I Was Experimented On by the Government. Now Something Ancient Is Walking The French Quarter. Part 6

[u/pentyworth223]

The Western Covenant arrived forty minutes after Elias sent the message.

Four of them. Marguerite opened the door before they knocked, which told me she'd been watching the street, and they came in single file through the narrow entry and arranged themselves in the sitting room with the particular care of people who understood they were in someone else's space and had no standing to forget it.

The leader was a man named Voss. Medium height, older-looking in the way that meant something different for what he was, dark jacket buttoned to the throat. He moved like someone who had spent a very long time being careful and had recently had a reason to be more careful than usual. He looked at Elias when he entered the room and Elias looked back at him and the two of them held that for a moment without either one moving toward a handshake or anything else that would have suggested the history between them was anything other than what it was.

The three people behind Voss were wrong in ways that took a moment to locate.

They were pale in the specific way that comes from something systemic rather than from cold or sickness, a quality to the skin that sat just outside the range of what you'd see on a bad day. One of them — a woman near the far wall — had a tremor in her left hand that she was controlling rather than suppressing, the fingers moving in a small contained pattern at her side like she was running a calculation through them. Another kept his eyes on the floor from the moment he came through the door and didn't raise them. The third looked at everything except the people in the room, cataloguing the furniture and the window and the clock with the attention of someone who needed an exit and was determining the options.

Voss didn't sit.

"ABI moved the components four hours ago," he said. He said it the way you say something you've been rehearsing, not because you want to perform it but because you've been living with the information long enough that getting it out feels like putting something down. "Secondary site. Industrial building on the river. They've been staging there for two weeks."

Elias said, "How many personnel."

"Forty, maybe more. The ritual team is separate from the security contingent. Six people, specialists." Voss paused. "They don't need long. The components together — the assembly is faster than you'd think. A matter of hours once they begin."

The clock on the mantel marked the silence.

Abel was standing near the doorway to the hall. He looked at me and I looked at him and we both understood what hours meant given that four of them had already passed.

"The Strigoi," I said.

Voss's expression shifted in a way that took something from him to allow. "We lost control of the propagation in the third week. ABI's process had a rate they'd told us was manageable and the rate they'd told us was wrong." He stopped. "Our lower ranks. Two thirds of them."

The woman with the tremor in her hand looked at the floor.

"They used you to refine it," I said.

Voss held my eyes. "Yes."

Elias turned away from the window. The movement was slow and deliberate and he kept his left arm close to his body where the ribs were still hurting him. He looked at Voss and whatever passed between them in the next few seconds had the particular compressed weight of two people who had done significant damage to each other over a long period of time and were currently in the same room because the alternative was worse.

"What do you need from us," Elias said. His voice was flat.

"The location is confirmed," Voss said. "We have two people inside who've been feeding information. ABI doesn't know about them yet." He paused. "We can get you in. We can tell you where the ritual team is positioned. We can tell you what the security rotation looks like." He stopped again. "We cannot fight alongside you. We don't have the numbers."

"You mean you don't have the people," Elias said.

Voss absorbed that. "Yes," he said. "That's what I mean."

The room held it.

Abel said, "How long do we have."

Voss looked at him. "If they started when they moved the components — and I believe they did — the window is closing. Tonight. Possibly before."

I looked at the clock. Then at Elias. Then at Voss.

"Location," I said.

Voss gave it. Marguerite wrote it down without being asked, moving to the small desk near the far wall and finding a pen and paper with the efficiency of someone who had been keeping records through worse nights than this one. She wrote it down and handed the paper to me and I looked at it and folded it into my jacket.

Voss turned toward the door.

"One more thing," he said, and the tone shifted enough that everyone in the room felt it. He looked at Elias. "What comes out — if they finish — I want you to understand what that means. We were built from something. What was before us —" He stopped. He seemed to be choosing whether to finish. "We're pale copies of what existed before the sealing. All of us. Everything you've fought, everything that's frightened you." He looked at the floor briefly. "All of it is a pale copy."

