Sons (Book 2) (27 page)

“How about cold and wet?” I muttered to myself as I started siphons, two of them.  One siphon added mass to the cyclone, stealing a little water from the Tennessee River not too terribly far from us here.  The second siphon took energy, sucking away the heat from the excited gases.  Within a second snow formed around me in the closing circle.  Another second and I had dime-sized hail tossed around in the wind, but no reduction in speed or violence in the wind and the scimitars still scissored around the circle below the flying heads.

I waved Peter and Jimmy in closer to me and shrank the shield wall in closer.  It was far too noisy for speech, even yelling.  We’d have issues with hearing for a time after this.  At four seconds, golf-ball-sized hail was landing on the ground hard, embedding and staying there.  The noise died down appreciably next.  I dropped the siphons when I saw the head crumble in a collision of ice.  The shield wall was next and we were assaulted with subfreezing temperatures.  And a wall of ice surrounded us.

“That was interesting,” Peter said, rubbing his arms briskly, trying to brace himself against the sudden cold.  Jimmy started tapping on the wall with his staff, looking for way out, I imagined.

“Wasn’t it, though?” I responded, glancing up at the twelve-foot wall.  “Does everything have to be this fast?”

“Why?  You’d rather die slowly and painfully?” Jimmy asked, grinning back at me.  “How are we gonna get out of here?”

I shrugged.  “Over, through, around?  Lots of ways,” I answered.

The second wave of attack hit then, choosing to strike at all three of us at once—the va-du-seet.  Jimmy faced the right direction to see his attacker coming, but Peter didn’t.

“Peter! Get down!” I yelled, already swinging the Day as it twisted me down and away from the bat coming at my back.  Peter fell straight back as the Day swung down right to left across his face, narrowly missing him but striking a clawed foot as it phased into reality to hit him.  It shrieked in pain, phasing back into the astral and gushing blue gunk into reality like a paint trail as it passed.  They phased through the ice wall with impunity in the astral plane, shifting into reality above it to arc over and dive bomb at us again.  They swarmed at us.

I spotted the hurt one overhead as it howled and rapidly phased in and out of reality.  That seemed to be stopping the flow of ichors from its rear “leg.”  I pulled the Crossbow off my shoulders and, timing a few fluctuations, put Bolts through its brain and heart then put it away again.  Jimmy was successfully fending them off in the physical plane, but they were swarming us.  The numbers would play out soon.  Peter threw volatile magicks into the astral.  Several different tricks, fire and ice, explosions of energy, but the va-du-seet avoided everything.  With a twisting of their wings, they could shoot away at unbelievable speed.

I needed to see what these things were doing to the atmosphere better and that meant magic and that was the Night’s purview.  Sliding the Night free with my left hand, I tossed it straight up into the night sky.  It hummed a satisfyingly deep and throaty bass as it rose thirty feet up.  Once again, I felt that reptilian tongue flick out and taste the air around us.  The va-du-seet recoiled from the Sword, pulling back well behind the perimeter of the ice wall and circling through the sky much like the Dervish before them.  I sheathed the Day as the Night fell back to Earth, defying physics by staying perfectly perpendicular to the ground as it came back to my hand.

Then I had my answer.  The air was clear now.  The Twin of Magic knew the answer, knew the trick the va-du-seet used to live and to fly.  These were definitely unnatural creations.  Destroying the balance would be easy.  Well, easy for me.

I pushed energy onto the energy plane, keeping it away from the astral and physical planes, just the energy plane.  It was in crossing over the energy plane to the astral that the beasts got their power.  I’d seen it earlier and not known that it meant anything, but it was the crux.  A small, almost differential crux, the occlusion to my sight in the clearing.  I pushed more energy onto that plane and several bat-things fell onto the top of the ice wall.

