Master and Servant

"If you don't let me go. I'm going to kill you, you sadistic son of a bitch." She hissed between clenched teeth. Gregory had her wrists in his vice like grip. Not that she couldn't have broken his hold if she tried, but Jeanine didn't want to waste the energy. She'd had enough of his attitude and wanted to be left alone for one evening.

"I'm not the sadist with wolves in her ancestry." His self-satisfied grin made her seethe. "Do you actually believe I'd keep you here if I had a choice?" He looked around with contempt.

Jeanine flushed, refusing to acknowledge the hit but damned by her pale skin. Dust motes danced in the thin shaft of golden light coming through the lone scratched window. "It isn't a pack. At least I have time to myself." She flipped her hair out of her eyes irritably. Somehow he'd managed to talk her into letting it grow out. Although at this point, Jeanine would have welcomed company, at least then she'd have someone to talk with. Trying to talk with Gregory was as enjoyable as talking with a hamir.

"At least Anatoly's place is clean." He pulled her towards him.

With a snarl, she broke his grasp and turned to the door. "Then go back to him if you prefer living with all those people." She sneered. "I don't." Jeanine certainly didn't want to have to share Gregory with a dozen or so other battle servants. Horrid as he was, at least she had him to herself, even if he wouldn't leave her alone when she needed it.

"Listen to me for once."

"No you listen, Gregory." She turned back and glared at him. His beautifully sculpted features no longer seemed as attractive as she'd once thought. A feather tree is beautiful, too, and about as intelligent.

He crossed his arms across his chest, waiting.

"I can't live like that. I tried. I'll starve before I go back to living in barracks, with you or anyone else." At this point, anyone else sounded like an excellent idea.

"There's no one better for you than I am." His ego was another thing Jeanine could well live without. "Besides, you have no idea what it's like to live in barracks." She had to bite back a scathing reply to his arrogance.

"Maybe you think you're better for me in bed." she said in an attempt to divert the subject from her past. "Just because you're the strongest battle master I've ever met , doesn't mean there aren't ones stronger." Of course, there was the problem with being on my own again. Jeanine debated the merits of remaining under Gregory's thumb versus the constant struggle against starvation for the emotional energy and attention she needed as a battle servant to live.

"Ones who can make you howl like a wolf in bed, my little servant?"

"I don't give a damn about sex." She flung the door open, careful not to pull it off its hinges in her fury. Sex was the easiest and least emotionally intimate way to get the energy she required. When she'd first met Gregory, he'd seemed an easy master to tolerate. At least, he was easy on the eyes. It's been a long time since I've been this stupid.

"What are you going to do?" He stalked her with the lazy grace of a giant cat, as if he'd been designed a predator and not her. "Go back to killing humans?"

"If that's the cost of freedom…" Jeanine lied and slammed the door behind her, not giving a damn about wasting energy. Never, never would she kill a human who meant no harm. A human had cared for her once and she'd vowed to never violate his memory. She didn't look back as the crash of rending wood rang in her sensitive ears.

Anatoly paced in his rooms. The smooth wood insulated his feet from the chill cement, but did nothing to relieve his growing tension. "Damn you, Gregory." He snarled at the absent battle master. While Gregory was hardly competent at his life, at least he gave surcease from the childish battle servants surrounding Anatoly.

It wasn't their fault. He looked down at them, laughing and dancing in the gardens below his window. They were so exquisitely beautiful. In his mind, he could sense each and every one of the nearly three dozen servants dependant on him for their very lives. The burden of years weighed like stone.

The battle servants had once served a purpose, defending mother Russia from the ravening hordes threatening her life. Now that life had been shattered, reconstructed in ways unimaginable to the humans who'd caused such destruction. He leaned his elbows on the high window ledge. With a sigh, he saw a trio of coppers baiting a bull. *That prey is not worth your time.*

*Master?* The petulant whine grated on his nerves. He sent a firm negative and one of them reluctantly dashed in and slit the animal's throat. Soon, nearly a dozen servants gathered around it. In an orgy of activity, they drained it of blood and quickly had it skinned and butchered. He hated seeing any creature tormented for mere amusement.

With a savage yank, Gregory snapped the master's bond he held over Jeanine. "What an arrogant little bitch." he muttered, kicking a battered wooden chair. It shattered into countless pieces under the impact of his fury now that his anger had no servant to feed. At least, when living around numerous other battle servants, he could feed them the excess.

