Auditor Mia Noel strode into the room on long legs, her slender hips rolling beneath a charcoal pencil skirt. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, about five foot ten, and tan, and she had curves in all the right places. She ran long fingers through her curling chestnut hair. “While you took care of his golem, two squads of mundane Agents apprehended the Puppeteer, so win for the mundanes,” she corrected, her cut-glass accent almost, but not quite, covering a trace of something foreign in her speech. The distinction was important. John Brown’s murderous, deicidal activities of the previous year wouldn’t have been possible without exploiting several individuals, my daughter included, with attunements to other dimensions. Coupled with the activities of the Escapees, even we “good” attuned weren’t popular in the Sons of Perseus. We had needed a win, but the glory would be going to the normals. Again.
Altogether, the Sons had taken down over a dozen of the Escapees in the last three months, leaving only the cleverest, the sneakiest, and the most dangerous free: the Protean, the Choker, the Father, the King, the Dancer, and…Stacy. We’d lost a triad of the attuned and twenty agents so far, but the body count amongst the general public had been much higher—and much harder to cover up. Even the office peon, me, knew that there was government pressure on the Sons to finish bringing the Escapees to justice, and Mia saw each one that we attuned didn’t personally bring in as a lost opportunity to prove ourselves to the cause.
Christian helped me up, and then he and Mia proceeded to give me more details and take my debriefing statement. They’d done the same with the rest of the team hours ago, but as usual they’d stuck around, waiting until I woke up from my laws-of-nature-imposed slumber. When they finished with the official bits, Mia sighed and put down her notepad. “You know, Julian, you’d be a lot more useful to us if you could use your powers more than once without passing out.”
“I keep telling you, I don’t give a damn about being useful for you. I just want my little girl. Now quit stalling. Tell me about my mother,” I retorted. I was tired, but this was the unofficial part of our deal. After every debrief, Mia would answer a couple of questions. Truthfully.
Mia lounged in a leather couch that didn’t even depress under her slight weight. She took a long pull of water from a canteen, sighed, and spoke: “I’ve already told you, Julian. She was a prodigy; at fifteen, she was a sorceress of great skill, surpassing even the Senior Auditor, but she went too far. After what happened with Father, I think perhaps it’s impossible to really comprehend knowledge alien to our reality without being changed by it.”
I nodded. Her adoptive father, Senior Auditor John Brown, had delved too deeply into forbidden knowledge, and he’d ended up with tentacle arms and a slug butt. Mia wiped her brow. “Your mother, Nancy Simmons, had a belief, one that the Sons couldn’t stand. She claimed that the Sons of Perseus would fall. That one by one the chapters would succumb to forces from beyond, and a new age of darkness would sweep across the earth—unless they followed her lead.” The well-turned-out woman paused to sip more water, and I balled my fists, frustrated.
“I know, you’ve told me this before. But where did she get her belief from? Answer me, damn it!” I’d been involved in taking down half a dozen of the Escapees, but Mia doled out information like a miser giving alms.
The auditor was unflappable; she nodded and continued, “Your mother claimed that she’d managed to see behind the curtain of time.”
I gave a barking laugh and lifted my head to look her in the eyes. “And what the hell does that mean, Mia?”
“Language,” Christian rumbled from near the door.
“I don’t know what it means, Mr. Adler. And even if I did, I don’t know if that information would help you,” the auditor volleyed back at me.
I took a deep breath. Mia had been raised by the Sons, had been part of their organization for decades, but she wasn’t trusted, and it was entirely possible that she was telling me the truth. Even with a lifetime of flawless service, she’d only reached her current rank due to a large number of deaths above her in the organization. That’s what happened when you were one of the attuned in the Sons of Perseus. Mia’s gift was as an opener: something in her makeup destabilized the fabric of our reality, making extradimensional forces, and gateways in particular, easier to use. That had helped us stop her father from destroying the world financial system last year. Not that that had counted for her in the Sons. I decided to poke at that; it seemed like a good idea. “Well, why don’t you tell me something that your superiors have shared with you?”
