Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  “Shit,” Rob said. He backed away.

  “You have to fight,” Chadang said. Rob wasn’t sure his words were even English, come to think of it. “You cannot leave me slaved to the wizard.”

  Rob’s back hit the wall. “Yeah, what kind of bastard would I be then? Is your name really Chadang? Got no idea why I think that, just popped into my head a while ago while you were pounding it against that support column. Or was it that lift thing? I don’t know, it’s all blurring together a bit, to be honest.”

  But he wasn’t thinking about what he was saying, nor was he thinking about Chadang. He cast his mind back to the fight on the Motorway, when he’d almost had his head kicked in by that woman with the black gunk coming out of her eyes.

  When, for a few moments, he hadn’t been a werewolf.

  “Enough,” Chadang snarled. “Kill me or die, Robert Cromwell!” He crouched and lunged at Rob.

  Rob found the memory. He remembered the feeling of it, the speed, the lightness of his step. The change took him, a fast pain that tore through his body. His fur grew lighter and speckled with black spots. His body became slimmer, quicker.

  He felt like he could step on air.

  He blurred into Chadang’s lunge and tore out his throat. Before Chadang could even make a choking sound he leapt up and over. He wrapped one arm around Chadang’s muzzle and bent his head back, tearing his throat open even wider. As his paws landed on the pipe, he threw his weight backwards and they plunged down into the glowing ooze.

  He felt it clawing and tearing at his fur. He held his mouth shut tight and kept Chadang’s head tilted back. He let the chaos sludge pour itself into Chadang’s neck.

  When Chadang’s struggle became wild thrashing, he leapt away, sprang easily back up onto the pipe and crouched there. Chadang hit the side of the pool below and tried to climb out. His body shook too much and the sludge pulled him back in. The last Rob saw of him, Chadang was changing back into his human shape.

  Rob hoped the ooze was hungry.

  A wave of weariness hit him and he sagged, but Julian and the others were up above somewhere. He shook himself, spraying blue goo everywhere, and leapt upwards towards the next handhold.

  “Not happy to see an old friend?” Jacob asked.

  “You did try to kill me,” Julian said. “I remember Axrillax.”

  Jacob shrugged. “You and your fuzzy friend cost me a good deal with a promising cult.” He looked around the almost empty mindscape in which they stood. “Not a lot going on here, huh?”

  “I happen to be busy,” Julian said.

  Another lock broke. It felt like lances of ice punched their way through Julian’s arms, legs and torso. It tore through the web he had woven around the entity bound within the sarcophagus like cold steel through lace.

  “Poor effort, that,” Jacob said.

  Julian gasped for breath around the pain in his body and mind. “You’re not helping.”

  “You and I, we haven’t been helping each other for quite a while, remember?” Jacob wore a familiar hard grin. He meant to enjoy what was about to happen because it wasn’t happening to him. “It was all good once, but that was a long time ago. It went sour, remember?”

  Julian put shaking fingers to his temples. “Spare me this again.”

  “Oh sure, water under the bridge,” Jacob said. “Let’s have a chit-chat then, shall we? It’s been a good four years since we last saw each other. What have you been up to in all that time?” He leaned closer. “You did it, didn’t you? Worked out how to make a portal and went through to somewhere else. I always thought you must have been on to something when you stopped talking about it.”

  “I’m trying to concentrate here,” Julian said.

  “And I’m trying to distract you.”

  He felt something bump into the side of his leg where he knelt in the emptiness. It was a black cat and he stared at it, baffled, until he remembered where he’d seen it before: the Jensens’ house. The walker of the mortal edge.

  Death. The last lock to go had been death. It’s going to wake up. The walker sat beside him and watched the sarcophagus, its black pupils as wide as they could go.

  He rubbed his throbbing temples and tried to think. Nothing was working. The web had been everything he could remember from his education as a Blackwood and everything he had learned during his time as a soldier. The entity had destroyed it without even noticing it was there. He was simply too drained from fighting through to Paris last night.

  He opened his eyes. “Unless.”

