Just as he ripped it free, a black dagger streaked down-next to the soldier's ear and its penetration into the packed cave floor snapped open the male's eyes.
V's father loomed like a chain-mail fist about to fall, legs planted, dark eyes leveled. He was the biggest of all in the camp, rumored to be largest male born into the species, and his presence inspired fear for two reasons: his size and his unpredictability. His mood was ever-changing, his whims violent and capricious, but V knew the truth behind the variable temper: There was nothing that was not calibrated for effect. His father's malicious cunning ran as deep as his muscle was thick.
"Awake," the Bloodletter snapped. "You laze whilst you are feloned by a weakling."
V cringed away from his father, but started to eat, sinking his teeth into the meat and chewing as fast as he could. He would be beaten for this, likely by the both of them, so he had to consume as much as possible before the blows landed upon him.
The fat one made excuses until the Bloodletter kicked him in the sole of the foot with a spiked boot. The male went gray in the face but knew better than to cry out.
"The whys of this happenstance bore me." The Bloodletter stared at the soldier. "What shall you do about it, is my inquiry."
Without taking a breath the soldier curled up a fist, leaned over, and slammed it into V's side. V lost the mouthful he had as the impact drove the breath from his lungs and the meat from his mouth. As he gasped, he picked the piece up from the dirt and pushed it back between his lips. It tasted salty from the cave's floor.
As the beating commenced, V ate through the blows until he felt his calf bone bend until it nearly snapped. He let out a scream and lost the deer leg. Someone else picked it up and ran away with it.
All along, the Bloodletter laughed without smiling, the barking sound coming from lips that were straight and thin as knives. And then he ended it. With no effort at all he grabbed the fat soldier by the back of the neck and threw him against the rock wall.
The Bloodletter's spiked boots planted in front of V's face. "Get me my dagger."
V blinked dry eyes and tried to move.
There was a creak of leather, and then the Bloodletter's face was before V. "Get me my dagger, boy. Or I will have you take the whores' place tonight in the pit."
The soldiers who had gathered behind his father cackled, and someone threw a stone that hit V where his leg had been injured.
"My dagger, boy."
Vishous speared his little fingers into the dirt and dragged himself over to the weapon. Though a mere two feet from him, the blade seemed miles away. When he finally closed his palm upon it, he needed both hands to free it from the dirt, he was so weak. His stomach was rolling from pain, and as he pulled at the blade, he threw up the meat he had stolen.
After the retching passed, he held up the dagger to his father, who had risen back to his full height.
"Stand," the Bloodletter said. "Or think you I should bow to the worthless?"
V struggled into a sitting position and couldn't fathom how he was going to get his full body up, as he could barely lift his shoulders. He switched the dagger to his left hand, planted his right one on the dirt, and pushed. The pain was so great his eyesight went black and then a miraculous thing occurred. Some kind of radiant light overtook him from the inside out, as if sunshine had swept into his veins and cleaned the pain until he was free of it. His eyesight returned and he saw that his hand was glowing.
Now was not the time to wonder. He peeled himself from the ground, rising up while trying to put no weight on his leg. With a hand that shook, he presented the dagger to his father.
The Bloodletter stared back for a heartbeat, as if he'd never expected V to get to his feet. Then he took the weapon and turned away.
"Someone knock him back down. His boldness offends me."
V landed in a heap when the order was followed, and at once, the radiance left him and agony returned. He waited for other blows to land, but when he heard a crowd's roar, he knew that the losers' punishments would be the amusement for the day, not him.
As he lay in the swamp of his misery, as he tried to breathe through the pounding of his battered body, he pictured a female in a white robe coming unto him and wrapping him up in her arms. With soft words she cradled him and stroked his hair, easing him.
He welcomed the vision. She was his imaginary mother. The one who loved him and wanted him to be safe and warm and fed. Verily, the image of her was what kept him alive, giving him the only peace he knew.
The fat soldier leaned down, his fetid, humid breath invading Vishous's nose. "You steal from me again and you shall not heal from what I bring unto you."
The soldier spat in V's face then picked him up and slung him like worthless debris away from the dirty pallet.
