Mary-Anne dug deep into her memory. Something sounded familiar in all of this. Some knowledge she was told years ago about Kurtherians who had the ability to body jump.
Is that what Ezekiel was? A Kurtherian parading around as a human? Was the technology that great that they could take human form and pass off as a perfect copy of a being without raising suspicion?
“Mary-Anne?”
Mary-Anne remained quiet.
“You there?” Helena asked.
Mary-Anne snapped from her thoughts. “Sorry, I’m not used to people calling me by my real name.”
“You’ve heard the stories, haven’t you?” Helena pressed.
Mary-Anne grunted her agreement. “But what has that got to do with the Madness? What has that got to do with the boy? What has the Queen Bitch and her history got to do with anything?”
“It’s got everything to do with it,” Helena snapped, for the first time allowing her patience to break. “Don’t you understand? It’s because of the Kurtherian nanocytes that all this has happened. Without them, the world would be ticking by right now. Humans would be holding hands in a world where no Mad roamed the land looking to eat people’s faces.”
“I doubt it,” Mary-Anne responded. “Someone pushed the red button to start WWDE. Somehow the world would have fallen to shit one way or another. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about humans, it’s that they don’t like to look after the things they can’t fix.”
Helena continued, unfazed. “I’ve spent over seven decades looking for a cure. Reading everything I could find. I even stumbled across entries from diaries and journals written by Frank Kurns.”
Mary-Anne’s face dropped. “The Frank Kurns?”
“The very one. A member of TQB himself, and the one rumored to have inducted Bethany-Anne into the UnknownWorld all those years ago. I studied everything I could about the history, everything I could about the nanocytes. Anything I could find that might suggest the answer. I traipsed across the country. I made friends, and I lost them. I killed, and I healed, and you know what all of that added up to at the end of the day?”
Mary-Anne shook her head.
“Squat!” Helena exclaimed. “Nothing more than a formula for a concoction that can slow the damn thing down. A formula that two vampires laying in this very room are now taking on the hope that they may be spared a few more precious days to fix this mess.”
Mary-Anne grew confused. “I don’t understand. If all of that was wasted time, why are you telling me all of this?”
Finally, Helena twisted her head in her strap. Mary-Anne copied suit until they faced each other. “Because the boy has found one of the beings. A sentient entity trapped inside a machine who may have all the answers we’ve been looking for.”
Mary-Anne gasped. “How? What is it?”
“She calls herself Lilith. She speaks as though she’s met Bethany-Anne directly, and seems to know all there is to know about the nanocytes.”
Mary-Anne began straining against her straps. “Well, let’s get going, then. Let’s go to her. Do you know where she is?”
Helena relaxed back on her bench and looked at the ceiling. “Ah. There’s the rub.”
Mary-Anne frowned. “What? You can’t be telling me you don’t know where she is? You realize we’re both dying? Let’s go find her before it’s too late!”
Helena turned back to Mary-Anne. “I can’t. But you all can.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lilith lies across the sea. Across the Atlantic, in Europe. We’ve had no means to fly to her, nor am I sure I would even have lasted the journey. You have to promise me that you’ll find her. Take Ezekiel, and swear you’ll keep him safe. You have to go on your way without me.” She turned to the window. “I saw your dirigible. A marvelous piece of technology, and something I thought I might never see again. You can fly there, right? Fly to Lilith and find the answers we need.”
Mary-Anne struggled to process all this information. That the answer to the Madness could actually be rooted in the history of the Queen Bitch, herself? It all somehow seemed ludicrous.
And this Lilith, a sentient being inside technology way across the sea? How was that even possible? How could…
“How do you know that this Lilith even exists?” Mary-Anne asked. “If she’s thousands of miles away across the Atlantic, how can you possibly know?”
The corner of Helena’s mouth pinched into a crooked smile. “Because she speaks directly to the boy.”
Chapter Nineteen
Potato Creek State Park, Illinois
Kain gave Helena an incredulous look.
