“Seriously?” I said, louder than I’d intended. A young man with tanned skin, dark hair, and thick glasses looked up at me—raising his gaze from the test paper in front of him. Rolling my eyes, I stepped into the room. “A math test? That’s what you’re having a nightmare about? That’s what you’re shouting about?” There’d been a time when I tried to be sympathetic to the plight of every dreamer. That was before my house was burned down, my wife taken, my career destroyed, and my daughter kidnapped. At least it wasn’t another random vampire dream—those seemed to have ended when the real thing showed up.
The young man’s mouth dropped open, and he started to sniffle. He raised one arm, extending a long-fingered hand toward the wall behind me. My shoulder blades itching, I dropped my weight and pivoted so that I did a 180-degree turn. Oh—there was a bomb on the wall. A counter was ticking down from two minutes and thirty-five seconds, and there was a note written on the white board: Solve the problem if you want to live. Below the note there was some form of a math problem. I was a physics major at university, so I’d dealt with quite a lot of math. Unfortunately, I never learned to solve any equations that used a frowny-face as a variable. I guess I owed the kid an apology—he was screwed.
“It’s impossible. I’m going to die,” the young man wailed, pulling his hair. I felt my most distant mental probes suddenly disappear and checked over my shoulder. Unsurprisingly, the door had disappeared—the dreamer’s feeling of being trapped manifesting in the environment. I’d dealt with a lot of dreams about difficult exams over the years, but this was the first time that the situation had been combined with an explosive, and I wondered if this kid had watched one too many Saw movies. I hated that series. I racked my brain while the clocked counted down. Two minutes and fifteen seconds left.
A couple of years ago, I would have pulled out my sword, chopped a hole in the Dreamscape, and tossed the bomb into oblivion. This had the benefit of permanently removing the threat to the dreamer, but there was the slightly concerning downside that “things” from outside of our reality were poised and ready to crawl, wriggle, and pulsate their way out of the rents that I made. Two minutes and five seconds.
“Are you just going to stand there? Oh God, I’m going to die,” the young man whined and bent over his paper, scribbling furiously again. Okay, the next tactic I could try would be to bolster his self-confidence. He didn’t really need to solve the problem; he just had to think he had for the strategy to work.
“Hey, kid.”
“My name is Ali, and I’m nineteen,” he snapped without looking up from his frantic scribbling.
“Hey, Ali, I’m sure that you’re great at math…s,” I said, remembering to add the obnoxious “s” to the end of the word, Brit-style. “You’ve probably been drilling on this stuff constantly, right? You’ve got this, buddy!” I said, guessing that this dream had been brought on by too much studying. I added a few iotas of willpower to conjure up some inspirational music. Eye of the Tiger played in the background; Survivor seemed like a good choice in this situation.
“Where the hell is that music coming from? Why do you think I’ve studied a lot? Is it because I’m Asian? What the hell. Can’t I get away from racist white people even in my dreams?” One minute twenty left.
I thought momentarily about just letting the bomb go off. Nah, I thought, the headache I’d get wasn’t worth it. I walked over to look at Ali’s work. Shit, I’m pretty sure that smiley-face/frowny-face doesn’t equal pi. So increasing his confidence wasn’t going to work.
“Is that a unicorn?” I asked, pointing behind Ali. He turned his head, and I quickly focused on the image of a large steel wall going up between us and the bomb.
“Hey, where’d that wall come from? That’s not strong enough to stop an explosion,” the annoying little shit said, ensuring that it wouldn’t be. It was his dream, and his rules. I was tempted to just “disappear” the bomb. With my years of experience and willpower, it was doable, but that kind of overt interference would almost certainly jolt Ali awake, which would leave me feeling just as awful as doing nothing. Thirty seconds.
Last year, a dragon that I’d summoned (long story) had lit me on fire. I’d burned because I’d had nothing that could hold off dragon flame—usually I could only summon up things that I had experience with in the real world. Luckily for me, since then I’d watched a sorcerer create a force field. Slightly less luckily, his spell had required the sacrifice of half a dozen people, but in the Dreamscape, I just needed to dredge up the right memory.
