Specter Rising (Brimstone Network Trilogy) (5 page)

Emily thought the words, but didn’t speak them as she stared into the still-burning office of the commander of the Brimstone Network, and her good friend.

Stitch stood silently by her side, staring into the unnatural conflagration, as one of the medical staff saw to his burns.

“I had to get you out of there,” Bogey said. “You would’ve been a goner if I didn’t. . . .”

“You did fine, Bogey,” Emily told him, grabbing his arm and giving it a gentle squeeze.

Stitch remained eerily quiet, watching as two experienced magick users arrived, seeing as conventional means to fight the fire had failed. The two, a man and a woman—Emily believed them to be husband
and wife—held hands and began to chant in some strange ancient language, the words leaving their mouths gradually taking a physical form and floating into the room. The magickal shapes found the coiled serpent of flame, and as the fiery reptile attacked—consuming the magick—its size and heat began to slowly diminish.

The pair continued their incantation until the serpent of fire was no more, leaving behind only the smoldering remains of Abraham Stone’s office.

With the fire extinguished they moved tentatively closer.

“He could still be alive, right?” Bogey asked them.

Emily could smell the Mauthe Dhoog’s tension, his fear.

“I bet he did his ghosting thing and went right down through the floor and is downstairs talking with the Archivist or something.”

She didn’t respond, and neither did Stitch.

“I’m gonna go check,” the creature said, opening a rift, and quickly ducking inside, almost as if wanting to be gone before they could tell him that he was wrong, that Bram had been inside the room when the explosion occurred.

“What’s going on?” a voice called out from behind them.

Emily turned to see Desmond awkwardly moving through the throng of onlookers who had gathered in the hallway. He was using his crutches and, by the expression on his face, and the smell that his body gave off, Emily knew that he was in pain.

“Is Bram all right?” the boy asked craning his neck to see inside the room. “Oh, my god,” was his next response.

Emily entered the room, the air inside still thick with smoke and choking fumes.

Stitch had gone in ahead of her and was where, if her memory was right, a file cabinet had once been. Now, nothing remained but the blackened, charred remains of something indistinguishable, and something that could have at one time been alive.

Emily felt her nose twitch, her animal senses reaching out to see if there was any scent remaining from the body that could tell her that it was Bram, but she could smell nothing but smoke.

“I want this examined,” the patchwork man said, squatting down beside the blackened shape.

Two Brimstone agents carrying a stretcher and a body bag came into the room and began to remove it.

Stitch looked up from the body, his different colored eyes burning with sadness.

“I’m sorry,” she said, fighting back her own emotional response. She could feel it building inside her and did everything that she could to keep it down. She was a Brimstone Network agent, and she needed to keep it together. She needed to set an example.

“Agent Stitch?” somebody called from the doorway.

They all turned to see a security officer standing there.

“We found an intruder on the grounds and have detained her for questioning.”

Stitch glanced over as the charred body was gently lifted from the floor and placed within the thick, zippered bag.

“I want to question this one myself,” Stitch said as the bag was zippered and placed upon the gurney for transport.

“Do you think this intruder could have something to do with this?” Emily asked.

“We can’t rule out the possibility,” Stitch said as he strode toward the security officer standing in the doorway.

As he passed Dez, he stopped and addressed him.

“I’m going to want your assistance on this, Desmond,” Stitch said, and then continued from the room.

“S-sure,” the boy stammered, using his crutches to follow.

Emily continued to stand in the room that had been blackened and destroyed by the supernatural fire.

Watching as a stretcher that could very well be carrying the body of one of her closest friends was slowly wheeled past.

H
er dogs hadn’t returned to her yet.

Johanna paced around the small room, stopping to look through the window in the door that looked out into the hallway. There was a Brimstone Network security officer standing outside, guarding her.

“Hey,” she yelled, slapping her hand against the window. “Think I’m gonna need a tinkle break pretty soon.”

