The interior courtyard was walled by stone and roofed by wood and clay tile to prevent theft of any of the gold leaf that coated the carved wooden exteriors of the vehicles and to protect the soft, cloth-lined interiors from the elements. Set into one wall of the courtyard was a heavy gate made of cypress logs and bound with iron bands. The gate led to a short hallway that in turn led to an exterior gate, a twin to the interior one. The Academy, like many of the buildings in the Administrative and Imperial Quarters of the City, was a virtual fortress. The imposing strength was more due to fashion rather than any real defensive need. Not since the rebellion had fortifications been required within the City walls.
The double gates fit snugly into their portals, admitting little to no sunlight, hence the courtyard’s gloom.
If he had not been so distracted by the sight of his ride and if the flames from the braziers had been brighter, he may have noticed that one of the corners of the courtyard appeared to be more shadowed then the others. If he had been particularly vigilant he may have even seen a flash of golden hair and pale skin; alas, he did not see either.
The Ferals who would be carrying him filed into the room and picked up the palanquin. He held on tightly as he was tipped slightly one way and then the other as the slaves straightened up.
The inner gate opened and the palanquin flowed forward into the lighter inner hallway. Hael could finally look forward to putting the Academy behind him and to starting his adult life.
The inner gate started to close, then stopped while still ajar. One of the medics from the infirmary slipped through the gate and ran up to Hael, and he could tell it was more bad news.
It was. It appeared that Bral had tried to take his own life.
He was going to be expelled for cowardice.
Chapter 8
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
Little Eve was furious at Baby when she returned.
Baby? No, make that Rebecca. Anticipating this request, she had managed to score some heroin on the way back to the flat.
Little Eve: Where the fuck were you? If Leader had checked we would have both have been in the shit, in the merde, I mean.
Little Eve really was angry to let her persona slip like that.
Rebecca –> Eve: I NEEDED SOMETHING TO TAKE THE EDGE OFF. I’M STARVING.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, why do I even bother talking to you like a person? Since you are still more animal than person, we will speak aloud, like animals.”
“Sorry.” Rebecca pulled out a bag of heroin, a large bag. “Look, I have drugs. Good stuff too.”
“D’accord.” Eve snatched the bag and walked into the kitchenette. Through the doorway she shouted, “Why did you leave so quickly?”
“As I was scanning for Charlie, I came across this bloke who was passed out beside this bag in his apartment down the road. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
“So you jumped up and ran out of here to get some heroin?”
Rebecca nodded.
“Bien, good girl. With no culling I feel I am shriveling inside. This will numb the pain for a while. Let’s cook.”
Rebecca had actually needed to mug a few of the local drug dealers she knew of to accumulate a bag large enough to distract Little Eve.
When one is virtually immortal, you could afford to indulge in all the best vices. No lung cancer, no cirrhosis of the liver and no overdosing. When not manipulating others and feeding off their emotions, they tended to indulge more than normal. Leader’s moratorium on culling, on feeding off the emotions of others, was making them all jittery. The worst part for Eve and Rebecca was that they knew that Don and Lew were probably getting some on their stake-out. They would have some half-assed excuse for needing to cull someone to carry out their mission, but it would be bullshit. They caused pain and killed because they craved it. They all did.
The girls had been shut up in the flat with nothing more than cigarettes and vodka for far too long. Rebecca knew that Little Eve would not question her too much, as long as she brought home some goodies. And H was Little Eve’s favorite pharma treat.
Rebecca would need to drug Eve into a stupor and try to sneak out again to see Finn. She needed time to speak to him.
Tomorrow, though. Right now she really, really needed a fix.
She studied his building from up the road. The building looked much the same as the other buildings along that particular stretch of Johnston Terrace. The building was four stories of charcoal-streaked grey stone. His red door was sandwiched between a small pub and a jewelry shop that took up the ground floor of the building.
“I like this ring,” said Rebecca to the old woman in the jewelers. “Is it silver?”
“Oh yes, sterling silver, a Rennie Mackintosh design.”
“Hmm, very nice.” She looked around and said, “Actually, you have lots of nice things. Have you been here long?”
“Oh, aye, fifteen year or thereabouts. I suppose to a young girl like you, that’s a long time. To me it doesnae seem so.”
“I suppose the street hasn’t changed much in that time. These buildings, they’re all so old.”
“No, nothing has changed much. Pubs open then close and are replaced by others. The only real change I can recall is about ten years ago when the flats upstairs were all bought up. There was construction for months. It soon quieted down. They said it was just one man who made flats into one large home. I’ve never seen him. He keeps to himself.”
“Really, the whole space is just for one bloke? He must be rolling in it.”
“Aye, that’s the rumor.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tried to break in.”
