Inkcaster (Library Gate Series Book 4)

by H. Duke

  The lab was more cluttered than the last time Thaddeus had been there. Stacks of papers were piled on the tables next to miscellaneous lab equipment. The air held a fetid odor that it hadn’t before, like some animal had been nesting inside. The case containing the vials of fortification serum was still on the table.

  Ink rot still covered the walls, the spider-web designs even more extensive.

  He tried the door that connected to Jekyll’s house. Locked. The door was made from thick, sturdy wood. He might be able to kick it in, but it would take much longer…

  William the Bold’s snarled laughter erupted from the door that led to the street. He’d climbed on top of the crate, wriggling through like a feral animal chasing after its prey.

  “I’ve got you now.” He hopped down on the crate and frowned as he looked around the room. “Where’s the girl?”

  “We split up. She’s long gone by now.” Thaddeus smirked, trying to show some confidence.

  The monster glanced around, his nostrils flaring and contracting as he drew in air.

  “You’re right. She isn’t here. The street outside stinks of her, though. She’s been running up and down it her whole life, after all. But one of those trails will be stronger, fresher than the rest. I just have to find it.” He smiled, and Thaddeus’ heart sank. If William the Bold was given enough time, his nose would surely lead him back to the hedge… and Sara.

  But Thaddeus couldn’t afford to let his fear show. He shrugged. “Look as much as you’ll like. You’ll never find her.”

  William the Bold considered him for a moment, trying to decide if he was bluffing. Thaddeus couldn’t tell what his final verdict was.

  William the Bold laughed. “Searching for her would be an inefficient use of time. When we were last in this room, I threatened to make you tell me. And that sounds like a lot more fun than sniffing her out.”

  He grinned. Thaddeus wasn’t looking forward to whatever he had planned. He hoped his interrogation resistance training wouldn’t fail him.

  Step one: make them believe you’re frightened. Thaddeus let his eyes widen. He took a step back towards the door that led to the Jekyll house. He jiggled the doorknob as though trying to escape, even though he knew it was locked.

  William the Bold grinned. “Don’t be so yellow,” he said. “We haven’t even gotten started yet.” He picked up one of the scalpels scattered across the table and stepped towards him.

  Thaddeus grimaced. In the hands of a trained professional, a person could be cut up with a scalpel like that for days without dying. Thaddeus was sure that William the Bold wasn’t a trained professional.

  As long as he’s not searching for Sara, Thaddeus thought, but he needed to think long-term. Even if William the Bold were preoccupied with torturing him, he had to think about what would happen to her later. If he died, who would protect her?

  Before he could think of anything else to put off that moment, the sound of wood scraping against stone drew their attention to the door that led out to the street. Someone had managed to push the crate slightly away from the door, leaving enough space for a normal-sized human to squeeze through.

  The Pagewalker appeared from behind it, Rex the dog sticking his head around her legs. She looked out of breath, but then she raised the gun and pointed it at William the Bold.

  Chapter 6

  “How did you find me?” Thaddeus asked. He wasn’t sure if her appearance was good or not. She’d surely want to put Sara back in the path of Mr. Hyde, after all. He was determined to roll with the punches, though. He’d work this situation to his advantage.

  “Rex led me here,” she said, keeping her eyes trained on William the Bold “Not that I really needed him. The broken door was a big giveaway. You should work on your stealth skills.”

  “I was evading a monster,” Thaddeus said.

  William growled, but didn’t move. He seemed to be taking stock of the new development. The fur on Rex’s neck stood up, and his lips curled back.

  “I didn’t have time to be discreet. Do you even know how to use that?” he asked, edging around the corner of the room toward her.

  “Of course I do,” she said. Still watching William closely. He seemed to be waiting for her attention to waiver. “What do you think Randall and I have been doing on the mornings where he leaves you alone?”

