Specter Rising (Brimstone Network Trilogy) (19 page)

What a day this will be,
he thought. First he would at last see the end of the Brimstone Network, and then the beginning of the fall of humanity.

Glorious.

The dark mage summoned the vast magickal forces that resided within his new body. He was close enough to see them now, to read the expressions of fear upon their faces.

Crowley wanted Abraham Stone to suffer the most. The mage wanted him to watch his friends die, one by one falling to the superior
magicks that were now Crowley’s to control.

An excited laugh stopped short in his throat as he saw the boy suddenly collapse and fall limply to the ground.

Crowley would have liked to believe that it was a reaction bred of sheer terror, but he doubted that was the case. Then he realized that the crippled member of the team was staring at him intently.

The boy’s eyes flashed just as Crowley sensed danger.

The mage tried to avert his gaze, but he was too slow. He screamed at the sudden agony in his head—as though something had been shoved through his eyes, and was now crawling through his brain.

14.
B
RAM COULDN’T BELIEVE IT WORKED.

He was standing on a sidewalk in an eerily silent suburban neighborhood. The street appeared damaged, the lawn in front of the quaint home charred and blackened.

Bram moved down the concrete path toward the house. It too appeared to have suffered some sort of calamity—maybe a fire.

Midway down the front path he stopped, looking around the neighborhood. There were two, maybe three other houses with an unfinished appearance, but beyond them was nothing but darkness.

He had to remind himself that he wasn’t anywhere that he’d ever been before, that this neighborhood was some sort of a mental manifestation of a memory. Taking
the doorknob in hand he had an idea as to whom it belonged, and it certainly wasn’t Crowley.

The child’s sobbing came from somewhere at the back of the house. Bram heard it, softly moving on the still, stagnant air of the dream place, and left the walkway to check the back of the house.

“Hello?” Bram called out as he passed through the gate of a high wooden fence, entering a sprawling backyard.

The damage to the house was even worse back there; the entire side of the house had been blown outward and the yard was mostly charred black. At the far end of the property, where the explosion hadn’t touched, stood a children’s activity set—a clubhouse, slide, and four swings standing in a patch of still green lawn.

The crying child slumped on the middle swing, head bowed, tiny hands holding the chains.

“Hello?” Bram said quietly, not wanting to scare her.

The little girl slowly raised her head, and Bram’s suspicions were confirmed.

He’d only seen this girl briefly, but he knew she was Claire Blaylock and that this was her world.

He walked closer to the play area, his footfalls crunching upon the blackened ground, to the green. He was
tempted to ask her what had happened, but he already knew the answer.

“The bad witches came and killed my mommy and daddy,” she said, starting to cry again.

In his father’s old files Bram had read about the rogue witches’ coven that had targeted Jeannine and Gareth Blaylock, two of his father’s finest Brimstone agents, and how the witches had attacked their home leaving Claire ill and her brother, Tobias, the only real survivor.

Bram stood beside the little girl as the swing slowly swung back and forth. “I’ve come to help you, Claire,” he said.

The child looked up, her face stained with tears.

“But the bad man said that the witches would get me if I left the yard.” Her voice shook with fear.

“I won’t let the witches or the bad man hurt you,” Bram said, holding out his hand.

She stared at it. “Where are we going to go?” she asked cautiously.

“Do you know where your brother is?” he asked.

She pointed to the clubhouse. “The bad man put him in there and told him not to come out,” Claire said. “I thought I heard him crying, but I didn’t want to leave the swings, if the witches . . .” She started to cry again.

“It’s all right,” Bram said, taking her hand in his. “Why don’t we go see if we can help your brother?”

The little girl jumped from the swing, and together they walked to the wooden ladder that would take them up into the darkened clubhouse.

“Are you ready?” Bram asked.

Claire nodded, and began to climb.

And Bram followed her, up the ladder and into the darkness.

B
arnabas stared at Trinity lying still upon the ground.

“Get up!” the warrior screamed from atop his reptilian steed.

