by Tim Waggoner
"A distraction!" I finished.
"From what?" Bogdan asked.
"From whatever the kidnappers really want to do," I said. "And whatever it is, they need magic-users to do it."
"Magic-users that for some reason they can't simply hire," Devona said, "and so they're forced to abduct them. I wonder…" She trailed off then, and her expression went blank. "I need to step outside for a moment."
She rose from the couch, her movements somewhat stiff, and started walking out of the great room. The rest of us exchanged puzzled glances, except Shamika. She looked worried.
"This isn't good," she whispered. Shamika sounded more than worried now; she sounded scared, and her tone prompted me to action.
"Devona, wait!" I followed after her, but Varney was already ahead of me, and he trailed Devona down the hall toward the front door.
"What's wrong?" he asked. "You're acting–"
That's as far as Varney got before Devona spun around and shoved her hand toward him. She didn't connect with him physically, but I could feel the psychic force pouring off her in waves. Telekinetic energy slammed into Varney and threw him back against the wall. The Midnight Watch building is old and made almost entirely from stone, and Varney's skull made a sickening scrunch as it connected with the wall. His eye went wide as he hit, and he fell face-first when he rebounded, leaving a bloody smear where his head had struck the stone. I wasn't worried about Varney. He'd recover, but it would take him a few moments. In the meantime, I had to stop Devona.
As soon as she saw Varney was no longer a problem, she turned around and headed for the front door again, not running, just walking with a slightly stiff-legged gait, as if she weren't entirely in control of her actions.
Devona's psychic abilities had continued to grow in strength since we met, but I'd never seen her wield telekinesis to that degree. Whatever was happening with her, it had given her a power boost, and I knew I had to approach her cautiously. In my current condition, if she hit me with a blast of telekinesis as strong as the one she'd directed at Varney, I'd fly apart and this time I might not be able to put myself back together.
I was tempted to try and reach out to Devona through our link. If she was trying to fight whatever was happening to her, she might still be herself inside her mind, and we might be able to connect psychically. On the other hand, if she wasn't still herself, she could send a flood of mental energy through our link and stun me – or worse, reduce my brain to tapioca. I decided to try another approach.
"Whatever's happening, my love, you have to fight it – for the babies, if nothing else!"
She didn't say anything, didn't turn around, didn't attack, but she didn't stop walking, either. I thought she might have hesitated for a second or two, but it might've been my imagination.
We were almost to the door now, and while I had no idea what would happen when she went outside, I didn't think it was going to be good. I hated to do this, but I didn't see that I had any other choice.
"Rover!" I called.
An instant later a torrent of wind came rushing down the hallway toward us. Devona ignored it and reached out to take hold of the door knob.
"Something's wrong with Devona, Rover! You have to stop her from leaving!"
Rover is a living, sentient wardspell, but I wasn't sure exactly how intelligent he (or more accurately it) was. In the time since Devona had purchased the Midnight Watch building, we'd gotten to know Rover, and while I was certain he understood simple commands, I was afraid the complexity of the current situation would be beyond him. His mistress was simply trying to leave the building, and her partner was ordering Rover to prevent her from doing so. I wouldn't blame Rover for being confused – hell, I was confused, and I was right in the middle of the situation – and if it came down to a case of conflicting loyalties in Rover's mind, Devona versus Matt, I had no doubt who would win.
But Rover must've understood the situation, or perhaps being a creature composed entirely of magic he was able to detect that something was wrong with Devona, for either way, he blew past me, surrounded Devona with a mini cyclone, and pulled her away from the door.
For a moment I thought that would do it, and I began trying to think of a way to snap Devona out of the spell that was affecting her. But before I could come up with anything, she reached into one of her pockets and brought out a small metal charm. It was a simple thing, a coin-sized disk with a yin-yang symbol painted on it, but I'd seen her use it in her work, and I knew how potent it could be. A reverser is aptly named, for it reverses the effect of any magic it comes in contact with. A freeze spell can become a fire spell, a stasis spell can become a fast-motion spell, et cetera.
Devona flipped the reverser into the air, where Rover's cyclonic wind currents snatched it up and began spinning it around. It orbited Devona twice before it began to take effect. Rover's wind started to blow slower and with less force, and within seconds it dissipated to little more than a light breeze. Another second after that, and it was gone. The reverser plunked to the floor, and Devona left it where it lay, walking to the door once more, gripped the knob, turned it, pushed the door open, and stepped outside.
I didn't know if the reverser had merely negated Rover's wind or if it had nullified the creature entirely, essentially killing him, but I didn't have time to worry about that right then. I still had to try and stop Devona.
I followed her outside. She'd walked down the front steps and was standing motionless on the sidewalk, staring out into the street. I hurried down the steps toward her, doing my best not to lose control of my barely held together scarecrow body, when I saw something small and black scuttle out of the gutter and head toward her feet. It looked something like an oversized roach – thick carapace, six segmented legs, wiggling antennae – but I knew it was no Earthly insect. I'd seen it before, or rather, ones like it, but I thought I'd never see one again. But I had, hadn't I? And not that long ago. I'd seen one in Devona's room at the Fever House, and I'd seen others at the Grotesquerie, moving so swiftly that I'd hadn't been certain I'd seen anything at all. Those bugs belonged to only one being I knew of – actually were that being, in fact, for each insect was nothing but a tiny component of a single gigantic group mind.