“Okay, so let me get this straight. You’re suggesting that the six of us—”
Caitlin coughed and nodded to Jaxon. The pooch lay on her lap, head resting on his paws.
“Sorry, Kitty-Cat. Can’t forget the dog now. That the seven of us fix up the flying space ship which we crash-landed into the trees—thanks to a superstorm—and blindly set out on a mission thousands of miles across the ocean where there’s literally zero places to land safely if anything goes wrong and search for a place that none of us have ever visited. All in order to go and find some kind of machine which may or may not hold the answers to fixing the Madness once and for all.” He looked around the room. “Does that about cover it?”
To his surprise, Caitlin, Ezekiel, and Helena simply smiled and nodded.
Kain’s mouth flapped. He looked at Cammie and Royland for help, but they wouldn’t meet his eyes. When he spoke, it was with the condescending tone of a parent telling their child that sometimes it’s okay to give your Nana sugar in her tea, but what you shouldn’t do is replace the sugar with salt. “Okay, I’m not saying that I’m not eager to help put an end to all of this shit—particularly with Ma pushed even closer toward the brink of batshit crazy herself—”
“Thanks for that,” Mary-Anne put in.
Kain gave her a sour look. “You’re welcome. But can we stop and think about this for a minute? This is suicide. You know that to get to Europe would take days? Maybe even weeks? We traveled a couple of nights and got smacked by lightning. What are we going to do if we crash into the ocean? I can’t swim. And I doubt that Jaxon will be happy acting as a life raft for everyone, do you?”
“Kain…” Caitlin warned.
Kain stood up, running a hand through his air. “What’s going to happen when we get there? We’re just magically going to find this robot and ask it to click its mechanical fingers and fix everything? How do we even know that it exists?”
“Kain,” Mary-Anne tried.
His voice rose steadily as the panic set in. “And don’t you think that if—and I’m talking the extremely unlikely case that this thing actually exists, because how the hell do we really know it’s real? If, if, if, if, IF this thing exists, don’t you think it’ll be protected? Don’t you think that forces across the pond are already aware of it and they’ll already be protecting it? Maybe this machine is the reason for all of this in the first place. Did—”
“Kain!” Caitlin shouted.
“What!” He whirled, and Jaxon’s ears spiked as he raised his head, upset at the disturbance.
Caitlin held Kain’s gaze for a few seconds before turning to Ezekiel. Up until this point, it had been Helena dishing out the instructions to the group. It had been she who had told them of Lilith and all of the information she’d had on how to find her and what this could mean for the group. Meanwhile, Ezekiel had sat quietly, as though he had been stuck in yet another trance, but now Caitlin handed over the baton. “Zeke, It’s over to you, buddy.”
Ezekiel took a deep breath and then begun to explain. He told them about the voice he had begun to hear in his head back in Salem. Of the intelligence who called herself Lilith, and the connection which they seemed to share.
He told them that she had spoken to him about the Madness. That he had tested her at first, verifying Helena’s theories about the nanocytes and the corruption that had
spread through the population. She had told him things that no creature on Earth should have known. Things which he hadn’t known himself, but when he had spoken of them to Helena, her eyes had widened with surprise. She couldn’t believe the knowledge he now had.
“When I quiet my mind, I can connect to her,” he murmured to a room so silent and attentive that the only movement was Ezekiel turning his head to meet everyone’s eyes. “She has begged for me to come to Her for weeks now. She tells me that there is great danger, and that time is short.”
“Why didn’t you go, then?” Royland asked. “Why didn’t you heed her call yourself?”
Cammie gave a soft slap to his stomach. “Because he had no means to cross the ocean,” she told him. “He’s just one boy, and she’s just one woman.”
Helena’s chin jerked in annoyance. “Excuse me, I’m a vampire.”
“You won’t be for long,” Kain muttered.
Mary-Anne shot him a look.
