Specter Rising (Brimstone Network Trilogy) (6 page)

Somehow it was different—the journey brutal enough to knock him unconscious as he was taken.

No, Bogey had nothing to do with this.

Bram almost called out, but restrained himself. What if whoever had taken him wasn’t friendly?

The ceiling in the chamber was very low, and he had to
crouch down as he moved toward an opening. The moss that he’d felt thick upon the wall, and floor, hung like a curtain over the exit. He could peer out through the hanging growth at a faint, iridescent light, glowing from outside.

Bram listened for the sound of voices, but only heard the rustling and chittering of what he imagined were the animals and insects that called this place home.

He was drawn to the eerie, green light. Crouching down, he moved aside the curtain of vegetation, and exited out into a much larger chamber. Bram moved no farther, checking out the size of the room. From what he could determine from the faint lighting, the room was enormous, reminding him of the inside of a football stadium, or the hold of some large ocean liner. He couldn’t even make out the ceiling; pitch darkness with patches of what must’ve been some sort of glowing plant life stippling the darkness like star constellations in the sky above.

Deciding to venture forward, Bram inched toward the light before him. It was different than the eerie light cast by the vegetation that grew upon the chamber walls and ceiling.

Cautiously he moved toward it, his eyes gradually
adjusting to this dark, cavernous place. The closer to the light he got, the more he was able to see.

Eventually Bram was close enough to make out a shape, a human shape, lying in a makeshift bed, covered with thick furs. Closer still, he was able to make out that it was a woman, the exposed flesh of her face so pale, it was as if her skin was glowing.

Bram wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he sensed that the woman was not well, that she was quite ill, and that her life was currently hanging in the balance.

And without explanation he knew something else as well, something that he could not act upon due to the fact that two armored warriors had surged out of the darkness at him, the points of their spears looking to strike him down.

The warriors were attempting to keep him from her, from the sickly woman who was very close to death.

The woman, whom he suddenly realized without any question, was his mother.

T
he scent of supernatural fire, and everything it had burned, still hung heavy in the blackened shell of Bram’s office.

But Emily had to smell past all that; she needed some evidence other than what the obnoxious Johanna Harkness and her stupid ghost dogs had said before getting her hopes up.

Is it possible? Can he actually still be alive?

Emily didn’t even want to consider it because the disappointment if he wasn’t would have been too damn much for her to take. It was bad enough thinking of her friend in the past tense; if she started to think that she would be seeing him again sometime soon and then it proved to be false, she didn’t know what it would do to her.

It was better to continue to think that he was dead, she decided.

But what if he isn’t?

Again in the shape of the wolf, she stood in the doorway to his room. At first she just sniffed the air, attempting to identify the various aromas that still hung within the dominant stink of smoke. It was tough separating all the smells, but this was important, and she tried her hardest to succeed.

Emily needed to go in farther, to sniff at the places where he might have been when the fire broke out.

Her nostrils became thick with the scent of burning
wood and plastic. She sneezed loudly, shaking her shaggy head as she attempted to clear the heavier smells from her snout. She wanted the smaller scents, the ones that hid beneath the stronger.

She hadn’t even realized that she was doing it, but she’d dropped to all fours, her nose practically touching the ground as she moved around the room.

Death had a very distinct smell, and she got a nose-full in the area where the burnt body had been retrieved. She’d thought that maybe she was going to have to sniff the blackened body, that anything she found inside the room wouldn’t be enough, but luckily that wasn’t the case.

Something had most certainly died in this spot, but it wasn’t human. If there was one thing she’d learned since accepting the wolf inside her, and using this talent in the service of the Brimstone Network, it was that creatures of the supernatural smelled really funky.

And that was what she was smelling now.

Most of the stink had been burned away with the fire, but there was still a trace of the bodily fluids of the creature that had managed to penetrate the wood floor, before being burned away.

It was still there in the wood.

She reached down, digging at the wood with her claws, letting the smell waft out. Something not human had died there.

Not Bram.

Emily left the spot, looking for more evidence of death, but there was none to be found. She even went around the room for a second time, just to be sure, but the results were the same.

Johanna’s dogs had been right: Bram hadn’t died in the fire.

She felt suddenly weak in her legs and dropped to the floor. The relief that she was experiencing at the moment was almost too much to take. She wanted to shed the wolf form, to return to normal, but she hadn’t brought any clothes with her and didn’t want to have to get back to her room naked to retrieve her uniform.

But all that was secondary to the knowledge that she’d uncovered here and now.

As far as they knew, he was still alive, and that was good enough for her.

“Emily?” a voice called from the entrance behind her.

She turned to Stitch, tears in her dark animal eyes.

“He’s not here,” she growled.

The patchwork man came excitedly into the room.

“Are you certain?”

She nodded. “His death scent would have been somewhere in this room, and it isn’t.”

Emily didn’t know exactly why she did it, and was sure that she would be mortified with the memory later, but she shot up from the floor and wrapped her arms around the large man, hugging him tightly.

“He’s alive,” she said, her snout buried against his chest.

And she felt his arms go tentatively around her, one of his large hands patting her back.

“And that’s a good thing,” he told her.

“The best,” she answered.

“But I’m still worried,” he then responded.

She looked up at him then, unsure of what he meant.

“The question now is where has Abraham gone—was he taken? If so, by whom—and for what purpose?”

And here she had been starting to feel good again.

So much for that.

B
ram started toward the sickly woman; drawn toward her like metal filings pulled toward a magnet.

The armored guards surged at him with a grunt, their fearsome spearheads mere inches from his chest.

He didn’t give them a second thought, ghosting his form and passing through the spears, as well as the warriors themselves, on his way toward the woman that he just knew was his mother.

