As the officers informed the attackers that they were under arrest, I drew my gladius forth again, but not for any violent purpose. As a teen I’d discovered the ability to consign bad dreams to oblivion by cutting a hole in the Dreamscape and chucking them in. Based on the lack of repeat nightmares I’d seen, I was virtually sure that doing so permanently excised them from the dreamer’s subconscious. Concentrating on nothingness, a complete and total lack of being, I prepared to plunge my sword into the ground—but I paused. I’d avoided doing this for months. Last time I’d done it, things had been waiting for me. But damn it, this woman needed my help. I pushed with my will and watched with satisfaction as a rent, a sucking blackness, appeared in the fabric of the Dreamscape.
A quick circuit around the cops and baddies later, a ninety-foot-circumference hole in reality opened up and devoured them with a soft sigh, banishing at least this particular manifestation of her self-loathing from the troubled dreamer’s subconscious. I watched in satisfaction as the dreamer’s mind started to “paper over” the hole, but just before it closed, a single bolt of lightning cut through the sky. Instead of thunder, a phrase floated on the air, its syllables made of the sound of tar bubbles popping and the death rattles of tortured souls. “Master, we wake.”
What the hell was that about? As the Dreamscape faded above me, I felt uneasy and thought about Olivia. Once again, I hadn’t been able to help her…and maybe I’d made things worse.
Chapter 2
0700–0800, Sunday, June 12, 2016
I awoke. The room was bathed in warm, amber morning light as I opened my eyes, and the pillow was hot and sticky against my face. I felt an arm around my middle and let out a sigh of pleasure. Then there was a kick against my lower back, and I rolled over and smiled. Dana was still asleep next to me, dark brown hair falling across her oval face, which was relaxed in the peace of dreamless sleep. She’d thrown her blankets off in the heat of the night, revealing the generous curves of her breasts and the swollen ripeness of her pregnancy. I watched her as a bead of sweat slowly trailed down to the end of her pert nose, one part of me reveling in her presence after the time that we’d spent apart, another part of me hiding from what I knew had to come next. The bead rolled down to her lips, and her eyelids fluttered.
For one frozen moment her mouth curved into the gentle, kissable pucker that I’d gotten to know so well during the years of our marriage, and then her hazel eyes flared open and the moment ended. “Did you find her?” she asked, levering herself up onto an elbow with a grunt of effort.
I closed my eyes, swallowed, and shook my head. “Nothing. Just another damned vampire dream. I don’t understand it; everything that I’ve learned tells me that with the thaumaturgic links we have, it should be no problem to find Olivia,” I said. Dana’s eyes gleamed with tears that she refused to let fall; she was clearly thinking of the obvious reason that I wouldn’t be able to find her. “No,” I said. “She’s out there somewhere. I just need to learn more.”
Dana closed her eyes, sniffling and nodding. “Okay, Julian. I believe in you. You found me when the whole world had given me up for dead.” She’d said this several times over the last couple of months, but the tremor in her voice made the statement sound brittle.
“You saved me when no one else would have come back for me,” I replied, leaned over, kissed her on the cheek, and shuffled to the shower.
As the hot water cascaded over my pale skin, I thought about the words that Dana and I had exchanged this morning and the events that had precipitated them. I’d told her that she’d come back for me when no one else would have, and it was no exaggeration. I’d hidden my Dreamwalking abilities from her for years, only revealing them when a coven of amateur witches had accidentally unleashed a dream demon, a puca, when they tried to enchant me and my colleagues into handing them a lucrative contract. The ensuing mayhem had seen me arrested and suspended from work and our house burned to the ground. I’d sent Dana and Olivia back to the US to stay with her parents in Florida. However, just as the witches were on the verge of a complete victory that would have brought England to its knees, Dana crashed back into my life, literally, smashing a car through a building to pull me out of danger and eventually riding the demon down to hell as I locked the gates behind her. She’d sacrificed herself to save me.
