I heard a gasp behind me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of my enemy as he glided forward, raising his deadly, acid-dripping tentacle arm high into the air. His lips curled back in a rictus of hate, revealing a mouthful of pointed, needlelike teeth, and his robes dragged the floor. “What did you think you would accomplish by invading my dream? You couldn’t best me before, and you must know that on home ground you have no chance!” he growled, looming over me.
I tried to rise, but a wave of dizziness hit me, and I had to close my eyes to avoid throwing up. “I don’t have to beat you…” I gritted out through clenched teeth, and focused my mind on the void, on blackest oblivion. The veil of the Dreamscape parted beneath my sword. “I just have to—” The plan that we’d devised, that Jack hadn’t supported, was for me to open a hole into oblivion. I was still afraid of what might happen to Dana if I threw anything else in, but the only thing that had ever made a dent in Brown’s defenses was the squamous, tentacled thing that had burst through my last portal. When your plan relies on anything squamous, you know you’re running out of options. In the end, the point was moot. The Senior Auditor realized what I was doing, hissed, and started to bring his deadly right arm down onto me.
There was a rustling noise behind me, and a high-pitched voice said, “Daddy?” Both of us whipped our heads around instinctively.
It wasn’t Olivia. I let out a mental sigh of relief.
As I watched, blond hair darkened, and short, slender legs lengthened and filled out. Over the course of two or three seconds, the little girl that had been huddling in the corner, the little girl that had been plaguing my sleeping hours, the little girl that had cried out to me in desperation morphed into Mia. The look of horror on Brown’s face told me that he hadn’t had a clue that he’d been unmasked.
We all have parents. At the deepest, most fundamental level, infants are programmed to bond with the adults that care for them. It doesn’t have to be a genetic bond, but once it is formed, it is permanent, whether we want it to be or not. Visiting the Dreamscapes of nearly ten thousand people, I’ve seen children who were beaten in ways that made me ashamed to be whole, abused in ways that made me ashamed to be a man, and neglected in ways that made me ashamed to be a human. But, personally, I’ve never seen any children that hated a parent. Until now.
Mia’s face blanched white, tears ran down her cheeks, and her face twisted up, her mouth opening and closing soundlessly while her gray eyes darted left and right like a trapped animal. One delicate arm trembled with barely suppressed rage as she lifted it, extending a long, red-nailed index finger at the Senior Auditor.
“Mia, you don’t understand. I didn’t want to do it, but—” Brown said in a high-pitched voice as he extended his hands in her direction.
“Liar,” Mia said.
A wind twitched the edge of my trench coat.
“Don’t do it, Mia. Please, don’t do it. I need your help. We can still stop them. You and me, we’ll—”
“Liar!” Mia yelled, stomping one foot on the floor.
“Pants on fire…” I whispered, unable to help myself. The wind turned into a gale, and I had to shield my eyes with an upraised arm.
“Obey me. I made you. You are mine!” Brown thundered, and glided in Mia’s direction, the wheedling tone replaced by one of imperious command. Eyes narrowed to slits and flared nostrils emphasized the lines in his face, and he looked like some wicked demon from the margins of a medieval manuscript.
“LIAR!” Mia shrieked. Chestnut hair curled around her face in the hurricane-force winds that suddenly scoured the room, giving me only a glimpse of her tear-streaked, snot-nosed visage. I was buffeted and slammed against the floor, so I grasped the hilt of my sword, still buried in the floor, to keep my balance. Brown was even worse off: his voluminous robes caught the blast of air like a parachute, and he slid, inexorably backward, straining to reach his daughter.
A white, glowing mist started to issue out of Mia, trickling from her pores, curling from her nostrils, and seeping from her eyes. The vapor was instantly whipped away by the wind, but it didn’t disappear; instead, it built up against the wall on the far side of the room, and I thought I could hear the arrhythmic beating of far-off drums.
“I should…have…destroyed you…when I found…you…” Brown strained to gasp out as the ever-strengthening cyclone snatched his breath away; then it pulled his robes off. Old slug-butt hadn’t gotten any prettier underneath the robes since the last time I’d seen his disfigured, twisted body, and Mia visibly retched and quailed.
