Chapter Thirty-four
It was still there, the old drainage tunnel. Trash drifted in the bottom of the round concrete cave, looking a lot smaller now that I was at least a foot taller. Several years of fallen leaves were turning into sludge at the bottom. I examined it carefully, reaching out to touch the concrete. Here, where the drainage ditch went through a hummock under the fence, someone had once cut through the iron grating covering the school side. Generations of students had carefully covered the hole with rotting wooden scraps from the woodshop, enough to let the water drain and cover the fact that the metal grille was broken. Since the hole went underground, it didn't register on the shields, psychic or electronic—or if it ever had, it had been forgotten. As far as anyone knew, this was one secret the students had successfully kept. Sneaking out to roam the streets at night was a Rigger Hall tradition, indulged in even in the darkest days of Mirovitch's reign. We were, after all, only kids. There was nowhere else to go, not as a collared psion. We were Hegemony property.
After hearing about the Black Room, I wondered if other secrets were kept. I would have thought it was impossible to keep anything from Mirovitch or his stooges. Now, with an adult's sense of circumstance and complexity, I found myself thinking a little more charitably about the stooges and rats. They had just been terrified kids, like me.
But I'd never broken. I hadn't broken even when he'd forced me to watch Roanna die—and now I wondered if he had known she would slip through his old, hard fingers and fling herself at the fence after we had refused to betray each other.
I had never broken, not even afterward when Mirovitch dragged me back into his office to punish me, demanding to know just what my sedayeen roommate had told her social worker—and if she had told anyone else. I knew now that he had been almost frantic at the thought of losing his personal playground, not to mention the punishment that would have been meted out to him; swift execution, most likely in a gasbox. After that, he'd had it in for me. My defiance outraged him, but I was still only one small girl in a large school. I frequently managed to stay beneath his notice.
I ducked into the end of the tunnel, my boots slipping in the scudge. Water sloshed. The air was absolutely still, and the fog made it eerily quiet. Complete blackness made the tunnel into an abyss, despite my demon sight. There were no streetlights on either side of the concrete pipe, and the thick fog cut visibility even for my eyes.
I lifted my sword, thumbed it free. The slight click of the katana easing loose of the scabbard was loud in the cottony silence. Three inches of steel slid free, and a faint blue glow flowed along the metal.
I saw the tunnel, still sloping slightly upward, a knee-high spill of water and leaf sludge coating its bottom. Permaspray graffiti tangled along the walls, some of it even glowing with Schorn's algae when the light from my blade touched it. The concrete was crumbling, but still sound. I couldn't see anything blocking it, and the water was still coming, so I bent down to step cautiously into the opening.
Halfway through, I paused and lifted my blade, looking at the left-hand wall. My boots sloshed; I moved very carefully, peering through the dark.
There it was. In black permaspray, the crudely-done drawing of a slender Egyptian dog with long ears, reclining; a copy of an ancient statue. I remembered biting my lip as I marked the wall, the sharp chemical reek of permaspray, and the satisfaction I'd felt when it was done. It was the mark of my personal war with the school, my badge of honor for not breaking. I smiled, holding my sword up a little higher, shaking my hair back. In the dim light, shadows shifting and crowding, it seemed the dog's head dipped once, nodding at me. I set my jaw and nodded back, then carefully stepped away.
The tunnel was shorter than I remembered. At the end, I pushed aside a sheet of rotted plaswood, setting foot for the first time in decades inside the walls of Rigger Hall again. I took a cautious sniff, smelled only leaf mold, grass, and salty fog. Strained my ears, but heard only the thick silence of a cloud-wrapped night. I held the cloak of my Power close but sensed no shields on the walls; when they closed the school, a team of Hegemony psions had come out and dismantled the defenses, earthing the power. And there were no electronic countermeasures. If Keller was here, he was counting on invisibility to keep him safe.
The familiar loose tension invaded my body, my heartbeat speeding up. I chased down a demon even the Prince of Hell couldn't catch. I survived two run-ins with the Devil. I'm the best Necromance in Saint City. I'm listed as one of the top-ten deadliest bounty hunters in the Hegemony.