“What? I’m just saying. If we’re really actually considering this absolute fuckfest of a mission, then shouldn’t we all be really honest with what’s going on here?” He pointed to Helena. “She’s going to go into full Mad-mode in the next few days,” he swung his arm to Mary-Anne, “She’s a few weeks behind on the timescale, but with the unpredictability of the damned thing she could still turn at any moment—as we’ve seen.” He turned his attention to Ezekiel. “And this boy thinks he can hear voices from halfway across the world. How do we know that he’s not going Mad?”
At this, Ezekiel suddenly stood up, eyes fixed on Kain’s. A grim, determined expression had come over his face, and now his chest rose and fell in great waves.
“Er, what’s the kid doing?” Kain asked.
But no one in the room answered. Instead, they all stared as Ezekiel’s eyes began to glow a bright red. He raised a palm as if cupping a ball, and now his hand glowed a strange yellow color. An orb of light formed in the center of his palm, hovering an inch or so from the skin.
When it had formed into a solid mass, around the size of a baseball, he tossed it against the far wall and sent it smashing through the window where it rolled on the grass outside, leaving a trailing burnt afterglow in the dark.
Kain crossed to the window, able to just about see the trail of blackened grass which had followed in the orb’s wake. He turned, open-mouthed, and met Ezekiel’s eyes.
“Magic?” he breathed.
“Not magic,” Helena replied.
“Not true,” Ezekiel refuted. “Esme always told me that once a technology is sufficiently advanced, it appears as magic.” He paused. “I’m paraphrasing. What I mean is, if everyone believes that it’s magic, who’s to say any differently?”
Helena narrowed her eyes. “Yes, well. You know whose side of that argument I agree with. There’s no such thing as magic. What you’ve just witnessed is the full potential of the Kurtherian nanocytes. An unlocked version of the very same technology that lives within me, and you, and you, and you. Even the dog may have them, for all we know.”
She looked up at Ezekiel, suddenly protective over her charge. “We don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but what we do know is that the boy possesses a gift that none of us understand or know the limits of.”
“Esme understood,” Ezekiel mumbled.
Helena chose to ignore him, focusing instead of Kain. “If you’re telling me that, in a room filled with Weres, vampires, humans. In a world where the Madness exists that you can’t believe that another form of this technology could also exist, then I ask you to leave my premises. These doubts are not conducive to progress. However, if you wish to save your friend any time soon, then you best get your big-boy believing pants on and prepare for a fucking voyage because there’s no other way that this damn thing will end. Of that, I am sure.”
Kain was stunned into silence. It had been years since somebody had been so brazen and spoken to him in that tone.
Caitlin made mental notes, finally glad to find a way to shut him up. Sure, in this scenario, Kain really had been the voice of reason. But the old vampire made some points that couldn’t be argued with.
If a woman who had spent the last seven decades looking for the cure believed that this might be the only way to stop the damned thing, then who were they to argue? Even though Helena teetered on the edge of Madness, the proof in Ezekiel’s powers was inarguable.
Helena breathed heavily, eyes locked momentarily on Kain’s. The next moment, she raised a hand to her head and took a seat, eyes screwed shut.
Ezekiel crossed the room and took a seat beside her. “Helena. Is it happening?”
She nodded. “Take me to the table.”
Cammie and Royland were on the edge of their seats, unsure of what was happening.
“Is she okay?” Cammie asked.
“She will be. It’s just an episode,” Caitlin assured her as Ezekiel and Kain helped Helena out of the room to the place where they could strap her down and wait for the old vampire to ride out the wave.
I hope…
When Ezekiel and Kain returned, they could still hear Helena in the other room. Although the walls were thick, the house hadn’t been designed as a soundproof bunker. They could hear her grunting and struggling against her bonds. The occasional cry sprang from her mouth and sent shudders down their spines.
They waited it out patiently. The group sat in the living room, talking about what was to come next. After seeing Helena in the state she was in while Mad, Kain’s eyes kept glancing over to Mary-Anne, a pitying expression marring his features much like Ezekiel’s were.
It was cute in a sad way. To see Kain care so deeply about the vampire he had spent most of his time mocking. Caitlin wondered what was going through his head. How he was really dealing with her condition, and how he would deal with the things to come.
