by John Conroe
Ian followed Stocan, then Ashley, who was flanked by Stacia on one side and Declan on the other, then Jetta and finally Mack.
“Into the fire,” Declan muttered as they headed out the apartment door.
Chapter 10
Chris
Rome
Things happened very quickly. Our two teams broke up and were escorted across Rome by the Carabineri in their Alfa Romeo police cars. As close as I could understand, the Carabineri were both civilian police and military, charged with keeping Rome safe. The soldiers who met my team at the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo were as well equipped and professional as any military force I’d ever met. I was particularly interested in their Beretta ARX160 assault rifles but there was no time to talk guns, as we had work to do. We climbed out of the van that had rushed us through the cobblestone streets of the ancient city and Lydia went to the soldiers, while I went to the back of the little van. Our driver looked relieved as I opened the rear and ‘Sos flowed out onto the street in wolf form.
When we had left the Vatican, my furry friend had loomed over the little Fiat Scudo van in Kodiak form before shimmering down to merely massive wolf size. The driver had stayed firmly seated inside the vehicle, not getting out to open the back for my wolf-bear, which led me to believe he might have been a touch frightened. That and the white-knuckled grip he held on the steering wheel the whole way here.
Lydia was speaking rapid-fire Italian with the two soldiers, who were securing the front of the Basilica.
“What’s the sitch?” I asked as ‘Sos and I came from the back of the van, me carrying a small duffle.
The soldiers were watching us closely as we talked. “They’ve secured all the entrances with two-man teams. Nobody has been inside, as per their orders. It’s just us. Also, I told them that we would use the code word Caesar when we come back out. No Caesar, start shooting,” she said. Her words had no snark and no sass.
“You good?” I asked.
Her expression went from businesslike blank to sarcastic sneer in a microsecond.
“Listen Junior, I’ve been doing this a lot longer then you,” she said. Still no real bite in her syntax.
Lydia was well-trained and dangerous, but she wasn’t primarily a fighter type. Seeing a regular human transformed into an unkillable weapon had shaken her up a bit.
“Well that’s super. But I get to go first. Furface goes second and you last. Watch our sixes. Got your hammer?” I asked.
She held up the big twenty-four-ounce framing hammer we’d borrowed for her from the Vatican facilities people, as most of our weapons were either on the plane or at Senka’s house. The hammer looked stupid big in her tiny hands, but she waved it around like it was a feather. Tiny but still vampire strong.
“Remember, break their joints and then the head. If they’re black armored, keep hitting the same spot over and over,” I said.
“I have additional forces to back you Christian. Once you, Miss Lydia, and Awasos are inside the church, I will deploy them,” Omega said through my phone. The volume was so low that the soldiers didn’t react. “They are in that small bag I asked you carry.”
I had figured something of the sort, ‘cause the bag kinda clinked a bit. “Right, let’s get to it,” I said. “What was the composition of the missing team?” I asked as we started up the steps.
Lydia started to run down the details, her voice settling down. “Two Darkkin and two human. The team leader is Natalie, one of Senka’s guardian corp. The other vampire and one of the humans are both scientists and the last human is daytime security. I know the scientists by sight only but the day guy is Kurt, an ex-GSG9 trooper. Good guy.”
We entered the church, closing the doors behind us and pausing to let our supernatural senses reach out.
The building was dark and old. Real old. It smelled of wood, candle wax, and people. But there was nothing there now.
“This way,” Lydia said, moving to take the lead, but ‘Sos pushed in front of her.
“Could you open the bag, Christian?” Omega asked before we got past the entry.
I unzipped the duffle and pulled both sides wide open, keeping my head away from the opening. A cloud of whirring micro bots burst out. They circled the air above us, some splitting off to presumably search the building, the rest settling down on all three of us. For Lydia and myself, they landed on our shoulders, gripping the material of our shirts and linking together. In moments, I could see what looked like titanium-gray-colored shoulder pads forming on Lydia while I felt something similar growing on my own shoulders.
On Awasos, they concentrated behind his head, locking into his thick fur and building up into a rounded unit of some kind. The final bots to link up put the finishing touches on a tubular gun barrel that projected out of the dome. Lydia’s shoulders had smaller versions of the gun tubes as well, as I suspected mine did.
“I am sending scouts to investigate. The linked units on your shoulders will provide coordinated infrared laser capability with the larger unit on Awasos.”
Lydia looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“I don’t know how excited I am to have active lasers on either side of my neck and head,” I commented.
“I am running all the units at all times. I will never allow the beams to cross any of you or any part of you,” Omega said. “If you need reassurance please consider how angry my father would be if I harmed any of you.”
