumbling back into the dust at Xia’s feet. Mitsuru barely had time to catch her breath before she saw a disturbance in the dust in the air that meant that the girl had passed by her, no doubt heading for Xia. There was the sound of a fire springing briefly to life, then a sequence of sickening crunches.
Chris stood up, brushing ineffectually at the dirt and dust that flecked his ice-cream white suit.
“Alice, meet Leigh. Leigh, Alice. Be nice to her, Leigh-my-dear. She really gave her all to try and save you a few months ago.”
Mitsuru might have been able to make it to her feet. She wasn’t hurt so badly as to make that impossible. But she wasn’t sure what she would manage to do when she got up, so she waited instead, and watched the vampire- girl strut calmly back to where Chris stood. And she could only be a vampire, the way she’d bypassed Mitsuru’s surveillance, the way she moved like a machine built from skin-and-bone. Mitsuru didn’t have a shred of doubt about it.
“Now,” Chris said, looking down at Alice happily. “Let me introduce you to the very last people you will ever meet.”
Alex managed to slip out of the living room while Emily and Anastasia were engrossed in watching a strange movie that was either about Julia Child, or some self-pitying despicable hipster trying to be Julia Child, he couldn’t tell which. He was exhausted from spending the last week practicing his protocol with Katya on the beach, and he headed immediately for bed. He was brushing his teeth when he found the little cushion with the dense center that Eerie had made for him. He looked at it for a long time before shrugging and sliding it beneath his pillow.
