Generation V (31 page)

“Back to square one, asshole,” I said.

And then I meowed like a cat.

His hand was around my throat before I even saw him move, and he began to squeeze very slowly, like a constrictor. I ripped and yanked with my hands, but nothing made his grip even flinch. His eyes were wide and unblinking. “This I won’t forgive,” he crooned. “This will be worth the price paid for killing you.” My vision began to gray out at the edges, and my lungs were
screaming for air. Blackness starting creeping in, but I held on to the fact that this had cost him, that I’d made him pay in some way for what he was doing. Then I couldn’t hold on to it, and all I could think about was that I needed air, and all I could see was the smile stretched across Luca’s face.

There was a scrabbling of claws against hardwood, and a black shape slammed into Luca, knocking him back. The hand finally lost its grip, and I gasped in the breath I needed, rushing through starved lungs and clearing my brain. I slid sideways onto the floor, still gasping and gagging in air through a throat that felt like a partially clogged straw, but I was able to look and see what was happening.

A black fox was ripping and tearing into Luca’s face like a mad thing, teeth embedded just above one eye while those feet with their wickedly sharp claws, so strong and suited for digging, raked huge furrows into his flesh.

It was Suzume.

Luca screamed and slapped her with his hands, the force finally breaking her hold on his face, though even as she was thrown backward I could see her jaw snap shut, the gout of blood, and knew that she’d taken flesh with her. She tumbled in the air and, with the same freakish twist that a cat would use, landed on her paws, sinking down as those four furry legs acted like shock absorbers for her hard landing. In one motion she was bouncing forward again, those white fangs snapping wildly, and Luca stumbled back and out of range. She bounced forward again, and the same reaction. But then Luca shook his head, blood still streaming out of his face
to leave droplets spattering across the walls, and he seemed to shrug off his horrendous injury. With the shock of Suzume’s sneak attack lost, I could see him evaluating her, and I could see the moment that he decided that she wasn’t something to be afraid of.

Now he was the one lunging forward, those strong hands reaching for Suzume, and she leaped backward, barely evading them. Another grab, another jump and near miss. Grab, jump, grab, jump. Each time, Luca’s hand came within millimeters of that dark fur.

I’d gotten myself up onto my elbows. I couldn’t seem to push myself up, and I started to crawl forward. With each jump Suzume was drawing Luca farther away from me, and across the room I met her brilliant black eyes. She yipped at me, a high, demanding sound, and suddenly I realized that she was doing all of this on purpose, that she was distracting Luca so that I could run.

I looked around frantically. A dark spot caught my eye, and I focused on it. There was the gun, halfway under the sofa, where it must’ve been thrown out of Luca’s hand when Suzume slammed into him. I started crawling toward it.

Then Suzume jumped back too slowly, and Luca had her. She made one agonized yelp as his hand closed on her back leg and squeezed, and then his other hand was around her throat and he was holding her off the floor. Her back left leg dangled, and I could see the white flash of bone sticking through her skin.

I screamed her name.

“Idiot vermin,” Luca said, and I could see his hand flex against her fur, knew that he was about to crush her throat.

Suzume bared her teeth, snarling defiance.

The gun was too far away; I was never going to reach it in time, but I pushed myself to crawl forward and then—

There was a snapping feeling inside me, like a rubber band I’d never realized was holding things in place had suddenly broken. Everything around me slowed to a crawl—I looked at Luca’s hand and could see each muscle engaging to choke the life from Suzume, but they were all so slow. I could see beads of saliva forming in Suzume’s open mouth, but I knew that it would take them forever to form a single droplet.

But if everything around me was slow, I was fast. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, but the beats were too close together for me to differentiate—it was a thunderous, deafening drumming. Everything was clearer to me now—the room that a moment before had been barely lit by the few tendrils of sunlight that could creep around the closed blinds now seemed as brightly lit as if I were outside under a noonday sun. There was the taste of blood in my mouth, but this had nothing to do with what had been running out of my nose and from a few cuts. This was hot, rich, and thick, a mouthful that I swallowed eagerly and that replenished itself instantly, so that I was drinking it down, and I could feel it spread throughout my body, brilliant and exciting. This blood wasn’t mine, wasn’t like anything I’d ever tasted before, and I felt a pang of sadness when I swallowed the last of it.

