Paranormals | Book 3 | Darkness Reigns

by Andrews, Christopher

  Another paranormal, he noted. At this point, he should assume they were all paranormals — except for Takayasu, who had used specialized weaponry on him.

  It also trailed through the back of his mind that this collection of costumed super-people would have thrilled his brother. And in his latest Sentietiam vision, Steve had been wearing something black over his head, and a black cape.

  Is that Steve lying there, dying? Did my own brother go paranormal after I left? Is that why his eyes changed from hazel to blue?

  The notion did not bolster his patience. But at this critical juncture, the last thing needed was the distraction of another throw down.

  But is that Steve? Is that my brother?

  It had to be. The new, blue eyes, the voice ...

  Yet another person appeared in the hole in the wall. This one, a young Black man — presumably Walker — stepped into the room, his eyes wide as he took in the scene, especially John himself. And when he saw Vortex lying in a pool of blood, his eyes widened further still.

  “Jesus!” he cried, lifting a hand to cover his mouth.

  “Don’t just stand there, young’n!” the man in red snapped. “Help him!”

  To his credit, Walker did not hesitate. Rushing forward, he knelt by Vortex’s right side and, heedless of the gore, placed both hands directly onto the wound. He closed his eyes for several seconds, and when he reopened them, they were filled with tears.

  “H-He’s almost gone,” he said, looking back and forth between each member of the group. “I ... I don’t think I can pull him back from this.”

  “Try,” Callin stated with authority.

  “I am trying,” Walker returned, “but I’m not ... I mean, I can fix things like bruises, torn cartilage, damaged ligaments, I’m even getting better at broken bones. But this ...” He shook his head. “He’s got trauma and shock, ripped tissue and muscle, God only knows how much wound contamination, and he’s almost bled out.” Then he looked to Takayasu. “There’s an ambulance outside ...”

  “Walker,” the man in red said, “if you can’t help ‘im, I don’t think they’ll get him to the hospital in time.”

  “But they can at least get some plasma into him, something! They can—”

  John could no longer bite his tongue. “Damn it, let me help him!”

  The group all exchanged leery looks, except for Walker, who appeared exasperated. “What? Look, I don’t know who that is, but if he can help me save Vortex’s life, then get his ass over here!”

  Another uneasy beat passed, and then Takayasu sighed. “Mark, let him through.”

  The man in red (“Mark”) didn’t look happy — not with the situation, and not with Takayasu’s decision — but with a grunt, he dropped his arms and jerked his head toward Vortex. “Well? Get your ass over there.”

  John rushed forward, kneeling across from Walker with Vortex between them. “I take it you’re a paranormal healer?”

  Walker nodded. “Yeah. But I’ve never—”

  “It doesn’t matter. Power up or whatever it is you do, get started, and I’ll do the same. With luck, we’ll augment one another.”

  Walker nodded. “All right. But he’s going to need more than that. Lieutenant, keep those legs elevated. Lincoln, we don’t have time for secret identities, not right now. Take his mask off, or at least pull it up so his airway is as free as possible.”

  The muscular man (“Lincoln”) looked to Takayasu for confirmation.

  Takayasu nodded. “Do it.” Then he glanced at John as he added, “We’ll deal with the fallout later.”

  Lincoln sort of shuffle-crawled around to Vortex’s head, probed around the neckline of the man’s costume until he found where the mask tucked into the tunic, and pulled the shiny material up and over his face, exposing a headband like the one Takayasu wore.

  Steve.

  It was Steve, his little brother, whom John had not seen — and had believed dead — for so very, very long.

  Except Steve not only looked older, he was pale, deathly pale. In fact, he looked like a corpse.

  John realized that he was frozen, staring at his brother’s face. And, in spite of the urgency of the situation, he might have continued to gawk a while longer, processing it all, if Callin hadn’t spoken up, right next to his ear.

  “If you do anything to hurt him,” the narrow-faced paranormal warned, and John could feel the warmth of his aura reigniting, “I will burn you alive. Do you understand me?”

