The Shroud of A'Ranka (Brimstone Network Trilogy) (7 page)

He paused, thinking about what his father had taught him. First, they had to know their enemy.

Bram returned to the group. “We know that whatever was imprisoned in that stone box in the cave was put there by the Brimstone Network,” he began.

They all nodded.

“And knowing how meticulous my father was about such things, we can only hope that the previous leaders of the organization weren’t any less strict in their record keeping.”

Stitch smiled.

“Bogey, I’m going to need you to open a rift,” Bram told the Mauthe Dhoog.

The little creature went to work right away, hands weaving a spell that would open a passage from here to there.

“You got it,” he said. “Where to?”

“Ravenschild, Massachusetts,” Bram said. “We need to pay a visit to the abandoned headquarters of the Brimstone Network.”

“DEEP BENEATH THE COLD, DANK, EARTH, SLEEPING
with the earthworms, moles, and other burrowing creatures, the vampire lord Vladek dreamed of days long past.

Curled in a fetal position, the warrior recalled the waning days of the vampire empire.

They had been poised for greatness, their voracious numbers yearning to spread across the earth, reducing humankind to little more than a source of food.

But there were some amongst humanity who would not stand for that. Some who had mastered the ways of magick, and who saw themselves as protectors of their kind.

Vladek snarled as he remembered.

Times had become desperate as the vampires’ numbers started to dwindle. They were reduced to hiding in the
shadows, only the lesser members of their kind venturing out to find food and bring it back to the royal family as they continued to hide in the ruins of castles that had once belonged to the kings of empires long forgotten.

Was that fate to befall the mighty vampire race?

Vladek had wanted to confront their attackers, the accursed Brimstone Network, to face them warrior to warrior, but the king—his father—would have none of it. King Yorga believed it better to hide and to survive than to fight and be obliterated forever.

The vampire prince did not agree, but he held his tongue. For as long as his father ruled, he would follow his wishes.

Beneath the ground, Vladek twitched with the memory of the old sorcerer, and his proposition of glory. The sleeping vampire saw the scene replay inside his mind as if it were happening again, his father’s hungry vampire subjects dragging the struggling old man beneath the castle rubble to the royal crypt that had become their nest.

They had found him wandering as the sun set in the sky. But before he could be fed upon, the ancient magick user proclaimed that his name was Gideon, and that he had brought with him a plan that would allow them to snatch
victory away from humanity and allow the vampire race to rule the planet.

King Yorga and Queen Valara had laughed at the strange old man and his even stranger ideas, but there was something about the one called Gideon, something in his words, that stirred Vladek. His father was not happy to have had his meal snatched away, but Vladek insisted that they listen to the old one, and as he spoke, they saw potential in his words.

The biggest question to the vampires was why? Why would this ancient wielder of magick want the blood-kind to dominate the earth? The answer came in the shape of immortality. Gideon saw that the perfect way to live forever was as one of them—as a vampire.

And only the ruling members of the blood-kind had the ability to pass the thirst to others. Gideon would help them defeat humanity, and in exchange they would turn him, allowing him to live forever.

It sounded like a bargain that they could live with.

But in order for this to occur, Vladek and Gideon needed to embark upon a mission of utmost importance and danger. They needed to cross the world, evading their pursuers, destroying anyone that stood in their way.

Vladek remembered the gift that Gideon had given him before embarking on their mission. He said that this would make him the ultimate warrior, the ultimate symbol of their most holy mission.

Still deep in his regenerative slumber, the cross-shaped scar upon Vladek’s chest began to burn as it had those many, many years past when Gideon had given him the gift of invulnerability.

The vampire prince was certain that nothing would stop them, confident that they would achieve their goals.

But they had underestimated the tenacity of their enemies. The Brimstone Order tracked them with their powerful magicks, smelling them out like the hound in pursuit of the crafty fox.

Many of the Brimstone order died in their pursuit of them, Gideon taking just as many lives as he, but still they kept after them.

