Inquisitor

by John Barrowman

  ‘Stop it,’ Em warned, batting away the snakes. ‘You’ll draw alligators.’

  But Rémy kept lifting and dropping the anchor. On his third try, it disappeared. Crouching down, he pointed the beam of his torch through a hole at his feet.

  ‘We couldn’t see it because we’re standing on it,’ he said in triumph. ‘Em, the anchor landed on what’s left of the deck.’

  Em leaned into the hole, the dangling anchor next to her head. Rémy heard a long slow moan in his ears as she jerked back violently. Even in the gloom, he could see terror in her eyes.

  ‘I can’t go in there,’ she stammered. ‘It’s too awful. The emotions… Rémy, I can feel them like a million needles behind my eyes. And taste them… the iron, the blood…’

  Rémy’s adrenaline was surging through his body. He leaned cautiously into the ragged hole, one arm linked on the anchor rope. He let his breath out in short rapid bursts. The hull was full of skeletons manacled to each other, hands to the feet of the person in front of them, tethered to their floating coffin.

  64.

  Mississippi River Blues

  Rémy swam slowly above the bones of his ancestors. Don Grigori had killed them all, it seemed – not just the Conjuror. He took his time, moving from one side of the hull towards the other, his flashlight running across the crevices and the cracks of the ship. The mournful drone that had accompanied him since the Professor’s underground lair was becoming a weeping of voices, the same bluesy requiem he’d heard inside the Lawrence painting.

  At the bow of the ship, his heart sank. A hole as big as a truck was open to the murky black water. If anything had been hidden, it had floated away or been salvaged centuries ago.

  ‘Bones,’ he managed to tell Em, returning to her side. ‘From stern to bow. And a big fucking hole.’ The chorus of voices in his head was softer again, a quiet drone of sound. ‘But there’s something down here. I can hear it.’

  ‘And I can feel it.’

  The oxygen in Rémy’s tank was lower than expected, with around a third left. He’d been breathing too heavily. ‘We’re running out of time,’ he said, tapping at his oxygen gauge. ‘Let’s do a sweep of the area.’

  Em took his hand, kicking towards the bow. They both held their torches out in front, to widen their field of vision. The sounds inside Rémy’s head grew louder and his Conjuror’s mark stabbed his neck as they swam along the top of the broken hull. When they got closer to the bow, the howls changed to weeping again, cascading over him like ice water.

  A huge figure lurched up in front of them. Em shrieked and dropped her torch. It bounced off the bottom of the hull and lodged in the silt beneath the wreck, its beam flickering as it sank into the murky bottom of the delta and was gone.

  Em tightened her grip on Rémy’s hand. ‘What the hell is that?’

  The chorus in Rémy’s head was screaming. They were on top of what they were searching for. He knew it. Picturing the little oilcloth package the child had been holding on board the ship, he levelled his torch.

  ‘It’s the figurehead,’ he said.

  The great wooden face was cracked in half. What was left of it looked like it was charred, thick black tar covering its entire surface.

  ‘Pan,’ said Em, taking a closer look. ‘The god of music.’

  ‘When Nuru opened Chaos with the lyre – before the young Conjuror shut it again – Pan was guarding the tree of life,’ Rémy said, thinking. He’d told Em about the awful visions he had experienced. ‘And when Zach and his mom helped me in Luca’s underground lair, I saw the petrified version of the tree and of Pan. I think the mirror was showing me a way to stop the Camarilla, and it’s hidden right here. Inside this figurehead. Inside Pan.

  ‘It’s literally screaming at me to be found.’

  65.

  Lavender and Grass

  Callum came round with a bang, a thunderous headache playing bass drum behind his eyes. He felt sick. The Roman Empire was going to rise again, thanks to some serious supernatural shit. Christ, his head hurt.

  He was fully clothed, and on a bed big enough for a family of four in a room straight out of a Dickens novel. He moved his hands and feet, relieved he wasn’t tied up. Someone had taken his shoes. When he sat up, the drum got louder.