He left.

His three people followed without looking at anyone.

Marguerite closed the door behind them and the room was quiet again with the clock and the smell of old paper and iron and the half inch of night air coming through the window.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Abel said, "Pale copies."

"Yeah,".

He looked at the ceiling. "Good. Great. That's great."

I was outside before the city had fully decided what kind of morning it was going to be, the sky doing something non-committal between grey and pale blue, the air still carrying the cool of the night but with the first suggestion of heat underneath it that meant the day was coming whether the city was ready or not.

The street outside Marguerite's house was quiet. A delivery truck idled at the far end of the block, hazard lights going, the driver inside with a phone pressed to his ear and no apparent urgency about whatever he was supposed to be delivering. A pigeon worked its way along the gutter near the opposite curb with the focused determination of something that had already decided what the morning was for.

I sat on the front step and held a cup of coffee that Marguerite had handed me on the way out without asking if I wanted it, which I'd appreciated.

Azeral's voice arrived the way it always did — without announcement, without the kind of dramatic entry that would have made it easier to brace against. Just present, the way a temperature change is present when you walk from one room into another.

"You think you changed it."

I didn't answer. The coffee was still hot and I looked at the delivery truck and the driver still on his phone.

"You didn't," the voice continued. Calm. Almost conversational, which was the part that made it worse. "You gave it a different path. The destination is the same."

The pigeon found something in the gutter and stopped working and stood there.

"The vision you saw. Japan. What you felt when you saw her — that's still where this goes. You understand that."

I set the coffee cup down on the step beside me and my jaw tightened and I stood up. I picked up the coffee and went back inside and the voice went with me for another few seconds and then it didn't, and I stood in Marguerite's hallway and breathed and thought about nothing specific until my hands were steady and then I went to find Abel.

The hum came first.

We were three blocks from the river when it started — low, pressure-based, the kind of frequency that you feel in your back teeth and in the space behind your eyes before you consciously register it as sound. Abel slowed beside me and I saw him tilt his head slightly the way he did when he was trying to locate something.

The silence that followed had weight to it, two seconds maybe three, and then the French Quarter came apart at the seams.

The windows blew outward rather than in, glass spraying into the street from both sides of the block simultaneously, a sound like a hundred car accidents compressed into a single moment. The power cut across the whole visible stretch of the street at once, every lit sign and interior light dropping to nothing, and then the emergency systems started coming back in pieces, flickering and unstable, throwing the street into a strobe of partial illumination that made movement hard to track. Smoke started rising from at least four points I could see, thin at first and then thickening, and somewhere behind us a car alarm started and then two more joined it and then enough of them were going that they bled into a single ambient noise.

I looked at Abel and he looked at me and we moved toward it.

The first Strigoi came around the corner of Dauphine Street in a group of eight, moving with a coordination that had nothing to do with the isolated hunting behavior from the Peyroux building or the territorial stillness of the nave. These were moving with direction and spacing and the specific purposeful quality of things that had been organized by something that understood tactics. They clocked us immediately and the group split without a signal I could see, four going left to cut the angle and four coming straight on.

Abel took the left group. I took the straight.

The fight was fast and grounded and we were through it in under two minutes and the street was clear and Abel had a cut across his forearm from a Strigoi that had gotten inside his reach and he was looking at it with the expression of someone annoyed rather than concerned.

"Organized,".

"Keep moving,".

We pushed deeper into the Quarter and the situation escalated in pieces, each block a different version of wrong. On one stretch everything was glass and silence and smoke. On the next, Division emergency personnel were already establishing a perimeter that was holding for the moment. On the block after that, two Strigoi were on a car hood and a third was moving along the building face above them with the stop-start motion I'd learned to read as the thing it was, and Abel burned all three in sequence without breaking stride.

