“Que?”
“I had it trapped within my mind, but without my Caduceus—the black stick—I couldn’t hold it, so I moved it to the gorilla. I feel terrible about it, but my only other choice was to put it on you.”
Colette’s confused scowl indicated pretty clearly that she didn’t understand yet.
“Colette, I do not wish to disturb you, but this being has existed for centuries. It lives to devour life. It sat at the bottom of a burial mound in Ohio for a thousand years before I dug it up. It killed three of my... three brave men before it was subdued and trapped. After I unburied it, it took over another guy who then killed several people. After that it took control of me for a while before I could throw it off and trap it. I bound it with the power from the Caduceus, what you call a piece of the cross.
“When this thing takes someone, it takes them completely. You become... twisted, hungry and evil. When it finds a new person with a stronger soul or healthier body, it arranges for the death of its current host, so it is free to move.”
Vinnie, standing tense a foot away from the cage listening to us, scowled. “You’re lying! There’s no such thing.”
“Mr. Vincent, I assure you I am telling the truth. I don’t know if it can kill its host on its own when it wants to move, but I am afraid of what might happen to you if it can. I would not wish such a fate on anyone. Unless your uncle’s displeasure is worse than mental slavery and eternal cold hunger, I would suggest you find something else to do.”
I shut up and anxiously watched Vinnie’s mental processes cross his face in various ticks, scowls and mutters.
“Screw you.”
Arrrgh! This was so frustrating, I’d beaten the command not to leave, why couldn’t I beat this politeness? I could! I knew it. I believed it. I said, “Don’t be a stupid asshole!” It came out as, “I am afraid you are making an unwise choice, sir.”
He flipped me the bird and fumbled with the keys for a moment before successfully opening the cage. It took an active effort of will to keep up my second sight, so I concentrated on watching that mystical spectrum. I Looked at the gorilla apprehensively as Vinnie walked by its still form. Nothing happened, either with the gorilla or the shadow. I let go of the breath I’d been holding, then I heard a scuffling in the room behind me.
I turned to see our new visitors. Dave and Jen stood together in the corner under the room’s camera. Dave was casting his shit-eating grin at me. When he saw that I had seen them, he smiled wider, twiddled his fingers at me and put his finger up to his lips. In contrast to the great time Dave seemed to be having, Jen, standing next to him, looked pale and sick. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving inaudibly.
Vinnie came out of the cage to drop a load of nasty straw into a large plastic trashcan. He couldn’t have missed my friends, but if he saw them at all, he didn’t seem to care. I looked back at Dave and Jen. They were still there. I dropped my sight and nothing changed. I took another look at Vinnie, who was just going about his task. I looked back and forgot what I was looking for. Oh right—hadn’t I just seen Dave? On a hunch, I raised my sight again and there they were. They didn’t appear so much as resolve out of the background.
I’m sure I looked pretty silly to Colette gawking at an empty corner with my jaw hanging down around my feet, but this was incredible!
I noticed that Dave and Jen were holding hands when Dave cupped his other hand next to his mouth and said in an excited stage whisper. “Pretty freakin’ cool isn’t it.”
I looked back to Colette. Her gaze was pinned on the gorilla. She hadn’t noticed Dave’s “whisper.” I tried to shake the Twilight Zone music out of my head and understand what this meant. It was pretty obvious it meant that Dave and Jen had snuck in unseen and were going to try and rescue us. But, from the pained look on Jen’s face, it was taking a toll on her, and she wasn’t going to keep this going much longer.
“Hey Mr. Vincent,” I asked. “Could you possibly find it in your heart to get us a drink of water?”
He didn’t even glance at me. “You can effing die of thirst for all I care.”
Crap. I had to come up with something else to get him out of the room before Jen’s hoodoo failed. I hoped they had a follow-up plan to get us out of here. I didn’t know if the two of them could free us, but even if they could, the guards would see it and come in, guns-a-blazin’.
As if summoned by my thoughts, two guards walked into the room, followed by Dr. Smith. They all walked by my two friends without so much as a glance. The Doc scowled at Vinnie cleaning the cage. “You haven’t finished that yet?”
