by Anton Strout
“I can’t let go,” he said. “If I do, that thing will destroy her boat for sure.”
Aidan was right. With the creature pinned in place up here, it couldn’t take on Jane or the boat unless he let go of it. The best I could do was join Connor and the Inspectre in fighting the green water woman. Maybe the key to stopping the monster lay in beating its keeper, the one helping it rise to full power.
The three of us turned our attention to the woman within the circle of water. Connor was busy uncorking a dozen or so stoppered tubes, rallying a thick swarm of ghosts all around him. He shouted instructions at them, but from where I stood I couldn’t quite make them out. I hefted my bat and came in swinging. I landed a solid hit on the woman through her tower of water, but once she felt it and became aware of my presence, every subsequent swipe of my bat passed through a liquid form of her body.
Another sound rose to meet my ears, one that horrified me. Jane’s voice rang out in all its technomantic glory from down below over the fight. With terror filling my heart, I realized it could mean only one thing. Jane wasn’t just going to ram the creature. She intended to blow the creature up with the blast materials and depth charges the Inspectre had brought along to dislodge all the sunken ships.
The fight went out of me and I ran to the edge of the bridge. “Jane!” I shouted.
The boat was underneath us and from where I was I could actually see her face. She looked up at me, her face sad but determined. She spoke, but I couldn’t hear her over the sound of everything, yet there was no mistaking the words her mouth formed.
I love you.
“Jane, don’t,” I shouted, but it was too late. She turned her head back to the ship and pressed her power into it. Sparks rose up all over the vessel as she pulled power from the boat itself, sending raw power across the bow like lightning strikes.
All that was enough to set things off, and the ship exploded. The heat of it rose up with concussive force, straight through the bridge. The gas of the boat and blasting caps fed one another, shooting a column of flame up in the air with its fury. Bits of the creature flew through the air, and I tried not to think of the same happening to Jane.
All around me the world slowed. I got back to my feet in time to catch Aidan letting go of the now-severed tentacle, letting it unwind and fall from where it had been wrapped around the bridge. Like a shot, the vampire transformed and shot up into the night sky and then down into the firecovered river below.
Behind me an inhuman keening arose from the woman as she watched her precious charge dying. The steady stream of water around her faltered and dropped away, yet she herself remained.
“Focus,” the Inspectre called out, slicing his cane through her body to no avail, passing right through her. “Don’t let up.”
His call to arms awoke something dark in the pain of my heart. I charged the woman again. Blow after blow of mine still passed through her as she came at us with a watery fury, unleashing waves of it at each of us. Connor’s assembly of spirits swarmed her to the point of distraction that had her firing off her powers in every direction. One of the blasts hit the Inspectre, sending him flying onto his back, his sword cane falling through the slats of the bridge.
“If you got anything better than a bat,” Connor said, still orchestrating the spirits in their attack, “now’s the time to use it, kid.”
The bat was doing nothing more than distracting her for a few seconds at a time. I collapsed it and slid it into its holster. I reached into my satchel to assess my other options. My hand slapped against what I thought was my emergency medical kit, but when I pulled it out I saw it was the Ghostbusters lunch box Jane had given me. Without hesitation, I opened it and shook out the contents. I grabbed it by its handle and lid, thrusting it toward the woman. I had been going about this the wrong way. I thought back to the vision where I had first seen Mason Redfield. He and the Inspectre had tried going for the ghouls’ hearts as a first means of stopping them. Even tonight, the Inspectre had tried that tactic, trying to stab her there, but that wasn’t the way to go about it. A blade or a bat could pass through water, no problem. What I needed was to take the woman’s heart from her in whatever form I could.
I swung the lunch box at her. Her body went liquid and it started passing through her like all my bat attacks had. When the lunch box was fully within the water, I stopped it in the center of her chest, slamming the lunch box shut and pulling it out by its handle. . . full of water. The woman screamed out, her eyes widening and her body stumbling. I stepped back from her, but she kept coming for me, clutching wildly for my lunch box.
I spun around and found Connor off in a crowd of ghosts. “Connor, catch!” I shouted and threw the lunch box over to him, but not before I felt a wave of the water woman wash over me. The fight was going out of her, but not fast enough. I spun back around and all the hate and surprise in her eyes were focused on me. She was going to make it her dying wish to take me with her, and there was nothing I could do to stop it now. With Jane gone, I didn’t care.
Falling to my knees on the slats of the bridge, I felt my strength leaving me. I was drowning. My last thought as I drowned was wondering if soon I’d be just another bridgebound spirit that Connor would be able to talk to in a few minutes.
