by Mel Odom
He sat across one of the tables in the abandoned restaurant on the second floor. All the tables and chairs were made of metal and glass. The paneling and other wooden furniture, including the bar, had been ripped out years ago by scavengers looking for enough wood to fuel a fire to get them through a long winter. The winters weren’t as long these days, and nowhere near as cold as they had been with the effects of the Burn taking place.
Besides that, fires drew the demons.
“In order to get to Fulaghar, I have to kill the bodyguards.” Warren couldn’t believe how calm he sounded as he talked about killing demons.
“You can do that?”
“I will. With your help.”
Naomi hesitated, obviously realizing that such action on her part didn’t come without risk. “All right.”
A small knot inside Warren’s stomach released. If she didn’t agree to help him, he couldn’t force her. It would be impossible to take control of her will and still allow her enough autonomy to help him if he needed it.
“Then let’s begin.” Warren got up from the table and walked to an open area of the floor. He reached into his shoulder bag and took out a small pouch of blue powder. The book had provided directions on how to make the powder. The ingredients were simple, but the arcane force that united them was incredibly strong.
“What is this?” Naomi asked.
“A protective spell. Sit down.” Warren pointed at the floor.
Naomi sat but didn’t look happy about it. Warren said nothing as he poured powder from the pouch around the two of them. When he had finished, they sat close in the circle of powder.
“If this works properly,” Warren said, “we should be able to see the demons, but they won’t be able to see us.” When he was satisfied with the thickness of the circle, he put the pouch back in his bag and laid the bag to one side. He sat down cross-legged opposite her and held out his hands.
After a moment she took his hands. He felt her trembling. The vulnerability touched a softness inside of him that even four years of hardship and horror hadn’t been able to eradicate.
Even though he didn’t want to, Warren said, “It’s going to be all right.”
Naomi nodded, but he didn’t think she believed him.
Warren took a deep breath and felt for the power within him. When he touched it and had a solid hold, he pushed in at the ring of powder. Instantly the powder glowed and pulsed, then created a shimmering half-dome of incandescent sapphire light. He felt the power of the protective energy surrounding him and the concrete floor beneath.
“What’s going to happen?” Naomi whispered.
“I’m going to find the first of Fulaghar’s bodyguards.” Warren closed his eyes.
“How are you going to find him?”
“Merihim has marked him for me. Finding him will be easy. Killing him is another matter entirely.” In his mind’s eye, Warren watched as a translucent copy of himself stepped out of his body. He had a curious sensation of being in two places at one time. He looked down and his hands—the hands of the self standing beside the self sitting—and felt them empty as well as Naomi’s flesh against his.
He concentrated on the translucent self and felt for the doorway that he knew should be there. A shimmering crimson ellipse not quite two inches across appeared in midair in front of him. Lips formed in the ellipse, pushed out, and opened.
“Will you go?” the same voice the book used asked.
A momentary fear quivered through Warren. He calmed himself, then answered. “Yes. Take me there.”
“Don’t be afraid,” the voice said. “I will be with you.”
Warren ignored the statement. His fear was his greatest weapon. It kept his senses sharp and made his power strong.
And until now, it had kept him from taking too many chances.
The lips parted and widened till he could step through. He entered and felt the arcane energy sweep him away.
Twenty-Five
At the time it was opened in 1897, the Blackwall Tunnel was the longest underwater thoroughfare in the world. It was eight hundred feet short of a mile. Two passages, both of them originally built for horse and buggy, ran side, by side under the River Thames.
Simon stood in the shadow of the Millennium Dome and studied the southern portal to the Blackwall Tunnel. Akehurst Sanitarium lay at the other end of the tunnel. Demons lurking in the area made the passage under the river dangerous.
There was no way Simon wanted to cross the river, though. The effects of the Burn showed prominently on the Thames. The last four years, the river had shrunk lower and lower. It was now almost possible to wade across the Thames in many places. Huge, rust-covered cargo ships sat mired in the mud and leaned at dangerous angles. Some of them had even fallen over.
With the depletion of the river, the North Sea had started rolling in. Mixed with salt water, the water was no longer fresh or fit for human consumption. Even the animals stayed away. For a time demons had gathered there to take their pick of prey when thirst drove them out of hiding. Lack of water had driven many survivors out of the city and into the surrounding forests.
The Isle of Dogs now seemed to thrust up from the brackish river like a promontory rather than a peninsula as it had been. One it had been home to the Canary Wharf and the tallest habitable building in all of London. Rich and poor people had lived there, not together but separate, and eked out lives for themselves.
No one lived there now. Fire had destroyed most of the homes and buildings. The Canary Wharf office building was a burned-out shell that remained home to several demons.
Simon shifted views to the line of Templar standing behind him. Although he had had some reservations, he had allowed Leah to join them. A few of the Templar had voiced similar reservations about the woman’s presence. Simon had made sure none of them had been picked for his recon team.
“Ready?” he asked.
