Possession

TWENTY-ONE

I cut through the doorway as low as I could and turned sharply, heading for where I’d seen the two stable energy shapes. They had to be Quinton and his father. Carlos flew past me, heading for the strangely surging energy I’d observed in the Grey—by his interest, I guessed that was Inman. I had no worries for Carlos.

Purlis was standing between a dentist’s chair and a sort of workbench with what looked like an old-fashioned ham radio sitting on it—lots of dials, lights, meters, and switches—the only thing missing was the microphone and speaker. He had his back to me so he could face the chair. Quinton was in the chair, held fast with an arrangement of straps that looked distinctly unsavory.

Purlis was already turning toward the sound of my running footsteps, reaching for a gun that lay on the workbench. Quinton looked startled and relieved to see me, but he didn’t say anything, biting his lip as a dozen clashing colors flashed through his aura and sent sparks into the Grey. I heard something humming, buzzing in my chest and ears, and I wasn’t sure if it was real, or Grey, or just the racket of my own pulse.

I wasn’t as close as I wanted to be, but I slid to a halt just before Purlis completed his turn and I squeezed the cocking lever on the HK so it made its distinctive clacking sound. “Drop the gun,” I said. I wasn’t sure if my voice was shaking or if it was just the shuddering of my blood in my ears.

Purlis stiffened, probably wondering if he was a faster, more accurate shot than I was. I adjusted my aim a little to the side and down and shot the big metal box of electronics. It made a howling sound as it collapsed in a smoking pile on the bench. Dark liquid ran out of the box and dribbled to the floor.

In the large concrete room, the concussion rang like a bell and my ears throbbed. I hoped I didn’t have to fire again—I would have hated to be more deaf than I was at that second—but I remained steady, returning my aim to the center of Purlis’s chest as he faced me. “Now,” I said.

He knew the shot would have temporarily messed up my ears, but he was in the same condition. Only Carlos and Inman could have ignored the shattering sound in this enclosed space. But I was already in position and Purlis wasn’t. I truly wanted to shoot him and from the look on his face, he knew it. He opened his hands and let the gun fall onto the workbench—I could barely hear the clatter. He was betting I wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man in cold blood, which was frustratingly true.

I was dimly aware that the howling from the box hadn’t ceased and I wondered where Carlos and Inman were, but I didn’t dare look around and give Purlis an opening to move on me. “Walk toward me, Dad,” I told him. “Slowly. Hands where I can see them.”

He took a step, letting one hand fall a little and turning his head toward the other, attempting to misdirect my attention.

“Don’t be a jackass,” I warned him.

“A bigger jackass,” Quinton muttered.

Nettled, Purlis shot a glance over his shoulder at him. “J.J. . . .”

Quinton’s face lost all expression. “Shut. Up.”

A black blur sped across the room from my left and struck Purlis’s chest, knocking him sideways and into the wall on my right with a crunching sound. Purlis shouted as he disappeared from my field of view.

Carlos seemed to just appear a few feet from Quinton, glaring toward the place where Purlis had fallen. “Stop,” he said, his voice shivering with command.

The thing that had hit Purlis rose and stood still. I couldn’t say I recognized the face, since I hadn’t really seen him when he’d attacked me in Post Alley, but I assumed it was Inman. The demi-vampire was bone-thin, wearing only a pair of black sweatpants that barely stayed on his skeletal hips. His hair was an unnatural dull slate color. He quivered as he watched Purlis with hunger and fury in his eyes.

“Stand up, Mr. Purlis,” Carlos said.

For a moment, Purlis resisted, glaring defiantly at him, but either he was smarter than he seemed or Carlos was pushing him magically, and he got to his feet. Inman shook and made a chattering noise with his teeth, staring at Purlis. I figured the vampires had that situation in hand, so I dashed to the chair and set Quinton loose.

As he stood up, Quinton put his arms around my waist a bit unsteadily and kissed my left cheek. I appreciated his not obstructing my view—or line of fire—to his father. He whispered into my ear, “Thanks, sweetheart. I’d be pissed you came down here if I wasn’t so damned relieved to see you.”

“You can berate me later.”

I glanced around the room, hoping I hadn’t overlooked something I was going to regret soon, but aside from a lot of bizarre equipment, there wasn’t much to be seen but a few tables with tools and parts and one with a laptop computer sitting on it. There was a bundle of cables from the wall to the wrecked box and another set of cables from that to a gurney contraption in the middle of the room. I assumed that was where Inman had been until Carlos had freed him. It looked as if the table could be swapped for the chair Quinton had been in. I didn’t like the implication of that.

