Vincent burped, spooned horseradish, mustard and pickled onions onto his plate. Relished every taste.
There wasn’t a hint of remorse on either of their faces.
We were sitting in the same dining room that Major Wilson had attacked us in. I could still see the marks on the door where he’d staked Alice. The table I’d thrown had been replaced, as had the broken window I’d crashed through. My heroics, saving Victoria and Vincent, all of it had been pointless. My cheeks burned with the humiliation of having been made a fool of so easily. All the times I’d trusted Victoria, all the times I’d put myself on the line for her and this was the result.
I was a chump, as the Americans might say. A patsy. A fall guy.
A prize idiot.
There was nothing I could do. Kate was still locked away who knew where. The three armed security guards had had their numbers bolstered by two in the meantime. Vincent was literally glowing with power. I was no expert on magic, but I guessed he could take me down in a heartbeat.
Eventually, through the numb shock, my ability to speak returned.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why let me go to pick up Marian and then send the demon after me?”
“The demon? I’d have thought the two of you would be on first name terms by now, given how much time you’ve spent trading blows. However, it was his choice to go chasing after you. He thought you might take Marian to Section 19, which would have complicated things no end. I knew you wouldn’t, but from our side it was a win-win situation. Either you’d bring us Marian or he would.”
“You were working with the MLF all along...”
It was the only thing that made sense.
“Helping them along, yes. We’ve been their sponsors, I suppose. How else do you think they were able to infiltrate Section 19, or know where to look for the files we needed?”
“The files that were useless in the end,” I said.
“Indeed. How did you work out who the other two cursed ones were, by the way?”
I kept silent. Either this was another one of Victoria’s games or she didn’t know about the mysterious hacker. There was nothing to gain by saying anything about him, or her.
“I’d like to leave now. And I’d like to take my friend with me.”
“Oh, Jason,” Victoria half yawned as Vincent gluttoned away, “Please, don’t be so...”
“...predictable,” Vincent said through a mouthful of steak.
“Exactly,” Victoria smiled, “Don’t be so predictable. There are things going on here that you have no understanding of whatsoever. You’ve barely scratched the surface of this new world you’re living in, and now you want to, what, go running home to Mummy?”
Another hot flush to my cheeks.
“Anyway, we can’t let you go. I want to know as much as I can about the formula that was injected into you. You’re a regular little miracle. Can you imagine what we could achieve if we could replicate the serum that made you what you are? Imagine the possible applications...”
“An army of Ethans,” Vincent said, “Wouldn’t that be something?”
“You’ve got my blood, what more do you want?”
“The cells in your blood break down after a few hours away from your body. We’ll need you to complete our studies.”
“Plus, we need to see what breeding would produce,” Vincent said, pushing his plate to one side, “Don’t forget about that.”
“Absolutely,” Victoria nodded, “Are your abilities hereditary? Will your children have the same qualities? So many questions to answer.”
The pair of them were insane. Completely, utterly insane. They were talking like giddy, drunk children, finishing each other’s sentences and thoughts, then pushing each other further. The symbiosis between them was in full flow now that Vincent had been restored to his youthful self.
“I don’t believe this,” I said.
“For heaven’s sake I do wish you’d grow up. There’s no point fighting me.”
“No point fighting us,” Vincent clarified.
“I trusted you,” I said to Victoria.
“Well, you still can trust me, once you stop being so...”
“Petulant,” Vincent said.
Victoria smiled, “Precisely. Have you finished?”
Vincent nodded, “That was excellent.”
I felt like I’d stepped into a sitcom set in an upmarket lunatic asylum. That feeling wasn’t improved any when Mr Stabby casually walked in and took a place at the table.
Chapter Forty Seven: Worst Allies
My eyes boggled. The demon was in his human form, but that didn’t make his sudden appearance any less bizarre.
“Hey, kid,” he said as he helped himself to slices of beef and loaded his plate with mustard. His multiple voices speaking at the same time were still there, but muted, as if he’d dialled them down.
“Jason, sit down,” Victoria chided me. I’d jumped up when Mr Stabby walked in. My fists were clenched, my heart rate pounding, ready for battle. Realising my erstwhile enemy was not about to attack me, I slowly sat down again.
What else was I supposed to do?
“Where’s Dee?” I asked him.
“Dee?” the demon asked between mouthfuls, “Oh, you mean the genie? Yeah, she’s downstairs.”
‘She’. Very funny. I ignored the sarcastic reference to Dee’s less than stellar fighting abilities.
“Is Dee okay?” I insisted.
“Sure,” the demon shrugged, “Little crack on the noggin, nothing more.”
“Another little mystery of yours,” Victoria commented, “Hanging out with a djinn in your spare time. I’m sure your story will be fascinating when we unravel it.”
More taunts, more smirks. I ignored her. I had more important things to consider. Dee was alive. Kate was alive. My friends were here, somewhere. Which meant there was hope. There was a chance we could get out of this mess.
