Strange Days (Bill of the Dead Book 1)

by Rick Gualtieri

  From the look on her husband’s face, I wasn’t sure he agreed with that last part. With the end of all things supernatural so, too, had ended the vigil of the Knights Templar. They’d existed to protect the world from things that went bump in the night. That charter, however, included people like Kelly. I could understand his worry. If this kept up, he was probably wondering what that would mean for their relationship.

  I shrugged and turned my attention elsewhere. There wasn’t much I could do about that. Ultimately, that was their marriage counselor’s problem, not mine.

  TUNNEL OF BLIND LOVE

  Even with the pulse over and me back to fighting shape, in a sense of the word, Christy still insisted I stay off my feet.

  Regardless, I knew we couldn’t stay at her place forever. The entire floor of this building was a crime scene. The best we could do was sanitize it of our presence and then play dumb later, much like I’d done at my apartment.

  However, we were neither ready to leave yet, nor had clue one as to where our next stop would even be.

  Christy, Gan, and Ed stepped into the kitchen to discuss exactly that ... albeit I had a feeling Ed was mostly there to play referee between them. Despite being a vamp, his knowledge of the supernatural was about on par with mine, which was to say limited. Kelly and Vincent, meanwhile, entertained Tina so as to calm her down from the excitement of the last hour or so.

  That left me and Tom. With a bit of time to kill and curious to see if the rest of the world was noticing these pulses, I flipped on the TV.

  Tom settled his incorporeal ass next to me on the couch. “Change the channel. I think Shark Week is on.”

  “How about we check the news instead?”

  “But they’re doing a follow-up to that Megalodon documentary.”

  “You do realize that was bullshit, right?”

  “Maybe they just wanted us to believe it was fake. Ever think of that?”

  I stared at him for a long second before turning back toward the TV.

  The top stories seemed to be normal shit: politicians fucking over their constituents, celebrities fucking each other, that sort of stuff. Stupid as this might sound, I found it reassuring. It meant the world as a whole wasn’t freaking out ... yet.

  When they got to local news, though, things took a turn for the weird.

  ...as seen in this footage, the structure is clearly engulfed in green flame. Let’s go to our chief science consultant to hear what might have caused this phenomenon...

  Locals are claiming ghost lights suddenly appeared over this remote lake seventy miles north of...

  “And then it disappeared in front of me, just like that. I ain’t normally a prayin’ woman, but...”

  Thirteen residents of this small senior community collapsed at the exact same time. Authorities are investigating food poisoning as a culprit, but the staff are claiming that couldn’t be the case...

  We reached out to a representative of the Church of the Green Unity for a comment. He issued a statement proclaiming the Strange Days had returned...

  Oh yeah, we definitely weren’t alone in noticing things. The upside, however, was the media didn’t appear to be taking it too seriously yet.

  That didn’t mean they wouldn’t eventually. But hopefully we could stop things before it reached the point of devolving into a witch hunt for...

  “I already concurred, witch. Do not let it go to your head.”

  Hmm. Only Gan could agree with something and remain that condescending in the same breath. I turned to find her and Christy marching out of the kitchen.

  “What’s up?”

  “Hold that thought,” Christy said, continuing past us. “I have to grab something from my bedroom.”

  Tom turned to me. “She means alone.”

  “I didn’t move.”

  “I know how your mind works, dude. To steal a phrase, lack of pussy makes you brave.”

  Gan, rather than acknowledge Tom’s jealous idiocy, sat next to me, right in the spot where he was. A disturbing double image stared at me, but only for a second before Tom leapt to his feet.

  “Personal space, lady!”

  She gave him the barest of glances before turning back toward me, her green eyes locking onto mine as if they had laser guidance. “Your revenant grows tiresome, my love.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He kind of grows on you, in a House on Haunted Hill sort of way.”

  She smiled. “I have missed your sense of humor these last few years. Tell me, how are you feeling now?”

  “Um, pretty good, I guess.”

  “As I knew you would. Yours is a destiny of might, not weakness.”

  “Well, isn’t that ... comforting.”

  “I offer no comfort, merely fact. It is as I have foreseen.”

  “Wait, what do you mean foreseen?”

  “You’re speaking metaphorically, right?” Ed asked, joining us in the living room.

  “Not at all, Progenitor,” she replied.

  “You do realize calling me that creeps me out, right?”

  She shrugged as if that were his problem to deal with. “It is a title of honor I bestow upon one who has risen from the ashes of the old race to create the new. For without you, I would not be here with my beloved today.”

  I mouthed, “This is all your fault,” at him, catching a dirty look in return. It felt good to lay the blame on someone else for ...

  Fuck! There I was, getting distracted again. “What did you mean by you’d foreseen it, Gan? Did you buy a magic eight ball or something?”

  I was hoping she’d throw back some bullshit about love conquering all. That was easy enough to dismiss. But what she said next sent chills down my spine.

  “You remember the Château de Chillon, of course, do you not, my love?”

  “I do,” Tom said. “That’s the French castle where Alexander the Great cornholed Bill.”

