by G A Chase
An alarm over the elevator and stairwell indicated an unsafe buildup of energy in one of the vaults. “Really? This is the sixth time this week.”
He dialed back his pursuit of Kendell. If he overshot her reality, he might lose his connection to the cufflink. With the gauges all indicating he was keeping time with Kendell but not gaining on her, he headed for the elevator.
Though he had a list of adversaries, on most days he only needed to worry about one: Luther Noire. “I should have killed you when I had the chance. A nice little Halon fire-suppressant cloud, and I wouldn’t have to leave my control room every five minutes.”
Luther still had his uses of course, and that—not mercy—had been what had prevented Colin from acting on his anger. Losing the totems had been a short-term blow to his plans, but having Luther released from his confinement had proven more challenging. The old fuddy-duddy kept messing with his toys, which nearly created paranormal meltdowns on a regular basis.
Colin fumed as he stepped out of the elevator. The smell of burning electronics stung his nose before the sweltering heat caused sweat to run into his eyes. “Damn it! Seriously? The air conditioners again?” Without a means of cooling the vaults that housed the paranormal objects, their interactions were like angry children on a hot day looking for an excuse to fight. The line between critical mass and meltdown had to be maintained. He followed the smell down a corridor stripped of its sheetrock. The metal beams and exposed wires were a dead giveaway as to the wing’s true purpose.
He stopped in front of a solid-metal industrial door that had no place in an office building. Heat radiated off the steel cross members. The oxygen gauge on the wall read “0.”
“Okay, either the Halon has kicked in, or the fire has burned out all the air. Either way, you should be cooling down.”
He pulled off his long coat and wrapped it around his hand. After investigating numerous near catastrophes, he’d learned to accept whatever he saw inside one of the vaults without applying logic. Please, no more damn flying monkeys. The fabric started smoldering from the heat of the half-inch-thick steel lever.
You can’t kill me. The mantra had seen him through much worse dangers than an electrical fire. He swung the heavy handle in a sixty-degree arch along the sliding door. Smoke billowed out along all four edges. The acrid fumes made it hard to breathe and worse to see.
The old swamp witch might not let him die, but she’d proven on many occasions that when it came to bodily harm, he was on his own. He threw part of the heavy coat over his head and yanked the door open. The heat enveloped him as though he’d pulled open a blast furnace. Peeking under the heavy fabric, he saw that the comparison extended beyond the temperature. Whatever objects had once been in the room were now a molten mess that covered the floor. A few remaining shelf supports stuck out of the glassy liquid.
Though the vaults had been designed for such eventualities, the safety features weren’t designed for multiple failures. “I can’t lose another whole floor.”
He backed away from the opening and pulled the door shut. The main lever only secured the contents of the room within the building. He turned the red wheel below the handle. A whooshing sound accompanied the rocking of the building. He continued turning the lock until the red light on the door switched to green, indicating the vault had been jettisoned from his reality.
The alarms stopped their incessant screaming. He didn’t know where the vaults and their contents had ended up, but all that mattered was that his hell had been saved from the inferno. He reopened the door to reveal dangling wires and metal beams that looked as if they’d been twisted out of place by a hurricane. He could see all the way out to the Mississippi.
“At least nothing came flying at me this time.” The relief was short-lived. Luther’s collection, though impressive, wasn’t unlimited. Too many more meltdowns, and Colin wouldn’t be able to wind his magical time machine on the top floor, let alone make the jump from hell to life.
He had only one answer. At least throwing caution to the wind was a risk he understood. “Time to investigate the floor that really makes this place tick.”
* * *
Sanguine despised everything about the voodoo realm of Guinee. With its whorehouses used as gates to the afterlife and male-dominated loas of the dead, the purgatory could have doubled as her personal hell. Her biggest irritation, however, was that she had to rely on a dude to provide her safe passage. Myles wasn’t such a bad guy, and after he’d provided his soul as a conduit to the life force of the band members, she could no longer lump him in with all the aggressive assholes who thought she should just swoon at their feet. He legitimately cared about women, and not just Kendell. Still, Sanguine would never get used to being led through the streets by the hand like a little girl.
“Aren’t we there yet? There has to be a more direct route than weaving through every back alleyway.”
“Hush,” Myles said. “If anyone sees us, I’ll have a devil of a time with the loas. I have no intention of spending eternity in this shithole.”
She bristled at being ordered around, but the fact that even he found the realm distasteful validated not only her dislike of Guinee but also her impression of Myles as a good guy.
He slipped into a side doorway and pulled her along after him. “Once you’re finished protecting Kendell, get out as fast as you can. I’m not going to be able to make this trip too many more times before the loas catch on that I’m sneaking through their purgatory like a kid cutting through someone’s backyard on the way home from school.”
He pushed open a door to a cleaning closet. Instead of mops and brooms, Sanguine saw the baron’s old office in the bank that doubled as the seventh gate to Guinee.
“As soon as you’ve figured out how to deal with hell’s time continuum, send word through the band’s second gate,” Myles said. “Kendell will torment my soul in her genie bottle if I can’t give her a definite pickup time for your return.”