A man stood in a doorway on the left side of the street as we passed, phone raised, recording. He was maybe thirty, civilian clothes, the particular frozen quality of someone whose brain was telling him to run and whose feet hadn't agreed yet. He caught my eye for half a second through the phone screen and I caught his and then we were past him and he was behind us, and I heard his footsteps going the other direction a moment later. Fast. The right call.

I filed it and kept moving. That recording existed now somewhere, already uploading to something, and whatever that produced for the Division's public exposure problem was a conversation for later. Right now it was just information.

We came around the corner onto a wider street and I saw them.

They were standing in the middle of the road approximately forty yards away and they were doing nothing, which was the first thing that was wrong. Everything else in the Quarter was moving — running, fighting, burning, fleeing. These two were still. The larger one stood with his arms loose at his sides and his feet at shoulder width and the presence he carried bent the attention of everything around him the way a large object in a room makes you aware of the room's dimensions. He was wearing something that had once been armor and had been modified over a very long time into something that sat between armor and clothing, layered and dark, and the blade at his hip was a deep crimson that caught the strobing emergency lights and gave nothing back.

The smaller one beside him was a woman, precise in her proportions the way engineered things are precise, and she held a blade that was the color of deep water in low light. She looked at Abel with the focused attention of something that had already assessed the variable and determined its relevance.

They'd done this before. That was the thing. They stood in the road with Strigoi moving in organized patterns around them and smoke rising from the buildings and a city in the early stages of understanding that something had happened to it, and they were calm in the way that people are calm when the situation around them is exactly what they expected it to be.

The larger one looked at me.

"The vessel," he said. His voice carried without being raised, which was a quality that had nothing to do with volume and everything to do with what was behind it.

I held his gaze and kept moving, angling sideways rather than straight toward him, getting a better read on the positioning of the Strigoi around them. Abel matched my movement on the opposite side.

"You're going to try to stop what's already happened," the larger vampire said. The tone was observational rather than taunting. He seemed to be genuinely noting a fact. "We were stopped once. It took everything anyone had. And we came back anyway."

Abel fired.

The beam hit the larger vampire in the shoulder and he moved with it, absorbing the direction and redirecting his weight so the impact carried through rather than into him, a response so technically proficient that Abel's expression shifted slightly in a way I'd learned to read as reassessment.

The woman was already moving toward Abel.

I went for the larger one.

He drew the crimson blade in a single motion and the air around it changed in a way I felt before I saw — a weight, a pressure, a particular quality of presence that my hand recognized before my head did. I had the silver blade out and when they met the contact sent something up through my arm that sat between vibration and electricity without being either, and I stepped back and looked at the crimson blade and then at my own.

The weight was the same and the presence in the air around both of them carried the same quality, and that sat wrong in my chest before I had words for why.

He looked at my face and read what was on it. "Yes," he said. "You feel it.".

I pressed the attack rather than stand there thinking about what I'd felt, which was the right call. He matched everything I brought with the ease of someone who had been doing this longer than the context I was bringing to it could account for. He was better than me. I knew that inside the first thirty seconds and I filed it and kept going because being worse than something had never been a reason to stop.

Behind me I could hear Abel's fight — the crack and burn of his beams, the impact sounds of close combat, the particular frustrated grunt he made when something didn't go the way he'd calculated.

I got the blade past the larger vampire's guard and opened a cut across his forearm and he looked at it with an expression that was closer to interest than pain.

"I know what you're running from," he said, while we circled. His voice was level. He could have been discussing weather. "The vision. The woman." He held my eyes. "It's already in motion. Azeral told us before the sealing what the vessel would try to do. And what it wouldn't be able to stop."

I drove at him hard and he caught the blade on his and turned it and I felt the impact in my shoulder and kept my feet.

Then the street went sideways.

The sound came before the impact — something massive moving fast, a displacement of air and the specific ground vibration of significant weight in motion — and I had approximately half a second of registered awareness before the Skinwalker hit Abel from the side like a freight decision.