  So the Pagewalker had started training with firearms. Smart. He had to admit that it was a good move. If she also learned to control magical items, she’d truly be a formidable force. She already knew basic defensive martial arts, but if she enhanced those defensive skills by learning a more offensive hand-to-hand combat style…

  He shook his head. The Pagewalker wasn’t his protégé to train and shape within the Agency. They were linked by a mutual desire to evade his former employers, nothing more.

  She addressed William the Bold.

  “Aren’t you supposed to protect the storyline?” she said. “Don’t you know whose house this is?”

  “Of course I know. This is the house of Dr. Henry Jekyll.”

  “Then you know that by being here you’re endangering the storyline. What if he sees you?”

  William frowned and seemed to consider her question “You’re right. I do feel a… compulsion to protect this place. The compulsion was all I felt at first. Don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t let this person see you, don’t let this person see this…”

  His eyes, which had been roving around the room as if he were looking for a better weapon than hers, settled on the case with the vials of fortification serum.

  “But after taking Dr. Jekyll’s serum, some of that went away. Not entirely, though.” Greed washed over his face. “I wonder…”

  He edged toward the case.

  “Don’t move!” April said, pointing her gun at him, moving the tip of it to the side as though she could make him listen to her, but William the Bold dove for the case and opened it. There were three vials of liquid inside.

  William scooped them up, “Is this the key to my freedom?” He pulled at the stoppers, but his fingers were too large and clumsy.

  “What are you waiting for?” Thaddeus hissed. “Shoot him!”

  April stared down at the gun helplessly. She’d frozen up.

  “Why did you bring the gun in the first place if you’re not willing to use it?” Thaddeus reached for the firearm, but she pulled it away.

  “I thought it would scare him into listening! It’s not my fault that you messed everything up.”

  By this time, William the Bold had gotten the stoppers off the vials.

  “This is your last chance! Stop him!” Thaddeus hissed.

  “Oh, shit,” April said. She pointed the gun at William the Bold and pulled the trigger, but the bullets whizzed past his head and lodged into the wall behind him.

  William grinned, revealing sharp, uneven teeth. He tilted the vials over his mouth, guzzling the liquid inside like it was shots night at a college bar. After he’d emptied them, he threw the spent vials down on the floor, where they shattered.

  “What happens if someone takes more than one vial?” Thaddeus hissed at April.

  “I don’t know.” Her tone was helpless. “It doesn’t happen in the book.”

  At first nothing happened. Maybe the effects of the serum were the same no matter how much a person ingested… but then William the Bold began to shake. It started out like a seizure, but then the shaking became more pronounced, more rapid. He was literally vibrating. Thaddeus could feel the vibrations through the floor.

  If William the Bold’s repugnance had been below the surface before, it was now physical. His forehead ballooned further out, his right brow larger and more pronounced than the left. His arms bulged, becoming too large for his torso, which, although beefy compared to that of a regular man, was dwarfed by his limbs. His jaw jutted out from his face.

  The vibrating slowed, and the creature that had once been Officer Powell extended his arms, flexing his fingers and then his bice
ps. He ran his oversized hands over his face. He frowned when he felt his uneven brow, and then grinned wickedly.

  “How wonderful,” he said, “to be without guilt, without morals. Without shame. Without fear of what humanity thinks.”

  An empty metal drum sat in the corner of the room. He turned to it and began swinging his arms at it, denting the metal. As his swings grew more savage, the drum began to cave. In less than ten swings he’d reduced the drum to a twisted heap of metal. Blood oozed from his knuckles and the sides of his hands and wrists. If he noticed the wounds, he didn’t show it.

  “Wonderful!”

  The sound of a lock turning drew their attention behind them, and Thaddeus and April turned to see two men standing in the now-open door to the Jekyll house. One was dressed in a waist-coat and tailored trousers. The other was dressed in a butler’s uniform, and his hair was gray, almost white.

