Chapter 2
2
Recovered Journal of Dr. Georgia Clark
February 1, Year 1, Emergence Era
It’s the little things that change the world. Big events on the tiniest of hinges. Nothing more than the right combination of proteins and cells. The details are what promise change. But the smallest minutiae are also what leave us in the dark, stumbling blocks that keep us forever falling into either discovery or failure.
T he 72 steps lead to another dark corridor. The lights overhead are closer now, no longer caged away from grasping fingers. They hum away as if they preside over nothing more than an accountant’s office or perhaps my old lab. Instead, they illuminate horror.
The concrete floor is stained almost black with old blood. Barefoot, I feel the chill of every spent drop. Crying and suffering echo around me. How many humans are trapped in this underground vault? No, not a vault; a larder. The smell of rot and putrescence is fuller now, hitting me with each ragged breath.
The guard pulls me along. I don’t see Vince or the military woman, and the white-haired vampire has already disappeared ahead of us. Mind muddled from the knock against the wall, I can’t count steps or memorize the layout. I can only be borne along, my body aching, fatigue in my bones. I know I’m on my way to die. With what’s left of my will, I try to yank my arm free from the guard.
He doesn’t respond, doesn’t loosen his grip, just continues as if I’d done nothing at all. His perfect features don’t change. That’s one of our many mistakes. Humanity’s, I mean. We had no grasp on the eternal, didn’t know that endless life was the catalyst for unimaginable cruelty. The sort of malice that, to the vampires, is commonplace. We weren’t prepared for it. How could mortals understand the depth of depravity created by the promise of forever? Impossible. A butterfly could sooner understand nuclear fission.
We keep going, moving up stairs and through other corridors. By the second set of stairs I can’t catch my breath. When I finally stumble and fall—my ribs blooming with white hot pain as I crash onto the corner of a step—the guard yanks me to my feet and shoves me against the wall.
“Walk.” He snaps his fangs at me, his face only inches from mine. I don’t flinch. I can barely breathe.
Then, after swiping his finger along one of his fangs, he jams the bloodied appendage into my mouth, splitting my lips from the force of it. That’s when I feel the pins and needles creeping along my skin, burrowing underneath and making a home. Compulsion . I’m too weak to fight it. My blood obeys his. He forces his will into my own, taking over my resistance, my weariness. Like someone dousing a rotten fence with a fresh coat of paint, he drowns out my mind. I’m a passenger in my own body, strapped to the automaton he’s made of me. I trudge forward, continuing for more sets of long hallways and screams and blood. More stairs. And finally, an elevator. The freight kind with scraped steel walls and an array of buttons, though none of them bear any marks.
The compulsion drains away, leaving me empty and cold. I sag against the wall as we travel upward so quickly my ears pop and my knees start to give. He cuffs the nape of my neck, holding onto me like I’m an unruly kitten.
“So weak.” He almost spits the words at me, his grip growing painfully tight. “Just like all your kind.”
“Theo would beg to differ.” My hoarse voice still manages to carry in the small space.
His nostrils flare the slightest bit, and he squeezes so hard my neck cracks and streaks of pain race up and down my spine. I sag, his hellish grip the only thing holding me up.
“Don’t speak his name.” He snarls, his fangs bared as he glares at me. “Insolent pig. I’ll enjoy watching the high lord gut you.”
Not a smart move on my part, mentioning the vampire king’s son. I’ve only heard whispered rumors from other prisoners about him—that he was killed, that no one knows exactly how. The elevator doors open.
He shoves me forward, his grip still tight as my limbs flop around, my body torn with the searing pain of everything. Everything . It all hurts. Inside and out. Plowing forward, he passes through two large doors, guards on either side. They don’t even glance at us as we pass.
Inside, the air chills even more, the cold rattling my teeth. The smell hits me again, this time somehow worse. I gag, but my stomach is empty. There’s nothing inside me anymore. I retch all the same, spit flowing in a string from my lips as we move into the king’s cathedral. The high black walls are polished to a sinister glow, light from a dozen huge chandeliers bouncing all around to illuminate the bodies.
Hundreds of them, each impaled on steel spikes that rise from the floor in an orderly pattern.
I try to look away, but they’re on either side. So many people, some of whom I probably know. I might remember. But I don’t focus on faces. I don’t focus on anything. I retch again as the smell of decay eats its way into my mind. For the first time in a long time, I choose to close my eyes.
