Infernal Father of Mine (22 page)

"Who is this Serena?" David asked.

"If you're lucky, you'll get to meet her." He
took out a notepad. "Now, what are your names, and
type?"

"I'm Bucky," my father said. "I like long walks
in the park, and curling up next to a warm fire with a good book
and a glass of wine. I guess my type would be hopeless
romantic."

One of the mannequins stepped inside the cell
and swatted a backhand at David. My father dodged back, narrowly
avoiding the blow.

"What's the matter? Don't like
romantics?"

"Shut your trap, or I'll have a sentinel break
your jaw."

I shoved ahead of my father before he provoked
Jarvis any further. "I'm Justin Slade. This is my father David. We
were sent through an arch by the Exorcists."

Jarvis narrowed his small eyes then jotted the
information down on his notepad. "So you're the two demon spawn
that got away from Gavin and Stephan yesterday." He snorted.
"Morons."

I decided not to pile on and changed the
subject. "Did someone dreamcast this place?"

"How do you know about
dreamcasting?"

"We overheard you talking about it," I said.
"You're obviously the leader around here, so I assumed you'd know
all there is to know." I figured stroking the man's ego couldn't
hurt.

Jarvis nodded. "You're right I'm in charge and
answer only to Serena. If you know what's good for you, you'll do
as I say."

"I understand," I said. "Did you dreamcast this
fortress? It's amazing."

A smug look came over his face. "No, but I
designed it myself. The superstructure is constructed of granite
brought in from the real world. Some parts of this place are
dreamcasted while others are real." He patted the gray wall. "The
trick is, only me and a few others know which parts are real, and
which are dreamcasted."

"I'll bet you came up with the sentinels too,"
I said, looking the one in the cell up and down. "They scare the
hell out of me."

"All mine," he replied, looking even more
pleased with himself. "Not only are they physically perfect, but
the built-in fear factor adds a psychological edge."

"Absolutely." I looked at the sentinel with
fear in my eyes.

He crossed his arms and bared his teeth. "I run
a tight ship here, just the way Serena likes it."

"You certainly caught us fast," I
said.

"Look, I didn't mean any disrespect," David
said, expression contrite. "It's good to find a man who knows how
to survive in the Gloom."

Jarvis relaxed perceptibly. "We ain't got much
use for demon spawn, but then again, neither do the Exorcists." He
burst into rough laughter. "We could always use more help with
manual labor. If you behave yourselves, I'll make sure Serena don't
work you too hard."

Apparently, Jarvis didn't realize Daelissa had
sent us through. The angel had mentioned Serena at the time, so
perhaps she was the only one who knew what horrors lay in store for
us here.

Jarvis continued to brag about how important he
was before assuring us he was the only hope we had for living a
comfortable life. "We'll make good use of you. How nasty the work
is will depend on how well you obey me." Jarvis looked at the
sentinel. It turned and left the cell. "And if you really piss me
off, I can always throw you in the pit." The door slid shut with a
dull thud.

David held a finger to his mouth. I extended my
senses and detected Jarvis just outside the door, probably
eavesdropping to hear if we were making escape plans.

"That's what a leader looks like," David said
with a wink. "We need to make sure we do everything he says,
because he's the one who can keep us safe."

"He seems really smart too," I said. "Can you
imagine how much military knowledge it takes to build a place like
this?"

Jarvis's mood switched from suspicious to
pleased. I couldn't usually read men as well as women, but the man
had a huge ego, and we'd just stoked it into a furnace. His
presence faded. My father and I exchanged knowing looks.

"Good job, son. You have a bright future as a
master manipulator."

I rolled my eyes. "Hardly my life's ambition."
I regarded the door for a moment. "How do you think he opens the
door? There's a handle, but no lock."

"I was wondering the same thing." He examined
it. "It's either dreamcasted, or uses some kind of facial
recognition spell."

I leaned against the wall and looked at the
cell. "I keep thinking back to my Elyssa clone."

"My company not good enough?" David
smiled.

I shook my head. "It's not that. I'm talking
about how I controlled her simply by thinking about it."

"I'm following."

"What would happen if I'd made my clone of
Elyssa fight Timothy's raptor? Dreamcasted beings seem impossibly
strong, so which one would win?"

"Interesting question," David said, tapping a
finger to his chin. "When you stop actively controlling a unit,
it'll just stand there and eventually deconstruct. When we attacked
Timothy, he lost control of the raptor. It seems to take a certain
amount of willpower to create and control."

"So, if two dreamcasted beings fought, it would
essentially be a contest of wills?"

"Yeah, I think so." He paused. "Your will would
have to overpower the other person's."

"If these walls are dreamcasted, I could
conceivably imagine a hole in one if I could overpower the will of
the person maintaining it."

David shrugged. "Possibly. The problem is we
don't know what's real and what's not."

"I just wonder if attempts to imagine a hole in
a dreamcasted wall would alert the person who created
it."

"It might." He ran a hand along the smooth
wall. "Maybe we should see how this plays out before we attempt
anything like that. Plus, we don't know how many of those sentinels
would come running. We might be able to overpower one person's
will, but not a team of them."

"Do you really think there's a team of people
manifesting those sentinels?"

He mulled it for a moment. "I can't see any
other way, unless they have some very gifted
individuals."

"If only I could go into a dream state more
easily." I felt the bottle of painkillers in my pocket. "Popping
more pills isn't going to cut it."

