Eligos responded privately to Zabab.
Eligos –> Zabab: You always were a lazy one, weren’t you, Zabab? If you weren’t so enamored with your hobbies, you could have been the one to shape the City’s destiny.
He then responded to Donta and included Zabab.
Eligos –> Zabab, Donta: I am glad you understand how he thinks, because Zabab and I certainly don’t. Your people can be perverse. We still feel a minor Lens would have been able to increase our chances of success.
It was bad form for Eligos to acknowledge that he and Zabab had been excluding Donta from part of the conversation, but it showed that they did not care if they offended Donta. One more minor humiliation he needed to bear. However, he did not need to bear it gracefully.
Donta –> Zabab, Eligos: We could always give him one of yours, most gracious Zabab. You must have something stowed away that is less well-known than that sword you are fondling so fondly.
Zabab mentally shielded himself from Donta’s sendings and stalked away.
Zabab –> Eligos: Like a boil, I tell you. One day he will push me too far.
Chapter 9
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
The Festival was winding down. By all accounts if had been wildly successful, but the press said that every year, almost as if it was their civic duty. It was a nice change to report on something positive in a world where disaster and misery sold the news.
Finn looked out of his window; a fine, cold mist soaked every exposed surface and reduced visibility to a few feet. It was a perfect day for a walk.
He couldn’t remember ever being as tired as he was at that particular moment. He reckoned he had slept for a total of five or six hours in the last three days. Commandeering the mainframe had provided the breakthrough he needed. If Blacksun ever found out that he had lost a month of work for the entire company on his vanity project he would be in deep shit — they would have grounds to remove him from his position as CEO. He could pretend all he wanted that he was independent, but the truth was, they held the purse strings. He was past worrying. It would all be over soon. More than twenty years of searching, of striving, of just surviving were coming to fruition and it would be sweet.
He rounded the corner and was approaching the courtyard in front of the castle. Through a gap in the mist, he saw her sitting on the wall, waiting for him. “Bex,” he breathed. He saw her stiffen from thirty feet away. She had heard him.
She flowed to her feet and glided over to him, until she was well within his personal space, about three feet away. She just looked at him and said. “Oh Finn, what did they do to you?” Tears welled in her eyes as she looked at him.
She stepped forward and squeezed him. The pain was excruciating. She was strong and he was damaged. A tear flowed from his remaining eye; he was wailing inside and not from the physical pain. He did not want the embrace to end.
She released him. “Is there somewhere we can talk? Somewhere private?” she said.
It took a moment for him to get the words out. He took a deep breath and let it out shakily. “Yeah, yeah, of course. I will take you to my place, we can talk there.”
He placed his eye to what looked like a peep hole. A moment later the door swung open. It swung farther out than she expected, then she saw why: it was one thick fucking door. It was a baby bank vault door. It was a door to his safe, to his life. It was the key to his security.
“Interesting door you have there, Finn,” she said lightly, making a joke of it. “Paranoid much?”
“Work, unfortunately, requires it. The shareholders insist on protecting the intellectual capital my company generates. It was a compromise, as I wanted to work from home and they wanted to keep our secrets safe. It does not really bother me and I don’t have many visitors. It was this or a security detail and I prefer my own company …” He trailed off as he noticed her raised eyebrow, then restarted. “Sorry, there’s not much humor left in me.”
She looked away quickly to compose herself. This was not the Finn she remembered; this was a shadow, a dark, black shadow of the man-child she had known.
He brought her through to his kitchen and offered her a chair at the table. The kitchen was a gleaming steel and stone marvel of cleanliness and efficiency. He put on the kettle to make some tea.
“How, how …” she trailed off.
He removed his hat and painfully draped his slicker over the back of a chair. He turned his scarred face to her. Among the old scars, there was a series of newer, small scabs across his forehead. “How do I keep so trim and fit? No? Hmm, how to I keep my youthful appearance? No, that probably isn’t it. How can I possibly continue on like this? Is that it?” His voice was a harsh wire brush against her nerves.
“I was actually wondering how you survived. I remember what happened to you.”
“And I remember what didn’t happen to you. I have to say, you’re looking well.”
“Don’t you dare think I got off easy, you bastard. I was in hell for three years. I was a sport and an entertainment to them. And then, then I was one of them. I have done things I never thought I would, things I did not think anyone could.” Her voice was gaining strength and volume as she spoke.
“Have you seen me, Bex?” he spat the last word at her. He tilted his face to better show the ruined glory of the left half.
“There are worse things than physical scars, Finn. I have scars too, scars deep in my soul. I may look whole to you, but inside, inside there’s not much left, not much left of the girl you thought you knew.”
“That makes two of us,” he was about to say more when the kettle started to whistle. It broke the mood. She rose and poured the water into the teapot before he could get to his feet.
“Let’s start again. I am so sorry for being bitter, Be ...” he stopped himself. “Rebecca. I have been living like an outcast for so long. Seeing you, it brought it all back.” He took a few deep breaths and focused his eye on a point in space over her left shoulder as he composed himself. If he looked into her eyes he would be lost. Even if she had been normal he would have been lost. “Tell me, what happened? Where did you go? I have been looking for you since I was discharged from the hospital. Your brother, David, he spent a fortune on private investigators, trying to find some hint of what happened to you. Why didn’t you let us know?”