  “We heard shots,” the butler said. “What are you people doing in here? How did you get in?” His eyes passed over Thaddeus and April, but widened as they came to rest on William.

  He opened his mouth to speak again, but the younger man held up his hand.

  “It is all right, Mr. Poole,” he said.

  “But Dr. Jekyll,” the butler protested. “Look at the mess these people have made with your laboratory!”

  “I will handle this.” Dr. Jekyll wasn’t looking at the butler. He hadn’t looked at Thaddeus or April since he entered the room, either. His eyes were transfixed solely on William the Bold.

  He approached the monster. He appeared awed by his appearance rather than afraid. “How much did you take?”

  “Four vials,” William the Bold said, proud.

  “There were only three in the case,” Dr. Jekyll said. “But there was another that went missing a few weeks ago. I wondered what became of it.” He didn’t seem that concerned by the theft, though. “I’ve only ever consumed one vial,” he said. “To take four… I could not even begin to imagine the effects. Tell me—how do you feel?”

  Officer Powers grinned. “Like the world is waiting for me to pluck it off the branch and take a bite.”

  Jekyll smiled wistfully. “It is an intoxicating feeling, isn’t it?” he reached out to touch the man’s arm. “The physical effects are increased exponentially…”

  Officer Powers pulled away from Jekyll’s reach. “I am no lab rat,” he growled. “In fact, I could snap your neck now, if I wanted.” He reached his arm out, and when Jekyll stepped back from his reach, he leered. “Is there an antidote for this serum, Doctor?”

  Jekyll gulped as he nodded. “Yes—it’s over there.” He nodded to a case identical to the one that held the fortification serum.

  “We can’t have that,” William the Bold said, and he shuffled over to the case. While his girth made him strong, it also made him awkward. It took him twice as long as it would have taken a man of normal size to get to the case. Once he got there, he opened it to reveal three more vials.

  He lifted one and squinted at the label. “Reversal serum.” He wrinkled his nose, then dropped the vial on the floor, crushing it underneath his foot, the toes of which protruded through the front of his boots.

  “Whoopsie,” he said, and proceeded to drop every other vial on the floor, crushing each one. He grinned at Dr. Jekyll and then April and Thaddeus as if daring them to stop him.

  Thaddeus reached for the gun again. “Give me that—I won’t miss,” he hissed.

  She hesitated but kept it out of his reach.

  After all the vials had been destroyed, William spoke again. “How long do the effects last?”

  “It’s hard to say…” Dr. Jekyll’s Adam’s apple moved up and down as he spoke. “Never more than a few days. I was taking only one vial at a time, though. It could be a lot longer after taking three at once. I wouldn’t know without testing.”

  “Smashing,” William the Bold said. “That’ll give you plenty of time to manufacture more, won’t it?”

  Thaddeus was so engrossed in what he was seeing that he didn’t notice April had inched her way towards him. “We need to go. Come on.”

  He threw one last glance at the monster that had once been Officer Powers. The monster was completely engrossed in his interaction with Jekyll. The doctor, for his part, looked both equally frightened and fascinated by the hulking monster in front of him.

  Neither noticed as he and the Pagewalker slipped out through the door, though Mr. Poole, still standing in the doorway of the house, narrowed his eyes at them. Still, he remained silent.

  “What is going on?” April hissed at him after they got a good distance away from the house.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything that just happened in there should have been impossible.” She said. “Officer Powers is a UNC—he has to be; I don’t remember a character with that name—so he shouldn’t be able to disregard the storyline like that.”

  “How did he change the storyline?”

  “He’s talking with Dr. Jekyll,” April said. “The title character. And, there’s nothing in the book about Dr. Jekyll being held hostage—or teaming up, or whatever—with a steroid-infused beat cop.” She put her head in her hands. “This is so bad. I can’t do this right now. I can’t. I have to take care of the other books, and figure out what I’m going to say to Gram…”

  Sympathy pinched Thaddeus’ heart. He’d forgotten, with all that had happened these last few hours, that the trip she’d had planned with her grandmother was effectively cancelled.