"You're already capable of meditating if you
know how to spawn to demon form or summon hellhounds at will," he
said. "Reaching inside yourself and drawing out the inner demon
takes a great deal of concentration."

"If you say so," I replied. "Maybe you could
give me a few tips."

"I'd be happy to," he said. "Doesn't look like
there's much else to do at the moment." He regarded me. "Vallaena
said you learned quickly. She even admitted you beat her in a
fight."

"She admitted that to you?" I said. "I find it
hard to imagine someone with that much pride could admit
defeat."

"Let's just say she's so proud of her
accomplishments at teaching you, it overwhelmed her usual sense of
self-importance." David chuckled. "I haven't seen that happen very
often." He sat down, and patted the floor across from
him.

I mimicked his cross-legged position. "Do I
have to hum and close my eyes?"

"Nah," he said, batting the air with a hand.
"But entering a lucid trance is a bit different than reaching for
your inner demon. You have to enter a waking dream."

"Like hallucinating?" I said.

"Exactly."

"Get me some heroin and I'll be good to
go."

His expression turned serious. "Let's keep the
quips to a minimum, or you won't learn anything."

The look on his face sobered me.
Time to
live the dream.

Our lives could depend on it.

"I want you to reach for your inner demon,"
David said.

I closed my eyes and reached inside. The
barrier between me and the other half of my soul was still there,
like a glass prison.

"I know you can't reach the demon, but I want
you to maintain this concentration for a moment," David's
disembodied voice said from outside the void.

Holding the emptiness wasn't hard. When I'd
learned to summon hellhounds, I'd had to reach through the window
of my soul to the demon plane and draw through lesser spirits which
could be conjured in the real world as the huge demon dogs, though
my first attempt had been outright embarrassing. Instead of a
monster hound, I'd spawned a pipsqueak the size of a Chihuahua.
Rather than banish him back to the demon plane, I'd kept the little
guy as a pet and named him Cutsauce. Realizing my thoughts were
running on wild tangents, I quashed them and settled back into the
darkness.

"Pretend you are weightless, floating in water.
You are numb to all outside stimulus."

The Gloom's neutral temperature made that
easier than normal. The darkness drew me deeper and deeper into
blank infinity.

My eyes flicked open. I stood on a precipice
between two rivers. The rivers bubbled and churned like lava. One
was blinding white, the other dark ultraviolet. The sliver of land
I stood on was gray.

"Oh, crap. Not this again." This was obviously
a different twist on the visions I'd had earlier. But the dreamlike
quality was absent. This felt real.
Maybe because I'm in a lucid
trance.
I took a breath and steeled myself as the weight of the
looming decision pressed down on me. If previous visions were any
indication, the choice I made here could determine the fate of the
world.

No pressure.

I wondered if this was the universe prodding me
to take matters in hand, or if some part of my consciousness knew
my efforts to stop Daelissa had hit a standstill unless I claimed
one side over the others.

Consider all
possibilities.

In the past, Daelissa and Nightliss had been
present in these visions. Now they were absent, and everything was
boiled down to the two essentials—the Brilliance, or the Murk. As a
Brightling, Daelissa represented the former. Nightliss, as a
Darkling, represented the latter. If I was choosing on
personalities alone, Nightliss's side won hands down. But the
vision of the park flashed past in my mind, and I felt a deep
certainty choosing either of those sides wasn't the right
path.

Haven't I already
chosen?

Foreseeance Forty-Three Eleven had supposedly
been fulfilled when Ivy and I hadn't tried to kill each other. Was
this still part of that prophecy, or something completely
different?

Think, Justin, think!

I regarded the two rivers for several minutes
and suddenly realized there was a third choice. Between the
darkness and the light stood the gray. A Seraphim I'd aptly
nicknamed Mr. Gray occupied that space. I'd only met him once, and
even then briefly. Supposedly, he was manipulating events to
prevent either side from winning because he wanted to maintain the
status quo.

I hesitated to call him a neutral third party
since his golems had tried to take me out of the picture on several
occasions. Even with his position as the Switzerland of the
Overworld, I wondered if choosing the gray was really a choice at
all. Pressure built in my chest, demanding I do something to make
known my affiliation.

Pushing back the desire to get this over with
quickly, I stretched my back and looked at the roiling gray sky
close overhead. I hadn't noticed it before since I'd been so intent
on jumping in the correct river. As I stared at the sky, I realized
it bubbled and frothed just like the light and dark rivers, except
it was flowing in the opposite direction.

The third side.

I thought back to the vision of the park and
remembered the gray statue of myself. All had been in order, and
nothing ever changed. It sounded just as bad as the other
alternatives. Did the gray represent balance, or something
else?

Should I choose gray, dark, or light?
I
wondered why the other colors of the rainbow didn't have a say in
this. Or was color just a meaningless detail? I looked at the
horizon in front of me. A vortex of white and ultraviolet swirled
upward from their respective rivers into the gray. Behind me, I saw
a large gray vortex spinning down and splitting into white and
dark.

One big endless cycle.

White and black came from gray. They combined
again to form gray.

Does color matter or is this simply
how my mind interprets it?

If aether really came from the dreams,
nightmares, and thoughts of people in the real world, supers and
noms alike, it meant negative and positive thoughts created the
very source of magic. Our hopes, dreams, and fears formed those
thoughts. I sucked in a breath as something of an epiphany hit me.
I had things reversed. Dreams were a byproduct of our emotions and
thoughts. Those all came from our souls. Dreams weren't the source
of aether. Magical energy originated in our
souls
.