My Pleasure, Darling

14: Pitstop

The Chancellor's message never reached Hakkat because the lines were cut. How many other cities had their lines cut? How many messages did he send to allies, begging them for their support and strength, that never made it? Would he have held the mountain if those messages had gotten through? Would I be comforted in the knowledge that my father would survive the oncoming slaughter?

This is a stupid train of thought. Mostly because it exists on fantasies and what-ifs. No matter what, my father isn't making it out of this alive. He is a vampire. A sucker, as Yew so colourfully described in her article. He consumes Bablets, a chemical solution of faux blood in water, so that he does not have to take human life to survive. He is everything HURS hates – not just a cold-blooded vamp, but a high-ranking one, a Chancellor-General, the head of the national army.

They will never let him live.

But Felix still has that newspaper. It's next to him on the seat. MT. ESTAR STILL UNDER SEIGE. Somebody is still alive up there. Somebody is still manning guns and throwing grenades, somebody is still devising how to drop bombs on the forces scaling the peak. Somebody is still alive.

They will be dead by the time I have completed my mission. Their bodies will be sprawled across the gym floor, or the battlements, or the cafeteria. Their lifeless eyes will stare at nothing as HURS troops rush through the mountain, securing every room and exterminating whomever and whatever they find there.

If I had been a vampire, would Dad have sent me? It makes sense, now that I'm sitting here thinking about it. Having a human woman take Andrea makes sense. Until her fangs come in – age thirteen or fourteen, maybe earlier – there's no way to tell she's a vampire child. Which means she and I can slip under the radar, unnoticed. I am the ideal candidate to take her away.

But part of me wonders whether there was something else behind it. Whether the Chancellor-General, the strategist, the hard man, the examinator everybody hopes they don't get, chose me, to keep me safe. Whether he chose me because I am his only daughter, his first, and he wanted to save my life. Because being human in the mountain, was not as great an assurance of my survival as it would be elsewhere.

The HURS soldiers will run through anything they find there. It won't matter if you are human. If you are – you might actually suffer a fate worse than death. Rape is always a consequence of a sacking. I learned this in history class early on, told in a matter of fact kind of way, like this was not a horrific thing to tell a class of twelve-year-olds. When I asked why, my teacher couldn't really tell me. I don't think he knew himself.

Older now, I know why. Because men who are high on power can take whatever they like without consequences. And they do. And it doesn't matter that the act is despicable, that they wouldn't do it under any other circumstances, and it doesn't matter if it's their sister or daughter, either. Men who are powerful are dangerous.

"Lois?"

I look up like I've been bitten, snapping to attention. Felix is leaning over the arm of his chair at me. He waves. "Earth to Lo?"

"Yeah, what?"

Elise grins. "You've been quiet for a long time, I thought you had lost your mouth somewhere."

"Sorry, I was just thinking."

"Well, stop. You look weird when you think." Felix sits back in his chair.

I want to snap at him. I want to tell him exactly what I think of him, exactly what I have always thought of him, and I want to tell him loudly. I can give as good as I get and I'm rarely, if ever, afraid to do so. But I don't. I just look away from him. I don't have the energy to waste.