Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  Well, at least I'd managed to save Ixa. Now someone just needed to save me.

  Part 29

  The first thing Bussard did was take my picture.

  "What's that for?" I asked.

  My new chains were no more yielding than the handcuffs, though now I was seated on one of the beds. My fingers fumbled for the slots where I kept my lock picks. They were narrow little pockets along the inside of the sleeve. They were designed to be overlooked, and Vanguard had overlooked them. So had the Morlocks. I fished one of the picks out and started on the lock for my chains.

  Bussard walked over to a desk in the corner and plugged the camera into his laptop. "My new passport photo," he said.

  "Oh really?"

  "You see, back before the burning times, the old masters would prolong their lives by taking on an apprentice who was physically fit but dumb as a brick. They'd name him their heir and transfer their consciousness over. Other apprentices were taught normally. This worked for a while, but the witch hunters were relentless. They didn't care how many innocents burned alongside the old masters. Fortunately, I never lived through that dismal era."

  "I take it you intend to carry on that tradition?"

  "Well, the apprentice trick is hard these days. So you look for opportunities where they present themselves. Say, a licensed hero who has no powers but is nevertheless absurdly fit and able to battle Jester of Anubis to a standstill. That was entertaining security camera footage by the way. You should have done Power Brawl."

  "And you think you can fool my family into believing you're me?"

  "I don't have to. I'm just going to use the documentation I've been building up for Peter Bussard the Second, attach your metrics to it and fly back to Sanalta. Sure, I have to give up being an Ambassador for a while, but my life insurance will make up for it."

  "How many people have you murdered this way?"

  "Oh, you'll be the first," Bussard said. "I was one of those normal apprentices. My master didn't want to teach me this spell, because he knew I'd abuse it. But after I pulled a switch on him and he ended up in the body of a cancer stricken little girl, he had to teach me the process so he could at least move back to his previous body. Poor thing had a nasty tumble down a staircase after the girl's cancer caught up with her."

  "You don't look particularly old, or even that far into middle age," I said.

  "But I am tired of being tired and fat," Bussard said. "It's time for a new model."

  "Well, good luck with that," I said sarcastically.

  "You don't believe," Bussard said, standing up. He gave an incredulous snort. "You've seen magic work, and you still don't believe?" He walked over to me. I suppressed a smile as the lock on my chains popped.

  "Oh, I believe, I'm just not going to let you do it." My right hook spun Bussard around and he staggered against the other bed.

  "Serar!" Bussard yelled. I drove a kick into his spine, knocking him to the floor. "You won't get your body if this snot kicks the shit out of me!"

  As I prepared to deliver a knockout blow to Bussard, I was lifted and fell against the wall. The sensation was as odious as it was familiar. The same force had pinned me to the glass partition in Dekker's room.

  "A bit slow on the draw there, Serar," Bussard said. "I almost thought you were going to pull the same thing you did with Victor."

  "Victor had nothing left to offer me," Serar's voice said in my head. "You can at least free me from this deformed wreck I was born into." The gray skinned little man loped into the room.

  "Look, you need to keep him compliant while I perform the ritual. We can then use his access to find where they've stashed the body you want," Bussard said. "Then we'll both be happy, but it all begins with getting him back on that bed and keeping him still."

  "Don't worry," Serar said. "He has no friends to distract me."

  "So when did this deal come about?" I asked. "You were perfectly happy to try to kill me before."

  "After Victor proved himself a bigger idiot than I'd previously imagined," Serar said. Climbing up the rough stonework, Serar clasped his tiny, misshapen hands to my temples. "My will is stronger."

  I fell backwards onto asphalt.

  The sky above me was an dark void, like a cloudy night, only without the knowledge that there was something up there. Two eye sacs peered down at me. Conical depressions at the back of the jelly-filled globes were lined with hundred of tiny eye-stalks. The white singlet and orange gloves told me it was Uth-sk. Or rather, Mini-Uth-sk, as he still had both eye sacs. I'd shoved a probe through the real Uth-sk's right sac. It was not my proudest moment.

  I sat up. In front of me were two computer screens, hovering above the double yellow lines in the middle of the street. The image they displayed was indistinct, and badly tinged blue. Flanking the screen to either side was me. Or rather, Shadowdemon and Travis. Shadowdemon stood on the left in full panoply, gadgets and all. Travis stood to the right in his Leyden Academy uniform and eyepatch. I looked from one to the other, both stared back at me. I had to be in my own head, and my avatar was that damned obnoxious analytical me.

  Why was there a street in my head?

  I stood up and looked at the houses along the far side of the road. I recognized all of them, and could name a few of the people who lived in them. Or rather, used to live in them. It was the street I grew up on. Tension wound up my innards as it slowly dawned on me what was behind me. It was home, and the sense of creeping dread told me that looking over my shoulder would not be a joyous sight. I was frozen, staring at the hovering computer monitors.

