“We’ll just be going then…” I said, putting my hand on Vir’s wrist, and I pulled him up. Running away is something. I made it three steps, half-carrying Vir, before a hand like a steel vise clamped down on Vir’s arm. Lynyrd Skynyrd, you liar.
“I’m sorry…” the vampire breathed, spittle suddenly running down his chin and his arms trembling but moving Vir’s arm inexorably toward his gaping mouth.
“Just get out of here,” the strange voice, presumably Henry’s, issued from Vir’s mouth again. My partner’s eyes flew open, and his head whipped around to look in horror at the creature holding his arm.
Vir yelled something in Hindi—I was pretty sure I caught “Ganesh” in there—and suddenly the chairs we’d been sitting in rocketed into the air. One of the chairs crashed into the vampire, splintering into pieces and sending the creature sprawling onto the floor—precisely in the center of one of the harlequin shafts of sunlight lancing in through the stained glass windows.
There were twin screams, one from the vampire and the other from my partner. Instantly I caught the scent of bacon, and the vampire threw up an arm to shield his rapidly blackening face. I pushed Vir toward the entrance to the chapel and spent just enough time focusing on him to notice that his shrieks must have been elicited by whatever damage was causing his arm to flop bonelessly at such an odd angle. I shoved Vir behind me, and he stumbled for the exit, cradling his arm.
My buddy was hurt; I saw red. “I’ve seen what you’re trying to do. I’m going to stop whatever it is you have planned. Even if I do have to work with Sloane. I’ll protect London from your kind,” I said, backing in the direction of the door and scooping up a broken chair leg as a makeshift stake, but refusing to turn my back on the creature.
The vampire rolled out of the shaft of multicolored light and struggled to his feet, flakes of scorched skin drifting down like black snow from an industrial hell-scape. Red, raw flesh showed on the vampire’s hands as he reached up to remove his sunglasses, and the hatred in his crimson eyes hit me like a physical force, making me stumble backward. My foot struck something, and I glanced down to see Paula’s revolver. “You ignorant ass. You will stay away from Sloane. I didn’t sacrifice everything to have you ruin it all,” the vampire said in the same tone of command that had sent Paula stumbling for the door. I felt a pressure inside my skull like the first tightness of an approaching headache, but then I heard a voice in my head—“Nay, you will stay away from him.”—and the pressure abated.
The vampire looked momentarily confused, “Stay out of my fucking head!” I shouted, and took a deep breath. “Like I said, I’ll work with whoever I need to, to stop you. Of course, if you’d just step back into the sun, then—”
I didn’t get to finish my sentence, because the vampire sprang at me—from twenty feet away. Six months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to react in time, but my training sessions were paying off, and I threw myself to the floor, ducking just under the monster’s outstretched arms.
The vampire crashed into the wall, growled in frustration, and rolled up to his feet in the time it took me to move one arm. Luckily for me, that arm movement was reaching out and grabbing the pistol on the floor. “I’m the thing that monsters have nightmares about, asshole.” The bloodsucker curled to spring at me, and I pulled the trigger four times in rapid succession just as he left the ground. The pistol bucked against my wrist and barked, the sound cacophonous in the chapel as it propelled eight grams of lead at nine hundred feet per second into the crouching form of the vampire only a dozen feet away. The monster jerked repeatedly, skidding back into another beam of light. He gasped as his still-unhealed face burst into flame and started charring again to the sound of sizzling meat.
My shots must have triggered some kind of contingency plan because even before the thunder stopped echoing, half-a-dozen armed guards poured into the chapel, MP5 automatic carbines at the ready. This was too much for the wounded vampire; he scrambled out of the light and, throwing his hoodie over his head, fled for one of the side doors, the police yelling for him to stop.