Before V passed out, his last sight was of the other pretrans, who was finishing the deer leg with relish.
Chapter Six
With a curse, V disengaged from his memories, his eyes flying around the alley he was standing in, like old newspapers caught in the wind. Man, he was a wreck. The seal on his Tupperware had cracked open and his leftovers had leaked out all over the place.
Messy. Very messy.
Good thing he hadn't known then what a crock of shit the whole my-mommy-who-loves-me thing was. That would have hurt him more than any of the abuse coming his way.
He took the Primale's medallion out of his back pocket and stared at it. He was still looking at it minutes later when the thing dropped to the ground and bounced like a coin. He frowned until he realized that his "normal" hand was glowing and had burned through the strap.
Goddamn, his mother was an egomaniac. She'd brought the species into being, but that wasn't enough for her. Hell, no. She wanted herself in the mix.
Fuck it. He wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of hundreds of grandchildren. She'd sucked as a parent, so why should he give her another generation to screw over.
And besides, there was another reason why he shouldn't be the Primale. He was, after all, his father's son, so cruelty was in his DNA. How could he trust himself not to take it out on the Chosen? Those females were not to blame, and didn't deserve what would come between their legs if he were their mate. He wasn't going to do this.
V lit a hand-rolled, picked up the medallion, and left the alley, hanging a right on Trade. He badly needed a fight before the dawn came.
And he banked on finding some lessers in downtown's concrete maze.
It was a safe bet. The war between the Lessening Society and the vampires had one and only one rule of engagement: No fighting around humans. The last thing either side needed was human casualties or witnesses, so hidden battles were the name of the game, and urban Caldwell presented a fine theater for small-scale combat. Thanks to the 1970s retail exodus to the burbs, there were plenty of dark alleys and vacated buildings. Also, what few humans were on the streets were primarily worried about servicing their various vices. Which meant they were otherwise occupied, giving the police plenty to do.
As he went along, he stayed out of the pools of light cast by street lamps and splashed by cars. Thanks to the bitter night there were few pedestrians around, so he was alone as he passed McGrider's Bar and Screamer's and a new strip club that had just opened. Farther up, he walked by the Tex-Mex buffet and the Chinese restaurant that were sandwiched between competing tattoo parlors. Blocks later he went by the apartment building on Redd Avenue where Beth had lived before she met Wrath.
He was about to turn around and go back toward the heart of downtown when V stopped. Lifted his nose. Inhaled. The sent of baby powder was on the breeze, and since old biddies and babies were out of commission this late, he knew his enemy was close by.
But there was something else in the air, something that made his blood run cold.
V loosened his jacket so he could get at his daggers and started to run, tracking the scents to Twentieth Street. Twentieth was a one-way off Trade, bracketed by office buildings that were asleep this hour of night, and as he pounded down its uneven, slushy pavement, the smells got stronger.
He had a feeling he was too late.
Five blocks in he saw that he was right.
The other scent was the spilled blood of a civilian vampire, and as the clouds parted, moonlight fell on a gruesome spectacle: A posttransition male dressed in torn club clothes was beyond dead, his torso twisted, his face battered past any hope of recognition. The lesser who had done the killing was going through the vampire's pockets, no doubt hoping to find a home address as a lead for more carnage.
The slayer sensed V and looked over its shoulder. The thing was white as limestone, its pale hair, skin, and eyes matte like chalk. Big, built rugby-player solid, this one was well past his initiation, and V knew it not just because the bastard's natural pigmentations had faded out. The lesser was all business as he leaped to his feet, hands going up to his chest, body surging forward.
The two ran at each other and met as cars crashing at intersections did: grille-to-grille, weight-to-weight, force against force. And in the initial meet-and-greet, V took a ham-handed smash to his jaw, the kind of punch that made your brains slosh around in your skull. He was momentarily dazed, but managed to return the favor hard enough to spin the lesser like a top. Then he went after his opponent, grabbing onto the back of the bastard's leather jacket and flipping him off his combat boots.
V liked to grapple. And he was good at the ground game.
