Crowley gave Jytte a wink. “Many of Earth’s heroic legends are based in encounters with creatures from other dimensions.”
I shrugged. “Somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess I remembered a description of a huge, hulking creature that ate men. I think the cold had something to do with it and, perhaps, your name.”
She frowned. “Jytte is a Danish variation of Judith... Oh, I see. Grendel.”
I nodded. “Grendel’s thick hide could not be pierced by ordinary weapons. I assumed the nasal membranes were not so tough.”
“Why not the eye?”
“Eyelid.”
Jytte accepted my answer with a grim nod. “Thank you for saving my life.”
I pointed at the two dead Draolings. “Thank you for doing what needed to be done.”
“Speaking of which, what are we going to do here?” Crowley frowned as he surveyed the cavern. “Clearly, Pygmalion is not watching over this place that closely. If I can find the command center for the dimensional gate the Draolings and this Grendel used to get here, I can set it up to be useless for them.”
Jytte looked at both of us. “I know the chances are slender, but will you allow me the time to look for other survivors?”
“By all means. Crowley, why don’t you fix the dimensional gate, and I’ll help Jytte search this place.” I kicked the Grendel’s body. “Do you know the dimension that gives birth to these things?”
Crowley nodded. “I tend to avoid it, but, yes.” “Good. When we’re done here, I want to drag this body off and dump it in its home.”
Jytte frowned. “Won’t that just anger these creatures?” “Could be,” I smiled, “but it should also serve to remind them that Earth is where Beowulf lived. I want to remind them that forgetting that particular lesson is something that can be downright fatal.”
Chapter 25
Our search for survivors in Pygmalion’s cavern proved fruitless, and a grim air settled around Jytte. Wordlessly, she listened to Crowley’s simple instructions concerning dimensional walking, then helped the two of us lug the Grendel back to its home dimension. There in Grendelheim, Crowley used telekinesis to lift the dead creature into the branches of a gnarled tree, leaving it like some grotesque parody of the Pieta.
Crowley had left the dimensional gate at the Pulliam estate in a random select mode. “For this type of gate to work, there must be a link between it and the gate at the other end. Gates in RSM do not maintain a connection, and only the sending of a proper unlocking code from another gate can bring it out of that mode and under control.”
“So nothing more will be heading through that gate?”
“Right. Oddly enough, that gate was not part of the estate until recently — probably after Pygmalion had abandoned it.” Crowley interlaced his fingers and bridged them out in reverse, cracking the knuckles. “Draolings are not good for much, but they do have a knack for setting up makeshift gates. Theirs are of limited capabilities in terms of size and the distance over which they permit travel, but they function for Draoling purposes.”
We appeared back in my office in the Lorica Citadel in Phoenix. “You mean they were not using a gate that Pygmalion had placed there?”
The occultist unbuckled his weapon’s harness and set it on the table back in the conversation nook. “I saw no signs of other gates there. It may be that he doesn’t know how to create gates.”
Jytte shook her head. “Is that possible? Pygmalion is a Dark Lord.”
“True, but he was a human being until only a few years ago. He might never have been taught how to create them.” Crowley pointed toward the window and the red warning lights blinking from the maglev train circuit around the city. “Nero Loring built a dimensional gate without knowing what it was, but only because he was given the plans by an agent under Fiddleback’s control. The knowledge of how to build gates is quite limited, both in depth and distribution. The vast majority of gates are little rabbit holes — shunts from one dimension to the next. Fully operational, variable-selection gates are very rare.”
I shot him a suspicious glance. “But most of the ones I have seen are of that rare variety. You even own one.”
Crowley smiled broadly. “Your experience is atypical because you’ve been running with me, and I know where most of the good gates are. And, as for the one I possess — a small one with little more than a single-person capacity — I got it as many other Dark Lords got theirs: I stole it.”
The occultist opened his hands. “While you’ve seen a lot of functional gates, there are hundreds more that are dead. They have no control functions, so they can never created a link out to anything. Someone with a working gate can interrogate them and set up a link, which is what Pygmalion doubtless had intended the gate Nero Loring built here in Phoenix to do with a dead gate he has somewhere.”
“He came damned close to succeeding.”
“Agreed. The trick here is this: Fiddleback has not found an active gate large enough to move him, nor has he been able to transplant the controls and power supply from another gate to his dead one. He’s stuck out there unless and until we bring him in.”
Jytte frowned. “We have dismantled the controls for the maglev gate here. Does that mean it is a dead gate and could, technically speaking, still function?”
Crowley nodded. “Sure, provided someone has a power source sufficient to open it and move something that large. As we know, those power requirements are not easy to meet.”
“That’s good, else we’d have Dark Lords stacked up for landing approaches like planes at O’Hare in the morning.” I walked around to the far side of my desk and glanced at the clock. “It’s midnight now.” Punching an icon on the surface of the desk, a roster came up, and I scanned it quickly, “it appears everyone is here from Japan. Bat is operational, Hal is home with his children. Dorothy is also with Hal, but Mickey and Natch are here in the citadel, as well as Vetha, Sin and Rajani.”
