Ashdale Pond, Old Ontario
The streets were eerily quiet as they sped through the town. Doors were closed, and curtains were drawn. A steady haze of black smog obscured their vision, the acrid cast-off of the charred cinders of the Firestarters’ HQ.
Caitlin pawed at her stinging eyes, silently thankful that the smoke muted the last rays of the day’s sun. Mary-Anne was beside her, coughing into her black material. Jaxon kept his head low, seemingly unaffected by the discomfort. Christy merely squinted and walked in silence.
Before long, the creaking sign of the Cloak & Dagger came into view, appearing out of the smoke as rocks and islands might once have for and sailors and pirates at sea. Caitlin had read about the ocean and seen pictures of its vast mass of water. As a child, she’d wondered if she’d ever see it herself one day.
One thing at a time, she thought before saying, “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
Her heart pounded with anticipation as she walked into the tavern. She could sense him now, could feel Trisk’s presence inside. As she approached the bar, she looked at the floorboards above, wondering if he had received the pastor’s message. He might even be up there right now, his great blubbering mass of stomach spilling over the sides of his chair.
Once more, her memory flashed back to that fateful day in Silver Creek and the oil and grease that stained his skin. The women he ‘entertained’ in the bedroom flashed through her mind with the vivid picture of the spilled wine which trailed down his stomach.
Trisk’s strength when he had shoved her back into her brother, anger and rage on his face, reminded her he was no pushover.
When they reached the bar, Caitlin leaned across and looked down low for Stump. He wasn’t there.
“What’s the problem?” Mary-Anne asked, lowering her hood.
Caitlin stared at her face in shock. “You could have at least washed the blood off your face. You look like you’ve just gone down on a girl during her moon phase.”
Mary-Anne tutted. “I hardly had time to wash, did I? Between that bonfire on the outskirts and speeding your prize back to Mabel’s, when did you expect me to shower? Should I have shaved while I was at it?”
She nodded to her crotch.
Christy stifled a giggle behind her hand.
“Where’s the little guy?” the vampire asked
“I don’t know,” Caitlin said in a hushed whisper. She looked around the room, noting that the place was almost empty. “He can hardly be collecting glasses, can he?”
“Why don’t we just go upstairs?” Christy asked.
Mary-Anne answered, her voice bored. “Because we don’t have the key.”
“No, but we do have a vampire with super strength,” Caitlin teased. “You think you can tackle an itty-bitty door?”
“I fucking hate you sometimes.”
They moved to the stairs. Jaxon sniffed the ground as he went, taking a great deal of interest in a small crack in the floorboards. He lingered, his nostrils wide, growling until Caitlin encouraged him to carry on. “Not now, boy. We’re going upstairs.”
“No entry without a key,” a voice grumbled from behind them as Christy’s foot hit the first step.
They turned, looking around for half a second before noting that Stump stood in front of them.
“There you are,” Caitlin exclaimed. “We were looking for you.”
“No key. No entry,” Stump repeated, his face an expressionless mask.
“In that case, can we have the key for room fifteen, please?” Mary-Anne asked, sounding more sickeningly sweet than Caitlin had ever heard her.
Stump’s eyebrows raised. He disappeared behind the bar without a word. They heard the jangling of many keys before he returned, squeezed between them, and headed upstairs.
With questioning looks at each other, they followed. The stairs creaked beneath their feet, loud in the silence, and soon, they stood outside the room.
Stump turned the key in the lock, opened the door, and again, they were met with the musty scent of sweat and body odor. Caitlin felt the rage boil inside her but managed to keep it controlled. She peered through the darkness, looking for any sign of movement before Stump lit a candle and stood at the side of the room.
Caitlin led the group, half-drawing her sword and craning her head around the room. Aside from Jaxon’s sniffing, silence shrouded the small group. She opened the door to a side room—also empty—and felt frustration replaced her anger.
Where the fuck is he?
“Anything?” Christy asked.
Mary-Anne sniffed the air. “Nope. No one.”