  The room was dark, floor to ceiling curtains on tall windows, but he could see the dim light of day breaking through. The walls were papered in a velvet flock design and covered in portraits of scowling old men in military uniforms, one or two on thrones, women in high ruffled dresses with children or dogs on their laps, and a row of horse paintings, many more appealing to look at than the people. It was the kind of art tracing a family of wealth and privilege over centuries. A whiff of lavender and grass tugged his senses and he rolled to a sitting position, feeling fresh air ruffling the curtains.

  Someone had set two bottles of water, an empty glass, and a packet of Alka Seltzer on a side table. He opened one of the bottles for the fizz, ignoring the glass and dropping the tablets directly into the bottle. What he really needed was an Irn-Bru and an explanation.

  His watch said 3:25pm. Given that he had confronted Fiera Orsini around 2am in the centre of Trastevere, he’d just had the best sleep since Pietra had died.

  His gut twisted with grief. With his hands on his hips and his head bowed, he swallowed until the nausea passed and the constellation of floaters vanished from his peripheral vision.

  Slugging the rest of the water, he dug around in the bedside tables, where he found a letter opener, blank stationery and a pair of wool socks.

  He slipped the letter opener under the waistband of his jeans and crept barefoot out the door, into a plaid carpeted hallway with two more bedrooms on either side of a staircase. The place was tall and narrow, a townhouse in a city somewhere. He could hear traffic noises outside, a horn honking and a screech of a lorry or a bus’s airbrakes. The house itself was quiet, apart from a radio playing classical music somewhere downstairs, and yet it felt as if it were breathing. When Callum looked downstairs, he thought he saw the foyer walls expand and contract for a split second. But then he blinked and everything looked normal.

  He returned to the bedroom and closed the door quietly behind him. At the tall window, he pulled open the heavy curtains and looked outside.

  ‘Oh shit. London?’

  Louisiana

  66.

  Gator Aid

  Em tied the anchor end of the rope around the upper part of the figurehead, knotting it the way Zach had taught her when she was learning to sail. Then she gathered up the rest of the rope and kicked to the surface. Rémy helped her back on to the deck of the barge, and together they tied the rope to the rusty winch. Rémy prepared to crank the wheel and raise the figurehead to the surface.

  A piercing shot came out of nowhere, hitting one of the oxygen tanks. The tank exploded.

  The blast threw Em back into the water. A series of shots hit the barge, sending flames shooting into the sky. Pieces of the burning wheelhouse dropped like Molotov cocktails into the water. As fast as he could, Rémy uncoiled the winch, grabbed the loose end of the rope and jumped into the flaming water.

  ‘Em!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you?’

  Another volley of shots skimmed the barge and ricocheted into the second oxygen tank. The tank rocketed away over the water screaming like a missile, exploding into a copse of trees on the other side of the bayou.

  ‘Em! EM!’

  Up at the shoreline, Rémy saw two ’gators slip one after the other into the water. He kicked harder, dragging the rope with him. When it caught on something, it took him three tugs to free it.

  He felt something grazing his leg. He whipped round, expecting to punch a ’gator.

  ‘Put this on,’ Em urged, handing him a mask. ‘It was floating in the water. I still had mine.’ She glanced around. ‘Vaughn was right. The Camarilla are everywhere.’

  ‘We need to get out of the water,’ said Rémy, doggy-paddling desperately while trying to t
ie the rope attached to the figurehead around his waist.

  Em beckoned. ‘Give it to me. I’m a stronger swimmer.’

  The ’gators were nosing past the debris, heading their way. Rémy didn’t argue. He knotted the rope around Em’s waist. Em kicked into freestyle, moving sluggishly but still moving forward.

  Smoke billowed over the tree-line on both sides of the bayou, sealing the area like a lid. A volley of shots hit the water, this time far too close to Rémy’s head. He went under, heading in Em’s direction, following the figurehead.

  When he came up for air, he crashed into a tree limb stretched across the water like a scolding finger, tearing the skin above his right eye. Swearing loudly, he struggled to free himself from the tangle of its roots. He wasn’t as fast a swimmer as Em, especially without his fins, but he wasn’t going to drown. He flipped under again and followed the glow of her wetsuit deeper towards the other side of the bayou, doing his best to forget about the ’gators behind them. His Tia Rosa had filled his head with stories about the spirits of the river and how the ’gators protected those that lived near and on it. She’d told him ’gators never ate black men. Rémy was pretty sure he didn’t want to be the first to test the theory.