It was Gregor.
The insect scuttled onto Devona's right foot and perched there. I was a bit surprised. I expected it to do something a lot ickier, like crawl up her body, enter her ear and dig its way into her brain. I'd seen Gregor's insects do it before. But this one seemed perfectly content to sit there on her foot, as if it had no intention more nefarious than hitching a ride.
I hurried up to Devona and stopped when I was within an arm's length of her. I didn't know what to do next. One of Gregor's insects wasn't much of a threat, but there could be hundreds of them – maybe thousands – hiding all around us, cloaked by shadow, wedged into cracks in the buildings and sidewalk, waiting to attack. I feared that if I made a wrong move, I might set them off. I thought about drawing my 9mm and shooting the bug on her foot. Devona would get injured in the process, but she was a vampire – albeit a half one – and she'd heal quickly enough. But once the bug was off her, I could haul her back into the Midnight Watch, and once we were inside, she would be safe. The security features of the building, both magical and technological, are so powerful that nothing would be able to harm her inside, including Gregor. His insects wouldn't be able to get in and…
I understood then. Gregor couldn't get in, so he'd needed to get Devona out.
I reached for her just as the insect clinging to her foot began to glow. I grabbed hold of her shoulder as her body became transparent, faded, and disappeared, bug and all. I frantically tried to connect to her through our psychic link, but I felt no echo of her presence. Wherever she'd gone, she was outside the range of telepathic contact.
Devona was gone. And as I looked down at the stump protruding from my right sleeve, I realized she'd taken my right hand with her.
I found Varney in the hallway, sitting up
against the wall and massaging the back of his head. Shamika and Bogdan stood close by, but I ignored them.
"What happened?" Varney said when he saw me approaching. "Did you stop her?"
In response, I drew my gun with my left hand, only fumbling a bit in the process, crouched down and pressed the muzzle to Varney's temple. Shamika gasped, and Bogdan took hold of her by the shoulders and slowly edged her back. I regretted scaring her, but I needed answers from Varney, and I was determined to get them, no matter what it took.
"I'm not as good a shot with my left hand as I am with my right, but at this range, all I need to do is pull the trigger." I was struggling to control my emotions, knowing that if I was going to be any help to Devona I had to remain calm, but I was too scared and angry, and it came out in my voice. "You know the kind of ammo I carry – silver bullets dipped in holy water and garlic, and infused with so much magic that each bullet is practically an anti-Darkfolk bomb. So if you don't want me to finish the job Devona started and decorate the wall with the rest of your brains, you need to start talking and you need to do it fast."
"Please don't hurt him!" Shamika said, and she tried to come toward, but Bogdan held her back.
If Varney felt any fear, it didn't show on his face. "I'll tell you whatever you want to know, but first tell me where Devona is."
"I don't know where she is!" I said, almost shouting. "She vanished before my eyes!"
Part of my mind was already starting to wonder if the missing magic-users had all disappeared the same way, but right now I was too upset to worry about solving mysteries. I just wanted to get Devona – and our unborn children – back safely.
I pressed my weapon harder against Varney's head and I tightened my finger on the trigger.
"Who are you really?" I demanded.
"My name truly is Varney, but my job as a cameraman is just a cover. My real employer is Lord Galm, and he assigned me to watch over Devona during her pregnancy. It was my idea to do a documentary on you, so I'd have an excuse to stick close to her."
I thought back to Galm's visit to Devona in the Fever House. He'd tried so hard to convince her to move back to the Cathedral where she'd be safe for the rest of her pregnancy. While that was the first time he'd expressed his concern about her pregnancy to us, in typically devious Darklord fashion, Galm had put an agent in place to guard Devona well before that.
I thought about it for a moment, and then I removed my gun from Varney's head, though I didn't holster it. "That explains why you were so upset you couldn't accompany us with Darius to the alternate Nekropolis. You were worried something might happen to Devona and you wouldn't be there to protect her, like you did when the Weyward Sisters destroyed the Bridge of Nine Sorrows and at the Grotesquerie."
I stood and reached out to help him up, but he just stared at my wrist stump.
"Sorry. I had hold of Devona's shoulder when she vanished, and my hand went with her." I wished the rest of me had gone along for the ride. Wherever she was right then, I might have been able to help her. If nothing else, at least we'd have been together.
I lowered my arm and Varney got to his feet on his own.
"Now that you know the truth, there's no need for me to pretend anymore," he said, and as I watched, the ruin of his cybernetic eye began to repair itself. "My systems are more sophisticated than they appear."
"And I bet that's more than just a camera too."
Varney smiled.
"You know," I said, "Devona's going to be very upset when she learns that you've been spying on her all this time." Assuming we ever find her, I thought, and then hated myself for it. We'd find her. Somehow. We had to. I couldn't imagine life – even my zombie version of it – without her.