Mia’s nostrils flared ever so slightly. Oh, she was furious. Of course, I had killed her father less than a year prior. She took a deep breath, crossed her long, stocking-covered legs, and continued, “Your mother claimed that humanity wasn’t strong enough to save itself. That it needed help. She didn’t have formal rank, but her skill brought her a knot of followers.”
“What kind of help? Just say it,” I said. We were finally reaching new information, and I was aching to unravel the mystery of where my mother had disappeared to for over a dozen years before showing up to kidnap my daughter last fall. The woman glanced away. It looked like she was stalling, which I interpreted to mean that we were reaching some juicy information.
“She wanted to intentionally breed hybrids: extradimensionally touched, attuned children,” Mia said. A knot of worry clenched in the pit of my stomach as she spoke in a dry whisper: “Your mother walked a razor’s edge along the Sons’ dogma for two years, but although her sympathizers grew in numbers, the establishment stonewalled her.”
My head spun, and I almost toppled off the chair. I didn’t like where this was headed. “Keep going,” I said, blinking. From where I was sitting, I could see Christian’s hand grasping the doorframe so hard that his knuckles were white. Apparently this information was pretty juicy.
“Your mother pulled a Martin Luther, nailing a demand to the doors of the London headquarters. She claimed that time was running out and that if she didn’t get support from the Sons, then she and her followers would take action unilaterally. The Chapter Master ordered the immediate detention of Nancy Simmons and her chief followers. Someone tipped her off, though, and she fled with some followers to the United States, disappearing into the vast interior,” she said.
My eyelids lowered, and I looked at the floor. “Just finish it, damn you.”
The auditor cleared her throat. “We looked for quite some time, and we finally found her when you were twelve years old. She made the mistake of going to Milwaukee, and one of our agents spotted her. Senior Auditor Brown joined a strike team from the American chapter out of Chicago, and they attempted to apprehend your mother. She was cornered in a building, which our operatives set on fire. Her body was found, blackened but identifiable from dental records, after the ashes cooled. We were able to trace her back to your family from the missing persons report. That’s when the Sons started keeping an eye on you and your siblings. You seem to be her only successful experiment.”
Mia stepped over me on her way to the door, looking back over her shoulder at the threshold. “I believe that will be all for tonight, but you’d better get to bed early—we have a lead on another one of the Escapees, and we’re going after her in the morning.” Mia click-clacked out of the room.
“Shit.” Out of time.
Chapter 4
2100, Sunday, June 12–0800, Monday, June 13, 2016
I didn’t know how to feel about Mia’s revelation. Except pissed off at my mother. Definitely that. I was proud of my abilities and what I’d done with them. Originally, I’d visited other people’s nightmares, fighting and banishing their fears. When I’d been attacked by a dream demon known as a puca, it had unlocked a (very limited) ability to shape the real world in the same way that I could shape dreams. Finally, last fall, I’d been forced to learn how to Dreamwalk, to jump from dream to dream, in order to hunt down a madman who’d been killing people in their sleep, and to stop an evil sorcerer f
rom slaying a god. Did it matter then that I’d been designed to do just those sorts of things? Had I fought because I wanted to, or because it had been bred into me?
Even more concerning, how could my mom have done this to me? A mother should keep her children safe, first, last, and always. Instead, mine had thrust me and my family into a world of supernatural danger. Part of that family, a woman who really did put her child first, chose that moment to walk into the room. “I’m glad you made it home before I went to bed. I feel much…safer with you here. You were only out for, what, a little over four hours this time?” Dana asked.