“Ali, stay close to me, I have one last trick…” I said, turning my back on the bomb and putting myself between it and the dreamer. I closed my eyes, recalled the shimmering viridian dome of energy that Senior Auditor John Brown had called forth, and pushed.
“Why are you making that face? Do you need to use the toilet or—” Zero.
The explosion sent a wave of fire and pressure throughout the room, shattering desks into kindling and turning chunks of concrete from the floor into lethal projectiles. There was a cloud of dust, but when the ringing in my ears stopped, Ali and I were okay.
“What the hell, man? You could have done this the whole time, and you made me try to do that problem? I was going to shit myself. I thought that I was going to die. What kind of asshole are you?” Ali accused. I couldn’t explain them to him, but I have two rules of Dreamwalking. The first is that I should use only the minimum possible amount of mystical power to resolve the dream; the more I use, the less rested I feel when I wake up. The second is that I shouldn’t wake the dreamer. That gives me a headache, a nosebleed, or worse, and the dreamer presumably doesn’t come off well either. I decided to make an exception this time.
As Ali stood to “get in my face,” I cocked my fist backward, pivoted my hips, and…flung a glass of water in Ali’s face. He spluttered, and the dream started to rapidly break down as he was jolted away. “Asshole.” Totally worth it, I thought, as the fading remnants of the dream took on an ocher hue. Uh-oh.
◆◆◆
I saw the tourists trapped in the graveyard again. Once more, Sloane faced down the vampires. Then a shift, and I was again looking at the ember-eyed vampire Cooper that had confronted me in the chapel. “You will kill no more of my kind, Sloane. Your day is past,” he said, prowling across a darkened inner London street, every move radiating barely restrained power.
“I’ll kill you all, Cooper. You hid from me, but no longer. You’re right about one thing, though. My days of hunting your kind are almost past.” There was a pause as the voice of Edward Sloane carried out of the shadows. “Now that I know where the true seal is, I will have the power to wipe your kind from this island.” The hiss of a crossbow bolt cut the cool night air, but the vampire, Cooper, contemptuously batted it to the ground.
“I had hoped that you would have learned something these last forty years, but I was sadly mistaken,” the vampire said, and sprang at Sloane. The vampire hunter pirouetted like a trained dancer, and Cooper flew past in a blur. There was a thunk, and the vampire came to rest facing a brick wall, six inches of wooden stake protruding from his back.
“Ah, but see. I did learn something during the last forty years. I learned patience,” Sloane said, a predatory grin stretching his visage into a network of wrinkles like the blasted, cracked plains of a drought-stricken hell-scape. He raised his crossbow again, and Cooper lifted his head, crimson eyes blazing defiantly. There was the sound of footsteps on cobbles, and both men’s gazes involuntarily twitched in the direction of the sound—and I emerged from the darkness, a package tucked under one arm.
“Ah, you have the Sigilum, Mr. Adler. Nicely done,” Sloane said.
Shift—sirens wailing, gunshots, people screaming, pale shapes sprinting down a high street, blood flowing in the gutters—
shift—tombstones in moonlight again—
shift—Cooper, grabbing the head of a man with an AK-47 in both hands and effortlessly snapping his neck—
shift
—a wax disk covered in occult symbols, now I knew it was the Sigilum, shining on an altar of stone underneath the statue of an angel and a young girl—
shift—a newspaper, the headline read: Bloodsucking Bastards: Outbreak continues, hundreds dead as capital quarantined. The date on it was June 24.
shift—a new scene. Slightly fuzzy. Stone building, low, maybe a mausoleum? Sloane and Cooper again. Sloane chanted words that made my ears ache and my teeth itch. Quite a feat since I didn’t have a body. Cooper fell. Sloane put a glowing disk, the true Sigilum, on the altar. Sloane held out his hands. A red mist started to boil out of the vampire’s pores, his body withering. The red mist flowed toward Sloane—
shift—another new scene. Rain pelting down. Me, staggering through a row of tombstones, blood and mud running down my face. “Sloane!” I yelled. Blackness.