“He does dote on that goofy kid,” Lydia said, her expression relaxing a bit. The lasers, the bots, and Omega’s presence were reassuring her. At some point in the recent past, she had started to trust the super AI.
“You mean the goofy kid who is probably rearranging the geography of another planet?” I asked.
“Father has done no harm on Fairie and in fact repaired an architecturally significant building.”
“Fixed what? Stone?” I asked, thinking of his Earth abilities.
“Yes, a relatively small amount of stone,” Omega said.
“Relatively? How come I think your relatively and our relatively might be vastly different?” I asked.
“We do, after all, have different perspectives.”
“Bet you it was at least a ton of stone or earth,” Lydia said.
“I calculate it was approximately twelve hundred pounds, Miss Lydia,” Omega said before I could answer. Which was good, because I was going to bet higher than a ton.
“And let me guess—he broke it in the first place?” I asked.
“Untrue. A dragon broke it, unintentionally.”
“Well then, he’s doing his job. Cleaning up after the dragons,” I said.
“Friggin kid gets right in the middle of everything, doesn’t he?” Lydia asked, smiling slightly.
“He does have a knack for finding trouble, which we are probably seconds away from, ourselves,” I said.
“The above-ground structures are clear, with the exception of a family of mice in one of the upper walls. I have checked them and they are just mice. Entry to the underground is off the right aisle,” Omega said.
We entered the sanctuary and even with a pressing and likely deadly need, we both paused for a second to take in the interior, which, like most of what I’d seen so far in Rome, was shockingly breathtaking. A microbot buzzed by us, flying through a passageway whose walls were lined with postcards from all over the world. We followed the bot, finding the stairs that descended to the lower church. The basilica was two churches built atop one another—well, three actually, if you consider the Mithrian altar room under the lower church to be one as well.
After making sure the lower church was clear, we went down another flight of stairs. The insect-like mini bot flitted to the curved ceiling and crept around the corner. We were deep into some old, old construction.
Grim moved up and took control, bringing my senses up to almost painful detail. Lydia’s foot dislodged a small pebble that tinged onto the floor. The tiny sound bounced through the stairway and out into the unseen room
beyond. The echoes filled my head with an image of a long stone room, curved ceiling, built-in stone bench-like structures, and a strange, rectangular altar made from the same rock—and three bodies with someone standing over them.
I turned and held one finger up to Lydia, nodded once, and then Moved around the corner.
A female vampire straightened at my entrance, eyes blank, hands pulling back from a male form with a crushed skull, a female with a broken neck, and a headless female form wearing a weapons harness. Brass cartridge casings littered the floor and the walls were pocked with bullet craters.
“Doctor Ricci?” Lydia asked, barely visible behind the furry bulk of Awasos, who had changed forms back to room-filling Kodiak.
A sharp, ultra high-pitched sound shot through the tight chamber and the vampire, presumably Doctor Ricci, folded to the ground in a now-familiar squat.
I shot forward, chopped her head off with one aura-lined hand, and threw the body against the back wall near the dark hole where the suspicious ear-splitting sound had come from.
“Diamondoid formation has begun. Please stand back and allow the units to begin incineration,” Omega said.
My shoulders both moved, the weapons units standing up and crawling off onto the nearby curve of the low ceiling. The big one on ‘Sos had climbed onto his head and was standing on six metallic legs. He looked at me with a what the hell expression while the laser activated and the kitten-sized bot crouched, then jumped to the ceiling directly above, firing at the vampire’s body the entire time. Even on all fours, Awasos’s head is higher than mine, leaving just a few inches for the bot to jump, which it did with ease.
A glance back showed Lydia’s two units also ceiling-crawling to get into optimum position. The two from me and the big one from my bear were already lasing, the infrared beams visible to my thermal vision, the surface of the twitching blackening body heating rapidly to from red, through orange, and rapidly toward white hot.
The high-pitched sound came again and I Moved to the back of the Mithrian blood chamber. A pale slug-like creature was squirming in an uneven hole at the back of the chamber.
Coating one hand with aura, I scooped it out and flung it to the floor where it twitched, squirmed, and sang ultra high-pitched notes.
The body of Dr. Ricci and her head were both shuddering as the nano invaders inside raced to transform her tissues into something deadlier. The right arm started to pull away from her shoulder.
Grim wasn’t willing to leave it to Omega’s lasers. He caused me to grab the rectangular stone altar and bash the crap out of the head, the slug, and the twitching body. Every time I slammed down the four or five hundred pound altar, the lasers cut off and then as I picked it back up, they fired right back up. We entered a period of steady smash and burn, gradually reducing the doctor’s remains to burnt mush.
