The Brimstone Network (Brimstone Network Trilogy) (19 page)

An explosion of magical force greater than the blast released during the Trinity test.
It will be a glorious thing
, the sorcerer thought to himself.

The shadow passage back to his domain started to fluctuate, someone traveling from his lair to the platform.

Cracklebones bounded from the opening, eyes wild.

Crowley did not have a good feeling about this.

The troll shrieked, his leathery flesh starting to smolder under the intensity of the desert sun’s rays.

The sorcerer moved to stand before him.

“Master,” Cracklebones said, shielding his sensitive eyes from the sun, his exposed flesh blistering.

“What news do you bring me?” Crowley asked, suspecting that he would not care for the answer one little bit.

Cracklebones had curled into a tight ball beneath the sun’s onslaught. Not feeling the least bit merciful, but wanting to know what news he brought, Crowley extended his magickal cloak, letting it envelop the burning troll like a cool shadow.

“Bless you, merciful Master,” Cracklebones said. “Bless you for your kindness and …”

“My patience wears,” Crowley warned, tempted to withdraw his cloak. “Where is the human … where is Tobias?”

Cracklebones looked up. “Dead, I think,” he stated. “We were attacked … we found the one you were looking for … the one on the list … but they were already there.”

“Who were already there?” Crowley barked, his spidery limbs reaching from beneath his robes to grab hold of the troll and lift him from his shadowy protection.

“The son of Stone,” Cracklebones shrieked, squirming in the rays of the sun, the blisters that covered his body popping, their juices sizzling in the heat. “The son of Stone was waiting to attack us.”

Crowley let the troll drop, and he scrambled across the platform, running toward the safety of the shadow passage.

The sorcerer let him go, pulling his cloak of darkness
tighter about his form, no longer feeling the effects of the blazing sun above.

W
hat a dump,” Emily said, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

“Don’t look at me,” Bogey said. “This is where Stitch said to rift to, so I rifted.”

Stitch emerged from the magickal portal, two heavy loads on each shoulder, one still living, the other, wrapped in a couch cover, not so lucky.

Bram helped take Desmond’s father from him, setting the still form onto the floor. He hadn’t even wanted to bring the man’s body along, but Dez had insisted.

“Careful with him,” Desmond said, wheeling his chair quickly from the rift to stop beside his dad’s body.

“What is this place?” Emily asked as she flicked a switch on the wall to illuminate the cavernous chamber. “Ewww, it looks worse with the lights on.”

“We’re in a secret chamber beneath the ruins of an ancient monastery on the tidal island of Lindesfarne,” Stitch explained as he set the unconscious Tobias down against the wall. “It’s also the place of my birth.”

“You were born here?” Bogey asked, strolling around
the room, fiddling with the knobs and switches on the various machines around the chamber. “I came out of a stupid egg.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me,” Emily said with a roll of her eyes, trying to find someplace that wasn’t covered in dust to sit down.

Stitch crossed his powerful arms, looking around the room. “It isn’t much, but it should provide for us until we can pull something better together.”

“It’s fine,” Bram said.

Stitch smiled. “Exactly my feelings. Now,” he said, rubbing his big hands together eagerly. “Who would fancy a cup’a tea?”

They all decided that they would, something to remind them that normal things still existed, and that werewolves, death magick, and swarms of evil monsters weren’t the norm.

They could only find two cups, but some glass beakers served the purpose just as well.

Everyone was quiet as they drank their tea, except for Bogey, who had curled into a tight ball on top of a workbench and had gone fast to sleep. Emily sat by herself, sipping her hot drink from a beaker, staring off into space.
Bram was tempted to go and talk with her but decided that maybe she wanted to be left alone. Stitch had taken the still unconscious Tobias to a corner far back in the chamber.

Bram finished his tea thinking back to the fight at the St. Laurent house, remembering the intensity of Desmond’s powers unleashed. He set the empty cup down and walked across the chamber to the handicapped boy sitting in a wheelchair beside the corpse of his father.

“How’s the tea?” Bram asked as he approached, unsure of what to say.