“I don’t understand,” Caitlin said. “Why wouldn’t he come? Andrews is his only conduit to the townspeople. What reason would he have to stand him up?”
“Because the governor is dying,” Stump said simply. His presence took Caitlin by surprise. He had stood immobile the entire time she had searched the room to the point where she had forgotten he was there.
“I’m sorry?” Mary-Anne’s face had turned curious.
“What do you mean, dying?” Caitlin asked.
Stump remained silent.
“Tell us what you know.” She exploded, drew her sword, and touched the blade against Stump’s neck. She could feel her emotions taking over now. She wouldn’t let the small man stand in her way.
But he didn’t move. He didn’t blink. Instead, he simply drew his own knife—a pretty little thing with engraving along the blade—and tapped Caitlin’s sword aside.
“You can’t draw words from a dead man.”
“You can’t tease women from the grave,” Caitlin replied.
A flicker of a smile touched the corner of Stump’s mouth. He put his knife back into its pouch and began walking out of the room. “Follow me.”
They did.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Caitlin exclaimed, her words muffled by the edge of her cloak drawn over her mouth.
The place was a hovel. After following Stump down some steps and through a tiny door which led to a secret room beneath the tavern, none of them could quite believe what they were seeing.
The stink was nauseating. The floors were strewn with straw which looked sticky and a strange shade of pink. In the corner were a pile of blankets morphed and shaped into a cocoon in which someone had previously slept. A tiny table stood in the corner and a bucket at the far wall, but little else.
“Why did you bring us here?” Mary-Anne asked. Caitlin couldn’t imagine how Mary-Anne and Jaxon were experiencing this room. Both vamp and dog’s smell were infinitely greater than that of Christy and Caitlin’s.
Stump walked over to the bucket and kicked it. A dark trail of what smelled like piss but looked like bloody tar seeped along the floor. “This is your governor’s quarters. This is where he has been resided in secret, biding his time, fighting the disease.”
“My governor? He’s your governor now,” Caitlin said.
Stump didn’t acknowledge that comment.
“He slept here?” Mary-Anne looked horrified, as well she might.
Stump nodded. “Late at night, he came, his hair wet and sodden from the rain. Afraid he was, though he wouldn’t admit that to be true. Wrapped in a dark shawl, he crept to the Cloak accompanied by the pastor, begging Stump for a place to stay. A place hidden and quiet in which he could work, hide, and recover. The pastor left him in my charge. There was a fear already in his eyes, though he didn’t know why at the time.”
“You?” Caitlin said. “You’ve been guarding Trisk?”
“Caring is more of the truth,” Stump responded with a shrug.
“Caring for what?” Mary-Anne asked. “From what I can see, the man is more than capable of taking care of himself. He created an entire following through Pastor Andrews in no time at all, utilizing fear and using the whisper of his name as a means to create a gospel. What does that sagging ball-sack have to fear?”
Stump’s face grew dark. “What else is there to fear these days, other than the
Madness?”
Caitlin’s face fell. She looked around at the pink patches in the straw and the sticky stains on the floor and around the walls, noting the hint of decomposition now in the air which always drew her back to a time, years gone, when her parents had passed. For a brief moment, she was a young girl standing outside the bedroom door, listening to the sounds of the Madness taking hold, the smells of the dead seeping through the gap beneath the door.
“You mean…the governor…”
Stump nodded. He told them about the small cut on the governor’s shoulder—a wound received as he had run through the forest, narrowly avoiding a swarming cluster of Mad in the darkness and escaping with only a single mark. The Madness had begun to spread, causing the sores and marks within hours—marks easily hidden by clothing as Trisk began to lay the roots of his lies in the town. The diminutive man related how he had created an elixir, a potion of his own devising, which seemed to have slowed the effects but would not last forever.
“That’s impossible,” Caitlin said. “Nothing can delay the Madness.”
“What’s in that potion, Stump?” Christy asked.
Stump detailed the ingredients—a mixture of seeds, oils, and fats—all reputedly used to slow the blood and decrease the heart rate. He explained how the sores still came, and the wounds still bled, but his feat of experimentation had afforded the governor an extra few weeks more than the traditional incubation period of merely a few days.
