He crept out of the storage room. A hall led down to a shadowed open area. Valentine could see a decorative rail looking out on the central atrium his companion described. Low-wattage electric lights cast patterns across the Golden Ones' renovated stone and woodwork overlaid on the older human design.

Keeping on his belly, Valentine crawled down the hall toward the atrium. He paused now and then to listen, but while there were sounds of activity on the floor above, he could hear nothing near him. He crawled out to the atrium and slithered to the staircase. Look. Listen. Smell. And then down.

On the first floor, he waited two full minutes in an alcove, feeling the rhythms of the sleeping building. The only sounds came from the guardroom just inside the main door, where the off-duty Golden One guards were eating and talking. He smelled heartroot, a rich smell like carrots pulled fresh from the earth. Following Ahn-Kha's instructions, he made it to the staircase down without encountering anything other than vague noises from somewhere below. As he moved down the stairs, listening and using his nose, he identified the sound and smell of machinery. A generator whined somewhere in the bowels of the building, and he picked up a faint medicinal odor, like disinfectant.

The Reaper definitely moved near him now. Life or death depended on the Cat continuing to sense it, and the Reaper being unable to read Valentine's lifesign until he was too close for it to matter. A silent contest, like the Old

World books of submarines hunting each other in cold darkness. He waited until the Reaper was somewhere far from the gate door at the base of the stairs before employing the keys.

Valentine noticed an alarm bell mounted on the wall just down the hall, next to a door with light and the sound of voices coming from it. A switch with a conduit pipe running up to the bell probably activated it. The door was wired, a detail perhaps none of the Grogs knew. He thought for a long minute, but could not come up with a decent plan. That Reaper would not stay in the opposite corner of the building forever.

It had to be done, and if it had to be done, it had best be done boldly. He unlocked both locks, his sword hidden against his leg.

"Yo!" he called. "I'm at the door. Wanna get the alarm for me?"

"Coming," a tired voice said after the echo faded. A human in a white lab coat appeared at the door and absently turned the switch. Valentine threw open the door and covered the ten feet of hallway in a single leap.

"Hey," the man in the lab coat said. Too late. He reached up to hit the red alarm push button, but Valentine's sword intercepted his arm, removing it from the elbow down. Mouth gaping, the man looked at the interesting phenomenon of his amputation as Valentine's sword point came up under his chin. Valentine withdrew the blade as He rushed around the corner and into the well-lit room. A woman, also in a white lab coat, had time to scream before he cut her down. When it was over, the only movement in the room was the slow spread of blood across the tiled floor. The remains of a meal sat on a table under dazzling spotlights. Stainless-steel counters and white cabinets marked the room as a dispensary or examination room. There were medical supplies, bandages and iodine-colored bottles and instrument trays available. Valentine saw machinery in the room beyond, but had no time to investigate.

The scream was nearly as effective as the alarm. The Reaper was coming. Valentine hurried to the gate and locked it again, then stepped back into the dispensary, dragging the dead man behind. He readied his blade, holding in his favorite stance, like a batter at the plate, just inside the door. He heard the Reaper's step in the hallway and listened to it pause as it saw the slain man's blood and the severed arm Valentine forgot to retrieve. Then it did something Valentine would not have believed of a Reaper. It turned and ran.

Valentine pursued. Cloak flying, the Reaper turned a corner, and Valentine had to slow in case it was waiting just around the corner. It wasn't-it was in a room off the hall. He heard the Reaper's odd, faint voice speaking urgently. case red! post twelve calling a case red! it breathed, pressing the transmit button on the microphone of the table-top radio. While the voice was that of a Reaper, something was wrong about the cadence, the urgency in the voice.

It sensed Valentine. Turned-slit pupils wide as screaming mouths reflected Valentine's blade flashing for its neck. It ducked, slowly for a Reaper-meaning it took a full blink of an eye to crouch instead of half of one.

Which was half a blink too slow. The Reaper's body crouched without its head-now spinning in the air sprinkling black blood on the painted cement walls.