“Nnnshugg lw’nafh Yoggoth f’ron gotha chtenff!” Brown rasped, and this time black lightning danced along his torso, flowing toward his handlike appendage. I didn’t want Mia to have to do everything on her own, so it was a good thing for my self-esteem that this was a post-Frozen world, because when I tried to call forth a small .38 revolver, I found my concentration spoiled by the beating drums, and the pistol evaporated. I felt myself sliding along the floor, and I gripped the sword with both hands again.
“Bring it, you traitorous freak!” Mia shouted and flung her other hand forward. The glowing vapor changed from a trickle to a torrent as it boiled off of her, and a hammer of air swept across the room and slammed into Brown, knocking him off of his feet to skid, skim, and scrabble across the floor. The extradimensional energy that the Senior Auditor had gathered lashed out at Mia but dissipated in the fog that surrounded her, making her hair stand up and float in the wind she’d summoned. Yeah, that wasn’t creepy as hell.
I wondered for a moment why the fog wasn’t filling the room entirely, but then I realized that where it had been building up against the far wall, it had formed a hazy vortex, like looking down into the top of a tornado. I watched as a book was snatched up, flew across the room—and disappeared. I had been wrong—this wasn’t a wind flowing out from Mia; it was the air in the room flowing out into a vacuum! The dissonant drums beats got louder, and a chill went down my spine at the sinister sound.
Brown slammed his sucker hand down on the floor and said something incomprehensible that nevertheless made my ears hurt, and serrated coils of inky power oozed over his skin.
“Go to the wind between the worlds, liar!” Mia shouted and hefted her writing desk, the desk where Brown had, for some reason, forced her to labor night after night. She wasn’t a small woman and, with a grunt, she heaved it across the room; the fifty-pound slab of wood crashed into the Senior Auditor. He tumbled across the floor but, just before he crossed through the mist-enshrouded gateway, he plunged his magic-infused limbs directly into his stomach. There was a tearing noise, brown ichor poured from his mouth, and his eyes bulged from his face—and then he disappeared.
The hurricane ceased as rapidly as it had begun, and I sagged to the floor. Brown had woken himself up, and I expected the dream to fall apart any second. Heart hammering, I tried to push myself up. I failed, but hey—ever tried. Ever failed. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
It was after I’d been lying in a heap for fifteen seconds that Mia spoke, her voice hoarse. “Julian, I need to stop him.”
“But you just did—” I started, my exhaustion making me stupid.
“Not here, Julian. In the real world. He’s just down the hallway!”
I looked up and saw her wide eyes darting around the room frantically. Her brow was covered in a sheen of sweat, and the uber-sophisticated English Rose that I’d initially met was barely recognizable in the desperate young woman standing over me. “I need to wake up,” Mia practically begged, wringing her hands.
I wanted to ask her what she needed to stop him from doing, but there was no time to lose. After being trapped in the Dreamscape on a few occasions, I had finally planned ahead. I reached into my trench coat pocket and pulled out a dirty napkin. I think it had been used to wipe up some coffee. I set it on the floor in front of me. I dug in my pocket again. Crushed paper cup. Went on the floor just to the left of the napkin.
“Julian—what the hell are yo
u doing? I don’t have time for your stupid jokes,” Mia growled at me, and I thought I heard distant drumming again.
“Man walks into a bar and sees a pig behind the bar. Man says to the bartender, ‘What’s with the pig?’ Bartender says, ‘He’s our chef.’ Man says, ‘What do you mean?’ Bartender replies, ‘Well, he’s always bacon (bakin’)’,” I said, proving that there was, indeed, time for one of my stupid jokes. I continued dragging out junk, some of which, like a pizza box, was too large to have fit in my pocket in the first place. A minute later, I was sitting in the middle of a ring of trash—trash from just outside of the Sons of Perseus’s headquarters. I beckoned for Mia to join me with a twitch of my head and a raised eyebrow. She stepped into the circle of garbage.
I concentrated, focusing on my memory of the outside of the headquarters on Temple Avenue. I held the picture in my mind and superimposed on it the picture of me, in my bedroom, surrounded by junk, encompassed in a circle of salt. I imagined the salt moving and—pushed.
