“When I Come Around”
The early summer sun caresses Paris and its inhabitants like an overeager young lover, pressing into the stones of its buildings with a fumbling caress that I, for one, have next to no patience for. Instead, I wait in the shade of an awning outside of a cafe on the Rue Daguerre, no doubt looking quite uncomfortable in my black leather duster and heavy dark clothing.
Not that I feel the heat. The chill of the grave hangs too close about me for that.
I’ve been sitting here for approximately an hour, nursing a cup of strong Parisian coffee and paying very little attention to my croissant. Occasionally, with ostentatious deliberation, I add a few more lines to the sketch in front of me. I’m sure I look utterly pretentious, which is exactly what I’m aiming for.
After another twenty minutes or so, a British businessman walks into the cafe. He comes out a few minutes later, preoccupied with a newspaper he bought inside, and sits down opposite me without any sign of even noticing my presence. I let out a deliberate little cough and fix him with a glare when he looks up, nodding my head first to the sketch and then to the view behind him.
“Oh!” he gasps, his face flushing with embarrassment. “Oh, I’m dreadfully—excuse me!” He stands up quickly, still stammering out very British apologies, and leaves so quickly that he doesn’t even notice his phone is still sitting on the table. After a few minutes more of irritated sketching, I reach forward to pick it up, my face a picture of bored curiosity.
It is unlocked, exactly as I knew it would be. Four hundred fifty years of spycraft, but the basic premises of the clandestine rendezvous remain unchanged. But of course, four hundred fifty years of spycraft has also not changed the man who sent me here to Paris. I begin searching the phone, keeping my attitude carefully desultory. It is difficult, though—I’m eager to learn why John Dee, Spymaster Royal since the time of the first Elizabeth, asked me to help England once again.
I find nothing in the email save boring information on import/export tariffs and cost estimates for shipping goods across the Channel. The bookmarks in the web browser contain nothing but travel agents, investment brokers, and a small selection of eye-watering hardcore pornography. I try not to let my frustration show as I swipe from one page of apps to another.
Then I spot it. An application named ‘Tereza’, with an icon of a silhouetted bird of prey in mid-dive. My heart would quicken, if it beat at all anymore. ‘Tereza’ is my given name, the one I was baptized with on that day almost five hundred years ago when I screamed the offended squall of an infant as the holy water seared my forehead. Even among those who know that I am truly the daughter of Vlad Tepes, sometimes known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad the Dragon or Vlad the Devil or simply Dracula, few know that name. John Dee is one.
And the bird of prey...the summer sun seems shaded for a moment. Jeremiah Whitehawk. The shadow behind a thousand conspiracies, the gray eminence for anarchists and tyrants alike. The arc of his cruelty has moved from providing Catholics with gunpowder to commanding troops under Cromwell to shepherding Lenin back to Russia, the scope of his ambition increasing with the passing centuries until he now imagines the entire world within his talons. I stab my finger on the icon, suddenly desperate to know more.
The phone goes black for a moment, and then...a pulse of light. It ripples outward from the center of the screen, startling with its intensity, then pulls back in a sudden implosion that draws my gaze along with it. I experience a moment of confusion, my expectations for a briefing or a message or even just further instructions completely confounded by the sudden flash of light.
The light pulses again, and the confusion becomes disorientation. The light seems to tug at my eyes, each pulse outwards overwhelming them with blinding sensation before the center of the screen swallows the light and swallows my thoughts along with it. A third pulse follows, and then a fourth, and then I stop counting them and simply watch.
As I devote more and more of my attention to the patterns dazzling my eyes, I begin to notice a fine tracery of lines weaving across the screen under each pulse, a subtle and enticing dance of light underneath the imperious flashes that command my gaze. I realize what’s happening, but the part of me that would normally resist is too astonished by the power of the hypnotic strobes to react. I am the Devil’s Daughter, stillborn child of the King of Vampires. I have dueled against the will of demons, drowned the minds of gods within the wine-dark depths of my eyes. I should be able to fight this as well.
But there is nothing here to fight against. I cannot focus my own hypnotic powers against my captor—it is a mere object, insensate and automatic. It has no will for me to break, and its own hypnosis is designed by a madman to be irresistible. The screen projects its spinning, pulsing, swirling lights into my eyes without pause, and my eyes are drawn helplessly to the endless pull at its core. I feel my body relaxing, all the readiness for action leaving me as the lights lull me into docility. The world around me fades to gray. Only the screen is light and color now.