Chapter 14
0800–1100, Sunday, June 19, 2016
I awoke. With a splitting headache. Dana was sleeping in the guest room. She’d gone to bed with her back turned toward me and hadn’t talked about how we’d misinterpreted my mother’s note. Instead, she’d stayed up late doing research. It wouldn’t help us if we found the Sigilum but she did something reckless or worked herself to death. Especially after the doctor had told her to take it easy. I took a second to consider women who I’d watched tromp off to work, heavily pregnant, falling asleep in their seats or being forced to stand by thoughtless idiots. Suddenly my headache didn’t seem so bad, and I rolled out of bed. I glanced at my phone and groaned; Mia was summoning me into the office.
Exhausted emotionally and physically, I got ready for work on autopilot, and my brain didn’t reengage until I was scrambling onto the Central Line at Ealing Broadway. I’d failed to help Ali deal with his nightmare, but I wasn’t that bothered. Instead, I was vaguely pleased that I’d managed to make the force field conjuration work. I’d spent so long not having an appropriate memory for that kind of thing that it hadn’t occurred to me to do so until last night. In theory, it meant that the more nasties I dealt with in the real world, the more powerful I’d become. Level up.
As I neared the office, I thought about the vision that I’d seen last night. It had only contained a little bit of new information, but that had been vital. I’d seen confirmation both that I’d find the Sigilum and that Sloane and I would make a deal. I’d also seen that he could stop Cooper—a big relief. I couldn’t help but be worried, though, to see myself, injured, calling out for Sloane. I was pretty sure I knew how I’d find the artifact, but I had no idea whether I could make an appropriate deal with Edward Sloane—I still needed the Sigilum for our unborn child, but the vampires had to be stopped too. My baby’s life might depend on Dana and I figuring out how to use the Sigilum without the monster hunter interfering.
The only action that I could take at this instant was to call Detective Chief Inspector James Badger, like I’d promised. I paused in the lee of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the towering dome looming above me and blocking the sun’s rays as they crested the eastern horizon, leaving deep pools of shadow on the pavement.
The phone rang three times before I heard the familiar, clipped tones of Badger’s military received English. “Good morning, Mr. Adler. How might I help you on this fine and sunny Sunday morning? I trust all is well?” I could picture the short detective twitching his walrus-like mustache as he finished the greeting, and I smiled. He could be a pain in the ass, but when the chips were down, Jimmy Badger had gone all-in for me. Twice.
The man knew that my call must be about supernatural skullduggery, yet he felt honor-bound to mention the weather. There were some days that I loved the British. “You wanted to know if I got any more information on extradimensionally attuned artifacts or any more solid evidence on the vampires,” I stated.
“Indeed.”
“Well then…” I spent the next five minutes explaining that the attack at the Chapel of Saint George, which somehow hadn’t made the news, was the result of a vampire—who also happened to be the same person that I definitely didn’t light on fire. I also told him about our plan to find the Sigilum using thaumaturgy and my Dreamwalking ability.
Badger hesitated for a moment before replying, “That’s still not solid evidence on the vampire front, Mr. Adler. However, I’ll have my lads cast an eye over the CCTV from the attack to see if they can spot anything that the Royal Protection unit missed.” After a further short pause, he added, “If you need that copy of the Sigilum, I can get one checked out of the British Museum on the proviso that no harm comes to it. One of my lads’ll need to be present when you do…” He trailed off and let the details remain in the aether. I nodded to the empty air like an idiot before he continued: “I’ll get the discussions going at the right level, and I’ll call you back when I have an update. Is there anything more, Mr. Adler?”
“No, Jimmy, thanks,” I said and ended the call. I did so about five seconds before Mia Noel, auditor of the Sons of Perseus, rounded the corner, looking fully recovered from whatever had happened after my training session. When I recognized her, long legs clacking on heels down the pavement, I did a guilty double-take that caught her attention, and I cursed myself for being stupid enough to have that conversation so near the Sons’ HQ.