The slayer was fast, though, popping up off the icy pavement and throwing out a kick that shuffled V's internal organs like a deck of cards. As V stumbled backward, he tripped on a Coke bottle, blew his ankle out, and took a seat on the express train down to the asphalt. Letting his body go loose, he kept his eyes on the slayer, who moved in fast. The bastard went for V's off ankle, grabbing the shitkicker attached to it and twisting with all the power in his massive chest and arms.
V popped out a holler as he flipped face-first onto the ground, but he shut out the pain. Using his bad ankle and his arms as leverage, he pushed himself off the asphalt, brought his free leg up to his chest and hammered it back, catching the motherfucker in the knee and shattering his joint. The lesser flamingoed, his leg bending in the absolute wrong way as he fell on V's back.
The two of them clinched up hard-core, their forearms and biceps straining as they rolled around and ended up next to the slaughtered civilian. When V was bitten in the ear, his shit really got cranked out. Tearing himself free of the lesser's teeth, he fisted the bastard's frontal lobe, laying a bone-on-bone crack that stunned the fucker long enough for him to get free.
Kind of.
The knife went into his side just as he was pulling his legs out from under the slayer. The sharp, shooting pain was a bee sting on 'roids, and he knew the blade had broken skin and penetrated muscle just below his rib cage, on the left.
Man, an intestine had been nicked, things were going to go bad, fast. So it was time to put the fight to bed.
Energized by the injury, V grabbed the lesser by the chin and the back of the head and twisted the sonofabitch like he was a beer bottle. The snap of the skull popping free of the spinal cord was like a branch cracking in half and the body went instantaneously loose, its arms flopping to the ground, its legs going still.
V grabbed his side as his crest of power faded. Shit, he was covered in cold sweat and his hands were shaking, but he had to finish the job. He quickly patted down the lesser, looking for ID before he poofed the bastard.
The slayer's eyes met his, its mouth working slowly. "My name was once Michael. Eighty three years ago. Michael Klosnick."
Flipping open the wallet, V found a current driver's license. "Well, Michael, have a nice trip to hell."
"Glad its over."
"It's not. Haven't you heard?" Shit, his side was killing him. "Your new town house is the Omega's body, buddy. You're going to live there rent-free for fucking ever."
Pale eyes cracked wide. "You lie."
"Please. Like I'd bother?" V shook his head. "Doesn't your boss mention that? Guess not."
V unsheathed one of his daggers, heaved his arm up over his shoulder, and drove the blade square into that wide chest. There was a burst of light bright enough to show off the whole alley, then a pop and shit, the burst caught the civilian, lighting him up as well thanks to a heavy gust of wind. As the two bodies were consumed, all that was left on the cold breeze was the thick smell of baby powder.
Fuck. How could they notify the civilian's family now?
Vishous searched the area, and when he didn't find another wallet, he propped himself against a Dumpster and just sat there, breathing in shallow sucks. Each inhale made him feel like he was being stabbed again, but going without oxygen was not an option, so he kept at it.
Before he got out his phone to call for help, he looked at his dagger. The black blade was covered with the inky blood of the lesser. He ran through the fight with the slayer and imagined another vampire in his place, one not as strong as he was. One who didn't have the breeding he had.
He brought up his gloved hand. If his curse had defined him, the Brotherhood and its noble purpose had shaped his life. And if he had been killed tonight? If that blade had gone into his heart? They'd be down to four fighters.
Fuck.
On the chessboard of his godforsaken life, the pieces were lined up, the play preordained. Man, so many times in life you didn't get to pick your path because the way you went was decided for you.
Free will was such bullshit.
Forget his mother and her drama-he needed to become the Primale for the Brotherhood. He owed the legacy he served.
After wiping the blade on his leathers, he resheathed the weapon handle down, struggled to his feet, and patted down his jacket. Shit his phone. Where was his phone? Back at the penhouse. It must have slipped out when he'd tossed his coat down on the bed back at the penthouse-
A shot rang out.
A bullet hit him right between his pecs.
The impact popped him off his heels and sent him on a slow-mo fall through thin air. As he went back flat on the ground, he just lay there as a crushing pressure made his heart jump and his brain fog out. All he could do was gasp, little quick breaths skipping up and down the corridor of his throat.
