The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5)

by Zachary Rawlins

  Mitsuru emerged from the confusion, sand pouring onto her shoulders and hair like rain.

  John Parson had musculature enough on his skeleton to move, but was still entirely lacking in skin or sensory organs, the roots of his teeth and the cavities of his eyes exposed and hideous.

  Mitsuru pulled the second gun from the holsters at the small of her back.

  John drew upon his vast reserves, aiming a telepathic assault at Mitsuru, intending to tamper with her perceptions or interfere with her movement. His power was far greater than her own in this regard, as Mitsuru was a combat telepath, but he found his attack effortlessly countered.

  Not even countered, he realized, but somehow avoided, as if psychically sidestepped.

  It was an impossibility, but Mitsuru had done it effortlessly, without even pausing in her relentless march forward.

  It was a moment later that he noticed that she had counterattacked while he was occupied with his own attack, sneaking inside a flaw in his defenses and establishing a beachhead in his consciousness.

  He turned his assault on the breach, but too much of his energy was occupied in rebuilding his body.

  Mitsuru stepped beside him and put the gun to his head.

  John put everything into a psychic command, forbidding her nervous system from carrying a signal to her forefinger.

  She pulled the trigger.

  He hastily called a barrier into existence, and then placed two more behind it.

  The first shot was deflected harmlessly.

  The angle on the second was not ideal, and the barrier cracked, though it held.

  The third shot opened the crack wider.

  The fourth bullet was lucky, or Mitsuru’s aim was improving, because it burst the first barrier into fragments, and then passed clean through the second, the third only just holding it back and suffering grievous damage in the process.

  He apported twenty meters back before the fifth shot could fracture his final barrier.

  Mitsuru continued to fire as she sprinted after him, the muzzle tracking him with robotic precision. He just managed to form a new barrier just in time, the transparent wall ringing shrilly with each impact.

  She finished the magazine and tossed the gun into the Sea of Ether.

  John flexed his new fingers and stretched his brand-new skin. It was pulled unpleasantly tight across his face, and everything felt wet and soft and perhaps a bit rotten, like his organs had been replaced with a load of fruit that had gone south in the heat.

  “Listen to me, Mitsuru,” he said, coughing as his pink new lungs adjusted to the atmosphere. “I can offer you—”

  She grabbed the pommel of the knife strapped to her back and came in low, whipping the blade out at the last possible moment to slice his belly open.

  Rotten fruit, John thought, his guts tumbling out of him in a glistening avalanche, his bowels so fresh and new that the only odor was that of the organs. He laughed instead of wrapping his arms around his stomach.

  Mitsuru stepped past him and out of his view.

  She grabbed his hair, pulling his head back.

  Of course, he thought, not really bothering to fight it.

  She slit his throat with one professionally delivered cut, making certain she went deep enough to fully sever the artery.

  He stretched his awareness out across his psychic web of Anathema, searching among the protocols of his followers for a last resort.

  His body turned to ash, the victim of its own spontaneous funeral pyre.

  The ash swirled around Mitsuru, caressing her cheek and leaving behind a soot-grey stain, before reconstituting further down the beach.

  John felt worse than ever, fever alternating with chills in waves that swept across the entirety of his new flesh. The overwhelming feeling of softness lingered in his fresh viscera, and John was transfixed by the worry that, should Mitsuru grab him, her fingers would sink into his skin like they would with a rotten pumpkin.

  He called up something from his reservoir of Anathema, activating a borrowed protocol across the disturbance in the Ether.

  It took a great effort, and a vast amount of power, but both were at John’s disposal.

  The featureless wall of clouds above them swirled and darkened. As Mitsuru approached John, higher up on the beach in the deeper sand, a black void opened in Central’s grey sky.

  There was a glimmer in the dark, like a headlamp of a distant train, and Mitsuru tensed slightly.

  She threw herself to the side, rolling across the beach as a bolt of plasma struck where she had just stood, fusing the sand into red-hot glass.

