Imperium (Caulborn) (8 page)

Especially me.

Chapter 7

Begin Coded Transmission
Details of what transpired during Corinthos’ crossover to the Bright Side are sparse, but from other interrogated fae we have learned that Corinthos’ psychic powers were amplified. This was illustrated when he single-handedly threw back a wave of hobgoblin soldiers that were attacking an Urisk farming detail. The Urisk who witnessed this were in awe of the Godling, and it is believed they were among the first to evangelize him to the other Urisk, proclaiming his heroic deeds.
-NS
End Coded Transmission

I was trapped in a demonic forge. The cavernous room’s only light came from the hellish red light of the forge’s flames, which easily reached the ceiling. The blacksmith, a crimson-skinned fiend with fangs as long as my index finger, pounded on an anvil with a hammer the size of a toaster oven. The blacksmith saw me and snarled, hurling the sword he’d been forging at me. I tried to turn, but it was like I was stuck in a vat of molasses. The world barely moved as I willed my body to run.

About halfway to me, the sword turned into a man whose eyes gleamed like glass. He stretched his arms out and chains burst from his hands. The chains ensnared me, dug into my skin, wrapped around my neck. I tried to raise my arms to break free, tried to summon the Urisk’s faith, but my body and my powers refused to respond. The man slammed into me, drove me to the ground. A blade appeared where his hand should have been and he drove it at my throat.

I came awake with a start and almost fired off a real telekinetic blast in response to the dream. I caught myself just in time. The last time that happened, we had to replace the bedroom door. I rubbed my eyes and tried to shake off the unease of the nightmare. I glanced at the clock. It was just after six in the morning. Might as well get up.

I started my morning out as I always do, by answering my follower’s prayers. I opened my mind to them, and their voices flooded into my mind. Many of them were just speaking their daily litanies, part of a routine that Lotholio and the other priests had instilled into them. Some of them asked for health or strength, and these I granted. With each prayer that I heard, my faith reserves refilled a bit more.

Twenty minutes later, I stood up and gave a satisfied stretch. When I was fully charged with the Urisk’s faith I felt like I could take on the world. So hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work I go.

When I got to HQ, I walked down the hall and saw that the lights were on in Megan’s office. I stuck my head in and found her in front of a whiteboard, a pad of paper in one hand and a marker in the other. In pristine handwriting, she’d written out the names of the missing and what we knew of them so far. The board was color-coded, with notes about the missing appearing in green, questions in blue, and miscellaneous bits of information in brown.

“Oh, hi, Vincent,” she said when she noticed me. “I copied these from Miguel’s whiteboard.” She held up the pad and gestured to her own board. “I’ve been going over this for the last hour, but I’m not having much luck.” We spoke for a few minutes while we reviewed what we knew so far. We took another look at the tapes we’d recovered from Mikey’s apartment, but even with the enhanced footage, courtesy of Gearstripper, we couldn’t see much. After about forty-five minutes of rewinding and replaying, it was obvious we weren’t going to solve anything.

“Up for a road trip?” she asked.

“Where to?”

“The Delions had a cottage in Dublin, New Hampshire.” She tapped a map printout. “From what the Caulborn files say about the Delions, Justine would take her son there when the moon was full. The last full moon coincides with the time they disappeared.”

I glanced at my watch. It was just after nine. Traffic shouldn’t be too bad heading north. “Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Let’s go.”

During the drive, Megan peppered me with more questions about the Caulborn’s activities in the New England area. She’d done a lot of research on her own, and I was impressed with how sharp her memory was. After driving for a little over two hours, we arrived at our destination. The Delion house was a small, two bedroom cape, located just off of Route 101. The yard was heavily wooded, and the nearest neighbor’s house was over half a mile away.

“Wow,” Megan said as she stared at the red and gold leaves on the trees. “It’s so pretty.”

“Yeah,” I said as I looked around. “Not many people around, middle of nowhere, yep, this is a great place for a werewolf to hang out.”

