Of course, I took the time to consider all of that because I was trying to put off confronting my failure. “Vir, how are you feeling?” I asked. Much to my surprise, the television didn’t start talking to me, nor did the bottle of juice on the counter bother to glance in my direction—Vir must have been hurt pretty badly.
“Hey, buddy,” Vir said weakly, with a strained smile on his face. “My chakras are chapped, my chi is chipped, and my mojo is mangled.” His eyes darted from side to side, and then he beckoned me in and whispered in my ear, “Henry drained me. He slurped down my powers like shucked oysters. I feel…empty inside.”
“I’m sorry. I should have been convincing him to hand himself in, but I let him spin me some story about Anne Boleyn and witchcraft,” I lied, leaning back and putting a hand on the smaller man’s shoulder, knowing that my friend had been hurt because I’d been unwilling to follow my orders and capture Henry.
“Don’t apologize, man. He took from me, but I took from him too. I saw into him. He is a complete and utter selfish bastard, but he isn’t evil, and he’s certainly not a monster. Not like some of the others.” Vir glanced at the corners of the room and twitched his head up. I leaned in again, and Vir mouthed, “I won’t try to take him again.”
My palms went sweaty. We both knew what happened to extradimensionally attuned people who refused to do the Sons’ bidding; we’d been tracking them down for the past half year. I shook my head, but my friend’s usually mischievous face was set in a rictus of determination, and I closed my eyes and nodded.
“I’m sure that it’ll take you a few weeks to recover. Then we can go get that bastard,” I said loudly for the benefit of the bugs in the room. Vir’s eyes narrowed in confusion for a moment, but then they widened with comprehension; he looked me straight in the eyes, and I nodded very slowly. A grin spread across his face, making him look like himself for the first time since I’d arrived.
As I left the hospital, I felt relieved that Vir had come to the same decision that I had: Henry wasn’t evil, and we weren’t going to go along with the Sons’ plans to recapture him—if he wanted to help Mia, that was his business. The message had been delivered. Of course, that also meant that I needed to wrap this up before Vir got out of the hospital, because I was going to need the support of the Sons to deal with the coming outbreak. I was just about to hop on the train into the office when I got a text from Dana: I’ve got it.
Chapter 17
0300–0400, Tuesday, June 21, 2016
I opened my eyes. I was garbed in trench coat and armed with gladius as I surveyed the Dreamscape around me. I could barely make out the shape of hedgerows rising up on either side of me. To my rear there was a rectangle of radiance that showed a break in the hedges. Pinkish light illuminated a road where a bus rumbled by; at first it was an old-fashioned Routemaster, and then for a few moments it flickered into a low, long, evil bendy-bus, and finally it became a modern, hybrid double-decker. The progression tickled something in my memory as I tried to figure out where I had appeared.
I clenched and unclenched my fists, fervently hoping that I was wherever the real Sigilum Dei Aemath was hidden. When I’d arrived home, Dana had been waiting for me with one of the British Museum’s copies and one of the British state’s coppers. A Sergeant Elizabeth Okoye had been assigned to ensure that no harm came to the object—even though it was a fake, it was a museum-quality fake. I also assumed that she was going to ensure that the Metropolitan Police were on hand when I tried to recover the real artifact.
Of course, recovering the real artifact would require that I figure out where in the hell I was. I’d prepared in the real world for my attempt to locate the Sigilum by placing the item under my pillow and putting a line of salt around my bed. A similar procedure had worked in the past when I’d needed to visit a particular person or place, but I’d been working with pieces of the originals then. This was a step removed, and I wasn’t sure it would function in the same way. That’s why Dana and I had spent the evening inscribing a copy of the Sigilum around the bed as Sergeant Okoye looked on, shaking her curly-haired head bemusedly. Then I’d gone to sleep and opened my eyes…here.