Dana’s words had been true as well. After she’d sacrificed herself, I’d become a man driven by a single goal: to find a way to bring her back from oblivion. The search had entangled me in the hunt to find and stop a supernatural killer, the Anarchist, who was stalking the Dreamscape. I’d eventually discovered that the killer was a high-ranking rogue sorcerer of the Sons of Perseus, a group dedicated to protecting society from the supernatural, and that he’d also been responsible for concocting the plot that had led to Dana’s disappearance. In the end, I’d used the brutal lessons that the Anarchist taught me in the magical school of hard knocks to stop him from fulfilling his ultimate goal of killing the ancient god Mammon, and I’d rescued Dana in the process. But in the chaos of trying to stop the Anarchist’s mad plans, Olivia had been kidnapped. By my mother. Who had disappeared over a decade prior.
Drying my ginger hair, I walked past the empty room where Dana’s little sister, Becky had slept when she’d stayed with me to watch Olivia. Becky was back in Florida now, spending the money that she’d extorted out of me for looking after her niece. At least the insurance company hadn’t been able to take that back the way that they had most of the money that I’d received when Dana had been declared dead. Dana was, literally, a rocket scientist, but she hadn’t been able to get her old job back, and no one will hire a pregnant woman, especially one who has spent some time legally dead. We were almost broke—being a secret society trainee doesn’t pay very well, especially now that the Sons of Perseus were out of favor with the government.
Dana was waiting for me at the kitchen table, wearing nothing but a long Garfield nightshirt and eating a bowl of cereal. She looked up as I came into the room. “According to my count, that was the one hundredth time that you’ve tried to contact Olivia. We need to start thinking about other options.” Her voice was steady and calm, but her spoon trembled in her fingers.
I grabbed a Pepsi from the fridge and sucked back a long draught before replying, “She’s still alive, Dana. Somewhere. I’ll find her. I won’t stop. But it was also almost the hundredth time that I’ve dreamt about vampires. What’s that about?” I replied. I didn’t want Dana to give up hope. I had missed her so much, and I worried that she’d only come back to me because she thought I was her best chance at getting our daughter back. If she didn’t believe that anymore…well, I couldn’t lose her again.
Dana stared at me, trembling spoon stopping halfway to her mouth. “I’m not saying that you should give up, but we need to get more irons in the fire. Have you spoken to DCI Badger recently?”
I shook my head. “He’s been busy as hell since he got reassigned to his new unit. After what happened in Cairo…”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. The government wanted anyone who knew anything about the supernatural,” my wife said, pausing to swallow before continuing, “But he owes you. The official investigation into Olivia’s disappearance didn’t find anything, but it never looked in the right places. He could get them looking for your mother. You’ve got to call in some of those chips.”
I knew that she was pushing me out of concern for our daughter, but I was desperate to get her back too, dammit. I slammed the door to the refrigerator hard enough to cause some of the magnets to tumble to the floor, and I had to take a calming breath before replying, “Look, I’ve got to get to work, but you’re right. I do need to call in some chips. I’ll see about getting some time with Jack Redderton tomorrow, and I’ll see if I can get some time alone with Mia.”
Dana frowned at my outburst and raised an eyebrow at that last comment, but she eventually nodded. “I’ll do some reading while you work. I still have those books that I borrowed from Jack; ma
ybe there’ll be something in there.” Dana was a great researcher, but I also knew that at nearly full term, her “reading” would include plenty of “napping.” Still, I appreciated the effort. It had to be hard on her just waiting for me to produce results.
“Thanks, baby. Look, I’m worried too. I’m sorry I snapped. I want to get Olivia back as much as you do.”
“I know,” Dana said solemnly, nodding at my words, “and you’re right to be weirded out by having your Twilight dreams every night. If something new is happening, it could signal a bigger change coming.”
“At least they don’t sparkle. Usually,” I said, quirking one side of my mouth into a smile, putting an end to the moment of tension between us, but I agreed with Dana, and I was worried. I’d never heard of real vampires—maybe they were some kind of symbol? I shook my head to clear it—we had a plan, and I needed to get going. After a few more moments of small talk, a change of clothes, and a quick peck on the lips, I slipped out the door.
