Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle

by Lackey, Mercedes

  …and rested it upon hers.

  “I…” he began…and faltered. “I lied before.”

  “Yes?”

  “I…” He closed his eyes and shook his head in resignation. “I…”

  “Yes, Red?”

  He grasped her hand in his, and Doppelgaenger leaned forward, ready to accept his surrender, to her and to her sweet promise of everything he could possibly desire…

  She gasped, as Red locked his hand around her wrist and squeezed.

  “I guess I did hesitate,” Red snarled, and slammed her into the broken mirror. “It won’t happen again.”

  Before she could blink, he was on her, bellowing his rage as he rained blow after blow down upon her. She had no defense against his ferocity, even with the remnants of his stolen healing ability. Wounds opened and began to heal, but not before his blows had inflicted a dozen more, and he felt a coldness creep over his heart for this woman, this…thing. For months, she had manipulated him, worming her way into his life, learning his secrets, and finally using them against him, to hurt him, to break him, to hollow him out in an attempt to curse him in perpetuity as her puppet. Worst of all, she was a threat to Victoria, and would forever be, unless he ended her now.

  Doppelgaenger continued to struggle, somehow finding her feet. She raised the torch again, lunged forward recklessly, and rammed him with it, scorching his flesh. With a grunt, Red kicked her off and examined himself. She had left a round, perfectly symmetrical burn mark on his chest. He watched it bubble for a moment, dimly aware of the pain and the horrible smell of cooked meat rising from it, when it suddenly darkened and expanded. He touched it briefly. It was tough but pliable, like rubber, and still it was expanding. No, not expanding, it was growing, spreading…

  In moments it had covered his entire body, a sudden layer of armor.

  “Adaptive Advancement,” Doppelgaenger said, and coughed as she spit out a wad of blood. “I burn you, you become fireproof. Will wonders never cease?”

  “You talk too much,” Red muttered and advanced on her.

  “Isn’t that your type?” Doppelgaenger asked. “Or do I need to be blonde too…?”

  He didn’t let her finish. He was past rage. He felt nothing as he batted the torch from her hand, nothing as he lay into her with his fists, nothing as he knocked her about the room. The torch, forgotten on the cold cement floor, carried on in its capacity as a makeshift beacon, casting an eerie blue glow on the room where hulking shadows continued to flail about and slam into one another.

  It was over soon enough. She struggled to rise, shuddering with rasping coughs, when her legs simply failed her and she sank to the ground again. Red reached down, caught a fistful of her hair and pulled her up. He drew a hand back and felt the claws burst through his armor-clad fingertips, ready to be plunged directly into her heart.

  And again, he hesitated.

  Perhaps it was how helpless she looked and felt, dangling pitifully from his hand. He knew who and what she was now, but as she looked up at him with her tired eyes, he remembered how it had been between them not so long ago, and he felt the cold certainty that her death was a necessary thing, begin to crack and waver. It was probably safe to say that she knew him better than anyone ever had. They had shared pretty much everything there was to be shared in a very short time, from the ethereal glory of reckless, passionate nights to the soul-searching conversations and cathartic musings that only came in the quiet moments before dawn, and pretty much everything in between. As part of a team, they had watched each other’s backs, with that unspoken trust inevitably forged in the line of duty. But it was more than just that, of course. Did he love her? Despite all that had happened in the last few days, how she had taken him to the very edge of sanity and perhaps beyond, he suspected he did. No, he knew he did. And so he hesitated, his claws at the ready, and pondered the finality of what one sharp thrust could do.

  “You still can’t do it, can you?” she croaked, her bloody lips curling up in an obscene grin. “No, of course not. It’s not really you, is it? It never was. You need to be in a certain place for it. You need to be ice cold, completely removed from it all, in a place near death or shocked into such a primal state where there’s nothing to hold you back. No meaningless moral compass, none of this rubbish about redemption. An hour ago, you could have done it, if you’d had the strength. But now, you are saturated with life, with hope! You don’t have it in you, to end me.”

