Tesla's Revenge

by Renee Sebastian

  “We won't have much time and a shot that misses only to alert our exact location to his men. I want the element of surprise on our side. Can you do it?”

  “Maybe I could hide both of us, but there is not much greenery left in this place now.” I sighed in desperation. “At least I am standing directly on the earth. There might still be some dying roots of things that were once green under us.

  “I will most likely be disorientated when I end the shield, so you may have to protect me.”

  “I'll make the shot count for the two of us then,” he replied.

  I nodded and then we both waited for Lovecraft to make his appearance. We didn't have long to wait. A small cyclone appeared in the middle of the center; and when it finally stopped, the telltale blue outline of Lovecraft's inter-spacial gate opened. Lovecraft alone walked through it, but it remained open. It was now or never.

  I withdrew my focus from him and refocused it on the earth below, as I sent out my awareness. Searching, searching, until I could find enough of the living earth to borrow just a little, just enough of its energy to turn myself invisible and blend into it. Then I reached for Dorian and I pulled a little harder, until I felt the cloak of magic cover him as well.

  The next part is a little hazy in my memory, but I do recall running out into the storm of ashes. Then Dorian raised his Colt to shoot him, but something prevented him from making the hit. Then my vision became hyper acute as the invisibility spell broke apart around us.

  We were immediately noticed. I lifted my Westinghouse, prepared to use it one him.

  Lovecraft said, “I wouldn't use anything that could ignite the highly charged air if I were you or we all could go pop. Besides, it might lead to the burning of earth's atmosphere which could mean the destruction of mankind as we know it, or at least the Republic.”

  Dorian said, “I can't let you bring in whatever monsters you may invite over into our plane of existence, Lovecraft.”

  “Of course you can and you will. And I'll tell you why and how it is going to happen.”

  I silently slipped my stilettos out of my sleeves and prepared to make a running go of it, when out of the blue the portal about twenty guards rushed out in about three seconds flat. Wonderful.

  Lovecraft shook his finger and said, “Now, now, Ms. Darling, that just won't do. Only one of you has to die today to make my special gate open, so unless you want the chivalrous Dorian Grey here to die, I would decline in using those pretty knives. In fact, I want you to give one to my Corporal here. That would make for a poetic ending, Miss Darling. To die by your own knife.”

  I still thought about just killing him, but I glanced to my right and saw that Dorian was surrounded. Several of his men already had out guns, pointing at him. They were using the bayonet knife ends of their rifles to effectively cage him in. I hesitated.

  Dorian said he couldn’t die. Was that because he had no soul? I didn’t believe that. What about if his body were dismembered, would he perish then? Certainly, if his arms, legs, and head were laid upon this earth, here and there, no one could survive that.

  Several more men rushed in as I hesitated and quickly we are surrounded by pointy rifles. I tried to look on the bright side of this. Certainly, whatever comes through that gate would be great rollicking fun to track down and kill. I'll be patient and let Lovecraft play out his hand.

  “There now.” He came up to me and used one hand to stroke the side of my face. “I need someone who is chaste and pure of heart to die in order to open up that little quark portal for me.”

  I spat in his face and he laughed.

  Then I said, “I am most definitely not pure of heart. I'll be opening no gate for you today.”

  “But you're dead wrong, Wendy. You always do what is in your heart. You were simply misled for whatever charlatan rouse the Society dictated so eloquently for you to do. You thought they were just, and Wendy, those people you killed were very bad people. You always knew that in your gut. You thought, even a good cause needs bad people to make change happen, and you love taking down bad people, don’t you? But what you didn’t know was that you set back the revolutionaries each time you took down one of their more nefarious numbers.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Because I controlled what information got leaked to S.O.A.R. Sometimes giving small victories to your enemy keeps them complacent. Those fools never even suspected that information was coming from the top of the food chain. Mostly, I used their assassins to commit hits for the benefit of Edison and the Republic. Mr. Van Moot couldn’t have agreed more with my position.”