Luca’s hand still moved on its inexorable move to squeeze; Suzume’s growl was a long series of individual motes of sound.

I could still feel all the pain in my battered body, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore, and I could ignore it enough to do what I needed. The gun was still there, waiting under the sofa for my hand to wrap around it.

For the first time in my life, I moved like a vampire.

The gun was in my hand, and then I was beside Luca. I pressed the muzzle of the gun against Luca’s head, just above his ear. I didn’t say anything—there were no warnings. I pulled the trigger, and I saw each nanosecond of Luca’s head tearing apart as the impact mushroomed through his skull and his brains splattered on the wall. Somewhere in my brain I noted that Yuri had been absolutely right about what this bullet could do.

Then time was moving again. Luca was on the floor, Suzume was as well, rolling back to her feet from where the spasm of Luca’s hand had dropped her. A big chunk of Luca’s head was missing, but I stood over him and squeezed off two more shots until his head above his jaw was simply gone, just a pile of meat on the floor. Luca’s arms and legs were lashing out, kicking and flopping violently, and I stepped back, horrified, wondering if this was like the decapitated running chicken phenomena that I’d read about in so many Gary Larson comics, but then Suzume was moving forward on her three good legs, hopping with amazing ease, and with her front two feet she began to dig frantically at Luca’s chest, his skin flying away like pieces of dirt in a garden, and I remembered what she’d once told me about what it took to kill a vampire.

The movements of his limbs took on a new horror, and I pushed Suzume back from his chest. I pressed the gun point-blank against the spot she’d been digging and
unloaded the rest of the clip into him, feeling the body heave as each bullet slammed into him and blood spattered upward and onto me. Four more shots and my gun clicked empty, and I slid backward onto my ass. Luca’s movements stopped, and for a moment we both just stared at him.

I turned to look at Suzume. Her silky black fur was matted with blood, and her back leg was dragging grotesquely. I reached out and brushed my fingertips against her jaw, not daring to touch any more in case it hurt her, and I whispered, “Suze. You came.”

She gave a little throaty gurgle, her pink tongue sneaking out to give my fingers a quick lick; then she let out a loud, bossy yip and pointed that long muzzle decisively toward the bedroom.

I scrambled back to my feet while she scampered off on three paws in the other direction. I staggered as I moved, reeling almost drunkenly. The pain was harder to ignore, like a loud knocking on the back door of my brain, but what I had to do next was too important for distractions. I heard a loud scuffling and breaking sounds from the kitchen, but I even ignored whatever the hell Suzume was doing, and focused on getting back into that bedroom.

Amy Grann was exactly where I’d left her, sitting inside her cage, the door still swinging open. Her body was fixed and frozen, and she’d covered her eyes with her hands, not daring to see who was coming back to get her.

I’d been her age when Brian and Jill were murdered. I remember what it felt like when Prudence forced me to look at their bodies, forced me to put my hand in the blood that was still warm while she told me that this was
all my fault, that if it wasn’t for my actions they would have been alive and well. That she was the train that hit them, but I was the one who tied them to the tracks. I remember the nights of sitting alone in my room, the fear so bad that I couldn’t even move far enough to flip the light switch. I remember those dreams that have never gone away.

I couldn’t stop any of that for Amy. Her world had been torn away as well, with blood and violence, and she’d have all of those moments, along with the horrible crippling guilt of being the one who lived. I couldn’t help her with any of it.

But I could do one thing for her. Something that I’d never had.

I crouched down and called to her. “The monster is dead, Amy,” I said. “He can never hurt you. Not ever again.” Slowly she took her hands down, and she looked at me with her eyes that would never be nine years old again. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t pull back when I reached inside the cage and took her out. She didn’t resist when I picked her up and cradled her against my chest, my hands smearing blood all over the clothes that he’d dressed her in.

I carried her out of the bedroom, but I didn’t cover her eyes or hurry her out of the house. Instead I carried her right over to the body and put her down. She didn’t flinch back; she just stared.

