Blood Vivicanti (9780989878593) (5 page)

He was just staring blankly at the flickering monitor. Perhaps he was staring at the warped reflection of himself. Perhaps he was staring deeper inside his
self
.

Either way, he looked pensive and angry – that was how he had learned to cope with fear.

Maybe I might’ve looked the same if my batcave had just been ransacked by a stampede of Lowen’s Sleeper Devils.

Wyn was wearing the remnants of one of his more expensive suits. Now it looked like the tatters of much poorer men.

He’d been so lost in the tumult of his thoughts that he hadn’t heard me approach. He jumped at the softest mention of his name. I’d never seen him glare so fiercely. He was a good thinker, but he was also talentless at turning off his deep-running feelings.

I wonder if his prey ever saw that glare in his eyes.

He looked away from me and became more reflective. He had to think about how he felt before he understood how to feel about his feelings. In that, we were the same, and I felt for him.

He must have seen in my stunned expression a reflection of the horror that he had become. He softened almost instantly.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a tired voice. It was the first time he’d ever apologized to me.

Hell must have frozen over.

My voice echoed in the emptiness of Wyn’s ruins as I asked, “What happened to the mansion?”

Wyn considered his response. “A burglary.”

“What did they take?”

Wyn looked at me, studying me, not with his powerful Blood Vivicanti eyes, but with very human eyes, eyes searching to find the answer to the question: Can I trust her?

“The Origin Blood,” Wyn said in a defeated tone, “they stole the Origin Blood.”

“Who’s they?” I asked. “And what’s the Origin Blood?”

Then he confessed everything, telling me the whole story.

We sat for a long time in the silence of his ruined life and work.

Then I confessed everything to him too – that I had started drinking more than a pint of blood a week, that I had drunk Nell’s black blood, and that I was sorry – so very very sorry.

“I know,” he said. He knew about everything. “Ms. Crystobal was keeping an eye on you for me.”

“You were spying on me?”

“A scientist doesn’t spy,” he said. “I was observing my science experiment.”

He was right, of course, and I knew that even then. But the Vulcan could have been a little more tactful. It was the truth that (as it so often does) brutally hurt.

Ms. Crystobal returned then. She had a limp.

“How did it go?” Wyn asked her. He’d read her note. He’d had some meatloaf.

Ms. Crystobal told us everything that had happened after she and Theo left the mansion together.

“We sneaked into Lowen’s building,” she said. “We dodged bullets and lasers,” she said. “We incapacitated dogs and guards,” she said and added, “Theo knocked several unconscious in seconds while I sent the rest through a dimensional portal that led to an uninhabited island somewhere in the Pacific, where there was an over-abundance of banana trees, coconut trees, and fish.”

Ms. Crystobal swept a strand of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear.

“No,” she said, “Lowen’s army of Sleeper Devils were no match for your Blood Vivicanti. Or for me.”

Ms. Crystobal was beginning to seem a lot less human. And I wondered if Wyn’s housekeeper could be from Khariton too.

“Theo drank the blood of one guard,” she went on. “The Blood Memories gave him a map of the whole building and access codes to all the locked doors.

“But,” she added, “he also tripped an alarm sensor. I tried to warn him. Sirens blared, a lot of red lights flashed, and a polite voice announced over the intercom that the intruders would either surrender or be eaten alive for a few days.”

Ms. Crystobal leaned against one of the broken computer consoles. She looked fatigued and vulnerable.

“We managed to sneak past many more groups of Lowen’s Sleeper Devils,” she told us next. “The Blood Memories told Theo that the 120th floor was the most guarded. We knew then that the Red Man was being kept somewhere up there.

“Theo led the way. Neither of us had ever before been in a building that high. We paused to look down through one of the windows. The sight gave Theo butterflies in his stomach. I yawned.”

She yawned again.

“We arrived at the 120th floor and we realized that it was one room,” she went on. “But it seemed larger than the whole building. It seemed to go on and on forever. I realized then that that room might not have been limited to this dimension.”

Blue blood ran from one of Ms. Crystobal’s nostrils.

Wyn looked more concerned than surprised. He handed her the handkerchief from his breast pocket.

