by John Conroe
The lines were clearly drawn in the two groups of people out front. One side was equipped with signs protesting the Demidova Corporation, its experimental drugs, and the very existence of vampires.
The other large group was our supporters, clearly a spontaneous gathering of people who believed in what we had done in Washington. They were loud and passionate, but unorganized and un-led. Despite that, they had held their own until Castille and his posse arrived and de-assed from the big white limo. Both groups converged on him and his portly lawyer buddy.
Most people would have been at least mildly anxious at two big, riotous groups yelling at them, but this guy was right at home. With his evil bible clutched under his left arm, he smiled and began to speak, and both groups paused to listen.
“What’s he saying? Can we get audio?” Lydia asked, looking at Arkady.
The massive vampire gently tweaked a control on his tablet with one big finger and the sound came up.
“—time has come to put an end to this corruption of what is correct and natural. Their charisma is undeniable and none of you should feel bad for falling under their spell. Spells,” Castille was saying, looking mainly at the group who supported us. Had supported us. I could see them already looking uncertain. It was ironic that he was casting his own spell, him and that book, while talking about our spells.
It wasn’t instant; some supporters were yelling angry comments at him. But he deflected each with ease and quickly wove them into his auditory hypnosis.
“Okay, time to counterattack,” I said, pulling on a hoody. Tanya held my eyes for a full five count before nodding.
“I’ll be in the lobby,” she said.
“We’ll be in the lobby,” Lydia corrected, waving a hand at Arkady, herself, and Tanya.
“Right. I’m off,” I said.
Four minutes later, I exited the building from the parking garage, on foot, hood up. With my casual jeans and dark hoodie, I blended right into the crowd, coming in from the back, eeling my way through the press of bodies.
“What I am saying is how do we know, really know, that they’re on our side? Sure, they fought in Washington, but are you certain that wasn’t just a case of the enemy of my enemy is still not a friend?” Castille said.
“Yes, because picking a fight with a Demon Lord of Hell isn’t as much fun as it looks,” I said loudly from one row back. Instantly, all attention turned my way as I lowered my hood and people realized who I was. “You’re a talker Castille. You manipulate people with your voice and words, but you don’t really do anything. Anything useful. You milk your flock for money and fly cross country in private jets, but you provide no service to mankind. In fact, you provide a major disservice.”
He was startled for a split second, but he recovered smoothly, raising one hand to calm his bodyguard. “Ah, the Hammer is here. Of course. He wants to finish me off here and now. He’s so fast and strong that I’ll be gone before you all can blink and then he’ll explain it away, claiming I was possessed or something,” Castille said. “Because God’s Hammer is just that… a violent fanatic.”
“Are you? Possessed? You never hold services in a real church, just empty warehouses, civic centers, sports arenas. You never preach in the name of God, always our Lord. Would that be Lord Satan? Lord Lucifer? And have you even stepped onto hallowed ground since you found that book?” I asked.
“You mean my holy bible?” he asked, holding it up, but ignoring my question.
“It was holy once, but not now. In fact, it doesn’t even say holy on its cover anymore, does it? It says oly. Or should that be oily? Tell us the truth, O pastor of lies. You found that book in a desecrated church in Sweat, Alaska. The same church where people were slaughtered when the town fell under your demon’s sway,” I said.
“See? Do you see how he seeks to pin me, me—a pastor of the Lord, as something evil that he is then free to kill… like he killed my friend John Cuttle,” he said to the crowd.
“That’s fascinating, Pastor Castille, because the evidence shows Cuttle was killed by a short range anti-vehicle missile, probably fired from a drone. Does that sound like us?” I asked the crowd. “Or does it sound like maybe the same source that launched a Tomahawk missile at us? But let’s settle this here and now. Let’s just stroll up the road a bit and hold our discussion inside that Catholic Church on the corner,” I said. “You know—consecrated ground? Or would that be a problem to a pastor who never names God. Tell us Castille, who is your Lord? Satan?”
He frowned, drawing a breath to speak, but our word battle was interrupted by two black SUVs with government plates that pulled up with grill lights flashing. All eyes focused on the agents that stepped out. One car held agents Krupp and Mazar along with Declan’s friend Caeco. The other car disgorged Deputy Director Donlon, Agent Gellan, and two other unknown men in black.
“Mr. Gordon, Reverend Castille, a word if you please,” Agent Krupp said, not even trying to phrase it as a request. Castille and I exchanged a glance, then moved separately toward the feds.
“Agent, I want protection from that… creature,” Castille demanded.
“Let’s all step into the building lobby here,” Krupp said.
“So Gordon and his people can finish me off away from cameras? I don’t think so,” Castille said.
“Let’s clip the drama down to shoulder length, Reverend. Nobody’s finishing anyone. But we all need to talk. This is Deputy Director Donlon of the NSA. I’m Special Agent Krupp and this is Special Agent Mazar of the FBI,” she said, herding Castille into the doorway and the lobby beyond. “Gordon, where’s Demidova?”