Chapter 27 0400–1800, Monday, October 5, 2015
I awoke. I dodged a knife coming down at my face. I got punched in said face. It hurt.
Utterly baffled, I rolled out of bed and hit the floor with a thump, squishing a pop can. “Shit,” I grunted eloquently as I crab-walked backward until I struck the wall. My battle in the Dreamscape had left me exhausted, and I struggled to pull my thoughts together. I scanned the room for my assailant, but it was pitch black, and I could only guess that someone had gone after the streetlights again in an attempt to isolate me.
I could hear police sirens wailing outside, but I strained to ignore them, trying to divine any tiny sound of movement from my assailant. My heartbeat whooshed in my ears, and sweat ran down my back. I levered myself into a low crouch. One of the floorboards squeaked.
There was a whistling sound, and an honest-to-God dagger thunked into the wall next to my head, the metal blade catching the moonlight. I flinched at a cacophony of splintering wood as nearly seven feet and 350 pounds of roaring Jack Redderton burst into the room. His face was illuminated a sickly green by the glow-stick that he grasped in his left hand, which also cast its light on the model 1911 pistol in his right.
A broad-shouldered blond man, at least eighteen inches shorter than Jack and dressed all in black, popped up from the opposite side of the bed, took three quick steps, and bounded toward the window—the same window that Mia had used to escape. His hands struck the reinforced, bulletproof glass that I’d had installed and slid to the side. His head wasn’t so lucky: it impacted the window with the same noise as a sledgehammer smashing a watermelon. He slid bonelessly to the floor. He wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
**********
“So they snatched Olivia and Becky before they could reach your compound but left disposing of me for last?” I asked, pointing a finger at the man sitting in a chair that was two sizes too small for his frame.
“My team tells me that the intruder claims there was some kind of glow around your bed that made him afraid to touch you. It only came down when you woke up,” Jack replied, flapping his hand down and then up at the wrist to emphasize his words. He started rubbing some kind of ointment into his swollen knuckles. Apparently there had been half a dozen black-clad operatives of the Sons of Perseus assaulting my house.
“Of course, he is only speaking to your men because he was ordered to,” said the third member of our hastily convened war council. Mia’s face was composed and her eyes steady, a far cry from the weeping, emotionally ragged wreck that I’d left behind in the Dreamscape.
After Jack had burst in to deal with my attacker, he’d informed me that Becky and Olivia had never arrived at his family compound. I’d raged at Jack, using all seven of the words that you can’t say on television and then some that I invented specially for the occasion. When I’d tried to add a boot to the captive’s head for emphasis, Jack restrained me and had the man removed. Mia had shown up about half an hour later, bearing a letter from the chapter master of the Sons of Perseus. I’d only gotten to glance at it for a few moments, but it basically laid out a series of charges against Senior Auditor Brown, canceled any of his outstanding orders, and designated him a kill-on-sight target for any member of his former organization. The young woman had strode in and shown the letter to the captured operatives, and they had immediately acknowledged her authority and complied with her instructions. Jack and Mia had both needed about an hour to sort things out with their respective organizations, so we were only now gathered in the living room of my rented flat.
Mia turned her red lips down in a frown and spoke again. “You know that the other agents of the Sons claimed not to have touched Olivia. Brown couldn’t have personally snatched them and been in the Dreamscape at the same time, and I’ve just been informed that the Senior Auditor made several large monetary transfers this afternoon…” She trailed off. We’d already discussed this, and I refused to believe that Becky had taken Olivia. She wasn’t a good person, but it seemed inconceivable that she’d be planning anything that might endanger Ollie, who represented the strongest possible validation of her beloved sister’s existence.
“Jules, you know she can be bought,” Jack said calmly.
“But why? Why now? She could have taken Olivia at any time,” I asked, spreading my hands out toward the others. What I really wanted to do was to scream, to tear my hair out and berate myself endlessly—I’d sacrificed my wife to defeat the puca, and now I’d lost my daughter to Senior Auditor Brown. It wasn’t possible to fail more as a husband or a father, but self-pity wasn’t going to get my little girl back. Only massive amounts of well-directed violence could do that.
