Blood Vivicanti (9781941240106) (7 page)

“
To where?”

“
To here.”

I didn’t understand. I
looked around but we seemed to be absolutely alone in the
room.

Ms. Crystobal saw my
confusion. “You asked the wrong question,” she said. “You should
not have asked to
where
, but to
when
.”

“
All
right,” I said: “To
when
did you send them?”

“
A few years from
now.”

I thought about this. “You
sent them to the same room, but some time in the future,” I said,
trying to understand.

“
Yes,
where they have probably already died – or I should say –
will
die from
exposure.”

“
Exposure?” I asked, not
quite sure what to think. “What will happen to this room in the
future?”

Ms. Crystobal sighed. “In
all honesty, I’m not entirely sure. But I think it has something to
do with the implosion of a neutron star.”

Once more I lifted the
coffin with the Red Man inside and placed it on my
shoulder.

Ms. Crystobal pointed
toward a hole in the room in the distance. It was the place where I
had come bursting in.

“
It’s time to go,” she
said.

We ran to the hole just as
a flood of new Sleeper Devils began charging into the
room.

We stood on the edge of the
opening. We looked down the side of the Black Building.

We were so high up that the
tops of the tallest skyscrapers were far below us. The wind was
tearing powerfully at us up there. It might have blown a mortal
away.

It’s good to be
Vivicanti.

Ms. Crystobal and I were
about to leap from the opening.

But suddenly a familiar
voice called my name, “Mary Paige.”

It was Theo.

“
Don’t turn around,” Ms.
Crystobal hissed at me. “Just jump and don’t look back.”

But I didn’t listen to her.
Excitedly I turned around.

The face looking at me was
Theo’s, only the eyes were different, not the shape or color, but
the spark of life, the look. Theo wasn’t there anymore, I
saw.

“
Theo?” I asked.

I took a step closer to
him. He wasn’t that far away. I hadn’t heard him approach. It was
as if he had appeared out of nowhere.

But I stopped with the next
step.

Standing beside him,
smiling at me was a girl I knew quite well. It was the kidnapped
girl from my fifth grade class, the pale girl whose black blood
almost killed me. It was Nell.

I could still taste her
horrid blood in my mouth. I could still see her tortured life
through her Blood Memories. The sense of her inside me made me sick
to my stomach.

And where are the clowns
now?

On the other side was a
shirtless man. He had been tortured. He had no wounds but his flesh
was covered in blood.

It was Wyn.

Several Sleeper Devils were
binding his arms from behind.

Yet still he winked at me.
Forever the boy.

Ms. Crystobal spoke to me
through her telepathic touch.

“
That’s not
Theo.”

“
Who is it?”

“
Look and see and
know.”

I did – I looked – and I
saw. And I knew the face of the Dark Man. Through Nell’s Blood
Memories, I could see him with all his many faces as clear as day.
And now I could see him again, past the eyes I once knew to be
Theo’s, deep in the emptiness of a lost soul.

“
Lowen,” I said in a hushed
voice.

It was Theo’s mouth that
smiled at me, but it wasn’t Theo’s smile, not the one I knew so
intimately.

“
Hello, Mary Paige,” Lowen
said to me in Theo’s voice. “You have something that belongs to
me.”

I gripped the Red Man’s
coffin tighter.

Theo
.

Part of me could not
believe what I was seeing. It was as if my whole world had been
turned upside down. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to spew
from my mouth the ocean of my sickness.

“
You know,” this Theo
imposter, this Dark Man, Lowen went on conversationally, grinning
as if nothing were wrong, “I have wanted you for a long time. And
I’ve come to discover that this body has wanted you too. It is
interesting how life comes full circle, how the very thing that we
most desire can be ours if we—”

He shut up because I threw
the coffin at his face.

Sorry, Theo.

Ms. Crystobal and I hurried
over to Wyn.

She grabbed him and flung
him over her shoulder. Then while carrying him, she leaped out of
the hole in the room.

I grabbed the Red Man’s
coffin and followed.

Leaping down 120 floors was
kind of fun. Had my heart not been so utterly crushed right then,
realizing that Theo was gone, I might have enjoyed it.

I left an impact crater the
size of a Volkswagen beetle. I had an urge to tear down the whole
Black Building brick by brick and screw by screw.

I wanted to open my mouth
and swallow the whole world.

Lowen, that evil and dark
man, he had been prepared for us to leap from his building. He had
already sent a sea of his Sleeper Devils to that very
spot.

They had been waiting for
us when we landed and now they surrounded us.

Ms. Crystobal opened a
dimensional portal. We went through it, returned to Idyllville, and
were instantly standing before Wyn’s mansion.

Ms. Crystobal closed the
portal as quickly as she could, but with Wyn over her shoulder, she
was not fast enough to stop the Sleeper Devils.

Over a thousand had flooded
through in a second.

They chased us to the
mansion.

We hurried inside. Ms.
Crystobal set Wyn down. He leaned on her with a bad limp, but he
was healing.