Surprised, Vinnie almost had a heart attack. He jumped and spun around. “I’m, I’m sorry, but the monkey was going crazy! I thought he was gonna break the cage!”
Smith’s scowl deepened with disbelief.
“No really, look at him! He’s all beat up.”
Smith and his guards came forward to look. He said, “I wonder if the leech caused that behavior.”
Smith was several feet away from the cage when the gorilla woozily raised its head and pushed itself up off the floor with a growl. Everybody took a step back. Vinnie, whose exit was now blocked, let loose an involuntary squeak and tried to become one with the corner of the cage. Through the open door of the cage, the ape focused on Smith and loosed a deep staccato growl. I Looked at the shadow. It had gathered in a bulge straining towards Smith. I immediately realized what was going to happen, but before I could come up with a polite way to say, “Oh shit, run away,” the gorilla roared and leapt out of the cage at Smith. The guards stood their ground while Smith fumbled back and let loose a deafening barrage of gunfire. The gorilla never completed his leap. Blood flew from the impact points on its torso and he landed face down on the floor in a quickly widening pool of blood. His body jerked as two more high-caliber rounds made sure he was dead. In an instant, the shadow pulled free, flashed across to Smith, and extinguished his flaring aura.
Oh holy crap, we were all so fucked.
Smith spasmed much as the gorilla had. He collapsed to the ground. One guard reached down to help him.
“Are you okay, sir?”
I finally got my mouth working. “I would like to suggest that you either kill him right now or run away.” I would have screamed if it had been the polite thing to do. “Dave, Jen, please retreat, and save yourselves from Wendigota.”
They both knew what I was talking about, but before they could react, the mad doctor sat up, stretched his neck and shoulders and said, “Ah, that is so much better.” He looked up into the concerned face of his guard and smiled. He reached up his hand, patted John once and said, “Thank-you for your years of service, John.” A pseudopod of blackness whipped out, grabbed John’s yellow aura and ripped it from his body.
I screamed in horror at the sight as images of Daniel’s death flashed through my mind.
John collapsed in a heap as Smith jumped to his feet. Smith turned to the second guard and in a flash of horror killed him, too. Smith snapped a necklace with some sort of pendant off of each man and then, dipped in his new black coat of toxic waste, turned to me. His triumphant, intoxicated smile turned into a snarl. He reached down, pulled John’s gun out of its holster, pointed it at me and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. I stood frozen as he scowled, looked down at the gun, hit the safety, re-targeted me. He pulled the trigger again. This time, the gun fired.
Bullets Fly
Colette grabbed me and nearly pulled me off my feet. I lurched off balance as the whole room seemed to shift around me. A bullet whizzed by my ear and smacked into the wall. I grabbed Colette to keep from falling.
Smith roared and shot again. This time the bullet whizzed past me to the right. Once more, the world lurched around me. The hit on my head must have been more severe than I had realized. He fired again, and missed again. He was a truly pathetic shot. I gave thanks to his Coke bottle glasses, but other than that, I had no fricking clue what to do. So, I just readied myself to dodge when t
he gun pointed at me again.
Dave tackled him from behind. Smith went down and dropped the gun. A deafening klaxon went off in the hallway. I didn’t pay it any attention and screamed at the top of my lungs to Dave. “Dave, please don’t kill him! Please get the Caduceus!”
It turns out I didn’t need to worry about Dave killing Smith. With one arm, Smith threw Dave across the room where he smacked into one of the concrete block walls and crumpled to the ground. How the hell did the scrawny little jerk get so strong so quickly?
I screamed again and tried to rip the door off the cage. That met with as much success as you might expect. Meanwhile, Smith stumbled around and soon saw where his gun had skidded when he fell. He reached down, grabbed it and pointed it back at me.
“Don’t move, asshole!”
Smith momentarily froze at the voice that rang out from behind him. It was Jen. She had her hand out to him like she had thrown something at him. She held him for about three seconds, before he whipped around and shot her. I watched the blood spray from Jen’s chest. She went down hard.
An ice pick pierced my heart. “Jen!”