  "You still don't want to face me," I said behind me. "You never did."

  Though it could only be an affectation, I swallowed hard and forced myself to turn.

  The once quaint, blue ranch house had been ripped in half from front door to back. The supporting timbers had been pushed down en masse, bringing the roof down on either side. Water sprayed from broken pipes, blackening the asphalt shingles that were now at knee level. The floor of the living room and the kitchen was exposed to the sky, the couch curiously unperturbed by the carnage around it. A shirtless figure in black trousers and Italian dress shoes stood in the middle of the gap. His sculpted, stone-white torso gleamed in the nonexistent moonlight. Hair that should have been platinum blond was instead black. His hands still dripped with blood.

  Before the towering figure lay the broken body of my mother in a turtleneck sweater and blue jeans. Her light brown hair was matted with blood, and her dead, accusative eyes bored into me. Even though she was dead, her eyes followed me, ignoring the smaller me that knelt over her. That me was twelve. He was wearing my hero suit. A few minutes before, he'd been whining about not being allowed to go out as a sidekick. Stupid kid.

  He looked up at me, eyes glowing red.

  "She blamed you for not letting me out," he said.

  "There's only me here," I said. "Don't lie to me."

  "You lie to yourself all the time," he said. "But you know I'm not."

  "Shut up," I said, kicking the younger me. He sneered at me, his skin turning a shade of darkness not found in human flesh.

  "You dismissed me as a bad dream, even back then," he said. "She knew I was real, but you were afraid of me."

  "Stop talking!" I seized the little runt and hauled him up to eye level. His right eye turned blue as he became the same height as me. His voice has deepened too.

  "I could have clawed through that bookcase and helped buy time," he said. "But you were scared. You still convinced yourself I was nothing but bad dreams. You let our mother face the monster alone."

  "Stop lying!"

  "That look when she died wasn't sadness, it was disappointment. Disappointment that her cowardly, selfish little whelp couldn't bring himself to let me loose. Because he was scared of me." I wrapped my hands abou
t his throat and tried to choke out the lies. He evaporated in my grip.

  "You can't kill your self-loathing," he said behind me. I turned to face him again. His skin had returned to my normal shade, but he wore neither mask nor eyepatch. "I'm more you than either of those masks you put on." He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder towards Shadowdemon and Travis, who stared blankly at us. I grabbed my 'self-loathing' and brought him face to face with me.

  "There's only me in here," I said.

  He smirked, turning to shadow again. "And we both know nobody hates you more than yourself." His claws raked across my chest, knocking me flat on my back. Michelangelo's blue eyes stared down at me with detachment. He was wearing my face. 'Self-loathing' landed on my chest and raised a claw to strike again.

  "There's only me in here," I repeated. "That means those aren't your powers."

  I wrapped myself in shadows and punted the twelve year old me to the far side of the street. I turned my gaze to the glowing blue eyes in Michelangelo's stolen face. "Michelangelo's eyes were yellow, Serar!" I shouted as I smashed through his avatar.

  My eyes popped open.

  Grabbing Serar's head, I threw the little gray gargoyle at the far wall. Much to my rage's displeasure, he halted in mid-air and wrapped himself in his angelic construct. I launched myself at him, claws tearing through ivory energy. I didn't manage to break through his defenses when Bussard screeched in horror.

  The explosion of magical energy knocked my wits out of me and left Mini-Uth-sk scrambling. It didn't help much as the ceiling came tumbling down.

  I choked on another cloud of dust as the ruins of the house shifted again. I was pinned quite soundly under far too many large blocks of stone. As best as I could figure it, the disruption of Bussard's ritual released the energy he'd mustered for it in an uncontrolled manner. It's really the only thing that explained why the ceiling was now trying to press me into a pancake. I could still wiggle my fingers and my toes, so I probably didn't have any serious nerve injuries. The pain seemed abnormally low, but then again, I'd been buried when in shadow form. As I recall, I'd taken being slammed into various parts of the Shining Future Arch by Jack in that form.

  The one upside to having my psyche torn open and literally coming face to face with my self-loathing was that I was beginning to accept the shadow as a piece of me. Having left it in control of my self-loathing, it had gone after what little I'd gotten right. Probably why he'd hit Xiv first. I'd saved him from the cultists, took him in, tutored him, started him down the path to helping others, and kept him from growing bitter or resentful. He isn't even my kid. Then he set about going after my family, then my team. If that was true, then what about Vanguard and the barn? The difference was, I'd been awake then, just deprived of my control. It wasn't my self-loathing that had hit them, it was my rage.

  I laughed.

  I was hopelessly pinned under the remains of a manor house where no one who cared knew I'd been, and I was psychoanalyzing myself. No one was going to find me. No one even knew to look for me. Well, Bryce and the Morlocks knew. That is, if they weren't down here too. The guards knew someone had been dragged inside before the house collapsed. They would, at the very least, come looking for Bussard. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility that they'd find me. My self-loathing mocked my pointless optimism, but I ignored him. Analytical me was right, I still stood a chance.