“So, it slows the nanocytes…” Mary-Anne mumbled to herself. “Causes them to move slower in the blood and reduce the rate at which the affliction occurs.”
Caitlin looked at Mary-Anne, intrigued despite the other emotions warring within her. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard that word over the years, but with knowledge limited to a token selection of books among her people at Silver Creek, she had never truly understood what they were. “What are nanocytes?”
“A bigger question than I think I have time to answer right now.” Mary-Anne shook her head but continued. “In short, nanocytes are the reason why vampires and Weres exist today. A microscopic alien technology lives in the bloodstream, affecting the biology to create the strength and powers that we have. It is, I believe, also the reason for the ushering in of the Age of Madness, though I’ve yet to find an explanation as to why.”
“Then why would you think that?” Christy asked.
“Because I feel it in my gut,” Mary-Anne replied, tapping her stomach. “Those affected with the Madness have eyes which glow like my own. It only makes sense that it’s the same curse which runs through our own veins.”
Caitlin’s head spun. She wasn’t sure which was more difficult to understand. That there was a microscopic alien technology floating around in Mary-Anne and Kain’s bloodstream, or that Stump had found a way to slow the Madness down in the governor’s body.
“Why would you save him?” Caitlin asked at last. “If he was dying, why would you risk your life to save him?”
Stump shrugged. “He paid me coin.”
“Then why are you telling us all of this? Why betray him now?” Christy scowled her open displeasure.
“Because there is no more coin.”
“What do you mean, there’s no more?” Mary-Anne asked. “Stump, where is Trisk?”
He shambled over to the corner of the room. There, the floor looked cleaner, and shapes left in the faint layer of dust indicated that something had been stacked there until fairly recently. Judging by the look of the marks, Caitlin thought they might have been boxes of some kind.
Stump stood in the clean space. “The answer can be found in coin.”
“We don’t have any—” Caitlin began.
Christy fished into her pocket and pulled out a couple of coins which she tossed to Stump. He caught them with little effort and dropped them in his pocket.
“Well?” Caitlin urged.
As Stump spoke of the governor’s plan, Caitlin, Mary-Anne, and Christy’s faces fell. Caitlin thought back to her dream of fire and flame, remembering the sound of the Trisk’s laughter and the bangs which had awoken her from sleep.
Chapter Twenty
Ashdale Pond, Old Ontario
Shit, shit, shit, Caitlin thought as they sprinted through the town. We picked the wrong fucking moment to send away our werewolf.
“Slow down,” Christy moaned from somewhere behind. “I only have short legs.”
But Caitlin wasn’t listening. Jaxon streamed along beside her, keeping up easily, his tongue flapping out the side of his mouth. Mary-Anne set the pace just ahead of them all, no longer burdened by her hood as they raced into the night.
Smoke still hovered around them. There was little light to see by, but Caitlin followed the vampire, completely at ease being led by her companion.
What the fuck were they thinking? At a time when they needed more people to help get Trisk, they had sent some away.
You needed to. How else would Christy’s parents survive? The plan was to operate in secrecy. To take the governor down without anyone else noticing. A covert mission—
Yeah, look how great that worked out.
It disturbed Caitlin how empty the town seemed. She guessed that everyone would be at the church now, waiting for their glorious pastor to give his sermon and fill their hearts with hope. Hands in their laps, no doubt, as they prepared their buckets for a delicious spoonful of gullible.
“It’s a good thing you know where you’re going,” Caitlin called ahead to Mary-Anne, blinking and rubbing the smoke from her eyes.
The vamp grinned and took a hard left. They could hear Christy somewhere behind them, but Caitlin didn’t have time to slow. She would catch up, sure enough. Christy had the advantage of knowing the town like the back her hand—she had been there for years, after all.
When they reached Jamie’s house, Mary-Anne burst through the door, near enough smashing the damned thing from its hinges.