Finally, I backed away, still holding the heavy cube of rock. Five beams of thermal energy roved across about a nine-square-foot area of clear blood, pink flesh, and black armor, burning it to cinders, inch by inch.
“Ah, Chris, you missed one,” Lydia said. I looked up at her and found her pointing at my makeshift melee weapon. The massive altar’s weight wasn’t as much of a problem as the awkwardness of it, but at least the square edges gave me gripping points. I spun it around to look at the bottom just in time to see something that might have been a finger jump free and race across the floor in a blur.
A resound thwack echoed in the little chamber, sounding like mini-thunder. ‘Sos stood with his paw on the floor, having slapped it with roughly the force of a heavy machine gun round. He looked at me, then growled in sudden pain. His paw came up and I saw something black and cylindrical sticking out of the middle of it, twitching as it tried to crawl deeper.
Not my bear, motherfucker. I was on him in a microsecond. “Paw,” I demanded, holding out my hand.
In obvious pain and facing an alien nightmare that none of us understood, my were-bear-wolf never hesitated. With heart-wrenching confidence, he put his platter-sized paw in my hand and looked at me like I could solve everything.
Anger swelled through me—anger like a friggin’ hurricane. Fuck this. Not today, not my friend, not ever. Power flooded through me and I poured every erg of aura I could muster through my right hand. I shoved that energy through his paw and up into my waiting left hand, making an aura circuit. The black, gleaming finger monster stopped squirming into ‘Sos, freezing for a second before going completely batshit crazy. It twisted and turned the opposite direction, backing up out of the massive paw, getting closer and closer to my waiting left hand.
Suddenly it popped free, slithering sideways and catching me off-guard. My left hand slammed down but only caught the tail end of it, a literal blackened fingernail of it. Shooting away from me, it hit the floor, all its tiny millipede legs flailing at once. Accelerating quickly, it was six feet away when the framing hammer hit it with the force of jackhammer. Black glittering armor and pink flesh spattered in all directions.
Lydia pulled back the hammer, looking at the still-moving smear she’d made on the stone floor. It was even now trying to put itself back together.
Enough. My anger overhelmed, blasting out of me in a purple-black fury. The God Tear necklace went burning hot against my chest and all of the built-up aura in my body shot out of my right hand and spread around the underground altar room in a concussive blast. The room flashed violet and I felt, rather than saw, the alien become dust.
When I opened my eyes, Lydia was blinking and looking at the powdery remains of the finger thing and the dusty residue still clinging to the face of her hammer. She looked as confused as I felt. “Holy shit!” she said.
Clap—clap—clap. Barbiel was leaning against the doorframe behind us, slow clapping his hands. We all heard him and, based on Lydia’s now-even-wider eyes, saw him too.
“Congratulations. It’s about time you remembered how to do that,” my angelic bro said with a self-satisfied smirk.
“Wait, I’ve done that before?”
“In the tunnel… under Atlantic Avenue,” Lydia said before Barbiel could more than open his mouth. He nodded at her words though.
“Miss Chapman is correct. Don’t you remember?” he asked me.
Most of my memories are back, but some come harder than others. An image popped into my head, of me sitting cross-legged on a dirt floor, Tanya in my lap, feeding from my wrist.
“I do remember,” I said, looking at Lydia then back at him quickly and suddenly having to catch my balance.
“It’s draining, right?” he asked, pushing off the doorframe and stepping closer. Lydia automatically stepped back, away from him.
“Lydia, this is Barbiel. Barbiel, Lydia,” I said, remembering my manners as my balance settled down. I was suddenly really tired.
“The esteemed Lydia Chapman,” Barbiel said, smiling. I just then noticed that he was wearing an Imagine Dragons “Radioactive” t-shirt and crisp, clean jeans.
“You couldn’t have just told me about this trick?” I asked.
“Ah, you know better—rules. I gotta stick to the rules, Chris,” he said. “Especially with something like this.”
“God’s other children?” I asked. “Aliens?”
“Aliens to you, but all part of the family. We’re not allowed to take sides in a family squabble,” he said.
“Unkillable alien zombie germs that take over our people are family?” I asked.
“No, those are weapons. What you just killed, brother, was a construct, as your computer friend surmised. But as you just figured out, you do have some power over that kind of weapon. So does your better half. She can sing to them. And when you do your thing, it will drain you of aura. There are some other effects we should talk about but that might have to wait. Possibly you should check on your people?” he said, and then was just simply gone. Not there. Completely vanished.