With his last bit of strength, he lifted his head and looked down his body. A gunshot. Blood on his shirt. The screaming pain in his chest. The nightmare realized.
Before he could panic, blackness came and swallowed him whole a meal to be digested in an acid bath of agony.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Whitcomb?"
Dr. Jane Whitcomb looked up from the patient chart she was signing and winced. Manuel Manello, M.D., chief of surgery at St. Francis Medical Center, was coming down the hall at her like a bull. And she knew why.
This was going to get ugly.
Jane scribbled her sig at the bottom of the drug order, handed the chart back to the nurse, and watched as the woman took off at a dead run. Good defensive maneuver, and not uncommon around here. When the chief got like this, folks took cover which was the logical thing to do when a bomb was about to go off and you had half a brain.
Jane faced him. "So you've heard."
"In here. Now." He punched open the door to the surgeons' lounge.
As she went in with him, Priest and Dubois, two of St. Francis's best GI knives, took one look at the chief, scrapped their vending-machine cuisine, and beat feet out of the room. In their wake, the door eased shut without even a whisper of air. Like it didn't want to catch Manello's attention, either.
"When were you going to tell me, Whitcomb? Or did you think Columbia was on a different planet and I wasn't going to find out?"
Jane crossed her arms over her chest. She was a tall woman, but Manello topped her by a couple of inches, and he was built like the professional athletes he operated on: big shoulders, big chest, big hands. At forty-five, he was in prime physical condition and one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country.
As well as a scary SOB when he got mad.
Good thing she was comfortable in tense situations. "I know you have contacts there, but I thought they'd be discreet enough to wait until I decided whether I wanted the job-"
"Of course you want it or you wouldn't waste time going down there. Is it money?"
"Okay, first, you don't interrupt me. And second, you're going to lower your voice." As Manello dragged a hand through his thick dark hair and took a deep breath, she felt bad. "Look, I should have told you. It must have been embarrassing to get blindsided like that."
He shook his head. "Not my favorite thing, getting a call from Manhattan that one of my best surgeons is interviewing at another hospital with my mentor."
"Was it Falcheck who told you?"
"No, one of his underlings."
"I'm sorry, Manny. I just don't know how it's going to go, and I didn't want to jump the gun."
"Why are you thinking about leaving the department?"
"You know I want more than what I can have here. You're going to be chief until you're sixty-five, unless you decide to leave. Down at Columbia, Falcheck is fifty-eight. I've got a better chance of becoming head of the department there."
"I already made you chief of the Trauma Division."
"And I deserve it."
His lips cracked a smile. "Be humble, why don't you."
"Why bother? We both know its the truth. And as for Columbia? Would you want to be under someone for the next two decades of your life?"
His lids lowered over his mahogany-colored eyes. For the briefest second, she thought she saw something flare in that stare of his, but then he put his hands on his hips, his white coat straining as his shoulders widened.
"I don't want to lose you, Whitcomb. You're the best trauma knife I've got."
"And I have to look to the future." She went over to her locker. "I want to run my own shop, Manello. It's the way I am."
"When's the damn interview?"
"First thing tomorrow afternoon. Then I'm off through the weekend and not on call, so I'm going to stay in the city."
"Shit."
There was a knock on the door.
"Come in," they both called out.
A nurse ducked her head inside. "Trauma case, ETA two minutes. Male in his thirties. Gunshot with probable perforated aorta. Crashed twice so far on transport. Will you accept the patient, Dr. Whitcomb, or do you want me to call Goldberg?"
"Nope, I'll take him. Set up bay four in the chute and tell Ellen and Jim I'm coming right down."
"Will do, Dr. Whitcomb."
"Thanks, Nan."
The door eased shut, and she looked at Manello. "Back to Columbia. You'd do the exact same thing if you were in my shoes. So you can't tell me you're surprised."
There was a stretch of silence then he leaned forward a little. "And I won't let you go without a fight. Which shouldn't surprise you, either."
He left the room, taking most of the oxygen in the place with him.