  Mitsuru scrambled to her feet and sprinted clear. Bolts of plasma fell like superheated rain, scouring the beach and searing the back of Mitsuru’s ankles as she ran.

  Her implant sizzled in her brain, overtaxed with downloaded protocols.

  Mitsuru activated an apport protocol just before a bolt transformed another several meters of beach into hot glass and steam.

  She blinked into existence behind John, knife at the ready.

  With no time for a barrier, he caught her knife arm in a telekinetic net.

  The blade came to a halt, trembling a centimeter short of his new eyes.

  Mitsuru strained, and impossibly, the knife started to push forward, severing telekinetic bindings as she forced the blade into imperceptible weaknesses in the net. Energy discharges rippled across her skin and made her jet-black hair stand on end.

  It must have been a trick of the light, but for a moment, John Parson could have sworn that he could see the blue blood in the prominent veins in her wrists turn to chrome.

  The knife sliced through the net with a flash and a sound like a clap of distant thunder, and sank deep into the side of his neck. Mitsuru twisted and dipped, and for the second time in as many minutes, John’s throat was cut, and his blood spilled warm across his naked chest.

  She grabbed him before he could fall over, clutching his head with both hands.

  She wrenched his neck to the side, twisting his head the wrong way around. John flailed and dropped to his knees, in immense, indescribable pain.

  The eventual snap and spinal dislocation came as something of a relief.

  Mitsuru let go of his head, and it drooped onto his bloody chest and hung there, slack and grotesque.

  She bent to examine his eyes, and then she reached for her knife.

  The first took longer to remove than the second.

  Mitsuru buried her knife in his chest, twisting it for good measure.

  Removing the blade with difficulty, she cut open his belly and shoved her hand inside, yanking out pink, squishy tissue that draped across the sand in gruesome ribbons.

  Mitsuru paused to inspect her work, her arms covered in gore to the elbows.

  The body seemed inclined to stay as it was, neither reconstructing nor turning to ash.

  She considered the matter, and then risked a final protocol.

  “I’m sure you aren’t dead, but I hope now that you understand that these kids are off limits.”

  Mitsuru stomped John’s head until the slope of his forehead took on a different angle underneath the heel of her boot.

  “Don’t ever come back here,” Mitsuru said, putting her hand on his battered head. “Don’t even dream of bothering my students again.”

  She forced an apport through the disturbance in the Ether.

  What was left of John Parson manifested before the Inverted Spire, beneath the vast and utterly devoid sky of the Outer Dark, his disemboweled body laid across the threshold of the tower like a pagan sacrifice.

  Twenty-Six

  Day Six

  The walls of the Thule estate were artifacts from prior residents of Central, five meters tall and seemingly carved from a single curved stone. From a distance it looked as if the hill the estate was built upon had been cropped and hollowed out. A manor and a formal garden were nestled inside the walls, perpetually in their shadow. The gates were massive metal slabs, wide enough
to accommodate a semi-truck with ease. Cartel soldiers were stationed along the wall in reinforced positions, rifles aimed through notches in the stone. The estate had survived three civil wars and innumerable smaller conflicts without being breached.

  Anastasia walked calmly through the gate, passing easily through the worked metal.

  The guards stared in shock at the veiled young woman in her black dress as she walked past them.

  Lord Gao tore one of the gates from its hinges before they could aim their guns. The guards turned their fire on the vampire, who registered no pain from their bullets. He hefted the gate and tossed it, crushing the guards beneath its vast bulk.

  Mai Quan hurried after with an eye on her Mistress’s skirts, moving occasionally to keep them free of the debris. Donner and Blitzen trotted ahead, launching themselves at the survivors in the courtyard. Renton savaged the Thule staff, killing with gun and knife and thought.

  The guards stationed along the walls repositioned and opened fire. The bullets passed harmlessly through Anastasia, and ricocheted around Mai without touching her, but the Weir were slowed, whining when they were struck.

  Lord Gao charged through the fire.