  John did not look at him — his eyes were still locked onto Steve’s face — but he turned his head toward him to respond, “Yes, I understand. Now get back and do not distract me.”

  Walker’s hands were already placed atop Steve’s horrific wound, on his intestines, so John placed one of his own hands just below the massive gash, and the other ... the other he placed upon his brother’s cheek.

  Closing his eyes, he whispered, “Sanitasto.”

  And the battle for Steve Davison’s life began ...

  PARANORMALS AND THE GLADIUS

  Callin paced back and forth as Jeremy and this newcomer, this “Gladius,” laid their hands upon Steve’s wounded body. His cape swirled about with extraneous energy, reacting to his emotional state.

  He didn’t trust the Gladius, because in his wakeful moment, Steve had clearly been terrified of him. But as soon as Callin saw Steve’s bare, haggard face, he accepted that they had no choice in the matter — according to Jeremy, without the Gladius, Steve would die, and the ghastly pallor of his flesh had corroborated that.

  But if Steve died due to any interference from the Gladius? Callin had not been bluffing when he threatened to burn him.

  His true frustration was, he had nothing to contribute, no help he could provide. There was nothing even to see, just Jeremy and the Gladius, hovering over Steve with their eyes closed, Jeremy’s face tight with concentration. He no longer had a viable position from which he could keep Steve warm — if that were at all beneficial at this point.

  So, fists clenched, Callin paced. And paced. And when he tried to think of something else, such as the message delivered by his alleged grandfather about this creature that threatened the Earth and the Taalu, he found himself coming back around to Steve.

  Steve, the first Earth person he met, the one who found genuine delight in their fight against the rogue converts.

  Steve, the one person with whom he had to be neither “Grand Lord” nor “the Shining Star,” but could just be Callin.

  Steve, his friend.

  So Callin had come full circle, and there was still nothing for him to do.

  So he paced. And paced ...

  PCA

  Lincoln knew that he, like the others, should be worried about Vortex, fearful for his life. And he was, really. It wasn’t that he didn’t care ...

  But he had trouble focusing on the situation. His head still hurt, his stomach felt queasy again, he was really tired, and all of this had taken on a dreamlike quality for him. After all, just ... twenty minutes ago? An hour ago? He wasn’t sure ... he found out that he was slipping in and out of a coma, and years had gone by and his Tommy and Sarah got old but he didn’t and he was going to live forever and ever, alone, and ...

  Except, now ... now he was here. Here with his PCA friends, all the same age as before. Which meant that none of that had happened, that Tommy wasn’t killed, and Sarah ... sweet Sarah had acted so weird at the end, and she forgot her cane, and ...

  Lincoln blinked, shaking his head a little too much so that the pain jolted him.

  Focus, he scolded himself. Vortex is dying here. And he will die if Jeremy and the sword guy don’t pull him through. The least I can do is ... is pay attention.

  And he tried. He hunkered down not far from where the healers did their thing and watched what little there was to see.

  But he couldn’t help thinking about how Sarah forgot her cane ...

  PCA

  Mark wanted to pace, too, but with the Grand Lord stomping back a
nd forth, that freaky cape of his twitching around him ... well, it would’ve been too awkward. So he settled for crossing his arms and leaning against the nearest wall, right next to the hole below the busted-out window.

  On that note, he had also spotted a splintered crater down the right-hand wall. Jesus, what the hell happened while he was off fetching Walker (like Mike’s damned trained dog)? Who the hell was this new guy with the swords, where had he come from, and how had he gone from apparently duking it out with the team to trying to help Walker fix Vortex’s slashed gut?

  Mark wanted to ask all of this, demand some explanations, but even he knew this wasn’t the time. So he struck a brooding pose and settled in to wait.

  Not that the “brooding” part was all for show. He was still smarting from Mike’s little bombshell — if it weren’t for what was going on at the moment, he’d be tempted to lay into Mike with both barrels!