Smith spun back to me with his gun held out in front of him. If hate alone could kill, Smith would have been a burning hole. Unfortunately, gun trumps hate. Colette tackled me again as he fired. The world shifted once more as I went down. I put my hand to the wall to stop my fall, but I missed. My hand went right through it and I hit the ground hard. Another shot rang out and hit somewhere behind me. A new voice entered the cacophony. “Hold it right there, Smith!” I looked up through the cage bars and saw my uncle standing in the doorway, pointing a gun at Smith. Smith whirled on him and again I could see what was coming. I yelled, “Don’t kill him!”
Uncle Mark’s small caliber gun popped, and Matt Smith fell back to land near the cage. He’d managed to hold onto his gun and brought it up to shoot Uncle Mark. Mark fired again and Smith’s head jerked back as a small, but bloody hole splashed open in his forehead. Smith didn’t move again.
I put up what pathetic shields I could to stop the assault from the shadow that was coming, but it didn’t matter. The assault never came. Instead, the shadow snapped across the room to Mark, coating him in its malevolence. Mark slapped his hands to his head. That was when I spotted the snake totem bouncing on a silver chain around his neck. The power in the Caduceus dwarfed that in the snake totem, but it was still a scary weapon in the hands of someone who knew how to use it. My uncle and I screamed at the same time. Mark staggered, kept his hands pressed to his head, and stumbled back against the wall.
I slammed my arm through the bars towards Matt Smith’s body and the necklace he wore. Only the Caduceus would give me the strength to save Jen, to save my uncle.
The Karma Fairy was in rare form that day. Until the recently, my arms had nearly no muscles and would have fit through the bars handily. Now, however, I had added considerable muscle bulk, and all I managed to do was get my forearm firmly wedged between the bars. I screamed and pushed through the pain to move my arm forward. My skin felt like it was being torn off, but I had to get the Caduceus before Mark could. Suddenly, my forearm slipped through and in one additional push, I rammed my elbow through the bars. I brought my hand down on the Caduceus laying next to Smith’s head, and missed. There was nothing under my hand even though it looked like there should be. I screamed in inarticulate rage. What the hell was going on?
I shook my head and suddenly the Caduceus lay about six inches past my fingers. Even over the continuing alarm, I could hear Uncle Mark crying out, fighting the shadow. I didn’t have much time.
“Dave! Get over here! I need you the fuck over here!” I didn’t get a response, and from my perspective, I couldn’t tell if he were conscious or even alive. I looked over at Jen. She was still sprawled where she had landed in a growing puddle of blood. I screamed in horror, denial, and frustration. Never had I been so thoroughly mocked by life.
I reached out towards the amulet with my mind, and commanded it to come to me. I pushed my energy along the new axis that the Caduceus had shown me. I pushed until I was seeing stars, but that damned stick didn’t move an inch.
“Dave! I need you! Help Jen! She’s dying!”
I reached through with my left arm but it was all I could do just to reach Smith’s wild spiky hair. His hair! I grabbed as much as I could with my left hand and pulled. Unlike my mental efforts, my purely physical ones worked. I inched Smith’s body towards me. A few discarded handfuls of hair later, when his shoulder hit the Caduceus, I half expected it to just go up and over the stick, but the stick slid towards me. The angle my arms were at was excruciating, and I’d reached my pulling limit with my current grasp. I had to bring my left arm back, move it through another slot, and pull some more. It hurt like a bitch, but I cried in joy when my right hand brushed the Caduceus. I pulled just a bit more, and I was able to finally get my hand on top of it. I was scrabbling my fingers against it, when Mark’s yells stopped and I saw him stand back up. As power flowed up my arm and through me, his face contorted into a mask of pure hatred. The shadow drenched him, but unlike Smith, his aura flared out in places. The pulse of the Caduceus filled me and suddenly I had options again.
Mark looked around and I knew he was searching for his gun. I had no time and no choice. If I wanted to live, I had to rip Wendigota off Mark and pray I didn’t kill him. I brought up my golden shield and flung it at my uncle. Before it could reach him, he literally flipped back through the door and was gone. I kept my shield going blindly past the wall, hoping to catch him, but there was nothing. I really wanted to know who taught my uncle those moves.