“Yes, boss.” She put as much sarcasm into the response as she dared before entering hell.
She literally stumbled out of the bank, realizing as she tripped that the earth was shaking. Earthquakes were a rarity in New Orleans and an impossibility in her grandmother’s hell. Her first thought was that Kendell and the team had spent way too much time arguing the merits and finer points of the plan. Colin wasn’t the sort to sit back and wait for an adversary. He’d have put the time to good use.
She needed to find him and discover what fresh nightmare he’d concocted. Another quake made her again lose her balance. None of their plans would be worth a damn if hell was about to crumble to the ground. She spread her wings and took off toward the swamp like an angel out of hell.
Her grandmother might have bent time to assist with the forming of the seven gates, but she wouldn’t be at her granddaughter’s beck and call. Sanguine beat her wings hard and fast. In spite of the dangers, being able to fly again exhilarated her more than the best sex. Her back ached from using muscles she hadn’t had five minutes earlier. Her previous flights had been as a spirit’s imaginings. This time, the wings were more than just a dream. If this paranormal skill is back, so too must be my insect sight.
She aimed toward the open air above Lake Pontchartrain and closed her eyes. She saw the causeway up ahead in her future vision before she opened her eyes. But her destination didn’t lie forward in time. She looked to the horizon and swung her attention to the past.
As nothing more than spirit, the experience of flying backward through time had been disorienting, but with her body along for the ride, Sanguine felt positively nauseated. She forced the jambalaya she’d had for lunch farther down her esophagus and let the confusing images flow by her. Fortunately, the lake seldom changed.
Once nights started preceding days in a kaleidoscope of weather events, she lost track of how far back in time she’d traveled. She stopped beating her wings and spread them out to glide over the swamp on a warm summer’s day. From the lack of invas
ive water hyacinth that usually clogged the waterways, she knew she’d gone beyond her lifetime. Before sailing out to her grandmother’s cabin, Sanguine took a leisurely glide along the river. Plants were growing so fast she checked her eyesight to make sure she wasn’t traveling in an accelerated version of time. She dove among the young cypress grove. This was the beginning of her grandmother’s creation—back when it was little more than developing vegetation.
She spread her wings back to their full span and gave them two hard thrusts toward the sun-drenched island. Time might be bendable, but her emotions nagged at her that there was work to do and she needed to get on with it.
The new grass felt good under her bare feet as she lighted on the edge of her grandmother’s outcropping of land. A child’s laughter made her scurry for the pine forest. Mom? Thoughts, questions, and emotions demanded attention, but her mission wasn’t to investigate her personal history. If that is my mother, then Grandma will be alone in the cabin.
She steeled herself for the strange meeting. The old woman she knew was seldom surprised by anything, but having her granddaughter show up from the future with angel wings exceeded any odd event Sanguine could recall.
The lightly forested section of the island extended from the water’s edge to a vegetable garden next to the cabin. Sanguine snuck as close as possible to the open window of the living room at the front of the house. “Agnes Delarosa, are you in there?”
A woman bolted out the front door, wielding a shotgun. Sanguine barely had time to hide beside the house. “Who’s there? Show yourself. Don’t make me conjure a gator.”
“Easy, Grandma.” Sanguine never could hide from the woman. She tried to keep her wings tightly gathered behind her as she stepped around the corner of the cabin. “I know this won’t make any sense, but I am your granddaughter. I’m from the future.”
Agnes heaved the long barrel of the gun over her shoulder. “Come inside before Julia sees you. Last thing that child needs right now is to hear one day she’s going to be a mother to an angel.”
Though the woman’s casual acceptance shouldn’t have come as a surprise, Sanguine was just a little disappointed her wings hadn’t elicited more of a comment. “I’ve come to talk about this realm you’re building. There’s a structural problem.”
The woman’s laugh reminded Sanguine of the old woman she’d known. “Only one? Watch those wings. If Julia sees a long white feather, I’ll never hear the end of questions regarding what magical bird I designed as her personal form of transportation.”
Again, Sanguine wanted to ask about her long-lost mother. The questions made her eyes water. “There’s a power surge in my time. It’s not unexpected. In fact, we intend to use it to run an app on top of what you’ve built.”
“What the hell is an app?”
Sanguine struggled with what words to use. “It’s an addition, like a layer of reality we’re using to enhance what you will end up creating.”
“It’s confusing talking across times, isn’t it? What do you need from me?”
The personal demands struggled to be expressed, but Sanguine maintained control of her emotions. “I need you to build in a way for me to access control of your realm. And the underlying structure needs to be stronger. We’re having earthquakes.”
Agnes set the shotgun behind the door. “So Baron Malveaux figured out how to control my world? Natural disasters work as my alarms.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that. Our prisoner is only mostly the baron.”
Agnes sat in the chair she would use as her seat of authority for the next fifty years. “Explain.”
Sanguine struggled with how much detail would be needed to fix the energy problem without unduly affecting the future. “A powerful businessman, a descendent of Baron Malveaux, will merge his spirit with the old baron. He had to be stopped. I didn’t have a choice.”