The quarter ton coffin of
the Red Man was starting to weigh on my shoulder, but I could carry
it a little farther.

Yes, being a Blood
Vivicanti means that you’re
that
mind-blowingly strong.

Once we were through the
door, Wyn told Ms. Crystobal to pause at a portrait painting. He
swung it open. Behind it was a touch screen.

Wyn placed his hand on it
to activate it. He typed in a code.

Immediately the mansion
locked down. Sheets of strong metal covered the doors and
windows.

Wyn knew that that should
keep out the Sleeper Devils, but he also knew that Lowen would not
be far off.

We mounted one last
defense.

The Sleeper Devils
surrounded the mansion. They pounded their rotting fists against
the doors and windows, trying to get in.

Then they
stopped.

The sound of the silence
concerned us.

A minute later we could
smell smoke.

The Sleeper Devils had set
fire to Wyn’s mansion. If they could not get through the metal
doors, they would get around them.

Wyn’s injuries healed. He
led us upstairs to the beautiful sarcophagus that I had seen
numerous times. I had studied the woman’s face carved all
throughout its white marble, but I had not understood who she was
to Wyn, not until then.

“
Aemilia,” I gasped, nearly
dropping the coffin in amazement.

It was the resting place of
his wife.

Or so I thought, because
without a pause, Wyn walked through the sarcophagus and entered a
hidden room.

The Winchester Mystery
House can’t hold a candle to the surprises in Wyn’s
mansion.

The shape of the
sarcophagus wavered for a second as he passed through it, like a
glitch of bad reception on an old television.

Ms. Crystobal smirked at me
and raised her eyebrow. Then she walked right through the
sarcophagus too.

The glitch in the
sarcophagus happened once again.

I had no idea what was
going on. I could smell the sarcophagus. I could see it. But could
I feel it?”

I had never touched it
before. It was never something I felt the need or desire to do, not
until then.

So I reached out and tried
to touch it.

My hand passed right
through the sarcophagus, through its seemingly white
stone.

It was a
hologram.

I carried the Red Man’s
coffin through it.

On the other side was a
whole new laboratory that I had not seen yet. It was filled with
Wyn’s personally designed computers and machines.

Also at the center of the
laboratory was an egg-shaped spaceship, colored robin’s egg
blue.

“
The Red Man’s ship,” I
said.

The spaceship was roughly
the size of a roomy recreational vehicle. In it, the Red Man would
be able to walk and move and read and sleep and do many other
activities. Two people could get along comfortably in
there.

I wondered if he would take
us to the stars.

I took the Red Man’s coffin
nearer to it and it came alive.

Lights lit up and
flashed.

The ship lifted off the
ground and hovered.

I could hear the Red Man
starting to move inside. His proximity to the ship had shorted out
the music in his ears. He was awake again.

He knocked on the
lid.

I set it down. But it was
Ms. Crystobal who opened it.

The Red Man sat up and she
immediately stared at him. She had opened a telepathic connection
to his mind. They were talking.

The Red Man blinked. He
looked a little shocked having to communicate without blood
dripping from his mouth.

Finally she nodded at him
and he nodded back, consenting to something that neither Wyn nor
myself could hear.

The Red Man stood up and
stepped out of his coffin. He walked passed me, glancing into my
eyes as he went. He seemed to know me somehow.

He stepped before Wyn and
looked at him. The Red Man towered over the Blood Vivicanti, his
genetically mutated child.

Wyn met his
eyes.

It was like watching two
silverbacks sniff each other.

There was an explosion. The
mansion shook.

Wyn looked at us. “Lowen,”
he said.

I didn’t know how Lowen had
gotten to us that quickly, but I knew that Wyn was right: Lowen was
there because the mansion was suddenly filled with Theo’s scent,
along with the stench of a thousand Sleeper Devils, all filling the
mansion too, packing themselves tightly inside.

They were coming up the
stairs. They would find us in minutes.

“
We can take them,” I said
to Wyn.

But he shook his head. “Ms.
Crystobal and I will handle them,” he said to me. “You get the Red
Man as far from Lowen as possible.”

The Red Man then touched
his spacecraft. A hatch opened along the ship’s glossy
surface.

I hoped our first stop
might be to the Orion Nebula.

Ms. Crystobal looked at the
Red Man and spoke with him telepathically. He nodded, she went
inside, and he followed her. Wyn gestured for me to follow them
both.

Inside, the spaceship was
impressive. Everything looked white and cool and smooth and
neat.

Ms. Crystobal and the Red
Man went to the cockpit. It was made of curves and lights. She was
entering a command into the illuminated controls.

“
Wyn and I need you to
escape with the Red Man while we deal with Lowen and his Sleeper
Devils,” she replied. “I’ve reprogrammed the automatic pilot.
You’ve got a new destination now. It was set to return to Khariton.
But we can’t have you going back there.”

My heart was
crushed.

I studied the controls.
They were written in a language that I could not
understand.