Voices murmur somewhere nearby, the echo flowing off the stone and muddling through the gore to reach us.
The guard doesn’t let up, dragging me along as my body rebels. I dry heave again as my feet squelch through rotten entrails and chunks of skin and hair.
“—isn’t something I’m interested in entertaining.” Gregor’s voice.
How do I know Gregor? How?—
“We still need enough of them to feed on.”
I go still, my heart frozen. That voice. I recognize it.
“I don’t care about keeping cattle!” Gregor roars. “I care about vengeance! I am owed their pitiful lives, every last one! There will never be enough death to repay what they’ve stolen from me!”
The guard stutter steps, then regains his balance and keeps going. People are on my left and right. No, not people. Them . The dark cavern is full of vampires, all of them focused on Gregor at the head of the room. He’s atop a dais, more bodies spiked on either side of him. And standing a few steps below him, his back to me, is a man. Not a man, I remind myself. I can’t take my eyes off him, the blackness of his hair, the pale skin of his hands. A monster.
The guard throws me down at the base of the stairs, pain bursting at my knees as I fall to the side. Someone beside me grunts, and I force myself back upright onto my aching knees.
“Vince.” I grab his arm and pull him toward me. He’s so light now that even I can lift him, the two of us huddled against each other as the wolves crowd around.
He grunts and opens his eyes, the whites gone yellow as he stares ahead.
“Vince.”
A sharp pain cracks through my skull, and I fall forward again, my cheek smashing onto the stone step.
“Silence, dog,” the guard growls.
I lie there for a moment, the pain paralyzing me.
The room is silent. I let my eyes close only for a moment. The slightest second of respite. And then I open them again and force myself back to my knees.
“My son.” Gregor’s voice is a furious hiss. “My beautiful son. They will die. All of them. I will wipe them off the face of the Earth. They must die.”
“They will. Just some sooner than others,” the monster on the steps says. Valen, his name is Valen . I remember him.
Gregor sighs.
My hazy vision clears somewhat, and I can see the vampire high lord. Sitting on a black throne, his hollow eyes almost glowing in the low light. Gaunt, white skin, blue veins like rivers flowing beneath his pale flesh.
“Washington?” Gregor asks.
“Gone,” Valen says. “Not a single human left alive. I made sure of it.”
The third prisoner, the one in tattered fatigues, moans and covers her face. The guard slaps her so hard in the side of the head she falls to the floor and doesn’t move.
Gregor drums his long fingernails on the arm of his throne. “They’ll run now. Little pigs running and squealing. Filthy beasts. Hunt them down. Drag them from whatever stinking hole they crawl into. Kill them as they killed my son. Kill them all. Spare no one.”
“With the government collapsed, the plague will kill them even quicker. No help from any quarter, they’re low on supplies and what little cooperation with each other they had to begin with has already evaporated.” Valen sounds almost bored. “If that doesn’t get them, your armies will.”
“I want them all. Across every continent. Every single one of them!” Spittle flies from Gregor’s mouth as he yells. “Dead!”
“My lord.” Valen dips his chin. “It will be as you’ve said.”
Gregor stares at Valen, his eyes narrowed. “My spies tell me you executed more humans than any other on the front lines. I chose well when I made you my general.” Click, click, click . His fingernails beat a maddening tattoo. A hammer in my skull slowly sinking deeper and deeper. “This pleases me.”
The monster nods. “For Blood Dragonis.”
“For Blood Dragonis?” Gregor considers for a moment, a slight snarl rising on his blue-tinged lips. “You should’ve been the one to die. Not him. Not my son,” he growls, rage flashing across his face. “ That is what you should’ve given for your blood! Your accursed life for his glorious one!”
The monster only bows again, accepting Gregor’s pronouncement without protest.
Gregor’s ire fades suddenly—a match quickly extinguished. His demeanor turns morose in an instant. “Theo deserves—” He pauses, his gaze dropping for a moment. “You’ve done well, but there is much more to be done. So much more.” His claws curl around the arms of his throne. “Bathing in their blood, in the blood of their children. All of it. This and more.” His gaze scans the room of vampires. “Corvidion and Tantun have served honorably as well. United, we will bring the human scourge to heel. We will crush them.”
Valen turns to the gathered crowd. “All hail the high lord!”
They rejoin him, their voices deafening in the black cavern as they repeat it again and again. When he turns back to Gregor, the sound dies. Abrupt silence reigns as Gregor surveys the room.
