Authors: Jean Lorrah
Eventually he had succeeded in discrediting the whole family. Dr. Troy Sanford was the last and most difficult, but finally he had driven him to drink. Even that hadn't been a permanent solution. So, he had turned the man and Harvested him.
As part of Callahan's getaway plan.
Brandy's police instincts screamed
Ambush!
Barely in time she and Dan braced for Callahan's attack.
He had set them up, allowing them to see what they already knew or had guessed. It was a lure for them to open willingly to the knowledge—
—whereupon Callahan fastened on Dan's mind and began to pull from it his computer knowledge!
Dan resisted.
Brandy interposed, and felt Callahan grab for her deductive techniques. She felt that creepy sense of not knowing something—and not knowing what she had forgotten!
Dan was there, reassuring, shunting her knowledge around the barriers the Numen created. Together they fought Callahan to a draw.
It was not enough. The only way to stop him was to Harvest him. That meant separating his mind from his memory, then from his personality—
Suddenly Brandy understood the peaceful smiles Dr. Land and Doc Sanford had worn in final repose. Not the relaxed smile created by a vampire's influence.
The smile of total imbecility.
“Brandy! Don't drop out! I can't fight him alone,” Dan pleaded.
She could not allow Callahan to drain Dan's mind.
But—how could she do that to anyone, even someone like Lee Joseph Callahan?
Upon her hesitation, the Numen attacked again. As her mind faded, Dan was there, telling her, “We have to do it together. Neither of us can escape alone."
In the metaphysical void they inhabited, she leaned on Dan's strength and faced the truth. It was still stalemate unless she was willing to kill.
“Kill the bastard!"
The voice was so real, she almost turned to see if Doc Sanford's body had risen to join them. Then she realized it was his personality within Dan or herself—a reminder of the casual cruelty Lee Joseph Callahan was capable of. Simple murder was the least of it. Psychological torture, economic destruction, false evidence to convict innocent people of heinous crimes.
This man headed the drug operations in the county named for him. To accumulate fast money for his getaway he introduced the horrors of crack to a community that had hitherto been free of it.
Callahan had traded in slavery, torture, pain, disease, death. He had killed Carrie! He could not be allowed to continue.
He could not be allowed to live.
Brandy and Dan joined forces. Callahan countered with attempts to pull their knowledge, thoughts, memories away from them, but working together they continued the inexorable process of draining his mind—his soul.
The deeper they went, the more horrors they exposed. Brandy shuddered at the cold calculation of Callahan's investments, monetary and personal, in the drug trade, the arms trade, and the slave trade. He made money from prostitution in the U.S., Mexico, and South America. He had a stake in an international business that kidnapped young men and women in the Caribbean, drugging and debasing them and shipping them to the Mideast or the Orient as playthings of the wealthy until they died of disease or despair. Each new wave of filth pouring over them only added to their determination to stop Callahan.
The Numen's courage never faltered. He fought by striking, by shielding, by pouring forth the worst that was in him in hopes that they would resist receiving it.
Sick at heart, they accepted.
It was a hard fight for the valuable knowledge: languages, history, economics, psychology, archaeology, poetry, drama, science. The knowledge of the atom bomb was there—not only since diagrams appeared in every encyclopedia and on the Internet, but since the Manhattan Project itself. More recent knowledge of genetic experimentation told of secret projects to cure diseases—or create deadly new ones.
Slowly, inexorably, they found personal memories, the vampires Callahan had created, the ones he had Harvested—and the ones he had simply murdered, like Chase and Jenny Anderson. He had made thousands of such creatures, hundreds at a time in the superstitious days in which he had originated, fewer and more selectively in more enlightened times and places.
As they uncovered those memories, Callahan began to struggle again. “You have gotten this far two against one,” he told them, “but only one of you can become the Numen. When you fight one another for that crown, that is when I shall win!"
“Divide and conquer?” answered Brandy. “It won't work."
“We're in this together,” Dan agreed, and Brandy felt his warm presence shoring her up for the final battle.