I nodded, sat up in bed, and looked at my wife, taking in her straight, dark-brown hair, hazel eyes, and pale skin that glowed orange in the evening light. I’d told her earlier about the mission, but I decided at this moment that I had to tell her about the information Mia had imparted. I couldn’t start keeping secrets from my wife again. “Dana, there’s something more…”
“What do you think?” I asked, voice trembling, after I told her what had been revealed about my mother. In response, my wife waddled over to the bed, sat, and took my hand, answering the question without words. She leaned her head on my shoulder, and I felt her warmth and softness press up against me. Her hair tickled my chin, and I smelled honeysuckle and lavender. I reached up with one hand and scratched her head, eliciting a small sigh of contentment. It was the same sigh that she gave after she had the first sip of a good wine or when she sat down on a beach lounger at the start of a vacation. The last year had been a trial that would have tried Job’s patience, but at least we were together, and I was more thankful than ever that Dana had come back to me. Eventually she looked up at me. “Are they really sending you out again tomorrow?” she asked.
I considered my answer before replying. I’d used a huge amount of extradimensional energy to throw the corrosive green blast at the golem, but I’d been practicing with my team for months, and I found that I was recovering faster than I used to. I thought for a second and then nodded. “As long as I get a good night’s sleep to recharge, I think that I should be okay.” The previous year, I’d blundered around, tapping into the energy of the Dreamscape on instinct. However, the first lesson that the Sons had given me as part of our knowledge-for-service initiative was around the nature of my real-world abilities. Like my ability to Dreamwalk, they were part of my entanglement with the Dreamscape; some infinitesimal proportion of me was made up of matter not of this dimension. Instead of dying from this abnormality, my body had adapted, growing to require the energy of the Dreamscape, which it normally replenished in large quantities when I dealt with other people’s nightmares. Using up that energy could cause me to pass out—or worse.
“Are you sure?” Dana asked.
Even if my mom had had me created as part of some experiment, I still wasn’t going to let monsters roam around London if I could help it. Especially when I carried some of the responsibility for them being free. And for a lot of people dying. “Yeah, I’ll be good to go,” I replied, setting my jaw and swallowing a lump in my throat.
My wife nodded. “In that case, I’ll order in some fried chicken and ice cream. Get yourself good and full, and get some shut-eye,” she said, displaying her continued ignorance of proper comfort food and proving that you can take the girl out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the girl. I mean, if it had been bratwurst and ribs, that would have been proper comfort food. Dana rose but stopped in the doorway; she turned back to me, a fragile smile on her face. “Who knows, maybe karma will balance out, and you’ll find Olivia tonight.”
◆◆◆
After a disappointing night spent staking a rat-toothed nosferatu who was stalking a bus driver, I rose and left Dana in bed. She was so heavily pregnant that she needed the extra sleep, and I figured that there was no reason to wake her up just to disappoint her. I’d save that for date night. I arrived at Shepherd’s Bush station a bit after nine in the morning. A WhatsApp pinged on my phone, and at the signal, I ambled over to Costa and grabbed a sausage roll and some caffeine.
A man walked up behind me. “About time you got here,” he said in a broad Afrikaans accent.
I glanced over my shoulder. “Morning, Christian,” I said, sipping on my energy drink.
His jaw muscles stood out as he ground his teeth. “No names.” Christian then beckoned to a table in the corner, where Vir was waiting. “Eat your brekkie. Then I’ll fill you in.”
I sauntered over to the indicated table. “Yo, V-man. How’s tricks?”
“Mmhsk,” Vir replied with his mouth full as he took a long drink of espresso. He shook his head, and the lid of a nearby empty coffee cup flapped up and down. “Yo, J-dog. I’m chill. I watched, like, twelve hours of cricket last night. India beat Zimbabwe by nine wickets. They had forty-five balls left. It was amaaaaazing,” the coffee cup said.
“First of all, you could tell me that India won by catching the Golden Snitch, and I’d believe you. Second—did you get any sleep?”
Vir shook his head and raised his espresso at me. “Who can sleep before these missions? I mean, besides you, dream-guy? I sure can’t. But the great god caffeine will get me through.”
