“No. Victoria was playing me all along. She murdered Marian, the barrier has come down.”
“That explains why I’ve been feeling so weird the past hour. I felt it happen. Magical energy is starting to return to the world, seeping in through the cracks. I even managed to unlock my cell door.”
“You used your telekineticesis thingy?”
“Telekinesis. Yeah,” Dee replied.
“You unlocked your cell door?” George exclaimed, “Oh, no, that’s not right at all. You have to go back to your cell, right now.”
“Yeah, right,” Dee replied.
“Telekinesis. Old school,” Balthazar said, “standard for a genie.”
Dee scowled.
“Get lost, yeah? Some of us didn’t feel the need to take a side in the war,” he replied.
“It’s called sitting on the fence,” Balthazar said dismissively.
“Whatever. The point is I might have enough energy to turn the wheels on that vault door. Maybe, if I concentrate hard enough,” Dee said.
“So can we do this now?”
“Don’t see why not,” Dee replied, “Where’s Kate?”
“Somewhere in the mansion. We have to find her.”
“We have to stop the Pryces,” Major Wilson said, “That’s the mission.”
“That’s your mission,” I replied, “My mission is to keep my friend safe. It’s my fault she’s here at all. You stop the Pryces, I’ll deal with my thing.”
Major Wilson raised an eyebrow, “Are you giving orders as well now?”
“Yes,” I said.
The word came out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. I was still on an adrenaline rush over getting both Wilson and Balthazar to stand down. For a few seconds there, as bizarre as it sounds, I’d been the alpha male in the room. It was a position I wasn’t used to. Wilson’s eyes flickered over to Balthazar. Balthazar held up his hands with a bemused expression.
“Kid wants to go rescue his friend, let him. He’s alright. I’m still going to kill you when this is over.”
Wilson grunted.
“If we get out of here, people are going to die,” Wilson said, “Are you ready for that, Jason? Are you ready to be responsible for that?”
“You have to stop them. That’s all there is to it. I have to find my friend and get her to safety. How many supernaturals are locked up in here?”
“Thirty at the last count,” Wilson replied.
“Well that’s thirty with a grudge against the Pryces. If we can get out of here...”
“That’s still a big if,” Wilson replied.
“...then you’ll have to lead them.”
Wilson shook his head, “Some of them have been locked up here for years. They’re weak, tired, easy pickings.”
“You’ll have to make do,” I said.
“If we can get to the portal, I can take them home,” Balthazar replied, “Get them out of here.”
“Saves me the bother of hunting them down later.”
Balthazar bared his teeth, “One day...”
“Enough,” I cut in, before the two of them forgot their temporary truce, “Dee?”
“Yeah, let’s go.”
“We’ll have a minute, two minutes at best before they hit us with the knock out gas. We need to make this fast,” Wilson said.
“Dee and I will go first. There’s less chance anyone watching will think anything suspicious is going on if it’s just two kids. Sorry George, but you’re staying here. Can’t have you raising the alarm.”
George whimpered as Balthazar put a firm hand on his shoulder.
Dee and I snuck along the gantry as stealthily as we could. Although there were no windows to the outside world, the guards still kept the prisoners to a day and night schedule. As we walked back along the length of the prison I expected an alarm to go off any second and for gas to seep into the complex.
It didn’t happen.
When we stepped into the waiting room there was nothing. No alarm, no announcement, no tell-tale hissing. It was as if no-one was paying any attention.
“This feels too easy,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” Dee agreed. He stood in front of the huge metal door, frowned.
“I saw two circular handles on the other side when I was brought in,” he said, “If I can reach them with my mind, I might be able to turn them from this side.”
He stood in front of the three metre wide vault door for a few seconds, his brow furrowed in concentration. He lifted a hand, palm facing the door, fingers spread outwards.
“Come on, come on,” he said. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He closed his fingers about halfway to a fist as if holding one of the metal rods on the other side of the door. Gritted his teeth, narrowed his eyes.
“Come on...”
His half clenched hand trembled with exertion as he tried to turn the unseen wheel.
I heard a satisfying swiiiiiish of bolts sliding backwards and then a clank.
“You did it!” I shouted.
Dee shook his head, his face anxious.
“No, mate, that wasn’t me. Someone opened it from the other side.”
“They’re coming in! We’re going to have to fight!”
“With what?” Dee said, “they’ve got the guns, remember?”
I swore in panic as the vault door slowly swung open. We both took a step back.
There was only one person on the other side of the door. Alice the vampire stood in the open circle. She was wiping blood off her hands.
With her lips.
Chapter Fifty One: The Mission
“Jason? Thank god I’ve found you. The Pryces, they’ve gone mad, we have to stop them.”
“Wait - you knew about this place?” I said. I was suspicious. The last time I’d seen Alice she’d behaved like Victoria’s best friend, and now here she was switching sides? It wasn’t easy for me to trust anyone by that point.
The non-metaphorical blood on her hands wasn’t inspiring a lot of confidence, either. Noticing my look, Alice did a double take at her bloodied hands and swiftly wiped them on her jeans.