  Suddenly he couldn’t see Em any more. He raised his head above the water. A series of shots went whizzing past his head and he ducked again.

  ‘Em!’

  ‘Over here. The rope’s stuck.’

  Rémy helped her, but the dead weight wouldn’t budge. The rope was caught in a tangle of tree roots.

  ‘The figurehead is stuck. I can’t pull it any further. And the alligators are coming.’

  ‘Leave it,’ Rémy said. ‘Get on to the shore. I’ve got this.’

  Em scrambled out of the water, rolling behind a thick copse of the trees hanging like loose teeth over the edge of the bayou. ‘They smell food,’ she warned Rémy as he splashed back into the murk.

  Wading out until he felt his knees scrape on the tree roots snagging the rope and the figurehead, Rémy stood up, knee deep in the water. Only then did he look back.

  One of the ’gators was just a few metres away. Rémy whistled, a long high pitched note. The ’gator kept coming. Rémy raised the pitch. The melody became a spiral of mist that spread from him across the water, settling like dry ice around the ’gators. The water crackled and popped and turned to ice, freezing the ’gators in place like popsicles.

  More shots whizzed into the trees overhead. It was hopeless. Rémy backed away from the snagged rope, waded ashore and grabbed Em’s hand. They crashed through the thick brush to the cover of an enormous live oak, kudzo coiling around its branches like streamers.

  The mosquitoes on this side of the river were swarming in full attack mode. Although Em’s neoprene suit was zipped all the way to her chin, her hands and feet were already a landscape of fiery red welts.

  ‘You’re getting eaten alive,’ said Rémy. ‘We can’t stay exposed like this.’

  Another shot peeled past his ear. He threw himself on top of Em, but not before the bullet had torn across her thigh and slammed into the tree behind them.

  ‘Aargh!’

  Em grabbed her leg, blood seeping through her fingers, her face grey with pain.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Rémy in frustration. ‘How can they see us? The smoke and trees should be shielding us.’

  ‘They can hear us,’ gasped Em. ‘You have to stop conjuring.’

  Rémy glanced over his shoulder. ‘We need to move. Can you put weight on your leg?’

  Em nodded, wincing. ‘Do you have anything else to defend us with? Your knife?’

  ‘Lost it in the explosion along with our backpacks. Thank God I put the journal in my wetsuit pocket.’

  They pushed their way deeper into the everglades. When they had enough cover from the shoreline, Rémy helped Em to sit on a felled tree. Something skittered from a pool beneath the trunk and into a nearby marsh. A woodpecker tapped above their heads. Ribbons of gold light washed over the bayou.

  ‘Find me a stick or a rock, something to draw with,’ Em said through clenched teeth. ‘I need to animate before the sun sets, or whoever’s shooting at us will see the animation glow and we’ll be sitting ducks.’

  67.

  A Song in the Night

  Rémy rubbed his hand over his stubbled hair, trying to think. He’d stopped shaving his head, saving the effort for when he had regular access to soap and water and showers again. The rasp of bristles helped him to focus.

  Everything on the ground was wet or muddy. Looking up, Rémy wrenched at a couple of branches overhead and handed them to Em, who selected the sharpest and dug it into the mud. She animated a roll of bandage first that Rémy wrapped tightly around her leg. Then she tackled protective clothing, with hats and gloves that made them both look like beekeepers. Finally, she created food and water. Rémy tried and failed to contain his disappointment at the ham and cheese sandwiches and the bottled water.

  Em’s face was still contorted with pain. ‘Best I could do in the circumstances. Need my energy for bigger things.’

  Next was a dark green boat with a small motor. The glow from the animations blended with the sun rising over the bayou, and no one else shot at them as they ate. The blood was clotting on Em’s leg. It wasn’t much more than a graze.

