Specter Rising (Brimstone Network Trilogy)

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  “Nope,” the crippled kid said. “She’s clean, she didn’t have anything to with it . . . wrong place, wrong time.”

  The big man nodded to Johanna. “Good, I kinda fancied you.”

  Shaking off the effects of the mental probe, Johanna smiled. “You’re not too bad yourself. Anybody care to tell me what’s going on?”

  The sound of claws clicking upon the tile floor suddenly filled the room, and she smiled, happy to have her ghostly canine friends back in her presence. They swarmed eagerly around her, brushing up against her legs, leaping up to lick her face with soft, ghostly tongues.

  “There’s my good boys and girls,” she praised.

  The crippled kid looked a little confused.

  “Ghost dogs,” she said, patting one of the invisible beasts.

  “I guessed,” he said. “Didn’t realize how weird it would be in person.”

  “So you gonna tell me what’s up?” she asked them.

  “Something very bad has happened here,” Stitch informed her. “It doesn’t concern you, so I would rather not . . .”

  “Is it about your commander?” she asked. “The cute kid? What was his name . . . Abraham Stone?”

  Stitch nodded again. “Yes, it is. How did you know?”

  She smiled, patting her dogs. “My friends told me.”

  “Something bad has happened to Bram,” the kid sitting across from her said.

  “You think he’s dead,” Johanna stated.

  The kid slowly nodded. “It’s looking that way, yes.”

  She shook her head no.

  “No?” Stitch questioned.

  “Yep, no humans are dead,” she said.

  “Did your friends tell you this?” the large, pale-skinned man asked, moving closer to where she was sitting, eager to know.

  “They did,” she said. “They have the ability to track spirits that have recently departed the land of the living,” she explained. “And they’re telling me that no spirits have left the building.”

  Stitch’s multicolored eyes bulged. “Are you saying that’s he’s still alive?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Johanna the Packman said. “And since I did you guys a solid, think I might get another chance at joining the team?”

  The Archivist looked up from an ancient volume as Bogey’s rift opened into the informational storage room.

  The room looked like a gigantic library today, row upon row of ancient books going off for countless miles in either direction.

  In reality, the room was probably no bigger than your average office, but it appeared this way to help the Brimstone agents understand the enormity of the information stored within the supernatural receptacle that was called the Archivist.

  As the room’s appearance looked like a gigantic library, the Archivist appeared in the form of the Network’s previous commander, Elijah Stone—Bram’s father.

  “Can I help you?” the Archivist asked, closing the ancient tome that was representative of all the information collected by countless Brimstone agents throughout the centuries.

  “Is he here?” Bogey asked, his rift closing behind him with a loud sucking sound.

  “Is who here?” the Archivist asked.

  “Bram,” Bogey said, looking around the room. “I . . . was hoping . . .”

  “Abraham is not here,” the figure stated. From what Bogey understood, each new commander of the Network donated a piece of his soul essence, which was then joined with the complex spell that created the Archivist, and seeing as Bram’s dad was the last commander to donate a piece of his soul, this was why the spell of storage had taken this form.

  Since Bram was the current commander, the Archivist should actually look like him, but he wasn’t interested in changing it. He’d told Bogey that he liked to be able to come down here, and see his father whenever he wanted.

  “Is there something I can do for you, Bogey?” the magickal spell inquired. “Some information that I can provide?”

  It hit Bogey like the intestines falling from the belly of a mud cow. Bram wasn’t here, and it was likely that he had been inside the room that had burned.

  The Mauthe Dhoog stumbled, suddenly feeling light-headed.

  “This is awful,” he said, his voice cracking.

  He didn’t know what to do, and felt himself begin to panic.

  “What is awful?” the Archivist asked dryly. He removed another ancient tome from a stack on the side of his desk and opened it.

  “I think Bram is dead,” the small creature said.

  “Abraham is dead?” the figure asked.

  Bogey nodded, tears suddenly burning in his eyes. “I really think he is.”

  “Most unfortunate,” the magickal spell in the shape of Bram’s father said, going back to the information stored inside the manifestation of an ancient book.

  “Most unfortunate?” Bogey asked, feeling himself becoming angry. “Is that all you can say?”

  The Archivist looked up from his work.

  “Is there anything else I can provide for you?”

  Bogey wasn’t sure exactly what he was expecting from the Archivist, maybe some hint that a piece of Bram’s father was still somewhere inside the magickal spell, but it didn’t appear to be there.

  “No,” Bogey said, lifting his hands to weave a rift so that he could leave this place. “I just thought that maybe since you record information and stuff that you might want to know.”

  “Thank you,” the magickal spell said, looking back down to the book beneath him on the desk.

  “Don’t mention it,” Bogey responded, stepping inside the newly conjured rift. He didn’t even know where he was going now.

  And he really didn’t care.

  5. BRAM REMEMBERED THE FIRE.

  The scene repeated through his feverish thoughts; he saw the strange, demonlike creature with the protruding belly—a belly filled with fire—and before he could even react, the bulging stomach exploded, filling his quarters with flame.