  Then he looked over to Dorian and back to me, “I see that you aren't going to argue your chasteness.” He laughed and said, “I see for once Dorian is without words.”

  I knew I had to be the oldest virgin in existence, but I always likened myself to Artemis, the virgin warrior. Really, it was my secluded existence coupled with a formal upbringing, that I still clung to, that retarded my emotional growth. Now my chastity seemed for naught, as I was about to pay the ultimate price for it.

  “Now Wendy, Jasper did well, even though he paid for it with his life. He did find my next sacrifice. And Wendy, it will be the ultimate sacrifice for you. No amount of wishing could possibly bring you back to life when I am done, because your soul will be bound to the gate. And, there it will stay until I wish it to close it. That's how it stays open, you see, and stay open it will for a very long time. When I'm through with it, I'm afraid that no one will be around to even wish you back into your rotting body.”

  Dorian tried to leap for Lovecraft, but his arms were quickly bound and ultimately he was completely blocked from my view.

  Lovecraft said, “Be sure he doesn't have a way to draw blood from himself or any of you, or you will be the demon's first meal.” How does he even know these demons culinary preferences? Then he laughed and said, “One of you will probably have to feed it anyway. I'll be studying which of you to determine who is the most expendable to me.” The bodies around Dorian drew tighter.

  I tried to go invisible again, but there was a barrier preventing me from reaching into the earth. Probably the etched circle that Dorian warned me about. I tried rubbing my Fairy kiss, until it burned, but felt nothing else from it. Nothing. That was the nature of the kiss. It only worked when Peter wanted to find me, not when I wished he would summon me.

  Lovecraft loomed over me with my own knife and then stabbed me in the heart. I felt my lifeblood pour out into his hands, as I collapsed onto the ground. Please don't let him take my heart. I hoped that the previous priest was merely for show.

  I wasn't sure how I could breathe and live again, so that I could get to Neverland to drink the elixir of life, if I didn't have a heart. He started to chant over my cooling body, and then I turned my head to see if I could spot Dorian once more before I lost consciousness. But he remained surrounded by a large contingent of armed men. I didn't want my last sight to be of Lovecraft walking the circle with my blood pooling around me.

  I blissfully blacked out again for the second time in so many hours. I felt myself drifting for a short time, when all of a sudden my spirit was sucked into something that was definitely not natural. Where was my body? I could always see my body before. I couldn't see anything. Just cloying blackness surrounded me. Then I was being stretched over something. I was supposed to know what that something was, but I just couldn't think through the pain of being stretched so thin. I thought I would break.

  Suddenly the blackness turned to a blinding white with no improvement on my vision. I saw nothing but the white light, now. Then I felt something move through me. It was large and horrid. It smelled of death and destruction. It felt wet and wrong.

  I tried to focus on it, to peer through the white light, but finally gave up. Instead, I tried to perceive it with my mind. I had to know what it was. But every time I focused my being and thought I had caught a glimpse of, it blurred as if it was just something so horrific that the human
mind was not meant to comprehend it.

  The only thing I could say for sure about it was that part of it held a heavy weight of knowledge. It was ancient. Something that had seen eons pass on earth. It would be a worthy adversary, if it could be killed at all.

  Then something happened and I felt myself freed once more. I felt myself getting shaken. I felt whole, normal once again, and in a lot of pain. Really, if I thought about it, I was mostly overcome with relief that I could feel anything again besides the ancient evil, but the pain in my chest did take my breath away. All this I felt, even before I could take my first breath.

  I opened my real eyes and looked up into Dorian's face. I sucked in my first true breath and before I was completely conscious, he roughly kissed my mouth. Then the kiss was over and he jerked me up.

  He shouted over the sounds of clashing metal, “Tesla has used the opened inter-spacial portal that Lovecraft left open from the Oval Office. Tesla has shot the President and his T.R.A.M.s have arrived. They have overtaken Lovecraft's men. Lovecraft has escaped back through his continental portal. We need to stop him before he stops Tesla. Can you travel?”

