by C L Walker
Six vampires had been captured, along with five hollow men who were not happy to see me. The bodies they wore looked even older than usual, their skin sagging unnaturally. They shuffled around me, looking at me like I was about to eat them. Which, to be fair, was a valid concern for them.
The cell beside mine held Bec. She got up calmly when I tore her door off.
“Took you long enough,” she said as she joined the group. “I was expecting this shit days ago.”
“I had some other things to do,” I said.
I waved for everyone to follow me. The vampires flanked Bec as though they knew she was important. I had to get back to Erindis and make sure she didn’t die, and then we could break out and deal with the aftermath.
Steps four and three had been done in the wrong order, but so far everything was going well. All I had to do was deal with my wife and her pet angel.
I grimaced as we ran through the corridors. Why wasn’t anything ever simple?
Chapter 11
She wasn’t in the examination room anymore. Keith was, though.
“How you feeling?” Bec said. She’d barged into the room and crouched over the doctor. She slapped his face and he groaned. “Feeling alright?”
“What? Huh?”
He wasn’t feeling very eloquent, it seemed.
“We don’t have time for this,” I said. “There might be more men on the way.”
“Then you’ll deal with them,” she said. She slapped Keith again.
His eyes shot open. When he saw the crowd gathered around him he backed away, dragging himself along the floor until he hit the wall.
“Hi,” Bec said. “Bet you didn’t see this coming.”
“Don’t do this,” he said. No smiles and no confidence. No excitement over seeing what his pets would do next. He was scared, his eyes darting around the room looking for escape. He settled on Bec. “Don’t let him kill me, please.”
“Oh, you adorable man,” she said. She patted his face and looked up at me. “He thinks you’re going to kill him.”
“I can tell you whatever you want to know,” he said. “I can tell you what we’re here for. What we planned on using the data for.”
“No,” Bec said, turning back to the terrified man. “I think we’re good.”
She stabbed him with one of the knives from the table. I hadn’t seen her pick it up and she buried it so deep in his stomach it took me a moment to work out what she’d used.
“That wasn’t necessary,” I said, bored and impatient. “We should go.”
“Not just yet,” Bec said. She tilted her head, staring at the dying man squirming around his wound. “I want to watch this.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “Revenge isn’t your style.”
“No, I guess not.” She stood slowly, her eyes never leaving Keith’s pain-wracked face. “Still, it felt a little good.”
I grabbed the doctor by the neck and lifted him from the floor. He weighed less than I expected and I barely needed the boost from the tattoos to do it.
“Where did she go?”
He groaned, trying to keep his mouth shut.
“Your defiance is misguided,” I said. “I want her dead as much as you do. You might get lucky. We might kill each other and your people can pick us up when they get here.”
He was breathing heavy, his body involuntarily trying to get away from the wound like it was a fire he could back away from and not a hole he was bleeding out of. He was sweating, and his eyes were still trying to watch the entire room at the same time.
“My office,” he said finally, spitting the words. “She’s here for the other one.”
“Like me?” I said. He nodded. I dropped him and turned to leave. The vampires stepped out of my way.
Bannon. His vessel was in Doctor Keith’s office and Erindis knew it somehow.
Bec caught up with me, pushing vampires and hollow men out of the way.
“Bannon?” she said, though she knew the answer.
“How did he get the vessel?” I asked.
“I had it on me when he picked us up. I’ve had it on me since…”
Since I gave it to her when she locked me away again. Since she betrayed me, just like everyone else.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “About what we did. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
We arrived at a security station. Guards lay dead on the floor and the gate had been torn open.
“I had just been brainwashed into being evil,” she said, still talking despite clearly seeing that I wasn’t interested. “And you did melt a safe almost on top of me. I was a little sore.”
“I said later.”
“Speaking of sore,” she continued, apparently unconcerned with my irritation. “You also almost ripped my arms off. So, that’s a thing to keep in mind.”
We hit the stairs and arrived on the office floor. The place was empty but for another pair of soldiers on the floor, groaning around the wounds in their chests.
“Could you slow down?” Bec said. “I’ve been locked in a room for a month and I haven’t been doing my cardio.”
“Bec, please keep quiet. Unless you have something useful to add I think it would be best if you waited behind the bulletproof vampires.”
“No, I’m good.”
Despite what she said she hung back when we approached the office and I waved everyone away. If Erindis was waiting for me with Bannon I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. I poked my head around the open doorway to check out the doctor’s office.
Erindis stood in the middle of it, the dog tags hanging from her hand. The office was a mess, torn apart by Peter, who stood in the remains of Keith’s desk; he’d torn it in half, though it looked like he’d done it after finding what she was looking for.
“Are you ready to go?” I said. “I don’t think we want to be here if they have reinforcements on the way.”
“We’ve got what we want,” Peter said. He put his hand on her back to guide her out and I had another moment of jealousy. For some reason.