Desmond seemed startled by the question, looking at the glass beaker in his lap. “I don’t really like tea that much.” He shrugged. “Dad was the tea drinker.”

Bram squatted down beside the boy’s chair. “You probably don’t want to hear this, but I know what it’s like.”

Desmond looked at him, confused. “What what’s like?”

“Losing your father,” Bram said, quickly looking at the still shape covered in the flowered couch cover on the ground before them.

“My father isn’t lost, he’s right here,” Dez said.

Bram was startled by the response, afraid that Desmond might be in shock over the loss.

And then the flowered slipcover moved.

Bram fell backward to the floor, startled by the sudden movement, and watched with a bizarre mixture of fear and fascination as Douglas St. Laurent wriggled out of his makeshift shroud to look around at his surroundings.

“Did I ever get that milk for those cookies?” he asked as a look of confusion crossed his face. “Hey, Dez, where the heck are we?”

“This is impossible,” Bram said as he shook his head. In this day and age, it seemed that the word “impossible” had pretty much stopped meaning anything.

Douglas stood up, stepping out of his sheet. “Kind of damp, isn’t it?”

“It’s all right, Dad, we’re safe. The bad guys can’t get us here,” Desmond told him.

The boy’s father nodded slowly. “Didn’t I always tell you? Those bad guys are everywhere, just waiting to get their hands on you and your special talents.”

Not sure yet what was going on, the others were cautiously making their way over to see.

“Oh. My. God,” Emily cried. “Would somebody please explain to me what the heck is going on? I thought he was dead. Wasn’t he dead?”

“He was dead at the time,” Stitch said. “But now I’m not so sure.”

“Cool,” Bogey said. “Think he can make us some more of those cookies?”

Douglas smiled at them, scratching his head. “Hey, guys,” he said, giving them a wave. “Must’ve dozed off.”

Bram slowly climbed to his feet, unable to stop staring at the man who was dead only moments ago. “Dez,” he asked. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing.” The boy shrugged, refusing to make eye contact. He swished the tea that he hadn’t drunk in the glass container. “Guess he wasn’t hurt that bad.”

“Not that bad?” Emily stated. “He’s got a hole in his chest. I can see through him.”

Desmond studied his fingernails. “We’ll just get him another shirt so you don’t have to look at it.”

Douglas St. Laurent had started to walk about, hands casually shoved into his front pockets, whistling cheerfully as if coming back to life was no big deal.

“I know what you’re doing, Dez,” Bram said, recalling something he’d read in the boy’s file.

Desmond looked up suddenly, a spark of anger in his eyes. “You don’t know anything.”

“Your father was very sick,” Bram spoke in his calmest voice. “He had something wrong with his heart, didn’t he?”

Desmond stared at him for a moment, then slowly nodded. “The doctors said they couldn’t fix him,” He shook his head, remembering. “They said he didn’t have much time left.”

“What did you do, Dez?” Bram asked.

“When the time came … when he … I did what I could.” There were tears in the boy’s eyes. “I did what any of you would have done. I used my talent … I used my talent to bring him back … so I wouldn’t be alone. I didn’t want to be alone.”

Bram wasn’t sure what to say or how to react. He looked toward the others, seeing that they were as stunned as he was.

“So, anybody want to explain what’s going on?” Douglas suddenly asked.

Bram looked to Desmond. “Does he have any idea?”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t let him remember the bad stuff,” he said, and then laughed sadly, wiping tears from his eyes. “I don’t like to remember the bad stuff.”

Bram found himself drawn to Dez. Standing beside his wheelchair, he put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“He wasn’t the best father before he got sick,” Desmond said with a loud sniffle. “Working all the time and stuff … but now he is. I’ve made him the best father he can be.”

Bram suddenly thought of his own father, and how little he had seen of him, and he had to wonder, if he’d had Dez’s abilities, would he have done the same thing? Would he have created the perfect father out of the remains of the old?

Bram was creeped out by the whole idea, but tried to handle it the way he imagined a Brimstone leader would have.

“You realize that you should tell him what you’ve done, don’t you?”

Dez’s body shuddered as he cried some more.