  I turned and gave him my best withering stare. “First off, it’s in Switzerland. Secondly, he only wanted to wrestle ... in the nude.”

  “I rest my case.”

  Grrr. How could someone dead be so fucking irritating? I sucked up any response I had and turned back to Gan. “Yes, I remember. It was the headquarters for...”

  “For the First, yes,” she finished. “But upon their death, the Swiss government reclaimed it for themselves, including the lower levels. I was forced to step in and convince them otherwise.”

  “Convince them?”

  “I understand their economy is doing quite well these days.”

  “Oh.” I suppose bribery was marginally better than the atrocities I immediately envisioned for her.

  “As my father’s heir and former hopeful to the First, I felt my claim was solid to all they possessed, so I took steps to secure it.”

  “Okay, fine. So you own the dungeon in a drafty old castle. Congratulations.”

  “You know as well as I what lies in those depths.”

  I glanced at my two former roommates. “You don’t mean...”

  “The cave of seers,” she replied. “Of course, is it not obvious?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The underground cathedral the seers inhabited was one of the more frightening places I’d ever been, and I’d seen some scary shit in my day. We’re talking a smoky cavern inhabited by a bunch of crazy fucks from the dawn of time. And that says a lot when we’re discussing vamps. I got the impression that even the First Coven were afraid of them.

  Forced to blind themselves on an hourly basis, these vampire psychos sat around huffing fumes until they hallucinated something of significance. Far be it for me to judge anyone high as balls, but the bullshit they spewed forth was then interpreted as prophecy ... of which Sheila and I apparently ended up as the subject of a few.

  Ah, good times, I tell ya.

  Still, all of that shit was dead and buried, or at least I hoped it was. But with my horoscope seemingly calling for miraculous resurrections, who was I to say?

  ♦ ♦ ♦


  “The seers were, of course, all dead by then,” Gan continued, “their ashes mixed with the soot from the ever-burning incense of that pit.”

  “And yet you still wanted this shit hole?” Tom asked.

  “Indeed. One need not be either Magi or vampire to be gifted with the burden of sight. One simply requires their mind to be elevated to a state beyond this mortal coil we inhabit.”

  “That sounds kinda hippyish,” I said.

  “You see, beloved, it was my theory that even the destruction of The Source could not fully obscure the mists of time.” She smiled at me. Ugh, so creepy. “It was a minor matter to recruit volunteers, blind them, then set them to plumbing the mysteries of what the future holds.”

  “Definitely less hippyish now.”

  “Unfortunately, it isn’t nearly as efficient as it once was. Humans are far more fragile than the old seers. Their viability within the mists is ... limited.”

  “Meaning?” Ed asked.

  “On average, they last less than seven months before I am forced to replace them. However, I have been making strides in extending their use. For example, rather than waste the bodies of their fallen colleagues, they instead utilize them as...”

  I held up a hand. “I really don’t want to know. Your point?”

  Gan smiled. “My point, beloved, is that my efforts have begun to yield fruit. For you see, I have learned a glorious truth.”

  “And that might be?”

  “You, Dr. Death. Your involvement in all of this, our glorious future, it is just beginning.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Am I?” she asked. “Who better for fate to choose, my love?”

  “How about anyone?”

  “I disagree. Think about it. Since the time when man first fell from the trees, we have walked side by side with creatures from beyond the veil. Millennia existing alongside, and being guided by, those who walk in the shadows ... until now. For the first time in all its long history, mankind is alone, free to dictate its own fate, and it is all because of you.”

  “Um...”

  “Who better to lead the charge into this bold new future which awaits us?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It took some effort to keep from freaking the fuck out. The last thing I wanted was for my name to come up again in some half-assed Chosen One lottery. I’d done my part, paid my dues. As far as I was concerned, I was square with fate.

  No, fuck that. Considering how things had played out, fate probably owed me one.

  Scooting away from Gan, I took several long breaths, trying to rationalize what she’d just said. I wasn’t exactly a neutral party in her eyes. For all I knew, she had these so-called seers tortured until they gave the answers she wanted to hear.

  Sucked for them. But that was more a problem for Amnesty International than me. No, my problem was the little psycho herself, sitting there making crazy proclamations like she was Lo-Pan to my Jack Burton.

  Fortunately, before she could get to the part about how we were fated to live out this glorious destiny together, or some other such bullshit, Christy mercifully walked back into the room.

  She was carrying a massive and ancient looking tome – something I sincerely doubted she’d gotten from the local chapter of the New York Public Library. Laying it down on the coffee table in front of us, she called for Kelly and began flipping through the pages.

  “I take it we’re not looking at yearbook photos,” I said.

  “Not quite. But I think we may have figured out what’s been going on.”

  “That’s great!”

  “Not only that,” Christy smiled at me and it lit up her whole face, erasing the fear I’d felt only moments earlier, “but we might actually be able to stop it.”

  LEY LINES IN THE SAND

  “Liz tipped me off,” Christy explained. “She mentioned something I did after The Source collapsed as being the key to opening the gateway again.”