The light is relentless, consuming my thoughts and my will more with every passing second. I summon up all my willpower, desperately trying to close my eyes and break the connection for even a fraction of a second, but it’s no use. My body no longer follows my commands. It is in the thrall of the patterns, and the patterns are the will of Whitehawk. I feel a brief thrill of terror at the notion of being helpless to resist him, but then the patterns numb that fear into warm, sedated pleasure. All I can do now is surrender to the undertow that drags my thoughts down into blank obedience.
A car pulls up to the curb, and I feel myself standing and walking to meet it. There is a brief sting as the sunlight hits my pale features, not nearly as strong as the pain a true vampire would feel but enough that I notice it despite the flashing lights that are rapidly stilling my thoughts. If I had more time, perhaps I could use that pain as a focus to resist the hypnotic effect, but it only lasts a moment before I climb into the car and the tinted windows block out the sun. Whitehawk has left nothing to chance.
In the darkness of the car’s interior, there is nothing at all to distract me from the swirling, dancing patterns. They expand, filling my consciousness, my entire world until I exist entirely within the light. They obliterate my thoughts, wiping them away with one bursting implosion after another until even the idea of thought is gone and my mind goes entirely silent.
Then the world is nothing but obedience and endless, pulsing color for a time.
When I come around, I’m in a windowless room with cold, gray walls. I am lying on a padded table, secured in position with segmented steel bands around my wrists and ankles. I am naked. None of that worries me—after five hundred years of fighting for England, for America, and for justice alongside the Dead of Night, I am all too familiar with being imprisoned under a variety of circumstances.
Whitehawk is standing by the table. That worries me.
He has changed a little since our last encounter. His robotic body is a little bit sleeker, the polished white surface gleaming with a reflective coating no doubt intended to counter the Rescuer’s power-vision. His left hand has become more recognizably human in form, even as the right hand retains the hawk’s talons he added when he first abandoned his failing flesh for the eternal implacability of metal. But it is still Whitehawk.
“My apologies for your indignities,” he says. “But you have such a knack for concealing helpful items among your clothing that I thought it best to have it simply incinerated. Just as a precaution.”
My first thought is escape. I attempt to transform my body into mist, planning to flow out around my bonds, but I cannot will it to happen. I struggle, but my muscles move weakly against the cold steel and it holds me easily. I am utterly helpless. Worse, I feel my arousal growing with every failure. Some part of me already revels in being powerless against Whitehawk, and it is already stronger than I am.
I don’t let it show. “You must have a plan for me,” I say, “or you wouldn’t have left me alive. You must need me conscious for at least part of it, or you wouldn’t have let me wake up. Go ahead and spit it out. We’re both too old for banter.”
He speaks in a voice like old leather, carefully preserved by a voice synthesizer long after his vocal cords were discarded. “Consider it a test,” he says. His speech is without inflection, his face a metal mask, but I can still read his body language. He’s pleased with himself. “There is only so much data you can gain from testing a hypnosis program on your own fanatical subjects. Even brainwashing your courier proved very little. A bribe could have achieved as much. But if I can control you, well...then my future might finally have arrived.”
I hear it in my head, the mantra of Whitehawk’s shock troops. ‘The future is coming.’ Four hundred years of manipulation, destabilization, assassination, cheating death time and time again, all to fulfill his vision of all humanity united under a lone authority whose power could cut through the chaos of politics and bring about utopia by force. I don’t know how he can still believe in it with all the blood he’s washed off those immaculate white hands, but Whitehawk is nothing if not determined.
He closes his razor-sharp talons into a fist. “Release yourself,” he says. As soon as he speaks, I feel my body dissolving, relaxing its cohesion into a thick white fog that floods the room. I don’t feel free, though. I feel more trapped than ever—the pleasure I felt when I struggled to resist and failed is nothing compared to the bliss I get from obeying his commands. I feel drunk on it, my mind reeling at the sheer ecstasy until all my other thoughts are swamped by wave after wave of it.
“And coalesce at my side,” he commands. My body moves on its own to comply, the mist swirling together to once again take physical form next to him. He waits for a moment, waiting to see if the change from one shape to another has done anything to free me from his control, but I remain motionless. How can I do anything, when I haven’t been given a new command yet?
“Intriguing,” he says at last, turning to face me. “But still within your capacity for deception. I’ve known you too long to believe you incapable of holding your betrayal until the moment it would do me the most harm. No, I need to find something you would never do. An indignity you would never submit yourself to no matter how high the price.”
His eyes sweep up and down my body. “Kneel,” he says, and I instantly drop to my knees in front of him. Inside, I fume and snarl and spit rage—I am ashamed to admit it, but I have my father’s pride. In nearly five hundred years, I have knelt to no man. But now I look up at him, and only quiet adoration shows on my face.