There was an aging green Hyundai in the driveway. Judging by the amount of leaves that had built up by its windshield wipers, the car hadn’t been driven in some time. We did a quick loop around the house; everything seemed normal. We went to the front door and rang the bell. I rang it again when no one answered after a minute. Another minute later, Megan looked at me.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to answer,” she said. I glanced away for a moment, and when I looked back, Megan had a slim leather case in her hand. She removed a thin metal tool from the case and crouched down in front of the doorknob.

“Lockpicks?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

Megan looked up at me. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just wasn’t expecting you to be geared for B&E.”

“I love B&E,” she said, her dimple blooming as she turned her attention to the lock. “Seventy percent of my time was spent in negotiations. That other thirty, though, that was when we’d have to break into some delegate’s quarters and retrieve information or equipment. So B&E was practically a requirement for what I did.”

Megan gently raked the lock and her dimple deepened when the tension key turned. The lock clicked and she swung the door open. “I’ll go first,” she said as she ducked inside. She already had her 9mm out. I hadn’t even seen her draw it, nor had I seen her put the pick set away. Dang, the girl had fast hands. We moved through the small kitchen. Everything was neat and tidy here. The kitchen gave way to a living room, and this was where all hell had broken loose. A large, recessed skylight in the ceiling was completely shattered, and fragments of glass and smears of blood were everywhere. Leaves and small tree branches were scattered among the furniture, blown in from the outside.

“Holy cow,” Megan whispered. “What happened here?”

“Looks like the Delions were taken by force, and they didn’t go without a fight.” There were splatters of silver liquid on the floor, as well.

“Something attacked them with silver?” Megan asked, gesturing to the splatters.

“I don’t think this is silver,” I said. “Molten silver would’ve burned marks onto the furniture and rug. Do you have an evidence kit in your car?” She nodded and ducked out to grab it. When she came back, I scraped up some of the silver onto a piece of paper and dropped it into a small plastic vial. We paced around the room, Megan taking pictures. I hadn’t seen her pull the camera out either. Where was she keeping all this gear?

“What do you make of these?” Megan asked, gesturing to a strand of vines on the floor as thick as my wrist. I knelt down next to it, and as I did, my Glimpse kicked on. I saw a slender reed of a man snapping his hands out in front of him. Vines burst forth from his arms, entangling a beast on the other side of the room. The beast, a wolf almost as tall as me, roared in rage and struggled for a moment before slumping to the ground. The vine man effortlessly hoisted the wolf over his shoulder and extended his arm toward the skylight. Vines shot up, and they went up and out of the house. The Glimpse faded.

“You all right?” Megan asked.

I shook myself. “Sorry.” I relayed the Glimpse to Megan.

She whistled. “What sort of creature can shoot vines from its hands?”

I pulled a large plastic bag from the evidence kit and carefully slid the vine inside. Doc Ryan could analyze it, along with the silver fluid. “Could be fae. Dryads do stuff like that, but it’s unlikely since it was inside the house. I’m not sure what else could do it.” We spent a few more minutes going through the house. There were more splotches of the silver fluid and a few more vine fragments, but nothing more.

We got back in the car and Megan started us home.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” she asked. I gestured for her to go ahead. “How does that Glimpse thing of yours work? Can you see anything? Is it always random? Can you pick what you want to see? Or who? Or when? Like, could you look back and see who shot JFK, or what happened to Jimmy Hoffa?”

I tried not to laugh at that last one. “Okay, I’ll try to explain as best as I can. Each Glimpse is tied to a particular person, place or object that I’m looking at. It lets me see a moment in their past that was important or especially formative. I can’t consciously control when it happens, and I can’t control how long it lasts. Sometimes, I Glimpse twenty or thirty seconds worth of time, and other times, it could be twenty or thirty minutes.”

The only time I can actually control a Glimpse is if I look back on my own life. I can choose to remember everything that happened at a particular point in time, and relive it in my mind. That’s how I got through school without ever studying; I’d just look at the pages in a book, and then Glimpse back during the tests. I kept that little secret to myself, though.

Megan nodded. “I hope you don’t mind these questions, Vincent. These are new waters for me, and I want to understand as much as I can.”

“Not at all. You’re very driven. Galahad says you could be Care Taker someday.”

