Specter Rising (Brimstone Network Trilogy)

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  The creepy guy Stitch had dropped her at the station just after six; there had been a 5:45 that she had missed, so she’d had no choice but to wait and to think about what she was going to do after she got back.

  She’d tried to make conversation with the large, pale-skinned man, getting only grunts and silence as she tried to explain her—what did her parents refer to it as? Oh yeah, her rather caustic personality.

  He didn’t seem all that interested, and dumped her at the station with not so much as a Hey, it was nice meetin’ ya.

  The ghost dogs whined around her, sniffing the ground at her feet. They were picking up on her feelings, reacting to her agitation.

  And yes, she was agitated.

  Johanna had always wanted to be part of something, but could never quite figure out where she belonged She’d tried to join the various clubs and organizations at school, but never seemed to make it through the first meeting without being asked to leave.

  Don’t even get her started on cheerleading tryouts. Those had come after the ghost pack had manifested. The stuck-up witches still looked as though they wanted to cry every time they saw her.

  Invisible ghost dogs = very scary to cheerleaders.

  Johanna smiled, remembering how the pack had chased the girls around the gym after they’d made fun of her. Served them right, and besides, most of the bites were just pinches. They didn’t even break the skin.

  A cold fall wind blew across the train platform and she was reminded of where she was, and how she had again failed to find that thing to be part of.

  She had known about the Brimstone Network most of her life, never really thinking that she could somehow be a part of it. But when she’d heard about how the new Network was looking for members with an emphasis on people with unique abilities, she couldn’t set up an interview fast enough.

  Johanna really believed this was it, her opportunity to belong and to actually contribute to something.

  Sitting on the bench out in front of the train station, she scowled, kicking her booted feet as they hung over the edge of the wooden bench.

  She guessed she had been wrong.

  The ghost dogs whined, brushing up against her legs, flipping her hands to capture her attention. Johanna reached out to pet them.

  “I really screwed up today,” she muttered.

  Mostly she would blame everybody else when things went wrong—when she tried to belong—but this time she couldn’t do it. She went in to that interview with a chip on her shoulder and was just daring somebody to knock it off.

  The wolf girl was just responding to the vibes she had been sending out.

  Johanna slid to the edge of the bench and turned around. The train would be pulling in any minute.

  But she didn’t want to go back, and if she hadn’t screwed things up she wouldn’t be sitting here.

  It practically killed her to have to admit it, but she had behaved like a big jerk, and in order to make things right she was going to have to admit this not only to herself, but to the people back at the Brimstone Network headquarters.

  She got up from the bench and walked around to the back of the building and the parking lot.

  “Can you guys get me back to where we were this afternoon?” she asked the ghostly beasts that mingled around her.

  They panted and growled excitedly, eager to be doing something other than waiting for a train.

  “All right then,” she said, starting to walk across the nearly empty lot. “Let’s get this show started.”

  She figured she had at least a forty-five-minute walk ahead of her; plenty of time to get used to the idea that she was wrong, and that if she wanted to be a member of the Brimstone Network, she was going to have to apologize.

  Ouch.

  Bram had never thought of his father as sentimental, but the old photo album he’d uncovered in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet while trying to clean out the office seemed to prove otherwise.

  He sat down behind the desk, his desk, and reached for the book.

  Within the yellowed volume were hundreds of pictures of the Brimstone Facility in some of its earliest days—when his father had first taken command from his own father. The photographs were like small windows into the past, frozen moments in time.

  But it was the last picture in the volume that fascinated Bram the most. It was of his father, dressed in a much more official version of a Network uniform. He looked as though he might’ve been in his late twenties, or early thirties; there was little gray in his hair or beard.

  Wearing his finest uniform, Elijah Stone was approaching what appeared to be a dimensional doorway.

  Bram hefted the heavy volume, bringing it closer so that he could study the picture better. Within the doorway he thought he could make out the shapes of ghostly figures clad in ornate armor, and wondered if this could be a picture of the first time his father passed from the earthly plane to the world of the Specter to negotiate the treaty between the people of earth and the supernatural warrior race.

  A treaty that had resulted in the marriage of his father to a princess of the Specter royal family.

  And Bram’s birth.

  He considered asking Stitch about the photo, or maybe even the Archivist down in records, as he closed the book and placed it on the side of his desk.

  Bram liked the photo book and what it had captured, and began to think that maybe his tenure as the Brimstone Network commander should be recorded as well.

  A smile found its way onto his face. Maybe he could ask all of his friends to participate. He’d give them each a digital camera and . . .

  He noticed the smell before actually seeing the demon.

  It emerged from a patch of darkness beside the file cabinet where he’d found the photo album. Bram wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen a beastie quite like this one. It was short, no taller than Bogey, and its flesh was the color of an oil slick, reflecting different colors as it slid from the cover of darkness. But the strangest thing about it was its swollen belly.

  Bram tensed.

  But the beast simply smiled widely, rubbing its spindly fingers across the taut flesh of it glowing stomach.