The howling from the broken box had finally ceased and though my hearing was still a bit dulled, I could make out Inman’s chattering. I pivoted to look at the rest of the group, turning my back on the wretched gurney and the workbench.

Carlos had placed one hand on Inman’s chest, but he was looking at Purlis, who was giving back a poisonous glare.

“You seem to have some difficulty with the rights of others,” Carlos said, unfazed.

“Your kind don’t have any rights,” Purlis hissed back. “You’re not humans. You’re monsters.”

“I was thinking more in terms of property rights. Inman is mine. You took something of mine from me. What should I take from you . . . ?” His gaze roved over the general vicinity, but settled back on Purlis in a moment. “Ah,” he murmured, poking Purlis in the chest and then crooking his finger.

Purlis made a choking sound and rose up on his toes as Carlos pulled his hand slowly back. I could see a thin yellow filament of energy drawing out of the man’s chest.

“Carlos, no,” I said.

He snarled, then rolled his eyes and looked back at me. Our gazes met and for a moment I felt the pressure of his anger and his desire for revenge burning like acid. I didn’t back down, but kept my stare on him, disapproving and adamant. He uncrooked his hand.

Inman made a sudden lunge at Purlis while Carlos and I were distracted. Purlis dodged and ducked, snatching something off the floor and ramming it into Inman’s chest. The dhampir fell backward, making a gagging, gurgling sound, his hands scrabbling at the steel rod protruding front and back from his ribs.

Carlos dropped to Inman’s side while Quinton and I both spun and jumped to pursue Purlis. Purlis, crouched, was running for the door. I went for my gun. Quinton grabbed the bundle of cables and hauled back on it.

The cables sprang off the floor and snapped taut across Purlis’s shins. He went down hard on his face and I heard his skull hit the concrete. His energy corona dimmed and he slumped against the floor, stunned or unconscious—I wasn’t quite sure which—but certainly not dead. Quinton picked up his father’s gun from the workbench and went to check on him while I moved toward Carlos and Inman.

I could hear Inman’s wet, gargling cough even though I couldn’t see him through Carlos. Demi-vampires aren’t as dead as the real thing, so he still needed to breathe, but the rod through his chest wasn’t making that easy. I stepped around to where I could see and—if needed—lend a hand. Carlos brushed me aside and put both his hands flat on Inman’s damaged rib cage, muttering. The slow blood that welled up around the steel rod crawled across Inman’s skin and disappeared under Carlos’s hands, but the dhampir didn’t seem to be recovering.

“The box . . . box,” Inman gurgled. “Feeding . . . Limos.”

Carlos seemed shaken and he stopped short in what he was doing, shooting me a glance. Inman’s energy corona began fading faster the moment Carlos’s attention wavered. The vampire pressed his hands back to the dhampir’s chest.

Inman coughed red foam. “The kostní . . . mágové . . . move south . . . the bone . . . churches . . .” He put his own blood-coated hands over Carlos’s and raised his eyes, going silent, staring at his master while more blood oozed out of him.

Carlos was stricken, a pain-filled expression flitting across his face and then vanishing again. “He’s been wasted. I can’t—I need more blood.” He looked at me and the glance had none of the arrogance or command I expected of him.

It startled me, but I had to shake my head. “I can’t. You know I can’t.”

His gaze darted toward Quinton and his father.

“No,” I said, softly but without equivocation.

“Purlis,” he suggested in desperation.

I shook my head firmly. “No. If you do that he’ll always have a blood tie to Inman. You and Cameron can’t risk it.”

It was a moot point anyway: Inman was dead. Forever.

Carlos let his shoulders fall. He closed his eyes, head down over Inman’s body. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he was praying, but I suspected it was something else. I could barely see a thin stream of energy rising from Inman and wafting toward Carlos’s downturned face like smoke that the surviving vampire breathed in. It almost seemed he was somehow absorbing Inman’s spirit—if a dhampir has a spirit.

Whatever thing, whatever knowledge it was that he received as Inman passed out of the world, it made Carlos furious. He came back up to his feet in a rage, roaring and rushing across the room toward Quinton and Purlis.

Quinton spun on the balls of his feet, still crouching, braced, and raised the gun. “No! If anyone’s going to kill this stupid bastard, it’ll be me. You back the hell off, Carlos.” I had never seen him look so cold-blooded.