The guard didn’t even flinch from her request. Maybe putting the possibility that she might have to go in the foreseeable future would help him to react when it came time that she actually did have to go to the bathroom.

She had sent her dogs out into the facility. There was something most definitely up at the Brimstone headquarters, and it had very little to do with her sneaking back onto the property unauthorized.

No, something had happened, and it had wound things up around here big-time. She hoped that her ghost pups came back to her with something useful; she was dying to know what was going on.

The door rattled and she quickly turned around. Maybe the guard actually was listening, and decided to take pity on her poor bladder.

The creepy Mr. Stitch ducked his head as he entered the room. His presence in that confined space was so powerful that Johanna found herself backing up.

There was somebody else with him, a heavyset kid who used crutches to help get around.

Johanna was about to ask what was going on when Stitch’s gaze pinned her to where she stood.

“Sit,” he commanded, pointing a long finger at a seat on one side of a small wooden desk.

She parked her butt. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Stitch moved aside to allow the crippled kid to take the seat opposite from her.

“Hey,” she said as he sat. He leaned his crutches against the desk beside him, completely ignoring her attempt at being friendly.

“Do you want me to . . . ?” he asked, looking up at Stitch, who now leaned against the room’s wall, with his powerful arms folded across his chest.

“Do what?” she asked, getting just a little bit nervous.

The big man nodded. “Go ahead,” he said.

The boy looked at her then and for a second, she could have sworn that she saw sparks jump from his eyes, and from around his head. Johanna had to remind herself that in this place, just about anything was possible, which made her all the more eager to be part of it.

She stiffened, feeling something moving around inside her head.

Wanting to ask if he was responsible, and if he was, what he thought he was doing, Johanna found herself stricken silent. Images flashed past her mind, almost as if somebody had found a great big box of photographs inside her head and was just flipping through them, tossing them here and there as they searched for something.

And as quickly as it had started, it stopped.

“Nope,” the crippled kid said. “She’s clean, she didn’t have anything to with it . . . wrong place, wrong time.”

The big man nodded to Johanna. “Good, I kinda fancied you.”

Shaking off the effects of the mental probe, Johanna smiled. “You’re not too bad yourself. Anybody care to tell me what’s going on?”

The sound of claws clicking upon the tile floor suddenly filled the room, and she smiled, happy to have her ghostly canine friends back in her presence. They swarmed eagerly around her, brushing up against her legs, leaping up to lick her face with soft, ghostly tongues.

“There’s my good boys and girls,” she praised.

The crippled kid looked a little confused.

“Ghost dogs,” she said, patting one of the invisible beasts.

“I guessed,” he said. “Didn’t realize how weird it would be in person.”

“So you gonna tell me what’s up?” she asked them.

“Something very bad has happened here,” Stitch informed her. “It doesn’t concern you, so I would rather not . . .”

“Is it about your commander?” she asked. “The cute kid? What was his name . . . Abraham Stone?”

Stitch nodded again. “Yes, it is. How did you know?”

She smiled, patting her dogs. “My friends told me.”

“Something bad has happened to Bram,” the kid sitting across from her said.

“You think he’s dead,” Johanna stated.

The kid slowly nodded. “It’s looking that way, yes.”

She shook her head no.

“No?” Stitch questioned.

“Yep, no humans are dead,” she said.

“Did your friends tell you this?” the large, pale-skinned man asked, moving closer to where she was sitting, eager to know.

“They did,” she said. “They have the ability to track spirits that have recently departed the land of the living,” she explained. “And they’re telling me that no spirits have left the building.”

Stitch’s multicolored eyes bulged. “Are you saying that’s he’s still alive?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Johanna the Packman said. “And since I did you guys a solid, think I might get another chance at joining the team?”

T
he Archivist looked up from an ancient volume as Bogey’s rift opened into the informational storage room.

The room looked like a gigantic library today, row upon row of ancient books going off for countless miles in either direction.