That thought caused a sniggering little laugh to jerk its way out of me. One of the biggest hunts of my life, and I wasn't going to make a red credit off of it.
That was a very adult thought, and I was glad. I still had to check to make sure I wasn't wearing the plaid skirt, and every time the denim of my jeans touched my knees I had to suppress a guilty start.
The grass was no longer manicured but knee-high, weeds lying thick and rank and edged by frost in the deeper shadows. I saw the familiar bulk of the dormitories' roofs over the hill, decided to go uphill and angle toward the Headmaster's House. I could cut around the back of the dojo and avoid any possible patrolling teacher or stooge.
As if there was anyone here.
For all I knew, nobody was here… but just because I felt like I should sneak around to avoid Mirovitch's hounds didn't mean it was a bad idea to exercise a little caution.
I'm being eaten alive by my own childhood. Gods above. Why me? The answer came in a flash. Why not? Who, after all, was better equipped than me?
I reached the top of the hill and hunched down instinctively, the edges of my shields roughening. Dust, offal, magick, aftershave, chalk, and leather. I retreated, almost as if scalded, gasping and dropping flat as the wall of magick passed overhead. He was scanning the grounds.
Well, now I know he's here. I tried to remember if I had any consecrated chalk in my bag. Then it occurred to me that I was doing exactly what a scared teenager would do—hiding, and waiting for Lourdes to find and trap me like a rabbit.
Which brought up another glaring hole in my plan. I didn't even have one. I was operating on a sort of half-ass instinct I hadn't used since I was twelve. A miserable instinct that was just what any stupid kid would use. The fact that it was impossible to plan for something like this didn't exonerate me from feeling a little dumb.
Time to start thinking, Danny! A whisper that sounded like Jace's in my ear, hot breath touching my cheek, warm fingers on my nape. It felt so bloody real I gasped, throwing myself down and rolling, instinctively throwing up a flare of Power that stained the hillside crimson for a moment.
Well, I just blew any chance I had of secrecy. I made it to my feet and bolted away at a different angle. This would take me directly to the Headmaster's House, keeping me below the sight line of the hill.
I heard boots crunching on gravel, which told me two things: that he was on the other side of the hill and behind me, and also that he had been at the front gate or in the dormitories.
For a moment, I considered veering up and engaging him head-on; but I was already running soundless as an owl. I heard the footsteps on gravel slow and strained my ears, suddenly and, for once, blessing my demon-acute senses.
A short yell of pain and the sound of something falling, hitting the ground hard. Then a mad gravel-crunching scramble, and footsteps on grass. I didn't stop, came around the side of the hill's breast, and found myself faced with the track leading up to the Headmaster's House.
Polyamour came this way, with a nine-year-old girl and Keller. Bringing them to Mirovitch. My gorge rose. The track was paved, and I ran over it using all the speed and silence my new body could give me.
I had just come over the slight rise, leaping over a pothole, when I heard a hissing crackle. I threw myself aside and the bolt flung past me, crackling and spitting as it went, and buried itself in the Headmaster's House.
The prim, two-story neo-Victorian was clearly abandoned, plaswoo
d over the windows. Uncertain foggy light showed great cracks in the peeling paint—the same kind of leprous blue light I'd seen in Sukerow's apartment. Only this time, the blue light spread, crackling and hissing. I wondered for a split second if the unhealthy looking glow would give me a radiation burn. It certainly looked like the diseased glow of a coremelt.
The explosion was deafening. I ended up lying in the long grass on the side of the road, the Shockwave smashing me down, a warm trickle of blood coming from my nose.
"Plenty more where that came from," I heard from my right, down the hill in the bushes. The bolt had streaked past me from my right, which meant that he'd been scrambling behind me.
The fléchette, he's probably tracking the fléchette.
And the last necklace that I had in my pocket.
"Who are you?" The wheezing, slightly asthmatic voice came again. Chills worked up my spine, spilled down my arms. It sounded odd, strangely distorted, as if passed through a synthfilter—but I knew that voice. My entire body went cold and strained against shock at the sound, my fingers digging into the earth, the smell of crushed wet grass and damp earth rising around me and warring with the heady, spicy fragrance of demon.