A man in the urban camouflage of the Twisted Cross stood next to an overturned chair, frozen in shock at the site of the Reaper's death. The communications center man reached for his pistol, and Valentine opened his stomach with a right-to-left slash, then stood on the man's wrist and pulled the gun and pocketed it. The man lay on the floor, gasping out his pain and trying to hold his intestines in.

Valentine tore the microphone off the radio, ignoring the Twisted Cross man, who coughed out his final breath. He unplugged the radio and cut the power cord.

The swinging cord end reminded him of something. That something was connected with the woman in the lab coat he had killed. An item that she was holding. An IV bag. An IV bag just like the ones hanging above the machinery in the room behind the dispensary. Why did a machine need an IV bag? It all came together in a rush.

Valentine flew back to the dispensary and into the room beyond.

Twelve oversize metal coffins were lined up on either side of the room, quietly humming with electric power. A thirteenth stood in the aisle between the two rows. They were wider and deeper than coffins, however. More than anything they reminded Valentine of defunct tanning beds he had once found while sheltering in an Old World strip mall. They had mysterious, unlabeled knobs next to telltale lights flickering on the side.

He closed the metal door behind him and barred it, using a pivoting arm that swung into a receiver on the frame.

From the lights and noise, Valentine determined that seven of the oversize coffins were on and functioning; each also had an IV bag hanging from a T-shaped rack above the machinery. Valentine went to the humming, blinking center machine and circled it. His ears picked up the sound of water being cycled through some kind of plumbing. A cabinet-door-size hatch was fixed to the top at one end.

Not knowing what to expect, Valentine opened the hatch. Inside, floating in the water like a piece of wood, was a very pale, thin man with a bristling growth of beard. Wires were attached with little flesh-colored cups all over his body, concentrated on his shaven skull. A smell, both salty and rank, wafted out of the miniature pool.

The man's green eyes opened in surprise, and Valentine looked into the confused gaze of the man who until a moment ago was animating a Reaper. How many years' service did he have in? How many people had his avatar killed while under his control? Did he climb out of the tank desiring to tear the throats out of victims, like the Twisted Cross man he'd met in Chicago who'd been "in the tank" for weeks at a time?

This was the reason the Reapers spoke to each other, as Duvalier had observed. And killed with guns, wasting vital aura. The Twisted Cross were a weapon, combining the minds of human soldiers with the death-dealing bodies of Reapers.

Valentine grabbed the man's neck and shoved him under- water to the bottom of the tank. The Twisted Cross Master struggled against Valentine's grip, muscles that hadn't been used in days creaking, while a sensor of some sort on his water-filled coffin beeped. The man clawed against Valentine's face with long fingernails, and the Cat turned his head away. Bubbles. The thrashing finally ceased, and the sensor added an outraged, high-pitched whine to the beeping. Valentine looked back down at the dead figure. His electrodes had come loose during the struggle, and under each one was a tiny tattoo of a swastika.

Valentine turned off the annoying monitor-machine. In the fresh silence, the crash that always came after a fight hit like a delayed-fuse bomb, and it hit hard. Vomit made up of his heartroot dinner poured into the salty water of the tank. But there was more to do. He rinsed his mouth with a handful of the salty water from an unused tank and spat it back.

Finish this.

Minutes later, six more dead bodies lay in their individual tanks of now-bloody saline solution. Somewhere, seven Reapers were wandering in confusion, bereft of the controlling intelligence of their masters. Valentine cleaned his sword with a spare lab coat and checked each of the other capsules to make sure they did not contain further Twisted Cross. He wanted to scream, to howl, to lose himself in a burst of activity, anything to push the last few minutes out of his mind.

Forget it. What you killed were not men. Not anymore, the old voice inside him said. Valentine wondered in a half-amused fashion if he were going mad. Had id and superego decided to launch a psychic putsch? He did not really care-perhaps another symptom of insanity.

The alarm, a mind-numbing Klaxon, screamed.

Tags: E.E. Knight Vampire Earth Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net