The robed figure didn’t move.

“Pick him up,” Barnabas ordered, and two of his soldiers scrambled to lift the unconscious being and toss it over the back of a mount.

The Specter warlord glanced ahead. He could see his enemies standing in the open, and felt a faint sliver of respect for them, no matter how foolish they were.

What chance do they have against me?
he thought, gazing out over the surviving soldiers that awaited his command,
never mind the ferocious beasts that had been created from Ligeia’s faithful by Trinity’s magick.

Barnabas looked beyond the enemies waiting to confront his forces and to the nearly fallen barrier that shimmered enticingly behind them. They were all that stood between him and the invasion of the human realm.

He pulled upon his mount’s reins, and the great beast reared up with a shriek. “Attack!” he bellowed to his foot soldiers, then turned his attention to the monsters’ handlers.

The transformed were kept on the end of thick chains. They sniffed at the air, some fighting amongst themselves in order to satisfy their voracious need for violence.

Some would call it overkill to use such savage beasts against so few, but today was a special day.

“Turn loose the beasts!” Barnabas commanded, grinning widely as the handlers released their hold upon the chains.

A special day indeed.

B
ram knew this place and felt something akin to a knife twist in his gut.

“This is a sad place,” Claire said, still holding
his hand as they walked from the darkness into the communications center of the Brimstone Network.

A chill ran up and down Bram’s spine as he climbed into the clubhouse only to find himself here. But it wasn’t how
he
remembered the place, it was how Tobias did.

The room was filled with the dead—those who had fallen to Crowley’s monsters—strewn about, their bodies cut, chopped and bitten. Bram hated to see them like this—these brave individuals who gave their lives for the protection of the world.

In the darkness at the far end of the room, Bram and Claire found him.

Tobias knelt upon the floor, hands pressed to his face, covering his eyes so he did not have to see what his betrayal had caused. The boy muttered beneath his breath, rocking to some silent death dirge that only he could hear. As they moved closer, Bram could just about hear what Tobias was saying.

“I’m sorry . . . I’m so, so sorry . . .”

“Tobias,” Bram called, finding it difficult to muster any sympathy for the youth who had sold out his fellow teammates to Crowley’s evil.

The boy’s back stiffened, and slowly he turned to look at
them. “Leave me alone. I have to do this . . . I have to suffer for what I’ve done.”

Bram released Claire’s hand and she ran to her brother, wrapping her arms around him.

“He’s come to save us,” Claire said, snuggling her face into the nape of his neck. “He said he would protect us from the bad man.”

“The bad man,” Tobias repeated, his eyes glazing over.

“Crowley has done this,” Bram said. “He put the two of you in places filled with fear and despair in order to control you.”

“Crowley,” Tobias repeated, letting the foul word work itself around in his mouth.

“There was an accident . . . a phenomena of some kind where the three of you merged together . . . forming one powerful magickal being,” Bram began.

“Yes,” Tobias said, gazing off into space. “There was . . . there was an explosion of light . . .”

“And the three of you . . . Claire, yourself, and Crowley . . . became one,” Bram explained.

Tobias rose to his feet, holding his sister in his arms. “I remember now. He . . . Crowley wants to destroy it all . . . he wants to tear all the barriers down.”

Bram nodded. “And we can’t let him do that.”

“He’s stronger than us,” Tobias said sadly, averting his eyes.

“But there’s only one of him and two of you,” Bram said. “You have to try . . . you have to try to take control.”

A powerful tremor went through the floor beneath their feet, making the corpses of the dead to jerk as if suddenly alive.

“You have to try,” Bram repeated as the floor began to shake even more violently and something began to push its way up through the floor.

It was Crowley, looking larger and more powerful than ever before.

“You want them to stop me?” the black mage asked, his voice booming through the chamber like thunder.

“They’re more than welcome to try.”

T
hey had tried to make her leave, but Johanna would hear nothing of it.