“We haven’t been properly introduced,” Mr Stabby said. He reached out a hand across the table, “People call me Balthazar.”
“Of course they do,” I muttered, ignoring the outstretched hand. Balthazar shrugged it off and went back to his plate.
“So when are we doing this?” Balthazar asked Victoria, between mouthfuls.
Victoria glanced at her brother and I knew what was coming next. It was the tiniest of conspiratorial glances, the faintest of smirks. The same looks that I’d had directed at me as Victoria had revealed herself.
Once you’ve seen someone’s true face, once you’ve seen the lies and deceit and how they operate, you can never unsee it. I’d seen Victoria for what she was. Seen her brother. Seen through both of them. I might not have known exactly what game they were playing, but I knew how they played. With manipulation, deceit and lies.
I looked at Balthazar innocently tucking into his plate of food and almost felt sorry for him.
The Pryces had what they wanted.
Balthazar was their next chump.
You’ve been played, I thought.
“We need to have to wait,” Victoria said.
Balthazar stopped shovelling food into his mouth.
Yup, here it comes.
“What do you mean?” Balthazar replied, “We agreed it has to happen tonight. As soon as the last cursed one was disposed of.”
“There are too many tests to run,” Victoria said, “We’ll have to postpone until we can be sure.”
The expression on Balthazar’s face was a mirror image of the one I’d displayed an hour earlier. He was a little faster on the uptake than I’d been, but that didn’t make any difference now.
“We had a deal,” Balthazar growled.
“We did,” Victoria said, “A deal which you spectacularly failed to deliver on. It was Jason here who finished your part of the bargain.”
Shock and anger swept across Balthazar’s face. He stood up, shifted into his demonic form.
Vincent barely moved a finger or said a wo
rd. A bolt of light shot from his hand and pinned Balthazar against the far wall. Balthazar shouted obscenities at the Pryces. Vincent snapped his fingers and Balthazar’s mouth jammed shut.
“Such melodramatics,” Vincent sighed. Victoria giggled.
“Take him away,” Victoria said. Vincent snapped his fingers again and Balthazar fell to the floor, unable to move. He was lifted out by two of the security guards.
I hadn’t moved a muscle in the meantime.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
“Good heaven’s no. There’s far too much valuable data to be gleaned from him.”
“It’ll wear off shortly,” Vincent added.
“What was your deal with him?”
Victoria looked at me with a coy smile, “Oh, Vincent, I do believe Jason is trying to get us to talk. Clever boy.”
“Not really. He had a point though,” Vincent said.
“Jason?”
“No, Balthazar. We should press ahead tonight.”
Victoria looked as startled as a kid in April who’s been told it’s Christmas tomorrow.
“I thought we needed to do more tests?” she said.
“No, I’m fine. The power is more than enough, Vicky...”
“...don’t call me Vicky, dear.”
Vincent smiled, then his voice became more urgent.
“We need to act tonight before anyone realises what’s happening. No-one can stop us, not this early on. Not the government, not Section 19, no-one. If we take all the magical energy now, before it scatters back into our world, no-one will be able to do anything to prevent it. We can take control of everything.”
“You think you can pull all the energy from Arcadia tonight?”
“I know it. And it has to be now, while it is still spilling back into the world. All the power has been locked away for seventy years, now it’s ready to explode back into our dimension. This is a one-time event, Vicky. There won’t be another chance at this for us or anyone else. By tomorrow or the day after the tidal wave of magical energy will have settled down. We either take it now or not at all. All it will take is one little portal and – boom. We can be gods, the two of us together. Immortal, all-powerful, filled with all the magical energy in existence. The world will tremble beneath our feet. Reality will bend to our wills.”
Victoria clasped her hands together in front of her face, her eyes filled with wonder.
“Do you think we could be coronated?” she asked, returning to a playful tone.
It was as if this was all one big game to them.
“I don’t see why not. I will be king and you will be queen. Everyone will bow before us. If they don’t then we’ll...hm, I think I prefer the term erase them to killing. Much less messy. Would you like the crown, dear?”
“Actually I prefer gods now I think about it. King and queen just sound so prosaic.”
“Gods it is then,” Vincent nodded, “There will be no rules for us, Vicky. Nothing we can’t do, no law of magic we can’t rewrite. No law of reality we can’t rewrite. We will have no limits at all.”
Victoria nodded, smiled, then pouted as a sudden whimsical thought crossed her mind.
“Shall we be cruel or kind deities?”
“We will be whatever we need to be,” Vincent replied.
Victoria sat back, satisfied with the answer. Their madness had been dialled way past eleven as they switched between manic, power-hungry scheming and terrifyingly flippant asides. Their eyes gleamed with madness. In her imagination, Victoria was already unwrapping all the shiny presents under the unexpected Christmas tree. Imagining the one thing she truly wanted: absolute power. Absolute control. Reality dancing to the whims of her and her twin brother.
No limits whatsoever.
That was what it had been about all along. Victoria and Vincent were returning magic to the world so they could take it all for themselves. Transcend their mortality, just as they had transcended morality a long, long time ago.