“Mr. Adler,” Mia said, leaning back and crossing her long, stocking-encased legs, “I’m guessing my f…former superior needs her to replace…other assets that he no longer has access to.” She’d almost slipped up and revealed her relationship with the Senior Auditor to Jack.
Jack tapped a fingernail against his teeth and leaned forward to ask a question, but Mia plowed on. “Now that he has her, he’ll assume that he’s neutralized you, but he can’t use her as he originally intended,” Mia said.
“What do you mean? Why was that son-of-a-bitch trying to take Ollie in the first place?” I asked, fingernails digging into my palms in an attempt to keep from losing my temper. Mia had the answers I needed, but she seemed constitutionally incapable of giving a straight answer.
“Mr. Brown is a sorcerer.” I gave her a blank look. Mia sighed before continuing, “It means, Julian, that although he has spent laborious years, decades even, studying the application of extradimensional theory, mythology, and arcane lore, he has no special connection to any source of supernatural power. Therefore, outside of some very simple effects, he needs an external source of mystical energy—like your daughter.”
“So Olivia is…” I prompted.
“We aren’t sure what she is yet, but when we were monitoring you during your coma, the extradimensional energy boiling off of her shorted out all of our measuring devices. That’s why the Senior Auditor wanted you living at our HQs. You’d be able to guide him in the Dreamscape, and he was going to use her, or so he claimed, to give himself the power to attack the Anarchist directly. I suspect now that he intended to use her to fuel whatever he had planned for the Mammonites,” she explained.
“And he won’t do that now because…” I asked, dragging the information out of her.
Mia looked around the house, like someone might be listening. “Because he can’t get out of his own dreams without me. I’m an Opener, someone that can weaken the barriers between dimensions. He came up with a spell for us to dream together, and then I’d open a path for him to where he wanted to go, but the formulae were torturously difficult. Unless he can find and train another Opener by midnight tonight—and he can’t—then he’ll resort to attacking here, in the real world.”
It was a lot to take in, and my mind travelled back to the electric jolt that I’d rece
ived the first time that I’d touched Mia, and I wondered if that had been because she was extradimensionally aligned? Before I could form a question or otherwise reply, Jack said, “Well, all of that and a quid will get you a cup of coffee.” He straightened the carnation in his lapel before continuing in his harsh, East London accent, “My brother is still dead, your wife is still missing, we got no leads on where Brown took your daughter, now also missing, and Brown seems to have got clean away.”
“But, gentlemen,” Mia said, her eyes sparkling with eagerness, or tears, or both, “I know exactly where he is going to be and when.” We both turned toward the young woman, who smiled like the cat that had got the cream. “Follow me back to HQ. I have a plan, and the clock is ticking.”
**********
We left my house just before rush hour and headed back to the Sons’ headquarters near Temple. The second story of the building gaped open where a four-foot-wide and eight-foot-high section of masonry had been obliterated. Mia’s lips pressed together as she looked at it, and I saw determination in her glistening eyes.
Once we were inside, Mia led us up the stairs and into a large meeting room where approximately twenty chairs were set up in front of an interactive whiteboard. Most of the other seats were already filled by a diverse collection of suited and booted individuals, including the two big thugs I’d seen in the cathedral, and the short, wide blond man who had tried to punch me out in bed. Several of them were disheveled, and one man had his arm in a sling.
There were a few glances at Jack and I as we took our seats, but Mia strode to the front of the room, drawing all eyes in her direction: “Tempus fugit, ladies and gentlemen. As you are aware, Senior Auditor John Brown has betrayed us and, although we have not currently divined the full extent of his betrayal, we now know that he was responsible for the recent string of supernatural murders—John Brown was the Anarchist.” There were gasps, but Mia talked over them. “As many of you will be aware, the damage to this office was caused by his release of over a dozen of our most dangerous ‘guests.’” There was a sharp intake of breath in the room, and a few chairs scraped. “However, we won’t be diverting any resources to their recapture. Unfortunately, due to the casualties incurred during their escape and the Senior Auditor’s redeployment of most of our assets to a series of dummy missions, the men and women in this room represent the bulk of our manpower. We have a more important mission.” This time, the response in the room grew positively murmurous, and a few people started to get out of their seats.
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