Vladek and the sorcerer had come so close, but not close enough for victory.

At the cusp of their journey, the vampire and the magick user had met their defeat at the hands of the Brimstone Order.

Gideon had been the first to fall, struck down by a blast
of pure magickal force wielded by the leader of the Order, a mysterious and serious figure called Stone.

Vladek had made it a point to remember this man, swearing that he and all who served him would suffer the most horrible of fates when the opportunity presented itself.

In the midst of their defeat, Vladek had tried to save the dying sorcerer, beginning the process of following through on their agreement—to make him one of the blood-kind—but had only taken his first sip of the ancient magick user’s blood when the followers of Stone were upon him.

The vampire lord twitched and moaned beneath the ground as he remembered how valiantly he had fought. Many a follower of the Brimstone Order had died that day, but eventually he fell before their might.

They realized the danger of Gideon’s gift of invulnerability to him, how it had made him nearly impossible to kill, but they eventually came up with a way to hold him. The Brimstone Order imprisoned him in a cube of stone, powerful sigils of magick and objects of faith preventing his escape.

Unable to move, unable to feed, Vladek was in Hell, and the only thing that he had to sustain himself was the memory of the holy mission that he had failed to carry out.

A mission that he would complete if the opportunity ever arose.

Vladek’s eyes suddenly snapped open.

He could sense the setting of the sun on the surface above and began his ascent through the dirt.

The vampire lord had made a promise to himself while imprisoned in the stone case lo those many millennia ago.

A promise that he intended to keep.

The Ravenschild castle was as quiet as a tomb. Bram and the others emerged from Bogey’s rift into the foyer of the fifteenth-century Scottish castle that had once been the Brimstone Network’s base.

But that was before the attack. Before the agents had all been murdered.

“So why are we here again?” Bogey asked as he closed the doorway behind him. The passage closed with an odd sucking sound, like the last bit of bathwater spinning down a drain.

“My father was kind of a freak when it came to documentation,” Bram said, squinting through the darkness. “I can’t imagine that the Brimstone organization wasn’t the same.”

They all stood looking about, knowing what had happened there only a short while before.

“So this is it, huh?” Emily asked. “Gives me the willies.” She rubbed her arms with her hands. “There’s a bad smell here too. It tells me something really awful happened here.”

“Don’t need a great sense of smell to know that,” Dez said. “All you have to do is read the newspaper, watch TV, or go on the Net to know what happened.”

Even though it had been cleaned up, a pall of death still hung over the castle like a heavy wool blanket. Bram looked about, images of what he thought it must have been like filling his head.

“There’re rumors that this place is haunted,” Emily said, walking to the reception desk in the center of the foyer and looking over and behind the furniture as if expecting somebody to be hiding there. “Nobody even wants to go near it.”

“Which means nobody will interrupt us as we search,” Stitch suddenly said. “Isn’t that right, Bram?”

His imagination working overtime, Bram saw the ghostly image of his father standing in the lobby staring at him.

“Bram?” Stitch called.

“Sorry,” he said. “The atmosphere is a little overwhelming.”

“Tell me about it,” Bogey said. “You can cut the bad vibes with a knife.”

“I’m betting there’s a pretty extensive records department here. I think that’s where we should start.” Bram looked to Stitch. “Any idea where that might be?”

The large man shrugged. “I’m guessing one of the lower levels.”

“Sounds good to me,” Bram said. He walked toward the door with the sign above it that said stairs. “Since there’s no power, it looks like we’re going to have to hoof it.”

Dez started to push himself up from his chair. “Gonna give this a shot,” he said, swaying slightly as he retrieved his crutches from the back of his wheelchair.

“Are you sure, son?” his father asked him.

“I’ll be fine,” he reassured his father. “And if I get too tired, Bogey can carry me.”

“Sure, and Drackleflints will fly out of my butt,” the Mauthe Dhoog grumbled, heading for the door.

