Chapter 2 Kal #3
Kal braced himself, summoning up his strength for battle, and in minutes, there was blood in the dirt.
Once Loren gave the signal, they didn’t try to be quiet.
They had double the men of the Lucian so they weren’t worried about their numbers.
But they weren’t taking anything for granted either.
That was good, because the Lucian entered into the fight with a kind of swift and dispassionate brutality that probably surprised even Loren.
When the Vampyren attacked, the Lucian didn’t seem surprised.
Kal suspected it was their nature as he ran into the fight.
If they’d seen the Vampyren company beforehand, they would already be dead.
Kal swung his sword and narrowly missed some razor sharp talons trying to slit his throat.
The rest of the fight was a blur of blood and breathlessness as Kal kept getting thrown into the dirt, the wind knocked out of him before he forced himself to his feet again.
He never felt what Vampyren referred to as “bloodlust” while fighting the humans, it was one of the many reasons he’d left.
But now he lost time, minutes of his memory simply disappeared as he went after the Lucian full force.
At one point he stood in mud up to his knees, the still beating heart of a Lucian in his hand.
He didn’t remember cutting it out, and he dropped it, the dried blood on his face feeling sticky and uncomfortable as he ran into the fray again.
When it was over, they had lost three men but all of the Lucian were dead.
Kal was in a heap in the back of the Humvee trying to collect himself and grimacing as he held a wad of cloth to the deep gash in his side when Loren sat down next to him.
“So tomorrow you and Tess will come down to the Council to report on the creche?” Loren said, as if they’d just been in the middle of the conversation.
It took Kal a second to even remember what he was talking about. He wanted to get stitched up and take a shower and make love to Tess again. His head felt scrambled. Loren handed him a packet of blood and said, “Drink. You need your strength.”
* * *
“I don’t trust them,”
Tess said later.
“You think I trust them?” Kal said, they were eating in the cafeteria alone.
Tess didn’t seem to trust many people, except the ragtag resistance bunch that lived in Kal’s building.
Now she was railing against the Council as the two of them ate their dinner alone at a table that seated twelve.
“I deserted my unit. If they decide to get nosy and that they don’t like me, I’ll be dead by tomorrow night. ”
“Your brother wouldn’t put you in that kind of danger,” Tess said, though it sounded more like a question.
“No, he wouldn’t,” Kal said. “Not deliberately.”
“I’d just rather bust those kids out than go the Council begging them not to treat children worse than dogs,” Tess said dryly. “But what do I know?”
“I know it’s more satisfying just to do it that way,” Kal said. “But another creche will just take its place It’s… it’s…”
“It’s Whack-a-Mole,” Tess said. “Yeah, I know, I know.”
“Whack-a-Mole?”
“Nevermind,” Tess said, chuckling. “At least we’ll be together, I guess. But if they shut me down over there, I’m freeing those kids.”
Kal leaned over and kissed the tip of her nose. Another thing he liked about humans; they were more freely affectionate than this kind. He was getting used to that. “That is why we brought you here.”
That night Kal and Tess made love again and this time it was slower and more deliberate.
Tess rode on top of Kal this time, which was a position that baffled him but which he ended up liking.
That night he was exhausted by the time they fell asleep together in her bed.
But at least he wasn’t thinking about ripping out that Lucian’s heart as he kissed the back of Tess’s neck, reveling in her scent.
The next day, the two of them made an attempt to look presentable.
Or rather Kal made an attempt, still tentative about the prospect of being immediately caught out as a deserter.
He borrowed one of his brother’s vests and wore the more formal and easily distinguishable clothes of a Vampyren and combed his hair, rebraiding it.
He even trimmed the bit of beard he’d grown out.
For all this, he was mercilessly teased.
“They’ll never suspect you,” Tess said, as they rode back to Chicago in the resistance’s SUV.
“Not when you’ve trimmed your beard.” He rolled his eyes at her as they sat together in the back but it made him laugh at least. “I’m the one that’s been on-the-run for freeing kids! I should be more worried than you.”
She’d expressed as much to Loren, Kal knew. But Loren had assured her he’d given the Council a fake name and profile for her. He wasn’t about to tell the Council he was helping out a woman who’d been liberating children from creches whenever she got the chance.
Tess put together notes for their report, but he knew she had already written off the Council.
She already met with the resistance group in Urbana and had gone over a plan to free the creche.
Unless the Council pulled off a miracle and abolished all creches, that mission was about to go down and Kal planned on being there when it did.
* * *
“The Council’s been shaken up,”
Loren explained as they pulled up in front of the squat cement building in downtown Chicago surrounded by Vampyren guards.
“I’d say about half are sympathetic to some kind of shared power between Vampyren and humans.
In which case, they’re more likely to be sympathetic to the cause of the children’s treatment. ”
“What about the abolition of forced breeding?” Tess said, though the way she said it Kal could tell she wasn’t optimistic.
Loren only snorted at that. “I wouldn’t count on that.”
“Yeah, didn’t think so,” Tess muttered.
“Let me take the lead,” Loren told them, as they were let through the two sets of double doors and down a corridor to the Council chambers. “Some of them aren’t going to be happy about listening to a human woman talk at all.”
“Oh goody,” Tess said under her breath.
“They’ll get there,” Loren said, sounding almost apologetic. “But I do have a strong voice on the Council. So far I’m the only one who’s laid out a decent strategy for fighting the Lucian so they trust my opinion.”
Tess was about to say something else but Loren quieted her as they entered the Council chambers where the Vampyren statesmen sat around a large half circle.
They were talking quietly amongst themselves, going over some maps and notes, when one of them waved a hand at Loren and beckoned them forward.
“Loren,” the elder Vampyren said. “You’re here to report on the creches?”
“Not so much me,” Loren said, clasping his hands in front of him. “This is Tess and Kal. They’ve witnessed first hand the conditions of a very large creche here in Chicago—
“But these creches are regularly inspected,” one Council member said, already sounding impatient.
“But there aren’t any standards,” Tess piped up. “They’re inspected so the leadership can say they were inspected. I assure you if there is a standard that the creche I saw was actually meeting, it is a terrible standard, sir.”
That led to a lot of grumbling and murmuring at the Council table and Loren cast Kal a sort of exasperated look as if to ask him to get hold of his woman… which wasn’t likely.
But he cleared his throat and said, “If we may, we’d like to describe what it is we saw? And I’d remind the Council we are speaking of children who are all half-Vampyren and range in age from newborn infants to adolescents.”