“You don’t understand, boy!” Carlos shouted, but he didn’t advance any farther. “This paltry man brought the hunger that threatens your home—Limos will devour whatever comes into her path and he placed thousands in her reach, which will only expand to hundreds of thousands, to millions. To bring her here, he planted seeds among the dead places of Europe and what he planted is bearing fruit. He brought starvation, disease, and death!”

“I know that!” Quinton spat back. “You think this little experiment tonight was the first one I’ve seen? My father believes that what he’s doing is right—no matter the cost. He believes the United States ought to rule the world—he believes in a global hegemony with America on top and everyone else under our heel. And he thinks he can make it happen by letting the monsters loose—his carefully tailored monsters, first here, then in Europe. He does not care who gets killed or what gets destroyed along the way because he believes in what he’s doing. Oh, I do understand.”

I felt like I was watching a play and had missed part of the first act. I wasn’t quite sure where Carlos had picked up the information he’d thrown out so angrily—from Inman somehow?—because he hadn’t seemed to know it when we were wrestling with Limos and Hazzard in the CalAska Pub’s back room. And I had known that Purlis believed the end justifies the means, but I hadn’t imagined his end to be quite so grandiose. I didn’t like being out of this loop.

Quinton and Carlos glared at each other for a moment until Carlos calmed down, but his calm was more frightening than his ire. “No. There is much more to it. What he has unwittingly set in motion will start in Europe, but it will spread. Fanatics who worship the bones . . . I have no time to teach you history!” he snapped. “He brought Limos here and he intended to take her back to Europe well fed after he had caused enough havoc. No doubt he thought a sudden plague of starvation and disease would make a case for whatever expansion of his project he’s proposed to whoever holds his purse strings—call it some kind of bioterrorism out of the unstable parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East and your government leaps to throw money on the fire. But your father can’t have known who he was dealing with—he no doubt thought this cabal who told him of the shrine was nothing more than a pack of mad old men who guarded relics of power they didn’t understand or dare to use. But they are far from toothless and their age is not infirmity. With power handed to them by Purlis himself, they would starve and burn Europe to scorched earth.”

“Who are these men and how do you know this?” I asked.

“The kostní mágové—bone mages. I know them of old, in Portugal, when I still breathed. They are not the doddering fools dreaming of myths and magic that they appear to be now. They are ancient and steeped in darkness—I know what they are capable of. They had been stopped, bottled up and made impotent, but they will rise—are rising—because of what Purlis has already done.”

I shook my head slightly. “I meant, how do you know what’s happening, what Purlis is planning?”

Carlos pressed his hand to his forehead as if he were in pain. “Inman. He showed me what he had plucked from Purlis’s mind. What he knew, I know. That is why I wished him back in my hands. Inman’s talent remained intact as he moved toward death—it is exceedingly rare. But it was also his weakness through which Purlis took him from me. Only when passing did he return to my mind. Now he is truly dead. And a fire that should have been ashes in Europe long ago is smoldering back to life. Because of him,” he said, pointing at Quinton’s father.

Carlos lunged toward Purlis again and it took both Quinton and me together to push him back. He wasn’t trying too hard or we wouldn’t have succeeded; I wasn’t sure why he’d made such a feeble attempt when he could have easily bowled us over.

The commotion had roused Quinton’s father and he struggled to his knees while we were busy shoving Carlos away.

Chest heaving, I stood close to the suddenly quiescent Carlos and Purlis, keeping both in my sight, but ready to jump back between them. “We’ll take care of Limos,” I told Carlos. “Here. Soon.”

“It will not be enough,” Carlos said in a low growl, watching over my shoulder.

Purlis scrambled to his feet and started running for the door.

“I’ll take care of my father,” Quinton said, turning, raising the gun. . . .

I don’t know if he would have killed him—he looked cold enough and set upon it—but I didn’t give him the chance. I swung at Quinton, knocking the gun barrel downward.

Not my best move: The bullet ricocheted and skipped off the floor, tearing through the back of Purlis’s leg near the knee. It could just as well have gone through something fatal—or through someone more important.

Purlis crashed to the floor again, writhing and trying to crawl away. Quinton shook me off with a glare and darted toward him. Carlos started after them both but I grabbed him, anchoring myself down to the grid as hard and fast as I could, pulling the vampire with me toward the earth, toward the flow and rage of magic.

Carlos struggled a little and I thought I’d lose him, feeling my own energy draining quickly. Then he gave up and stepped away, turning his back. “Let him die, then.” The voice was as much in my head as spoken.

I pulled myself back up from the Grey and glanced toward the door. Quinton was kneeling beside his father and I could hear the conversation between them as bowing and plucking on the strings of the Grey, because my natural hearing was nothing but buzz and whine.