She took it and wiped away her blue nosebleed with a look of embarrassed frustration.

Where could she be from?
I asked myself.

“A metal coffin was in the middle of this seemingly limitless room,” Ms. Crystobal continued explaining. “Theo and I ran to it. The run took over thirty minutes.”

“How could a room be that big?” I asked.

Wyn’s scientific interest peaked. “It might be because of gravitational eddies,” he suggested, “or perhaps because of a perception filter.”

Ms. Crystobal waved her hand, dismissing these responses as speculative nonsense. “The room was an inter-dimensional folding of space and time,” she said.

“Theo opened the coffin,” she went on explaining. “Music was playing inside. A blindingly brilliant light shone out. Theo had to shield his eyes. So did I, which says a lot, considering the fact that I once spent a crazy summer looking directly into the hearts of supernovas.”

Ms. Crystobal rubbed her eyes now. Her blue blood had been on her fingertips. It smeared across her eyelids.

“Our eyes would not adjust,” she went on. “But we did manage to see the outline of a body inside. He had red skin.”

“The Red Man,” I said.

“Silent,” Wyn said reflectively.

“Someone else closed the coffin lid,” Ms. Crystobal said, looking at us. “We could not see him at first. Our eyes needed another moment to adjust. In the meantime, a terrible stench had suddenly filled the whole room. And when our eyes finally got used to the normal light of that great room, we could see that we were surrounded by Sleeper Devils. By the sheer scope of their number, I knew that Theo would never escape, although I might have.”

“How many were there?” I asked.

Ms. Crystobal narrowed her eyes at me. “They were packed into every inch of that room,” she said. “They were crammed into the corners, far in the distance.”

Wyn went to her and spoke softly. “Was Lowen there?”

Ms. Crystobal nodded. “The Dark Man was standing before us. He had closed the coffin lid. He was smiling at us then. His smile looked mean.”

I knew that smile from Nell’s Blood Memories. It gave me chills.

“Lowen kindly escorted me from his building,” Ms. Crystobal said.

“What happened to Theo?” I asked.

“Lowen kept him,” Ms. Crystobal said, looking defeated for the first time. “But he gave me a message to give to you both.”

Wyn blinked.

I’d stopped breathing.

We waited.

“Lowen said,” Ms. Crystobal told us at long length: “‘The next time you seek me, look for a new face.’”

To be continued…

Coming next in

THE BLOOD VIVICANTI

Part 5

Wyn and Ms. Crystobal stood before the Black Building. It was night. They were wearing dark sunglasses, gray clothes, and black overcoats.

They looked so cool and confident.

They went inside the Black Building.

The main lobby was packed with Lowen’s Sleeper Devils. None tried to stop Wyn and Ms. Crystobal at first. They watched the two enter, as if Lowen had ordered his slaves not to touch the Blood Vivicanti and his powerful companion. The Sleeper Devils gathered around Wyn and Ms. Crystobal and moved with them through the main lobby.

Playing in the background was an elevator music rendition of Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
.

Wyn and Ms. Crystobal headed for a corner of the lobby where there were stairs, elevators, and the security office.

Two Sleeper Devils blocked the way. They were large. Their skin was ashy and they smelled like rot. One was wearing a tattered suit. The other was wearing a grocer’s uniform. They might have been simple and kind people in life, before Lowen turned them into cannon fodder for his personal army of slaves. Now they were decaying versions of the good things they had been.

The two Sleeper Devils would not let Wyn and Ms. Crystobal pass.

Their reflection glinted in Wyn’s sunglasses. His expression was unflinching and fearless.

Ms. Crystobal smirked.

Wyn moved faster than sound. He flung the two Sleeper Devils into a nearby pillar. Their bodies crumbled. Their souls released.

Ms. Crystobal held out her hands. Energy in the shape of blue swirling light hovered over one palm. Over the other hovered black droplets of something she called, “The Ink Mass.”

She flung the light at a group of Sleeper Devils.

It scattered them to atoms.

She flung the Ink Mass at another group.

Those Sleeper Devils all tumbled backward like ragdolls, spilling into a dimensional portal that opened up into the heart of the Mojave Desert.