The Headmaster's House was burning merrily, orange flames instead of blue now, casting a livid light up into the fog. I had only a few seconds before he crested the rise and saw me.
Then I heard a horrible, chilling scream. "No! NO! Stop it! STOP IT!" This voice was different, a baritone, with the unmistakable tang of Skinlin. I only heard one set of footsteps—but then I heard a thrashing, like a fight.
"Whoever you are, ran! Run for your life!"
I intended to run, but not for my life.
I intended to run for his.
"— down," Mirovitch hissed. "And stay down. In your place, boy."
I didn't stick around to hear more. I ran.
Chapter Thirty-five
I suppose the last place either Mirovitch or Keller would have expected me to go was the cafeteria. There was a wall of boarded-up windows on one side, two lone leftover tables stacked against the wall, and insulation hung from the ceiling in long swathes. It was tactically exposed, and I'd had to break open a door to get in here—and if the sound of screeching metal and my own jagged breathing didn't bring Mirovitch, what I was going to do next would.
I was only a few steps in before my foot came down on something soft. My sword whipped out, and I found myself looking at an innocuous sleeping bag, lying tangled on the floor. The smell of canned beef soup hung in the air, and I smelled candle wax as well. Candle wax and unwashed human—and the cold, fetid reek of Mirovitch, dust and magick and feces and chalk and aftershave.
I'd found a lair. The trouble was, I wasn't sure of what.
I dug in my bag with one trembling hand. My sword glowed blue. My frantic fingers couldn't find any chalk, though I knew I had some. I could almost feel time winding down, the clocksprings of whatever was going to happen ticking away, closer and closer, rising through the water to sink its teeth into my thrashing legs.
I pulled my hand out of my bag and took a deep breath flavored with human and not-so-human scents, my own smoky demon smell suddenly strong as a shield in my nostrils. Reached into my pocket, fingers closing around the fléchette in its plasilica sheath.
The touch of cold metal shocked me back into some kind of sense. I crouched down on the floor in the middle of the caf, a swordsman's crouch, my blade held out to one side, the fléchette in my left hand. What do I need chalk for? I'm part demon.
The circle swirled in the air, dust scorching as the fire in me rose, whipcracking in small, controlled bursts, a tattoo of Power burning into the concrete under the linoleum. It took bare seconds. By the time it was done, I had a tolerable approximation of a double circle scored around me with red-glowing Power—and between the two circles, the subtly altered shapes of the Feeder glyphs Kellerman Lourdes had created writhed. Every candle Lourdes had placed in here burst into flame, suddenly alive with fire, their glow warm and welcoming. The fléchette began to hum, metal glowing, heating up in my hand. My pocket, the one holding the leftover spade necklace, began to smoke. I didn't have a hand left to fish it out, so I just crouched, on guard.
One of the plaswood windows blew in. Then another. Another. Splinters skidded across the floor.
Silence descended. Here was where it would end.
Do you believe in Fate, Danny Valentine?
I gulped down air, the three phantom scars on my back alive. The vanished brand along my lower-left buttock began to ache, dully at first, and then with increasing pain. A curl of smoke drifted up from my pocket. I waited.
The door I'd wrenched open creaked as it was pulled wide, then ripped off its hinges. And into the cafeteria shambled Kellerman Lourdes.
Now that I saw him up close, I vaguely remembered him as a tall, gawky, acne-pocked Skinlin, always on the periphery of whatever activity was being conducted. His career at Rigger had been singularly free of rumors and whispers. It was as if nobody noticed him at all. The invisible man.
Part of the puzzle became clear as I studied him. He stepped into the caf and watched me, dead dark eyes sparking with blue pinpricks, his thick wattled cheeks quivering ever so slightly.
"You were a Feeder already." Breathless, I sounded like I was fourteen again.
And scared.
