Paradigms Lost (31 page)

CHAPTER 45

That Future is Past

Morgan opened the door, startled as I pushed past him without so much as a “hello.” “Master Jason . . . ?”

I looked around, shrugged, jogged into the living room and climbed up on a chair. Verne was in that room, staring at me curiously out of hollow eyes set in a leathery, lined face and framed by pure white hair. “J . . . Jason,” he said slowly, as I mumbled a curse to myself and dragged the chair over a bit, “what . . . are you doing?”

“Maybe making a fool of myself.”

I reached up and unscrewed one of the bulbs from the fixture and pulled the fixture itself towards me. It looked normal . . .

The other lights on the fixture went out. Morgan stood near the switch. “Perhaps, if you are intending on tinkering with the lighting, you may wish the electricity off, sir.”

“Thanks, Morgan,” I said absently. Pulling out a small screwdriver, I unfastened the interior baseplate of the fixture.

There. Underneath the base.
“Morgan, you said it. Kill the electricity—
all
the electricity in the house!
Now!
”

“Sir . . . ?” Morgan hesitated for a moment, then hurried off towards the basement and the main breakers. I switched on the flashlight; a moment later the house was plunged into darkness.

“What . . . what is going on, Jason?” Verne asked.

“I was right all along, Verne,” I said. Morgan entered; he had a much larger portable light. “Unless you bought that light in the last few days, you might even want to shut off that light. Go with candles.” I turned back to Verne. “It wasn’t magic. It was technology that was killing you. Every one of your lights—and maybe even some other devices—is fitted with a gadget that turns ordinary light into the kind of light that hurts you. My guess is it’s managing to get filaments to spike high enough temperatures to radiate UV somehow, along with everything else; cuts their lifetime down a
lot
, but they only need this to work for a few months. In the short term, it can’t damage you, but with enough exposure . . .”

“. . . yes,” Verne said slowly. “It . . . it becomes like a slow cancer, eating away at me. But even in the day, when I sleep in darkness?”

“Probably a device in your rooms does the same thing. If, as I suspect, it’s not just one wavelength of light but a combination of them, it probably can’t do enough in darkness to continue
hurting
you during the day, but it could slow your recovery so that you’d always be getting damaged more than you were healing during your rest, especially if the really critical wavelengths are combinations of ultraviolet and infrared.”

“How did you know?”

“There were a lot of clues, but the biggest one—which didn’t register until almost too late—was that the few times you were
outside
of your house, you actually started to look a tiny bit better. But when you and Sylvie couldn’t find anything, I was stumped . . . until I realized that coincidence is damn unlikely.”

We both thought for a moment. “I must confess, Jason, that I don’t quite understand,” Verne said finally. His voice was slightly steadier already, testament to the tremendous recuperative powers that were his, and I started to relax slightly. It looked like I might be right. I
knew
I was.

“Well, to kill you, someone would have to know what you are, exactly. Maybe one of your old enemies, right? Who else would know precisely how to kill you subtly, without alerting everyone you are close too? But this started just as Kafan showed up, so, to me, that’s not a coincidence.

“What if the lab that Raiakafan escaped from was being run
by the same people
who were
your
enemies, Verne?”

“Impossible,” Verne breathed. “After all this time . . .”

“But it would explain everything. And there’s evidence for it. Consider Raiakafan himself—if your enemies didn’t have a hand in this, how else? You survived all these years, they certainly could have. And another thing, one that’s bothered us both for quite a while: Klein. Where the hell did he come from? Only another vampire—of the kind made by one of your enemies—could create him. And what did he do? He
set you up
, that’s what—tried to get you killed off! Somebody knew where you were, and what you were! Somebody who knew that converting Klein would give them a weapon to trap you, and they damn near succeeded. If Virigar hadn’t shown up, I suspect there would have been another attack on your life.” I took another breath, then continued, “And look at the timing. Klein showed up sporting a new set of fangs, if my calendar’s right, a few weeks after Kafan whacked the good doctor.
They knew who Kafan really was, and they knew where he was going
.”

“Very good, Mr. Wood.”