Megan nodded. “That’s what I’m shooting for. I can see a world where the paranormals don’t have to hide anymore, where aliens and vampires and everything in between can co-exist. It may sound naive, but it will happen someday, and I hope I can be the one to do it.”

I wondered if Martin Buckham, the current Care Taker, ever had similar ambitions. He oversaw everything the Caulborn operatives did, and under him we definitely won more than we lost. All too often though, it seemed like our job was to stay one step ahead of the next paranormal crisis. “That’s a very ambitious goal, Megan,” I said.

“That’s why I need to be out here,” Megan said. “I need to understand as much of the community as I can, see what’s back in the dark corners, and know how those beings see us. Many of the alien races we’ve encountered see us as a primitive race with a lot of potential; they see us like children. But I can see us becoming a power in the universe. In order for that to happen, all the peoples of the earth have to be united, and I have to understand how all the pieces fit together.” She blushed and her dimple popped out. “Sorry, that probably makes me sound stupid, doesn’t it?”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s a very lofty goal, but I’ve seen enough in the last five or six years to know that anything is possible.” It would probably take Megan her entire life to get the first steps of something like that in place, but if she could, and she was able to name successors who would honor her vision, that might be possible. It would probably take hundreds of years, but I didn’t want to rain on her parade.

We got back to Boston and I headed to Medical while Megan went upstairs to speak with Galahad. Doc Ryan was making some notes on a page as I walked in. “Afternoon, Doc,” I said. “How goes the battle?”

The Doc ran a hand through his thinning white hair and gestured to the papers on his desk. “This zombie Kristin brought in has to be one of the strangest things I’ve seen from an anatomical perspective. Its organs are in the wrong places, and there are membranes stretching through tissues that I’ve never seen before. Add to that it seems to have been rotted alive by some disease I’ve never encountered before, and you’ve got yourself a case of weird shit.”

He lit a cigarette and took a puff. “You know I’ve been working with the Caulborn for almost fifty years now? It’s crazy, Vincent, absolutely crazy. In five decades I’ve treated diseases that cause vampirism and lycanthropy, I’ve healed wounds that were infected by black magic, I’ve de-animated zombies and cyborgs. And still, just when I think I’ve seen it all, you kids find something new.”

“Come on, Doc, you know you love it.”

He smiled at me as he let out a smoke ring. “I never said I didn’t. Just the same, sometimes it’d be nice if someone brought me something I’d already seen.” He gave a short laugh. “Just once I’d love to say, ‘oh, yeah, I know what that is.’”

I handed him the vial with the silver stuff I’d scraped up. “Well, how about this?”

He took it in his aged hands, and his bushy white eyebrows rose. He swirled the liquid in its container, watching how it stuck to the sides. “At first glance, I’d have said melted silver, but that’s not right. The way it’s clumped together reminds me of a blood clot.”

“You know anything with silver blood?”

He sighed. “No, no I don’t. So I guess I’ll have to find out for you, eh?”

“You’re the best, Doc.”

He pointed at me, a thin tendril of smoke rising from his cigarette. “Damn straight. Don’t you forget that.” He slapped a label on the vial, made a quick note, and then put the vial into a rack of test tubes on his desk. Gearstripper popped out from beneath the desk.

“Okay, Doc, I just loaded a bunch more RAM into your computer. The facial reconstruction program should run much faster now.”

“Thank you, Gearstripper,” Doc said. “I can finally get that reconstruction analysis going for Kristin.” He gestured to the bag I held. “Something else?”

“Yes.” I pulled out one of the vines and laid it on the desk. “I need you to tell me what these are.”

Gears hopped up on the table. “Oh, I know what those are.”

The Doc and I looked at him. “You do?” I asked.

“Well yeah,” Gears crouched down next to the bag and stared intently at the vines. Then he looked back up at me. “Plants,” he said.

I stared at him for a moment, then he burst out into squeals of high-pitched laughter. His tiny, sharp teeth shone brightly as he laughed. “Oh, I got you good!” he squeaked. “You should see the look on your face, Vinnie! Plants!” The Doc and I couldn’t help but laugh along with him. Gears was laughing so hard he fell onto the table, holding his sides. After a moment, he calmed enough to stand back up.