“Aye, they have tried. Once in a while someone gets the idea that his richness upstairs should be supporting the local community a little more directly and tries to break in. No one has succeeded yet.” The old woman looked around a little self-consciously. “He has security, you see. He has a steel inner door, toughened glass windows, cameras, the whole kit and caboodle. I’ve even heard a rumor that there is a stairway that goes down into the old buried part of the city. It's all very mysterious.” The old woman was not really sure why she was giving the girl so much information. She was not usually such a gossip, but when she looked into the girl’s eyes she could not seem to look away and wanted to tell her everything she knew. She was working for every encouraging nod and sound of approval.
“Yes, he certainly does sound intriguing.” Rebecca turned back to the ring. “So how much was the ring again?”
The old woman gave herself a little shake, coming back to herself. “Hmm, the ring, yes, let me see.” She picked up the ring and held it out at arm’s length to look at the tiny numbers on the scrap of paper wrapped around it. “Fifty, but we are having a sale, ten percent off, so forty five?”
“I’ll need to think about it,” said Rebecca. “I may be back later in the week.”
Seeing Bex had been a shock. He always felt, no, he knew — deep down in his bones, he knew — that she was alive out there somewhere, but seeing her face to face had sent a knife through his heart. He could still feel the ache in his chest. The ache he thought he had put away in a box, never to be reopened. He knew she wasn’t the same person he fell in love with all those years ago, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t care that she was now a monster. He still loved her and always would. His love for her was as vast as the world. Almost as vast as his hate for her kind and what they did to him.
He put her from his mind and focused on his laptop; he needed to finalize his data analysis.
It was gratifying how his work on the sensors had meshed so well with his side project with Charlie. With the sensors implanted on her brain, he could see which neural pathways triggered when he hurt her and what was going on in her brain as she healed.
Prior to implanting the sensors, he had had scanned her across a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum as she healed, monitoring the rise in her body temperature as she healed, as well as the drop
in ambient temperature. He found that she extracted heat from the environment as her body repaired the cell damage he inflicted. It was fascinating, but he had no idea how she did it.
With the added data from the sensors, he could see some very interesting areas of her brain light up as she healed. He had even managed to halt her healing response by suppressing those same areas of her brain with electrical impulses delivered through the sensors. If he could stimulate those same areas in his own brain — but better not to get ahead of himself. First he needed to perfect the implantation device.
He had successfully penetrated her skull to the correct depth five more times since he first used the device. He had also penetrated too deeply twice, resulting in some minor temporary brain damage. He was making rapid progress, but the appearance of Bex on the scene had changed his timeline.
He had known that there was a high probability that Charlie’s coven would eventually find him, but he hoped for more time. If Bex was alive, she must have been accepted into Charlie’s coven. He would need to dispose of Charlie soon, just like he had done with prior test subjects.
There was no other alternative; he needed to run the data through some simulations on the mainframe they had at his R&D facility on the outskirts of town. That would allow him to perfect the implantation process and help him decide exactly where to implant sensors when he was ready to become his own subject.
He had also noticed some extremely interesting brain activity when she was left alone and conscious in the lab for a few minutes. It was similar to the brain activity that accompanied speech, but slightly offset. It was halfway between the activity triggered by singing and talking, but much more intense. He thought that he may be detecting her attempts to contact her coven telepathically. It was fascinating.
“House,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Alexander,” the voice with the faint Welsh accent replied.
“Call Lindsay for me, will you?”
He heard a brief dial tone then the sound of a phone ringing at the other end of the line.
“Hello, Mr. Alexander, what can I do for you?”
“Can you send over a car? I’ll be coming into the office.”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second, surprised. He had not been in the office for more than a year. “Yes, of course. The car will be there in half an hour.”
“And Lindsay, have IT clear everything off the mainframe. I need to use it.”
“Everything? But, Mr. Alexander, no one will be able to do anything without the mainframe. It will take weeks to reimage it and get everything back on track when you are done.”
“Everything. See you soon.”
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
Finn was trapped in a nightmare.
Every time he felt that he was going to escape, every time he thought he was going to wake up, he would start to feel the pain, the ever-increasing pain. As soon as the pain started to plateau he would become aware of a shrill beeping, then the blurry image of someone leaning over him, followed by a soft push back into oblivion and his dreams of beautiful, monstrous figures ripping him apart.
Eventually he figured out that he was in a hospital under heavy sedation. He felt that this should disturb him, but it didn’t; it just felt remote. It did not seem to have any impact on him.
Must be the drugs, he thought to himself.
As time passed, he started to take more notice of his surroundings. Occasionally, there would be a familiar person sitting by the side of his bed. They often tried to talk to him, but he could not really understand what they were saying.