"Now what?" he asked himself, sitting on the edge of the old, but scrupulously clean mattress and putting his head in his hands. "Why in hell did she have to pull this stunt now?" he rolled his shoulders as if to settle an itch. Without some way to rid the excess emotional energy battle masters used to feed and control their charges, he'd age until he looked as old and decrepit as any human nearing their century mark.

"Didn't think of that, did you, Lord and Master Ilya?" he snarled at the icon of his creator on the altar in the corner of the room. The statue's blank blue eyes stared back at him. "You probably think I should go get her back." He considered it. He had no desire to shepherd a whole flock of battle servants the way his brother, Anatoly, did. Even though, right now, he could probably feed at least three times as many servants as Anatoly had ever had at his services.

Only someone of Jeanine's power or better could satisfy him alone. He snorted at the thought. "Except there are no more powerful servants than platinum." He used the street label for the most arrogant and, yes, most deadly of the battle servants. They had eyes with metallic flares to the irises, a result of the light intensification mechanism bred into them. Lord Ilya's sick sense of humor had led him to use precious metals for the reflective backing, copper for the least powerful, then silver and finally gold for the normal ranks. The almost-mythological platinum servants had flares of the manmade--or grown, he thought wryly--adamantine, which was a dull silvery grey, thus the nickname platinum.

With a sigh, Gregory realized Jeanine had been merely rebelling her normal irritation at having to submit to her master. Not even humans, as close to mere animals as they were, liked being dominated. Battle servants, utterly dependant on their masters for their very lives and far more self aware than any human, often tried to reject their genetically-mandated inferiority.

He stood and pulled a heavy cloak around his shoulders. It hid his unusually heavy physique far better than a coat. With a flicker of power, he reached out to find Jeanine and met with no success. Blinking in surprise, he tried again. Still nothing.

I might as well go visit my brother. At least he always has tea on.

Jeanine barely made it into the darkened alley before she doubled over, throwing up everything she'd eaten in the last day . Heaving again and again, helpless in her body's torment, she fell to her knees in the horrid muck of the dank alley. Burning knives twisted in her gut. Before she could do anything about it, her sphincter gave way under the onslaught and scalding hot filth ran down the backs of her legs inside her pants.

I knew there was a reason to wear underwear. Giving up any sense of dignity, She simply let her body writhe in its horrid torment for her disobedience to Gregory.

The stench made her retch long past the time she was truly empty. Battle servants couldn't digest solid food without the constant linkage to a master, a fact she'd conveniently forgotten. She was shaking with cold as well as shock by the time her body had rid itself of all foreign matter. A heavy fog had rolled in off the nearby river. Grateful for small favors, Jeanine stripped off her soiled clothes and threw them against the far wall to land with a wet smack. They hung for a long moment, and she couldn't help but grin wryly when they fell into the pile of other garbage.

Gagging over the rank odors assaulting her sensitive nose, she blinked to readjust her eyes. Looking around, she found a heat source three meters up and almost five to her right. Too bright. As she focused, it resolved into a rubbish fire. She snorted, thinking it would probably smell better than she did right now. No warm-blooded animals were within visual range. With all her senses set to maximum gain and spectrum, she heard the high pitch whine of itrians, tiny scavengers a big as her thumb, exalting over the feast she'd left them.

"Eat well, little friends." She whispered under her breath, thinking of their beautiful, iridescent carapaces and freezing cold pincers. They lived on heat and, as she looked back, she saw the warmth she'd left behind fade with amazing speed. There must have been an entire horde of them. She placed the image of the smouldering fire she had seen in the forefront of her mind. Many of the strange creatures left behind in the wake of the Great Biowar were telepathic to one degree or another. Jeanine had no idea if itrians were, but figured it didn't hurt to try.

Tiny flashes, like lighted beads on a string, trailed behind the jet. The sonic boom hit just as the breeze brought the first wave of death from the strike of yet another bioweapon. This one wouldn't kill immediately, as even the great Weapons Masters had yet to create one capable of such a thing. The timing was irrelevant, though, as Jeanine's first lover coughed out his life in a spray of stinking black blood.

She tried to wipe her eyes clear with the back of her hand, instead spreading the putrescent mess. Tears streamed down her face as she howled to the moon on the orange-lit horizon. Jeanine damned her own immunity. Why in hell can't they find something to take down battle servants? She longed for death. Unable to close Misha's staring eyes, she tried to lay him gently on the broken soil, only to have his entire body disintegrate in her hands. She remembered his laughing grey eyes, so exquisitely beautiful and soft after they'd made love.

"No!" Jeanine screamed her loss and pain. It was overshadowed by a booming crash and a sheet of fire directly overhead. Instinct for survival forced her to run for the cover of the nearest building. Only later did she realize she'd taken Misha's gold wedding band with her.