  A few of the Thule soldiers were smart enough to run from the advancing vampire, but it made no difference.

  Lord Gao leapt to the top of the wall and tore the gunmen to pieces.

  Donner and Blitzen killed guards and gardeners alike as Anastasia calmly marched across the courtyard, while Mai reached out telepathically to distract and frighten snipers. A fixed gun temporarily mounted on the steps of the manor sprayed the courtyard with automatic fire, but the bullets did not even muss Anastasia’s silk gown as they sailed through her.

  Mai gave the gunner a look and he stopped firing. His spotter yelled and pleaded, but the gunner took no note of it. He nodded slowly, never taking his eyes from Mai, and then lifted a grenade from his belt, tears dripping from his eyes. His spotter screamed and retreated, but he made it only a few steps before the pin was pulled and the grenade detonated, disintegrating both.

  Anastasia walked across the frontage to the manor, passing directly through the fountain in front of the mansion.

  The Weir finished the last of the guards and rejoined their Mistress, nuzzling at her black skirts with their bloody muzzles. Mai shooed them away, brushing the gore from Anastasia’s gown with a handkerchief.

  “That’s quite enough,” Lóa said, Egill holding the door for her as she advanced slowly, still unused to the braces on her legs and the pair of canes in her hands. “Some of us are fond of this place.”

  “Not for long,” Anastasia said. “I allowed your servants to die easily. Produce Courtney Lede and Mohammed Omar, and I’ll extend you and your cousin the same courtesy.”

  “That’s unexpectedly cruel,” Lóa remarked, making her way carefully down the broken stone steps. “I had always heard you were so reasonable.”

  “Brennan was always going on about that,” Egill agreed, his hand on Lóa’s elbow. “He was obsessed with you.”

  “I remember,” Anastasia said. “I did not enjoy my stay at your family estates outside Reykjavik. When we are done here, I promise you that I will reduce that place to ash next.”

  “You won’t like this visit, either,” Lóa said. “My uncle warned me that you would come.”

  “I am the Mistress of the Black Sun,” Anastasia said, planting her umbrella in the ground in front of her. “You must have known that I would come from the moment you decided to attack my family. What difference does your forewarning make? I will give you one last chance to produce Courtney Lede and Mohammad Omar.”

  “They aren’t here,” Egill said. “We sent them on hours ago. To…where was it again, cousin?”

  “Home, Egill,” Lóa said. “There’s nothing here of value. There was never any need for you to return to Central, Lady Martynova, but Uncle Gaul told us to keep you distracted for a while. You’ve wasted your time.”

  If Anastasia hesitated for a tiny interval, if she was at all perturbed, then it was masked so well by her cultivated poise that only Mai would have noticed, with the benefit of telepathy and long familiarity.

  “What foolishness,” Anastasia snapped. “All you can do is delay the inevitable. I won’t forgive you for what you did to my servant, you degenerate.”

  “I would be careful what you choose to call me,” Lóa replied. “We are more alike than we are different. We have bathed in the same waters, Lady Martynova. You are as irrational as I am.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” Anastasia said. “As for your plans, I could not care less. Do you have any last words?”

  “Not from me,” Egill said, with a flippant shrug.

  “Then let us begin,” Anastasia said, pointing her umbrella at them. “I will show you no more mercy than you showed my family.”

  “This is not the place,” Egill said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Yes. That is exactly right,” Lóa said. “You mentioned the estate in Iceland earlier, Lady Martynova, and your intention to return there. I’m sure you won’t mind us accelerating that timetable slightly.”

  Anastasia took a firm grip on her umbrella and advanced on them.

  “I showed your apport technician in Harbin the same courtesy you extended to my soldiers,” Egill said, with a benign smile. “She died quickly.”

  Anastasia stopped.

  She did not look at Mai, but Mai closed her eyes and then nodded.

  “It is true,” Mai said. “Svetlana is gone.”

  “Whatever is left of your family will fare no better,” Lóa said. “You should have learned by now that you cannot protect anything.”