Then another thought struck me. As my world went dark, I wondered if Jane was already waiting for me on the other side or if Connor would find her standing around on the bridge, too.
31
White light, I thought. That’s a good sign, right?
The blur in my eyes roused me and I struggled to awaken the rest of my senses as well. The ringing of an angelic host, complete with accompanying harps, sounded more like the beeps, pings, and whirs of . . .
“Hospital equipment,” I croaked out. “I’m not in the afterlife?”
“I don’t know, kid,” Connor’s familiar voice spoke out. “Does your personal vision of blissful eternity include me?”
“Or me?” another voice asked. The Inspectre.
I willed my eyes to fully open, and to my surprise they did, the world coming into focus. I was in a hospital bed, the overhead lights of the room turned off, the white blur that woke me coming from the hallway outside my room.
Connor was already standing at the side of the bed. The Inspectre stood up from a nearby chair, using the empty scabbard of his sword cane to help him up. I tried to turn my head to him but couldn’t. I went to speak again but managed only to get out a dry croak before Connor grabbed a Styrofoam cup with a straw sticking out of it from the table next to my bed. I sipped from it, and the hit of refreshing water shot through me like a jolt of energy. Once I was done drinking, I tried speaking again.
My mind stumbled forward slow, the world and everything around me a fog. “Why can’t I move?”
“That’s probably the pain meds,” Connor offered. He put the water back down on the bedside table. “You’re probably on enough morphine right now to warrant a rehab program when you leave here.”
“What happened?” I asked, feeling like a foreign passenger in my own body. Questions were forming, but slowly, not nearly fast enough, and I was having trouble organizing my thoughts.
The Inspectre stepped closer. “You sustained quite a bit of damage,” he said.
“So removing the woman’s heart didn’t work. . .” I said.
“Quite the contrary,” the Inspectre said. “It worked remarkably well.”
I forced my head to do my bidding and I felt it shift a fraction to my left.
“Easy,” Connor said. “You’re in a neck brace. What you did with the lunch box worked, but you still sent that woman into a blind death panic. When she wasn’t trying to drown you, she was trying to crush you with all that water. Your body is pretty battered and bruised, but I asked the docs and they say you’re going to live.”
“What about all those spirits on the bridge?” I asked.
“They moved on,” Connor said with a smile. “To wherever spirits go. Once Scylla and Ch
arybdis were dead, their hold over the Hell Gate passage broke.”
A new thought slammed into my head, pushing past all of its cloudiness. How had it not been there right away? “Jane,” I whispered. “What about Jane?”
Connor’s face sobered. “ ’Fraid not, kid,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“She went down fighting,” the Inspectre said. “She saved us all.”
The meds numbed me. I could barely think, let alone process what had happened to Jane. Fleeting images of her running for the boat and the explosion played themselves over and over in my head, but my mind refused to process the fact that she was gone. I lay there not speaking for a long time. Connor and the Inspectre stood at my side and remained silent themselves as the sounds of life struggled out all around us in the hospital. The figures in the hall passed by until one of them stopped in the doorway. I recognized him, even without his hoodie pulled up.
“Aidan. . . ?”
Aidan Christos stumbled into the room. He was soaked through, his clothes clinging to him, what had survived of them, anyway. Most of what remained of his hoodie was charred or torn. His features, while still human-looking, were drawn and gaunt to the point that he looked like a spectral version of himself. Connor ran over to him and helped him into the room.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked.
Aidan looked at Connor, but he was so messed up I wasn’t sure he could see him in his state. “I told you my kind doesn’t take well to water,” Aidan said. “Not really our element, and I was in it far too long, I think. I’m having trouble healing.”
“At least you can,” I mumbled, still in my daze.
Aidan turned and followed the sound of my voice. He shuffled toward the foot of the bed. When his bony claws of fingers hit the end of it, he grabbed onto it like it was the only thing that could keep him standing. “Simon?” he asked. “How. . . how are you?”
“I’ll live,” I said. I couldn’t hide the darkness in my voice. “What happened to Jane? I saw you let go of the severed tentacle and then dive through the fire into the water.”
Aidan tensed. Parts of him were slowly healing, his features turning back to his normal look of a teenager, everything except his clothes. The better his features got, the worse his actual face looked. The young vampire looked pained and worried.
“There was so much going on,” he said. “There was the monster. It was dying, but not fast enough. Underwater, I couldn’t avoid the tentacles. They were thrashing about everywhere, making it harder to try to find her.”
“Did you find her?” the Inspectre asked.