That was why he'd been invisible; and that was why he could get close to Mirovitch that fateful night with Polyamour and Dolores. He'd had a Feeder's camouflage; it was no use being a psychic vampire if you shouted it to the heavens. No, they were all-but-invisible, especially to children, which was what made them so bloody dangerous. In a normal Hegemony psi school he would have been tested, treated, and more than likely saved, free to live out a normal life as a psion. But in Mirovitch's kingdom he was left untreated… and so he used that camouflage to kill Mirovitch with the others, probably taking Mirovitch's death into his own psyche and sealing his own fate as a Feeder—or even worse, a Feeder's mule. A physical body for the ka of the dead Headmaster to ride.
He stared at me fixedly, his face slack and wooden. Then something swirled in the bottom of his eyes, crawled for the surface, and tried to speak. "You're… not… one. Of. Them." He cocked his head to the side, his throat swelling as he wrestled for control of his own voice. "Get. Get out. Out of here. I can't… hold…"
"He's riding you," I realized out loud. "You're a Feeder's mule. But you kept him down for ten years." I felt a thin burst of satisfaction at having guessed right, along with a flare of guilt for how stupid I'd been. It was all plain as day now.
"I can't—" Kellerman Lourdes gasped, spittle flying from his lips. He twisted, hunching down, some terrible battle being waged for control of his body. "I can't stop him now. You… run…"
Then his head jerked forward, like a snake's quick whipping strike. The fléchette in my left hand abruptly cooled, the cold stinging my fingers far more than heat would have. I held on, grimly. Waiting.
Then blue light bloomed from the circle of glyphs I'd scratched into the floor. The necklace, still in my pocket, fell as I shifted. It had burned a hole straight through the Kevlar-reinforced canvas of Jace's coat. It fell, the chain writhing like a live thing, and hit the floor with an oddly musical tinkle.
The circle cracked. Blue light flared like a thunderclap, and I saw Kellerman Lourdes's entire body jerk as ectoplasm streamed from mouth and nose and eyes and ears, a coughing mass of it. I dove back as Mirovitch's ka streaked for me, its inhuman hands turned into venom-dipped claws. Only this was not Mirovitch, the stoop-shouldered tweedy Feeder Headmaster who liked to prey on children.
This was the ka, grown monstrous and foul, Mirovitch seen through the eyes of a child, with claws and fangs and the leprous blue-burning eyes of a closet-hiding goblin.
I screamed, scrambling back, forgetting I was holding a sword. The backlash of the circle's cracking and breaking from inside poured up my spine and jerked a coughing yell from
my throat as the Headmaster descended on me, his claws raking my belly, one catching in my ribs. A hot gush of demon blood boiled out, I convulsed, and Mirovitch dove for my open mouth, gagging reeking ectoplasm forcing down my throat.
Chapter Thirty-six
Wagging. Retching. Agony, as the claws tore in through my skin and organs, viscera spilling in a hot stream, my eyes bugging out as everything behind them pushed like depressurization.
"Student Valentine is called to the Headmaster's Office immediately."
Walking, every step a dread drumbeat, up the wooden stairs. Mirovitch's smile as his dry papery hand landed on my shoulder. We've got something special for those who break the rules today, Miss Valentine. Meeting Roanna's eyes, feeling the sick thump of knowledge behind my breastbone. She'd told her social worker, and Mirovitch had found out.
Jerking, crackling, her body on the fence, Mirovitch's fingers sinking into my arm as he dragged me back into Hell… and the brand, glowing red hot. Leather against my wrists as I screamed until my voice broke, after he was finished with me and the red-hot iron burned my skin as his semen trickled down my thighs; the chair's hard slat in my midriff, unable to breathe, the sound of his papery laughter filling the universe as that lest shameful memory crashed out from behind the locked door—the door I'd closed and locked when I left Rigger Hall, the door that had to close so I could go on living. Surviving.
Fingers. In my head. Scraping, tearing, ripping. Burning.
No wonder Christabel couldn't be brought back—
The alien thing in my mind recoiled. That thought wasn't part of the feedback loop that would keep me helpless while it destroyed me. I grabbed onto it with the last shipwrecked vestige of my strength, sank my mental teeth into its hide, and began to fight.
Polyamour, tilting her head so slightly. "You learn early that your body betrays you—it's your mind that has to stay impregnable. Your soul. To have that filthy old maggot fingering inside your head…"
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