One toppled down to one side of us.  I smiled at the thing on the ground.  Jimmy approached it cautiously and prodded it with the staff.  It was stiff and hard.  The other va-du-seet above us moved more slowly through the air.  A few more fell to the ice wall.  Jimmy swung back hard and hit the creature in front of him, like a baseball, a hard drive to deep center field.  His staff hit and sunk in, shattering its outer shell like a dried bug and sending cracks across it everywhere.  He pulled the stick free and tapped it on the ground a few times to get the bits of dead bat-thing off.

“Well, that one’s dead,” he said as he turned around, a slight smile on his face.

“You seem to be taking all of this really well,” Peter said cheerfully as I pushed more energy onto the energy plane, increasing the volume of space around us I was encompassing.  I didn’t want any of abominations getting away or getting us.

“I am First of Daybreak and First of Gilán,” Jimmy said, shrugging.  “I’ve got a lot to get used to.”  He said it as if he was saying, “I took my dog to the vet yesterday.”  I rather liked that.

The bat-things were moving like they were trapped in molasses now, even in the astral.  They weren’t attacking anymore, either, but they did exhibit some intelligence.  They started to swarm together again, slowly, and rising higher.  Not that rising would help them since I’d put the field pretty damn high up and out.  Peter and I watched them for a moment.  Jimmy was looking up, too.

“Can you see them, Jimmy?” I had to ask.

He glanced over at me briefly.  “I can see a very pale outline of something fluttering up there.  Almost like something clear catching the light of the stars every once in a while.  Whoa!  That, I see!”  We looked up.

As he said that one of the bat-things rose quickly, far more quickly than any others were moving, straight up then turned down.  Every other bat-thing froze in place and shifted onto the physical plane, making one final shift over the astral.  Then gravity took over and they fell. 

Unfortunately for us, we were directly underneath them.  I threw an umbrella on top of us as the rain began, just as the first hit the ground to Jimmy’s rear left.  A tenth of a second later, five more hit the clear umbrella above us.  In twenty seconds we were knee-deep in dead, dried-up carcasses.  I pushed my umbrella of shield energy up and away, throwing the four-feet of bat off the top of us.

“How did that work?” Peter asked, confused.

“Tell me and we’ll both know,” I said, looking around.  “I’m lost.  Which way is out of here?”  The winds had torn the landscape up and now there was nothing but a huge wall of ice and two feet of dead bat-things on the ground.

“North is that way,” Jimmy said, pointing with his truncheon.  He’d shrunk the staff when I wasn’t looking.  He would have to show me how he did that.  “The trail is that way and the house, that way.”  Slipping a platform of the Stone’s energy underneath us, I lifted us up in the direction of the trail as Jimmy indicated.  If I could complain about Jimmy being wrong, it would have been by a degree or two, but that could have been me.

Setting us down on the other side of the ice wall, I noticed the gray mist, the occlusion to my sight, dissipated as the energy plane bled the excess power I’d held there away into the astral plane and back into the leys.  Except for one vapor trail leading back the way we were going.  That one was more persistent.  I cast my senses further down as we walked, the Night still in my left hand.  The vapor trail led to the same cave this trail led to.

“Peter, do you see that?” I asked him, pointing at the trail using the Sword.

“Faintly, though most of that soup is gone,” he answered.  “You think that last one got away?”

“The dive bomber?” Jimmy asked.  He’d seen it too?

“Maybe,” I muttered and walked faster.  I couldn’t see Kieran or Ethan anywhere outside and when I brushed the anchor lightly, Ethan was busy.  I didn’t intrude.  That could be dangerous to Kieran and him.  “How far ahead are they, do ya think?”  The cave entrance was another two hundred feet or so up.

“Five to seven minutes, maybe?” Peter offered.

“Too long,” Jimmy said, matter-of-factly.  I believe he knew who Dieter was, too, not that I had tried too hard to hide it.  Dieter certainly hadn’t. 

“Damn, we need to hurry,” I said, worried.  “They have a nasty habit of disappearing on me when they’re alone together.”

“And you don’t?” Peter muttered as he fell in beside me.