  “Unless?” Jacob said.

  Julian leaned forward and put his hands flat on the ground beside him. The ground had been an invisible black surface moments ago. It took shape and became British soil covered with green grass.

  Beside the Motorway, almost dead from fighting off vampires, he had reached out to the power buried deep in the Earth. He reached for it again.

  It was a bare trickle at first and he thought that was all there was, that Earth remained barren and empty, that what he had drawn upon beside the Motorway was all that was left. But then it stirred, as if remembering what it was to be called.

  He sucked in a long, deep breath as the Earth rose within him.

  Black, thorny vines sprang from the ground. They creaked and crackled as they wrapped around the thing in chains. To Doctor Hargrave’s remaining bindings, Julian added the Earth itself.

  The mist surrounding them wavered and thinned. Beside him, its gaze still on the sarcophagus, the walker settled against his leg.

  “What the fuck?” Jacob said.

  “I don’t know,” Julian said, “but I’m going with it.” He had made himself a conduit for more power than he’d ever touched before. His thin body shook with the force of it.

  “Doesn’t look like you’re going to be able to hold that for long. Then what? You think those other losers you brought with you will save you?”

  “Jacob,” Julian said, trembling all over, “you really are a son of a bitch.”

  “Whatever’s in there will break free and kill you,” Jacob said.

  “I’ve stopped one of them before.”

  Jacob’s head jerked towards him. “Have you?”

  The walker hissed as two slits of light appeared in the darkness that was the bound entity, two slits that looked just like opening eyes.

  Have you?

  Alice hung limply in Yadrim’s grip as he rose higher and higher into the night sky. His wings had become leathery flesh and the fingers of his hands had elongated to support them. Alice knew it was his will that lifted them, but the wings provided additional control. His feet had become claws and they held her painfully as they climbed.

  She was battered, broken, near gone. Blood oozed from a dozen wounds. She had a broken arm and leg and she had spent too much of her strength already to heal them. Through the pain, the red thirst sang to her. She needed to feed.

  Yadrim would kill her first.

  He was the most intensely vampiric creature she had ever met. It wasn’t just age, though he had that too. To her senses he was much more of a vampire than the oldest of her kind she had ever met. All of those she had met before were weak shadows of what he was.

  In other circumstances, it would have been fascinating.

  “Are you the first?” she croaked.

  “The first what?” he asked.

  Trafalgar Square was far below them. As they turned, Alice saw a great blaze of light near Tower Bridge. It just had to be the colour of blood, didn’t it?

  “The first of our kind,” she said.

  He snorted. “No. No, far from it. You sense my superiority, don’t you? You know how much more I am than you.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Arrogance. How boring.”

  He hissed and swung her forward so he could look down at her. His face had become even less human. He was hideously ugly to human sensibilities, yet she found him striking. The mark on his forehead still leaked cold blood down his face.

  �
��I am prepared to make this quick,” he said. “Not for your sake, but because I despise the wizard who has bound me. I think he would enjoy it if I took my time with you.”

  “There’s one thing you should know before you kill me,” Alice said.

  “These are your last words. I suggest you make them meaningful.”

  “I can fly too.”

  She whipped up and around, pushing herself with her will, riding the air with the last of her strength. Yadrim’s amber eyes flew wide in alarm. He tried to grab her but his hands, reshaped to be parts of his wings, were ill-suited to grasping.

  Her fangs punched through the skin of his neck. Yadrim roared as she began to feed.

  Jessica considered it clumsy work, but she had her flashlight back together. She pushed the button with her thumb and was careful to make sure it wasn’t pointed at her, because mesmerising herself now would be just dumb. Familiar light poured out of the bulb end. It was ten times brighter than before.

  She peered up at the band of glowing letters high above and tried to map out a climbing route.

  “Little girl!”

  Jessica looked around to see Evelyn grabbing her time-lock gun again. Evelyn aimed it at something beyond her. Jessica whipped around and to find the man-shape made out of writing, the thing Julian called a daemon, had broken free of Evelyn’s time-lock. It pointed its see-through hand at her and said, “Consume.”

