It was faint at first when the rest of us were able to hear it; barely perceptible would be a better way to describe it. If we hadn’t been creeping around like cats, we might have missed it.
Singing.
Warbling, wavering, almost wailing, it floated to our ears through the quiet corridors like a psychotic lullaby. As soon as I heard it, I brought us all to a halt in the hallway and gave Lysette a look.
“Further up ahead on the right,” she whispered. “Behind those double doors. Male voice. Under duress. Sounds like a… nursery rhyme.”
This job was nothing if not consistently weird.
“Move up towards it,” I whispered. “Nice and slow.”
As we crept toward the sound, it changed from singing to more like chanting, and by the time we were close enough that I could start making out words, it sounded like someone was simply talking to themselves. Lysette was right; the voice sounded strained, tortured, like someone was speaking through gritted teeth.
Still, I recognized the voice. Adjani.
There was a simultaneous sense of exaltation and wariness. Exaltation, because Adjani meant answers to questions we needed to have answered in a hurry. Wariness, because a high value target like Adjani was unlikely to be left unguarded.
As we approached a pair of double doors with small windows set at eye level, I brought Dread to a halt. Normally, it would be him opening that door with blasts of shotgun fire to the hinges, but I didn’t want to give our position away to Kel and call down whatever doom she was gathering together to deal with us.
“Lys,” I said. “We need that door open without using gunfire.”
Dread shifted from the front of our formation to cover our rear. Lysette slinked forward with fluid, careful steps that didn’t make a sound as she moved up on the double doors.
“Can’t disentangle the angle,” Adjani’s pained voice said, muffled through the door. “Primary considerations are set to… set t-t-to… there’s always another factor to… factor to… factor to factor in.”
Nobody answered him. Either nothing was guarding him, or whatever was in there wasn’t in the mood to engage in conversation.
Lysette slid in front of and past the doors, staying low, then, staying close to the wall, she eased up so that she could look through the windows. She didn’t do it head-on; she stayed far to the left of the window so she could peek through at an angle where she was unlikely to be seen.
It’s called “cutting the pie”. If you have to approach a door or window, you don’t stand in front of it like a dummy, asking to be shot. You slide across it from one side, taking in a progressively larger view of the room as you move, so that you can control how much of an area you are exposed to at once. As you clear one slice of the pie of the room, you can then move on to the next.
Lysette angled around that small window, looking around as much of the room as she could. Once she had gotten a good look, she shook her head at me, holding up one finger.
Only Adjani? It didn’t seem right that Kel would leave him unguarded. Then again, she hadn’t expected us to outmaneuver her, so maybe she’d sent anything that had been guarding him running down the stairs to the lobby to kill us just like everything else in the building.
We’d find out soon enough. Lysette braced herself for a second, about to smash the door down, and then something seemed to occur to her and she tested the handle.
Unlocked. No shit. She looked as surprised as me, and simply pulled the door open for us.
The rest of us moved, Shifty up front this time with a shield to cover our movements as we all swarmed into the room as one unit, covering every possible angle of attack. Part of me was a little proud of how Jolly and Mickey held up their end of the deal. They were still somewhat new to all of this, and while we’d been drilling them on room clearing for the last few months, you never knew how people would handle the real thing under pressure.
In any case, it turned out to be unnecessary. There really was nothing in the room other than Adjani, and he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.
Mainly because he was lying face up on a table in the center of the room, his feet and hands nailed down in a crucifix position, talking to himself. I don’t think he even realized we were there.
“You have to understand these understandings,” he said to the air. “Nobody can simply unlock the visual sensations of… of… why isn’t it there for me? Why can’t I f-f-find the… place for…”
We ignored him at first, since he didn’t pose any immediate threat, and cleared the room. Nothing. Plenty of computer screens attached to sort of monitoring equipment, but nothing that could take a bite out of us.
Adjani continued with his gibberish as we cleared the room, eventually switching back into singing.
“All clear,” Dread said. “Shifty, watch the door.”
“Adjani,” I said, moving over to him.
“Ashes,” he whispered to the air. “Ashes, ashes.”
“Adjani.”
“We all… f-f-fall… down.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that his mind had taken a long walk off a short pier. I waved Jolly and Mickey over, and dug out the multitool I had in a vest pocket so I could use the pliers to pull the nails out of Adani’s hands and feet. He was a douchebag and I can’t exactly say I felt sorry for him, but this was barbaric.
The nails were driven in too far for me to pull out easily. “Dread,” I said, handing him the multitool. “Get restraints on him once he’s free. Jolly?”
“Um,” Jolly said, looking him over. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, other than the obvious wounds to his hands and feet, there isn’t anything wrong with him. Physically.”
“What about all those pinkish areas on his skin?” Dread said, grunting with effort as he pulled the nails out of Adjani’s hands and feet. Adjani didn’t make a sound as he did it, or seem to react at all.
“Yeah, it looks like extensive use of Healing Tricks,” Jolly said. “But…”
“He’s been Revived,” I said. “Keeps stuttering with that nervous tic Vive Jobs get. Am I right, Mickey?”