They blinked in surprise, suddenly surrounded by a pack of hungry coyotes.

All the other Sleeper Devils now swarmed around Wyn and Ms. Crystobal.

He fought them mercilessly.

She decimated them entirely with a blast of red energy.

More Sleeper Devils poured out of doors along the walls, more came down from hatchways in the ceiling, and still more crawled up from trapdoors in the floor. More came in, and more came in after them, and more and more and more came in after them.

Wyn thrust his way into the security office.

It was full of important-looking monitors displaying greenish images of the hallways and rooms and toilets. Each image was filled with Lowen’s Sleeper Devils. Not one floor was free of them – except the 120th, where Lowen was keeping the Red Man.

Wyn studied the computer layout while Ms. Crystobal remained outside, turning Sleeper Devils into motionless piles of bones and bile.

Wyn leaned over one computer console and quickly hacked into the system and reprogrammed the music to play Mozart’s
Requiem
– “in honor of Aemilia,” he said softly to himself.

Fifteen Sleeper Devils were standing outside the door to the security office waiting for him.

He turned them into pulp in 3.14 seconds.

Meanwhile the chorus of the requiem was screaming, “Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla.”

It translates as:
Day of wrath, day of anger will dissolve the world in ashes
.

Ms. Crystobal flung seventeen Sleeper Devils through a portal toward the Draco Dwarf Galaxy.

She tossed twelve more through a portal toward the bottom of the Mariana’s Trench.

She hurtled twenty-two more through the nearest wall.

The room was mostly empty when Wyn and Ms. Crystobal were finished. The only things still moving were parts of Sleeper Devils – a few heads here, some arms there, some twitching, some scratching.

Wyn and Ms. Crystobal then went to the elevator. He pressed the button. They waited.

“How was the game?” she asked.

“I don’t watch sports,” he said.

“Please.”

“Space Invaders?”

“Of course.”

“New high score.”

There was a pause.

Then Ms. Crystobal said: “Bet I can beat it.”

The elevator doors opened.

Ms. Crystobal rubbed her hands together for a moment. Then she opened them and over her palms was a glowing spec of light, as small as a pinprick of starlight.

She blew it from her hands and it gingerly floated inside.

Wyn pressed the 120th floor. The elevator doors closed.

Then the two took the stairs.

A minute later there was an explosion that shook the whole building violently with the force of an earthquake.

Wyn smiled.

He and Ms. Crystobal looked down the stairwell. They were on the ground level, but the stairwell wound just as far down as it did up.

Ms. Crystobal leaped up the stairs as silently as a cat.

Wyn leaped down the stairs, no less stealthily.

They didn’t say goodbye to one another. That would have been crossing into the undiscovered country of intimacy –
from whose bourn no traveler returns
, sayth the Bard.

It took about fifteen minutes before Wyn finally came close to the lowest level. He paused to study the bottom. It was a very far drop.

A troop of Sleeper Devils was waiting for him. They were walking around in a melancholy circle. Two were in the middle.

Wyn leaped down the rest of the way.

In the second before he landed, he grabbed the two center Sleeper Devils and slammed them into the floor.

It cracked beneath his might.

Their black blood bespattered his sunglasses.

That whole time I had been in Idyllville. I was sitting in the largest eighteen-wheeler I could find.

I had pierced a professional truck driver and had drunk his blood. His Blood Memories filled me now with the knowhow for handling such a monstrous rig.

It also gave me a peculiar itch to listen to
Dolly Parton's Greatest Hits
.

I had been waiting for a signal from Ms. Crystobal.

Thankfully it came right as I’d begun to hum
9 to 5
.

“Go,” was all she said to me through her telepathic power.

And so I drove the eighteen-wheeler as fast as I could down the straightest street I could find.

I reached 100mph. The truck started shaking.

“Now,” I replied to Ms. Crystobal through her telepathic channel.

I heard nothing more for a few seconds.

Suddenly an energy portal opened before me in the middle of the road. My job was to drive straight through it.

You see: A powerful magnetic field was preventing Ms. Crystobal from opening a portal to the 120th floor. She and Wyn had to get up there by some other means.