“He’s really dead, Amy,” I told her, giving her something that she’d always be able to cling to on those long nights of fear. “He is never going to touch you again.”

Amy got down on her knees and leaned over him. Every movement she made was slow and absolutely
precise. Someday she might be spontaneous again, but not now, and she’d never move with a child’s scattered motions ever again. Carefully, never touching Luca’s skin, she tugged at those hideous satin harem pants of his, tugging the waistband down about an inch to reveal a large brown birthmark. She looked at it for a long minute, then looked back up to me and met my eyes.

“That’s really him,” she said flatly. “He’s really dead.”

My throat tightened, and I nodded.

“Okay,” she whispered. There was no crying, no tears, but something behind her eyes changed just a little, and those small shoulders relaxed just a fraction.

There was another loud crash from the kitchen, followed by an awful scraping, and I finally looked over. All of the lower cabinet doors had been opened and (literally) pawed through, and the floor was now covered with half-open containers of Windex, baking soda, a bag of rice, and any number of little scrubbing pads. Suzume was dragging a tall glass bottle across the floor, her teeth slipping as she fought for purchase against the tall mouth of it. I stared as she leaned it against my arm and sat, panting shallowly and looking extremely proud of herself.

I was less impressed. “Bacardi 107?” I asked incredulously. “You want me to get drunk? Right now?”

She gave an impatient little foxy huff and scampered off to the bedroom, long tail swishing behind her, and returned a moment later with two long white candle tapers clenched in her teeth. She spat them out onto the floor and looked at me expectantly.

I looked from the tapers, to the alcohol, to what was left of the body. I looked at all three again, then back to Suzume, who wagged her inky black tail.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

She gave a loud bark and glared.

“We seriously have to
burn
him?”

She eyed the corpse closely, then looked back at me. Her tail flipped once, as if asking if I wanted to risk
not
burning him.

Fair enough, I supposed.

I poured out the entire bottle, making sure that the whole corpse was saturated with it. Suzume made one last trip to the bedroom and returned with a box of matches in her mouth. I lit one taper, then considered it for a second.

Amy was surprised when I wrapped her small hand around it, and Suzume gave a slightly uncertain chuff, but I thought again about what Luca had taken from her, and knew that this was right.

“He can
never
hurt you again, Amy,” I told the little girl. “You’re going to make sure of that. And this is for your family too.”

She hesitated, then nodded firmly. As she stretched out the candle, she whispered their names.

“Daddy. Mommy. Jessie.”

The Bacardi did its job, and the fire caught immediately, spreading quickly over the body.

“Daddy. Mommy. Jessie.” Amy repeated her mantra as the body began burning, never looking away from it.

The fire was spreading, already jumping onto the sofa. Hopefully it would take the entire house, with all the evidence it contained, with it. There weren’t any fire alarms wailing as I scooped Amy up and we all went out the back door. If Luca had been in a habit of lighting all those candles in that bedroom, he would’ve had to take
the batteries out of his smoke detectors to avoid having the fire department on his doorstep.

Amy looked over my shoulder as I carried her, and I could hear that small whisper in my ear as we left. “Daddy. Mommy. Jessie.”

The sun hit me like a sledgehammer the moment I stepped outside, and the last of whatever had been holding all my pain back broke, and it rushed through me in a wave. I went down, barely managing to turn so that I took all the impact and Amy stayed safe and unharmed in my arms. I could feel every place I’d been hit, but more than that, it felt like every muscle in my body from my smallest toe to the top of my ears had been overextended in one full-body scream of pain. It was too much to hold out against, and the last thing I saw was Suzume’s dark muzzle changing into her human face.

Then there was nothing.

I woke up in
a series of stages, each one bringing with it another snippet of sensory information. At first I was just aware of how much my body ached, and that I was covered in bandages, with a hard cast on my right arm. Then I realized that I was in a bed, with clean, cool sheets. There was a breeze that carried the smell of the ocean, and I could hear the distant sounds of birds chirping, while closer to me there was the quiet, occasional sound of book pages being turned. My eyes were almost sealed shut, but I slowly managed to force them open, blinking a few times against the blurriness until my vision finally sharpened.