Chapter 10 – Great Expectations

Chapter 10 – Great Expectations

It’s been exactly three years – to the hour, in a couple of minutes – since Kellan took me in. I sat upside-down on one of the couches, hanging on by my heels – much like a bat. The common room was mostly empty, as the majority of my Company were out trying to redeem themselves after failing the previous training challenges. Zoe was the only other vampire in the room with me, and she was taking a small nap.

The clock ticked over my third year mark, and I had to smile at the lack of trumpets and fanfare. My first two birthdays – or is it death-day? – were both spent being trained and groomed to fulfil a certain role expected of me; in the first year, I had to learn what sort of public face I had to put on – tots retracted, skin smooth as ice-cream, exuding as much pheromones as I could get away with – and in my second year, I had to re-learn how to go back to school. I supposed that I was still being trained in my third year, albeit for the vampire world.

One month in, and the challenges had proved to become ridiculously demanding. Cara had failed the most recent one, and had to redeem herself if she didn’t want a strike (I didn’t know what would happen if Cara, Brandon or I received three strikes, but I foresaw some very awkward discussions between Kellan and the Council). She’d looked genuinely worried before heading out for her make-up challenge – she was already on one strike.

I pulled myself upright, and walked over to the fridge. I preferred A-negative, but so did Cara, and there was only one bag left. I settled for a shot of bourbon.

A lot of vampires in Company B had failed that challenge, which resembled a game of capture the flag. In the unresisting afternoon sun, with an area was larger than three football fields, each team of three vampires had to both protect their own flag, and capture their opponent’s – within an hour. If your flag was captured, or you failed to capture the flag, you and your teammates received a strike. I only managed to capture the other team’s flag when it was my turn because I was able to stand the sun for the hour.

The lift – a rather loud one with a warehouse metal gate – crashed open, and Cara walked in, followed by the rest of Company B. They were groaning loudly, pleased to be in the cool darkness again. I quickly retrieved the last bag of A-neg, drained my glass and poured one for Cara.

“Well?” I prompted. Cara took the glass from me, and downed it unceremoniously. Her face was pale, and a vein pushed angrily from her jaw and down her neck. She waited impatiently for the refill, and as she gulped down her second glass, her features returned to the humanly acceptable.

“I passed,” she finally answered. “It was a pain up my arse, though. Do you know how hot it is out there?”

“Fifteen? Sixteen degrees?”

“Twenty-bloody-degrees. In the middle of July!” Cara stopped short in the middle of her rant. “Oh crap! It’s your birthday isn’t it? Happy birthday!” She pressed the rest of the A-neg into my hands, accompanying it with a kiss on the cheek.

A few ‘happy birthday’s echoed from the tired voices around us. As ironic as it was, the expected had to be fulfilled.

“I can’t wait until training ends. My first birthday’s right up after it,” Cara sighed, nudging another trainee off a couch with her foot.

“How do you plan to celebrate?”

“Big party. Try to outdo the Troy one.” Cara raised an eyebrow at her own plans. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Intimate gathering of close friends, maybe. Ew, that sounds so unthoughtful.”

“Don’t worry, the thinking should be done by your friends, not you. We’ll figure something out for you.”

“As long as you’ll be there.”