“I couldn’t. I can’t, I can’t be here. If they knew you were alive … If they knew that I had spoken to you.” Her eyes were starting to get a little wild. “I need to go, now.”
“Rebecca, wait. I know. I found out a little about what you are. I probably know more than anyone who is not one of you, but that’s still too little. You need to tell me —all of it.”
“What do you know? What do you think that you know?”
“I know you are strong, strong as a gorilla.”
“Well, maybe a small one,” she said.
“And damn near indestructible. I know you heal when hurt and I know you feed on people.”
“How? How do you know?”
“I was there, I remember. If you are alive and unharmed, I figure that you must be one of them.”
“How can you remember? No one remembers, not consciously anyway. Dreams and psychosis, yes, but memories, no.”
“Just lucky, I guess.” The right side of his face smiled, she did not look at the left.
“That’s the Finn I remember,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”
“And I you. Can you stay for a bit? Tell me, where have you been?”
“I can tell you a little. But I can’t stay long. You have no idea what they will do –”
He interrupted her. “Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea. I do have a couple of mirrors in this place, only a couple.”
A small smile flitted across her face, the sun briefly shining through the clouds. Then the moment was gone and she started to talk.
Leader –> Eve: Eve, where is Baby?
Leader’s thoughts smashed into Eve’s consciousness like a runaway train.
Eve –> Leader: She is not here.
It was very difficult to lie when speaking telepathically. Not impossible, just very difficult. If you wanted to hide something it was easier to provide short, direct answers and not elaborate. Leader was smart though; she had been living this life longer than Eve could imagine. She needed to end the conversation quickly. Eve had no real incentive to protect Baby, but she did not want to appear complicit.
Leader –> Eve: Where is she, Eve? I need to know, now. The boys have been telling me disturbing things about our youngest sister and I need to know if they are true.
Eve –> Leader: She went out, but she did not say where she was going. She said she will be back soon.
Eve knew that Leader would be angry that she had not been informed of Rebecca’s abandonment of the search for Charlotte. She tried redirection.
Eve –> Leader: Did you ask her where she is?
Eve knew that if Leader could find Baby, she would not be asking Eve. That meant that Baby had shielded herself. She had shielded herself so tightly that Leader could not find or talk to her. Very naughty. Until now Eve had not known that Baby was strong enough to elude Leader. No one else in the coven could do that. Well, maybe Lewis. Lew the enigma had been with them thirty years and she still knew little about him.
Leader cut off the contact as Eve had been hoping. Leader did not want to discuss any possible shortfall of her own. The more Leader left her alone, the better.
Donald had contacted Leader a few minutes earlier to tell her that Baby had entered the subject’s house, again. This time it appeared that she was staying for a chat. Leader was concerned; this was very odd behavior. There was something going on here that she knew nothing about. The unknown carried risk. She had dedicated her extremely long life to reducing the risk of the unknown. That is how she ended up having such an extended life. Knowledge was power and power was life.
It was intolerable that she was unaware of something going on with one of her children. She let them think that they had their little secrets and small freedoms. They were illusions. They had no secrets from her, and they had no freedom that she had not granted, until now. First Charlie disappeared without a trace. Then Baby had been derelict in the search for Charlie. Now, Baby had visited the subject of their surveillance at least twice, compromising their assignment. The fact that she did not know about the assignment did not matter; their employer, Blacksun, would not care. It put Leader in an embarrassing situation. Not that she was embarrassed, but she was furious and her anger was quickly building into a rage.
Leader’s rage, once kindled, was fearsome to behold and difficult to survive.
Finn was horrified.
Rebecca had been telling him about the beasts who had kept her captive over the last twenty-one years. Well, that was not strictly true; she had been a captive for three years and a member of their coven for the remainder of the time. Finn was not only horrified by what they had done to her but also by what she had done.
The words poured out of her mouth in a rush. She had never been able to talk to someone outside the coven about the brutality that she had endured. How they had played on her emotions and fears like a finely tuned piano to extract a symphony of emotion. How they made her love them, hate them, fear them and lust after them.
“They came to realize that I would not break, so they made me one of them. Following the initiation my sense of being part of the world started to fade. I know that sounds odd, but it is something you do not really notice until it is gone. As the world opened to me in one way following the initiation and it closed off in another, I felt removed from the experience of living. I felt as if there were a barrier within me that prevented me from feeling everything I could. My sight, hearing and sense of smell had increased by an order of magnitude, I was stronger, faster and nearly invulnerable, but I could not feel the thrill of living unless I was involved in some sort of extreme activity. I craved danger, but little could endanger me. Then they showed me how I could feel through others.”
“Feel through others? What do you mean?”