“I’m right behind you, Agent,” my vampire said over Krupp’s shoulder. To give her credit, the tough little fed didn’t flinch, but I saw her eyes tighten sharply. Arkady and Lydia were on either side of Tanya.
“Maybe we can sit down somewhere?” Krupp asked, twisting to look behind herself and bring all three vampires into focus.
“I’m not going any farther into this den of evil,” Castille said.
Donlon ignored him, instead walking over to the waiting area and sitting down in a plush chair. Then he looked at the rest of us. “Well? Let’s get this going,” he said in the tone of someone used to being obeyed.
Within moments, we were all sitting down, trying to ignore the crowd looking in through the glass walls fronting the building. Agent Gellan and his two companions blocked the front door, preventing the lobby from flooding with bystanders while the front desk personnel stood in front of the elevators to stop anyone from getting off.
“Gordon and company didn’t kill your security chief, Reverend,” Krupp began when we were all seated. “The NSA did.”
Chapter 40 – Declan
I’d had it. First getting yanked out of Plasma like a kid past curfew, with Stacia still in some funk, and then sent to Susskins while Mack got to hang out and play video games in my quarters. Actually, I could have handled all that, but Susskins was the most insulting, egotistical son of bitch I’d ever met.
He belittled my intelligence, my schooling, and my future with every failure to achieve quantum stability. Give me a break. Baldy had been at it for years; me, almost half an hour. Yet when I didn’t instantly give him perfection, he started calling me a moron, an idiot, a cretin. He drew me pictures so I could visualize what he wanted but I was so mad, I couldn’t concentrate. Then he said something about my mom. That she must have been the product of incest.
Now he was stuck to the ceiling, plastered in a spread eagle position directly over the massive black cube of the D-Wave cryogenic cooling unit—which was chilling at some ridiculous degree below zero. Frost had formed on his lab coat in the short time I’d had him up there, hanging a couple or inches from the cold metal.
“Declan, put him down. Dr. Susskins didn’t mean what he said about your mother,” Chet said.
“That’s right, Declan. I was kidding. Just my way of motivating my staff,” Susskins said, his breath fogging in the super-chill
ed air. He didn’t look quite so condescending now.
Etch his flesh like he wanted that metal etched, Sorrow suggested, showing me just how to do it. A spell to magically tattoo glyphs into flesh.
It would be easy, now that my many-great grandmother’s grimoire had shown me. I could literally tattoo him with electrons, burning any symbol I wanted into his skin.
Hi I’m an asshole! emblazoned across his forehead. Perfect.
“Declan, why is Dr. Susskins on the ceiling?” Stacia suddenly asked from behind me. Turning to her, I gave Chet a glare as I did, guessing that he’d called in help. He shrugged.
She had changed into yoga pants and a stretchy blue workout shirt. I wasn’t going to let her distract me from my anger. After studying my expression, she turned and looked up.
“Nevermind. Susskins, what did you do or say that put you up there?” she asked.
When the doctor didn’t answer right away, Chet answered for him. “He may have said something about Declan’s mom.”
“Oh no. Tell me you didn’t?” she asked.
“He said my mom was a product of incest,” I said.
She sucked in a sharp breath, staring at me for a moment. “I take it all back. Declan, why is Dr. Susskins still alive?” she asked in exactly the same tone she’d used when she’d first walked in.
“Now see here,” Susskins said, frost on his eyebrows building from his breath.
“No Doc, you see here. Declan’s mom was the product of generations of Irish witches selecting the very best partners they could find. She was, by all accounts, the most powerful witch to come out of a nation that has consistently produced strong witches. So for you to tell the son of that witch that she was in any way of poor breeding is so monumentally stupid that it makes me wonder how you stay alive when that massive cranium isn’t in the lab. What could possibly possess you to say such a thing?” she asked.
“I was trying to motivate the boy,” he said.
“Before you undertake a motivation program, you should first decide what behavior you are actually looking for. Getting yourself murdered by an angry warlock is sort of Darwinian, don’t you think? Removing your own genes from the pool by insulting his? No wonder this program goes nowhere.”
“In reviewing my technique, I have to admit to perhaps not thinking it through first. It’s just he has so much raw ability. We should be able to do this,” he said, eyelashes now clumping together with white.
I realized, somewhere in the middle of his speech, that with Sorrow’s mental tutorial, it would be almost as easy to accomplish it on the single atom thickness of tin that he called Stantene. Not that I could actually see the metal that was attached to a substrate, but I could feel it with my Earth senses.
With a wave, I removed Susskins from his spot on the ceiling tiles, sliding him across the ceiling to just above an open spot on the floor and then removing my telekinetic hold on him. He hit the floor with a satisfying thump.