“Sure,” she said dreamily, lost in the dog tags in her hand. “Call for transport.”
Peter led her out and I followed. When she entered the hall and the vampires saw her they stepped out of her way as quickly as they had stepped out of mine.
Something had happened while I was away. She’d done something, or been involved in something, and I was going to have to find out what it was. And probably deal with it.
Nobody tried to stop us on the way out. We passed offices and a cafeteria, meetings rooms and other rooms with unknown functions. There were people within sometimes, but they cowered behind tables and hid around corners.
We made it to the front entrance to find the last of the soldiers. They had set up in front of the double doors leading outside. The night behind them was lost in the bright glow of the lobby.
“Peter,” Bec said. “Take care of them please.”
The hollow man was happy to comply. He raced into the lobby, dodging left and right to avoid gunfire that never came. When he reached the soldiers he destroyed them, tearing them apart with ease.
They never fought back and he gave them no mercy.
Bec led us all outside. A white panel van was waiting on the street.
We were in suburbia, or near it, anyway. The building behind us was a normal office building, though it was conspicuous for having the windows boarded up. Other buildings nearby had lights shining out into the night but the facility was a black box.
“There isn’t enough transport,” I said. The vampires could probably take care of themselves, assuming I was right and we were somewhere near Fairbridge, but the hollow men looked helpless. I’d hurt them, drained them, and left them in their old bodies without their angelic powers.
“No,” Erindis said. “There’s exactly the right amount.”
“We can’t leave them here, and Bec has no way home.”
“We’re
not going back to the city, Agmundr.” She turned to me and I saw the locket in her hand.
“What are you doing?” I said. I wanted to snatch it from her and stop her from doing what I knew she was about to do, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place, waiting for the inevitable.
“Don’t worry,” Erindis said, a sadistic grin on her face. “I’ll take care of her.”
“Erindis, don’t do this.”
“You said you can hurt me, and you were right.” She held the locket up so it twinkled in the street light. “Let’s see if I can hurt you back.”
I turned to Bec and the others to tell them to run, knowing it wouldn’t matter. She had Peter on her side and all the hollow men on mine were spent. There would be nowhere for them to run to, not in the moments they had before she acted.
“Agmundr,” Erindis said. I could hear the evil smile on her face, the sadistic joy she was getting from my discomfort. “Return.”
The night grew darker, blotting out the streetlights and the ambient light from the other buildings. It swallowed me as I opened my mouth to warn them.
And then I was back in my prison, viewing my wife from above. It had once been my gift, to see the woman I loved whenever I was returned to the locket. Now it was another curse, something I desperately didn’t want.
Peter grabbed Bec and dragged her to the car. For her part, Bec barely fought, putting up a token resistance. She knew she couldn’t beat the angel and she was pragmatic enough to not want to get hurt in a fight she couldn’t win.
The vampires gave Erindis space and the hollow men cowered behind them.
My wife got into the van and looked up into the night sky, somehow pinpointing my exact point of view. She smiled, raised her fingers to her lips, and blew me a kiss.
The world vanished, but only for a heartbeat.
“Agmundr, vochex,” Erindis said, calling me back from the dark.
Chapter 12
“Agmundr,” she said again. “Vochex.”
She spoke quickly, with none of the reverence normally used when summoning me. The way she pronounced the words, though, was exquisite.
“Agmundr, vochex.”
The final invocation brought the world into focus. I was in a dungeon, or somewhere that looked a lot like one, with heavy stone walls with fungus and slime growing on them. The air was dank and heavy, warm and smelling of decay.
She stepped out of her circle and walked quickly around me, watching me with eyes I had loved longer than civilizations. She returned to her circle, bowed her head, and muttered the closing of the spell.
When she looked up at me again there was no hate in her eyes, as I had expected. No love, either, though that would have been a surprise. There was nothing. Apathy, perhaps boredom.
“Where is Bec?” I said. We were alone in the room but there was light coming from under the heavy wooden door in one wall. I thought I could hear people speaking.
“What is your fascination with that girl?” She stayed where she was, watching me as though trying to figure me out like a puzzle.
“She’s nice to me.”
“That’s all it takes? You sure she isn’t doing anything unladylike when the lights go out?” She said it like an insult, like something that was beneath her.
“She’s nice to me,” I repeated. “Where is she?”
“She’s still alive. She’ll be alive for a long time. I promise you that.”
I didn’t like the way she said it. I didn’t like the way she was behaving. I didn’t like that she’d summoned me again, even if it meant I was once again out of my prison; it meant she wanted something and I had learned to fear the things she wanted.
“Kneel,” she said. The tattoos were barely awake yet, but I did it anyway. There was no use fighting. Not yet.
She approached me. She wore a dress, a long flowery thing that covered her heavy boots except when she walked. She stood over me and pushed my head down, then began tracing her fingers along the tattoos on my shoulders.