Then one day he woke to see a man with a wide face and slightly protuberant eyes sitting by his bedside and staring out the window. His hair was dark brown, but it was lightened by flakes of dandruff that had also migrated to the shoulders of his brown sweater, the pixie dust of a diseased scalp. He felt he knew this person and knew him well.
The man turned from the window and saw he was awake. He leaned forward. “Alright, pal, can you hear me? Do you know who I am?”
It was Jonni. He remembered Jonni Brown was his best friend. Jonni was closer to him than anyone, well anyone other than …
His mind froze for a second. He did not want to finish the thought. He would not finish the thought. For all the pain he was in, it was nothing compared to what he would feel if he finished the thought.
“Do you know what happened to her? Do you know what happened to Bex?” Jonni asked.
An avalanche of fear and horror washed over him.
It all came back to him.
He started to struggle, trying to sit up. His mouth was working but no sound came out. Jonni leaned forward with a look of concern on his face. He turned towards the door and called out, “Nurse!”
Finn was stuttering, “Rrrr, Rrrr.”
Jonni said, “Calm down, pal, you’re going to hurt yourself. The nurse is coming.”
Finally Finn managed to cry out, “Bex, Bex, Bex.” His voice was not more than a pitiful croak. The pain was encroaching on him as he flailed. The background beeps from the machinery around him were becoming more strident.
Jonni turned towards the door and called for the nurse again. When he turned back he said, “Do you know where she is? Bex, I mean … do you know what happened? The police have been looking for her. No one has seen her.” He did not finish his sentence.
The nurse entered the room with a syringe and started to fiddle with the IV.
Finn looked into Jonni’s eyes and croaked out as clearly as he could, “Monsters.”
“What? Monsters? Is that what you said?” said Jonni.
Finn tried to nod. He could sense the downward pressure on his consciousness. He fought the drugs in a desperate attempt to make Jonni understand. He croaked out, “Monsters took her.”
Jonni’s surprised expression was the last thing he saw when he lost consciousness.
The next time he woke up he found Mara Novak sitting beside him reading a book. He could not see the title. He remembered seeing her sitting there a couple of times during his pain- and drug-induced fugue.
He tried to speak and failed. His struggles attracted her attention and she closed her book. Keeping her place with her index finger, she leaned forward a little.
“Hello, Finn. Welcome back,” she said. “I’m the one who found you in the surf. You gave me quite a fright, I must tell you. You were quite a sight. Still are, if I may be so bold as to say. I didn’t even know it was you that I found until they told me.”
He looked at her, not really understanding.
She continued, “Ah yes, not really my place to explain this to you. Suffice it to say that you have a long recovery ahead of you. I have been coming to visit you over the past month. I was curious on how you managed to get in such a predicament. The police are so closemouthed.” She leaned further forward and lowered her voice some more even though the room was empty. “I think they are not saying anything because they do not know what is going on. In any case, call me an old busybody, but I wanted to see how this all turned out.”
Finn’s head was spinning. A month, she said a month. What was wrong with him? He started to try and sit up.
He was looking as her and he thought he heard he say, “Oh dear, I shouldn’t have mentioned his injuries,” but her mouth did not seem to move.
Suddenly a nurse was there again with a syringe, ready to put him under again. She shot a look at Dr. Novak. As he lost consciousness he thought he heard the nurse say, “Silly old bint, disturbing this poor damaged boy,” but again he did not notice her lips moving.
When next he woke, he was alone. There was a book on the chair that his visitor had been sitting on. He could see its title now, The Akashic Chronicle by H P Blavatsky.
The City, Year 7875 in the Reign of Enki II
The palanquin made its way slowly through the crowds.
The Academy was located just outside the Imperial Quarter that housed the Palace at its heart. The large quadrangle in front of th
e Academy was filled with students and their families because it was Graduation Day, when the Sixth Years moved out. It was also Assessment Day, when the new boys vied for a spot in the Academy and moved in. It was a day without classes, it was a day during which all the boys were allowed to spend some time with their families, as long as they stayed near the ziggurat that housed the Academy, hence the quad and the streets surrounding the Academy became a carnival. Hawkers were broadcasting the virtues of their wares mentally and verbally. Food stall vendors were projecting feelings of hunger and exuding pungent delectable odors. Entertainers were projecting anxiety or giddiness or lust, depending on whether they were juggling fire, capering or whoring. All and sundry were hoping to profit from the goodwill of families seeing their sons, families celebrating their sons being accepted into the Academy, families celebrating their son’s graduation and families rewarding their sons for becoming men.
The carnival meant that Hael’s palanquin would not make good time to the Emperor’s Palace. People made way, and pedestrians always made way for people powerful enough to not walk, but the distractions of the carnival meant that it took people a little more time than normal to notice the palanquin and make way.
Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) Page 19