“Coyote, we need to determine where Build-more is doing its work for Pygmalion.” Jytte headed toward the door of the office. “I will get right on that.”
“No, Jytte, we can get Sinclair to get us that information. He has to still have contacts in Build-more.”
She stopped and pulled off her watch cap, releasing a flood of golden hair that half-hid her face. “Chances are excellent that Sin’s sources are either ignorant or will report his inquiries to Darius. This is not because Darius assumes we know something about his secret project — and I wonder if he knows what it is himself — but because Darius wants to know what his son’s area of interest is so he can control him. Darius has likely also heard that you are back and, therefore, will perceive anything his son does as an action motivated by you.”
Jytte’s concise analysis surprised me, not because of its thorough nature, because I expected that from her. What stunned me was her precise insights into Darius MacNeal’s character. Before, I might have expected her to cite instances where Darius had made moves to curtail and control his son’s life without drawing the conclusion concerning the man’s desire to dominate Sinclair. Now, without an example, she picked out his motivation and made her point quite eloquently.
“I concur. How will you get the information we need?”
She smiled confidently. “Even if he had been paid in advance, Darius MacNeal would not pay cash for anything on the project. He and his people will be using credit. His workers will be using credit. Some of them will also be calling family members here in Phoenix. By hitting the phone company records and credit card company records, I can pinpoint the area where his workers are spending their money. Rental car mileage records can give me an approximate radius of travel from that point. Delivery company records, like United Parcel Express, can track and perhaps zero in on a location.
“Once I have the area, I can tap into LANDSAT photographs of the area and compare those with more recent photo-recon of the targeted region. I could even work a back-channel deal with the Ukraine Satellite Maintenance Ministry to ha
ve one of their old spy satellites make a pass over the area. As much as this base is supposed to be a secret, its construction is going to leave a large footprint. I will find it.”
As Jytte spoke, I heard an animation and determination in her voice where I had only heard mechanical precision before. She had once used computers and her skill with them to create a safe haven for herself. She did what we had asked of her because it meant that we would leave her alone while providing her with all she needed to survive. Her work was her way of appeasing the people who insulated her from the outside world.
She had changed, and changed radically. She reacted to the challenge of locating the base like a tiger smelling blood on the hunt. She wanted the base’s location because it was another place connected with Pygmalion. I could not tell if she wanted to avenge the dead we found at the Pulliam estate, or if she was out to get a direct shot at Pygmalion herself, but it made no difference. Instead of doing things because she had been assigned them to do, Jytte had defined her task and now eagerly looked to leap into it.
I gave her a respectful nod. “I have no doubt your strategy will work. Go to it.”
She nodded and headed out. As the door closed behind her, I turned to Crowley. “We’ll have to do another scouting run on this facility.”
The occultist nodded. “Agreed. Since we know it’s in Nevada, we could even head up there early and be in position when Jytte finalizes the location. Depending how things set up, we should not have any trouble learning the nature of the facilities in place for transferring troops over from Pygmalion’s home dimension.”
I frowned, an irritating fact about the assault on Turquoise bringing itself to my conscious attention. “With Turquoise, you said that Pygmalion had Ryuhito’s troops tunnel out to a dimensional gate, then get sent through. Do you think he will have the same setup maintained for this base? Will he insulate himself that way?”
Crowley’s left hand strayed to his goatee. “Interesting point, and one that we need to answer. I would assume that if he has insulated himself that way, the gate out would still be within the same cluster as his home base.
That means our plan for bringing Fiddleback in could still work.”
“Provided the conditions on the other side of the gate are suitable to our existence.” I sighed. “If Pygmalion outsmarts us and used an inhospitable proto-dimension as his staging area, he wins because our ambush falls prey to where-ever he has chosen to stage his attack.”
“A strategy worthy of a Dark Lord, yes, but is Pygmalion that cautious? He was human until not long ago.”
I smiled. “I’m human, and I thought of it.”
“Yes, but you were trained in the ways of death and warfare — it makes sense for you to think of that sort of thing.” Crowley stared at me for a second, then smiled grimly. “Still, your point is well taken. We will have to penetrate the base and see if we can confirm the location on the other side of the gates.”
“I concur.”
Crowley tugged at the heel of the glove on his left hand. “And that means we’ll have to bring Mickey with us.”
I wanted to ask him if he was insane, but the matter of fact way in which he spoke made me think before I reacted. Mickey had spent what must have been an eternity in Pygmalion’s home dimension. He would know it, and could confirm for us that the place connected to the base Build-more was constructing was Pygmalion’s stronghold — much as Jytte had managed to do on our recent recon of the Pulliam estate, it was the right choice, the logical choice, but part of me rebelled at the idea of bringing a 5-year-old child back to the place where he had been traumatized.
“Wouldn’t a videotape suffice? Couldn’t he identify it in another way?”
“Coyote, it might be a scent or the way the breeze feels on his skin that identifies it for him. We can’t capture that on video.” Crowley took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “I know that bringing Mickey creates all sorts of risks on a quiet insertion, but he’s a good boy. He’ll do what we ask him.”