Callahan fought for his life—for his very soul. They drew his memories, his emotions, his personality—
They were no longer witnessing. They were actually absorbing the creature's cold-blooded ruthlessness!
“Together!” Dan insisted. “Stay with me, Brandy."
The final barrier was cold beyond belief—no feeling except the passion for power and an obscene glee at the weakness of others. A barrier that should shatter like ice held like tensile steel. They could not penetrate.
Not penetrate—absorb.
Greater fear than Brandy had ever known weakened her limbs. She leaned into Dan's embrace for warmth, for courage to accept that into herself.
Together!
Paralyzing cold cauterized feeling. There was no warmth, no love, no pity, no joy, no hope.
Brandy's heart shattered.
Her being was suffused with terrible, unspeakable knowledge. She could not absorb it, could not contain it—
Yet it poured through her, beyond her, into Dan, and back in a feedback loop—something howling and gibbering, screaming in agony and utter, obscene ecstasy!
It seemed to go on forever—and then all was darkness and silence.
Brandy opened her eyes.
She was back in her body, reality in the form of the cold floor against her legs and Dan's warm body against her back. The broken handcuffs dangling from Dan's wrists told her that when she had sensed his touch it had not been merely in the dream landscape of their mental battle.
“Dan?” she murmured, squeezing his hand as she turned to see his face.
There was only a single candle burning, but she saw clearly. Dan, too, was just waking from their altered state. His dark eyes looked at her in wonder.
She stared at him in the same way. The wound on his throat was gone. His eyes were clear, his skin tone normal. He had always looked like a man in the peak of health; now he practically glowed with well-being.
“We survived,” he said.
Still holding his hand, Brandy carefully got up. She realized she didn't need to be careful; she felt wonderful.
Physically.
Mentally, emotionally, she was numb.
What had been Lee Joseph Callahan lay beside the corpse of Dr. Troy Sanford at the foot of the wooden altar. His eyes were closed, and his face wore that serene smile Brandy now knew the source of. She felt nothing as she took in the fact that it appeared to be the corpse of someone very, very old. The flesh had melted away from between skin and bone, leaving a mummy-like appearance.
“We have to get out of here,” Brandy said. “The moon will set soon."
Dan went to the lock plate and punched in the combination. The metal door slid open.
He twisted off the handcuff dangling from his left wrist. Although she didn't really need to test her strength, Brandy broke the one off his right wrist. She put the broken pieces into her purse. “Don't leave anything we don't want the fire marshal to find."
She put her purse into the box by the door, and picked up the scroll they had originally come to get. She could read it now, as easily as printed English. There was another scroll with the same information in Greek, one in Hebrew, and a book in Chinese. Callahan's own journal was there, several volumes of cramped writing, in Latin. She knew what it was, knew it was valuable, knew now that the translations of the Numen document varied, and that the German translation Dan had read from—was it only hours ago?—was incomplete and flawed. It was left on the shelf, to be incinerated with the rest.
In the outer office, Dan picked up Callahan's notebook computer, its hard drive containing what the Numen had intended to take with him. The hard drive on the desktop had not only been wiped clean and reformatted, but had a complete erasure program run on it.
They had no need to talk to one another as they completed Callahan's plans. The incendiary materials were in the storage room. They moved them into the safe room, so that the fire would reduce everything there to ashes. If enough of the two corpses remained for identification by dental records, it wouldn't be hard to believe that Doc Sanford had gone completely ‘round the bend and blown up the judge and himself.
There was no one else in the house. Callahan had wanted no witnesses.
Their car was outside. They put the box in the trunk, then went back inside to set the fire.
By the time Dan and Brandy were outside again, the house was exploding. They drove away by the light of the setting moon, lights off, turning in the opposite direction from the one from which the County Fire and Rescue Squad would come.
Gray dawn was breaking as they pulled into the yard of Brandy's house. Once inside, Dan went straight into his office and plugged the telephone cord into the back of Callahan's laptop.
“What are you doing?” Brandy asked.
“All that money,” he replied. “I'm moving it to where only you and I can get at it, before Callahan's financial contacts find out he's dead."