  The question dribbled back to the fore of my mind: could I actually control the shadow?

  I'd seized it from my self-loathing through simple epiphany. Could I conjure it through force of will? That's where I drew a blank. What do you focus on to trigger an active power? It couldn't be the same for everyone. Most people with powers manage to figure it out on their own. I didn't like what had triggered it before. Uncontrolled rage and self-loathing. There had to be a better way. One that my conscious self could use. Self-loathing laughed and said it didn't have to work at all. I might just have a super powered evil side. I shoved my old epiphany back in his face. I'd triggered it without losing control when I'd driven out Serar.

  What had I done then?

  I'd wrapped myself in shadows in my mindscape.

  Could it be that simple? Envision the change and cloak analytical me in gloom? It was worth a shot. Worst that could happen was my self-loathing would laugh at me. But he hated me anyway. I closed my eyes and stepped myself though the vision. The shadows moved like a blanket that clung to my skin. As soon as they'd enveloped me, I opened my eyes again.

  The tiny stone chamber my head was in appeared in flat colors, mostly grays and a few browns. There were no shadows nor gradients. It was as if darkness had been turned off. There was no light, but I could see. It was the same way I'd seen the alley, the streets and the city from the rooftop. I did have a power, and I could turn it on at will.

  That power, however, did not include strength. The stones resting atop me were still as unmovable as ever. Except, the house shifted again. Why did the house keep shifting? The collapse should have finished long ago. As stones closer to me ground against each other, it dawned on me. Someone was moving the rubble. I called out to try and get their attention. Rocks closer to me moved, the grinding of granite buoyed hope within me. I kept calling out. They called back, "Hang in there."

  The mass of rock directly over me lifted up, and Stoneclad looked down at me.

  "It's a... shadow," he said.

  "Let me bring some light," Photovolt said. I covered my face before a brilliant beam shot down into the cavity I occupied. Wherever the bright light fell upon me, the shadows evaporated and I felt weaker. "It's a Shadowdemon," Photovolt said.

  I kept my arm over my face. "I'm sort of short on a mask here," I said. The light stopped and my shadows returned.

  "Don't just stand there gawping," Torquespiral said. "Find him a mask and get him out of there."

  I didn't care that the domino mask they found me was red, I was just happy they freed my legs and I was able to climb towards the edge of the hole. Photovolt propped me up. As we moved, I caught sight of a red mess. From the shirt it was wearing, it used to be Bussard. Without defensive spells up, catching a couple hundred pounds of stone with his face had not gone well.

  "When this place came down, Serar was within arm's reach of me," I said. I dropped the shadow and slumped against the front bumper of an ambulance.

  "We'll look for him," Photovolt said.

  "In the meantime," Torquespiral said. "You're going to explain how you got here, and why you are not in your room at Vanguard. And make it terribly good, because the board is not in a forgiving mood these days."

  I looked up at him and explained the call from Cold Case, the exchange, and why Bussard wanted to bargain for me. I had a bigger audience than I intended as the tale unfolded. In the tale, the fight with my self-loathing became a battle with Serar inside my mind. Though I did include how causing a catastrophic disruption of the spell had not been intentional. "I had no idea that interrupting it would cause the whole thing to explode," I said.

  "Indeed," Torquespiral said. "And you came out of the hole looking a lot like a certain shadow who's been misbehaving all over town."

  "If you mean the fights with my team, I already reported that to them and the compliance officer. There's more to that than has been properly explored."

  "This is not the venue to explore potential disciplinary measures," Torquespiral said. "The matter will be addressed with the full board present, and all the facts at hand." He turned to look at the wreck of the house. "When I sold that thing, I figured it wouldn't be demolished again for quite some time. I guess I was wrong. I should have known better than to sell to someone who wanted to use it for rental property."

  "That is far from your biggest concern right now, Mister Edgars," Agent Overton said. It was the first time I'd seen him in person. He was taller than he looked on telev
ision. "We have an ambassador killed by an explosion near a member of your organization in a town recently beset by bombs set off by Community Fund members. Your board is not the only ones who will be taking a very close look at what happened here." Overton turned to me. "I have a few questions."

  "And you can ask them after he's had a chance to see a doctor," Torquespiral said. "We just pulled him from under a building."

  Given that he'd also just let me sit there and prattle on, it seemed like an odd reversal, until I saw the twitch in Overton's cheek muscle. Torquespiral wasn't playing the medical attention card because he thought I was hurt, he was doing it because the rules said he could, and he'd been butting heads with Overton. He motioned to the EMTs. "Take him back to Vanguard to get checked out. And tell the doctors to put guards on his room this time so he doesn't wander off again."