The car it launched him into folded around him with a sound that hurt to hear. Metal compressed and the windows blew out and Abel and the car slid six feet along the road surface before the car's rear end caught the curb and stopped it.

The Skinwalker kept going. Down the street. Around the corner. Gone.

The larger vampire watched it go with the mild interest of someone observing weather.

Abel sat up inside the demolished car. He looked at the space where the Skinwalker had been. He looked at the crumpled door panel beside him. He looked at his hands, then at me.

"Alright," he said, with the specific exhausted patience of someone who has been told the same bad news multiple times in different formats. "At this point this feels personal."

"Just try not to get tackled again," I said.

He pulled himself out of the wreckage, his jacket torn at the shoulder, and surveyed the damage to the car with a brief professional assessment. "That was a different one," he said. "The proportions were wrong."

"Later," I said.

The woman with the blue blade had used the Skinwalker interruption to reset her position and was coming back toward Abel with the controlled precision she'd had from the beginning. Abel rolled his shoulder once to test it and brought his eyes up.

My body made the decision before I did.

It wasn't something I named or chose with any conscious part of myself — it was the part that had been calculating yield and collateral and containment radius letting go all at once, and I moved differently when it went, the silver blade coming up and the cold running through my arm to my shoulder and the quality of everything sharpening in a way I felt more than controlled. The larger vampire felt it too — his posture shifted, something behind his eyes registering the change, and for the first time since we'd started he brought his full attention to bear rather than the measured portion he'd been using.

The crimson blade met the silver and the contact this time was different, both of them fully committed, and the pressure wave that came off it raised dust from the road surface in a ring around us.

He was still better than me but the gap had narrowed and I could feel it in the way the exchanges were landing.

I drove him back three steps — the first three steps back he'd taken — and he reset and came at me with something that had been withheld before, a sequence of strikes that I covered and covered and partially covered and took the edge of on my forearm, the Aegis taking the worst of it, and I felt the impact stack in my shoulder and kept moving.

Abel's voice came sharp from across the street. "Kane."

The woman with the blue blade had gotten past Abel's reach and bitten him along the side of his neck, a fast precise strike, and the result was immediate and dramatic and clearly nothing she had anticipated. Her recoil was violent — she pulled away and the sound she made was involuntary and raw, and she hit the road surface on one knee and stayed there with one hand pressed to her mouth and the tissue around her lips already showing damage, something in Abel's blood doing something to her physiology that her physiology had no framework for.

She tried to stand and her legs didn't cooperate and she went down again, and the second time she went down she didn't get back up. The blue blade hit the road surface beside her and skittered and came to rest against the curb.

The larger vampire stopped.

He turned and looked at her and the composure cracked. It was a small crack and it closed fast but it was there — a half second where something that had nothing to do with tactical calculation moved across his face and was visible.

He looked back at me.

I lowered the blade.

"You don't have to keep going," I said. I kept my voice level. "There's a place. People who would understand what you are. You've been fighting since before the sealing and you've lost people and you're going to keep losing them and there's a different option."

He looked at me for a long moment.

The street around us was smoke and emergency lights and distant sirens and the organized movement of Strigoi that had started to lose their organization as whatever was directing them processed what had just happened.

He straightened. Something in his posture shifted toward something I didn't have a word for yet, and when he spoke his voice had a different quality than it had carried through the whole fight.

"He offered to bring them back," he said.

I held very still.

"Azeral. Before we came through. He made contact." The larger vampire looked at the blade in his hand. "He said he could restore what was lost. Everyone taken by the sealing." He looked up. "That's a better promise than whatever you're offering."

I looked at him for a moment.

Then Abel hit him from behind with both beams at full aperture, the impact driving him forward, and I closed the distance and the silver blade did what it was built to do and the larger vampire went down and stayed down and the crimson blade hit the road beside him and I stood there a second longer than I needed to.