His claws retract somewhat as he refocuses on Valen, his demeanor switching yet again to something more lax, verging on indulgent. “As a reward, I’ve brought three choice beasts from the dungeon. These animals are to be awarded to the top generals from Corvidion and Tantun and one for you, Valen. Your choice. All I require is that you make them hurt. Make them suffer as my Theo suffered. Show them nothing but pain and fear and when you finally end them—” His fangs lengthen, “—send them to hell where Theo awaits them with open arms.” Gregor’s gaze rakes past me, his malevolence like a winter draft. Then it returns, his nostrils flaring.
I choke, my throat burning as Gregor appears directly in front of me and hoists me in the air by my neck. “You,” he hisses and brings my face to his. “That traitorous bitch’s sister!” He roars, his fangs long and deadly. “You’re here!”
I claw at his hand.
He throws me down, something snapping in my side as agony lances through me. Broken rib, I think almost clinically. Possibly punctured lung.
“Was it you?” He yanks me up again, hand around my throat, his claws digging into my spine. With a movement too fast for me to track, he bites my shoulder, ripping my flesh as my scream meets the bottleneck of his palm. Then he presses his fingers into the bite as I flail.
He returns his gaze to me, the blackness of his eyes becoming my whole world. “Tell me. Who killed Theo?”
Compulsion. He must’ve mixed his blood into the wound. This compulsion is more than suggestion, far more than the puppet show the vampire put on with me earlier on the walk here. Gregor’s power is magnitudes higher than the guard’s, so much so that my entire body goes limp, every bit of my energy focused on answering his question. I must answer him. I must tell him the truth. But my mouth doesn’t move. No words form in my mind. I … I don’t know the answer.
“I don’t know,” I say hoarsely.
With a vicious screech he throws me into the crowd of vampires, some of them not fast enough to get out of the way. I land in a heap, my ears ringing. I hurt in so many places. More broken bones. More pain. But I don’t need to stop my suffering. I need to tell Gregor what he wants to know. With a groan, I crawl toward him, my entire being focused on telling him the truth. I feel like I know the answer. Somewhere. Somewhere I have what he wants. Give me another chance . I crawl, my blood streaking the floor as vampires snarl on either side of me.
“If I find out that any of you had something to do with it!” Gregor’s voice rises, the entire crowd wincing back. “Blood Tantun, Blood Corvidion, or my own —” His gaze cuts sharply to Valen. “I will rid this world of you and every single one of your line.” Teeth bared, eyes wild, he bellows his rage to the ceiling of the black room. Then he turns to me, his roar still resonating as his voice slithers into my ears. “What happened to my son ?”
I convulse, my mind twisting in on itself as it tries to find the answer. Where is it? Theo. Blond hair, cruel eyes—I see him. Standing behind Juno. In the White Hou—the pain expands, filling every cell of my consciousness as I scream. “I don’t know!” My throat tears, anguish in my heart at being unable to answer Gregor. I must give him what he wants.
“Tell me!” Gregor is in my face, his hand gripping my hair.
All I see is the endless black of his gaze. I’d do anything in my power to tell him. It hurts as I can only say, “I don’t know.”
“Were you there?” he asks.
I would turn myself inside out to answer him. To give him what he wants. Again, the words pass my lips as tears well in my eyes at my failure. “I don’t know.”
His screech echoes along the black walls, and I feel blood oozing from my ears. “You know something. You know !” His fangs are so long they graze my cheek as he speaks. “You were captured near the White House. Where my son died. You were there!” He shakes me, some of my hair ripping free as he slams me onto the floor. “You know. Tell me.”
I close my eyes, but when I try to pry back into my memories, tearing through them to find an answer, all I feel is pain ripping me in half. All I can do is scream, ‘I don’t know’ the only words coalescing amidst the shrieks.
“You lie!” Gregor’s eyes swallow me, crushing me in endless black. “You lie!” he thunders. “You will tell me what I want to know.”
“I don’t know.” I can’t stop saying it even though it fractures bone and crushes my lungs. “I don’t know.”
He snarls. “You know nothing. You failed at your task. You didn’t cure the plague. I’m glad, now, of course.” The merciless pits of his eyes are streaked with veins of red. “Your kind will suffer the same fate. Pain and death. Over and over again. You included.”