Jamie jumped up, startled. He had been asleep on the sofa. On the floor, tied from neck to toe in rope, was Pastor Andrews, and Mabel’s snores could be heard from way upstairs.
“Come. Now,” Caitlin said, kicking Andrews in the side as she passed.
Jaxon began growling at the pastor as he blinked stupidly.
“What’s going on?” Jamie asked.
“We have to go—now,” Caitlin instructed. “Go, get Mabel. Hurry her fucking ass up unless you don’t want her to see the morning.”
As Caitlin waited in silence with the pastor, Mary-Anne swept around the house at speed, looking for fire pokers, cutlery, or anything that could be used as a potential weapon for the pair upstairs. Christy arrived a minute later, her breathing labored and chesty. It seemed the smoke had begun to take its toll on her.
“Nice of you to join us,” Caitlin teased.
“Fuck you.” Christy scowled her obvious displeasure.
When Jamie and his Nana came down the stairs, Mabel seemed more bewildered than ever before. Her hair stood up in odd directions, her nightgown was caught up in the back of her pants revealing a very pale, weathered ass cheek, and she muttered incomprehensible words to herself.
Jamie looked darkly at Caitlin. “Nana needs her rest. It’s the only thing that keeps her sane. Mind telling us what’s going on?”
Caitlin looked from Jamie to Mabel. She sighed. “You need to get Mabel out of the village. It’s the governor—”
Pastor Andrews’ ears pricked up.
“What about him?” Jamie asked.
Christy answered. “It’s fucked up, Jay-Jay. He’s gone Mad.”
“He’s always been a bit kooky to me,” Mabel said, a light coming back into her eyes briefly. “Strange man. Handsome at the start. The years have not been kind.”
“No. He’s gone Mad,” Christy emphasized. “He’s contracted the Madness. It’s eating him alive. He’s at death’s door, his mind’s gone. He wants to lead one last sermon before he…before he…”
“Before he what?” Jamie urged.
“Goes out in a blaze of glory,” Mary-Anne finished simply.
Mabel gasped and clapped a hand to her face. The light in her eyes extinguished. “Does the reverend know?”
“I prefer ‘pastor,’” Andrews said.
Jamie rolled his eyes.
They packed a quick bag of necessities—food, clothing, and the like—and were soon back out the door again. Caitlin cut Pastor Andrews’ legs free but made it clear he was to follow Jamie and Mabel and not run away.
Jamie and Mabel prepared to separate from Mary-Anne, Caitlin, and Jaxon as they neared the edge of the village. Ordinarily, they’d have been able to see the church from where they were stood, but the smoke was too much, and in the dark of the night, they could see nothing.
“Take care,” Jamie said, supporting the pastor awkwardly. “And if we don’t see you again—”
“You will,” Caitlin said. “You will.”
They lingered a moment. Mabel’s eyes had glassed over again, and she looked tired. Caitlin felt a sudden pang of guilt for waking the old woman in the middle of the night until she remembered that Mabel would have been woken by one of the pastor’s goons anyway. At least soon, she could stop all that bother—she hoped.
Christy hesitated a moment before flinging herself into Jamie’s arms. Her eyes were filmed with tears, and Caitlin wondered whether that was from sadness or from the smoke.
“I’m sorry,” Christy said, then pulled away and kissed Jamie on the lips. The pair softened, falling into the romance of it all before Mary-Anne coughed and broke the spell. “I never meant to join them, Jay-Jay. The pastor had my parents from the start. It was all to keep them safe.”
“I know,” Jamie said as they fell back into another smooch.
“Seriously?” Mary-Anne hissed a breath of displeasure. “That’s enough tonsil-tennis. It’s not like we’re on a time limit or anything.”
Despite it all, Jamie and Christy smiled. “I’ll come back for you,” she said.
“About bloody time,” Mabel said with a wink.
Then they were gone, into the smoke and out of sight with instructions to find one of their sheds on the outskirts of town and hide up until the chaos had passed. Caitlin hoped it wouldn’t come to that but already knew in her heart that there would be a lot more madness before the night was over.
The Caitlin Chronicles Boxed Set Page 43