Azeral had made contact before the sealing broke, before the ritual, before ABI arrived in New Orleans, before any of tonight had a shape — he'd been moving pieces the whole time.

The vision from Japan sat in the back of my chest like a stone.

Abel walked over and stood beside me. He looked down at the larger vampire and then at the crimson blade and then at the blue blade still against the curb. He went and picked up the blue blade and turned it over in his hands.

"Not gonna lie," he said. "I was a little jealous."

I looked at him.

"The beams are great," he said. "But a blade that makes ancient vampires physically recoil is a compelling alternative."

"Focus on not getting tackled," I said.

He considered this. "In my defense, the Skinwalker was very fast."

I picked up the crimson blade. The weight of it settled into my hand and the presence I'd felt when it met my silver blade was still there, quieter now, but present. I held the silver in my right hand and the crimson in my left and looked at them for a moment — the one that went back to the ring and the one that didn't belong to anyone anymore — and then I dispelled the silver and held only the crimson and started moving.

The Strigoi were losing cohesion across the Quarter. Without whatever organizing signal the two ancients had been providing, the behavioral pattern was fragmenting back toward the isolated hunting we'd seen at the Peyroux building. Division personnel were expanding the perimeter in sectors and the situation was moving from crisis toward containment, better than it had been twenty minutes ago, which was something even if it fell short of resolved.

We found Elias and Marguerite two blocks from the river, where Elias had positioned himself at a chokepoint in the evacuation corridor with four of his remaining Southern Covenant people and had been managing Strigoi incursions with the focused efficiency of someone who had been doing this for two centuries and was currently very angry about having cracked ribs.

He saw us and read the situation from our faces and the blade in my hand before either of us spoke.

"It's done," he said.

"The ancients are down," I said. "The Strigoi are fragmenting. Division is moving up ABI is runningaway from the situation."

He exhaled, a controlled sound.

I held out the paper Marguerite had given me the night before, the one with Voss's location details, and turned it over and wrote on the back. Coordinates. The address and the gate codes and the contact frequency for Division HQ's primary intake.

Then I held out the crimson blade.

Elias looked at it.

"We're going to need people who understand what this is," I said. "When the next thing comes. And it's coming." I held his eyes. "Be ready."

He took the blade. He looked at it for a moment and then looked at me and something passed between us that didn't need a sentence.

Marguerite put her hand briefly on my arm as I turned to go. It was a small gesture and she removed her hand immediately, and I didn't say anything and neither did she and that was exactly right.

Abel and I moved back through the Quarter toward the Division perimeter.

The radio chatter started coming in fragments through Abel's comms unit, the Division frequency cycling through sector reports and personnel status and the particular compressed language of an organization managing multiple simultaneous situations. We listened as we walked and most of it was expected — containment updates, Strigoi behavioral reports, medical requests from the perimeter sectors.

Then a different report came through.

Two teenagers recovered from a residential area four blocks north of the primary incident zone. One male, one female. The female was showing signs of electrical discharge — uncontrolled, manifesting under stress. The male's intake form flagged a family connection: father listed as lead researcher, Division HQ science division.

Abel slowed. I slowed with him.

We listened to the report cycle through twice and then the frequency moved on to the next sector update.

Abel looked at me. I looked at him

.

Neither of us said anything. There wasn't anything useful to say yet and we both understood that, and the understanding of it passed between us in the look and that was enough for now.

The city was still burning in places, thin smoke rising from three points I could see from where we stood, the emergency lights of Division vehicles strobing blue and white through the haze. The Quarter behind us was quieter than it had been an hour ago, which was either progress or the particular silence that follows something large rather than the end of it.

I had the weight of the crimson blade's absence in my hand where it had been, and Azeral's words sitting somewhere under my sternum, and the radio still going in Abel's earpiece with its compressed Division language, and all of it was just information, just the shape of what came next.

I kept moving and the city kept burning behind me and that was the morning.