I knew that voice. “And Ed Sommer’s business started about the same time. Funny thing, that, Ed. Digging into your background produced some fascinating blanks.”

Ed was holding a large-caliber gun—a .44, I guessed. While ordinary bullets wouldn’t hurt Verne and probably not Morgan, I suspected that he would not be using ordinary bullets. For me, of course, the point was moot; if you fired a wad of gum at the speed of a bullet it’d probably kill me. “I’ve gotta hand it to you, Mr. Wood. If we hadn’t been watching the house constantly over the past couple of days, you might have blown the whole thing. We wanted him,” he nodded at Verne, “to be unconscious before we actually moved.”

“How very convenient for you that I happened to decide on remodeling at just the right time.” Verne tried to deliver the lines in his usual measured, sure manner, but his weakening had gone far past the point where iron will could banish it.

“Convenient, but hardly necessary. Morgan, down on the floor. Once we’d tested to make sure that our precautions rendered us invisible to your casual inspection, the installation could have been made at any time. More dangerous, but no major enterprise is without risk. And after we began remodeling, the whole house was wired in more than one way. It would have been a
lot
easier if our . . . subcontract that sent Klein over had worked out, but hey, measure once, cut twice, right?” He smiled. “We learned a great deal recently. It does bother me about Kafan’s new identity. Why anyone would take that much interest in this case is a matter for concern. But not for you.” Ed shifted his aim directly to Morgan and, to my horror, began to squeeze the trigger.

Weakened and sick Verne might have been, but when it came to the life of his friend and oldest retainer all his supernal speed must have come back. There was movement, a blur that fogged the darkened air between Ed and Morgan for a split second; then Ed Sommer was hurled backwards into the front stairwell with an impact that shook the house. The gun vanished somewhere in the darkness.

The lights came back on; there must have been some of Ed’s people in the house. Caught in the light again, I could see Verne sag slightly.

From the stairwell came a curse, but it wasn’t the voice of a human being. A monstrous figure tore its way out of the wreckage, a hideous cross between man, lizard, and insect. Humanoid in form, scaled and clawed and with patches of spiked, glistening armor from which hung the tattered remains of Ed’s clothing. “A good final effort, Sh’ekatha,” the Ed-thing hissed. “But foredoomed to failure.”

While it was focused on Verne, I had time to draw my own gun. Its gaze shifted towards me just as I got a bead on it.

BlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlam!
I emptied the full ten rounds into the monstrosity. It staggered with the impact, and toppled backwards. “Run!” I shouted. Verne and Morgan were already moving. I ejected the empty magazine and slammed in a fresh one as I sprinted after them. A single glance had sufficed to show me that the bullets hadn’t done any notable damage. “Just
once
I’d like to find something I can shoot and
kill
, like any normal person!”

Verne staggered down the basement steps to be caught by something indescribable that tried to rip him apart. Morgan intervened, shoving the interloper through a nearby wall with unexpected strength. “Keep going, sir!” he said over his shoulder as he kept his attention on his adversary. Distantly, we could hear other things smashing; the rest of the household must be under attack now as well!

“Damn you, Jason!” I heard a voice roar as we pried open the door to the Heart. “This was supposed to be a subtle operation!” Massive feet thundered down the stairs behind us.

The door swung open; I shoved Verne through it and then stepped through myself, pulling the door shut as a huge shadow rushed towards us. I pulled the door shut and twisted the lock. The impact on the other side shook rock dust from the tunnel ceiling.

“It will not stop him for long, Jason,” Verne forced out.

“A little time’s better than none,” I gasped.

I’d seen the Heart a few days before, as a sort of postscript to Verne’s story. Here, things seemed quieter, like a summer forest in midafternoon; lazy, sleepy, silent. In the center of the large cavern, a perfectly circular pool of pure water shimmered in the light, blue as the vault of heaven. At the far side, a squat obelisk of black obsidian. The Mirror of the Sky and the Heartstone. Hanging on the far wall was some kind of sheath or casing.

I became aware I was gasping for breath, realizing only then that Verne hadn’t really been running; that I’d been dragging him along instead. Even here, in the place most sacred to him, he had no strength. Technology was winning the battle.