  “Barnabas sends his regards,” the creature growled.

  And before Bram could react, the invader’s stomach detonated in a deafening explosion, and the office was filled with hungry fire.

  ***

  Total chaos.

  Stitch dropped his coffee mug down upon the table in reaction to the sound of destruction.

  An explosion, somewhere in the facility.

  Alarms sounded as warning lights flashed in the ceilings of the winding corridors.

  He was moving quickly, sidestepping nervous agents frozen in place, fear upon their faces. Stitch knew what they were wondering.

  Is it happening again? Is the Brimstone Network under attack?

  “What’s going on?” asked a voice now running along side of him.

  He glanced over to see that it was Emily.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “An explosion of some kind.”

  In mid-stride she started to change, shucking off her clothes and skin to assume the form of the wolf.

  “Follow me,” she said, nose twitching.

  They took the stairs, her nose bringing them to the upper level, to where the commander of the Brimstone Network kept his office.

  “Where’s Bram?” Stitch asked, pushing aside a door that hung loosely from a broken hinge.

  “Not sure,” the wolf answered beside him. The sprinklers were raining water down upon them. The air was thick with the smell of smoke. “He might’ve gone back to his office after he ate. I was on the phone, I didn’t . . .”

  Stitch bounded down the corridor toward the office. There were agents stumbling around in the smoke, their features stained with smears of ash.

  “Get them out of here,” Stitch commanded, taking a moment to escort the dazed agents toward the waiting Emily.

  Alone, he turned his attention to Bram’s o
ffice. The doorway was nothing more than a jagged hole now, the frame, and even part of the wall, blasted away from the force of the explosion.

  Stitch did not hesitate, delving into the smoke and heat to crawl across the rubble of the Commander’s office space.

  “Bram!” Stitch called, squinting through the shifting smoke. “Are you in here? Bram!”

  The ground and walls were horribly charred, the desk and furniture reduced to awful, blackened shapes. The heat was intense, but he moved inside farther, searching for signs of their leader.

  “Abraham, it’s me!”

  Squatting down below the smoke, he searched the floor. Stitch held his breath so as not to take in the thick, noxious fumes, desperate to stay within the office—now an inferno—to be certain that his friend was nowhere to be found.

  There was a shape upon the floor, near the burnt remains of what was once a file cabinet, a shape that at one time could have been human.

  Stitch felt his powerful heart leap painfully in his chest.

  “No,” he said, his breath escaping in an emotional gasp.

  There was movement beside him, and he spun around just in time as he was attacked.

  Stitch dove to the right, avoiding the lunge of the fiery beast.

  Squatting upon the floor, coughing from the thick black smoke and furnace-intense heat, he looked in awe upon the animal that writhed in the air before him.

  It was a serpent composed of fire.

  The burning reptile reared back with a sizzling hiss, a spray of burning liquid shooting from its open mouth.

  The fiery venom spattered the floor as he managed to jump backward. The poison ate at the charred wood, dissolving it away and leaving a deeply pockmarked surface. He imagined what the spew would have done to his clothing and the flesh beneath.

  The fire serpent swam through the air toward him, and he reached to his left, grabbing hold of the burnt desk and, with a display of strength, hefting it up to block the next attack of acidic spray.

  He felt the desk begin to disintegrate in his grasp as the venom hit the wood.

  The snake’s attack became more physical, its diamond-shaped head diving down to shatter what remained of the desk, leaving Stitch completely open to attack.

  The snake recoiled, its burning eyes locked upon him as it opened its maw to attack.

  Stitch stumbled back through the smoke, away from the advancing serpent. His back struck the wall, and he could go no farther, as the serpent reared back to strike.

  Bracing himself, the patchwork man prepared for the inevitable. He wasn’t about to go down without a fight.

  From the corner of his eye he saw the air split; a jagged tear appearing to the side of him. And within the rip that hung there beside him he saw movement.

  Tiny hands reached out from within the darkness of the fissure, pulling Stitch inside just as the fire serpent lunged.

  Its burning fangs snapping closed upon nothing.

  4. NOTHING COULD HAVE SURVIVED THAT.

  Emily thought the words, but didn’t speak them as she stared into the still-burning office of the commander of the Brimstone Network, and her good friend.

  Stitch stood silently by her side, staring into the unnatural conflagration, as one of the medical staff saw to his burns.

  “I had to get you out of there,” Bogey said. “You would’ve been a goner if I didn’t. . . .”

  “You did fine, Bogey,” Emily told him, grabbing his arm and giving it a gentle squeeze.

  Stitch remained eerily quiet, watching as two experienced magick users arrived, seeing as conventional means to fight the fire had failed. The two, a man and a woman—Emily believed them to be husband and wife—held hands and began to chant in some strange ancient language, the words leaving their mouths gradually taking a physical form and floating into the room. The magickal shapes found the coiled serpent of flame, and as the fiery reptile attacked—consuming the magick—its size and heat began to slowly diminish.

