The Eternity Cure. Julie Kagawa

I am forbidden to kill any more bloodbags.” Jackal crossed his arms and peered down at me, enjoying himself. “You were the one who told me to stop killing indiscriminately. I’m just following orders, here.”

      I bristled. “You can be such a—”

      The woman screamed and, this time, I reacted on instinct, spinning around. As the human lunged for me, my blade sliced through ribs and out the other side, nearly cutting her in two. The body struck the curb with a wet splat, and though it thrashed and spasmed for a while as we watched it warily, it did not rise again.

      Jackal and I exchanged a look as the body finally stopped moving. The night seemed deathly quiet and still.

      “Okay.” My blood brother nudged the corpse’s leg with the toe of his boot. It flopped limply. “That’s something completely new. Any guesses as to what that was all about?”

      I peered down at the body, though I certainly wasn’t going to touch it. “Maybe a rabid got in somehow,” I mused. “Maybe that’s why they shut down the city.”

      Jackal shook his head. “This wasn’t a rabid. Look at it.” He nudged the body, harder this time, flipping it over. He was right, and I had known it wasn’t a rabid from the beginning. The rabids were pale, emaciated things, with blank white eyes, hooked fingernails and a mouthful of jagged fangs. This wasn’t a rabid corpse. It looked perfectly human, except for the deep gouges down its cheek, and the wild, bulging stare.

      “Smells human, too,” Jackal added, taking a slow breath before wrinkling his nose. “Or at least, she doesn’t smell dead. Not like they do. Though she must’ve been pumping herself full of something good, the way she put a hole through those bricks.” He nodded at the cement wall, where the cracked indentation of a human skull sat in the middle of a bloody smear. “What did the crazy say to you? Something about making the burning stop?”

      “Jackal,” I growled, lifting my sword again. My blood brother looked up, following my gaze, and his eyes narrowed.

      Across the street, two more humans shambled from a skeletal building, heads and faces torn, bright mad gazes searching the road. They muttered in low, harsh voices, garbled nonsense with only a few recognizable words. One of them held a lead pipe, which he banged on a line of dead cars as he crossed the street. Glass shattered and metal crumpled with hollow booms, ringing into the silence.

      And then, another human emerged from an alleyway, followed by a friend.

      And another.

      And another.

      More torn, bloody faces. More glassy eyes and mad, wild laughter, echoing all around us. The mob of humans hadn’t seen us yet, but they were steadily drawing closer, and there were a lot of them. Their raspy voices slithered off the stones and rose into the air, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Vampire or no, I did not want to fight my way through that.

      I snuck a glance at Jackal and saw that, for once, he was thinking the same. He jerked his head toward a building, and we quickly slipped away, ducking through a shattered window into the gutted remains of an old store. Dust and cobwebs clung to everything, and the floor was littered with rubble and glass, though the shelves were bare. Anything useful had been ripped out and taken long ago.

      Outside the windows, the mob shambled about aimlessly. Sometimes they yelled at each other or no one, waving crude weapons at things that weren’t there. Sometimes they shrieked and laughed and clawed at themselves, leaving deep bloody furrows across their skin. Once, a man fell to his knees and beat his head against the pavement until he collapsed, moaning, to the curb.

      “Well,” Jackal said with a brief flash of fangs, “this whole city has gone right to hell, hasn’t it?” He shot me a dangerous look as we pressed farther into the building, speaking in harsh whispers. “I don’t suppose the population was like this when you were here last, were they?”

      I shivered and shook my head. “No.”

      “Nice. Well, if we’re going to pay a visit to old Salazar, we need to hurry,” Jackal said, glancing at the sky through the windows. “Sun’s coming up, and I don’t particularly want to be stuck here with a mob of bat-shit-crazy bloodbags.”

      For once, I agreed wholeheartedly.

      Silently, we made our way through the Fringe, ducking into shadows and behind walls, leaping onto roofs or through windows, trying to avoid the crowds of moaning, laughing, crazy humans wandering the streets.

      “This way,” I hissed, and darted through a hole into an apartment building. The narrow corridors of the apartments were filled with rock and broken beams but were still fairly easy to navigate. Being inside brought back memories; when I’d lived here, I’d often taken this shortcut to the district square.

      A moan drifted out of a hallway, stopping us. Sliding up against the wall, Jackal peered around a corner then quickly drew back, motioning for me to do the same. We both melted into the shadows, becoming vampire still, and waited.

      A human staggered by, clutching a length of wood in one hand. He passed uncomfortably close, and I saw that he had clawed at his face until his eye had come out. Pausing, he glanced our way, but either it was too dark or his face was too ravaged for him to see clearly, for he turned his head and continued walking.

      Suddenly, the one-eyed human staggered, dropping his club. Gagging, he fell to his hands and knees, heaving and gasping as if he couldn’t catch his breath. Red foam bubbled from his mouth and nose, dripping to the ground beneath him. Finally, with a desperate choking sound, the human collapsed, twitched weakly for a moment and then stopped moving.

      Jackal straightened, muttering a low, savage curse. “Oh, damn,” he growled, more serious then I’d ever heard him sound. “That’s why the city is locked down.”

      “What?” I asked, tearing my gaze away from the dead human. “What’s going on? What is this?” Jackal stared at the human, then turned to face me.

      “Red Lung,” he said, making my blood freeze. “What you saw right there, those are the final symptoms of the Red Lung virus. Without the crazy muttering and tearing the eyes out, anyway.” He shook his head violently, as if remembering. “I’ve never seen it, but Kanin told me how it worked. The infected humans would bleed internally, and eventually they would drown in their own blood, trying to throw up their organs. Nasty way to go, even for the bloodbags.”

      Dread gripped me. I glanced back at the body lying motionless in the hall, in the weeds poking through the floor, and felt cold. I remembered what Kanin had told me once, in the hidden lab when I first became a vampire. I’d asked him about the virus, why there was no Red Lung in the world anymore, if the scientists had found a cure. He’d given a bitter smile.

      “No,” Kanin said. “Red Lung was never cured. The Red Lung virus mutated when the rabids were born. That’s how Rabidism spread so quickly. It was an airborne pathogen, just like Red Lung, only instead of getting sick and dying, people turned into rabids.” He shook his head, looking grave. “Some people survived, obviously, and passed on their immunities, which is why the world isn’t full of rabids and nothing else. But there was no cure for Red Lung. The rabids destroyed that hope when they were created and escaped.”

      And now, Red Lung had emerged again, in New Covington. Or a version of it had, anyway. Jackal and I exchanged a grave look, no doubt both thinking the same thing. This was what Sarren wanted, why he’d taken the virus samples. Somehow, he’d created another strain of the plague that had destroyed most of the world, and he’d unleashed it on New Covington.

      The thought was terrifying.

      Voices drifted out from the shadows, and we went still. The corpse in the hall had attracted another pair of humans from a nearby room. They poked it halfheartedly, asking crazy, nonsensical questions. When it didn’t move, they quickly lost interest and shuffled back to the room, leaving it to rot at the mouth of the corridor.

      We made our way through the apartments, slipping