“Yes,” he said, looking up at Bram with swollen red eyes. “But not now, please don’t make me do it now.”

“Not now,” Bram agreed. “But definitely later, all right?”

He watched as relief appeared in Desmond’s eyes. “Definitely later.”

“Hello? Is anybody going to answer me?” Douglas asked, oblivious that he shouldn’t even be walking around.

A low, ghostly moan suddenly filled the chamber and
they all looked toward the form of Tobias, tied up in the room’s far corner. The traitor to the Brimstone Network was coming around.

“We’ve brought one of the bad guys here, back to our secret location for questioning,” Bram answered. “And it looks like it’s time to go to work.”

“Oh,” Douglas said, accepting the information with a nod. “That seems kind of exciting.”

Bram looked to Desmond, who was wiping at his eyes, pulling himself together. As they had discussed earlier, he was to be a major part of Tobias’s questioning.

“Are you up for this?” Bram asked.

The boy looked up, a sudden hardness to his features.

“Just try and keep me away from him.”

T
obias was dreaming, dreaming of the time when he had become less human, when he had become a monster.

“Tell me everything,”
the spider with Crowley’s voice said to him.
“And I will make your sister well again.”

Hanging by a thread of silk, the spider swayed before his eyes like a pendulum, hypnotizing him.

It would have been so much easier to say that he had
been seduced by the sorcerer’s evil power, that Crowley had somehow made him betray those who had taken him in after his parents’ untimely deaths.

All the anger, sadness, and fear that he’d had inside him after his mother’s and father’s demise was still with him—then and now—and it had changed him, shaped him into the person …
the thing
he was today.

He was no better than the beasties he had fought against in his time with the Brimstone Network, no better than the manifestation of evil that had dangled before his eyes by a thread, convincing him that the only way to save his sister’s life was by betraying the Network, and the world.

Tobias was transported back to that night, when the Network was attacked, when people he had known for many years died so that his sister could live.

Suddenly he didn’t want to dream anymore, and tried to wake himself up.

But something held him there.

Tobias struggled against the dream world. No matter how hard he fought, he couldn’t escape the nightmare of what he had done.

How does it feel?
an unknown voice suddenly asked.
How does it feel to suffer like those poor people you killed?

Tobias pulled his attention from the nightmarish scene unfolding before him and focused on the voice. It was then that he realized that someone was doing this to him, forcing him to see what he had become.

And he didn’t like it one little bit.

H
e came awake filled with rage.

They were all standing around him, and they appeared surprised.

It was the cripple in the wheelchair who had been trying to keep him asleep, using some sort of psychic power to make him relive his worst nightmare.

Tobias was furious, and he used his anger to fuel his magick, easily breaking the bonds they’d placed around his hands and ankles.

The artificial man was the magick user of the bunch. Tobias could see that he was getting ready to cast a spell, and acted accordingly. The magick fueled by the power of his fury exploded from his hands, the force of the blast striking the man full on, burning his body to bone.

I’ve taken another life
, Tobias thought as one more fragment of his already dwindling humanity fell away.

The boggart was the next to attack him, and again,
Tobias let the magick flow, destroying the corner of the room where the creature had been standing. This time, all that remained was ash.

The anger inside him was like an inferno, burning hotter with the passing seconds. Those remaining were nothing against him. One by one they fell to his rage. The girl screamed as he boiled her blood in her veins. The cripple didn’t even get a chance to cry out as Tobias turned him to crystal, and another spell of sheer force smashed him into a million glittering pieces.

All that remained was the son of Stone. Tobias gathered his wrath, conjuring a roiling ball of magickal fury and letting it fly toward the last of his captors. Abraham simply stood, staring at him, their eyes locked as the ball of magick struck and his foe was obliterated in a searing white flash of light.

Tobias expected to feel some sort of pleasure as the son of the man he hated so much was destroyed. But he felt nothing. It was as if all the poison in his heart had finally been released, purged by this last, violent act.

Tobias dropped to his knees, breathing heavily. The threat to Crowley’s plans had been eliminated, and with that done, so was the fulfillment of the bargain he had made.