“Easy, child. You won’t be hearing judgment from me. As you’ve flown out here, I assume you will grow up in this cabin. What shall I teach you?”
Even with her multitime sight, Sanguine knew her grandmother understood the river of time better than she ever would. “My best subjects were plants and animals. I went to Tulane as a biology student.” She spread her arms and wings. “Animals understand my words in life, but here in your world, they obey my every thought.”
Agnes put the tips of her fingers together in front of her face, a stance Sanguine remembered as her grandmother’s way of driving some piece of information into her memory. “I will leave the tools to modify this realm with the animals in my creation. Now that I know it’s you who will inherit this dimension, and that it will be needed, I can gear it to your use. Honestly, it’s a relief to hear that the baron doesn’t make his move sooner. Julia is too sweet a child to do what’s needed.”
Her grandmother had raised Sanguine to be tough and self-sufficient—both physically and emotionally. Never before had she considered that the old woman might have been trying to correct the mistakes she’d made raising Julia. Confronting the devil wasn’t a task for the weak. “I have to go before I mess up my personal future.”
Before she could leave, her grandmother got up and took Sanguine’s hands. “If you’re here, I must be dead in your time, so there will be no harm in telling you that I love and trust you and I always will. Do what you must with my creation. You have my blessing.”
Sanguine flew back out to Lake Pontchartrain to consider her options. Thinking about the birds who’d shown her how to fly and the dragonflies who’d taught her about seeing the past and future, she realized that some of the animals her grandmother had mentioned had already found her.
Though the swamp was her home, she did some of her best thinking while staring at the open expanse of the lake. She needed to return to her future, but moving ahead in time proved more challenging than making her way back along the well-known path of history. Sitting on a piling at the end of the long dock separated her from the land. The feeling of isolation matched her sense of time. She hadn’t exactly followed the path back to the future she’d taken to see her grandmother. Just stopping at the dock branched her off from the life she knew.
Her insect view of the future only extended a few moments, but those images changed slightly, depending on which way she looked. Growing up, she’d often been told that all futures were possible. Never before had she been so afraid of that truth. I have to get back to where I started.
Why? The question was her rebellious side hoping to return to the plan of extinguishing Colin Malveaux from existence. However, the thought of leaving Kendell stranded in hell forced Sanguine to look across the lake for the path through time that led back to her friend. Like her dragonfly mentors, she saw multiple futures as not simply possible. Each branch off of her destiny was every bit as real as the people from the other dimensions she’d met.
She tried to shake the confusing possibilities from her mind. As she stood on the dock, some version of her might fly off to erase Colin, Lincoln, and Baron Malveaux from history. Another Sanguine would fly to the future but as the guardian of hell intent on turning Colin’s existence into the torture he deserved. Then there was the Sanguine who loved her friend. Even if she pursued one of the directions she’d envisioned as a means of stopping Colin from ever coming into being, the path that led to Kendell standing in hell with the devil in hot pursuit wouldn’t cease to exist.
She leapt into the air and focused her attention on the woman she knew. Kendell needed Sanguine’s help, and the only way to find her way back was to follow through on Kendell’s plan.
* * *
Kendell had mixed emotions about Myles putting his soul at risk for her. On the one hand, she hated having to put him in danger, again. His possession by Baron Malveaux had been partly her fault, and she’d never forgive herself. Having to lock souls with who the baron had become had to be a fate worse than death. Though no one could come up with a better answer for how to control Colin, she felt like she was asking the i
mpossible of her partner.
But he wasn’t going alone. He’d accepted her help before. She never had any use for the alpha male who didn’t know how to let a woman come to the rescue from time to time, and Myles had proven to be far more of a life partner than a dominating boyfriend. He’d taken her on his psychometric outings, and it was only fair for him to now trust her completely with his soul on her voodoo adventure.
She held his hand as they sat in front of Delphine’s worktable. “You’re stronger than you think you are.”
He sat up a little straighter. “The funny thing is, I’m not all that afraid of being stuck with Colin. Baron Malveaux saw me as some snot-nosed kid. He despised me and didn’t bother hiding his contempt.” Myles kicked his cane, which was leaning against the table. “But this stick wasn’t meant for him. It was meant for me. I’m kind of looking forward to bashing him over the head with it.”
She tried not to laugh. “Don’t get crazy. You’re just supposed to sneak in and help him detect the human energy that infects all man-made objects. This isn’t a pissing match.”
“Maybe not, but it does give a new meaning to ‘giving him a piece of my mind.’”
She smiled at his outward desire to protect her. “Don’t forget, you’re partially doing this to keep me safe. Provoking Colin might not be the best way to do that.”
He took his cane and held it between his legs like a joystick. “And the other part is to fly us to hell. That’s what really worries me. I’ve been to Guinee, but this will be my first time traveling between multiple dimensions. Each time I move the cane, we’ll be banking through time. Though I know where and when Colin is located, finding him in the interdimensional soup will be a challenge.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be your navigator.”
Delphine finally arrived, carrying her assortment of candles and incense. “I assume Kendell explained what you’re in for? This isn’t going to be pleasant for any of us.”