Aidan nodded. “Eventually, yeah,” he said. “I don’t know how long I was under. I don’t need to breathe, but still the water was having an effect on me. I felt my body giving in to the river, until I finally struggled to the surface.”
I lay there, thankful for whatever painkillers they had given me. My mind filled with sadness, but my body wouldn’t react to it in my condition. When I could finally speak, I did. “At least you found her body,” I said. “Her family will be able to give her a proper burial.”
Aidan looked exhausted, but even through that I could see some hesitation in him. “About that . . .”
“What?” Connor asked.
“Please tell me you found all of her,” I said. “Please.”
“You have to understand something,” Aidan said. “I barely made it to shore. We were both. . . burnt and wet. I could barely pull her after me . . .”
“What the hell did you do?” I asked. “What happened to her body?”
“Tell the boy, for goodness’ sake,” the Inspectre added.
“I needed to replenish myself,” he said. “I. . . I couldn’t stop myself.”
“You fed on her?” I asked, horrified.
“I would have died,” he said.
“So you fed on her body,” I said, feeling rage rising up in me despite the painkillers coursing through my system.
“Jesus, Aidan. . .” Connor said.
“Wait, wait,” Aidan said, holding up his shaking bony hands. “Not exactly.”
“Then what exactly?” the Inspectre asked.
“I liked Jane,” he said. “A lot. She was always nice to me. Whenever Simon or Connor sniped at me, either in jest or whatever, she didn’t. She treated me. . . I don’t know, normal.”
“And that’s how you repaid her kindness?” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. “By feeding on her.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” he said. “You’re not listening. I wasn’t trying to feed on her. I was trying to save her.”
“Save her?” I said. “Bullshit.”
“He’s not listening to me,” Aidan said, turning to Connor.
“I’m not sure I’m listening to you, either,” Connor said, getting pissed himself. “Why don’t you just say what you’re here to say?”
Aidan looked down at the floor, looking unsure of himself. “It just takes humans some time to adjust to it,” he said. “To accept it.”
Maybe it was the meds clouding my head, but I wasn’t getting it. “Time to adjust to what? Accept what?”
Aidan moved to the side of the room, exposing the door leading out into the hall. A nurse walking by stopped, a startled look on her face as she backed away slowly from something coming down the hall. The wet squick of footsteps came slowly toward my hospital room and a moment later the doorway filled with a lone female figure.
Jane stood there, her hair wet and tangled. Her clothes were torn, burnt, and stained with blood. How they even stayed together enough to remain on her was a mystery. They were practically destroyed.
But not Jane herself, though. Everything about her body was perfect. Her skin showed not a scratch of damage, except for a small section of burnt black skin on her cheek, but even that flaked away when she smiled at me. The skin underneath it was just as perfect as the rest of her was.
“The change,” Aidan said. “I told you I lost a little blood.”
Even in my fragile condition, my heart leapt. Was this really Jane? Was I really seeing her like this, transformed? I could only pray that this wasn’t just the pain medication messing with me. “Jane. . .? We thought you were dead. . .”
“Hey, Simon,” Jane said. The pronounced points of her eyeteeth bit into her lower lip as she smiled. “I’m not dead yet. Hopefully your offer to move in still stands. . .?”
I had spent so much time worrying about the water woman’s mark gaining control over her and what I would do if I had had to kill her, but Jane had taken all those choices away from me by running off to take on the sea monster herself. Seeing her alive killed any residual traces of anger, rage, or my own insecurities, all of it replaced with the sudden inescapable fact that my girlfriend was now one of the undead. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, although I was relieved to see her alive, or rather unalive. Still, one thing was for certain.
“I told you I loved you and I told you that wasn’t going to change,” I said, mustering a weak smile in the hospital bed. “Looks like I’ll need to invest in some serious blackout curtains.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANTON STROUT was born in the Berkshire Hills mere miles from writing heavyweights Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. He currently lives outside New York City in the haunted corn maze that is New Jersey (where nothing paranormal ever really happens, he assures you).
His writing has appeared in several DAW anthologies—some of which feature Simon Canderous tie-in stories—including : The Dimension Next Door, Spells of the City, and Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies.
In his scant spare time, he is an always writer, sometimes actor, sometimes musician, occasional RPGer, and the world’s most casual and controller-smashing video gamer. He now works in the exciting world of publishing, and yes, it is as glamorous as it sounds.
He is currently hard at work on his next book and can be found lurking the darkened hallways of www.antonstrout.com.
Ace Books by Anton Strout
DEADER STILL
DEAD MATTER
DEAD WATERS