“You shot me.”

“I missed. I was aiming for your head.”

“I’m your father. You owe me your existence, if not your loyalty.”

“I gave you that. You pissed on it. I’m not giving you anything else. Except your life. For now.”

Quinton ripped strips off his father’s shirt and wrapped one above the gushing wound in Purlis’s left leg. He picked something up off the floor and used it as a stick to tighten the tourniquet, which he tied down with another strip of the shirt.

Quinton glared down at him. “There. Now we’re even.”

“You wouldn’t leave me here. . . .”

Quinton gave him a hard stare. “What else should I do with you? I can’t imprison you—though I wish I could, for humanity’s sake, I have no way to do it and it wouldn’t do any good to turn you over to the police when there’s no charge that will ever stick to you. And I’m not going to kill you and bring the wrath of your agency down on my head. No, you get to stay here until someone comes to find you and I can get well ahead.”

“If you leave me here alone, I could die.”

Quinton scoffed at the weak bid for sympathy. “You wouldn’t die. Your underlings will come back soon enough to find you and save your rotten life. I’ll even raise your odds. I’ll carry you to the stairs. Which is more than you deserve or would have done for me.”

“Son—”

Quinton stood up and away from him. “Call me that one more time and I’ll kick you so hard, they’ll have to look for your head in Japan. You gave up the right to call me your son. You almost fed me to that thing in the box—Limos or whatever it’s called. You believe you’re a patriot and the end justifies the means. Well, justify this: I’ll see you in Europe, where you won’t be threatening my friends, or I’ll see you in hell. You choose.”

Whatever he saw in his father’s eyes convinced him of something and he stooped, picked the older man up, and carried him out of sight.

I turned back to look at Carlos, who had gone so still and quiet I was afraid he’d slipped away.

“We will find Limos,” he said. “Her shrine must be here. . . .”

“My head’s still reeling. How can she be here if she was with us earlier? And you said she’s a goddess of hunger, but a few minutes ago you said something about disease . . . ?”

“She is the goddess of famine. She brings the blight, the failure of crops, the drought, hunger everlasting. Death by starvation. Purlis brought her with him from Europe—I don’t know where he found her—and he meant to take her back when he was done here. Somewhere among all these effects is her container, her shrine. She rides Hazzard, uses her ghost to her own ends. To Purlis’s ends as long as they coincide.”

I closed my eyes, thinking, remembering. . . . “Pandora’s Box.”

I opened my eyes, sure now. Carlos quirked an eyebrow at me, but said nothing.

“Quinton told me about it. He called it ‘Pandora’s Box’—something Purlis brought here from Europe. When Quinton found it, it had dirt from the tunnel project on it, which is how I connected it to the ghosts and the PVS patients. Remember Quinton said, ‘You tried to feed me to that thing in the box’? He meant Limos’s shrine. Well, I’ll bet that’s what’s at the end of these cables.”

We looked around the room we were in first, carefully skirting Inman’s remains. I tried to follow the cables, but they ended in a coupling at the wall. Carlos followed me out and around to the previous chamber where we’d seen the body of the blue-green creature.

The box of skin and bone was still there, on its own table, surrounded by the glimmer of lives swallowed up in its folding doors. The cable ran to a plate—some kind of resonance emitter, I thought—on which the box stood. I slid the panels open and looked at the miniature shrine within and the glittering wreck of tiny figures, carved in bone and decorated with delicate gems and gold leaf, now all tossed about by the glut of suffering that had been pumped into the box through the device I’d shot in the other room.

“What do we do with it now?” I asked.

“We must entrap Limos in it and then destroy it. Otherwise she will be unbound, and while that will reduce her power, she still holds Hazzard and the tribute of souls. She would have no reason to stop her plans to ruin the Wheel, and every reason to go forward at once.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. How are we going to catch her?”

Carlos looked amused. “I suggest we lure her to us once again through the offices of your friend Mr. Stymak.”

“Why can’t you do it?”

“This will be much more complicated than our little chat with Hazzard and her mistress. You and I must be free to act, so others will have to occupy the séance circle. We’ll need a circle of protection for them while you and I remain outside it to capture Limos and Hazzard.”

“So . . . we need sitters—at this time unknown—to be bait for Hazzard and Limos and we need a medium who doesn’t want to be associated with this for a séance we aren’t actually going to be part of. Oh, that’s going to be a piece of cake,” I added in a sarcastic tone.

Carlos laughed—damn him. “I’ll leave the arrangements to you on that score.”