After the confirmations came quickly, Simon freed his sword and Spike Bolter, then swung into a steady jog for the Blackwall Tunnel.
* * * *
The tunnel didn’t run straight. Twists and turns created blind spots that slowed the approach. Simon remained aware that demons could lie in wait around each of those.
All along the way cars sat abandoned. When the demons had arrived, many motorists had been trapped underground. Skeletons on the ground testified that not all of those had gotten free. Many of them have been stripped of clothing by later survivors who had gotten desperate for extra garments.
No dignity had been left to the dead. Rats scurried through the shadows and wreckage. Compared to the demons, the creatures almost seemed like kindred spirits.
Slowed to a walk now, Simon went forward carefully. The HUD washed the darkness from the scene with the night-vision capability. His auditory receptors were turned up to the point that he heard the rats shifting through the ruins and the breeze blowing through the tunnel.
Only eighteen minutes later, the Templar group reached the northern portal of the tunnel. Simon paused and peered out at East India Dock Road to the north.
The darkness only blunted the destruction that had been done to the area. Besides the ruin of Canary Wharf, the row houses lay in disarray.
Simon hated to see all of the destruction. There had been so much of London’s history that had been preserved either out of sentimentality or necessity. There was no other city ever like her, and now she was torn and sundered. But London was also a city marked by disasters. For a time the largest city in the world, London had undergone many hardships and changes.
When the demons are gone, Simon told himself, she’ll stand straight and tall again. He just didn’t know if he would live to see that day.
In the distance, a few flying demons sailed silently through the sky. None were close enough to worry about. After checking the map on the HUD, Simon pressed on and led his troops toward their destination.
* * * *
The wrought-iron fence around Akehurst Sanitarium rem
ained standing and provided a gloomy introduction to the building behind it. The sanitarium stood five stories tall. The gray brick exterior exuded cold indifference. It was in a place Simon would ever have wanted to bring a family member.
Most of the windows had been broken out, and they gaped like empty eye sockets. Something had torn the ornate front gate from its hinges and cast it to one side of the entrance. A security kiosk stood on one side of the gate. No one was there now.
A simple brass plaque on an arch over the entranceway announced the name of the place in gothic script.
“I take it we’re not going in through the main gate,” Nathan said.
“No.” Simon glanced up at the fence. It stood ten feet tall and had sharp tines at the top of each bar. He crouched and leaped over, easily clearing the top of the fence by inches.
On the other side, he landed with his feet spread and dropped into a low squat with the Spike Bolter braced over his right wrist while he held it with his left. The move wasn’t for accuracy, but to help provide extra coverage for His face and shoulders in case of attack.
Nathan, Leah, Danielle, and the other Templar followed in quick succession. Simon jogged easily to the rear of the building.
Macomber hadn’t known it, but the clinic had shut down two years after he’d gone into the Parisian sanitarium. All the patients had been transferred elsewhere when the corporation finally went financially bust after several civil cases put them out of business. With the state of disrepair the building had been in, and all the problems inherent in the age, no one had purchased the property and it had sat in escrow.
Hopefully, that meant whatever had been in the building still remained there.
Someone had already broken the locks on the rear door. It stood ajar a few inches.
After he sheathed his sword, Simon pushed the door open with his free hand and followed it inside. The night-vision capability stripped away the darkness.
The doorway opened onto a storeroom that was partially sunk into the ground. Simon had to navigate a short flight of stairs to get to the bottom. Metal wire shelves lined the stone walls. Nothing cosmetic had been done to make the walls more appealing. They were bare stone. Halfway underground as the room was, there hadn’t been a real need for insulation beyond the stone.
Bottles and jugs of industrial strength cleaner littered the floor. Clothing, bedsheets, and other things that survivors could use had been stripped and taken years ago.
Simon crossed the room and peered through the open security door there. It too had been burgled, but the scratches on the inside of the door told him whoever had broken in had done so from outside.
“So where is this concealed stairway to the lower levels?” Nathan asked.
“Other end of the building,” Simon replied. He stepped to the doorway and crept along the hall. A transparent map of the underground section he was in tracked through his HUD. Differently colored blips on the screen marked his position as well as the other Templar and Leah.
“Why didn’t we just break into the other end of the building?”
“Because we’d have had to break in through a wall,” Leah said. “It would have probably been more conspicuous that way.”
“A little antsy, are we?”
“Not at all. I love poking through madhouses in the middle of the night. Especially when there might be demons here and the people I’m with insist on conducting a travelogue.”
Nathan laughed, and the chuffing sound it made coming over the comm took away some of the tension Simon was feeling. It reminded him that he was there with experienced warriors. If anything went wrong, these were the people for it to go wrong with.
* * * *
The stairwell in the center of the hallway went upstairs. Simon took an independently powered button cam from one of the cargo compartments built into his armor. He pressed the button cam to the wall and hit it with a charge of static electricity from the suit. The button cam adhered to the wall.
A quick check through the HUD showed that the miniature vid camera was online and available to him and the rest of the team. He went on.