I was on the floor behind a bench, and the police hadn’t noticed me yet; due to the literally smoking gun in my hand, I’d be better off if it stayed that way. I was taking a gamble that if I could use my powers and stay conscious long enough to get out of the building, I might still get out of this situation without landing in jail. I tucked the gun into my trench coat and reached for my connection to the Dreamscape. A feeling somewhere between the need to sneeze and the rush you feel when you wake abruptly filled me, and I knew I’d succeeded. Before the police could turn around and notice me, I focused on a memory, from the BC (Before Children) period, of being ignored while I waited in line with Dana to get into a trendy club, and pushed, visualizing my temporary remolding of reality falling over everyone in a hundred-foot radius. Instantly, my head swam, but I felt energy race out of me to bend the universe bend to my will, and I clambered to my feet as swiftly as I could, wincing slightly at the ache in my shoulder. Affecting that many people had taken a lot out of me.
“Hey you! What are you doing here?” Shit. One of the cops was looking right at me, so I froze.
“Yeah, you’re not allowed in here. Get out. We don’t need any trench coated weirdos in this club. Piss off,” said a burly, well-tanned bobbie that I could easily picture moonlighting as a bouncer.
So I pissed off. Sometimes I can follow directions. (Don’t tell Dana.) Just as I stepped out of the chapel, a soporific tsunami hit me, and I stumbled on the steps. The bystanders’ faces crinkled up as they stared at me in obvious distaste. I thought I heard someone muttering about “letting drunks in here,” and I decided I wouldn’t use that memory again any time soon. I shuffled about three more steps, and then the ground rose up to give me a hug and a kiss goodnight.
Chapter 12
2000–2300, Friday, June 17, 2016
“Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
I shook my head and opened my eyes, turning my head in the direction of the voice. Dana was grinning at me from the love seat, hands covering her belly as I sprawled on the couch.
“Pistol,” I said, showing her the snub-nosed revolver that no one had bothered to take out of my pocket.
“Awww…” Dana replied, her dark eyes twinkling with mischief. “Here I was worried that the sour-faced woman who dropped you off had taken advantage of you, and I’d have to lay my claim on you again.”
I had some very distracting thoughts for a moment, but then I remembered what had happened before I’d passed out. “Ummm…Dana, as much fun as we might have, I think I need to put my other head to use.”
Dana gave me a pout, and I proceeded to relay my experiences in Windsor. I explained that the vampire, Cooper according to my dream, had shown up again, preventing me from really speaking to Henry. She sat back and was silent for a minute.
“Henry helped you?” Dana asked, and I nodded before she continued. “And the vampire seemed to know Henry, or at least to be aware that he’d been one of John Brown’s Escapees. Bela Lugosi was also there when the Choker made her move. I think that Cooper was one of the Escapees.”
“Don’t think so. Mia claimed that there weren’t any vampires in Britain,” I replied.
“Just means she didn’t know about him. I think you should rectify that. She wanted proof. Well, she now has three witnesses. What more does she need?”
Dana had made an excellent point, as usual. “Okay. Done. I’ll speak to her tonight, after the training session,” I said, feeling a lot better about the outcome of my day’s work than I had before.
Dana held up a finger. “And also, I think you must have made a good impression on Henry. Why else would he have helped? Play that up too when you talk to her.” Right about then, the doorbell rang, and I tried to get up. I failed, sitting back down on the couch with an indelicate “oomph” and leaving Dana to make her way, slowly and obliviously, to the door.
“Don’t
open it!” I yelled. Panic at the prospect of who or what could be at the door propelled me over the couch in a lunging dive.
Dana sidestepped me and opened the door—her hand flew to her mouth in horror. “You didn’t forget the garlic butter dip, did you?” she said…to the Papa John’s delivery driver. He smiled and produced a couple of the tubs of yellow goodness from inside his jacket, and Dana glanced down at me. “Y’all gonna stay there, or are ya gonna help me eat this?”
“Eat it…” I mumbled, and then made good on my words, wolfing down three slices of pepperoni and sausage before I remembered what Dana had been planning to do today.
“Well…weren’t you heading out to do research on the Sigilum today?” I asked around a mouthful of garlic cheese bread.