“We could feel the emotions of regular people. We called them things like the Herd and Prey. Through others we could feel that connection to the world again, we could feel the adrenaline rush of risk and terror, the powerful throb of lust and, most deliciously, the warmth of love and the pain of heartbreak. But it’s never enough to sit and watch from the sidelines hoping to be near enough to pick up on these emotions randomly. You get so much more out of the emotions if you are the focus of it. So we cultivated targets from the Herd.”
“How?”
“You’d be surprised at how easy it is to make someone fall in love with you …”
“Yes,” he said.
She looked at him with a question in her eyes. “I was going to say, you’d be surprised at how easy it is to make someone fall in love with you when you can feel what they are feeling.”
He flushed a little and said, “Um, yes, of course. Sorry, please continue.”
“Okaaay. Anyway, we could make the Herd feel love, hate, lust or terror. We could tell what emotion our actions instilled and then use that to enhance and increase the emotion in our target.”
In spite of the horror of it all, Finn was fascinated. He had found out bits and pieces about the covens over the years. His research and experiments also shed some light on her and her brethren’s capabilities. Nothing compared to having a fully cooperative member of the coven in his kitchen explaining their lifestyle.
Finn was careful to hide both his horror and fascination from Bex as she bared her soul. He wanted to know everything, and he did not want to interrupt her or cause her to stop talking. He made the appropriate murmurs of sympathy and even awkwardly reached out for her hand at one point to urge her on.
She explained about their abilities to control their bodies. How they communicated through telepathy. How they could suck in heat and light to heal or enhance their bodies.
“What happened, Rebecca? How did they give you these powers? Did you just wake up with them one day?”
“I don’t really know how, to tell you the truth. I remember the ritual initiation and I also know that it does not always work. Leader has always operated on a need to know basis. As of now I do not need to know. For all I know, the initiation was all smoke and mirrors and something else they did changed me. I do know that I almost died before I became one of them.”
“Tell me about the ritual,” Finn could not keep the eagerness from his voice.
Rebecca seemed to come back to herself and realize once again where she was. “I need to go, Finn. I have closed myself off so that they can’t find me. I don’t know if they are calling for me. If they find out I’m missing, if they find out that you are alive and we spoke, Leader will go nuclear. Neither of us will survive.”
“But, she can’t really hurt you, can she?”
“Oh she can, especially if the others back her up. With enough damage, anything can be killed. You’ll need to forgive me for not giving you the details on how to kill one of us. I am not sure that I trust you that much.”
“All right, I understand. Promise to tell me when you are ready. I have the feeling it could save my life.”
“You know they didn’t just stumble upon us that night on the beach. They were sent.”
He nodded, “I guessed as much. It was my research, wasn’t it? They were part of the conspiracy of silence and confusion that has been holding back parapsychological research, aren’t they?”
“Yeah. The others have let things slip over the years. They never came out and said it, but I am pretty sure they don’t want the world to know about telepathy, psychokinesis, remote viewing and certainly not about shape shifting. Disbelief can be a wonderful cloak for us.”
An alarm went off. They both jumped.
“Intruder alert. Intruder alert.” A voice with a slight Welsh accent said.
“OkayK, Finn what the fuck? That voice sounds just like me,�
� said Rebecca.
He did not have the opportunity to respond before a massive boom rocked the entire building. Leader was knocking on his front door.
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
Finn’s stay in the hospital was a long, monotonous horror show, featuring special guest stars — anger, pain and the ever-popular humiliation.
The left side of his face had been replaced with a mass of puckered red tissue that would eventually transform into a mass of white scar tissue. His left eye was gone. His right leg had been broken in two places, the left had been shattered so badly that the doctors had not been able to save it and it had been removed from the mid-thigh. His left arm was gone from just below his elbow. His testicles had been torn from his body, but his penis remained. The damage meant he was confined to a bed for twenty-four hours a day.
He pissed into a catheter.
He shat in a bed pan.
The doctors told him he was lucky to survive.
Lucky.
Right.
One of the few things he looked forward to was the weekly visit by Mara Novak.
Apparently, she was the one who found him after the attack. He probably owed his life to her. Not a huge debt as far as he was concerned, considering the quality of life he was looking forward to.
A few weeks ago she had left a book on his bedside table about the Akashic Chronicle, and when she had come back to pick it up a day later she found that Finn was reading it. In fact he had almost finished reading it. He had been fascinated. Although his field of study was psi, he, like most of his colleagues, studiously avoided the appearance of being too interested in the occult. They had enough difficulty being taken seriously by the scientific community without appearing to believe in anything more bizarre than acupuncture. Even acupuncture was a little iffy.
The concept of the Akashic Chronicle in general had struck a chord with Finn. According to the book, there existed some sort of eternal collective unconsciousness that stored every piece of knowledge accumulated by humanity since they had climbed down from the trees, made their way to the coast and started living a primitive beach life. Every memory and experience was out there, one just needed to know how to access it. To Mara and Finn, who each had a passion for knowledge, this was the ultimate honey pot. They had spent hours talking about the possibility of the existence of an Akashic Chronicle and the implications of being able to access it. Mara had even admitted that she had attempted some of the exercises in the book, to no avail.
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