Over two centuries later, Jeanine looked at that same simple gold band on her own finger. After Misha's death, she'd bathed herself clean in the great river Moskva. Although now the scenery was quite different. Warped and scarred beyond recovery by the humans' insane warring, the bioweapons created by humans had changed the face of the earth until no one but another who'd actually seen pre-War earth could ever know the true extent of the damage.

Jeanine washed her face again in the cold water. A huge river fish, distant kin to the great pike which had once lived in these waters, swam by with a wary eye to the animal on the shore. With no chance for clothes there, she eyed the fish in return. Finally, loping off, Jeanine searched the now abandoned streets of Moskva for a likely clothes provider.

Anatoly dubiously watched the young battle master who called him brother. They weren't actually brothers, but Anatoly's putative relationship with Gregory gave him a degree of anonymity he couldn't find elsewhere. He set down his tea and sighed in disgust. "You idiot."

"What?" Gregory sucked in his flat middle, as if he were posing for a photograph. Admittedly, he was a pretty man; blond hair, blue eyes, and built like something out of a pre-War bondage loop. "She made demands of me." He preened in the only mirror in the room, a silver platter over the mantle. "Servants don't have any rights."

Anatoly rolled his eyes to heaven, truly glad Gregory wasn't actually his brother or he'd have feared for his own degree of intelligence. "Haven't you learned anything about women yet?" He thought about adding a shot of vodka to his tea. If nothing else it would dull the young man's voice whining in his ears.

"I fuck her often enough, if that's what you mean." His blue eyes reminded Anatoly of crystal. They were almost as vacant of thought.

"Put that way, I can well understand why she left." Anatoly gave in to the temptation to adulterate his drink, even if he did have to go on stage in under an hour. Without some kind of anaesthetic, he was going to smack this child. Why do I put up with him? If it were widely known he'd been both a confidant of Lord and Master Ilya and one of the first generation of battle masters, he'd have to spread himself so thin trying to satisfy everyone, no one, including himself, would be content. Contentment had become Anatoly's one goal in life. Calm, quite, contemplative peace was his entire life's focus.

Gregory looked at the bottle. With a sigh and a grimace, Anatoly poured some into Gregory's cup. The cup stayed there. Anatoly poured more until Gregory put up his hand. Maybe I can get him drunk and shovel him into the alley for some lucky silver to find.

Gregory took a big gulp of his well-doctored tea. A whiff of the overpowering fumes hit his nose and Anatoly had to hold back a sneeze. Slumping back into a big, green, overstuffed armchair, Gregory continued with his tirade. "I was good to her. She didn't want for anything."

"Except possibly a little consideration." The situation finally struck home. There was a platinum loose in the city. Setting his tea down, Anatoly rubbed his temples. He was getting too old for this kind of nonsense. "Do you have any idea where she went?"

"She locked me out after I broke our bond." Gregory took another big gulp of tea.

"You broke the bond?" Anatoly snapped.

"What about it?" Gregory leaned forward. "She walked on me."

"Didn't you even stop to think she might come back if you left the bond in place?" As soon as he said it, Anatoly realized Gregory never thought. He didn't have the equipment.

What a mess! He glared at his own tea. He'd much rather spend this evening in the baths than trying to track down the most dangerous predator ever created out of the hundreds of monstrosities. A being created to kill humans and humanoids like himself.

Gregory shrugged and leaned back again, "No, the bitch'll just have make her own way in the world. I might've taken her back if she apologized."

"For what?" Anatoly glared. Then he pushed at Gregory to finish off his drink. Mindlessly unaware he was being controlled, Gregory slugged back the rest of the tea. He was still vertical.

Disappointed, Anatoly examined the remaining vodka in the bottle. I can always get more. He poured the rest into Gregory's cup. "Fer pissin' me off. Damn bitch has no right to nothin'" Finally, Gregory finished off the almost pure ethanol and slumped into the chair.

"Damn, almost a liter." Anatoly tossed the bottle into the rubbish bin. Even the shatter of breaking glass didn't disturb Gregory now. *If you would?* He sent to his single gold servant.

The young man looked around the edge of the doorway timidly, "Yes, my master?"

"You don't have to bow and scrape in private, Dimitri." He smiled fondly at the youngster. One of the rare, born battle servants, Dimitri had been the pet of too many people.

"It gets me fed when someone decides to pity me." He gave a very mature wink. Anatoly was never entirely certain if Dimitri were actually slow, or simply very, very clever in having found a unique niche.