Dana smiled like the cat that had gotten the cream. “I thought you were never going to ask. So, I went to the British Museum’s Sloane collection—no relation, by the way—and found quite a bit of information about the Sigilum. Obviously I found the basics on Wikipedia pretty much immediately: known in English as the Seal of the Truth of God, whatever the hell that means, popular Middle Ages magical diagram, made famous by Queen Elizabeth I’s court astronomer/magician, John Dee. Supposedly enables the user to command anything in creation except for archangels. Shows up on Supernatural as a way to trap demons,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, giving her the “get on with it” hand motion.
“Well, I was looking at a big diagram of the thing in one of the library books, but I couldn’t fit behind the desk. One of the librarians wandered over to see what I was doing, and he told me that the British Museum copy was on display at the moment. It’s in a glass case in the Enlightenment Gallery!” Dana said. My eyes went wide, but before I could say anything, Dana plowed on: “So, I got specific directions and waddled my ass up to the case. It was all there!” She grabbed her phone off of the nightstand and held it out to me, showing not only the wax disc of the Sigilum, looking just as it had in my dream, but also a large obsidian mirror, a crystal ball, and a golden amulet.
“But, Dana, like I said before, if this is just sitting out in the museum, then it can’t be the real thing, can it?” I asked, not quite sure why she was so excited.
“Well, duh,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “If this were the real thing, and its location was on Wikipedia, then yes, Julian, someone would have stolen it by now. However, they didn’t have the ability to go find the real location, did they?”
“And we do?”
“Yes,” she hissed, grinning. “All we need to do is get ahold of this, and then we can have you use the same kind of thaumaturgy—like calling to like—that you did last year to visit the Sons’ HQ, and voila! You dream of the Sigilum, we fetch it, and we’ll be able to get our daughter back!” Dana had a manic grin on her face and was almost bouncing with excitement, which, in her condition, was pretty impressive.
My wife is an absolute genius, and I felt my head swim with exhilaration at the idea that she’d solved this already (except for the whole robbing the British Museum thing, but…details). That feeling lasted for about ten seconds—then I remembered the vampires. I closed my eyes, sat on the bed, and put my head in my hands. “I don’t know if we can use it to help Olivia…” I mumbled.
“What?” Dana said, her face draining of blood as her voice became icy cold.
“I don’t know if we can use it to help Olivia,” I repeated, looking up at my wife. My wife who had spent months in a realm of nothingness for me. My wife who had come back to me, even though I’d lost our daughter. Clenching my fists, I added two words: “Sloane. Vampires.”
“I thought we went over this. I don’t care if he wants it. We’re using it,” Dana stated.
“But my dreams. Sloane implied that he needed it to deal with the vampires…Cooper was a boss. He got shot six times, and it didn’t even slow him down. All he had to do was glance at Paula, and she was under his control. It’s like he has psychic roofies.”
“So what? Helping someone else comes before fixing your mistake? Again?” she said, hands on her hips and eyes narrowed in a venomous gaze. I felt sick to my stomach. Vir had been hurt, we’d failed in our mission, I’d failed my secret mission for Mia, and now I was being made to choose between protecting my family and protecting hundreds, or even thousands of innocents? I racked my brains…then I had it! One of my first supervisors told me that if you have one problem, then you’re in trouble, but if you have two problems, you might have an answer.
“We’ll tell Badger about the vampire. He wanted to know about any supernatural problems. And if I tell him that the creature is trying to get the Sigilum, then I bet he’ll be able to get the copy out of the museum. He is heading up the Arts and Antiquities Unit, after all,” I said.
Dana’s expression softened, and she nodded at me before heading to the other end of the room, leaving me to consider my situation. Vir had failed in his attempt to apprehend Henry, so presumably we’d be sent off to do that again soon. I wanted an opportunity to talk to the former monarch, to understand why he’d helped me against the vampire and to carry out Mia’s mission, but would apprehending him continue to be our focus once Paula reported to Mia that my premonition about vampires had been correct? What would the Sons do if they thought I really could see the future? Would they help me or lock me up? I couldn’t be sure.