“Hmm.” His utterance hangs in the air. “Spread the legs a bit wider, please.” I want to strike out instead, shattering his metal legs with a single swift blow and making him crawl before me as I kneel before him. But instead I meekly squirm and wriggle in order to display my body as lewdly as possible to his gaze. The worst of it is that I can no longer hide my arousal from him.
“Almost proof enough,” he says to himself. “But I would be a fool to leave it here.” He looks down at me. “Masturbate yourself to orgasm, Tereza. Tell me you obey me while you do so.”
There isn’t even a moment where I resist. My mind recognizes the command for the violation that it is, and I will myself with every ounce of strength I possess to fight it—to fight him. But none of it results in even an instant of hesitation. My hand drops between my thighs, my fingers strum away at my slick and dripping flesh, and I hear my own voice repeating, “I obey you, Master.”
“I obey you, Master.” I have never called any man ‘Master’ before now. I would not have thought my mouth capable of forming the words. But they come to me so easily, and worse, they feel so delicious on my lips. It is not merely my body he controls, although his grip on that is stronger than the one he has on my mind. I can feel the pleasure of obedience. I can feel it submerging my resistance like a tiny atoll at high tide, making my own thoughts seem tiny and irrelevant next to his power.
“I obey you, Master.” With every repetition, the words come easier. Every time I say them, it gets harder and harder to remember why I wanted to bite my tongue to hold them in. I still feel the desperation to resist, but it seems as motiveless as a child’s tantrum now. What reason could I possibly have to deny myself this bliss? My fingers slide in and out, the pleasure of submission matched by the pleasure of masturbation until the two become one.
“I obey you, Master.” The words begin to slur slightly as I repeat them, each chorus of submission bringing me closer and closer to my ultimate climax under Whitehawk’s watchful gaze. He is enjoying this, I can tell. He no longer has a body to feel arousal, but there are certain types of pleasure that transcend the purely carnal. He wants to see me submit. Whatever he may have said about wanting to test the limits of his hypnotic device, that is the truth behind this game. He wants to awaken me and watch as my will breaks against his power.
“I...obey you...Master, I...I obey...M-master...” The words stutter from my lips as my mind begins to skip in its grooves like a broken record. I can no longer remember which word comes next, and it becomes harder and harder to remember to inhale before I speak. But the obedience is always there, driving the pleasure to greater heights until all my thoughts are bent towards submission. I want to submit. I feel it all the way down into my core. My resistance has been reduced to wanting to not want to be owned, as futile an act as wishing on a star. I am his. Willingly.
“O-obey! Master! Obey! Master!” The orgasm unfolds inside my mind like an explosion, a blossom of fire uncurling and consuming my thoughts. I’ve never had a climax this strong before. I’ve never felt anything in my eternal life as good as submitting to Whitehawk’s will. My words have been reduced to a gasping chant moaned out through drooling lips, an endless mantra of obedience that no longer means anything because I have no thoughts to understand it with. I simply obey. And I come. I can no longer do one without the other.
“...obey...” I whimper out, as my body finally exhausts itself with pleasure. The words slip out in a dazed whisper as Whitehawk lifts my unresisting body up and straps me back onto the table. He caresses my cheek with metal talons, and presses a button on its side. A screen swivels into position, and my voice finally stills completely as the patterns begin to pulse and dance in front of my eyes once more.
I have no resistance to offer now, and my mind drifts into darkness within moments.
When I come around, I’m standing in front of a different screen, this one designed for communications. I watch myself punch in a familiar priority code, a private channel to the Liberty Squad’s satellite headquarters. Before I can even remember what I’ve been programmed to do, I know who will answer.
The screen flares into life, and of course it’s Captain Patriot. His face twists with the memory of old pain at the sight of me, and I feel as much guilt at entering his life once again as I do at the betrayal I now realize I have been tasked with. “Tereza,” he says, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
I want to tell him that I understand now. I want to say to him that I can finally give him what my foolish pride would never let me, that I have learned just how much beauty there is in submission and we can finally let that old wound heal. But instead, all I say is, “You know I would not have called if it was not urgent, Benjamin.”
He glares at me for a moment, lost in his private memories of our love and the way it soured, before he conceals it all behind a mask of grim determination and says, “Talk to me.”
“Whitehawk,” I say, dangling the bait in front of him in the sure and certain knowledge that he will chase it. “He wasn’t destroyed in Sierra Leone after all. He’s planning something, something big. I’ve infiltrated his base, but I think I may have been discovered. I may only have a few minutes to talk.”