  But deep down, beneath his personal issues, he was honestly worried about Vortex. Steve was a good kid with a great heart — a little nerdy for Mark’s taste, but solid and dependable.

  Unlike how Mike’s turned out, he grumbled inside.

  So he’d stand here and wait, and hope that Steve pulled through. And then they’d need to figure out what was going on with the little sword master there (he was inclined to deride the guy for dressing in all black like some ninja-wannabe, but considering Mark was dressed in all red, he stopped short). And then they’d try to figure out what in the world was going on with all of this: The weird darkness, the supposed pedophile-rogue ring, and — if it wasn’t the sword guy — just who the hell messed up Steve’s gut.

  Until then ... as far as he was concerned, Mike could go straight to hell.

  PCA

  Michael, still kneeling with Vortex’s feet propped up on his thighs (his own legs were going numb), tried to figure out where things had gone so wrong? The preternatural darkness that had interfered with their keeping within sight of one another could only have been created by a paranormal, but who, or what, had slashed Vortex’s stomach open — and, after such a brutal assault, why was he left alive? And who the hell had tried to bushwhack Michael himself? Because that sure as hell wasn’t the real Christine.

  But that was just it: Whoever — or, again, whatever — had tried to rattle him, to convince him of his old doubts and distract him from everything else that was going on in the area ... he knew this strange enemy wasn’t Christine White, but he/she/it had known about Christine, known about those self-doubts, known the best angle from which to push him. And, he was forced to admit, he/she/it had done a very good job at it, too; had he not been pushed too far, too fast, who knows how long he would have taken to snap out of it.

  The more he pondered it, the more the whole thing felt like a trap — but an odd one, in that only one of them (possibly two, as he had yet to follow up with Lincoln) had been seriously injured. And Mia Singh — where did she fit into all this? She had seemed like a simple not-so-helpless victim in the initial sting operation, and when she had shown up at the PCA regional headquarters with her story about hiding in the church all night and overhearing about the child-slave ring ... damn it, he had been distracted, hung up over Doctor Park’s offer for his stupid scars, and he had acted almost on autopilot.

  Michael knew that Lincoln had a sensitive spot when it came to pedophiles, and Mark (usually) went along with anything Michael suggested, so this one was really on him. He should have vetted Mia’s claims in some way, at least double-checked with the agents he had sent to the Church of the Seven Stars, but instead he had just taken Mia’s word as gospel. And it begged the question: Did Mia know what she was sending them into?

  Maybe Mia was innocent in all of this, and things had occurred exactly as she described — and maybe the rogues really had known she was there, hiding under the pews, and had fed her exactly the information they wanted. But how did that track with the way things had ended up?

  Mia gave the information to the PCA — asking for Powerhouse, specifically — and while Michael needed to pursue this knock Lincoln took on the head, he could not escape the fact that only Vortex had been critically, perhaps mortally, wounded. And very shortly after that happened, the smothering darkness lifted.

  Was Vortex the intended victim all along? If disinformation was fed through Mia, how could his attacker have known that Powerhouse would bring him along? The five of them did not always work together, not on every single mission.

  And just who the hell was the Gladius? And if he truly was not the one who injured Vortex (two short-swords notwithstanding), then how did he factor into all of this?

  So many variables, so little information. And when exactly did this particular scenario get rolling? Did it begin with Mia’s story? With his getting distracted by Doctor Park? With yesterday’s sting operation? When all the different rogue cases started getting vile a few weeks ago?

  Too many damned questions for his taste. But he was looking forward to reviewing the security footage from Doctor Park’s building, to see what familiar faces that might reveal.

  And the cherry on top of this large pile of excrement? Mark had chosen now, of all times, to suddenly revert to his old attitude. Hell, it was actually worse than that, because while Mark had been a pain in everyone else’s ass during his earlier days with the PCA, Michael had hit it off with him almost from the get-go. So while Mark had a long track record of flipping the bird at authority, he had never given Michael such grief.