What I could be sure about was that I’d better not give any indication that I was putting anything before my family again. Dana was right that I owed it to her and Olivia. But didn’t I also owe something to the people who had already died because of my mistakes, dozens against the puca, and then hundreds taking down Senior Auditor Brown? Only a monster could ignore that. And I wasn’t a monster. Was I? Those lovely thoughts went around my head as we got ready to head to another training session with Mia—perhaps the last one that I’d get a chance to do without Edward Sloane supervising, and thus the last one where I might get some answers.
◆◆◆
“Dana. It’s been a while,” Christian said, his accent thick as he took my wife’s hand and shook it vigorously. Dana had fought zombies next to him, which was all that Christian needed to know about her. That, and that she’d gotten a special dispensation to come to my after-hours training sessions. It was just easier on everyone if she was there to drag my hairy, pale ass home after I ended up unconscious from using my power: badly or skillfully, it didn’t make much difference—I was gonna pass out. Dana stepped forward, returned Christian’s handshake with a smile, and let herself be led to a seat. I was meant to have these training sessions once a week, but the previous few had been canceled due to field operations.
Mia was seated imperiously next to the door in a high-backed chair and looked like she’d just stepped off of the set of a Bond movie; her gray eyes sparkled, her skin glowed with a healthy tan, and her makeup was done so skillfully that if I didn’t have a bunch of Irish women’s memories stuck in my head, I would have thought she didn’t have any on. If she was armored like this, then she must be nervous about something. My guess was that she didn’t know why Sloane wasn’t here to supervise. I was pretty sure that there were no more than fifteen or so attuned, so any training would presumably have been of interest to the monster hunter. I knew why Sloane wasn’t here, but I wasn’t telling. At least not yet.
“How’s the auditing going, Mia? You deemed any attuned to need locking up lately?” I needled, knowing that cracking her exterior was the best way to get juicy information out of her.
Mia looked me up and down without moving anything other than her eyes. “I’ll let you know after this session. Stop your posturing, and go prove that I haven’t wasted my time with you.”
I cracked my knuckles and rolled my neck. “I have some important questions. I’m going to take this bastard apart,” I said, and ran into the interior of the abandoned warehouse to hide.
“Good luck, babe!” Dana shouted.
“Yes, good luck, Mr. Adler,” Mia added.
/> I jogged forward and passed into the active part of the training facility. The Sons had several similar facilities set up around London in apparently derelict warehouses, and they all had a similar layout: a small reception like the one I’d just left, a heavy rollup gate, and a much larger active area. The active area was set up with movable walls, ceilings, and floors to allow for many different training scenarios such as office complex clearance, events venue infiltration, and school hostage crises. Today’s setup looked like…a warehouse. Which was a bit boring, but hey—there are lots of warehouses. I checked the place out and was acutely aware of being alone. I’d never had to do one of these sessions alone before—I’d always had Bensen and Vir, but I’d managed to lose both of them in the past weeks. I was the last man, or mostly man, standing…
Ten minutes later, I was perched on a rafter, clutching a big chunk of concrete under one arm and holding my breath as the target robot, which looked surprisingly like a Taser-armed Poundland version of Johnny Five from Short Circuit, rolled underneath me. Each vibration threatened to collapse the rotten floor of the shadowy, derelict industrial unit. Taking the robot down would have been easy if I could just fling another blast of corrosive extradimensional energy at the construct, but part of my deal with Mia dictated that if I wanted to ask a new question, then I had to use a new method to overcome her challenge. In the next ten seconds, I was going to look either incredibly awesome or incredibly stupid. I cleared my mind, like Mia had taught me, took a deep breath, hopped off the rafter, and concentrated.
My trench coat made a whistling sound, which might have been what caused the construct to look up. Or it could have been my resounding battle cry of, “Shiiiiiit!” as I plunged the thirty feet to the floor. The ground rushed up at me, and I swung the chunk of concrete and prayed that the middle finger I had just flipped at Isaac Newton had done its job.
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