  The pair continued their incantation until the serpent of fire was no more, leaving behind only the smoldering remains of Abraham Stone’s office.

  With the fire extinguished they moved tentatively closer.

  “He could still be alive, right?” Bogey asked them.

  Emily could smell the Mauthe Dhoog’s tension, his fear.

  “I bet he did his ghosting thing and went right down through the floor and is downstairs talking with the Archivist or something.”

  She didn’t respond, and neither did Stitch.

  “I’m gonna go check,” the creature said, opening a rift, and quickly ducking inside, almost as if wanting to be gone before they could tell him that he was wrong, that Bram had been inside the room when the explosion occurred.

  “What’s going on?” a voice called out from behind them.

  Emily turned to see Desmond awkwardly moving through the throng of onlookers who had gathered in the hallway. He was using his crutches and, by the expression on his face, and the smell that his body gave off, Emily knew that he was in pain.

  “Is Bram all right?” the boy asked craning his neck to see inside the room. “Oh, my god,” was his next response.

  Emily entered the room, the air inside still thick with smoke and choking fumes.

  Stitch had gone in ahead of her and was where, if her memory was right, a file cabinet had once been. Now, nothing remained but the blackened, charred remains of something indistinguishable, and something that could have at one time been alive.

  Emily felt her nose twitch, her animal senses reaching out to see if there was any scent remaining from the body that could tell her that it was Bram, but she could smell nothing but smoke.

  “I want this examined,” the patchwork man said, squatting down beside the blackened shape.

  Two Brimstone agents carrying a stretcher and a body bag came into the room and began to remove it.

  Stitch looked up from the body, his different colored eyes burning with sadness.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, fighting back her own emotional response. She could feel it building inside her and did everything that she could to keep it down. She was a Brimstone Network agent, and she needed to keep it together. She needed to set an example.

  “Agent Stitch?” somebody called from the doorway.

  They all turned to see a security officer standing there.

  “We found an intruder on the grounds and have detained her for questioning.”

  Stitch glanced over as the charred body was gently lifted from the floor and placed within the thick, zippered bag.

  “I want to question this one myself,” Stitch said as the bag was zippered and placed upon the gurney for transport.

  “Do you think this intruder could have something to do with this?” Emily asked.

  “We can’t rule out the possibility,” Stitch said as he strode toward the security officer standing in the doorway.

  As he passed Dez, he stopped and addressed him.

  “I’m going to want your assistance on this, Desmond,” Stitch said, and then continued from the room.

  “S-sure,” the boy stammered, using his crutches to follow.

  Emily continued to stand in the room that had been blackened and destroyed by the supernatural fire.

  Watching as a stretcher that could very well be carrying the body of one of her closest friends was slowly wheeled past.

  Her dogs hadn’t returned to her yet.

  Johanna paced around the small room, stopping to look through the window in the door that looked out into the hallway. There was a Brimstone Network security officer standing outside, guarding her.

  “Hey,” she yelled, slapping her hand against the window. “Think I’m gonna need a tinkle break pretty soon.”

  The guard didn’t even flinch from her request. Maybe putting the possibility that she might have to go in the foreseeable future would help him to react when it came time that she actually did have to go to the bathroom.

  She had sent her
dogs out into the facility. There was something most definitely up at the Brimstone headquarters, and it had very little to do with her sneaking back onto the property unauthorized.

  No, something had happened, and it had wound things up around here big-time. She hoped that her ghost pups came back to her with something useful; she was dying to know what was going on.

  The door rattled and she quickly turned around. Maybe the guard actually was listening, and decided to take pity on her poor bladder.

  The creepy Mr. Stitch ducked his head as he entered the room. His presence in that confined space was so powerful that Johanna found herself backing up.

  There was somebody else with him, a heavyset kid who used crutches to help get around.

  Johanna was about to ask what was going on when Stitch’s gaze pinned her to where she stood.

  “Sit,” he commanded, pointing a long finger at a seat on one side of a small wooden desk.

  She parked her butt. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

  Stitch moved aside to allow the crippled kid to take the seat opposite from her.

  “Hey,” she said as he sat. He leaned his crutches against the desk beside him, completely ignoring her attempt at being friendly.

  “Do you want me to . . . ?” he asked, looking up at Stitch, who now leaned against the room’s wall, with his powerful arms folded across his chest.

  “Do what?” she asked, getting just a little bit nervous.

  The big man nodded. “Go ahead,” he said.

  The boy looked at her then and for a second, she could have sworn that she saw sparks jump from his eyes, and from around his head. Johanna had to remind herself that in this place, just about anything was possible, which made her all the more eager to be part of it.

  She stiffened, feeling something moving around inside her head.

  Wanting to ask if he was responsible, and if he was, what he thought he was doing, Johanna found herself stricken silent. Images flashed past her mind, almost as if somebody had found a great big box of photographs inside her head and was just flipping through them, tossing them here and there as they searched for something.

  And as quickly as it had started, it stopped.