Unfortunately, I doubted that the answer to where the mysterious Sigilum was would be found by going toward the well-lit, safe-looking street; rolling my eyes, I sauntered into the eerie, silent darkness. As I ambled forward, feigning insouciance, I reached out with my mental probes into the Dreamscape, searching for a dreamer. I wasn’t sure if there would be one in this circumstance, but to my enormous surprise I sensed not one, not two, but well over a dozen presences. However, where a normal dreamer’s mind is like the taste of sunshine or the sound of creation, these presences were the opposite. They brought to mind ancient, unbending monoliths and empty, hungry night, making me shiver and draw my senses back. I’d never felt minds like these before, and I guessed that they belonged to the foreseen vampires—which told me that they were currently sleeping. Not something vampires are well known to do at night. I had to file that fact away for later consideration.
I had been visiting nightmares since I was a child, so I set my jaw against the things in front of me, steeled my nerves, and pointed my rolling gait in their direction. The scenery around me gradually coalesced out of the darkness, and I recognized my surroundings: a cemetery, but not the one that I’d seen in my previous, blood-soaked nightmares. I recognized my surroundings because I was only a few hundred yards from where my body was currently slumbering! Tombstones rose around me, and a small church, pulsing with tendrils of ebon light (hey—it’s a dream, it doesn’t always make sense) loomed before me. I was in the Kensington and Chelsea Cemetery. Which, proving that the profession of realtor was alive and well for the Victorians, was located in Hanwell, nearly ten miles from the nearest border of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Knowing where I was made me feel bolder, and I decided that I’d had enough of the dark, so I called forth a memory of shining for deer as a teenager back in Wisconsin and materialized a ten-million-candlepower UV spotlight—my favorite vampire-slaying weapon. I shielded my eyes and flicked it on—then wished I hadn’t. The beam that emanated from the spotlight had turned night into day, and would have fried any lurking vampires crispier than a bucket of the Colonel’s finest, but it wasn’t vampires that were between me and the evilly pulsating church. It was rats. Thousands and thousands of rats. I shuddered and took a few steps backward as their beady, red eyes turned in my direction.
I didn’t have trouble dealing with vampires, demons, abusers, or muggers. I had good strategies for all of those bad dreams, but I’d never found a good way to deal with swarms. I thought for a moment about the Pied Piper of Hamelin but discarded the idea; last time I’d tried to call on the collective unconscious, I’d ended up being barbecued by a very well-known dragon. With a squeal, the rats surged, and I scarpered.
Using a thread of will, I accelerated to a speed that would have let me race a thoroughbred, opening up a gap on the chittering horde as I jinked between jutting tombstones. The dragon thing hadn’t worked, but the idea of fire stuck in my mind, so I pulled up one of my hillbilliest, most “hold my beer” memories—and grabbed the homemade flamethrower that I suddenly had on my back.
I set my spotlight on the ground, and its beam illuminated ten thousand glowing-red eyes, so I unleashed a jet of flaming, jellied gasoline. The fuel poured over the writhing carpet of rodents, and several hundred furry little bodies ignited with a whoompf. The rats screeched, kicking and thrashing, and most of those caught in my attack died within seconds, some setting their neighbors alight. I smiled and played the hose left and right, the heat of the flames making the hairs on my hands curl—and then I felt something thump into my leg. Glancing down, I saw that it was just a dead, charred rat, and I kept the trigger down, but then another one struck my hip, and another smacked into my shoulder. My blue jeans started to smolder, and I realized that maybe, once again, lighting things on fire might not be the answ
er to my problems.
Letting the flamethrower dissipate, I legged it and bounded twenty feet into the air, sailing diagonally over the edge of the pursuing mass and landing on top of a nine-foot-high tombstone. I took a deep breath of air, glad to get out of the stench of burnt hair and carbonized vermin. The graveyard was still lit by my spotlight, and I took a few moments to plot a path from my temporary refuge to the church where I assumed that the Sigilum was hidden. I gathered my willpower and hurled myself in the direction of a compact mausoleum.
As I sailed through the air, something small smacked my cheek, I winced in pain and flailed. Distracted, I mistimed my landing and slammed into a stone cross; pain blossomed in my shoulder, and I groaned. Putting out my left hand, I levered myself up and tried to reorient, but I felt two more impacts on my face, so I threw one arm up and turned away. For a moment I was confused about what was attacking me—but then the colony arrived, and it finally clicked. Bats. Of course it was bats. Vampires, rats, bats. Apparently Stoker had been on to something.