  He gasped at the memory of how even in his Spectral form, the fire had managed to burn him.

  Lying in the darkness, he lifted his hands up to his face to inspect the damage. His skin was pink, badly singed, and he hated to think of the fate that would have befallen him if he hadn’t been removed from the burning room.

  I was rescued.

  The thought suddenly filled his head as he gathered his wits together, sitting up in the dark, attempting to adjust his eyes to the nearly pitch black.

  He was in some sort of chamber; a cave perhaps. The air was thick with a heavy, musty smell that made him almost certain he had been brought to a cave.

  But by whom?

  It was an answer that he had every intention of finding.

  Carefully he rose to his feet, careful not to hit his head on the low ceiling. Bram reached out, letting his fingers explore the walls. They were damp, covered in a coating of slime and what appeared to be some kind of thick moss.

  At first he’d entertained the idea that maybe Bogey had been the one to save him, dragging him off to who knew where, and depositing him someplace safe where he wouldn’t be eaten by the local inhabitants, but it didn’t feel as though he’d passed through one of the Mauthe Dhoog’s rifts.

  Somehow it was different—the journey brutal enough to knock him unconscious as he was taken.

  No, Bogey had nothing to do with this.

  Bram almost called out, but restrained himself. What if whoever had taken him wasn’t friendly?

  The ceiling in the chamber was very low, and he had to crouch down as he moved toward an opening. The moss that he’d felt thick upon the wall, and floor, hung like a curtain over the exit. He could peer out through the hanging growth at a faint, iridescent light, glowing from outside.

  Bram listened for the sound of voices, but only heard the rustling and chittering of what he imagined were the animals and insects that called this place home.

  He was drawn to the eerie, green light. Crouching d
own, he moved aside the curtain of vegetation, and exited out into a much larger chamber. Bram moved no farther, checking out the size of the room. From what he could determine from the faint lighting, the room was enormous, reminding him of the inside of a football stadium, or the hold of some large ocean liner. He couldn’t even make out the ceiling; pitch darkness with patches of what must’ve been some sort of glowing plant life stippling the darkness like star constellations in the sky above.

  Deciding to venture forward, Bram inched toward the light before him. It was different than the eerie light cast by the vegetation that grew upon the chamber walls and ceiling.

  Cautiously he moved toward it, his eyes gradually adjusting to this dark, cavernous place. The closer to the light he got, the more he was able to see.

  Eventually Bram was close enough to make out a shape, a human shape, lying in a makeshift bed, covered with thick furs. Closer still, he was able to make out that it was a woman, the exposed flesh of her face so pale, it was as if her skin was glowing.

  Bram wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he sensed that the woman was not well, that she was quite ill, and that her life was currently hanging in the balance.

  And without explanation he knew something else as well, something that he could not act upon due to the fact that two armored warriors had surged out of the darkness at him, the points of their spears looking to strike him down.

  The warriors were attempting to keep him from her, from the sickly woman who was very close to death.

  The woman, whom he suddenly realized without any question, was his mother.

  The scent of supernatural fire, and everything it had burned, still hung heavy in the blackened shell of Bram’s office.

  But Emily had to smell past all that; she needed some evidence other than what the obnoxious Johanna Harkness and her stupid ghost dogs had said before getting her hopes up.

  Is it possible? Can he actually still be alive?

  Emily didn’t even want to consider it because the disappointment if he wasn’t would have been too damn much for her to take. It was bad enough thinking of her friend in the past tense; if she started to think that she would be seeing him again sometime soon and then it proved to be false, she didn’t know what it would do to her.

  It was better to continue to think that he was dead, she decided.

  But what if he isn’t?

  Again in the shape of the wolf, she stood in the doorway to his room. At first she just sniffed the air, attempting to identify the various aromas that still hung within the dominant stink of smoke. It was tough separating all the smells, but this was important, and she tried her hardest to succeed.

  Emily needed to go in farther, to sniff at the places where he might have been when the fire broke out.

  Her nostrils became thick with the scent of burning wood and plastic. She sneezed loudly, shaking her shaggy head as she attempted to clear the heavier smells from her snout. She wanted the smaller scents, the ones that hid beneath the stronger.

  She hadn’t even realized that she was doing it, but she’d dropped to all fours, her nose practically touching the ground as she moved around the room.

  Death had a very distinct smell, and she got a nose-full in the area where the burnt body had been retrieved. She’d thought that maybe she was going to have to sniff the blackened body, that anything she found inside the room wouldn’t be enough, but luckily that wasn’t the case.

  Something had most certainly died in this spot, but it wasn’t human. If there was one thing she’d learned since accepting the wolf inside her, and using this talent in the service of the Brimstone Network, it was that creatures of the supernatural smelled really funky.

  And that was what she was smelling now.

  Most of the stink had been burned away with the fire, but there was still a trace of the bodily fluids of the creature that had managed to penetrate the wood floor, before being burned away.

  It was still there in the wood.

  She reached down, digging at the wood with her claws, letting the smell waft out. Something not human had died there.