Mickey looked him over and nodded. “Definitely. I barely need to look into his mind and I can tell… ugh.”
“What?”
“His mind is like mush, Cass. I think… I think they tortured him to death, then Revived him, then tortured him again.”
“Why would she do that?” Jolly asked. “She could’ve just killed him and done that creepy bit where she talks to the dead, right? He would’ve told her everything she wanted.”
“Well, we knew she had a mean streak to her,” Dread said, pulling out the last nail. “That’s it, Cass.”
Adjani sat bolt upright on the table. Dread’s hands shot out to grab him by the chest, and I thought there was about to be a struggle, but Adjani simply looked at him and placed his ruined hands over Dread’s, gently.
“I know you,” Adjani said. “I knew that I knew you. She can’t take everything from me.”
“Dr. Adjani,” Dread said. “Do you know where you are?”
“Heaven. I’m in Heaven…” Adjani said, starting to sing a little. “And my heart b-b-beats so that I can hardly speak…”
Dread shook his head, placing restraints over Adjani’s wrists without any resistance from him. “He’s fried. Revival Psychosis, maybe, or worse.”
“Mickey,” I said. “We need to know what he knows. Where the Intron Code device is. Where Kel is. Everything.”
“Go deep into that mind?” Mickey said. “I’d rather crawl through a sewer in my birthday suit.”
“We need it,” I said. “What about that thing you did with Fly back at the prison? Making him talk through you?”
“Can’t,” Mickey said. “I’d just channel his lunacy and talk like he’s talking. He’s not holding anything back. His marbles are scrambled.”
She let out a sigh. I knew that sigh. It was what she did when there
was something that she knew she could do to help, but she really, really didn’t want to do it… or even let anybody know that she could do it.
“Mickey?”
“I…” she started to say, then let out a groan. “Oh, okay. I did do an internship at a mental hospital while I was still in school. It was a pilot program to see if Mentalists could stabilize schizophrenics better than medication.”
“Did it work?” Dread asked.
“Eh,” she said, waving her hand back and forth like a see-saw. “Kind of.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning,” Mickey said, “if you really dug in there, you could bring them back to reality for a little while. But it wore off even faster than the medication did, so they scrapped the whole idea.”
“And you think that same technique could work on Adjani now?” I said.
“Maybe. I don’t know. His mind kind of feels like a schizophrenic’s. But…”
“But it’s uncomfortable,” I said.
“That’s a huge understatement, Cass,” she said. “Wearing the same underwear three days in a row is uncomfortable. Trying to smooth out a schizophrenic is like having a super bad acid trip… I mean, so I’ve been told. I’ve never actually dropped acid. But any time I had to go into a schizophrenic’s mind… it really messed me up.”
“Um, Mickey?” Shifty said from the doorway. “I hate to be the bad guy here, but let me sum up this situation for you. Entire city under siege by monsters. Entire building below us, chock full of even more monsters, all of which are right now figuring out how to climb up the stairwell or maybe the elevator shaft so that they can kill us. Then there’s the master level death mage and her dream team of zombie wizards upstairs, also itching to figure out the best way to kill us.”
“I know, I know!” Mickey said, starting to bounce up and down on her heels to fire herself up. “Give me a second, okay?”
She approached Adjani slowly, as if he were a cobra reared up with his hood flexed wide. Her hands reached up toward the sides of his head. At first, he didn’t move, but before she made contact, his eyes turned toward her.
“You’re known to me,” Adjani said.
“Just so you know, before I do this,” Mickey said, “I never liked working for you.”
Her hands touched the sides of his head. As one, their eyes rolled upwards and their mouths opened, sucking in air in an extended gasp. Mickey began to shake and tremble, a little at first, then more and more as she kept the connection.
“Mickey,” Dread said, starting to move towards her.
“Let her do her thing, Dread,” I said.
He shot me a look. I tried to shoot one back, one that said hey, no shit, I don’t like it either, but we don’t have a hell of a lot of choice here, but Dread didn’t look convinced. Hell, I wasn’t convinced.
All of us were wringing our hands watching tiny little Mickey, drowning in her over-sized body armor, shake and tremble with the effort of trying to pull Adjani’s shattered mind under control. Even Lysette… who usually shows about as much emotion as your average great white shark… couldn’t sit still, but she fidgeted and fretted until finally, Mickey’s hands dropped away from Adjani’s temples and she stumbled backwards.
Dread caught her and propped her up. “I got you. I got you, Mickey.”
Mickey looked up at him for a second, and then her face twisted up and she began to cry. Dread tried to comfort her, but she shook herself away from him, waving us all off as she retreated into a corner of the room and curled up into a ball, shaking and sobbing uncontrollably.
I can’t image the flood of thoughts or emotions that must’ve torn their way through Mickey’s mind during her time in Adjani’s head. We all stood there for a little while, watching her body shake with sobs, wondering what we could do, knowing that the answer was nothing.