  More of the glowing slime monsters poured up from the floor grating beneath her feet. They wrapped around her trainers and started up her legs.

  “Miss Jessica!” Mr Shell said. His tasers flashed and zapped. She saw he would be overrun in moments.

  Evelyn fired her time-lock gun. The daemon blocked it with a raised hand. It made a slashing gesture. Evelyn’s head snapped sideways as though she’d been struck and she collapsed to the floor.

  Jessica tried to pull her feet out of the blue slime. It held her in place. She looked up at the glowing glyphs she was supposed to deal with. They might as well have been a thousand miles away.

  The daemon approached her on soundless feet. It raised a hand towards her, rotated it and leaned down to grab her by the shirt.

  “Little girl,” it said, mimicking Evelyn’s voice perfectly.

  “Yeah,” Jessica said. “That’s me all right. Just a harmless little girl.” She stabbed her flashlight at its face and pressed the button with her thumb.

  Fiona saw a grey and shattered landscape through the portal. It was so familiar she gasped out loud. She had seen it before in dreams and visions and she had woken up to find she had drawn it in her sleep. There too floated the airborne barge, its prow adorned with carvings of animal heads, just as she had dreamed it.

  Savraith had told the truth. This place, wherever it was, and this vessel, they were connected to her.

  The barge drew closer and she saw movement at the bow. A man appeared there and Fiona frowned at the sight of him, confused by what she saw. As the man’s features became clearer, her confusion grew.

  His jaw was a little squarer than hers and his eyebrows were thicker, but aside from those little differences he could have been her twin.

  He was not old, but he was grey. His skin, his hair, his eyes – all grey. While she had skipped past the years in her sarcophagus, he had been preserved, stopped. Some vital part of his life had been stripped out and locked away, to keep him going until the time when they were reunited. She saw how much more heavily the years weighed on him than they did on her.

  Their gazes met through the portal, across the vast gulf between suns.

  Savraith’s grip on her arm tightened. His teeth flashed white in the red-stained night. His outstretched hand closed into a grasping claw.

  He twitched.

  “Blue toes and a ring made of funeral songs?”

  Jessica, Fiona thought. Jessica, no!

  Savraith clutched his head and bent double. He made a long, low keening sound as he fought Jessica’s mesmeric effect. Fiona stretched out a hand towards him but didn’t touch him. She didn’t know what to do.

  The portal wavered. She watched in horror as it whirled shut. The blood-red aura staining the sky above the Thames faded out to nothing.

  Savraith grabbed her wrist and the world lurched. They stood in a large iron room. A giant black sarcophagus rose in the centre of the chamber, surrounded by electrical equipment. Incongruously, it was also covered in thick black vines sporting thorns the size of nails.

  Jessica was there, blue sludge climbing up to her knees, with her flashlight in her hand. Mr Shell shot at monsters made out of the same sludge, assembled from a nauseating range of animal parts. A young man covered in frost knelt in front of the sarcophagus.

  Savraith snapped a word and Jessica’s flashlight exploded. She screamed. Mr Shell tried to shoot him and he sent the tortoise flying. Mr Shell pulled his head and legs in, an instant before he crashed against a far wall with a mighty metal clang and vanished from sight.

  Savraith spoke again. Jessica clawed at her neck and made choking noises.

  Fiona took one look at her, at the girl who wasn’t really her sister, at her bulging eyes and the hands at her throat. She pointed at Savraith, looked down at her shadow and said, “Kill him.”

  A long arm shot out of her shadow and punched through Savraith’s chest. When it came out the other side, it held his heart in its hand.

  Savraith stared at it, his mouth trying to form words. A second arm reached up from Fiona’s shadow, grabbed him by the collar and hauled him down into the blackness.

  Chapter 31 – Saturday Morning

  Fiona stared down at her shadow and thought, What have I done?

  That grey and blasted place, the floating barge, the man at the prow who could be her twin brother – lost to her. Two words and she’d lost it all.

  She was sure she should be angry.