  He shook his head. He didn’t feel sorry for the Pagewalker; he felt sorry for her grandmother. This was just one more example of how April’s actions had affected those around her…

  But he couldn’t help but notice how miserable she looked.

  April approached a woman walking by the side of the road. Her empty eyes marked her as a UNC. She didn’t seem as menacing as the UNCs had been toward them before.

  “Excuse me,” April said, “Don’t you know that one of your characters is interacting with Dr. Jekyll? He’s ruining the time-line. This could end your world. Don’t you need to stop that?”

  “He’s affecting our world, all right, but there’s nothing I can do about it. He’s unnatural. He’s not like the rest of us. None of us will dare interfere with him or his will.”

  “You sound afraid of him,” April said.

  “So what?” the woman responded. “You should be afraid of him, too.”

  “Aren’t you worried about your world breaking apart?” April asked.

  The woman shrugged. “Of course. But that’s already happened, hasn’t it? A few weeks ago. Everything’s been off since then. The only way to fix all this is to bring that girl back and put her where she belongs. You all should find her before he sees that you’ve gone.”

  The woman walked away. April didn’t stop her.

  Thaddeus, hoping that April hadn’t caught on to the part about the little girl, said, “How does she know all this? Isn’t she a character?”

  April shook her head. “I don’t know. I think there’s some force, something similar to the gate, that animates them and speaks through them. It knows more than they know and makes decisions for them. I was talking with that force, not the woman herself.”

  Thaddeus nodded, shivering. He suddenly felt more sympathy for the UNCs. He’d gone through something similar, hadn’t he? The gate had taken over his body. It still controlled him, in a way.

  April looked up at him, bringing him out of his reverie. “Where’s the girl, Thaddeus?”

  “She’s safe,” Thaddeus said. “That’s all that matters.”

  “We have to put her back in her scene. You know that, don’t you? It’s the only way to make things right.”

  Thaddeus shook his head. “Nothing can make things right,” he said. He wasn’t talking about the book-world. He was talking about the real world, the one they’d both have to face when they went back home. “You could end all your strife,” he said, “if you just
turned your back on this gate, on these places. They’re not even real, not like you and I are. You could just throw that book through the gate, sever the connection, and be done with it.”

  She lowered her head so she was looking at him from under her eyebrows. “You’re the one who’s risking everything—our world included—to save one little girl. A fake girl, by your estimation.” She spread her arms wide. “We need to get her, Thaddeus. As soon as he notices we’re gone, he’s going to come after us.”

  Thaddeus shook his head. “Never.”

  “You have to trust me,” April said.

  He shook his head again. “How can I?”

  She looked sad for a moment. “Then trust this.” She raised the gun, pointing it at him. She had three bullets left, if the gun had been fully loaded before she shot at William the Bold.

  “I won’t fall for that,” Thaddeus said. “You wouldn’t even shoot that monster—why would you shoot me? You’d risk leaving me behind here. And then our world would really be screwed, since you care so much about it.”

  “WHERE’D THEY GO?”

  The voice erupted from the laboratory. William was at the door struggling with the crate, still partially blocking the doorway. Anyone of a normal body size would have been able to move through the space easily, but it was too small for him. He’d have to duck down to get through the doorway as it was.

  He grunted, the sound turning into a guttural cry as he pushed the crate aside. It flew, colliding with a wall and cracking open.

  “Come on,” April said. “We have to get to the gate.”

  “What about Sara?”

  “We’ll come back for her,” April said. “You said she was safe. Were you telling the truth, or was that a lie?”

  “I wasn’t lying. I mean, I hope I wasn’t. I hope she’s safe.” She’d been so sure that no adult would be able to find her, but William the Bold had come dangerously close. What if his sense of smell had gotten even more heightened after taking the last three vials of fortification serum?