If she was going to be part of the team—part of the Network—then she was going to have to stick it out during the bad as well as the good.

She hoped that she lived long enough to see an example
of the good, ’cause things hadn’t been all that hot so far.

The bad guys were on the move; storming across the open field, back to their camp, and right at the team.

Her dogs had begun to bark and growl, taking up a defensive position in front of her.

Johanna saw it all play out in a weird kind of slow motion even though it was really happening so fast. The first wave of screaming barbarian guys was met by what looked to be some kind of invisible wall. She guessed that the crippled kid Dez had to be responsible.

He was kneeling beside Bram’s unconscious body, but he was looking toward the attacking army, and she could have sworn she saw sparks jumping off the top of his head.

And then that giant turtle dude and the chick who was supposed to be Bram’s sister jumped in.

A giant turtle. Hello, crazy town? I’d like my sanity back, please.

The giant turtle—
what was his name again . . . Booma . . . Beamer
. . . Boffa . . . yeah, that was it. Boffa.
Boffa stepped right to the line where the army had been stopped, pulling two enormous guns from somewhere—
inside his shell?
—and started blasting away, making short work of the first wave of attackers.

Bram’s sister wasn’t doing too badly either. Johanna could see how the girl and Bram could be related. They both had an air about them; something that said,
Hey, we’re a nice couple’a guys—but you don’t want to mess with us.
Lita was using both a sword and a pretty big gun to take care of some of the Conan rejects that had managed to get past the turtle’s hail of bullets.

Not that the Brimstone guys were any less impressive. Dez was holding them back with one side of his brain, while another was throwing the bad guys around like dolls, and Johanna was pretty sure that he’d set a couple of them on fire. The little guy Bogey was doing some pretty awesome stuff as well; opening up rifts beneath the soldiers, like trapdoors that they fell through and never came back from.

Stitch and the wolf girl Emily seemed to be doing all the heavy lifting. The two were right there, literally side by side, tearing into any of the Specter soldiers that managed to make it past all the others. They had their job cut out for them because sprinkled in the mix were those monsters and they weren’t as easy to take down as Barnabas’s soldiers.

Johanna would never have admitted it to anyone other
than herself, but she was scared, with no idea as to whether or not she was going to survive this.

Her dogs began to go wild, warning her of an imminent threat. Johanna spun around just in time to see one of Barnabas’s soldiers explode out from behind a tent, an ax ready to fall on her. She reacted instinctively, ducking beneath the blade as it fell.

Jumping back, she silently commanded her dogs to attack and they did as they were told, bringing the armored warrior down and ripping through his armor as if it were made of paper. He didn’t even have a chance to get all ghosty before he was dead.

Would she survive this?
The question again echoed through her mind.

Inspired by her teammates . . . by her friends . . . she was certainly going to try.

I
nside the mind of the creature called Trinity, Bram was getting his butt kicked.

Crowley had manifested in the form of a behemoth, and before Bram had a chance to react, the evil sorcerer had grabbed him and tossed him across the room like a rag doll. Bram bounced off the wall and lay there stunned
as Crowley pulled his massive bulk from the floor.

“How dare you come in here,” the monster roared.

Through blurred vision Bram could see Claire and Tobias cowering at the other end of the room as Crowley loomed above them.

“He has no power here,” the mage told them, pointing to Bram propped against the wall. “This is my domain and you would be wise to remember that. Only I can protect you from the dangers of your mind.”

Bram fought to stand. “He’s lying to you,” he said to Claire and Tobias.

Crowley whipped around to face him. “You’ll die in here,” the sorcerer growled, bounding across the room tossing furniture and the bodies of dead Brimstone agents aside as if they were nothing.

Bram tried to ghost, but his powers didn’t seem to work here.

The black mage grabbed him in his enormous hands and again hurled him across the room.

The point of impact shattered like glass and Bram found himself in a completely new environment. He was in the desert now, the place where he and his Brimstone Network had last faced off against Crowley.

The place were the being Trinity had been born.