  Instead, she crossed over to Jessica and put her hands on her shoulders. “Are you all right?” Jessica looked furious. She held her hand against her chest, the one that had been holding her mesmeric device. “What is it?”

  “I screamed like a little girl,” Jessica said. “Like a little” – her cheeks flushed – “damned girl!”

  A smile curved the corner of Fiona’s mouth. “I think you’re allowed to do that when you actually are a little girl.”

  “I’m ten!”

  “Sure,” Fiona said. “Let me see your hand.”

  Jessica grumbled but held out her hand. Her palm was red and would be sore for a few days, but Fiona didn’t think any lasting damage had been done.

  Jessica wasn’t paying attention. “Is she dead?” she asked.

  The young man covered in melting frost pushed himself to his feet as if he barely had the strength to do so. A red-headed woman lay on the floor at his feet.

  “Just unconscious,” he said. He rubbed his temples with his fingertips, as though he had a headache.

  Jessica grunted. “Some help she was.”

  “I’m Julian,” he said. To Fiona he looked hollowed-out with exhaustion. “I think I’m your neighbour. You’re Jessica’s sister Fiona?”

  She did smile this time. “Yes, I am.”

  “May I take a look at your shadow?” he asked.

  “Um, well, sure.”

  Leaned forward, he peered into her shadow and Fiona felt herself blush. After a few moments, he looked relieved. “That should be dead enough. Nicely handled.”

  “Thank you,” Fiona said.

  Jessica snorted. “She didn’t do anything at all. The thing in her shadow just protects her.”

  A monster leapt up through a hole in the floor and Fiona gasped. If a cheetah could stand up on two legs and then grow to be eight feet tall, it would look something like this. It was also, Fiona noticed, wearing a pair of jeans so torn they were about to fall off.

  “Everyone all right?” the creature asked.

  The three of them were silent for a few racing heartbeats.

  “Evelyn’s
out cold and Alice is still missing,” Julian said, “but the rest of us are fine. The situation is secure.”

  “We won then?”

  Julian nodded.

  “Great.” The creature looked at the black sarcophagus in the middle of the room and his nose twitched. “Hey, that thing’s all covered in vines now. Weird.”

  “I could use an explanation for the … feline,” Fiona said.

  Julian tipped his head towards the creature. “This is your other neighbour and my flatmate, Rob.”

  “Oh,” Fiona said. “Sure.”

  “Rob,” Julian said, “you’re a cat.”

  Rob looked down at his arm. “Yeah? Thought it might be that. It’ll take some getting used to, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “You’re so cute!” Jessica squealed. Her hands were clasped to her chest and she stared at Rob with big, shining eyes.

  “Er,” Rob said. His ears flicked. “Hey, I think that bird’s coming back.”

  Mr Beak streaked into the room from the surface tunnel. He circled once, landed on the back of a console and danced from foot to foot. “Take cover! Guys with guns on their way!”

  Rob sighed. “On the off-chance it might actually work, can we try talking to them first? I’m buggered.”

  A dozen men spilled into the chamber. They were armed with assault rifles and wore full riot gear, though they lacked any symbols of the Metropolitan Police. Fiona put an arm around a protesting Jessica and held her close as the men fanned out and covered them.

  “Shield Foundation,” Julian said.

  “Who are they?” Fiona asked.

  “Just tell them you aren’t with us,” Rob said.

  Three men in suits and coats emerged from the tunnel. Fiona picked out the gleaming rings on their fingers and knew them for warlocks. The man who led them marched in as if everyone and everything would get out of his way. He had precisely brushed grey hair and a neatly trimmed grey beard. He frowned at the four of them and looked them up and down one at a time. He looked at nothing else in the room which, given the sights the room offered, surprised Fiona more than a little.

  “By the authority of the Shield Foundation I am placing you all under arrest,” the man said. “The charges are destruction of property and attempted mass murder.” His gaze fixed on Julian and Fiona saw twin fires of hate and ambition in them. “Julian Blackwood, you are also under arrest for murder.”