I dropped my face against the cold steel bars and tried to hold back sobs of anger and frustration. I’d lost my uncle. Unfortunately, the world didn’t give a flying fluck and gave me no time to mourn.
“You killed him!” Vinnie yelled out from behind me. “I’m gonna kill you!”
I tried to pull back from the bars, but failed. My right arm was well and truly stuck. I couldn’t pull my elbow back through. So, I had to turn my head to try and catch a glimpse of what Vinnie was doing. I found him quickly enough. He was swinging his push broom at my head like a golf club.
I flinched back from the bars, instinctively closed my eyes, and put some of my newly returned power into my voice. “Stop it!” The broom smacked into the bars in front of me with a muted thump. “Goddammit! Stop!”
I opened my eyes when nothing else happened. The push broom head was wedged tightly between the bars and had been stopped about an inch away from my eye. I craned my neck back to see Vinnie. He was standing above me, glaring down. Happily, he wasn’t moving.
“Okay Vinnie, I mean....” I couldn’t remember his real name. “You! Whatever your name is, unlock this cage, now!”
To my vast relief he did as I commanded. But, now that the door was open, I still couldn’t get myself out. I thought about having him pull me back by my legs, but then I might lose my grip on the Caduceus and I couldn’t even contemplate that. Uncle Mark would be back. I knew it.
“Colette, go help Jen! Hey Colette?”
She didn’t answer and I couldn’t turn to search for her.
“Vinnie, you there, you answer to Vinnie now. Where is the girl who was in this cage?” There was no response other than a nasty sneer. I kicked myself and said, “Vinnie, you can talk now.”
“She’s laying down behind you. I hope she’s dead. You’re a slimy bastard, get out of my head!”
“Do what you can to help her, Vinnie,” I said. I turned my attention to my next best hope.
“Dave! Dave! Wake up!” I put my will into the command and hoped like hell that he wasn’t dead. My mind’s eye helpfully replayed the way he had smacked into that wall—hard.
“She’s bleeding.” said Vinnie with satisfaction.
“Dave!”
“Holy crap Finn, stop shouting! You’re killing me... Oh my god, my head hurts.”
“Dave, you’ve got to get up.
They’re going to come back. I need your help. Jen’s hurt.”
“Okay, okay, I’m coming. Did we win?”
“The shadow took Uncle Mark. Go help Jen!” I tried to move my head up high enough to see more of Jen’s still form over dead Dr. Crazy, but it was nearly impossible. I had no leverage.
I momentarily rested my aching neck, which caused pain in my face where it pressed against the bars. “Vinnie, what’s happening with Colette?”
“I’m not sure, it looks like she broke her nose or something and she’s not moving. If I’m lucky she’s choking to death on her own blood.”
I flung power at him. “Don’t just stand there, you idiot! Help her!”
From the other side of the room Dave called out. “She’s hurt bad, Finn. She needs you.”
“I’m stuck. I need you to come pull me out.”
Dave stumbled unevenly over to my cage. I said, “Get the Caduceus off this guy’s head first.”
He did, and soon, I was gritting my teeth against the pain of Dave trying to pull me back through the bars.
“Pull harder.” I was completely panicked. My elbow and forearm had swollen. If I couldn’t get free, I was well and truly hosed and Jen was dead.
“Finn, I don’t want to pull your arm off.”
“Just do it! Vinnie, help him.”
I felt another pair of hands on my right leg.
“Okay Vinnie, on three. Three!”
My elbow cracked, my shoulder popped, and I screamed as I came free. The pain was excruciating, and I couldn’t seem to move my arm, but that was okay. I didn’t need it to help Jen.
I staggered to my feet, glanced at Colette where she lay unconscious on the floor. Jen was my first priority.
“Vinnie, help her!”
I staggered across the room half drunk from adrenal overload and exhaustion. Halfway across, a guard called from the doorway, “Stop!”
Running counter to my luck, he didn’t shoot first. I put force into my words when I said, “Stand guard over us. Don’t let anybody else into this room. Do or say whatever you need to keep us safe.”
The Templar's Legacy (Ancient Enemy) Page 16