"Not spying. Watching over her," Varney said. "It's not the same."
"Try telling that to her. All right, so now we know who you are." I turned to Shamika and Bogdan and pointed my 9mm at the girl. "How about you?"
Shamika's eyes widened at the sight of my weapon trained on her, but she said nothing.
Bogdan looked shocked. "You can't be serious, Matt!"
When I spoke, my voice was as cold as only the voice of a dead man can be. "The woman I love just vanished, and I suspect our most dangerous enemy is responsible. I'll do whatever is necessary to get her back, and if that means threatening a young girl, so be it. Both Varney and Shamika have been keeping secrets from me. Varney's spilled his guts, and now it's time for her to do the same."
Bogdan looked at me, shock in his eyes, along with something else. He was seeing a different side of me, one he hadn't known existed, and I could tell he was reappraising me.
"Matt," he said softly, speaking in the overly gentle way people talk to someone who's on the verge of losing it. "Don't do this. She's just a girl."
My gun hand didn't waver.
"This is Nekropolis," I said. "No one's ever just anything here."
Bogdan opened his mouth as if he intended to argue with me, but then he shut it. He knew the truth when he heard it.
I trained my best intimidating gaze on Shamika, one I'd honed during my years as a cop and enhanced by the fact that zombies don't need to blink.
"You're not really Papa Chatha's niece, are you?"
I was trying to look and sound scary – I figured the acid-vomit scars on my face had to help – but as upset as I was over Devona's disappearance, I didn't have to try very hard. I'd suspected for some time that neither Varney nor Shamika was telling the truth about who they were, but I'd let it go, telling myself that the time would come to confront them. Varney had turned out to be benign enough – assuming his story was true, and it meshed with what I'd observed, and it was exactly the sort of devious controlling move Devona's father would make. But if it turned out that Shamika was mixed up in this somehow, if she was responsible for Devona's disappearance in even the most tangential way, I'd never forgive myself for not confronting her earlier with my suspicions.
But despite my attempt to intimidate her, Shamika didn't seem scared in the slightest. Instead, she seemed sad. "I'm not his niece," she confirmed. "I've never even met him."
"Then who are you?" I demanded.
She paused, and then almost apologetically, she said, "I'm Gregor's sister."
I looked at her for a long moment, and even though I didn't need to blink, I blinked in surprise.
"Uh… what?"
FOURTEEN
"Who's Gregor?" Bogdan asked.
I ignored him and continued focusing on Shamika.
"Gregor can't have a sister. The Watchers are a group mind that share a single consciousness."
"Gregor is only one manifestation of that consciousness," Shamika said. "I'm another.
"But you don't look anything like Gregor." I kept my gaze – and my 9mm – on Shamika, but I spoke to Bogdan and Varney now. "Gregor was – is – some kind of insect thing. A giant roach with obsidian gems for eyes. And his component parts are miniature versions of him. He posed as an information broker located in the Boneyard. His insects traveled throughout Nekropolis, watching from the shadows, gathering information, eventually returning to Gregor to report what they'd learned. But Gregor had his own reasons for gathering as much knowledge as he could, and they had nothing to do with turning a profit. When Dis and the Darklords first traveled to this dimension to build Nekropolis, they discovered something was already living here. Millions, hell, maybe trillions of small insect-like creatures. The native life form didn't appear to be intelligent and showed no reaction to the Darklords' arrival. So the Darklords thought no more about them and began the work of creating their great city.
"Turns out the life forms were sentient, but their group intelligence was so different from that of any Earth creature, the Darkfolk included, that it didn't even recognize the newcomers as life forms, for it had no concept of Otherness. But as the centuries passed, the intelligence's insect components infiltrated the city and secretly watched the citizens of Nekropolis, eventually coming to understand Ot
herness – and to hate it.
"The Watchers' group mind created Gregor as a mask for itself, a way to interact with Darkfolk and study them more directly. It gathered all the knowledge it could, with the ultimate goal of finding a way to destroy the Others who'd invaded its home dimension. Once the Darkfolk were no more, things would return to the way they were, the way they were supposed to be, and the Watchers would be alone once more."
I paused and looked hard at Shamika. "How am I doing so far?"
"I'd argue some of the details, but your tale is essentially accurate."
"Good," I said, a sarcastic tone in my voice. "I wouldn't want to misrepresent you." I went on with my story. "Last Descension Day, Gregor stole a magical artifact called the Dawnstone from Lord Galm. The Dawnstone was the only object in Nekropolis capable of emitting actual sunlight, and Gregor planned to use it to disrupt the Renewal Ceremony. Umbriel does more than provide the shadowy half-light that illuminates the city. The Shadowsun's power keeps Phlegethon burning and maintains the city in this dimension. Gregor planned to use the Dawnstone to kill Father Dis, and without his power, the five Darklords wouldn't be able to recharge Umbriel on their own. The Shadowsun would fade away, Phlegethon would go out, and the deadly energies of this dimension would pour into the city, destroying everyone in it. And Gregor would've succeeded if Devona and I hadn't stopped him.