I hear the urgency in my own voice, and a part of me marvels at the way that Whitehawk’s conditioning has enhanced my acting skills. I don’t think I’ve ever lied so convincingly before. “I’m sending you my coordinates now, Benjamin. You’ll need to move fast—whatever he’s up to, he’s on a timetable. Come down about five clicks away and head in on foot, and don’t bring anyone clumsy. If he knows you’re coming, he might just bug out. You’ve got to—”
I press a button, out of view of the camera, and lights and sirens begin to go off in the room. “No time to talk,” I say, reaching into a very good facsimile of my coat for a gun that looks almost identical to my usual weapon. “Find me when you get here.” I cut off the comlink without waiting for a reply. The last thing I see is the briefest glimpse of his face as it contorts in concern. He never stopped loving me anymore than I stopped loving him. But we could never move past that one thing. Five hundred years, and not a moment on my knees.
I stand at the keyboard for a long moment, waiting for my programming to unveil itself from the depths of my subconscious, but there’s nothing. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. I don’t have any commands pressing insistently on me, I don’t suddenly remember an irresistible compulsion that I have to obey. It’s like the future simply trails into darkness and uncertainty. I suddenly realize this is what I used to feel like all the time, and now I can only react in terror.
I try to shake it off, to embrace my unexpected freedom. If I have no commands, then I can act on my own. I can send another message to Captain Patriot, warn him of the trap he’s entering. I can hack into Whitehawk’s computer systems, do something to disrupt or destroy his hypnotic program that he no doubt plans to use to enthrall the world one smartphone at a time. I can find his power source and set his entire base alight with its detonation. I can, I can, I can...
There’s too much. Too many possibilities, in the absence of pure and perfect submission. I have every choice in the world, and I cannot decide between any of them without guidance. I need someone to tell me what to do. I need a voice in my head, whispering commands. I need some way to sort out the myriad potentialities of planning and acting that loom in front of me like a maze. Because if I fail, if I get it wrong and the world falls to Whitehawk, then it will be my fault if I choose wrongly. I cannot bear that responsibility.
I stand there for what seems like hours, desperately weighing what seems like an endless number of options and finding each one filled with its own risks and flaws, before I realize the truth. This is what I’ve been programmed to do. I’ve been commanded to wait here, patiently and unresistingly standing at this spot, until I receive further instructions. The panic, the confusion, the self-doubt...all of it was nothing more than my conscious mind rationalizing away my inactivity as something other than Whitehawk’s will. I am no more free now than I ever was.
But now that I know that I am still obedient, I can finally get my mind around the shape of resistance. Resistance simply means acting. A single step away from the keyboard, a single transmission to the Liberty Squad, anything I can do is another way to break Whitehawk’s hold over me. All I need to do is move. All I need to do is speak. All I need to do is act. And I know I can do that.
I feel myself pushing at the inertia that holds me in its grip. I feel a surge of elation as I force my fingers into motion, opening up a new communications channel. I hear my own voice speaking, and I know in that instant that I have finally rediscovered the indomitable will that Whitehawk sought to break. I can resist. I will resist.
And I hear myself say, “I am attempting resistance. Please send a hypnotic pulse to this location to reinforce my conditioning.” There is only an instant to despair before the screen flares into life, spiraling with Whitehawk’s irresistible patterns and deadening my mind once more. My last thought is a silent prayer to whatever gods will listen to the damned that Benjamin will do what I no longer can.
When I come around, I ache all over. It feels like there isn’t an inch of my body that hasn’t received some sort of punishment, and as I look down at myself, I realize it’s fairly easy to see whether or not that’s true. Whitehawk has dressed me in some sort of concubine’s garb, a few wisps of fabric that doesn’t so much conceal my sexuality as highlight it. I would blush, if I was still able to do so.
I get to my feet slowly and survey my surroundings. I’m no longer in the communications room—I appear to have found my way to Whitehawk’s latest throne room, another of his attempts to create a palace from which he can orchestrate his dominion over the world. This one has seen better days. Laser burns criss-cross the walls, some of them still smoldering, and only a few of the grand ornamental pillars that line the path to Whitehawk’s throne are only intact. The rest have been shattered to rubble. It appears I have missed a great battle...or at least, my conscious mind did. The soreness I feel is a testament to my participation.
I search the room, but find only unconscious shock troopers, smoking debris, and the twisted remains of Whitehawk’s latest body. Part of me wants to kneel before it even now, but my thoughts are already clearing. Whatever hold he had on me is broken. Mostly. And I suspect I know why.