“Good work. Dan, they'll probably routinely question every guest at the fundraiser. You and I left at about 10:00pm, and came back here."
Dan nodded. “Ten o'clock. Brandy, what's the number for the account in the Bank of Zurich?"
“1879403,” she responded automatically. Then, “You didn't know that?"
“I do now,” he replied, still playing with the computer. He smiled wickedly. “Not only will we never have to work again,” he said as he studied the screen, “but if we wanted to we could purchase a small country!"
Brandy came to look at the screen. The figure in the Swiss account was one of those “beyond comprehension” amounts that simply didn't seem real. “Travel,” said Brandy. “Servants. Political power."
“Ye-es,” Dan agreed. “We'll groom you, Brandy—first the legislature, then the governorship."
“Why me?” Brandy asked. “Why not you?"
“You know Kentuckians, Sweetheart. They don't trust anyone with a Ph.D. But the cop on the corner is perfect. We'll go after Callahan's supporters, the people we met at the fundraiser last night. With judicious influence—"
“—we'll have them right in the palm of our hand!"
Brandy and Dan looked triumphantly at one another, their minds meeting and racing with plans for power.
“Mmmmrrrowrrr?"
Sylvester jumped up on Dan's desk, green eyes wary. He looked from Brandy to Dan and back, poised for flight—the way he acted around strangers.
“What's the matter, Silly Cat?” Brandy asked him.
Sylvester stared blankly, as if wondering how she knew one of his nicknames. When Brandy reached toward him, he backed off. “What's the matter with you?” she asked in annoyance.
Sylvester jumped off the table and headed for the door.
“Stop,” Dan said.
Well, that was certainly useless with a cat—but before Brandy could say it, Sylvester stopped, turned, and came back, beginning to purr and wind about both their ankles.
“Influence,” Brandy recognized.
“It's even stronger than before,” said Dan. “Try it,” he added as he picked up Sylvester and handed him to Brandy.
She took the cat, willing him to purr and snuggle, which he did exactly as her thoughts directed. It was weird, it was delightful, it was—
It was completely unnatural!
Golden light crept through the curtains as the sun rose.
Deliberately, Brandy stopped trying to influence Sylvester. Her cat continued to purr in her arms for a moment, but soon, in typical cat fashion, squirmed to be free. As she let him go, Dan opened the curtains and stared out at the bright sunlight. “It doesn't hurt my eyes."
“Nor mine,” said Brandy. “But, it hurts my conscience."
He turned to her, and she saw that he understood her meaning. “We almost succumbed to power madness."
“How do we know we won't when the sun sets tonight? What are we, Dan? Have we become Numena?"
“I don't know,” he said. Then, “I didn't feed on blood last night. My strength returned from—what we did to Callahan."
“We Harvested him."
“We killed him,” Dan said bluntly.
“In self-defense,” Brandy protested. “There was no choice, Dan."
“I know. He intended to kill me, use you—and no jail could have held him if by some miracle we could have restrained him. It wasn't just ourselves we were defending."
Brandy studied the man she loved, trying to sort out her feelings from his, and both of theirs from what they had absorbed from Callahan. “Will we ever be free of him?” she asked.
“We are,” Dan insisted. “Any other vampires he created are also free. He didn't think we could work together—for all his knowledge, he thought what we did was impossible. That means—"
“We don't know what is possible,” Brandy finished the thought. “We don't know what we're capable of doing."
“For good or evil,” Dan agreed. He turned to the computer to exit from the banking program. Then he turned the machine off and took Brandy into his arms, a hug of support as he said, “We'll have to watch one another, Brandy. Be each other's conscience."
She nodded, clinging desperately to his familiar physical presence as she wondered how much either of them had been changed by the infusion of Lee Joseph Callahan. How far could she trust Dan now? How far could she trust herself? What had seemed so clear last night was frighteningly complicated in the light of day.
Doc Sanford's words came suddenly back to her: “Blood will tell.” He had meant character, upbringing, the values handed down from one generation to the next.
Was her blood strong enough to resist the contamination of Callahan's? Was Dan's? Only time would tell. Only in time would their own blood tell its story, for better or for worse.