  I shrugged, not following. “But all the magic was destroyed at that point.”

  “That’s exactly what I said,” Ed replied.

  Gan turned his way. “And hence why you added so little to our discussion, Progenitor.”

  I may have snickered a bit at that.

  “That’s what I thought at first, too,” Christy said. “It’s been five years and I freely admit my memories of that time are a bit fuzzy for ... reasons.” Though she didn’t elaborate, I saw her glance Tom’s way. “But then I forced myself to think about what happened, what really happened, step by step.”

  She opened the book to what appeared to be a crude map. The continents were all askew and missing were any country markers, making me wonder if whoever drew this had been drunk off their ass. Making things even more chaotic were a series of interconnecting lines scribbled across the whole thing.

  But then Christy pointed at a spot on the map where the squiggles all seemed to converge. “Ley lines.”

  That seemed to ring a bell. “Weren’t those the portals we used to get to The Source?”

  “That was simply one use for them, my love,” Gan explained. “A quick means of ingress and egress that Ib utilized. The lines themselves are much more, though. They are the former conduits through which The Source’s power flowed to all corners of this world.”

  “Exactly,” Christy said. “Look at this. It’s a reproduction of an ancient map, one of the first and only attempts by the Magi to map the ley lines.” She tapped her finger at a spot where the lines converged. “There’s been debate for millennia about this focal point, what it meant and where it was. As you can see by the map itself, there isn’t a lot of detail to go off.”

  “The Source?” I offered.

  “Yes. We know that now, as well as where it’s located. Because of that, we can add context that never existed before.” She pointed elsewhere on the map. “For example, this is most likely the line that runs beneath Boston. You remember that, right?

  “Bunker Hill? Hard to forget.”

  “And I think this is the one under Las Vegas.”

  “Why the big mystery?” Tom asked. “If you can find one line, just follow it back to where it came from.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Kelly said. “Legend tells us there’re thirteen major ley lines zig-zagging across the globe, crisscrossing each other. Good luck tracking one with even modern technology.”

  “And yet somehow they managed to do it thousands of years ago,” Christy replied, her eyes still on the map.

  I exchanged glances with my former roommates, living and otherwise. “Okay, and this means what for us?”

  “Remember what happened,” Christy asked, “after The Source was gone? We weren’t sure how to get out, but then I realized the ley lines themselves still held some power, enough for us to escape.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Saved us a lot of walking. But why does that matter now?”

  “Think of these lines as rivers of pure magical power, with The Source being the mountaintop they all flowed from to carry that energy across the world – energy that empowered my people and connected this world to all other worlds of the multiverse.”

  “Getting kind of trippy,” Tom remarked.

  “So says the guy with the transparent body.” I turned to Christy again. “Okay, I sorta remember you explaining this. But, if I recall correctly, you said the magic in them would dry up pretty fast without The Source.”

  She nodded. “I did and still believe that’s the case. But, continuing the water analogy, when a river runs dry, sometimes small ponds or creeks are left behind – not much more than puddles but still there.”

  Kelly snapped her fingers. “Where the ley lines run deepest.”

  “Indeed, witch,” Gan replied.

  “Hold on,” Tom said, crossing his arms smugly as if he thought he had something useful to contribute. “I thought we were talking about gods kicking down doors.”

  Gan waved her hand dismissively. “An early hypothesis, nothing more.”

&nb
sp; Christy nodded, the look on her face saying she wasn’t overly happy to agree with Gan on anything. “What cemented it for me was what Komak said before that last pulse, about three at once.”

  I nodded. “Yep, that one was a doozy.”

  “I think what’s happening is that Komak’s coven are working with the Magi to search the ley lines for these deep wells of remaining energy.”

  “But why?” Kelly asked. “Even if they managed to tap into some residual energy in the surrounding rocks, it would be finite, like taking the last few nuggets of gold from a spent mine.”

  “So that’s why these pulses have been so short,” I surmised. “They’ve been digging for magical gold, spending the shit out of it, then moving on to the next one.”

  Tom tried to clap me on the back, doing nothing more than sending a static shock down my arm. “So that means there isn’t anything for us to do. We just wait for these fuckers to tap all the wells and then shit goes back to normal.”

  “A gross oversimplification,” Gan said. “And also incorrect.”

  Christy again nodded. “She’s right. I know Liz. I doubt she’s in this for one last fling to get it out of her system. No. She and Komak want to turn the lights back on full time. And that’s where Sheila comes in.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “How?” I asked, despite not wanting to. “Sheila’s power helped close The Source.”

  “What better way to unlock a door, my love, than with the same key that closed it?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do we. Not fully,” Christy said with a heavy sigh.

  Gan looked like she wanted to say something to that, but Christy shot her down. “Nor do you. Admit it.” Gan’s response was a silent glare, so she continued. “Our working theory, however, is that The Source cave is the central focal point where all of these ley lines used to be fed from. That’s why Komak’s people commandeered it.”