  Even now, right this moment as Jeremy and the Gladius struggled to save Steve’s life, Michael could feel the hostility coming from his partner. If the current situation weren’t so dire, he would be tempted to have it out with Mark here and now.

  But even his hot-headed partner, sulking as he was over by the hole in the wall, had obviously concluded that this was not the time.

  For once, it was Lieutenant Takayasu’s turn to follow Shockwave’s lead and keep quiet while the healers did their work.

  PCA

  Jeremy had never pushed his paranormal abilities this far, or this deep, or for this long. He was one of the lucky paranormals — “lucky” given the nature of his power — in that, unlike most people who gained an ability and locked in at that level, Jeremy’s was gradually growing stronger.

  About a year ago, Jeremy learned about his boss’ double-life — that Steve Davison, the alleged MMA “fight club” enthusiast, was secretly the costumed super-vigilante known as Vortex — when his employers needed him to heal some burns on Steve’s leg ... but not just any burns, laser burns, that had gone straight through the skin and muscle. And they had another paranormal — an actual alien, as in from outer space! — who had gotten stung in the neck, and they needed Jeremy’s help dealing with the venom, helping the victim (whom he now knew as Shining Star) recover from the consequential swelling so that he could get back into the fight.

  Jeremy was left almost dizzy from the whole experience, but it provided an undeniable advantage for his healing ability: Delving into the realm of laser burns and alien physiology pushed the envelope on his power in all new ways, and the result was that Jeremy gained even more mastery over healing the regular, good old fashioned human body.

  Would this be adequate to save Steve here, now, with such a horrific, open abdominal wound and way too much of his blood all over the warehouse floor? If he were alone at this task ... he hated to admit it, but he would not be strong enough, and Steve would have already died.

  But whoever this new guy was, and regardless of what he might have done to set off Steve’s super friends, Jeremy recognized that, whatever he was doing on his end, it was definitely something critical, accomplishing more than Jeremy could on his own. Far more. In fact, as Jeremy sent wave upon wave of his own power into Steve’s traumatized body, he could feel the new guy’s efforts interacting with his own, merging with and complimenting his work. It was as though he were not only assisting Jeremy, but also elevating his ability, allowing Jeremy to accomplish thing
s beyond even what he had achieved since last year’s alien attack. Some extension of himself was throbbing, not in pain, but with swelling potential, and that potential surged that much further into Steve, keeping his heart pumping, urging his bone marrow to ramp up production and replace the blood he had lost and which was still draining from his body (though in thankfully less volume) — to say nothing of urging Steve’s natural antibodies to fight against all the foreign matter that had been introduced into his system through the ragged wound.

  Working together, and only together, Jeremy and the new guy — and Steve himself, with his innate strength and stubborn endurance, holding on as long as he had — might turn the tide ...

  PCA

  Time passed for all of them, waiting, waiting to see if their friend would live, or not. Twice, the agents positioned outside with the ambulance called in for an update, and Takayasu told them to continue standing by. And then they waited some more.

  Nothing changed that the others could see — the intestines did not retract into the wound; the wound itself did not heal over at lightning speed — except that Vortex was definitely no longer bleeding. But, as both Takayasu and Shockwave silently noted to themselves, this could have been because he had run out of blood.

  Finally, without warning, Jeremy Walker gasped, slumped, tipped forward almost to the point of falling onto Vortex himself, then instead collapsed to his left onto the dirty floor, away from the blood.

  “Jeremy?!” Takayasu called out, reaching for him but only able to touch his leg.

  “Walker?” Shockwave asked, standing upright from where he had been leaning against the wall.

  Walker gave them only one answer: He began to snore.

  Then the newcomer, the Gladius, also slouched, but it wasn’t as drastic as he reached out one arm to brace himself upright. His head hung for a moment, then he rallied and turned his hazel eyes in their black mask toward the lieutenant.

  “I think you should call in ... call in the medical people now,” he said, sounding somewhere between sleepy and out of breath. “He’s ... he’s still going to need a ... lot of work, get patched back together ... but Walker and I ... we’ve pulled him back from the abyss.”