“No, not exactly,” Alice replied, “I knew there was something down here, but Victoria never allowed me access.”
“Go on,” I said. Wary.
“Jayce,” Dee said, pulling me to one side, “That’s a vampire.”
“I know. I told you about her, remember?”
“Yeah, the hot one who probably just put a glamour on you to make you like her anyway. You can’t trust a vampire, period.”
I pulled away from Dee and turned back to Alice, “Explain.”
“I was investigating the Pryces. I knew something was going on here but wasn’t sure what.”
“Why didn’t they lock you up with everyone else?” I pressed on.
“Victoria trusts me. It’s personal. We have history.”
There was no time to go into whatever that meant. I couldn’t tell if Alice meant they had intimate history or something else, and frankly I didn’t care.
“So she trusted you, you’re betraying her, but now we should trust you too?” Dee said.
“Or perhaps she didn’t lock me up because she didn’t trust me,” Alice backtracked, “I don’t honestly know. Maybe it was because if I’d vanished, there would have been too many questions for them to answer.”
“Answer to who?”
Alice pursed her lips.
“And now?”
“I saw you getting taken away and found my way down here to get you out.”
“Why?”
“I owe you one, remember?”
“Oh no,” Dee said, “Whatever she’s selling, don’t buy it. She’s a vampire, not to be trusted.”
“Nice to meet you too,” Alice replied, “Don’t mind me rescuing you and stuff.”
“We were doing fine without you. Jayce, seriously: Vampire.”
“Yeah, Dee, I know but tonight we’re all making strange allies, okay? We need all the help we can get
to stop the Pryces and rescue Kate. Get the others, tell them the coast is clear.”
Dee scowled but did as I told him, running back along the gantry to Major Wilson and Balthazar – who in the meantime had kept their truce.
“There’s a control room along the corridor,” Alice replied, “There were only three guards. Victoria has taken the rest to Avebury. They’re evacuating the village with some bogus story about a gas leak. She’s gone manic. I’ve never seen her like this.”
“Yeah, I’d noticed. Have you seen Kate?”
“Kate?”
“Redheaded girl, my age. Cute freckles.”
“No.”
“She’s in trouble. Victoria has her locked up somewhere in the mansion.”
“I don’t think so,” Alice replied, “There’s no-one left in the mansion. Everyone has gone to the stones. She didn’t leave anyone behind apart from three guards down here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. We were all told to go to the standing stones.”
“How come you didn’t go?”
“I slipped away. Not difficult for me.”
I wasn’t entirely buying what Alice was telling me. Maybe I was being paranoid, or maybe I was wising up. I’d been lied to so many times in the last few weeks that I was finding it impossible to take anything at face value. My gut told me that there was more to this than Alice was letting on, something she was hiding.
On the other hand she had just busted me out of prison, so I couldn’t be too hard on her.
“Jason, we have to stop them.”
“I know. Look, we have a plan, but...”
“Who is ‘we’?” Alice asked. Her eyes widened with rage as Major Wilson stepped into the room, and she vamped out, “YOU!”
I grabbed Alice before she could try to tear out Major Wilson’s throat and slammed her against the wall, pressing against her chest with my forearm. Alice looked startled at the speed and strength I’d displayed. Her face was a sudden mask of fury and teeth.
“He’s on our side until this is over. Okay?”
“Are you serious?” Alice hissed, “He nearly killed me!”
“Yeah, you and me both. Right now we need him and until this is over he’s on our side. Afterwards you can do whatever you want but there are bigger things to deal with right now.”
Alice thought about it, then shifted back to her human form. Held up her hands.
“Okay, Jason. You’re the boss,” she said. Her tone was borderline flirtatious.
I let her go. She turned to Major Wilson, “When this is over, I’m coming for you.”
“Join the queue,” Major Wilson snapped back.
“Actually, I’m first in line,” Balthazar said.
“Why don’t we make it a three-way?” Alice glowered.
“Seriously there is no time for this,” I said, “Alice, lead the way.”
With a dirty scowl, Alice indicated we should follow her. She led us to the prison’s control room. The bodies of three guards lay on the floor.
“You killed them?”
“What did you expect me to do? They shot first.”
I looked at the three dead bodies. One of them had been shot, another had a broken neck, while the third was sitting in a pool of blood, a surprised expression on her face.
I tried to feel something, tried to square it with my conscience. Easy divides between right and wrong weren’t straightforward anymore. If Alice hadn’t killed the guards, we would still be trapped in the prison, could have spent the rest of our lives there. I remembered the shock with which I’d seen my first dead body three weeks earlier, in the attack on Section 19, my fury with Wilson for his execution of Brooks
Now I felt numb. Three people had died and it barely affected me.
Was this what it felt like to be a soldier? Was this what I was turning into? Someone – something - as unfeeling as Major Wilson?
“Save the ethics debate for later,” Alice said as if she’d read my mind. My expression must have given more away than I’d intended. I sighed, nodded, turned my head away. Avoided eye contact with the attractive vampire who’d brutally murdered three people.
Major Wilson picked up an assault rifle from one of the corpses. Checked the ammo, checked down the sight. Satisfied, he strapped it over his shoulder.
