Division Zero: Thrall (29 page)

Dorian, rolling on the floor, twisted Zahn’s arm and managed to get the weapon out of her grip. He hauled her around by a fistful of spectral matter somewhere around her collarbone and pinned her back to the wall. His ghostly sidearm formed in his hand and he ‘fired’ twice into her face. Zahn’s eyes rolled into the back of her head and she convulsed. Black ichor ran out of her nose, ears, and mouth.

Kirsten had no faith her body would listen to her in time to get out of the way of Womack’s pistol. The huge, possessed man leaned over her, attempting to aim at an angle to skip a bullet under her visor plate. She held her hands up, latching her power onto the paranormal presence inside him. Womack’s arm shuddered, the pistol lifted. A bullet skimmed over the top of her helmet. Kirsten stopped breathing, focusing all she had on pushing Womack’s arm away.

“Zahn! Wake up! Zahn!” Donovan, pinning Lewis to the ground, shouted at the convulsing white-eyed woman slumped against the wall.

“ She’s fine,” yelled Dorian out of reflex. “I just killed the thing inside her.”

Womack flashed a sudden grin before he ceased fighting her, and let her push his arm up―tucking the pistol under his chin. He fired. His silver visor exploded in a wash of blood and skull fragments. The seven-foot-two man collapsed to the ground.

“No!” Kirsten screamed, unable to hold back tears. “God dammit, no!”

“Womack!” howled Donovan. “Wren, what the fuck is going on?”

His spirit emerged, staggering off to the side and holding his face. A shadowy form seeped into the air from the corpse. She bisected it with a scintillating thread of light before it could divest itself fully from the dead man. Womack’s ghost leapt away from the energy whip. Kirsten rolled to her feet, sprinting at Donovan with an enraged babble of curses. She swept the lash through both Donovan and Lewis, causing an explosion of black liquid to burst out of Lewis’s mouth.

Donovan gawked, aghast at the stream of energy coiling about. Fear manifested in Reverend Wallis’s face as his eyes went onyx black. He held his hands out; spoken Latin amplified as if over speakers, called forth a wall of flames that slid up the curtains behind him. The room glimmered in the orange-crimson light and a wave of heat billowed over them on an incendiary breeze as the burning licked at the ceiling. Before the fire could engulf them, Kirsten thrust the astral lash through Wallis’s heart, twisted, and yanked it loose.

The flames dispersed.

Wallis wheezed. Black water fell from his mouth, his nose, and leaked like tears from his eyes. He fell to his knees, staring agape. After a cough, he lifted a gaze of utter confusion up at her. His pants darkened.

“Fuckin’ psio motherfucker,” barked Donovan. He stomped past Kirsten and went for a home run swing on Wallis’s skull with his rifle.

The Reverend skidded into the podium, knocking it over. Blood covered his now-unconscious face. Donovan stalked after him, flipping the rifle over to aim at the heart.

“By the authority vested in me by the United Coalition Front, I hereby sentence you to summary execution for the murder of Officer Edward Womack.”

“Donovan, stop!” shouted Kirsten. “There was a paranormal entity controlling him. That man was just a host.”

Sergeant Donovan looked away from Wallis, glaring at her. “This fucker did it. He forced Ed to kill himself!”

Zahn snapped out of her stupor and pulled herself up. “Fuckin’ a right. Kill the son of a bitch.”

Lewis moaned, gagging on the ichor in his mouth. He made a sour face at the flavor and vomited.

“ Sergeant Donovan, do not execute this man. Not only is he a possibly unwitting pawn, he may have valuable information. That’s an order.”

“All due respect, ma’am, but he’s responsible for the death of a squad mate. He ain’t gonna walk out of here.”

“
Stand down.
” Kirsten’s eyes flared with a trace of light. “Secure that weapon, officer.”

Donovan shuddered; his muscles unable to override the command she put in his mind. Frustration boiled into a scream of rage, then tears as he collapsed to his knees. Womack’s ghost stood over his own body, shaking his head.

Zahn gave Kirsten a nervous look. “You just… did something to him, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I saved him from a court martial.” Kirsten put a hand on Donovan’s shoulder. “I know you don’t understand this stuff. Please believe me, it was not Wallis’s fault. If I thought he did it, I wouldn’t stand in your way.”

“We went in at the same time, been squaddies since first deployment back in the 89
^th
.”

Kirsten patted his shoulder. “Don’t ruin his memory by murdering an innocent man.”

In the basement under the Faith Pentecostal Baptist Ministries building, Kirsten found a few moments of peace from the bustle of crime scene investigations going on upstairs. Aside from a large room of barely-functional boilers, little seemed out of place. Whenever she closed her eyes, Ed Womack’s helmet exploded again.