Knowing what they were now, I couldn’t imagine anything more horrifying than all that power in their hands. Worse still, I had put everything in place to let them do it. I’d brought the last cursed one straight to them.
“Vincent, are you absolutely sure?” Victoria said.
“Completely. And if we don’t act now, and fast, we won’t get another chance.”
“You’re totally crazy,” Victoria said with admiration in her voice.
“You know it, toots,” Vincent winked at her.
“You’re both crazy.”
Victoria looked at me, her eyes suddenly dull and flat. I was no longer of any interest to her.
“I’d almost forgotten you were here,” she said. She waved across to three of the soldiers, “Lock him up with all the others.”
This time, she wasn’t joking.
Chapter Forty Eight: Victoria’s Secrets
I leapt out of my chair, spinning around and grabbing the back of it, intending to use it was a makeshift weapon against the three armed soldiers. Before I could do anything else, Vincent muttered a few more words. There was no flash of light this time, as there had been with Balthazar. Instead I felt a sudden numbness take over my body. I stood stock still, the chair half raised, facing the soldiers, frozen in place.
“Put the chair down,” Vincent said.
His tone was mild. The spell he had cast was anything but, as my actions were not my own. I mentally struggled against the controlling spell that Vincent had cast, but it was hopeless. Despite my internal screams at my muscles to obey me, I returned the chair to where it had been.
“Now follow the instructions of the guards,” Vincent said.
Unable to do anything other than comply with the guard’s terse instructions, I was marched through the mansion to an elevator I hadn’t seen before. The elevator shot below ground and I was taken to a large, tiled room and told to strip. Once I’d done so they blasted me with a hose that shot out freezing cold water that smelt of bleach.
An orange jumpsuit had been laid out for me and I was ordered to put it on.
I was taken along another corridor at the end of which was a huge circular bank vault style door. It was three metres in diameter, a metre thick and I guess weighed twenty-five, maybe thirty tons. The front of it was attached to a massive metal sheet with four huge hinges – two in the middle of the door and two attached to the wall beside it. There were two metal wheels the size of car tyres on the door, with thick steel spokes poking out. One guard laboriously span the wheels, unlocking the door’s twenty four bolts.
I took a step back, overcome by a feeling that once I ended up on the other side of that door, I was not coming back out of my own choice.
“Don’t even think about it,” one of the soldiers said, “Inside, now.”
Vincent’s spell still holding sway over me, I stepped through the vault door and into a large room on the other side.
“Wait there,” the soldier said, “until George shows you around.”
The large metal door was slowly closed, the bolts sliding shut with a swish and a clank. There was one other exit from the almost empty room, a plain metal door that was locked. There were a few plastic chairs in the room.
Balthazar was sitting on one of them.
Like me, he was dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He raised an eyebrow as I stepped inside, but said nothing.
I felt the spell that Vincent had cast on my slowly fading from my body. I flexed my arms and found that they were under my control once more. Then I pulled a chair as far away from Balthazar as possible and sat down.
“Have to admit it, I did not see this coming,” Balthazar said. His voice was resigned, even more muted than earlier. I got the impression that his ‘speaking in multiple voices’ thing was a trick he pulled when he felt like it.
“Things not quite going according to plan?” I asked.
“Well how’s trying to be the hero working out for you, kid?” he replied, matching my sarcasm.
“I’ve had better days
. Still, you won’t be able to bring your demon army into our world. So, you know, fifty-fifty from where I’m sitting.”
Being flippant was about all I had left. If I’d spent a minute pondering on how everything had gone wrong, thinking about Marian’s murder, about the Pryces’ betrayal, I’d have folded myself into a little ball and given up.
Things were what they were. I was just going to have to deal with it. Somehow.
“My demon army?” Balthazar repeated.
“Yeah. Sucks to be you right now, huh?”
“My demon army?” Balthazar said again with even more incredulity. Then he started to laugh as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
“Is that...” he gasped between laughs, “Is that what you think I’ve been trying to do? Bring a demon army to this world?”
“Well, yeah?”
He burst into laughter again.
“Oh that is too damn precious. That’s truly brilliant,” Balthazar continued, “Kid, you need to stop watching so much television. ‘My demon army’. Genius.”
“So what has this all been about, then? What have you been trying to do?”
“Kid, if there was a demon army on the other side – which there certainly isn’t by now – why on earth would I want to invade this world? Supernaturals as you call them have been hunted and murdered for as long as I can remember - and those have been the lucky ones. The unlucky ones? Tortured, vivisected, experimented on. Auctioned off to fill up exotic zoos. Turned into pets or slaves. Why would I want to bring my people into this hellhole?”
“You’ve been trying to go home...”
“We’ve been trying to go home,” Balthazar confirmed.
“But you killed people. You nearly killed me.”
“It was nothing personal. You were just in the way.”
“And the others? The soldiers, the cursed ones?”
Personal Demons Page 20