  Not Bram.

  Emily left the spot, looking for more evidence of death, but there was none to be found. She even went around the room for a second time, just to be sure, but the results were the same.

  Johanna’s dogs had been right: Bram hadn’t died in the fire.

  She felt suddenly weak in her legs and dropped to the floor. The relief that she was experiencing at the moment was almost too much to take. She wanted to shed the wolf form, to return to normal, but she hadn’t brought any clothes with her and didn’t want to have to get back to her room naked to retrieve her uniform.

  But all that was secondary to the knowledge that she’d uncovered here and now.

  As far as they knew, he was still alive, and that was good enough for her.

  “Emily?” a voice called from the entrance behind her.

  She turned to Stitch, tears in her dark animal eyes.

  “He’s not here,” she growled.

  The patchwork man came excitedly into the room.

  “Are you certain?”

  She nodded. “His death scent would have been somewhere in this room, and it isn’t.”

  Emily didn’t know exactly why she did it, and was sure that she would be mortified with the memory later, but she shot up from the floor and wrapped her arms around the large man, hugging him tightly.

  “He’s alive,” she said, her snout buried against his chest.

  And she felt his arms go tentatively around her, one of his large hands patting her back.

  “And that’s a good thing,” he told her.

  “The best,” she answered.

  “But I’m still worried,” he then responded.

  She looked up at him then, unsure of what he meant.

  “The question now is where has Abraham gone—was he taken? If so, by whom—and for what purpose?”

  And here she had been starting to feel good again.

  So much for that.

  Bram started toward the sickly woman; drawn toward her like metal filings pulled toward a magnet.

  The armored guards surged at him with a grunt, their fearsome spearheads mere inches from his chest.

  He didn’t give them a second thought, ghosting his form and passing through the spears, as well as the warriors themselves, on his way toward the woman that he just knew was his mother.

  It was like he was in some kind of trance as he continued toward the bed of furs and the fragile woman who lay bundled within them.

  The sudden pain in his shoulder blade was excruciating, breaking the trance that the woman had over him.

  Instinctively he spun around to see the guards still standing there, snarls upon their equally pale features. Bram reached behind himself, feeling where the burning pain originated, and pulled his hand away red. He was bleeding from a shoulder stab.

  But how was that possible? He had been a ghost at that point.

  One of the warriors smiled, waving the tip of his spear in the air. It was stained with his blood.

  “I don’t want to fight you,” Bram told them, the wound in his shoulder throbbing. “I just need to go to her.”

  He turned slightly toward the woman, to make his point, as the warriors again attacked.

  Bram was ready this time, his body instantly becoming immaterial to avoid the slashing weapons.

  But it didn’t matter.

  The edge of the spearhead cut across his ribs, even though he was in his Spectral form, and Bram let out a scream of pain, jumping back and away from their weapons.

  “How?” was all that he could muster, placing a hand against the new bleeding wound in his side.

  They were charging him again, triggering his immediate response. Somehow these warriors could hurt him in his ghostly form, so it was time to rely on the skills learned in the monastery of P’Yon Kep if he was going to survive this encounter.

  Bram lunged, meeting their attack. An op
en palm strike connected, driving one of the warriors’ heads back with a snap.

  Turning his attention to the other, he drove his leg up, the sole of his boot aimed toward his adversary’s pale, snarling face.

  Bram’s foot connected with nothing, the warrior’s upper body becoming like smoke.

  Like a ghost.

  Taken aback, he let his guard down and was struck from behind by the other of the pair.

  Bram’s head spun as he dropped to his knees. He could hear one of his attackers coming closer and he knew that he was ready to take him out with the point of his spear.

  Concentrating, Bram allowed himself to pass through the moss-covered ground, sensing the point of the spear digging into the surface above him.

  He then sprang off, flowing up and out of the surface, solidifying his form as he flew up and into the air.

  The warriors tensed, leaping back as he sprang into the air. Bram willed himself solid, dropping back down in a crouch and swiping his leg beneath the legs of one of his attackers, dropping his heavy, armored form to the floor.

  The other of the warriors lunged, and Bram went immaterial, just as his attacker did as well.

  It was the oddest sensation that he’d ever experienced—another’s ghostly matter mixing with his own. Somehow, even in an almost gaseous state, they were still fighting, their ghostly forms mingling together, fighting as he’d never fought before.

  And all the time he fought, one thought pounded through his mind.

  They’re like me.

  Bram felt as though he might suffocate. Beginning to will himself solid, he broke away from the others, drifting across the room, where he pulled himself together.

  It all made sense now; the ferocity of their battle sense, the weapons that could even harm a ghost . . .

  “You’re Specter,” he said to one of the armored warriors as the other reconstituted his mass beside him.

  “You speak the obvious, boy,” the warrior who had just re-formed stated as he retrieved his spear.

  His back and side throbbing painfully, Bram mentally prepared himself to continue the fight.

  The warriors stood between the woman and himself.

  All he wanted to do was to go to her side, to stare long enough to remember her face and, if possible, to place his hand upon hers.