“What, exactly, did you find down here?” she asked, glancing at Dorian. “It’s barren.”

“Over here.” He walked through a boiler she had to skirt around, pointing. “This is a false wall.”

She searched, pawing at white-painted bricks laced with green mold until she found a loose one. It turned out to be only a façade, a small hatch that opened to reveal a fingerprint reader.

“Damn.”

Dorian stuffed his hand through it, making a face as if he rummaged through a hat full of names. Within six seconds, the door swung open.

Kirsten pulled aside a metal slab coated in brick face and stepped into a square room containing the nude remains of a man in his thirties. He lay with his arms at his sides. Strange markings covered his chest and his still-open eyes were orbs of onyx. She crept into the hidden chamber, careful not to step on any of the black substance forming a circle around the remains on the bare cement.

“Look familiar?” asked Dorian.

“I don’t know him.” She looked over and shrugged. “Should I?”

“I mean the circle.”

Kirsten squatted, balancing on the balls of her feet as she got as close as she could without touching anything. “Charazu? But, I… we destroyed that one.”

Dorian rubbed his chin. “Perhaps. It’s also possible we just sent it home. Someone had to call it here. No telling how long the good Reverend has been under the influence of whatever had him.”

“No way was that Charazu inside Wallis, it died way too easily. Konstantin said something bout ‘the ones who always were’, ancient
demons
. Abyssals are just returned mortals.” She stood up, lifting her forearm to her face. “Ops, this is Agent Wren. I’m in the basement, got another victim down here. Need a forensics unit; they’re already upstairs.” She glanced over bizarre scrawling on the walls to an arrangement of candles, knives, and a disorganized mess of old papers. Arms folded, she frowned at Dorian. “I don’t like this at all. Those fanatics, they had no ghosts of their own and the spirits that came out of them were way too strong to be recently dead.”

“Maybe they weren’t so recent.”

Kirsten got paler.

octor Loring’s office smelled of lavender and candle wax; a scent that soon drowned in the fragrance of Earl Grey as the slender woman offered Kirsten a cup. They sat by a small round table, in plush chairs at a ninety degree angle to each other. Pale blue, like the ceiling, they left the women on more equal footing than a couch and a seat behind a desk.

“I’m sorry if you find this irritating,” said Dr. Loring, as she settled into position and crossed her legs. “Any officer present at such an event is required to have an assessment.”

Kirsten blew on her tea before taking a sip. “I know. I’m not annoyed at having this session. I’m annoyed at spending time here I could be using to figure things out or be with Evan.”

“He’s in school now. I spoke with Captain Eze. We both want you to know Officer Womack’s death was not your fault.”

Kirsten gazed at her lap. “He was throwing me around like I was a little kid. Something possessed him, but I couldn’t stop him. Womack was trying to kill me, then out of nowhere…” Kirsten made a finger gun under her chin.

“Kirsten, you probably saved the other three officers by keeping his rifle at bay. Given the situation you found yourself in, it’s amazing there was only one fatality.”

The tea, while warm and comforting, concealed no answers at the bottom of the cup―no matter how long she stared at it. “I told Eze not to send them in. I told them to wait outside, but they didn’t listen to me.”

“Would it have made you feel any better to have gone in there alone and been overwhelmed?”

“They had knives. Black silk robes and knives. They didn’t even have clothes on under the robes.” Kirsten scrunched up her face. “Wallis just stood there and laughed, he wasn’t armed. I think I could handle four idiots with composite combat knives. They couldn’t have pierced my armor.”

“What I’m saying is… everyone involved was acting in accordance with best practice in mind. A detective doesn’t go in alone to apprehend a suspect, especially when they are expected to be dangerous; more so when the extent of that danger is unknown. You share no part of the blame for what happened to Officer Womack.”

Kirsten stared at the rug.

“Watching a person die is traumatic. If there’s anything you want to talk about, I’m here for you.” Dr. Loring shifted her legs, crossing them the other way.

After a moment, Kirsten looked up, feeling less awkward at the sight of the warm smile on the clinician’s face. She flicked the side of the cup and stared straight ahead. Behind the desk, a holographic portrait of a young Dr. Loring sat between her parents in their house in the UK. Kirsten giggled at the thought of how a pasty-faced blond man and a beautiful Indian woman could have produced the person opposite her.

“What are you thinking?” Dr. Loring leaned forward.

“Oh, nothing.” Kirsten blushed. “I just found the face your father was making to be a little funny is all.” She gestured at the portrait.

The doctor smiled. “Dad always has some kind of joke going on in his mind. He fancied himself a screenwriter for a while, you know. None of his comedies ever got picked up.” She leaned back. “So you’ve nothing to say further about Officer Womack?”