  ‘Do you think they’re gone?’ Em said, wiping her mouth.

  ‘No.’ Rémy emptied his bottle of water in one gulp. ‘I think they’re waiting for our next move.’

  ‘What’s on the other side of this bayou?’

  ‘More bayou.’

  As the sun rose, Em animated a winch to pull the rope free from the tree roots and haul the figurehead ashore. Rémy rolled it on to its back. The ram stared up at them. Thick algae and muck wept from its eyes and a wide crack around its mouth gave it a malevolent grin. When this had been on the front of the ship, it would have been painted a brilliant white, with eyes of onyx. Rémy rubbed the curve of one of the horns, revealing a flash of gold.

  ‘Creepy,’ said Em with a shudder.

  ‘I have to conjure,’ Rémy said. ‘Sorry.’

  Em glanced around. ‘Try and keep it quiet,’ she advised.

  Rémy began to hum quietly. After a moment, he snatched a handsaw from mid-air and sawed both the horns off. The ram’s head looked even more malevolent.

  Each horn was as wide as Rémy’s upper arms. Rémy tapped the curl of the horn, at the point where the golden metal was the thickest. ‘In here.’

  Voices carried from the water. They heard a small outboard motor start up.

  ‘They’re getting closer,’ said Em, tense again. ‘We could take the boat I animated earlier, it’s just back there. Give me the horns.’

  The mark at the back of Rémy’s neck itched seductively as he sawed at the horns. He handed them to Em for safekeeping.

  She got up from the log with some difficulty. It was clear that her leg was still hurting. ‘Time to get the hell out of here.’

  Rémy glanced towards the water. ‘They’ll follow the boat. We need to shake them off.’

  Em paused. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Scare the shit out of them.’

  *

  Rémy sprinted back into the trees. Em closed her eyes for a second. A wind rustled the branches above her head. The scent of oranges tickled her nose.

  ‘That was fast,’ she said, looking up.

  London

  68.

  Watching Airplanes

  Zach Butler was staring out of the Orangery window at Kensington Palace and the Round Pond. It was late afternoon and tourists, university students, and gaggles of school children filled the pedestrian avenue that criss-crossed Kensington Gardens. He was working on a laptop of his own invention, monitoring Luca Ferrante in a 3D hologram map hovering from the screen.

  Zach spotted his mother coming out of the trees in the park. He watched her dodge around a family trying to negotiate tourists on Segways and jog towar
ds him. He wondered how his childhood might have been different if Orianna had returned to his life sooner. He understood now why she had stayed away, but understanding hadn’t come with acceptance. At least not yet. He could only cope with one abandonment at a time, and Em’s was still pretty raw.

  ‘What’s Luca doing now?’ asked Orianna, breezing into the Orangery.

  ‘Terminal Five at Heathrow.’ Zach pointed to the twinkling image on the 3D hologram.

  ‘Have I told you recently how truly brilliant you are?’ Orianna was looking closely at the hologram. ‘A twenty-first century da Vinci.’

  He smiled at the compliment. ‘I’ve got no idea what he’s doing, but he’s not moved from that spot at Heathrow for a couple of hours now. I’m worried he won’t hold up the bargain he’s made with us for the lyre.’

  ‘He will,’ said Orianna. There was a curious confidence in the way she said it. ‘But he needs to stay on Cecilia’s plan until the very end.’

  ‘How can you be so sure he’ll help us when we need him?’

  ‘His human nature was always stronger than his divine one. I mean, look at what he’s been doing for hours.’ She laughed. ‘Sitting at the airport, watching planes.’

  ‘Are you worried that time has changed his feelings?’

  She cupped Zach’s face in her hands and looked into his eyes. ‘Of course I’m worried. I’m terrified. But I’ve waited a long time for this all to end and we’re prepared.’

  ‘I never feel anything but calm from you,’ signed Zach. Orianna’s emotional temperature never modulated enough to trigger Zach’s Guardian senses, even when she had every right to be freaking out.

  ‘I wouldn’t have survived in the Camarilla all this time if they could sense my emotions. I learned a long time ago how to put up… what would you call it? A psychic firewall?’