"Get on with you. Feed on him when he wakes, if you like." Anatoly waved his hand at Gregory. "Don't kill him though."

"I haven't yet." Dimitri grinned, looking almost twelve despite the fact Anatoly knew he was well over eighty. "Don't worry. He's a bit hefty for me to kill. Probably won't even scare him. Think he'll like the poor little urchin waif who needs to be taught a lesson?" He said the last while arching his back and sticking out his rear end.

"Oh God, Dimitri!" Anatoly had to wipe up the tea he'd spewed all over the place with Dimitri's posturing "You're a bad little servant."

"Wanna spank me?" He danced out of range. Brilliant blue and gold eyes danced with bright good humor.

"You'd enjoy it too much." He shook his finger at the youngster. No, there's nothing slow about Dimitri. The young servant's good cheer and obvious intelligence was like a draught of ice cold spring water on a hot summer day after dealing with Gregory.

"True." Dimitri winked. "But how else can I grow up big and strong like you?"

"By eating your greens." Anatoly teased.

"Not on your life, Anatoly." the young man's face was white with remembered pain. "I forgot once and the next morning was horrible."

"How did you forget?" Anatoly laughed. "It isn't like you couldn't have known."

"Well, maybe not forget." Dimitri grinned, "More like I really wanted a salad and the watercress was soooo very good." He sighed. "I might do it again sometime, too."

Unrepentant as usual. Anatoly shook his head. "Are you ever going to grow up, Dimitri?"

"Not if it'll turn me into a drunk like this one." Dimitri carefully set Gregory's much greater mass over his delicate shoulder. It looked odd, the tiny Dimitri carrying the far larger Gregory, but as long as Dimitri kept him balanced, he'd have no problem managing. Particularly with as good a feeding as Gregory would provide for incentive. Fully fed battle servants could accomplish incredible feats of pure strength and endurance. Letting Dimitri take Gregory, who overpowered him by at least a factor of two, would keep Dimitri at full strength for almost two months if the youngster husbanded his resources.

With anyone but Dimitri, Anatoly would never allow so much leash. Battle masters controlled their servants by restricting their feedings. If the servant had to return every week or starve, they became quite docile. Most of them anyway. Platinums were always a rule unto themselves. Maybe I should see if I am up to... oh hell, I don't even know her name.

Even with all the experience humans now had as prey animals, they still rarely looked up. Jeanine jumped across the three meter gap between one crumbling building and the next. Closer to the city center, she'd started seeing the occasional human, but none of them were wearing anything she'd want to be seen in. Almost at the end of her reserves, she finally spotted someone almost as tiny as she was.

Jeanine jumped to a light standard. It was broken and black. All the better for my purposes. Handily, like the upright predator she was, she slid down the post. Faster than thought, she scurried into a sheltering doorway. Her prey walked down the sidewalk, completely unaware of her presence as she tested its mind. It was thinking of getting home to its boyfriend and she fed on its lust.

Shaking her head in irritation, as the amount of energy she could get off a human's emotions alone without injuring it were hardly enough to whet her appetite, she silenced the gnawing hunger in her body and mind. I need camouflage, not a snack. There was no one else in sight in the heavy fog, even to her broad spectrum vision. A human wouldn't be able to see its hand in front of its face.

She lunged across the street, taking the animal with her, and landed in another doorway. It struggled in her arms. Feeding on pure terror, she licked her lips and looked at what she'd caught. Its huge grey eyes stared back, so much like Misha's, but for copper flames outlining the pupils.

"No mere human can kill a battle servant," he said as her surprise relaxed her strangling hold on his mind.

"I'm no human." She purred and fed on his returning terror.

"What are you?" He hissed as she moved her hands down his body, now drinking in both terror and the beginnings of lust.

This is so much better than a human. Why didn't I think of this before? For, while Jeanine would never kill a human, a battle servant was certainly fair game. Of all the great bioweapons created in the war, battle servants were the most deadly, and, to Jeanine's mind, the most expendable for the risk they posed to what remained of "natural" ecosystems.

She looked into his eyes and smiled a slow smile. "You don't know?"

As the servant stared at her, slow realization crept into his face.

"You can't exist!" Before he could scream, she covered his mouth with hers. She could tell his body knew death was approaching from his hardness. Wishing she had more time to enjoy his sweetness as well, she mouthed him in a parody of a kiss.

"But I do." she whispered, snapping his neck neatly. The cracking sound echoed in the empty streets. "I know you can still hear me. When you reach hell, expect company." With a final, silent scream, his deathshock filled the black void of her hunger far better than the meager gleanings of scaring a mere human senseless.