“Kind of have to be, right?” I teased.

~~~~

The thermometer had not nudged far past single figures for quite a few nights, and this pleased the trainees to no end. The training grounds were perhaps halfway up the Dandenong mountains, and it was to everyone’s disappointment that we weren’t fifteen kilometres further up, for some white had touched the grounds there.

We were nearing the end of our sixty days, and it was easily seen in the numbers. Company A, faring the best under their insanely strict Commander, had six trainees remaining. My company had been reduced to just Zoe, Cara and me. As Cara and I had won the unfair immunity, the pressure was on Zoe.

“This is your final challenge.” Angelia’s words rode the cutting wind with some hesitation. Uncertainty from Angelia was as rare as her smiles. “You cannot fail this.”

“This is a fundamental aspect of your work on the Patrol,” the male Commander took over. “If you cannot do this, then you cannot do Patrol, no matter how well you did in other things.”

“Tonight, you are required to exterminate low-Gens,” Amie finished, at the same time the wind roared louder. Cara grabbed my hand. This did not go by unnoticed. “It won’t be clean. It won’t be glamorous.”

“There are fourteen Fourth-Gens in this bushland; one for each of you still here. No more, no less. That is all.” Angelia didn’t – couldn’t – make eye contact with me. With one glance at the looming trees, she walked away, her speed hauntingly human.

The trainees stood at the edge, unsure what taking the initiative would be seen as. Finally, Brandon spoke up. “Come on, they’re just Fourth-Gen rubbish. They won’t have much of a future anyway – we’d be doing them a favour.” With that justification, he walked into the forest.

“There goes our friend Brandon,” Cara whispered. She had not let go of my hand.

“He’s right though, isn’t he? What else could come of them?” I started leading us into the forest, my level of confidence mirroring Zoe’s on our first challenge.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t see how upset Angelia was,” Cara said.

“Yeah, of course I saw it. She’s upset because we have to kill tonight. But death isn’t even…it’s not the main issue when it comes to Fourth-Gens. They’re already dead. They’re worse than dead. We’re here to make sure they don’t do that to someone else.”

Spotting a Fourth-Gen wasn’t hard – their smell travelled as far as an uncovered dumpster.

The first time I used my new body after I was Draked, the sudden influx of strength was, to say the least, intoxicating. I found any excuse to exercise a superhuman feat – running so fast that the human eye couldn’t keep up; leaping from the ground to the third-storey balcony, and healing immediately each time I missed; playing catch with another vampire servant using the grand piano – and didn’t care about the consequences. After a while, the novelty began to wear off, and since I was requested to act more human (as to keep with the desired image of vampires being a similar and non-threatening specie), there weren’t many times when I flexed my muscles beyond ‘wow-you’re-stronger-than-you-look’.

Therefore when I started the Patrol, I thought it would simply be sixty days of license to show off all the skills I’d been told not reveal I had. Sometime between seeing Angelia step off the noisy lift and my face intimately seeing the floor, I figured out that I was probably going to be disappointed.

I found myself sitting on a bike that, up until that moment, I was pretty sure I was an expert in riding. Instead, everyone around me were doing flips and wheelies while I kept my two wheels on the ground, and it became a conscious effort to remind myself that I was more than capable of defying gravity.

The Sera from two months ago would be looking at the Sera now with considerable intimidation. Perched on a branch barely thicker than my thighs, the wood was more of a place to rest my feet rather than a beam keeping me up. Cara chose a sturdier branch a few metres below mine, and seemed to be waiting on me to make the first move.

In one moment, the wind direction began to change. Stepping off the branch, I dropped as fast as gravity would allow me, grabbing Cara’s arm along the way. Too late, I could almost see the trails of scent from Cara’s wrist whisk away in the wind.

Barely hitting the ground, I chased after the runaway scent. I had locked onto the target, and it was mine – even though there was one for everyone, I would feel cheated of my victory if this one was taken by another.