Obviously every cave I have ever seen was a “commercial quality” endeavor, with lights and wooden walkways, guides and maps.  I’d been to Mammoth Cave National Park with my parents at nine years old and we’d spent a few days touring through the Green River valley, taking various trips around the area.  Mother had never been to that particular area before so we all enjoyed that time and we were all enthralled by the dark beauty in the caverns.  It wasn’t until much later in my life that I realized how dangerous exploring and spelunking was and I could appreciate that beauty so much more.  The Earth is a wondrous place in so many different ways.

Mammoth was far different from the hole in the ground I was looking at now.

“They’re down there?” I asked in disbelief, wondering how the va-du-seet fit through hole at all.  “It barely looks wide enough for Kieran.”

“Well, when all roads point to Rome, you go to Rome,” Peter said and started through the hole.  He was halfway in the hole before I could object.

“Damn it, Peter!  I should go first.  I’m better protected,” I said, nearly shouting.

Jimmy snorted.  “You are Daybreak.  You shouldn’t be going at all.”

“That’s not the way it works, Jimmy,” I snarled at him.

“And for that, I am eternally grateful, Lord,” Jimmy said, snapping the truncheon into its holster on his thigh.  “But Peter managed to keep the va-du-seet at bay while your back was turned and he showed quite a mastery at the computer systems earlier.  He has shown his value to you admirably.  Trust him.”  Then he dove into the hole, too.

“Damn it, Jimmy!” I did holler that time.  I really needed to start paying attention.  “Trust isn’t the issue,” I said in a whisper.  “You’ve all come a hair’s breadth of dying on me.”  I crawled in behind him, then got mildly aggravated.  The hole opened up almost immediately, giving me enough room to crawl or duck-walk easily for a few feet then crouch another few feet then stoop slightly and then even Kieran could walk without hitting his head in the cavernous space.

Apparently we’d found Yaeger’s panic room, or some paramilitary-redneck blend of it.  This was a storage room.  On the right was a wooden wall with brackets screwed in at shoulder height, a coat rack.  The left side was ammunition.  Shelf after reinforced shelf of ammunition.  This section of the cave was a single room dedicated to a coat rack and enough gun powder and brass casings to fill a semi-truck full and probably part of another.  I didn’t stop to consider how many different weapons this might be for, but I doubted this would be all we found.

I followed Peter and Jimmy back into the cave.  The next room was the living room and it was nicer than Yaeger’s house.  Well, ‘nicer’ being a relative term.  The walls were covered with framed pictures of Hans, Dieter, and Yaeger, Sr., in various poses, both alone and with groups around impressive hunting kills or displays of weapons.  A huge flat-screen, high-definition television hung on the wall, the screen indicating a lost satellite connection on one feed but displaying newsfeeds on three other channels.  This was not from your average, commercially available satellite companies.  The furniture was three large recliners spaced evenly in front of the television with small tables between them.

“Ewww!” cried Jimmy, walking around the recliners.  He reached down between a pair and pulled a magazine out from between the cushions with two fingers, barely touching it.  The title read “Let Daddy Show You How” and showed a scantily clad woman looking over her shoulder at a mid-thirties man while her arm was draped over a mid-twenties man. 

“You could have kept
that
image to yourself,” I said, clenching my eyes shut and moving for the door.

“Why should I suffer alone?  And you wanted to come,” he said, chuckling.  He dropped the magazine and followed me.  The next room was more of a connecting hallway without a ceiling than a room.  To the right was a kitchen and to the left were bedrooms, two of them, and two other rooms.  Straight ahead led further back into the cavern.  The flooring stopped about twelve feet back but a single string of lights continued back a ways.  Peter sat crouched on a rock between two lamps, listening for something.  “You don’t suppose the three of them together would sit in there watching pornos and—”

“Enough, First!” I snarled at him quietly, keeping my eyes on Peter.  There was no one in the apartment area of the cave except us, so I crept softly back to where Peter crouched, peering out into the darkness.  The string of lights branched once then disappeared after twenty feet, only helpful if we followed it apparently.  The right branch led back behind the kitchen area and the left further back into the cavern.  Straight ahead seemed to go back into the cavern as well, but the passage was blocked and too uneven and irregular for storage.