It was like he was in some kind of trance as he continued toward the bed of furs and the fragile woman who lay bundled within them.

The sudden pain in his shoulder blade was excruciating, breaking the trance that the woman had over him.

Instinctively he spun around to see the guards still standing there, snarls upon their equally pale features. Bram reached behind himself, feeling where the burning pain originated, and pulled his hand away red. He was bleeding from a shoulder stab.

But how was that possible? He had been a ghost at that point.

One of the warriors smiled, waving the tip of his spear in the air. It was stained with his blood.

“I don’t want to fight you,” Bram told them, the wound in his shoulder throbbing. “I just need to go to her.”

He turned slightly toward the woman, to make his
point, as the warriors again attacked.

Bram was ready this time, his body instantly becoming immaterial to avoid the slashing weapons.

But it didn’t matter.

The edge of the spearhead cut across his ribs, even though he was in his Spectral form, and Bram let out a scream of pain, jumping back and away from their weapons.

“How?” was all that he could muster, placing a hand against the new bleeding wound in his side.

They were charging him again, triggering his immediate response. Somehow these warriors could hurt him in his ghostly form, so it was time to rely on the skills learned in the monastery of P’Yon Kep if he was going to survive this encounter.

Bram lunged, meeting their attack. An open palm strike connected, driving one of the warriors’ heads back with a snap.

Turning his attention to the other, he drove his leg up, the sole of his boot aimed toward his adversary’s pale, snarling face.

Bram’s foot connected with nothing, the warrior’s upper body becoming like smoke.

Like a ghost.

Taken aback, he let his guard down and was struck from behind by the other of the pair.

Bram’s head spun as he dropped to his knees. He could hear one of his attackers coming closer and he knew that he was ready to take him out with the point of his spear.

Concentrating, Bram allowed himself to pass through the moss-covered ground, sensing the point of the spear digging into the surface above him.

He then sprang off, flowing up and out of the surface, solidifying his form as he flew up and into the air.

The warriors tensed, leaping back as he sprang into the air. Bram willed himself solid, dropping back down in a crouch and swiping his leg beneath the legs of one of his attackers, dropping his heavy, armored form to the floor.

The other of the warriors lunged, and Bram went immaterial, just as his attacker did as well.

It was the oddest sensation that he’d ever experienced—another’s ghostly matter mixing with his own. Somehow, even in an almost gaseous state, they were still fighting, their ghostly forms mingling together, fighting as he’d never fought before.

And all the time he fought, one thought pounded through his mind.

They’re like me.

Bram felt as though he might suffocate. Beginning to will himself solid, he broke away from the others, drifting across the room, where he pulled himself together.

It all made sense now; the ferocity of their battle sense, the weapons that could even harm a ghost . . .

“You’re Specter,” he said to one of the armored warriors as the other reconstituted his mass beside him.

“You speak the obvious, boy,” the warrior who had just re-formed stated as he retrieved his spear.

His back and side throbbing painfully, Bram mentally prepared himself to continue the fight.

The warriors stood between the woman and himself.

All he wanted to do was to go to her side, to stare long enough to remember her face and, if possible, to place his hand upon hers.

This was his mother, of that he had no doubt, and if it meant that he needed to continue to do battle with these two to be in her presence, then he figured he might as well get to it, and get things over with.

“Ready for round two?” Bram asked, trying to block
out the pain. “Now that I know what I’m dealing with . . . shouldn’t be any problem to take you two out.”

He really didn’t care for the tough-guy stuff, but felt that maybe a little bit of confidence might provide him with an edge.

It couldn’t hurt.

The Specter warriors roared, their bodies lifting off from the ground as they became more ghostlike, soaring through the air toward him, spears lowered to pierce his flesh. The Specter used a specially treated metal for all their weapons, metal that could inflict damage even when a Specter warrior was ghosted.

“Cease these actions!” a female voice of authority suddenly proclaimed, the order echoing throughout the cavernous chamber.

The warriors reacted at once, regaining their weight and mass and dropping to the floor of the cavern before him.

They turned their backs to him, their heads lowered in subservience.

“What is the meaning of this?” the girl asked as she strode out of the darkness. She was dressed in a white, loose-fitting blouse that tied in the front, and pants that looked as though they had been made from the skin
of some odd, spotted animal. There were also heavy-looking boots upon her feet that she stomped as she placed her hands upon her curvy hips.

“Explain yourselves,” she demanded of the warriors.

Her skin was the same sickly pale as the woman he believed to be his mother, as well as the two armored warriors.

A physical characteristic of being Specter?
Bram wondered.

Her lips were full, and she wore her hair pulled severely back and braided in a ponytail. There was an air about this girl, who couldn’t have been much older than himself, that suggested she wasn’t somebody you wanted to mess with.

“The half-breed attempted to approach the blessed mother,” one of the guards explained, lifting his helmeted head temporarily before gazing back down at the floor.

“We attempted to warn him off,” said the other, “but he ignored our wishes, flaunting his Spectral talents and challenging our authority.”

“What?” Bram found himself blurting out. “I did no such thing.”

The girl’s dark eyes widened, and he realized that perhaps he had just stepped out of bounds.

“I apologize,” he said, doing as the warriors did in her presence, and bowing his head. “I should never have spoken out of turn . . . but when I hear these accusations, I can’t help but—”

“Silence!” she commanded, and he found himself closing his mouth pretty darn quick.

The girl then turned her attention from them, going to the woman lying upon her bed of furs. She knelt down beside her, placing a hand gently upon her delicate brow. Taking her hand away, Bram noticed a look of sadness spread across her attractive features.

“She’s very sick, isn’t she,” he said, walking around the warriors.