Jane leaned back against her locker and looked across to the kitchen area to the mirror hanging on the wall. Her reflection was crystal-clear in the glass, from her white doctor's coat to her green scrubs to her blunt-cut blond hair.
"He took that okay," she said to herself. "All things considered."
The door to the lounge opened, and Dubois poked his head in. "Coast clear?"
"Yup. And I'm heading down to the chute."
Dubois pushed the door wide and strode in, his crocs making no sound on the linoleum. "I don't know how you do it. You're the only one who doesn't need smelling salts after dealing with him."
"He's no problem, really."
Dubois made a chuffing noise. "Don't get me wrong. I respect the shit out of him, I truly do. But I don't want him pissed."
She put her hand on her colleague's shoulder. "Pressure wears on people. You lost it last week, remember?"
"Yeah, you're right." Dubois smiled. "And at least he doesn't throw things anymore."
Chapter Seven
The T. Wibble Jones Emergency Department of the St. Francis Medical Center was state-of-the-art, thanks to a generous donation from its namesake. Open for just a year and a half now, the fifty-thousand-square-foot complex was built in two halves, each with sixteen treatment bays. Emergency patients were admitted alternately to the A or the B track, and they stayed with whatever team they were assigned until they were released, admitted, or sent to the morgue.
Running down the center of the facility was what the medical staff called "the chute." The chute was strictly for trauma admits, and there were two kinds of them: "rollers" who came by ambulance, or "roofers" who were flown into the landing pad eleven stories up. The roofers tended to be more hard-core and were helicoptered in from about a hundred-and-fifty mile radius around Caldwell. For those patients, there was a dedicated elevator that dumped out right into the chute, one big enough to fit two gurneys and ten medical personnel at one time.
The trauma facility had six open patient bays, each with X-ray and ultrasound equipment, oxygen feeds, medical supplies, and plenty of space to move around. The operational hub, or control tower, was smack in the middle, a conclave of computers and personnel that was, tragically, always hopping. At any given hour there were at least one admitting physician, four residents, and six nurses staffing the area, with typically two to three patients in-house.
Caldwell was not as big as Manhattan, not by a long shot, but it had a lot of gang violence, drug-related shootings, and car accidents. Plus, with nearly three million residents, you saw an endless variation of human miscalculation: nail gun goes off into someone's stomach because a guy tried to fix the fly of his jeans with it; arrow gets shot through a cranium because somebody wanted to prove he had great aim, and was wrong; husband figures it would be a great idea to repair his stove and gets two-fortied because he didn't unplug the thing first.
Jane lived in the chute and owned it. As chief of the Trauma Division, she was administratively responsible for everything that went down in those six bays, but she was also trained as both an ED attending and a trauma surgeon, so she was hands-on. On a day-to-day basis, she made calls about who needed to go up one floor to the ORs, and a lot of times scrubbed in to do the needle-and-thread stuff.
While she waited for her incoming gunshot, she reviewed the charts of the two patients currently being treated and looked over the shoulders of the residents and nurses as they worked. Every member of the trauma team was handpicked by Jane, and when recruiting, she didn't go for the Ivy Leaguer types necessarily although she was Harvard-trained herself. What she looked for were the qualities of a good soldier, or, as she liked to call it, the No Shit, Sherlock mental set: smarts, stamina, and separation. Especially the separation. You had to be able to stay tight in a crisis if you were going to W-Z the chute.
But that didn't mean that compassion wasn't mission-critical in everything they did.
Generally, most trauma patients didn't need hand-holding or reassurance. They tended to be drugged up or shocked out because they were leaking blood like a sieve or had a body part in a freezer pack or had seventy-five percent of their dermis burned off. What the patients needed were crash carts with well-trained, levelheaded people on the business ends of the paddles.
Their families and loved ones, however, needed kindness and sympathy always, and reassurance when that was possible. Lives were destroyed or resurrected every day in the chute, and it wasn't just the folks on the gurneys who stopped breathing or started again. The waiting rooms were full of the others who were affected: husbands, wives, parents, children.