“Kieran and Ethan are back there somewhere,” Peter said softly as I crept up beside him.  “Chasing something, I think it’s the va-du-seet, but I haven’t seen Dieter either yet.”

“How are they seeing back there?” I asked, then looked back as Jimmy crossed the hall and kept looking through the rooms.

“I think they’ve mapped it out somehow,” he said.  “Traveling like blind men.  I saw brief low-level pulses of heat where I got a sense of them on the edge.”  He sighed tensely, shaking his head.  “I don’t know, man, this whole cavern gives me the creeps.  Can’t see worth a damn down here.  Everything’s so close.”

“I’m not seeing any better than you are,” I assured him, putting hand on his shoulder as I sat down on the rock beside him.  I’d forgotten about the armor, making sure my hand touched him instead of a gauntlet.  “There are some serious freaks in my backyard.”

Peter snickered.  “You haven’t gone into the back rooms yet, have you?”

“No, just glanced at the doors and came to you.  Jimmy’s looking through them now, though.  Why?” I really didn’t want to know and I knew that to the core of my being. 

As if on cue, Jimmy calls out, “Aw, you sick fuckers!”  A loud crash of something hitting the floor and Jimmy scuffling to pick it up.  He griped the entire time so I didn’t rush back. 

“How could you have seen anything?  You had maybe a minute longer?” I asked Peter as I stood up.

“I figured out what it was at a glance,” Peter said laughing.  “Jimmy probably had to go all the way in.  He’s right, though; they were some sick fuckers.”

Jimmy was carefully closing the last door on the left when I got to the hall.

“Jimmy,” I said softly.  “Whacha doo-in?”

He panicked at my voice, turning and plastering himself in the doorway of the room he just left.  “Seth, um,” he said, breathing rapidly through his mouth.  “You scared me there for a second.  Um.  You really don’t want to go in there, Seth.  Really.  It’s worse than that magazine out there.”

Oh, crap.  “Is that all that’s in there?  Sex toys?” I asked.

“Um.  That’s all I saw,” he said.

“But now you’re not sure,” I said.  “Well, unfortunately, you were right earlier.  I need to see it anyway.  I need to be aware of the evil that men do.”

It took me a few minutes of cajoling but I managed to get him out of the doorway and me into the room.  I could have just
moved
him, but if I started that now, that would pretty much flavor our relationship for the rest of our lives and I already had enough to feel guilty about with him.  Jimmy was right and there wasn’t anything else in there but “toys” and, no, I really didn’t want to go in there.  Well, there was some video equipment…  Yeah, these were some sick, sick people…  yeah, sick, sick individuals.

Jimmy stayed by the door.  “Let’s not steal anything from their DVD collection,” I said as I shut the door behind me.  He gave me a wry smile.

“There’s a fairly sophisticated computer system in that room,” Jimmy said, obviously trying to move away from the “play room.”  “The other two are bedrooms and a bathroom, straight back.”

“Okay, so the Yaegers built them a nice underground apartment,” I said, walking down the short hall and glancing into the rooms as I went.  Someone would have to go through these rooms, but we were on the clock right now.  “There’s obviously a lot of reasons why.”

I wanted a better idea of how this part of the cave was structured to see why they’d built their bolthole this way.  It seemed like there should have been another room behind the last bedroom.  Standing in the hall, I asked the Stone to raise me through the ceiling and saw that the Yaegers had fit their vacation home rather tightly into its spot.  It also showed more light around the right-hand bend of the light strand near Peter than you could see from his vantage.

I walked past Peter, turning right with, “You could have warned me.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” he asked quietly, snickering but still staring into the void.

I followed the string of lights back to the right to find the room I’d seen from the hall, turning a few quick turns.  It was just enough twisting in the corridor to block the line of light from escaping the dimly lit room.  Of course, in the pitch blackness of the cave, even “dimly lit” is bright.  There were two clusters of two sixty-watt incandescent bulbs hanging uncovered on either end of the long, thin room, roughly ten feet wide by twenty feet long.