Hospital rooms—though Simon thought of them or as prison cells—lined the hallway on both sides. A few of them held mummified bodies and enough dust to prove that no one had been there in years. Simon took a little hope in that.
The door at the end of the hallway was locked from the outside. It was a rectangular section of ugly, dented metal that showed years of hard use. A sign in the middle of it announced:
Authorized
Personnel Only
Strictly Enforced
“Sounds properly mysterious, doesn’t it?” Nathan asked. “What’s supposed to be on the other side of that door?”
“Another storeroom.” Simon tried the nod and found it was locked.
“Takes a key to lock that, mate,” Nathan observed. “Makes you wonder why they bothered, doesn’t it?”
It did, and Simon thought about that for only a moment before he pressed the forefinger of his free hand to the door lock. “Key,” he said.
Immediately, the nanofluid inside his suit squirted a stream into the lock mechanism. A visual popped up on the HUD and showed the locking mechanism’s interior as well as the nanofluid’s progress into it.
“Key is ready,” the AI announced.
Simon twisted and felt the tumblers rolling over as the key worked the lock. He let the Spike Bolter nose into the room ahead of him, of that never far enough that anyone could easily take it away from him.
An oozing tendril suddenly wrapped around Simon’s wrist and yanked. As the AI loosed a warning, Simon tried to set himself. But it was too late. Whatever had hold of him of was incredibly strong. He left his feet as he sailed into the room and the waiting darkness.
And in the darkness, something huge moved.
Twenty-Six
Heat slammed into Warren as he was pulled through the dark current that gripped him. He didn’t know how much time had passed. Fear throbbed electrically inside him. Usually he could change his vision so that he could see wherever he was. That had been one of the earliest uses of his powers he discovered. But when he tried to use that power now, nothing happened.
He reached for Naomi’s hands. Although he could feel them almost within his grasp, he couldn’t quite take hold of them.
“Don’t struggle,” the voice said. “You’re only making things more difficult.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“To meet Fulaghar’s first lieutenant. As I said I would.”
Warren tried to catch hold of Naomi’s hands again, but failed. He called her name. There was no answer.
So much for being able to pull me out in case I get into trouble, he thought.
“The spell will work when it needs to,” the voice said. “At this point you don’t need to fear anything from me.”
“Are we going where the book is?”
“Yes. Fulaghar has recently found out where it was.”
“How?”
“Fulaghar has many resources. He’s struck many deals with demons and humans alike. Merihim isn’t the only one to use humans to suit his purposes.”
Neither of them are, Warren thought.
“All of us have uses for other people. You have Naomi waiting for you within the protected circle. Before that you had Kelli.”
Guilt stung Warren again at the thought of destroying the Kelli zombie. She had been gone before he knew it.
“Prepare yourself,” the voice warned. “I can’t protect you here in this place. You’ll have to care for yourself.”
Nervous anxiety thrummed through Warren as the darkness around him seemed to grow less dense. “Where will you be?”
“I can’t go with you here. You’ll be on your own. Fulaghar’s lieutenant, Hargastor, searches the underground labyrinth for the manuscript at his master’s request. If you find him there, he’ll know you.”
“How? We’ve never met.”
“Fulagha
r has your scent. Once he knows you, all of his people know you.”
“How will I kill Hargastor?”
“Don’t confront him. Kill him from behind.”
“I can’t just ask him to turn around.”
“There are others down here. Be careful.”
The sensation of moving ceased. Warren hung in the empty blackness for just a moment. He still distrusted the voice.
“We’re inextricably linked, you and I. I’ve waited over a thousand years to be able to speak to someone again. I cherish you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Warren wanted to believe that. He held on to that thought as the darkness around and dissipated. He felt the voice leave his mind, but he still felt Naomi with him.
In the next instant, solid ground was once more beneath his feet. He felt like gravity had increased tenfold because his legs would not hold him. Despite his best efforts, he dropped to one knee. And when he blinked his eyes open, he saw horror all around him.
* * * *
The creature that held Simon suspended in the air was so malformed that he had first didn’t recognize it. The Templar had never learned a proper name for the monstrosity before him. It was a thing of nightmare, and for a long time Templar historians believed that was what it was: a fever dream on part of a warrior next to death.
Except that the description had kept occurring. Again and again, warriors that had sought out the demons had heard stories about creatures like the one that held Simon. In the end they had simply called it a Grotesque. The name suited, even if it didn’t aptly describe the monster.
Grotesques came in different sizes, depending on the materials they had at hand when they were assembled. None of the Templar knew how the horrible things were brought to undead life in the fashion that they were, but they had seen them on occasion in the streets of London these days.
This one was as big as a cargo van. Simon guessed that at least thirty or forty corpses had gone into the Grotesque’s manufacture. Although he had never seen a Grotesque put together, Simon had seen them come apart. Even through the palladium armor, he felt the buzzing pulse of the arcane energies that bound the corpses into one large entity.