He rises and turns. The woman cowering on the stairs screams, but the sound is cut off as Gregor digs his claws into her back, then rips her apart. She splits, her torso in his right hand, her legs in his left. Blood splatters across the floor, spraying on me as he throws the two halves down with crushing force. Her mouth is open in a scream, her eyes blinking once more before she goes still.
“Valen!” Gregor barks as he sags on his black throne, his fury crackling through the air like an electrical storm. “Get that creature out of my sight. Scrape every piece of information from her mind and serve it to me. Break her apart. She knows.” His glare is like a dagger in my forehead. “She knows .”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Any scrap you get from her, I want it immediately.” His eyes flash. “If you get nothing, I’ll tear her to pieces myself. Slowly.” He sits back, his body thin and taut, as if he’s fed on nothing but rage. That’s when I realize he’s worn. Tired. Not the invincible creature from some snippet of my disjointed memory.
“If I may, my lord?” Another vampire steps forward, though he stops short of mounting the stairs.
His voice makes my skin crawl, and for one terrifying moment, I think he’s speaking in my mind again. Poking and prodding, looking for memories where I have none.
“Yes, Whitbine?” Gregor’s ire has faded to a simmering, exhausted rage.
“I feel I’m particularly suited to extracting the secrets from this human. As you know, I’ve worked tirelessly with her. I could be close to cracking what’s left of her memory.”
Valen turns toward him, a derisive sneer on his face. “You’ve gotten nothing. Not a single iota of useful information, and yet you have the audacity to ask our high lord for more time?”
Whitbine’s gaze darts to me and then back to Gregor. “I apologize, my lord. But, as I’ve said, I believe I’m close?—”
“You’ve learned nothing from her?” Gregor asks. He blinks slowly. “Nothing. She’s been here all along. She knows. She knows everything .”
“Sire, you’ve known she was here. You asked me to—” Whitbine pales as Gregor’s gaze snaps to him. “You—” He swallows hard and seems to rethink whatever he intended to say. “In any case, she is particularly astute at withstanding my efforts. I haven’t had the chance to adequately break her. However, if she were to be placed in my care at all times, I’m certain I’ll be able to?—”
“Silence.” Gregor slashes a bony hand through the air.
Valen stands with total nonchalance, his gaze somewhere over my head.
“Valen?” Gregor asks.
“If Whitbine truly had any chance of breaking into her mind, he would’ve done so by now. His blood is weak, just as he is.” Valen shrugs and looks up the stairs at Gregor. “However, I serve at your pleasure, my lord. Do with the creature what you will.”
Gregor’s gaze lands on me again. I whimper, faintly writhing as my body desperately tries to find a way to ease the pain.
“No, you’ve had your chance.” Gregor’s eyes narrow on Whitbine, then he turns to Valen. “Take your spoils. Return her to me once she’s broken. I’ll take my time with her then. You will ravage her mind, but keep her in good health. I want her to survive me as long as she can.” He smiles, his thin lips parting to show his yellowed fangs. “Whitbine,” he snaps.
“My lord!” Whitbine bows again.
“Inspect the prisoner weekly. Report progress to me.”
“Yes, my lord.” Whitbine shoots me a sideways look, triumph in his vicious eyes.
Valen, the monster, turns to me, his form blotting out everything else.
Blue eyes. A glassy, stormy lake, gray clouds overhead. I remember him. We were supposed to work together to find a cure. A sharp stabbing pain lances through my head when I think about it. About my work. I see faces—blue eyes, shaggy hair, a friendly smile, more—but they’re blurry. I know them.
Valen strides to me, his cold eyes taking me in with utter disdain.
“Get up,” he snarls.
The vampires closest to me back away, all of them pitiless ghouls. They’re afraid of him. Of Valen.
I try to push myself to my knees, but my left arm hangs limply at my side. It’s broken close to the elbow. Blood trickles along my cheek and drips onto the black stone.
With a grip like iron, Valen grabs my other arm and yanks me to my feet.
I scream involuntarily as he drags me away, my feet scraping along the floor as the vampires part for him. Some of them hiss at me, their fangs bared. My ruined arm drags the ground, and I can’t get a full breath. Black spots float in front of my eyes as we pass the impaled bodies. Valen drags me through the viscera and congealed blood, past severed and torn body parts, past organs ripped to shreds. His steps never falter as he bears me away to more torment.
Somewhere in the horror and pain, I pass out. Blessed oblivion. Silence. Night.