  Weakly, she reached up with her hand and laid it gently on his cheek. He didn’t recoil from her touch, and only held her gaze with his own, confused.

  “Let’s see if I fare any better,” she whispered, and sighed, as she reached up to embrace him.

  At least…that was what he thought. But she kept…growing. Her limbs contorted, grew boneless, flattened. She took on mass faster than he could comprehend it and suddenly, he realized he wasn’t being embraced after all.

  She was enveloping him, like some sort of giant amoeba.

  He had just barely enough time to realize this, and then it was too late to do anything about it. He had just enough time to understand that it was too late—

  And then she absorbed him, just as she had absorbed his claws, the first time they had fought. Darkness and horror closed in.

  Their eyes rolled up into their head, and they collapsed to the ground. Nearby, the torch began to sputter as the fuel tank ran empty. It gasped one last flash of light and was extinguished, plunging the room into utter darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  Forty-Six and 2

  Dennis Lee, Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin

  I thought I knew Vickie. I soon discovered I was wrong. I had completely underestimated her.

  Then again, maybe all along it had just been that she had underestimated herself.

  The door to Red’s quarters was plastered with police tape. Rage gave Vickie the energy to blast it out of her way, gave her the energy to shatter the locks on the door, and force the door inward before she even reached it. She stalked inside and paused for a moment, breathing harshly, while taking a careful look around.

  The place had been ransacked, of course. Jensen had made sure of that. Red wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave so much as an incriminating note about an illegal poker game around, but that wouldn’t stop Jensen from trashing the place in a pretense of looking for something that he already knew wasn’t there. Her hands twitched a little with the urge to get them around Jensen’s neck.

  She was furious. But fury had never left her helpless and blind. Fury had always given her a cold clarity and a sharp focus, had always driven all other emotions out. Fury let her see with the acuity of a falcon, and the calculation of a mastermind.

  So where in this mess would there be something she could use? No hair, of course. But a bit of scarlet cloth made her ease her way towards the tumble of bureau drawers to pick out a red scarf among a pile of red scarves just like it: the one that was the most worn, the most frayed at the corners. Next to the bureau was the pile of books thrown out of the bookshelf. She carefully moved them until she found Franny and Zooey. That went into her bag with the scarf, and the box from the Med Lab containing a slide with a blood smear on it, and some tiny, tiny vials of skin and claw samples. Toothbrush, she thought. Of course, it might be at Mel’s place—which had been scoured clean of everything—but maybe he had more than one. She began picking her way across the mess to the bathroom when a shadow loomed in the doorway.

  She looked over at it and began to shake with rage as “shadow” became “recognizable human.”

  Jensen.

  He scowled at her. “I—” he began. She extended her hand towards him, twitched her fingers, and he found himself unable to utter a word.

  “You, you soulless bastard, will march yourself right back around and forget I was ever here,” she said icily. “Because if you don’t, I swear to you I will witch your junk next, and shrink it down so far you’ll need tweezer
s and a magnifying glass to masturbate.”

  A look of disbelief was followed by a look of sheer terror as her fingers twitched again, and he felt the tingle she sent to his privates.

  He fled.

  Vickie took a breath, exhaled, and marched to the bathroom.

  Toothbrush.

  * * *

  Red Djinni awoke to nothing but a harsh white light. There was no source, it was simply everywhere. He seemed to be on his back, and as he placed his hands on the ground to lift himself into a sitting position, he froze. There was nothing there. He was floating in a brilliant void, and the worst part was that it was familiar. He had been here before. He groaned in dismay. The last time had not ended well. He had no reason to believe this time would be any better.

  “Alright then,” he muttered. “First things first. Think of gravity. Think of standing on a floor.”