Chapter 3
1000–1500, Sunday, June 12, 2016
“Fire! Fire!” Bensen yelled as a blast of flame lanced out from his outstretched right hand, scoring the rampaging golem across its chest. Chunks of dry, cracked clay fell off of the eight-foot-tall construct’s body and shattered on the floor, but it wasn’t slowed down in the least. The golem focused on Bensen’s shouting and slowly pivoted in his direction. How many times had Mia told him that he didn’t need to say anything? Least of all “fire.” Dumbass.
“Run, run, B.!” Vir, cried to Bensen. Bensen was attuned to a dimension with a much, much lower ignition temperature for oxygen than ours, which let him manifest fire within about a fifty foot radius.
The golem ignored Vir’s shouts and pounded implacably in Bensen’s direction, blocking the only exit to the room. The Sons used three-man teams of attuned—any more and we’d be too much of a threat, any less and we might just wander off. Bensen was our triad’s most impressive offensive weapon; I’d seen him put up a wall of flame that would cover a big chunk of a football field, but his abilities were almost useless against the nearly half-ton of clay golem that was bearing down on him. I could reach out for the Dreamscape, but I needed to come up with an attack that would put the big construct down in one hit. In fact, situations just like this were why I was, to my surprise, considered so valuable; most attuned were talented in a very deep but narrow way. I could do just about anything that I could think up—once. After that, I’d pass out within about a minute.
“Julian, do somethi—” Vir started to implore from down the hall, dancing from foot to foot. Unfortunately for Vir, he’d not been paying enough attention to the enemy, a common problem for the astral projector, and the golem lashed out at the wall with one fist, shattering plaster and masonry. A chunk of brick tumbled through the air and caught Vir in the forehead with a crack, and he collapsed in a boneless heap. Shit.
The little guy hadn’t been wrong, though; I did need to do something. I decided to buy Bensen a bit more time, so I leapt forward, trench coat flapping and gladius raised. My arm whipped out, and the sword sunk up to the hilt in the golem’s back—causing it to rock forward an inch or two. I set my feet and tried to yank the gladius out, but my weapon was stuck. As soon as I realized my predicament, I jumped back. That jump saved me: the golem, having no ligaments to worry about, whipped its arm straight back and caught me across the chest, but I was moving with the punch, so I only flew across the hall instead of getting launched through the wall.
I crashed to the floor, a whup of breath driven out of me, and stars danced in front of my eyes for a few moments. When they cleared, I could see the construct bent over Bensen’s prone form. A big part of me, the part that was used to striding through the Dreamscape like a ginger demigod, wanted to charge the golem, but instead I put my slightly shaken gray matter to use and realized that my best shot to take out the golem was to get one massive sucker punch ready…so I picked up a chunk of brick on the floor and flung it with all my strength. The masonry smacked into the golem, causing it to swivel away from Bensen, and it took a step in my direction. I turned, ran away, and ducked into a closet.
While I was hiding, I had time to think about the poor life choices that had brought me to this, being hunted down by an implacable, mindless monster while working on an assignment for the Sons of Perseus. After rescuing Dana last October, I’d been offered a chance to get revenge on the Sons by Father Michael O’Hanrahan, a disaffected former member of that secret society. He’d promised to give me information to help get my daughter back in exchange for working on his schemes. I’d turned the crazy old man down, but not before he’d revealed that the Sons had been the ones to drive my mother into hiding…so I went to the very people that had caused me so much pain and made a deal. If I helped them to clean up the fallout from Senior Auditor Brown’s attempt to kill a god, they’d not throw me into a deep, dark pit underneath their headquarters, and they’d teach me how to manipulate extradimensional energy—what most people called magic—and help me hunt down my traitorous, feckless, wicked mother.
I probably should have read the small print on that deal, because nowhere had there been any mention of needing to hunt down a mad attuned that could make giant, homicidal clay puppets. My reflection was interrupted by the thump, thump, thump of the golem tromping along the hallway, shaking the pictures on the wall and almost drowning out the sound of liquid dripping from its massive, lumpen hands of clay. I pushed myself into the back of the closet, hoping against hope that the shadows would conceal me. The behemoth creature stopped outside my hiding place, and I held my breath.