I could see her legs through the thin film of the dress. She had tattoos of her own there.
“What have you done?” I said.
“Shut up.”
They were hard to make out in the dim light but what I could see I didn’t recognize. They were strange, so unlike the straight lines and simple shapes of our people. They looked more like those of the new witches who ran Fairbridge, or the symbology Roman had shown me in one of his books.
“You don’t want to do this,” I said. “It won’t end well for you.”
“I said shut up. That’s an order.”
She finished tracing the tattoos on my shoulders and started working her way down my arms. She paused over each for a moment, as though reading them like a book. She might have been, actually, because her lips moved when she did it, like she was deciphering them.
“You’re not the first person to try and replicate what was done to me.”
“I’m not trying to become like Bannon,” she replied. She moved onto my back, her fingers lightly brushing against my rough skin.
She knew about Bannon, but that didn’t tell me anything new. She’d gone into Keith’s facility to get the dog tags Bannon was trapped in, so she’d found out about him before I was summoned.
She found what she was looking for. I heard the change in her breath as her fingertips paused, though this time they weren’t going to move again.
“You’ve spent your whole life dreaming of the day when I got my power back,” she said absently, almost to herself. “You wanted the end of days. You wanted to remake the world with me.”
“I did, once.”
“Well that’s because you’re a fool. You didn’t want me to return. You didn’t want me to get the power of an elder-god. You wanted her, Ohm. You wanted the woman who actually loved you.”
I knew what she meant, knew that she’d secretly hated me all along. It was the elder-god who’d possessed her who had loved me. Even though she had been a creature that I could not understand, she had loved me as a man.
“But I’m going to make your dreams come true,” she continued. She placed her palm over the tattoo she’d found. I knew what was coming next. “I’m going to be the woman you thought I was.”
“You’re trying to summon Ohm?” I said.”
“No,” she spat, angry at the mere suggestion. “That bitch is dead and she’s staying that way, but her essence remains in the world. Her power lives on, even if she is gone.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about but I could guess. I didn’t like where she was going.
“I summoned you to help me bring about the end of the world. Properly, this time, with no assassins to stand in the way and no last minute rescues.”
“You think you can turn yourself into an elder-god?” I said. Her palm was warm against my skin.
“I didn’t think it was possible,” she replied. “All those years and I thought my best course of action was to hide. I was scared when the assassin appeared and brought Ohm back to me, when he forced me to become her again.”
I hadn’t heard the story of Ohm’s return. I had been in my prison when it happened, or I would have helped her. I would have been her strongest champion and watched as everything was devoured. I would have smiled.
“Out here there are no assassins, but the process is taking too long and I underestimated what would be required.”
She lifted her hand and the tattoo tried to follow. It rose and dragged my skin with it, stretching my flesh to meet hers.
“See, I can’t just go to the mountaintop and take the power there.” She was concentrating, her words barely audible. “I have to use finesse and care, or I’ll just burn up. I have to do what has never been done before.”
“A human cannot become an elder-god,” I said. “You were given the power before. You didn’t develop it.”
“A human has, actually. An old man stole Ohm’s essence when she was defeated, so I know it’s possible. He let me live when
he should have killed me, and I’m going to make him regret it.”
I felt the tattoo leave my skin and leap into her hand. She stepped away from me and turned her hand up, cupping the warm blood the tattoo had returned to being.
“I think I know how to do it, too,” she said, entranced by the blood swirling in her hand with a life of its own.
“Why would you want to? Why would you take the risk?”
Her eyes shot up to me, her look one of surprise.
“Are you insane?” she said. “Why would I want to be an elder-god? Why would I want that kind of power without the bitch running my mind as well?”
I nodded, unsure how to answer her questions.
“You’re a strange man, Agmundr. You always were.” She walked back to her circle and faced me. “You achieved the highest power a human could have, and I don’t think you wanted it. You ruled the world and all you wanted was a wife. And then you get the cleric’s gift and you squander it for millennia. Epochs passed and you still couldn’t work out what to do with it.”
“It wasn’t a gift for me,” I said. “It was for you.”
She shook her head as she held out the locket in her free hand. I raised my own hand instinctively, as though I could ever have stopped her.
“I hope I never see you again, my husband. Agmundr, return.”
The world vanished more quickly now that I couldn’t see much of it. The dungeon faded to darkness and all that was left was Erindis in her flowery dress.
I watched from the ceiling as she carried the blood she’d taken out of the room. I followed her a short way, through the ancient corridor beyond. She was flanked by warriors dressed in jeans and shirts, but with swords on their backs and pistols on their belts.
I wanted to follow her further, to see where we were and what she was doing, but the world disappeared and I was returned to my prison.
A moment later, her voice, angry. Frustrated.
“Agmundr, vochex.”
Chapter 13
She rushed through the summoning, circling me haphazardly, barely looking in my direction. When she returned to her own circle she whispered the closing words and immediately stormed toward me.