  He closed his eyes. It had been easier that way, the last time. He pictured himself standing on ceramic tiles, and with a gentle push of his will, he believed it to be so. He opened his eyes again. The ceramic floor seemed to extend to each point on the horizon. It might have been dizzying, if he had not been expecting it. Yes, it was precisely the way it had been the last time. Except now, there wasn’t that paradoxical sense of claustrophobia, of being cramped and constricted in what appeared to be an infinite space. He felt calm, comfortable, which was odd in itself. He never felt calm and comfortable. Surely something had to be horribly wrong, for if he was here, then there must be another…

  “An interesting choice,” said a voice behind him. “It’s all a bit bland though. I thought you were more imaginative than this.”

  “It’s been a while,” Red said, turning. “Figured I’d start slow, y’know, before we get back to the violence.”

  Doppelgaenger gave him a knowing smile. She stood at ease, one hand resting on her hip. She seemed petite, garbed in a simple pantsuit of 1940s vintage, and knee-high leather boots. She looked to be in her twenties, but there was no mistaking the calculating glint in her eye. It was Doppelgaenger. This was how she saw herself, Red supposed. Her true self. Karoline.

  He looked down at himself, and was a little surprised to see he was clad in his ECHO uniform. Well, that was a revelation. Was this how he saw himself these days?

  “Somewhere, Bull is laughing…” he said.

  “I sort of doubt it,” Karoline said. “I don’t think Bull has much to laugh about right now.”

  Red shrugged. “So, is this your place or mine?”

  She chuckled and waved her hands around in a grandiose motion. “Would you believe, this is our place?”

  “Both of us,” Red murmured. “I guess that explains why it doesn’t feel so cramped this time.”

  “I almost forgot,” she nodded. “This isn’t your first rodeo.”

  “Nope,” he said, eyeing her cautiously. “You seem pretty comfortable here, too. I’m guessing it’s not your first time, either.”

  “Oh no,” she grinned. “I’m well acquainted with this place. You might say I’ve visited here many times in my travels. The Mindscape has become a bit of a second home.”

  “Mindscape,” Red mused. “Never thought to give it a name.” He looked around. “I don’t see anyone else here.”

  “Did you expect to?”

  “Unless you have certain abilities of the psychic persuasion, this isn’t a place you would regularly come to.” He gave her a direct look. “You would only come here when forced to. We’re not really here, after all, but the mind’s a funny thing. Two personas, one brain, there tends to be conflict. Where’s there’s conflict, there’s violence. My guess is the Mindscape is a visualization of where we meet. It’s the best approximation our simple brains can manage. It’s here to give us a place to stand on while we struggle to destroy each other, to claim this space as our own. If you’ve been here before, you’ve brought others with you. If they are no longer here, then you destroyed them. How am I doing?”

  “It’s a bit simple”—Karoline shrugged—“but it’s a fair approximation of the situation. It goes a bit further than that though. From what I can tell, this is the basic make-up of where one experiences dreams, but with the lucidity turned up to eleven.”

  “Spinal Tap reference,” Red mused. “Nice.”

  “You’re right, though,” she continued. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been forced here. I’ve brought others, but they’re gone now. This time is different. It doesn’t have to end that way.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “I told you,” she sighed, standing at ease with exaggerated patience, “that before this was over, I would offer you a choice. We don’t have to fight. We can be together. Forever. You know, the whole two-become-one thing. You don’t have to be extinguished, or extinguish me; we can merge. Think of what you’ve become, and what I was, and the synergy that could exist between us. Together we would be unstoppable, perhaps even eternal.” She frowned. “Am I getting through that hard head of yours?”

  “Like a diamond pickaxe,” Red sighed. “And the others? Why didn’t you share this space with them?”

  “We weren’t compatible,” Karoline shrugged. “In the end, what I received from them proved temporary. They didn’t have what you bring to the table. The regeneration alone might be enough to sustain us indefinitely. With them, the fusion would not have been…ideal. Merging with them would not have been seamless, at least not enough.”

  “But we would be?”