Jane knew what it was like to lose someone who was a part of you, and as she went about her clinical work she was very aware of the human side of all the medicine and the technology. She made sure her people were on the same page she was: To work in the chute, you had to be able to do both sides of the job, you needed the battlefield mentality and the bedside manner. As she told her staff, there was always time to hold someone's hand or listen to their worries or offer a shoulder to cry on, because in the blink of an eye you could be on the other side of that conversation. After all, tragedy didn't discriminate, so everyone was subject to the same whims of fate. No matter what your skin color was or how much money you had, whether you were gay or straight, or an atheist or a true believer, from where she stood, everyone was equal. And loved by someone, somewhere.
A nurse came up to her. "Dr. Goldberg just called in sick."
"That flu?"
"Yes, but he got Dr. Harris to cover."
Bless Goldberg's heart. "Our man need anything?"
The nurse smiled. "He said his wife was thrilled to see him when she was actually awake. Sarah is cooking him chicken soup and in full fuss mode."
"Good. He needs some time off. Shame he won't enjoy it."
"Yeah. He mentioned she was going to make him watch all the date movies they've missed in the last six months on DVD."
Jane laughed. "That'll make him sicker. Oh, listen, I want to do grand rounds on the Robinson case. There was nothing else we could have done for him, but I think we need to go over the death anyway."
"I had a feeling you'd want to do that. I set it up for the day after you get home from your trip."
Jane gave the nurse's hand a little squeeze. "You are a star."
"Nah, I just know our boss, is all." The nurse smiled. "You never let them go without checking and rechecking in case something could have been done differently."
That was certainly right. Jane remembered every single patient who had died in the chute, whether she had been their admitting physician or not, and she had the deceased cataloged in her mind. At night, when she couldn't sleep, the names and faces would run through her head like an old fashioned microfiche until she thought she would go mad from the roll call.
It was the ultimate motivator, her list of the dead, and she was damned if this incoming gunshot was going on it.
Jane went over to a computer and called up the low-down on the patient. This was going to be a battle. They were looking at a stab wound as well as a bullet in his chest cavity, and given where he'd been found, she was willing to bet he was either a drug dealer doing business in the wrong territory or a big buyer who'd gotten the shaft. Either way, it was unlikely he had health insurance, not that it mattered. St. Francis accepted all patients, regardless of their ability to pay.
Three minutes later, the double doors swung open and the crisis came in at slingshot speed: that Mr. Michael Klosnik was strapped to a gurney, a giant Caucasian with a lot of tattoos, a set of leathers, and a goatee. The paramedic at his head was bagging him, while another one held the equipment down and pulled.
"Bay four," Jane told the EMTs. "Where are we?"
The guy bagging said, "Two large-bore IVs in with lactated ringers. BP is sixty over forty and falling. Heart rate is in the one-forties. Respiration is forty. Orally intubated. V-fibbed on the way over. Shocked him at two hundred joules. Sinus tachycardia in the one-forties."
In bay four, the medics stopped the gurney and braked it while the chute's staff coalesced. One nurse took a seat at a small table to record everything. Two others were on standby to bust out supplies at Jane's direction, and a fourth got ready to cut off the patient's leather pants. A pair of residents hovered to watch or help as needed.
"I got the wallet," the paramedic said, handing it over to the nurse with the scissors.
"Michael Klosnick, age thirty-seven," she read. "The picture on the ID is blurry, but it could be him, assuming he dyed his hair black and grew the goatee after it was taken."
She handed the billfold over to the colleague who was taking notes and then started removing the leathers.
"I'll see if he's in the system," the other woman reported as she logged onto a computer. "Found him-wait, is this Must be an error. No, address is right, year's wrong."
Jane cursed under her breath. "May be problems with the new electronic records system, so I don't want to rely on the information in there. Let's get a blood type and a chest X-ray right away."
While blood was drawn, Jane did a quick preliminary examination. The gunshot wound was a tidy little hole right next to some kind of scarification on his pectoral. A rivulet of blood was all that showed externally, giving little hint of whatever mess was inside. The knife wound was much the same. Not much surface drama. She hoped his intestines hadn't been nicked.