  “Is the other portal closed?”

  “It collapsed in on itself, shortly before you woke up.” Nearly dying and reawakening is not exactly like falling asleep, but I didn't bother to correct him.

  “Did anything get through?”

  “Not that I could see, but we'll discuss it later. Do you need to wait here and recover, while I go?”

  I tried my unsteady feet and found that even though my chest felt like it had been put through a meat grinder. I could indeed walk and function in a relatively normal way. I found that my torso was stiff and it was difficult to bend in any which way I tried.

  I next felt for the hole in my chest, but instead found a pierced hole that seemed to be smaller than I had thought. I realized that my book, The Metamorphosis, had allowed Lovecraft's aim to miss my heart completely and simply severed an artery that caused me to nearly die from internal bleeding.

  “The Metamorphosis has saved my life in more ways than I can count,” I said, as I took it out to show Dorian where the knife split the book's binding.

  “Amazing.” But somehow, I didn't think he was talking about the book. I simply nodded my head in agreement, and then he pulled me through the portal into the chaos that was the Whitehouse's Oval Office.

  Chapter 25

  Fight in the Oval Office

  “Revolution is a farce. Why would one want to replace order with ruffians?”

  -Patton Tiberius Edison, Inaugural Speech, 2228.

  From Dorian's Journal of Memorable Quotes to Live By

  Mass havoc greeted us as we exited the portal. I surveyed my surroundings and found the president slumped over his oval office desk with a large and growing bloodstain spreading across his back. The king was dead…

  There were T.R.A.M.s everywhere crushing Lovecraft's small army of soldiers and the President’s Werewolf bodyguards. I scanned over the room for the thing that I had thought crossed over through the portal, but I didn't see or feel anything even remotely like it. It was somewhere, just not here. Who knew what kinds of havoc it would create while loose in the D.C. area?

  “Where's the demon?” I asked one of the soldiers that were laid out on the floor. He seemed to be dying from electrical shocks.

  “What do you mean?” he shot back.

  Over the fighting, I yelled at him, “That thing that made it through the gate! Where is it?”

  “Nothing made it through that gate. Now leave me be, so I can die in peace.” Which was a fat lot more than they had planned for me. Overall though, this was bad. No one saw it, but I knew it gotten through. Who in the hell knew where it was now? I guessed I would get my wish to hunt that thing down, but first I had to deal with Lovecraft.

  A shank shoveling Wolf had other plans for me. I hated Werewolves. At least the rumors about being bitten and turned into one were entirely false. Also, the bit about the females not being able to reproduce was ludicrous. It was ridiculous to think that the change would be detrimental to a fetus. It was a werewolf, too, after all. Your heart, lungs, and eyes didn't change shape when they shifted. Why would a uterus in a female change when she shifted? Seemed detrimental to a species if it couldn't procreate, if you asked me. But for all this, they were still rare.

  The Werewolf lunged for me, but I still had one of my knives and somehow both of my pistols. Silly Lovecraft, what were you thinking leaving me armed?

  At least the myth about silver held some truth. Silver hurt them the same as the rest of us in the User community, but it just hurt them a little more. I rammed a blade into his side while he took a bite into my neck. That hurt, but the knife hurt him worse and he let go before he did any real damage. I left my knife in his side. Knives were replaceable, but lives were not. I would have to buy some silver bullets somewhere or learn how to make them myself. I didn’t like being underprepared.

  I scanned the room for Lovecraft and found that Tesla had him cornered. Lovecraft was now holding my Westinghouse and had it pointed at Tesla. Guess they confiscated it from Dorian earlier. Not good. Could Tesla take on extra voltage like his automatons?

  Going invisible was not going to happen here. I was above ground, so I slipped into my usual stealth mode and tried to remain undetected as I drifted around the perimeter of the room to get closer to Tesla. I had to step over a dead wolf and around a fallen T.R.A.M. or two until I could hear Lovecraft and Tesla’s conversation, as they appeared to be having a polite conversation.