In reality, the room was probably no bigger than your average office, but it appeared this way to help the Brimstone agents understand the enormity of the information stored within the supernatural receptacle that was called the Archivist.

As the room’s appearance looked like a gigantic library, the Archivist appeared in the form of the Network’s previous commander, Elijah Stone—Bram’s father.

“Can I help you?” the Archivist asked, closing the ancient tome that was representative of all the information collected by countless Brimstone agents throughout the centuries.

“Is he here?” Bogey asked, his rift closing behind him with a loud sucking sound.

“Is who here?” the Archivist asked.

“Bram,” Bogey said, looking around the room. “I . . . was hoping . . .”

“Abraham is not here,” the figure stated. From what Bogey understood, each new commander of the Network donated a piece of his soul essence, which was then joined with the complex spell that created the Archivist, and seeing as Bram’s dad was the last commander to donate a piece of his soul, this was why the spell of storage had taken this form.

Since Bram was the current commander, the Archivist should actually look like him, but he wasn’t interested in changing it. He’d told Bogey that he liked to be able to come down here, and see his father whenever he wanted.

“Is there something I can do for you, Bogey?” the magickal spell inquired. “Some information that I can provide?”

It hit Bogey like the intestines falling from the belly of a mud cow. Bram wasn’t here, and it was likely that he had been inside the room that had burned.

The Mauthe Dhoog stumbled, suddenly feeling light-headed.

“This is awful,” he said, his voice cracking.

He didn’t know what to do, and felt himself begin to panic.

“What is awful?” the Archivist asked dryly. He removed another ancient tome from a stack on the side of his desk and opened it.

“I think Bram is dead,” the small creature said.

“Abraham is dead?” the figure asked.

Bogey nodded, tears suddenly burning in his eyes. “I really think he is.”

“Most unfortunate,” the magickal spell in the shape of Bram’s father said, going back to the information stored inside the manifestation of an ancient book.

“Most unfortunate?” Bogey asked, feeling himself becoming angry. “Is that all you can say?”

The Archivist looked up from his work.

“Is there anything else I can provide for you?”

Bogey wasn’t sure exactly what he was expecting from the Archivist, maybe some hint that a piece of Bram’s father was still somewhere inside the magickal spell, but it didn’t appear to be there.

“No,” Bogey said, lifting his hands to weave a rift so that he could leave this place. “I just thought that maybe since you record information and stuff that you might want to know.”

“Thank you,” the magickal spell said, looking back down to the book beneath him on the desk.

“Don’t mention it,” Bogey responded, stepping inside the newly conjured rift. He didn’t even know where he was going now.

And he really didn’t care.

5.
B
RAM REMEMBERED THE FIRE.

The scene repeated through his feverish thoughts; he saw the strange, demonlike creature with the protruding belly—a belly filled with fire—and before he could even react, the bulging stomach exploded, filling his quarters with flame.

He gasped at the memory of how even in his Spectral form, the fire had managed to burn him.

Lying in the darkness, he lifted his hands up to his face to inspect the damage. His skin was pink, badly singed, and he hated to think of the fate that would have befallen him if he hadn’t been removed from the burning room.

I was rescued.

The thought suddenly filled his head as he gathered
his wits together, sitting up in the dark, attempting to adjust his eyes to the nearly pitch black.

He was in some sort of chamber; a cave perhaps. The air was thick with a heavy, musty smell that made him almost certain he had been brought to a cave.

But by whom?

It was an answer that he had every intention of finding.

Carefully he rose to his feet, careful not to hit his head on the low ceiling. Bram reached out, letting his fingers explore the walls. They were damp, covered in a coating of slime and what appeared to be some kind of thick moss.

At first he’d entertained the idea that maybe Bogey had been the one to save him, dragging him off to who knew where, and depositing him someplace safe where he wouldn’t be eaten by the local inhabitants, but it didn’t feel as though he’d passed through one of the Mauthe Dhoog’s rifts.