  “Enough, yes, enough that we could even maintain our own identities, for the most part.”

  “For the most part?”

  Karoline made an impatient face. “You must realize, as compatible as we are, we are at this moment two distinct personalities. Only one can have absolute control at any time. You know I want you here with me. I want to share all of this with you. But I’m not stupid. I don’t trust you…not yet. In time, we will draw together, root out the differences and line up as one. In the meantime, I know you well enough that you will fight this every step of the way. So, it’s a matter of time, but for now…”

  “Right, for now I’m just going to be some spectator along for the ride. How can you ask that, of me? Maybe you don’t know me as well as you thought?”

  “I thought love would convince you, like it did for me,” Karoline said. “Try to imagine it, Red. In time, you would have everything you could ever want, and you would be able to share it, with me. You said you still loved me, even after Victrix, that you still felt love for me. What if one doesn’t exclude the other? I’m not above sharing you. You would have everything, and me, and you could still have her…”

  “Well, that’s just about the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Red snapped. “And that’s saying something. So I’ll get—what?—vacation days to be with Victrix, and the rest of the time I’ll be chained up in some corner of our brain, be a little bug of a voice in your head?”

  “It will seem that way, in the beginning,” she conceded. “Admittedly, securing Vickie from the clutches of the Masters might require some doing. Probably a bit of fast talking on my part, or subterfuge, or both. But I think it can be done. As for us, we will adapt to share this existence, to share control, to share everything, even her.”

  “No,” Red disagreed. “It can’t ever be like that. Even it was possible, even if we could merge that seamlessly, it can’t ever happen…”

  “And why is that?”

  “Have you met me?” Red asked. “Do you think I would ever let you near her again, let alone touch her, share in any semblance of intimacy with her? And as for me, do I seem the sort who would give up even a fraction of who I am, for anything? You can forget it. Not for anything, especially not for you, and not for…”

  “Love?” Karoline interrupted, her voice soft and mournful. “For completion? This can end without violence. This can, for a change, end peacefully and you will experience an eternity of bliss. And you will never be alone, ever again. Have I met you? Yes, I have. It
’s the one thing neither of us ever said, ever shared, but we could feel it in the other, we could feel the truth of it. We were always alone. It’s our deepest fear, our greatest shame. And it doesn’t have to be that way, ever again.”

  Red stared at her.

  “Yeah, it does,” he said finally. “If those are my choices, then it does.”

  “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t be so rash as to…”

  “But I am rash,” Red said with a wry smirk. “For all my attempts at planning, for all the careful machinations of the past, that really is who I am. Come to think of it, my instincts have gotten me out of some tough jams. When things go tits up, it’s all I’ve got left. And look, I’m still standing. Well, in a manner of speaking.”

  Karoline didn’t answer, and merely stood there, her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes pleading with him.

  “Please,” she repeated finally. “Please reconsider. You know what I’m offering. Don’t let some foolish and stubborn ideal stand in the way of…”

  “No,” Red interrupted. “It’s not foolish. It’s not stubborn. It’s me, girl. And you know it.”

  He watched as his words bored into her. She seemed to wither, to grow dimmer, as if something inside of her had been poisoned. She bowed her head, and shivered. Red took an involuntary step forward, suddenly concerned. For a moment, she seemed to fade away, her very skin a translucent curtain threaded through with pale veins. She was disappearing. Concern became fear, and Red took a few more steps towards her before stopping again.

  She wasn’t disappearing. She was gathering herself.

  What had withered in that single moment was returning to life, and that life was building in a steady crescendo. It was as if he stood in front of a furnace being heated to a white-hot inferno. Her emotions began to bombard him with a fervid intensity to the point where he actually held up his hands to shield himself. He felt anger, resentment, even hatred, and beneath it all, a cold reserve of self-preservation. And when she finally looked up at him, it all erupted to the surface, unleashed in a mighty blow that sent him flying to land hard on his back.