  Tesla said in a coolly confident manner, “Hello Howard. Fancy meeting you here.”

  Lovecraft spits out the words, “Tesla... you Slavic filth, I’ve known all along that you were behind the shakers.” I looked at Lovecraft more closely, and saw that his pallor was not right. Something was off with him, but what was it?

  “You are just furious that you couldn't harness its power for yourself to commit some sort of mass genocide of immigrants. You were always such a prejudiced ass.”

  “Shut your mouth. You and your kind were never supposed to come to the great land of the Republic. I opened the demon world in order to cleanse your kind from the earth.”

  “If you think releasing one of the ancient ones on the earth would destroy only the immigrants, you are even more foolish than I thought. Immigrants are only immigrants if they leave one border and go across into another. That thing doesn't care about borders. And mark my word; it would have destroyed everything in its path, including you. You're a fool's fool, Howard.”

  “You could have had it all, Nikola: the fame... the challenge... the pigeons. But you threw it all away. Do you still have the plans for your Death Laser?”

  Tesla sneered and said, “So you were behind that, as well. I should have known. No, Howard, I have completely forgotten everything to do with nasty affair.”

  It was then that I noticed that Lovecraft still held my other stiletto and he was about to pierce his own skin with it. Why would he do that? I glanced behind me and the T.R.A.M.s were busy frying people and Wolves alike, followed up by Dorian beheading them with red slashes of his sword. There was one bodyguard left standing in Werewolf form and he tried to attack Dorian with a... scimitar? Where did the president's guard come from exactly?

  Then I saw the impossible. I swore I saw the sword slice completely through Dorian's arm. It slipped through like butter and then the coat and shirtsleeves fluttered to the ground. He simply tossed his sword from one hand to the other, but his arm remained attached. What the hell?

  It was too dangerous to watch Dorian a moment more than necessary, but I thought up a slew of questions to query him on when this was all over. I studied the position of the fights and people around me. When I decided that no one was about to sneak up behind me or help me, I leaped onto Lovecraft's back. It worked before on Jasper, maybe it would serve me well again.

  He roared, as I delved my fingers into his eye sockets. He shook
me off and my head glanced the side of the desk. I saw stars and before I could get back on my feet, I saw that he had sliced off a piece of his own arm's skin. That had to hurt. Then he dipped my stiletto into his bleeding arm and painted something out on it. Oh, no!

  Next, I heard a gunshot and saw a red hole blossom up like a twisted rose on his chest. I leaned to the side and saw that Tesla had shot him with the Colt P that Dorian had given him. I guessed Tesla was right: nobody expected anyone to use regular guns anymore. But you would have thought that what with Lovecraft being immortal, he would have at least been wise enough to suspect it as a possibility.

  But from what I knew about Lovecraft’s mortal history, he was taught science and the arts on a gentleman's diet, only to starve when he had to work for his living. He blamed immigrants for stealing the wealth that was just out of reach for him, being a native-born son of the Republic. He wasn't the smartest man I knew.

  To my chagrin, I wasn't ready for him to die yet, and I asked, “How do you get rid of the demon?”

  He spun back to face me and said, “You're like a fly. Always popping up when you are unwanted.”

  “How Lovecraft?”

  “How does one rid the world of the primordial beast? It is the thing of man's nightmares, made true. One who was here a millennium before modern man. You do not, Miss Darling, get rid of anything of that magnitude. Now let me turn my attention on how to get rid of you...”

  I had originally thought that the deadly glyph was meant for Tesla, but now I knew otherwise. Whatever curse he drew on his own skin with his own blood, he meant for me. But the brave and foolish man that Tesla was, he jumped in front of me and intercepted Lovecraft's deadly curse. Lovecraft took the chunk of skin he had cut out with the crazy blood glyph on it and flung it. The skin meant for me, touched Tesla's hand instead. Its effect was immediate. Tesla's skin started to bubble and turn gray, at first only where it had touched the skin, but then I could see it begin its insidious infestation over the rest of him.