Still, I thought, if the bloodsuckers aren’t attacking me directly, then it must be because they can’t. Aching, I popped the collar on my trench coat, closed my eyes, and made one final, massive leap toward the church. Bats swarmed me, their furry, squeaking bodies crunching sickeningly as my mass scythed through them, but they were just enough to throw off my aim. Instead of sailing through one of the stained glass windows, I clipped the edge of the sill and flipped end over end. “Shiiiiiiit!” I screamed as I arced through the church and crashed into a wooden pew. The impact sent lances of agony through my body, and I knew that if I had been real, I’d have at least a few smashed vertebrae and a shattered pelvis.
As I pulled my mental conditioning into place to block out the pain and ignore my injuries, I was happy to realize that none of the vermin had been able to follow me into the church, but I didn’t have time to consider why not. My mental faculties at that moment were focused on a glowing block of wax sitting on the altar, almost entirely shrouded in tendrils of pulsing darkness. The tendrils reached through the walls of the small, stone church; even as I watched, one moved closer to the Sigilum.
I wasn’t sure where the tendrils went, but I wanted to get a better look at the artifact, so I slowly, cautiously stalked to the front of the church, my gladius drawn and my will reaching out to flip the light switch, filling the church with soft, orange light from old-fashioned incandescent bulbs—the only lightbulbs that weren’t the devil’s work.
I reached the base of the raised dais containing the altar. The nearest tendril was only a few feet away, and I could see that it wasn’t pure black. Instead, it shimmered like oil on water. Colors flowed slowly over the surface of the mystical construct, moving and pulsing in a slow rhythm like the beating of a huge heart, and in a way it was beauti—
I was suckered. A pseudopod shot out and wrapped around my waist, the pressure was enormous, and my breath whooshed out of me in one huge exhalation. The thing that I had thought was beautiful a few moments before was suddenly loathsome, a sightless, questing horror. I knew instinctively that it would be a very bad idea to allow it to touch my skin, as visions of being sucked dry like a raisin in the sun played through my head. I lashed out with my gladius, a weapon that I’d used to slay ten thousand nightmares, and the edge bit into the tendril, making it smoke and hiss. In response, the pressure on my ribs increased, something popped, and I would have screamed if there had been any air in my lungs.
A normal man would have passed out, unable to breathe, but I wasn’t a normal man, and this wasn’t a real place. I thought of the people I’d seen in my premonitions, of the blood, the pain, and the terror, and I fed it into the Dreamscape. My sword blossomed with crimson energy, sparks trailing down to the ground. I pulled my arm back and struck as something cracked inside of me. The enhanced sword sheared through the tendril, and I fell to the floor, scrambling away. I knew where the Sigilum was—it was time to get out of here before the vampires could ensnare my mind again.
Twisting ropes of dark energy quested for me blindly as I limped across the church. Stained glass shattered into rainbow-hued dust and flared as lights burst in their sockets. I ducked, and the vampire-stuff lashed over my head by a few millimeters, making tufts of hair sizzle where they brushed the foul energy. Hunching over, I climbed on top of a table at the back of the church and jumped. I kept my eyes wide open as the floor rushed toward me. Inky, roiling evil surged toward me, and a voice sizzled into my mind, burning words into my brain like acid etchings on glass: “The Master knows of you, Dreamwalker.” I tensed, willing myself toward the ground and—
Chapter 18
0400–2200, Tuesday, June 21, 2016
I awoke. “You can’t have me!” I screamed. In a completely manly way. Sergeant Okoye snorted and sat up with a start a few feet away, unimpressed with being woken so abruptly. Dana, rubbing her eyes, waddled in while I was getting a dressing down in my dressing gown. I realized that I was safe. “Dana, I know where it is!”
“So where is it then?” Dana asked, and then added, “What happened to your hair?”
I patted my head and felt that a chunk of hair was crispy, but I smiled, hopped up from bed, pointed out the window, and announced triumphantly, “The Sigilum Dei Aemath is less than a mile away, in the Kensington and Chelsea Cemetery.”