A rending, shattering sound echoed down the corridor as I dragged Verne to the pool’s far side and dropped him to rest against the obelisk. Slow, measured footfalls clicked down the tunnel. The snake-headed monster that called itself “Ed Sommer” entered the room, smiling at me. “Too bad about you, Jason. You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t afford to waste my breath.

“Tired?” it asked cheerfully as it continued towards me. “Well, it will be over soon enough.”

As long as he was moving slowly, with full control, I didn’t have a chance. “At least I know you’re not going to survive me by much, Ed or whatever your name is.”

The slit-pupiled eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I found the location of your laboratory tonight. My TERA-5 got lucky and matched patterns. And if I don’t send the ‘no-go’ code soon, the system storing my data will dump the location and all the info I have on the lab’s operations into every intelligence agency and scientific forum on the planet. It’ll be a lot easier to pry the kid and the mother away from a bunch of squabbling agencies than from one group of demonic crossbreeds with a unified purpose.”

The lie worked; it fit perfectly with what they knew of my capabilities, was precisely what I would’ve done if I
had
found the location and had no other choice. The giant figure charged forward. “I’ll have that code out of you if I have to rip it out of your heart!”

Jesus, he was fast! Fast as Klein! But with him charging, everything changed. I jumped up onto the Heartstone and lunged to meet the Ed-thing just as he leapt towards us across the Mirror of the Sky.

The impact stunned me, and I felt at least three armored spikes go deep into my arms, but I held on. My momentum had mostly canceled his, and the two of us plummeted directly into the deceptively deep pool below.

A detonation of leaf-green light nearly blinded me as the entire pool lit up like an emerald spotlight; surges of energy whipped through me and I came close to blacking out. Boiling water fountained up and I was flung outward to strike with numbing force on the altar, shocked, parboiled, and aching. Electrical arcs danced around the edge of the water, then spat outwards, shattering the lightbulbs across half the room. A roar of agony echoed from the depths of the Mirror of the Sky. Then the boiling subsided, the eerie green light faded away. Blinking away spots, I looked down. A few pieces of spiky armor, bubbling and dissolving away like Easter egg dye pellets, were all that remained.

“One more guess confirmed.” My voice, not surprisingly, shook. I reached down and retrieved my gun from where I’d dropped it near the Heartstone.

Verne gave a very weak chuckle. “If they were my enemies, they would be the very antithesis of the power I wielded. Yes?”

“I hope so.”

Another voice spoke from the entranceway. “And you were quite correct.”

I felt my jaw go slack as I looked across. “Oh . . . oh damn. You’re dead.”

In the bright lights that remained, the Colonel, resplendent in his uniform, walked towards us. “As is oft-quoted, reports of my death were greatly exaggerated. Kafan, poor boy, didn’t realize precisely what I was, so he only damaged my body. As you learned,” and suddenly, without any visible pause, he was there, taking the gun from my hand with irresistible force, “ordinary weapons are rather useless against us. Tearing out my throat was an inconvenience, easily remedied. But it was more convenient to appear to die and hope he’d lead us to the other two children, than to keep fighting him.”

Despite my struggles, he picked me up and tied me up with rope he had slung over his shoulder. A casual kick from him sent Verne sprawling. “Now we can fix things. Pity about Ed, though. Rather promising in some ways, but a trifle dense. If only I’d been a moment sooner . . . good bluff, boy. But your mind is a bit transparent.” He set me down on the Heartstone and groped under his uniform. “Now where . . . ah, there it is.” His hand came back into view, holding a long, sharp, crystalline knife. He smiled.

I couldn’t maintain my usual facade of confidence here. I swallowed, tried to speak, found that my throat had gone completely dry.

“Don’t bother trying to speak. You see, a ritual sacrifice on this stone will negate its very nature, ending the power of this shrine, which is quite painful to me, and in his weakened condition it should also destroy the priest. So you, by virtue of your very bad fortune, shall be the one through which we cleanse the world of the last trace of Eönae and her nauseating priests.”

“So why are you bothering to tell me?” I managed to get out. “Just a melodramatic villain with a long-winded streak?”