Long seconds ticked by while the stoic creature waited, still as a statue, straining for any sign of me. The closet was small and warm, and soon I felt beads of sweat trickle down my brow. I exhaled, slowly, soundlessly, and eight hundred pounds of clay and murderous instincts shifted to its left and plodded implacably toward the kitchen, floorboards protesting under its weight.
“Plaaack!” I sneezed.
A fist smashed through the wall next to my head, bits of plaster and joists exploding outward to pepper the side of my face. I flung myself at the door, and it burst open with a crack as my six-foot-two, 185-pound frame slammed into it. I dashed around a corner, trench coat flapping and blood pounding. The golem had stopping power in spades, but it lacked one important element—the magic of friendship.
No, just kidding, but it was absolutely shit at cornering, and I heard the sound of crumbling plaster and splintering floorboards as the construct lost its footing and caromed off the wall. In the time that I’d bought, I backed across the dozen feet of the living room and stood next to a small fireplace. There was a boarded-up window nearby, but leaving the house before the golem was stopped would put innocent civilians in danger, so I closed my eyes and concentrated.
I thought of my missing daughter: how I had failed to protect her, how scared she must be, how desperate I was to get her back. Despair, anger, and hope roiled in my chest. I imagined them compressing down into a big, green, corrosive ball. I held that image in my mind and opened my eyes. The golem was only four big strides away, its heavy, barrel-like body seeming to fill half the room. Soundlessly, dispassionately, hands that could smash walls with ease reached for my throat. I pushed with my willpower, feeding in my emotions and thrusting my hands forward. A pulse of green light leapt from my fingertips and slammed into the golem with a blinding flash.
I was propelled backward, where I flopped to the ground and rolled, feeling displaced air whoosh past me, though whether the golem was launching a blind attack or toppling over, I wasn’t sure. As my vision cleared, I fervently hoped for the latter because unless I could defeat this golem, I wouldn’t get the answers that I was seeking in this abandoned, mildewed shack on the outskirts of Brentford. And they were answers that I desperately needed if I was going to have a chance at saving my little girl.
I took one breath, two, three. There were no hands crushing my windpipe. My vis
ion cleared; the golem lay on the wooden floor, one board smashed beneath it, a smoking hole the size of my fist burned through its head. I let out a deep breath; I’d put down the golem, protected my friends, and earned some answers. I felt bands of fatigue press down on me, nature taking its revenge for my violation of its laws, and spots swam in front of my eyes. Those answers would need to wait until I woke up from a short nap…
◆◆◆
Cold water splashed over my face, and I woke up spluttering on a couch back in HQ. The room was small, just big enough for a couch and two swivel chairs, with gray carpet. It was one of several rooms where staff could grab a quick nap between shifts if they didn’t want to head home. “Wakey-wakey. Nicely done, Julian. And the other lads are fine,” Christian said in his Afrikaans accent as he bent over me. Christian was probably a year or two younger than my twenty-seven, and from anyone else I’d have felt a bit patronized, but he had saved my life, and I’d saved his. I respected him. That was good, since he was now in charge of my field operations as a Penitent in the Sons of Perseus. Yeah, not only had I joined up with the same organization that had burned my house down and had gotten hundreds of people killed in the last year, but I’d joined at the very bottom of the career ladder.
“We get him?” I asked.
“Yup. We bagged the Puppeteer. Win for Penitent Adler,” Christian said laconically. I did a mental fist pump. The Puppeteer was one of the twenty Escapees, the dangerous, extradimensionally attuned individuals who had been let loose last year as a distraction during Senior Auditor John Brown’s killing spree/god-killing gambit. The Puppeteer had been using his supernatural automata in an to attempt to found a protection racket in Southwest London, and more than a few people had gotten hurt when they’d refused, although no one had died yet—and now they wouldn’t.
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