  Anastasia lunged at them with the umbrella.

  Egill brought his hands together and he and Lóa disappeared, leaving the Mistress of the Black Sun amid the rubble of the Thule familial estate in Central, surrounded by her servants, and the dead.

  ***

  Eerie woke him from a nap when she arrived with coffee and juice and donuts from the machines in the lobby of the infirmary building, which was really a small hospital and veterinary clinic attached to the biology labs at the Far Shores.

  Alex shifted on the hard bench and stretched as she closed the door.

  “I didn’t hear you leave,” Alex said, yawning.

  “I was only gone a minute,” Eerie said, taking the spot beside him where she’d spent much of the night. “I thought you would be hungry.”

  Alex glanced at Katya, sleeping in the elevated hospital bed, attached to monitoring cables and IVs.

  “How is she?”

  “Same as before,” Eerie said, handing him a canned coffee. “Asleep. The doctor came by a few hours ago, and said she was doing well. Just shock, he said.”

  “She lost her hand and her leg,” Alex said bitterly, opening the coffee. “That’s more than just shock.”

  “It’s my fault,” Eerie said, setting aside her juice. “I should never have—”

  “Let’s not do that,” Alex said. “We all messed up.”

  “I should have told the truth,” Eerie said, burying her face in her hands. “Now Katya is hurt, and I, I…it’s my fault! If I had just—”

  “She’s gonna be okay,” Alex said, putting his arm around Eerie. “Katya’s tough. Don’t worry.”

  Eerie nodded and lifted her head, still sniffling.

  “Okay?” Alex squeezed her shoulder. “She’ll get through this.”

  “Yes,” Eerie agreed. “I know.”

  “Do you?” Alex tore open the plastic wrap on the powdered donuts with his teeth. “Is it, like, a sure thing?”

  “I’ll believe it if you will.” Eerie took one of the miniature donuts and popped it into her mouth. “They are okay, I guess,” Eerie said, making a face as she swallowed. “I like the outside, but the inside is…it’s a lot of bread, don’t you think?”

  “It’s cake,” Alex said, helping himself. “Deep fried cake.”

  “Yeah,�
�� Eerie said, licking powdered sugar from her fingers. “I don’t need that.”

  “You really are as weird as everyone says.”

  “I am, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah, but I like that.”

  “You better,” Eerie said, pressing her leg against his. “It probably won’t change much.”

  They finished the package, Eerie content to lick the sugar from the outside of her half of the donuts.

  Alex read a three-month-old celebrity gossip magazine while Eerie napped on his shoulder. The cadence of the monitoring equipment engrained itself in his mind like a burr caught in a woolen sock, and he started anticipating every beep and blinking light.

  He might have fallen asleep, or perhaps he just drifted until the nurse showed up on her rounds.

  “Good morning,” she said, bustling into the room.

  Alex was about to respond, but then he realized she was not looking at him.

  “Morning,” Katya said, rubbing her eyes with her remaining hand and yawning. “When do we get to eat?”

  Alex and Eerie attempted to swarm onto Katya’s bed, only to be harshly admonished by the nurse.

  “It’s okay,” Katya said weakly. “I’m fine.”

  “You aren’t fine,” Eerie said. “I’m so sorry!”

  “Eh. No big deal,” Katya said. “I’ve had worse.”

  “You have not, you liar,” Alex said. “Are you really okay?”

  “I’ve still got one leg and one hand,” Katya said, shuddering momentarily when she glanced at the bandaged stump at her left wrist. “It’s like kidneys, right? I’ll get by fine with just one each.”

  The nurse finished whatever she had come to do and left, glaring at Alex and Eerie on her way out.

  “I tried to fix it,” Eerie said miserably, laying her head on Katya’s uninjured leg. “I really did!”

  “I sort of remember that,” Katya said. “You almost choked me with a lollipop.”

  “Yeah,” Eerie said. “That was it. It didn’t work.”