“Julian, so nice to see you. And on time for once,” she said, her mouth curving into a mischievous grin for a just a moment before settling back into a serious line. “Or maybe you won’t be on time. Why don’t we go get a coffee? I think we might have some things to talk about.”
We doubled back toward the underground, walking through Paternoster Square. It turns out that even shady secret societies use Starbucks and, within a couple of minutes, she had a coffee and I was drinking an iced tea. We looked like any other work colleagues in the City, catching up before their early-morning meetings—if you ignored the fact that it was a weekend and no one else’s meeting started with, “So, Paula tells me that I may have been slightly premature in declaring vampires extinct?”
“Yeah, vampires. The coelacanths of the supernatural world. Who knew,” I replied helpfully, noting that apparently we weren’t addressing her seizure.
“Julian, if your dreams actually are prophetic, then your value to this organization is almost incalculable. I’ve spoken to the Senior Auditor”—my eyes went wide—“the new Senior Auditor, and she agrees that we need to start mobilizing a task force. One vampire can become thirty in a month. We need to get on top of this. If you see any more dreams about the vampire outbreak, the location of Gerald Cooper, or any connected artifact, then I need you to tell me immediately. Is that understood, Junior Penitent Adler?” she finished, leaning in and staring me in the eyes, challenging me to buck her authority. Well, buck her.
“Mia, that’s asking a lot from someone that you admitted you can’t help,” I said.
“I’m helping you all the time. You haven’t been deported, have you? You aren’t in one of the Sons’ dungeons, are you? You won’t come home to police waiting at your door, will you? You deserve, you’ve earned, you are guilty of infractions that should lead to those things, but they haven’t occurred. And they won’t occur. As long as I keep helping you. Now be a good dear and tell me what you know. I will not have one of the best things that my father did ruined by your silence,” Mia said, her cut-glass accent turning dear into daa as she crossed one long leg over the other and leaned back like she owned the place.
I shivered inside at the threat. I’d worked with Mia, and I’d seen her vulnerable, but she wasn’t pulling any punches. If I didn’t fall in line, then I’d just fall. In a way, it was good that she was taking the threat so seriously, but this was a side of Mia that scared me. I needed to be very careful with what I said next. “I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as I find out anything else,” I lied. Mia studied my face, but I didn’t twitch a muscle, and eventually she nodded and turned away.
◆◆◆
“Yo, J-man. Good to see you’re all right! I heard that you shot up the vam
pire! Man, that is awesome!” Vir said, pointing his index finger, cocking his thumb, and making pew-pew noises as I walked through the door to Mia’s office a few hours later. One arm was in a sling, and I wondered if it was his natural disposition or if a lot of unnatural chemicals were making him so…perky.
“Boys,” Mia said, looking us over. “Due to the extenuating circumstances—”
“It was a freakin’ vampire. That isn’t extenuating circumstances. That’s just crazy. Even for this place,” Vir interrupted. Senior Agent Paula Smith, dressed in a black suit and white shirt, shot Vir a withering gaze. He met her eyes and grinned.
“As I was saying; due to extenuating circumstances,” Mia started again, “we have decided to send the same team back out to capture King Henry VIII. Unfortunately, it seems that he vacated Windsor Castle and was seen at Hampton Court Palace last night. Therefore, your assignment is, once again, to hunt down Henry VIII and apprehend him. You’ll arrive around four in the afternoon, when tourist numbers are down. We don’t want to have quite so much cleanup this time. Further failure will reflect very poorly on you three in particular and all attuned here in general. Is this understood?” Mia said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Paula replied, a strange tone in her voice, while I nodded. I was pretty sure that she was okay with things reflecting poorly on the attuned. We all turned to Vir, whose eyes were closed. Suddenly a marker floated into the air and started to scribble on a whiteboard. A few seconds later, the message This one hears and obeys appeared.
Mia’s head swiveled, terribly slowly, back in Vir’s direction, and we all waited silently until he opened his eyes, returning from his astral projection. Mia’s face was absolutely still as she bit off one word: “Out.”
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