Nocturnal (episode n. 1) (7 page)

Reaching the headquarters was unthinkable, they had to find a nearby place to stop to, and stay there until the weather improved. If it was ever going to.

«Down there!» Amanda shouted again, trying to show him something he couldn't see at first. Then he noticed. At their right there was a place in which clouds seemed to be thinner, as if there was an area the hurricane wasn't hitting.

He immediately steered in that direction, hoping it was really the case and that they could be able to be there before the protection of the carpet was completely broken.

When they got there, it was like breaking a barrier between two different worlds. The carpet poked out of the storm in a zone that seemingly had been left untouched by it, not even brushed by the wind.

There they would have been safe, if they hadn't been a second too late.

The magic of the carpet gave way completely, and a sudden burst of wind grabbed it and threw it away, towards the safety they were looking for, but not the way they wanted to go there.

Shim did his best to stay in control, and almost succeeded, but it wasn't enough. The carpet crashed to the ground, making Amanda roll away and sending the dwarf headfirst against a tree.

She was the first to get up. She was confused and hurting, she probably had bruises in places she hadn't even known the sheer existence of so far, but she was alive.

She look around, searching for Shim, and in doing that she finally realized where she was: in front of the university.

Then she saw the dwarf, collapsed against the trunk of one of the trees lining the courtyard. She rushed to check if he was fine. He was unconscious and had a vicious cut on his forehead – the collision must have been quite hard to do such damage to his hard skull – but at least he was breathing. There wasn't much she could do for him but pulling him to a covered place before wind and rain got there as well. Neither she had a lot to say about the place to choose: the university seemed to be the only building the hurricane wasn't hitting. The actual problem was how to get in, but that she would worry about once she was there.

She lifted the dwarf from his armpits, trying not to shake him too much, and started pulling, surprised by his heavy weight. She could only take a few steps before she had to surrender to the truth: she wasn't going anywhere like that.

Then her gaze fell on the carpet, heaped not too far. She hurriedly fetched it and managed to pull Shim on it, then she grabbed one edge and started pulling again. The weight wasn't changed, obviously, but this way she was able to move him more easily, so much so that she reached the stairway to the entrance. Then the carpet became useless, and she had to lift the dwarf little by little, step by step, to the archway. She got there breathless, ready to look for something with which to break a window and enter. To her big surprise, she didn't need to. The door was closed, but unlocked.

Even though she didn't understand, she wasn't going to complain. She opened it and brought in Shim, who didn't seem about to wake up. She rolled the carpet and set it under his head. Now she needed to find something to cover him. In the basement there were sheets used every now and then to cover desks and furniture. They weren't the best choice, but there was nothing else she could think of, so she headed to the stairs, opened the basement door and stood there astonished for a sight she would never have been able to foresee.

The center of the room had been almost completely emptied, and now there stood a large metal frame in which several crystals were mounted. In the middle of it, a man wearing a ceremonial tunic. He stood with his arms open and flung upward, and she could almost hear power crackling around him as he murmured barely audible and completely unintelligible words. Crystals were reacting to whatever he was doing, pulsing with a dark and regular light, like a huge heart beating in the chest of a giant. Something that looked like the before-unheard crossbreed between light and smoke was spiraling away from the frame, rising to the ceiling where it seemed to disappear.

Even though she had never seen something of the like, she didn't need anyone to suggest her what it was. After all it couldn't just be an accident that the university was right in the middle of the quiet zone.

The man seemed to be so absorbed in what he was doing that he was unaware of her presence. Amanda stood for a while, uncertain about what to do. She had no idea of what could happen if she interrupted the magician, but she didn't think things could be any worse than they already were.

She unsheathed her wand, that she had managed not to lose this time. It was very much alike the ones carried along by police officers: its bolts stunned their targets but caused no permanent damages.

She took aim and was about to shoot when a sensual voice whispered «Don't.»

CHAPTER 8

Amanda turned. There seemed to be a whole world trapped someway in that simple word. In her whole life, she didn't think she'd ever heard a voice like that... and actually she still wasn't hearing it, because it didn't reach her ears, she perceived it at a much deeper level. It wasn't even like telepathy, it was something completely different, just as if, in some way, although she hadn't heard anything, she just knew what had been said, and with such a clarity that no form of communication she knew could convey.

Not far from her stood a woman she'd never seen before. She was tall, slim, full of a grace no simple mortal could possess. Long blond hair framed her face and body, embracing her in soft spires which seemed to flow around her as if they had a life of their own. Her features expressed a sensuality that was out of that world. Her long and dark eyelashes surrounded eyes that seemed to have all existing colors and no color at all at the same time. Her lips where soft and full, slightly parted in a smile showing white and perfect teeth. A dark violet dress covered her body from the lower part of her full and well proportioned breast to the ankles, fitting perfectly her exquisitely carved hips and barely brushing her delicate feet, wearing simple heelless sandals.

«Who are you?» Amanda asked. She had wanted to say something wittier, and she would have if she hadn't been startled by the presence of that woman more than by that of the magician.

«Let go of the wand», she answered, barely moving her lips. She mustn't really need to, as she wasn't making any sound. It almost looked like she did that to be more believable.

For a second Amanda strongly felt the desire to humor her, just for a second. Instead she aimed the wand at her and let go a bolt with a simple act of will.

A light-blue lightning left the tip of the metal cylinder and hit its target, apparently with no effect of any sort.

«Let it go, you don't need it», the woman reiterated, disregarding the fact that she had just been hit, as she moved a few steps in her direction. «Trust me.»