“I already told you,” he said, “People will die tonight. You’d better get used to that idea right now, or walk away.”
“And you’re okay with that? Actual humans dying?”
“Right now, there’s worse out there than the creatures in here. I might not like it, but stopping the Pryces is the mission. It always has been the mission, remember? And now the stakes are higher than I thought possible. If beating Victoria and Vincent means working with these vermin, then so be it. The soldiers out there have sided with the Pryces and made their choices.”
For a few minutes I’d thought perhaps Major Wilson had softened his stance on supernaturals. He hadn’t. He was just working tactically with what was at his disposal to neutralise a bigger threat. I had no doubt that if he thought he could finish this on his own, he would have executed every single supernatural imprisoned here without hesitation.
I wasn’t sure if he’d have included me in that category. I wasn’t sure if he’d include himself in that category, as I still didn’t know what effect the werewolf serum had had on him.
As for the prisoners; none of them knew who Major Wilson was, apart from being the new governor. Things could well have been very different if they’d known he was the former head of Section 19.
Wilson went to the control panel and flipped a switch. Through the observation window, we saw all the lights in the prison switch on. Major Wilson flicked more switches. Containment units unlocked. Cell doors swung open. Figures stepped out of their cells into the light, confused and disorientated at their sudden awakening.
Major Wilson switched on the tannoy.
“This is your governor speaking...” he began.
Chapter Fifty Two: The Standing Stones
“We’ve all been lied to. We’ve all been imprisoned, tortured, experimented on. Tonight we’re free, and tonight we’re going to take revenge for what the Pryces have done to us. You have a choice. You can follow me and fight or you can run and hide. If you hide, rest assured the Pryces will find you again, they will drag you back to this hellhole... but as long as you follow my orders, you will have your freedom and you will have your revenge!”
Wilson’s short speech did its intended job. Listening to him, you’d have thought he’d been locked up in there for years, instead of three days. His voice had adopted his commanding not-to-be-questioned tone that whipped the prisoners into a frenzy of anger and desire for revenge. He talked and the creatures listened, and once he was done we left.
As Alice had said, the mansion was deserted. The Pryces’ private soldiers were in Avebury, two miles away. It wasn’t hard to tell in which direction we needed to go. An unnatural light shone in the distance, shards of silent lightning occasionally jumping upwards from the ground and into the clear night sky.
The village of Avebury had been cleared by the time our orange jumpsuit wearing group got to the outskirts of the field of battle. Major Wilson and I snuck ahead. Despite Major Wilson’s speech, half of the prisoners had fled. Taking revenge was less important to them than running as far away as possible. Some of them started a fire in the mansion on their way out, determined to burn their prison to the ground.
That left us numbering fifteen. A bloodthirsty group of unwashed nightmares, ready to gut and kill: Three ragged angels, their wings dirty, their silver-white hair unkempt and the colour of urine. Willing - for one night only - to put their crusade against all other supernatural creatures aside in order to take the Pryces down. Two scarred werewolves, their emaciated bodies and broken claws a testament to the tortures they’d endured. Five snarling, bitter demons, including Doctor Pierce and Balthazar. An actual damned troll, all seven and a half ugl
y feet of her. A vampire - Alice, a djinn – Dee, whatever Major Wilson was, and me.
Fifteen hungry, scraggy half-breeds, scientific experiments, supernaturals and demonic monstrosities against sixty heavily armed, trained and well-fed soldiers and one power-mad warlock.
We raced across the fields through the freezing darkness, blood pounding in our ears, fury in our veins.
Major Wilson and I surveyed the scene a few hundred metres from us. We’d skirted around the village and found a copse of trees from which we could observe the proceedings.
The Pryces had set up around the southern inner stone circle. Only five of the original stones remained but there was enough power in the rest of the structure to achieve what Vincent wanted. To open the first portal to Arcadia in over seventy years and drain all the power so that he and Victoria could become actual deities.
Around sixty men and women, fully armed, stood between the Pryces and us. Four vans were dotted around the outskirts of the outer circle, and two helicopters had landed in a field further away.
The five standing stones of the inner southern circle had various wires and instruments attached to them, long cables running into the back of a van from where Victoria was monitoring what was happening.
Vincent, standing tall, was walking around the stones, energy flashing around his hands. A portal like one I’d seen at High Wycombe was open, power rushing out of it and into Vincent’s body. The glowing we’d seen from a couple of miles away was growing in intensity as the power rushed through the portal, light spilling outwards and upwards, creating crazy shadows.
I saw Kate. She was standing next to Victoria, who was explaining to Kate what was going on. Kate looked pale, scared. She nodded listlessly as Victoria jabbed at a screen here, a reading there, clapped her hands together. Victoria was trying to groom Kate in the same way she’d tried to groom me, thrilled to have a spectator who she could explain everything to.
I turned to Major Wilson and saw an expression on his usually impassive face that I took a second to recognise.
Sheer disbelief.
“What is that?” He said, pointing at the glowing circle of energy that Vincent was drawing power from.
Personal Demons Page 22