Sure enough, Cara’s smell was like a screaming siren for the Fourth-Gen, and no doubt our proximity doubly served it reason to be terrified. It moved a lot faster than I thought it could, and I shamed to have to actively call upon training to not recklessly lunge after it. Picking my footfalls in split second decisions, I gained ground upon the fleeing creature until I was physically able to see it in the trees in front of me. Coiling up my muscles for one final leap, I launched myself after it, tackling it into the ground in a mess of furious snarls.

“You got him, Sera?” Cara asked. I elbowed the struggling mass in the stomach, and dealt and sharp backhand for good measure. With a small whimper, the rank-smelling monster fell unconscious. “What are you going to do now?”

I turned to look at her, my knee still on its throat. “Invite it to a tea party.” Cara rolled her eyes, running her hands through her cropped brown locks – a habit she’d picked up since having it cut off. “We’ll get to yours right after this one.”

“Hold on.”

“I don’t want to hold on. I want to do this now. Why are you suddenly so hesitant about everything? You’re usually so gun-ho about stuff like this.” I placed a hand under the emaciated chin, feeling the jaw sharp against my fingertips, and the other hand under its head, feeling the grease in the hair and dreading how badly my hand would smell afterwards. Letting the power in my arms not please me too much, I pushed with both hands, yanking the head clean off the shoulder. “Ugh,” I groaned, not moving fast enough to avoid the fountain of darkening vampire-blood spouting from the cavity. “I smell like someone took a piss all over me. An impure, filthy-”

“I get the point,” Cara cut in, still standing where she was before.

“Well, there’s one up-side to having a perfectly good jacket ruined,” I continued, as Cara didn’t appear to want to say any more. “At least now we smell like one of them.” Shooting a glare that I wasn’t altogether sure I deserved, Cara stripped off her jacket and received mine with a scowl. Without waiting for me to finish redressing, she was off into the trees. “I didn’t think vampires still PMS’d,” I muttered.

When I’d caught up with Cara, I was momentarily surprised and somewhat jealous to find her standing a few metres away from a headless corpse.

“Was that ‘gun-ho’ enough for you?” she said.

“I’m just going to cut the sarcasm and ask you, alright? What’s up with you tonight?”

“Where do you think these Fourth-Gens came from, Sera?”

“Okay, we’re doing the question-with-a-question tonight – I’ll bite. These Fourth-Gens came from the same place every other Fourth-Gen comes from.”

“Yes, but why do you think they just happened to be on this training grounds? Conveniently fourteen of them?” Off my silence, Cara sighed. “The law for all vampires is that any Fourth-Gen and below spotted are disposed of on the spot, it’s like our civil duty. There’s no way the Patrol rounded up fourteen of them and threw them in here.

“Look at the one I just disposed of. Does she look familiar to you?” Cara tossed a large ball towards me. Only when I caught it did I recognize it as the other part of the corpse laying behind her.

The flesh was sunken in all the places where it should have been plump, and even if I could ignore the pungent odour of the filthy undead, the experience of looking at it was overwhelmingly repulsive. But the frozen face of horror was one I’d seen before, when I’d hungrily drank from her veins, unable to stop from the effects of her silver necklace.

“I would assume Troy offered up one, or more, of their escorts for the purposes of this training,” Cara gently prised the disembodied head from my hands, and placed it by the body. “They Draked fourteen humans to Fourth-Gens just so we can kill them. I’d seen all sorts of immoral stuff in Greece but…”

I grabbed Cara’s face, holding her lips closed. “But nothing. It’s sad, yeah, but it had to be done. It’s for a greater good.”

“That’s exactly my point! That mindset, that…that idea that it’s okay to sacrifice some humans if the ends justi-”

“Greater good, Cara,” I repeated. “I need you to be on board with me, I need you to be in the Patrol with me.”

There was a loud cheer a kilometre to our West. Cara and I identified the voice as Brandon’s. He met us halfway as we went to investigate this uncharacteristic break of cover, grinning broadly and bare-chested.

“That’s all fourteen of them eradicated! See, this is what I joined for – getting rid of scum. You two stink, why are you still wearing shit-stained clothes? C’mon girls, strip them off like me.” Brandon winked, stretching the muscles around his shoulders.

“You’re disgusting, Troy,” Cara quipped, removing my jacket and throwing it at the gloating Noble. The latter caught it with some irritation, but threw his arms around our shoulders and began to walk us out of the woods.

“Get used to it; we’re in the Patrol now! The three of us, especially, are expected to do disgusting jobs like these that others simply aren’t qualified for. Think of it in a good way, girls.”