“You’re pointing north. The only thing in that direction is the A40,” Dana said, and Sergeant Okoye snickered.
I swung my arm ninety degrees, and Dana shook her head again. “Try following your other arm,” my wife said, and the policewoman’s laughter burst free in a big guffaw.
I looked down and dove back under the covers, my face red. I had to wait nearly a minute for the two women to stop snickering before I could continue. “Look, the Sigilum is in the cemetery only a few hundred yards away. I’d go get it now, but my vision showed that I retrieved it around twilight.”
“Always with the Twilight,” Dana said with a wink. “I guess we’ll just have to wait,” Dana agreed, wiping a tear from her eye.
The good sergeant had missed the byplay between Dana and I. “Sounds like a plan to me too. I’ll tell DCI Badger, and we can be on hand as well at the retrieval. Now, can I get the museum’s copy back?” the policewoman said.
I reached under my pillow to retrieve it. “Oops.”
“What do you mean, ‘Oops’?” Sergeant Okoye asked, putting her hands on her hips.
I turned and held out my hands, “Umm…here’s the Sigilum back,” I said, as rivulets of wax dripped between my fingers. The fake Sigilum had been consumed by the thaumaturgy that I’d employed, and was no more than a squishy beige lump, like an overcooked Camembert. “I’m sure there’s an Etsy that’ll show how to fix this in a jiffy…” I muttered.
“I’m not taking that back to DCI Badger. You can explain this bullshit,” the policewoman said as she packed up her things and left the room.
Dana waited until our front door slammed, and then she waddled over, threw her arms around my neck, and kissed me full on the mouth. “I assume that you’re calling Sloane now? What will Badger do if you don’t hand this thing over?”
I thought about Dana’s question for about ten seconds and then went with the obvious answer. “I imagine he’ll do what he always does—try to arrest me. I think if we make good use of it, though, that I can get him to let me off easy. Maybe he’ll just get me deported. Are we sure that Sloane is our best choice?” I replied, trying to ignore the possibility of alienating another ally. Detective Chief Inspector Badger had been there for me, and I’d been there for him in some very tight spots. He was a man of his word, and his oath to keep the peace was like a shield of faith around the squat little man. Out of all of the players on the field, he was the only one that I really believed wanted the Sigilum for unselfish reasons—but once he had it, I doubted I’d see it again, and that wasn’t acceptable.
Dana shook her head. “In terms of other options, I’ve already written
off the idea of bringing the Sigilum to the Sons. What minuscule amount of trust I had in the organization is gone after finding out that the only thing holding their Chapter Master back from rounding up all of the attuned and making like the SS with you is a fading geas laid on him by a madman. Mia doesn’t have enough pull there, and she’s too wrapped up in her own schemes. You need to follow your dreams. Let Edward Sloane deal with the vampire, Cooper, while you get the Sigilum and then get him to help you with the bloodsuckers in the graveyard. I believe in your abilities, Julian.”
“Even if it means that Sloane might try to take it for himself?” I said, pointing at her belly.
“We can’t use what we don’t have. Focus on getting the thing. Then we can worry about holding on to it, and hell, maybe we’ll even get the chance to figure out how to use it. Say whatever you need to get Sloane on board.” A shiver went up my spine. I’d been an office ladder-climber, I’d scrambled over people, but at the end of the day, I’d always thought of myself as a decent, honest person at heart, someone who acted in good faith. Those little white lies just happened in the moment. This was premeditated. I was going to make a deal in bad faith, planning to break it from the outset. If I did that and got caught, no one would ever believe me again. For someone who had prided himself on his ability to make a deal, that was a terrifying thought. But not as terrifying as the thought of what would happen to my unborn child if I didn’t get the Sigilum and find some way to use it for my own ends.
Dana was right. We practiced what I’d say half a dozen times, and then I called Sloane. The monster hunter’s phone only rang once before he picked up, and his voice sounded completely alert. “You have the location?”
“Yes,” I replied, the phone on speaker as Dana stood silently next to me.
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