I returned to the day I’d asked if Mickey could be trained to kill again. Hal’s resistance to my suggestion, and my surprised reaction to Bat’s indifference to Mickey’s age again hammered at me. I had never seen anyone who could do what Mickey could, so I could think of few threats on our mission that could harm him. Yet even if I could have guaranteed no chance of injury to him, I would still be reluctant to bring him with us. I felt as though the only way I could make up for the abuse he had suffered at Pygmalion’s hands was to make sure he never suffered again.
Even with that as my goal, I knew it had been my plan that had gotten his father killed. “Damon, he’s an orphan.”
“But he is the only one who can make the correct identification for us. Ryuhito is out of commission and will remain so until and unless we have no choice but to bring him into the fight.” Crowley chewed his lower lip. “I also don’t believe Mickey knows he is without any parents.”
“No one has told him?!”
“Who would? Rajani is the only logical candidate, and she is dealing with the death of her own father. No one else would have taken the initiative and a few, like Bat, would have been specifically ordered not to do the job.” The occultist inclined his head in my direction. “He has to be told.”
“And you think it is up to me?” I shivered. “I never knew I had parents, Crowley. I was raised in the GalBro Headquarters with my only human contact coming in the form of tutors and trainers. I knew no one well enough to call him a friend. From birth, from before birth, Fiddleback made me into an assassin who could kill coldly and efficiently. How can I explain to Mickey about the loss of his father when I cannot even begin to fathom what that will do to him?”
“Fiddleback wanted to make you an emotionless drone, but he couldn’t. Emotionlessness demands a lack of passion, a lack of pride in your work. A hunter cannot be without emotions. They are there, Coyote, and you can tap them. You have, in realizing you hate your former master enough to rebel against him, and in realizing the debt you owed to your predecessor. You have accepted Coyote’s crusade to oppose the Dark Lords and prosecute it with a fierce loyalty to humanity.” Crowley nodded at me. “You can find it in yourself to explain things to Mickey and, I think, you need to do so to finally gain back the last piece of your soul that Fiddleback still owns.”
Something in Crowley’s words burrowed deep into me and began to twist in my guts. As he spoke, I sensed the location of the piece he had seen missing. I desperately wanted to fill that void, but I could not. I realized he was right — telling Mickey about his father would heal that wound, shrink that abscess in my soul. I did not know how it would accomplish that end, but I just knew it would.
I looked up at him. “How is it that you are so closed to others, yet you can see into our hearts so easily?”
“Perhaps it is just anti-matter knowing matter, or shadow knowing light.” Crowley shrugged easily. “It makes no difference, does it, really?”
His smile grew as I shook my head. “I thought not,” he said quietly as he headed for the door. “I’ll send Mickey up. Good luck to you both.”
Mickey arrived dressed in a white T-shirt that showed Heidi Stiletto, the buxom songstress of the rock group Hell’s Belles, giving everyone a good look at the trident tattoo on her right cheek. A pair of gym shorts completed his ensemble, and I suspected he got both articles of clothing from or in imitation of Bat. The short-sleeved shirt and short pants hid little of the carbon-fiber armor beneath his flesh, making him look like a man-zebra with twisted curls replacing orderly stripes. His hair had been combed into place by his fingers, but enough of it stuck out in odd directions that I suspected he had been sleeping when Crowley sent him to me.
As unusual as he looked in his borrowed clothes and decorated flesh, the expression on his face was one of childish innocence and even happy anticipation. I realized as I watched him walk across the carpeted floor and half-leap on to the end of the couch, he felt proud to have been called into m
y presence. I could feel it radiating off him like pure sunlight burning through the blue sky above the Frozen Shade. He had no idea why he had been called to see me. He was just happy, and I was going to destroy that happiness.
“Good evening, Mickey. I hope you will forgive me for waking you.”
He nodded his head emphatically up and down, then grinned. “S’okay. I like being awake. When I sleep, there are bad dreams sometimes.”
“I’m sure there are.” I smiled at him. “I have them as well, sometimes. All we have to do is remember they are dreams and cannot hurt us.”
Another big nod acknowledged my statement.
How to begin? How can I do this? I stopped my pacing and clasped my hands at the small of my back. “Mickey, the reason I wanted to speak with you here is because I have some news for you. I am afraid it is not good news, it is bad news — no, you didn’t do anything wrong — but it may hurt you, inside, and make you sad. That’s okay, to be hurt inside. You can cry if you want.”
His look of puzzlement half died as he pressed his lips together and shook his head. “My father said to be brave and not to cry. He said it would upset Dorothy.”
“I see. Then, perhaps, you could cry here, and we will not let it upset Dorothy.” His determination to be brave slammed down on the rising fear I sensed in him. He shunted his fear away and concentrated on what I was going to say. Like a good little soldier, he was determined to do what his father had told him to do. “Mickey, your father will not be coming back.”
Anguish shot through the child like lightning and immediately slaved itself to a rising sense of self-doubt in the boy. His mouth dropped open in what would have been a prelude to an outcry, but he held himself back. I could feel the emotional riptide pulling him one way and another, then I found the thing creating it and immediately acted to shield Mickey from his own worst fears.
Evil Triumphant Page 21