“Shit, Declan! Dude, you can’t just throw people around like that,” Chet said, looking seriously freaked out.
“See, Chet, but he can. He just doesn’t, unless he’s seriously provoked. Calling him names won’t generally do it, but attack someone he cares about, living or dead, and well, there ya go,” Stacia said.
Now I suddenly felt bad. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t that guy. The one who used his abilities against those without them just because he could.
“This isn’t working out. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but I’m not going to sit here and listen to his verbal abuse, Stacia. Chris and Tanya can fire my ass if they want. I didn’t sign up for this,” I said. “In fact, I’ll start packing now. Mack and I can be gone within the hour.”
“Whoa, whoa. Nobody said anything about firing anyone, dude. Right Doc?” Chet asked Susskins, who was sitting up and rubbing his hands and blowing on them. Stacia wasn’t saying a word, just watching me.
“What? Of course not. I just want you to use what you were born with,” he said, frowning. I actually believed him. The arrogant son of a bitch thought nothing of degrading people, but he also wasn’t holding my temper tantrum against me.
“I use my intelligence to its fullest and I have little patience for people who can’t equal it—which is no one, by the way. So I do understand when you use your gifts to their maximum capacity, even if it was against me,” he said.
“That wasn’t maximum. Not even close,” I said.
“Really? You can throw me on the ceiling but you can’t scribe a simple circuit on a tiny piece of metal?” he said.
“I think I can. I didn’t figure it out till Sor… till I got mad,” I said.
“Show us,” Stacia said, waving at the little table that held our experimental material.
After thinking it through one more time, I looked at the drawing Susskins had made while reaching out to the little block of substrate and its nano-sized piece of tin with my mind. “I think I just did it,” I said.
“Nothing happened,” Stacia said.
“Nothing visible to the naked eye,” Chet said.
Susskins stood up and looked from me to the experimental substrate, then he looked at his computer monitor. Chet moved up next to him and they both studied the readout. The only other people in the room, two technicians, a man and a woman, were still backed up against the wall, watching me like I was a crazed carnival clown.
Susskins looked up from the monitor, exchanged a glance with Chet, and then turned to me. “Excellent. Absolutely perfect.”
Now I just felt weird. “Yeah, well it’s not so hard.”
Stacia smiled at me. “You help them if you want, but if either of them get abusive, walk away. Then tell me and I’ll kick their asses,” she growled the last part.
“Threats won’t be necessary. Now that we know what we’re about, we can do a whole lot of more of it,” Susskins said. “Samantha… what are you doing over there? Never mind, just bring up the theoretical architecture diagrams. Calvin, come away from that wall and find out where we can get more Stanene,” Susskins said.
“Ah, I can probably make more of it,” I said.
“Really? How?” Chet asked.
“Well, if we have tin on hand, I can sort of repurpose it, so to speak,” I said.
“My boy, you didn’t even know what it was until an hour ago. Now you think you can make it?” Susskins asked, but his tone wasn’t condescending, just curious.
“I can feel it,” I said, “and therefore, I can replicate it as long as I have the raw material.”
“Could you mold the circuits into it as you synthesis it?” Chet asked.
“Could you?” Susskins asked, truly excited.
“Probably,” I said.
“You heard the boy—no. You heard the man,” Susskins said. “Let’s get him some tin. We have a quantum computer to build.”
Stacia leaned in and whispered in my ear. “I mean it. Stop when you want and let me know if Susskins gets nasty. And thank you for my blade breaker,” she said, giving my cheek a kiss. “All right, I’m going to check in with the others. Play nice,” she said, sauntering away.
I watched her walk away while Susskins gave orders and the room got rearranged behind me. Then I turned back, meeting Chet’s eyes. He had a funny little smile that I couldn’t decipher, but he just nodded and started to lay out material. Susskins looked up from a monitor, where he was reviewing diagrams of quantum circuits.
“Come on, people. Let’s make history,” he said. I shivered a little. Making history wasn’t necessarily hard; making good history was.
Chapter 41 – Chris
“It wasn’t actually the NSA but an… asset of ours that identified your man as a terrorist for killing those children,” Donlon said. “And unless you cooperate fully, you are likely next, Reverend.”
“You expect me to believe this bullshit?” Castille asked, sounding less like a reverend and more like an… ex-card shark. “This is a cover-up. You people are just protecting these mo
nsters for your own purposes.”
Krupp leaned down and placed an open file in front of Castille. It was opened to a page with a transcript of a cell phone call. His attorney, Fierro, leaned down and looked it over. I already recognized it.
“This was collected illegally. You’re not allowed to spy on Americans,” the fat lawyer said.
“Actually, it was delivered to us anonymously, giving the Bureau probable cause to get warrants for your text messages. Didn’t you ever warn your client to avoid writing incriminating things on texts and e-mail, councilor?” Mazar said, glancing at Tanya and me.