URBAN NOSGOTHIC

Chapter Eight

Legacy of Kain created by Eidos Interactive, Crystal Dynamics, Silicon Knights.

Oh yes. This girl is screwed up.

I think I'd like to point out at this particular moment that when you're about to die, your whole life does not flash before your eyes as most poetically-inclined people seem to think. I am far too busy screaming like a rabbit in a snare and wondering why oh why oh why does my throat already feel so raw? My mind is also running a side-study of demon-face-demon-eyes-white-hair-ugly - no, not truly ugly, just different - and an awful strength more terrifying than Raziel's because here I can be certain there is no mercy, none at all -

My scream breaks in my mouth as soon as I feel the almost-gentle pressure of his mouth gripping my neck. My body becomes rigid: my chest hikes up and down like a sprinter's: but I find myself unable to make a sound.

The hum of the Reaver breaks the sudden silence in the street, and I screw up my eyes against the bright glow of the wraith-blade as it hovers very close to Kain's back.

"Drop her," says Raziel, in his best I'm-pissed-off-so-don't-mess-with-me voice. The fangs fastened in the skin of my neck tighten their grip and I feel a growl begin to vibrate in Kain's throat.

"Drop," Raziel repeats, quieter this time, as if commanding a strange dog, and he makes a brief, warning pass with the Reaver. My neck stabs pain at me as Kain's fangs dig in viciously. From the warm path it traces over my collar I know my own blood is flowing.

The growl I can hear rumbling in his chest becomes a silken purr, almost a croon of delight. He tastes my blood and he likes it. His body, pinning me to the ground, shudders all over in ecstatic joy, just briefly, then -

Kain lets go and leaps to his feet with a furious snarl. Raziel, the Reaver humming happily on his arm, says sharply: "If you eat her, I will kill you."

He leans against the wall, pressing one claw to a particularly nasty bullet-hole in his thigh. "I may well kill you anyway, " he continues, "but eating her will not improve your chances."

"Dear Raziel," says Kain sweetly, "you're so erudite when you're bleeding."

His voice cuts through me like a winter gale. Arrogant, yes, arrogant to a fault, but full of authority, full of power. He kicks an abandoned flick-knife aside as he and Raziel start to circle each other like tigers in a cage.

"What is this place?"

"A different world."

"Why am I here?"

"I do not know."

Kain snorts. "So much for the supposed knowledge of youth. Who is this human girl?"

"She calls herself Rhianna."

For a brief moment, two sets of inhuman eyes, one blank and glowing, one yellow and cat-pupilled, fix on me and stare. I huddle around my knees, feeling the blood congealing on my collar, and try to pretend I'm somewhere else...

Maybe I'm in my old bed at my mother's house, years away in time. The old smells of lavender and maybe toast cooking. My old ginger tomcat, long dead now, playing with the laces of my shoes -

" - with her?"

I surface from my protective daydream to see Kain gesticulating violently in my direction. Raziel is standing in front of me, arms folded. The Reaver has fled his arm and I take this as a good sign, a sign that I am not in immediate danger of having my throat ripped out.

"Calm yourself, Father," says Raziel infuriatingly. "This world is not so different to ours, in many ways. But we need Rhianna to explain things to us."

Kain throws up his arms in a gesture of helpless fury. "Explain to me why I should not just kill every piece of human vermin in this city, starting with her!"

"And what then?"

Kain looks incredulous. What more was there?

"Where will you go, Kain?" Raziel pursues. "From what Rhianna tells me, this city alone could hold a million humans. And these humans are not like ours. They know all about vampires, and how to kill us. They have these -"

Language fails him, but his claws are working eloquently enough, and he digs a piece of shot out of his leg.

"Guns," I manage to quaver, and Kain glares at me. My heart, just beginning to calm, thumps again arrythimacally. Sweat breaks out along my collarbone, but not the ridiculously cold fear-sweats I've been suffering of late.

No. Oh no.

"Raziel, if I did not know better, I'd say that when your jaw dropped out you grew sentimentality to replace it," Kain is saying, but I am barely listening to his words anymore. I am too busy being horrified at myself, cursing myself for being who I am.

You may remember I said that I've gone through life being attracted to the wrong sort of men? Men who will dominate me, hurt me, may even be capable of killing me in the end?

Oh, my friends, I can certainly pick them.

"Better a sentimental fool than an interesting decoration on some vampire killer's wall," says Raziel, and as if to make it clear that this discussion is over as far as he's concerned, he turns to me and holds out his hand. "Rhianna? Get up. Three men are dead. We cannot stay here."

My voice-box makes a little, strangled sound.

"You don't have to look," he adds, almost kindly, and steers me out of the side-street. One of my trainers feels sticky as it treads, and I am far too scared to look down to see what I have trodden in. Behind me I can hear Kain's footsteps, and his occasional low growls of exasperation as he is forced to leave all this perfectly good food just lying about in the street. I try not to think about him.

After all, I'd really have to be pretty far gone to start fancying genuine demons instead of their human mimics - wouldn't I?