After a few minutes of exploring the base, I find exactly what I expected to see. Captain Patriot, bloody but unbowed, standing next to a terminal at the base of a vast, multi-story room filled with computers. The acoustics are amazing—even from up here, near the top, I can hear him speaking with an elderly man dressed in the uniform of Whitehawk’s Science Division. “And you’re sure he won’t be able to recreate it?”
The old man laughs. It turns into a cough. “Not without my help,” he says. “And I believe that very soon, I will be beyond any threats Jeremiah Whitehawk can offer.” I see his face is covered with radiation burns. I clearly spent more time than I imagined in the grip of Whitehawk’s program.
“I understand, Doctor Willoughby,” Benjamin says tenderly. “You’ve been very brave. I’ll make sure that they remember your courage when all this is said and done.” He looks at the keyboard on the computer bank. “The world owes you a great debt, Doctor. This is a power that nobody should have.”
Before I even realize consciously what I’m doing, I shout “No!” I match the words with action, leaping down the three-story drop to the bottom of the gigantic terminal room to land next to the two men. My body absorbs the shock effortlessly, and I rise to my feet with urgency plainly written across my face. “Wait! You need to—”
I barely dodge Captain Patriot’s blow, and take a quick step back to avoid a second and a third. They whistle past with a force that leaves me no doubt as to the source of my sore and battered body—Benjamin’s physical power grows in direct proportion to the threat to democracy he faces, part of why Whitehawk no doubt wanted him out of the way before embarking on his schemes of conquest. Against a plan to destroy the very concept of freedom, he must be stronger than I’ve ever seen him before. More than a match for even Dracula’s daughter.
But I’m not interested in fighting him. “Wait, stop, just listen!” I shout, rolling backwards out of his reach. “I’m not under Whitehawk’s control anymore.”
Benjamin raises an eyebrow, making sure to keep himself between me and the terminal. “Of course not,” he says, his voice filled with suspicion. “You just jumped down here while telling us not to delete Whitehawk’s brainwashing program out of humanitarian interest.”
“I know how it looks,” I say. “But please, just give me a moment. Just a moment, and then you can erase the whole damn thing forever, burn the computers, destroy all of it.” I know I sound desperate, possibly even insane. But I don’t care. I have only one chance at this. We both do. I have to take it.
“Whatever it is you’re planning, it won’t work,” Benjamin says. “I’ve already destroyed the communications systems, shut down all the transmission links. Whitehawk might have downloaded himself out of here before I locked everything down, but that brainwashing program isn’t going anywhere.”
“Please, Benjamin,” I say, nearly choking on the words. They barely escape my lips as a whisper; even on the day he walked out of my life, I could not bring myself to beg him to stay. But I force myself to beg now. My pride is a poison, a prison, an inescapable trap that already cost me happiness once. I cannot let it do so again.
I see the shock on his face. He knows what it must have cost me to say those words. They overwhelm his better judgment, strike at him where he is most vulnerable—his heart. He stands aside to let me pass. I go to the computer terminal and begin typing, accessing Whitehawk’s brainwashing program and downloading a copy to portable storage before purging it from the data banks.
“No,” he says angrily as I take out the memory stick containing the last copy of Whitehawk’s work, modified slightly to ensure no one else can duplicate it. He grabs my wrist tightly, his face a thundercloud of righteous anger. “You’re not taking that back with you. Not to the British, not to the Americans, not to anybody. I don’t care who you’re working for this time, Tereza. There’s nobody that can be trusted with that kind of complete sovereignty over the human spirit.”
“There is,” I whisper, my voice hoarse with desperation. “You.” I pluck the memory stick out of my trapped hand, and slip it into his belt pouch.
His face is a mask of confusion now, his grip relaxing as he tries to puzzle out why I would do any of this. “I don’t understand, Tereza, I—”
The room is rocked by an explosion, undoubtedly the result of some fail-safe Whitehawk had or some act of sabotage Captain Patriot committed. The usual conclusion to an adventure like this. “I’ll explain later,” I shout, as the computer terminal behind us bursts into flames. “I promise. Just...keep it for me, Benjamin. So that I can give you the gift you deserve.”
Then we are both running, separated by smoke and concussion and sheets of flame as Whitehawk’s dreams collapse the way they always do. I escape into the waters of the Atlantic, with no idea where Captain Patriot has wound up. But I am content. He survives, I feel certain of it...and I will always treasure the dawning awareness on his face of just what it was that I offered to him.
Five hundred years, and I could never bring myself to kneel to a man. But I can bring myself to give him the means to make me.