I never felt so awful as when I had to watch one of my people suffer, and I was helpless to do anything about it. You don’t know what to do with yourself; you want to wring your hands or pace or howl at the moon, anything, just to be doing something to make yourself feel like you’re something other than a useless lump of shit watching their friend writhe in pain.
Then, Adjani’s voice pulled me out of my concern for Mickey. This time, when he spoke, it was as smooth as a pane of glass.
“Ms. Wheeler. Mr. Harrison,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t know the rest of your names.”
“Dr. Adjani,” Dread said. “Do you know where you are?”
“Of course,” he said. “The monitoring station on the fourteenth floor.”
“Monitoring station?” I asked.
He nodded. “For the device. The Intron Code device.”
“Where is it? The device?”
“Above us,” he said. “Directly above this room, actually. One floor up.”
He looked down at his mangled hands as if studying an interesting painting. As he flexed his fingers, there was a wince of pain, and when he finally looked at me, his eyes were perfectly sane.
“What did you do?” he said.
“She,” I said, nodding toward Mickey, who at this point seemed to pulling herself together somewhat. “She did that for you.”
Adjani looked at her. “My mind was… gone. She tortured me. Kel. Had her ghouls tear me apart. They took their time. I begged her to make it stop, I told her everything I knew. She didn’t care.”
He paused for a moment before continuing.
“I felt myself… die. Everything started to slip away and I thought, at least now the pain will end. And then…”
I saw his jaw flex, just a bit.
“Then she brought me back. Revived me. And when she commanded me… I couldn’t resist. Anything and everything she wanted to know, I told her. There was no way to hold anything back. It was as if a request from her was a request from God. How could one say no?”
“And now?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Whatever she…”
“Mickey,” Lysette said. “Her name is Mickey.”
“Whatever… Mickey… did to me, it’s shaken off Kel’s influence. I don’t know if it will last.”
“It won’t,” Mickey said. Her voice was shaky and her face was wet with tears. “It won’t last.”
“How long do I have?”
She wiped at her eyes and shrugged. “Couple of hours, maybe. I’m not sure.”
“I should be terrified of that, but I find I’m… very calm,” Adjani said. “And I can remember, now.”
“Remember what?” I asked.
“Everything she did to me. But there’s no emotion attached to it; it’s like my memories are nothing more than a video of something that happened to someone else.”
“Tell us what she’s done.”
“She’s killed everyone in the building. At first, she spared the personnel she needed to Revive Caleb and Martin and Oswald, then, she killed those last few people as well. She’s filling this city with ghouls and conjurations, and everyone they kill continues to power the sphere.”
“We figured that part out already.”
“She’s locked the sphere into the Intron Code device. I helped her bypass the last security protocols, the ones even Oswald didn’t know about. He was a plant for the Cabal, did you know that?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s hers now. Like the others.”
“Why is she still powering up the sphere?” Dread asked. “Didn’t she already do that at the prison?”
“As powerful as the sphere was, even after the prison, it’s not enough. Not for what she wants. She’s used it to create the same kind of barrier around the city as she did around the prison. Much larger, obviously. And now she’s using it… using all of the death her creations are causing throughout the city… to continue to power up the sphere to an even greater extent.”
He waited a moment before continuing.
“I tried to trick her. If the sphere is not aligned properly with the machine, there can be d
isastrous consequences. Lethal consequences. But when it came time… I couldn’t do it. As I said, a request from her was like a request from God.
“I confessed my betrayal, I told her about all of my plans. She forced me to do the job properly. And then, as punishment, she… tormented me. Killed me over and over again, Reviving me each time. Eventually she tired of it and had her ghouls nail me to this table. ‘Watch on these screens as your failure becomes complete’, she said.
“I can remember that, now. Then, at that time, my mind was gone. Like a jigsaw puzzle shaken up in the box. But now… now everything is so clear. And calm.”
He looked at me, almost pleading. “All I wanted was to finally be able to do what I saw so many others do. To be able to learn even one simple Trick. To be able to do something extraordinary. To be something extraordinary.”
“You want to see extraordinary?” Dread said, pointing at Mickey. “Look at her. But not because she’s got abilities. All the awful shit you’ve done, and she still put herself through hell to help you out.”
Adjani looked at Mickey, and I swear, there might have actually been a drop of compassion in his eyes. “You’ve given me something priceless. Pulled me back from the depths. At least for a while. It must have been… awful for you.”
“You have no idea,” she said.
“I do, actually. I was lost in that madness. Why did you put yourself through that for me?”
Mickey shook her head and pointed at me. “Didn’t do it for you. I did it for her.”
“Then let me repay the favor,” Adjani said. “Ms. Wheeler. What I did to you…”
Seeing Mickey in the state she was in, I wasn’t in the mood to be a part of Adjani’s little twelve step program of begging forgiveness for his past sins. “Save it. You want to apologize, do it by helping us to stop Kel.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. She has to be stopped. I’ll do what I can. On one condition.”
Son of a bitch. Didn’t that just figure.
“Conditions, now?” I said.
“When this is over,” he said. “You must kill me. Kill me and make sure there is nothing that remains of my body. I can’t go back to…”
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 74