The furnishings and decorations looked new, or rather, newly placed there.  The two dead men still had a core temperature above ambient, so at least they were fairly new.  Certainly not my choice for decorations, but Dieter already showed poor tastes.  One man was hanging over the side of a metal claw-footed bathtub on the right-side of the room, his arms spread over the sides and his head under the surface of the dark brown liquid.  The other guy was face down on a square of concrete near the center of the room, blood all over the concrete, but no obvious wound from this direction.  I could guess at the killing blows from here. 

I still had to go in, though.  At the far end of the room was an altar to something, probably something really disgusting, too.  There were several books on that altar and they may have something in them about blood magic that we can use against it.  Something that our side of magic didn’t know, or even want to know but needed to know to fight against it.  Like the Loa, it reared its ugly head at us and we had to answer it.

I crept along the cave wall to avoid contact with tub and the concrete slab, but as I got closer, I could see the man in the tub wasn’t holding his head under the fluid.  I didn’t want to guess where his head was, or about how many men and women died to get the metal basin that full.  The next option for somewhere to look at wasn’t much better, though.

The naked man was faced down and away from me as I approached the slab.  His blood pooled over the slab and ran over the side and already soaked into the loose dirt around it.  A single indention showed in the concrete through the drying liquid, a circle of almost the diameter of the slab.  As I skirted around the sides, I could see I had guessed correctly about the cause of death.

I sighed, shaking my head in morbid despair, and said to myself, “You’d think I’d be used to this by now.”

“Really?  Seen a lot of this?” Jimmy asked from the entrance, his voice a choked whisper.

“I’ve seen a lot of dead men lately,” I said somberly, continuing on to the altar.  “Been the cause of it far too often to be happy about it.”  It was set up on an old computer desk made of pressed wood and glue.  It was covered in bits and pieces of things I didn’t have a clue of how or why they’d be important to anybody.  Nothing held any power that I could see, but several things appeared to have a ceremonial importance, or could have.  Since I didn’t know anything about ceremonial magics of any kind, I was definitely not qualified to make any judgments about this.

I decided to put this away for the time being.  Searching through the Palace briefly, I found another room in the vault, a room with no entrance, and shifted the entire altar there, cheap computer desk and all.  Turning back to the concrete slab, I looked deeper into that as well.  The outer ring wasn’t an indentation, but rather inlayed copper, a ring of brass.  At the center sat an ingot of iron, an anathema to Fae magic, though my magic didn’t flinch over it at all.  The concrete itself contained an unhealthy mixture of ground human bones and the remnants of dried blood.  Charcoal markings covered the surface in some places, but the blood marred it too much to make out the symbols.

“Seth,” Peter called, not loudly but enough.  “Something’s happening out there.”

We both sprinted down the narrow corridor back to Peter, my examination of this room forgotten.  I brushed the anchor in my head lightly as I ran and got the most peculiar impression of Kieran in mid-leap from a falling eighty-five ton stalactite.  It wasn’t an image exactly, but more like looking at a sonogram without someone to explain what you were seeing.  At least now, I knew how they were moving around back there.

The sound of the stalactite falling made it to us with a rush of air and a distant, echoing rumble.  They were coming closer.  I felt Ethan bounding on the cavern walls like a sonar image in the echoes.  And a faint blur of something shooting between two columns.  Clamping my hand down on Peter’s shoulder, I fed him that image directly.  It mapped the cavern about a half-mile back, but there were several possible turns that led to dark, unknown pits and crevasses.

“Explains how they’re getting around,” Peter said, standing up slowly.  “What are they chasing?  Can you see it?”

“No,” I mumbled, peering into the dark.  Jimmy fidgeted nervously with his truncheon in his hands, staring with us.  I wasn’t watching anymore, so much as listening now.  I got a flash of aura.