Vir’s eyes darted toward the door, and I thought that he hardly needed any more caffeine. “Mate, I’m pretty sure that everyone else got some sleep. This is some serious shit—” But before I could finish the sentence, Vir waggled his bushy black eyebrows behind his glasses, and my sausage roll started to inch across the table in his direction.
I slapped my hand down on the possessed pastry and decided to let Vir’s lack of preparation go. That was the problem with working with someone so much younger, who hadn’t been in the corporate world—they didn’t get preparation. He also wasn’t getting my food because I scarfed the greasy sausage roll down in three big bites.
Vir and I chatted about sports, video games, and his nonexistent love life. “It’s hard to find time to meet any lovely ladies when you have to spend your Friday evening learning the Elder Futhark,” Vir said at one point. I wouldn’t know—I’d been married for years, and Dana was helping me study every night. She seemed to love all of this supernatural stuff. Eventually, Christian beckoned us to join him outside with a few other agents who’d been at another table. They didn’t like eating with the attuned.
Christian pointed at Vir. “You, go around the side of the shopping center, by the big TV screen.” He was referring to a twenty-foot-tall advertising screen at the side of the Westfield Shopping Centre. He turned to me. “You wait on the green. Take the target down if you see her, and remember that we have her rated as a class three. We should be able to handle her with the team we have,” Christian said, pointing to some benches in the small park across the Uxbridge Road. The big man’s eyes roamed around the green nervously. We both knew that this operation, like most of our operations lately, was massively understrength. Vir and I should have been joined by an attuned with more offensive firepower, and there were only half-a-dozen agents. A class three was part of the Sons’ threat classification rating. The golem that I’d blasted was a class one: physical enemy, susceptible to mundane damage, capable of destroying within one hour a single residential structure or killing occupants of said structure. A class three could do the same to a city block.
“Yes, sir.” I nodded, clicked my heels, and marched across the road, taking advantage of a break in the traffic. By the time I took my bench, Christian’s dark-suited form was vanishing around the corner, in the direction of the Westfield Shopping Centre. I was being a smartass when I called Christian “sir,” but he really was three levels above me, albeit in a different department in the organization. When they’d offered to recruit me, I’d been surprised at the complex hierarchy of the Sons of Perseus, but I probably shouldn’t have been: the secret society had been founded in an era when the finest minds in the world had bent their faculties to classifying the choirs of angels. Of course they’d spend time devising an elaborate hierarchy for their se
cret, monster-hunting society.
To explain the Sons’ organization as simply as I can: At the top, there is the grand master, who runs all of the various worldwide chapters of the Sons and has a small army of flunkies to help with the admin. I have no idea where he or she is based. I didn’t rate that info. Within geographic regions, such as the East Coast of the US, Great Britain and Ireland, Asia Minor, and so on, there are chapter masters that are responsible for the extradimensional threats in their areas and are highly autonomous. The British chapter, at least, was then subdivided into various departments with a complex system of seniority. Each department was run by a confessor, who had a number of deacons, who in turn were served by acolytes. Acolytes formed the vast bulk of the Sons of Perseus and generally were referred to as “agents” when in public, because “acolyte” just sounds like something out of some bad Warhammer 40k fluff. Below acolytes you have novices, who are essentially trainees, and then at the very bottom are the penitents. All attuned started as penitents, and normal humans could end up there too if they did something truly heinous, like screwing the Chapter Master’s daughter and posting the video online. Outside of that hierarchy sat the auditors: internal security, usually sorcerers, who kept tabs on everything, especially the attuned. They answered only to the Senior Auditor, and he only to the Chapter Master.
Within my department I was the lowest of the low, a junior penitent. Since my department, Special Assets, was also the most junior in the order, I was officially the office peon. However, today I was out of the office, hunting another of the Escapees. There had originally been twenty, but the Sons had already tracked down fourteen, and today’s target, the Choker, would make fifteen.
Dreamonologist Page 4