As she approached, her features started to change. It wasn't a gradual transition: in-between one step the woman was replaced by a man. He had short, black hair and was wearing black trousers as fitting as a second skin, matching soft boots and a shirt halfway between blue and dark green, unbuttoned on his slightly bronze chest. The only things he had in common with the woman where the indescribable eyes and the charm they both radiated. But it was none of this that hit Amanda like a tidal wave, it was a weird déjà-vu feel that swept over her suddenly. She knew that man, she'd seen it before. At the station, briefly, the evening of the day Parker had been killed... even though that wasn't the first time. Meaningless images clustered her mind, untouchable sensations like the ones sometimes felt in... dreams! She had dreamed of him!

Like threads of water opening their way through a dam, spare memories surfaced in her mind. She was remembering dreams she had canceled even before waking up, which had tormented each of her nights of the last days. Dreams that should have been pleasant but actually were... dirty... rotten.

That's what Vivienne had tried to tell her in her twisted way... Marsten had been so fool as to summon an incubus... a being that hadn't walked the world for centuries. That explained a lot of things, other than saying that that magician had a great power and an even greater idiocy.

Amanda was almost sure he had summoned the incubus – or, better, the succubus, as that's what it had to be, although they were but two sides of the same coin – thinking he could use her as a sex slave with no consequences. In truth she had fed on it until he was dead. Because that was what incubi did, they eat humans almost like vampires, just in a slightly less detectable way, not stealing their blood but draining their life force during sex. Surely way more pleasant than a bite on the neck, but not less lethal.

That his lust had brought him death was almost pitiful. That the being had been able to take from his mind, most likely in dreams, the information about Weather Control that had supposedly been removed from his memories was almost a tragedy. It shouldn't have been difficult then to reach the weather station in which Marsten had worked and find the controller who had replaced him, seduce him and earn his love, as blind as delusional. How she had been able to find out the names of other controllers and enchant them one after another, finally reaching the one in charge, the magician she had brought at the university, was not clear at all, but some way she had. Amanda didn't know those beings enough to be sure of the powers they could command.

Meanwhile, she had found her... she had fed on her, trough her dreams. That explained her tiredness, her inability to rest. Evidently her nature, not entirely human, allowed her to resist, to avoid being drained completely like the summoner had been... and it allowed him... that being... to keep strong as he was carrying on his plan.

The rest was easy to understand. The incubus had had to find a place in which to build a facsimile of the control frame used by the head controller to gather the power. He couldn't use the real one, because he couldn't get in, no matter what his powers were, and he had to stay close to his victim to be sure he did what he wanted. Seducing someone and stealing his endless loyalty didn't include the ability to order him around from a distance, how sad!

How he had been able to build one, and what had been Parker's role in all that, were questions most likely doomed to be unanswered. Did Parker found out anything and got killed for that? Or was he implied in all this? For sure he would have been able to put together that frame, having the proper information. Maybe he had been killed to eliminate an uncomfortable witness. Or maybe he had changed his mind and tried to get out. Was that the meaning of the fable book in his study? A hint left there for someone who could understand it, just in case things got for the worst?

The light touch of the creature's fingers on the skin of her face startled her. When had it gotten so close?

«Let go», it said. «You know me. You know what I can do.»

Did her? Maybe. She'd rather not ask herself. Its voice, or whatever it passed for a voice, was warm and sensual, wrapping her like a blanket in a cold winter night. She could embrace it and let herself go into its warmth, accept it and be lost in it. She could, but she wasn't going to. It didn't matter what had happened in the dreams she still didn't remember clearly, things were different when she was awake. There was only one thing she had inherited from her mother, and she had never been as happy about that. Seduction charms didn't work on her, maybe because she came from one herself.

Her mother – she had seen her only once in her life, and in spite of the outcome of that meeting she still couldn't think about her in any other way – was part of the ancient and devious fairy people. A people with no males. To reproduce, fairies didn't have much choice, and their best method was embracing simple humans, too weak-blooded to pollute their own lineage. Sometimes that happened on mutual consent. More often, as in her case, a fairy had a short-lived crush for a human male and ensnared him with her arts to obtain what she wanted. In both cases, those unions wouldn't last long, and almost often gave birth to a new life. And when a fairy gave birth that way, only two things could happen. Usually she bore a fairy, a female of course. Rarely a male was born, completely human, which was left with his male parent with no remorse or regret. Amanda was the third chance. The impossible one.

«Don't touch me!» she roared, in fury, as she pushed the incubus away, placing her hands against its chest. Caught off-guard, the creature fell backwards, and she seized the moment to point her wand and hit it again, and again, and again. She hoped that, even though her first bolt had proved completely useless, a barrage could at least succeed in dazzling it. It wiped away her hopes with a smile.

«It could have been pleasurable», it said, a slight sarcasm in its no-voice. «You made your choice.»

Its body seemed to melt, as if it was suddenly becoming liquid. The wave that started moving towards her, tough, wasn't liquid at all, but crawling, made up by an apparently endless number of spiders.

Did incubi have such powers? As far as she could remember, they shouldn't. Their ability to change their features was supposed to be fairly limited. Shapechanging wasn't one of their gifts, and splitting into more creatures should have been completely out of the equation.

What she was seeing had to be some kind of illusion. She did her best to convince herself of that, to no good. Real or illusionary, spiders scared her to death. Was it the way it had killed Parker, having him face his deepest fears? She didn't know, and right then she didn't want to, she just wanted to be elsewhere.

Although she knew it was useless, she hit several times with her wand the river of arachnids moving towards her, until nothing more happened and she realized she was out of charges.

The spiders started to climb her shoes, going up her legs in spite of her frantic attempts to sweep them away. In a moment she was completely covered by a pulsating dark mass, unable even to scream, for fear that the creatures could crawl into her mouth.