Choice of the Cat (Vampire Earth 2)

It was like a white-hot poker being held to his face. He felt himself scream, but there was just a ringing in his ears, lightning in his eyes as he viewed the world through a glittering curtain of diamonds. Somewhere outside the fog of pain and disorientation, he heard steps on the stairs. Concentrating like a drunk trying to get his house key into a lock, he picked up the shotgun, went to the stairs, and fired blindly down the spiral staircase. Blood poured out of his face. Dripped onto the storm-cloud-colored concrete and the metal stairs going down. Fell across his chest, warm rain. An apple dropped from the sky and into his concrete tree house. No, not an apple, a grenade.

There was nothing to do but jump. He launched himself out of the tower, spinning and pivoting -wow! just like a cat-to land hard on the surface below and run toward the darkness outside the hangar. Running had never been so easy; he hardly felt his feet touch the ground.

Though there was no one around, someone managed to kick him in his left leg as he ran. No matter, the foot on that side wasn't working that well anyway. He could hop into the darkness. But the darkness could not wait-it came rushing at him, greeting him in its comforting embrace like a long-lost love.

"It'll be all right, Molly," he said, lost in a strange new tunnel he had somehow floated into, an ever-lengthening passage of closing mists. "If you can't walk, I'll carry you."

He found the strength to turn his head, the darkness having decided to put him gently on the ground. He could see campfires in the distance. The fires burned brightly, melding into a single fire like the sun coming up. The fire was what counted. The fire was all that mattered. Too bad he was too tired to remember why.

David Valentine's body fought a hard war against waking up. Every time consciousness charged up the hill, his exhausted, pained, exsanguinated body held the line and at the last moment sent consciousness tumbling back into the darkness of oblivion. It tried to return when he was picked up and carried from where he fell, and tried again when he was placed on a table. A bright light in his face and surgical tape over his cheek brought other battles. Later, on a hospital bed, consciousness launched a series of sneak attacks. He had vague dreams of speaking to Captain Le Havre, then to his father.

Death never arrived to relieve his body from its war against the pain, so Valentine eventually awoke. He was disoriented; for some reason he wanted more than anything to know how long it had been since he'd been taken.

As he spun back to the awful real world, he reached up, but some kind of restraint frustrated his first instinct to touch his face. In fact, he couldn't even turn his body. The whole left side of his face throbbed in pain, and he felt a tired empty nausea. There was cold dampness between his legs, as well as a warm, sticky, solid presence in his undergarments. His left leg was missing its pantleg, though the rest of his clothes were still on. The pain was too much to deal with, so he sank back into a groggy sleep.

He did not sleep deeply enough. A woman eventually cut away the rest of his clothes and cleaned him up, a surprisingly agonizing process, though she handled him as gently as if he were a baby. When they changed the dressing on his face, under the care of a man not nearly so gentle, it hurt like the bullet cutting through his flesh a second time, and he passed out again, unfortunately for only a minute. He came round while they were applying more searing iodine and another dressing.

The hours ticked by, and he tried playing games with the pain, offering the pain thirty minutes of agony for just five minutes of relief, but pain would not agree to his terms.

He dropped into a fitful doze and came out of it a little further at a shake of his shoulder.

"Would you like some water?" a man in a lab coat asked.

"Yes, please," he croaked. There were more sensations now. The pain, always the pain, but he could also taste the air, and something about it told him he was underground.

The man brought the cup lower, and Valentine sucked cool water down through a surgical tubing straw.

"He can talk, that's good enough. Bring him."

Through the mists, he felt himself being lifted, carried down a hall to another room. They sat him up in a tube-steel chair with a hard wooden seat, the kind of chair that's been sitting in a neat row with five others just like it in some assistant principal's office since the school was built. They handcuffed his hands behind his back, which amused him. He was too weak to crawl, let alone fight. When they moved his leg to handcuff his ankle to one of the chair legs, the pain became so bad that warm urine flooded his pants. It felt like he was pissing nitric acid.

"Aw, Christ," one of the guards said, seeing the seat get wet and smelling the urine. "He pissed himself."

"So what."

Valentine's head lolled, and he looked at the pale green tiles on the floor. He tried to remember if he had ever seen such small tiles, so evenly laid out, when he again slipped into unconsciousness.

Later he had to wait. It felt like days, but perhaps it was only hours. His consciousness strengthened, and the haze began to fade. He realized that he desperately wanted to live, even if it was only for a few more hours. He wondered if they were just going to shoot him or if they had a more elaborate end in store.

They gave him more water. He was able to drink it, though it hurt his face to do so. The room was uninteresting, not even a desk or another chair decorated it. The little green tiles went from the floor about one third of the way up the wall. From there on up, it was unrelieved and undecorated concrete, marked only by a swirl or two of the mason's smoother. He smelled chalk somewhere and tried to remember if there was a chalkboard in the room from when he was brought in. The lone door to the room was also behind it, and he heard people passing in the hall at intervals.

When he heard a set of heavy steps in the hall, something inside him told him This is it. He tried to steel his mind, even if his body felt like worn-out rubber. But his mind was a slave to his body; intellect prostrated itself before the pain and fatigue just when he needed his wits most.

The door opened, and he was able to turn his head enough despite the pain in his cheek to see two tall Grogs enter. They were Golden Ones, dressed in black leather robes cut like a double-breasted trench coat of the Old World and shiny as a beetle's back. One stood to his right, the other to his left. Their fawn-colored hair was shorn down to stubble.

A dried-up husk of a man walked around in front of him. His skin had the waxy look of a cancer patient in the last stages of the disease; his lips chapped. Vigorous dark hair grew out from a widow's peak on his forehead and was brushed straight back across his head. His eyes could have been pale blue or pale green, depending on the opinion of the person looking into them. He wore a simple rust-colored uniform, and a Sam Browne belt very similar to Valentine's own. Red tabs with golden reverse-swastikas marked his collar. He wore no tunic, sidearm, or decorations.

"One of the best things about living so long," he said, in a vaguely European accent that Valentine was not experienced enough to place, "is that you get to see all the mistakes historians make, talking about something they don't really know.

"For example, the only history widely read since 2022 is that wretched pamphlet called Fallen Gods by that would-be Margaret Bourke-White named Kostos. She says the first of the new doors to Kur were opened in Haiti in the eighteenth century. She only missed by about a thousand years. How do I know? I was there. My eyes have looked on Charlemagne, young man. Kur had a door open in the Dark Ages, but they were not dark times for me-oh, no. During the Inquisition, we managed to get another open in Spain."

The General walked around behind Valentine and wheeled a cart into view. On it was his sword, his fighting claws, his little glow bulb, and a few other personal effects.

"So you joined long ago?" Valentine asked. "What did they offer for betraying a whole world?"

"What no price, no wisdom can buy. Time."

"So you feed."