And just what exactly did lie ahead? If the path to victory lay thousands of miles away across the sea, was that something that the group could bear? Were they really going to place all of their hopes into Helena and Ezekiel’s plan?
Of course, we are, Caitlin thought, looking at Ma as she stood quietly in the corner of the room. Because if we can’t heal Mary-Anne, what else is there to do? I am not losing more people that I love to this goddamn disease.
Helena screamed again. The room fell quiet, each one wondering when the cries would stop.
“We should be able to fix her,” Royland reasoned when there came another break in Helena’s outbursts.
Ezekiel looked at Royland questioningly.
“The ship. The dirigible, I mean,” he clarified. “The crew was making great progress on the hole, so it should be airborne by morning.”
“Sure,” Cammie countered. “Airborne, but not prepared for the long voyage you’re all talking of taking. We’ve added a band aid to a cut. We need to put on the antiseptic, bandage that baby up, and have the whole thing checked before we can even think of heading to Europe. The last time anyone voyaged that far…”
A small smile came to Cammie and Royland’s faces as they shared a memory of the vampire they had traveled with who had since taken to the stars—Valerie.
“Where do you expect to fix her?” Kain asked. “It’s not like there’s a mechanic nearby where we can just drop her off for a quick once-over.” He threw his arms into the air. “It’s hopeless. We’ve got nothing. A suicide mission, and a ship that won’t make the voyage.” He turned to Mary-Anne, a hint of mania in his eyes. “How about it, Ma? Shall we just call it quits and submit to the will of the Madness? Helena’s doing it. How about you bite me in the neck, right here, and then maybe I can just get it over with. It’s not like you’re going to survive the journey, is it?”
Mary-Anne’s eyes grew dark. She didn’t want to tell them that, at that moment, she was fighting the very urges which Kain described. She closed her eyes and turned away.
Kain threw out a hand toward the vampire. “See? Even Ma thinks the whole thing is stupid. Just admit it, Caitlin
. We’ve hit a dead end. It’s over. We’ll never make it—”
Cammie’s slap rang around the room. Kain’s hand moved to his cheek, feeling the warmth as blood rose to the surface of the skin.
“You hit me,” he complained.
“Somebody had to,” Cammie replied. “Do you realize how crazy you sound?”
“How crazy I sound?” he demanded.
“That’s right,” she continued. “Do you realize what this world’s been through? Do you realize the struggles, the trials and tribulations that have brought about each age that has come before ours? When the Nazis rose to power, people thought they couldn’t be defeated and that the world as we knew it was over. It wasn’t.”
Kain’s mouth opened and closed. “But…”
Cammie paid him no mind. “When technology was brought into the world and people thought the year 2000 signaled the end of all things as we knew it, we survived. I’ve known Weres who have wandered through the apocalypse and rebuilt the land. I’ve known vampires who have overcome their own families and fought off evil in order to make the world a better place.”
“That’s not what I’m…
Cammie continued, undeterred. “I know one vampire who came into the Unknown world with less knowledge than a newborn has on algebra, and she tackled everything which came her way. She overcame age-old feuds, she learned to harness Kurtherian technology, and she’s out there right now battling to keep our tiny shithole of a planet safe.”
She waited for Kain to interrupt once more, but he had fallen silent. He looked at his feet as if ashamed.
“And now our small band of fighters has a chance to restore the world to rights. To help rebuild the world one more time, and you’re shaking in your boots, cowering before the job at hand? Well, let me tell you something. There are only a few moments in our life where we get to choose what truly defines us. Moments when life asks you who you want to become, and you get to make your choice.
“Your choice is now, Kain. Mary-Anne. Caitlin. Zeke—”
“Ezekiel,” Ezekiel corrected.
“Whatever.” Cammie dismissed. “So, what choice do you want to make?”
Chasing The Cure: Age Of Madness - A Kurtherian Gambit Series (The Caitlin Chronicles Book 5) Page 15