“Drackleflints?” Emily and Dez repeated at the exact same time.

They descended the stairs, floor after floor, and after
a while, Bram started to notice a strange sensation in his head.

“Hey, Stitch,” he called. “Do you feel that?”

Stitch stopped, turning upon the steps to look back at Bram. “I was wondering when you were going to notice.”

“And?” Bram asked.

“We’ve gone from one reality into another.”

“Yeah,” Bogey agreed, holding on to the railing. “I thought something might’ve been up.”

They finally reached the bottom, where a sign over a large metal door announced
RECORDS
.

Stitch hauled open the heavy door and held it open so they all could enter.

“Oh wow,” was all Bram could say.

For as far as the eye could see there were shelves, and on those shelves there were boxes, and where there weren’t shelves, there were filing cabinets.

“Can you guess why we’re in a pocket dimension?” Stitch asked.

“More room?”

“Precisely,” the big man answered. “If they’d tried to use a room beneath the castle for storage, it would have been filled in a few days. Pocket dimensions provide
perfect storage places as long as nothing is already stored or living there.”

“Oh, crap,” Bogey said. “We’re gonna be here for years.”

“We better get started then,” Bram said, pushing the Mauthe Dhoog toward a section of shelves. “If we’re lucky, there will be some sort of order that we can figure out and we won’t have to search every single box and file cabinet.”

Emily stared at him.

“What?” Bram asked.

“When have any of us ever been that lucky?” the girl asked.

He hated to admit it, but she had a point.

They all headed off to different parts of the vast storage room. It was tough to see exactly what they were doing, the only light provided by small emergency lights that cast everything in a soft red hue, like blood dispersing in water.

Bram took his first box from the shelf and was carefully going through the first of the files. He was amazed at the amount of cases investigated by the Network in just this box alone. It was incredible, and a little bit daunting.

He and his team had to now pick up that slack, and the idea that the world was now a much more dangerous
place since the event made him seriously consider going back to the Himalayas in search of P’Yon Kep and asking for his room back.

The records room was suddenly filled with light.

Bram left his work, walking up the aisle to join the others who were looking at the ceiling, at long, fluorescent bulbs that burned in the panels above them.

“Somebody must’ve paid the bill,” Dez said, leaning on his crutches, a crumpled file folder beneath his arm.

They heard a door open somewhere in the distance and the sound of someone approaching.

“Much better,” Stitch said as he emerged from one of the countless rows. “I found a small emergency generator in a back storage room and fired ’er up.”

Gradually they all returned to the work they had started, the floors littered with folders and stray bits of paper, but Bram still couldn’t find what he was looking for.

His eyes burning and the muscles in his back starting to cramp, Bram got up from the floor to stretch. Walking to the opposite end of the row, he saw Emily sitting off by herself in the distance, a large stack of file folders beside her as she dug into the open box for another handful.

She had a look on her face that told him that something
wasn’t right. He headed toward her. Although they hadn’t known each other very long, he liked to think of her as a friend. That, and the fact that she was a member of his team and he needed everyone on their game, made him want to help her if he could.

“Hey,” he said.

Emily closed the folder she’d been looking at and threw it on the floor. “Nothing,” she said, anger in her voice. “If we’re looking for some kind of pattern, then I think I found it.”

For a minute Bram thought she was serious.

“Yeah, the pattern is that there is no freakin’ pattern.” Emily removed another file from the box. “The stupid things aren’t even in alphabetical order. It’s like they just tossed all this crap in a box and shoved it on a shelf.” She removed a piece of paper and shook it at him. “And half the information has been blacked out.”

Bram squatted down beside her as she threw the last file onto the stack and went for another. He reached out and grabbed hold of her wrist.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She looked from the box into his eyes, their gazes locking, and for a second he saw the wolf looking back at him.

“I’m just freakin’ great,” she snarled, yanking her arm back. “Sitting on the floor of a haunted castle looking through folders filled with crap. Yeah, things couldn’t be any better than this.”