Imperium (Caulborn) (20 page)

Pestilence’s tone was patient, the tone of a teacher explaining something to a very slow student. “Famine kills the crops, I blight the animals. When untainted resources become scarce, people begin fighting. When people begin fighting, it’s natural that some of them die. So War gets his conflicts and Death gets his souls without ever having to lift a finger. We do all the hard work.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry to have disturbed your pets.”

“I do not wish to have to speak with you again on this matter, Corinthos. See to it that you do not interfere with the will of a Horseman.” He turned, the alley warping around his horse, and clopped away. He faded in a gray cloud a few moments later. I hastily stripped off my clothes and threw them into a trash can. Then I drew on the Urisk’s faith and immolated them. I glanced out of the alley and saw Megan’s Tercel coming back around the block. I waved at her and jogged out of the alley. She pulled up to the curb and I ran around the car as quickly as I could. Megan blushed as I slid back into the passenger seat.

“All right,” she said, keeping her eyes straight ahead. “Why are you getting back into my car wearing only your underwear?”

“That was Pestilence. Like Biblical Horseman Pestilence. If you’d gotten within ten feet of him, you could contract any disease known to man. Unknown too, I suppose.” I shrugged into my coat and rubbed my arms and legs to get some warmth.

“And you decided to get naked with him?” Megan asked as she turned up the car’s heat.

“No,” I said flatly. “I had to burn my clothes. Anything that was in the open air around him would’ve been at risk.”

“I’ll get you back to medical,” she said as she started to drive. “Will I need some sort of decontamination, too?”

“No,” I replied. “We only need to worry about things that were exposed to him directly. As for me, I’m immune to diseases. It’s a side benefit of what I am.”

“You mean gods don’t get to call in sick,” Megan said, a hint of a smile on her lips.

“Something like that,” I replied. “Once I get some fresh clothes, we can go check out the Lucille’s apartment. Hopefully Gears will have turned something up, too.”

I checked my watch. Just after 10 a.m. I’d already fought golems, met with a lying doctor, talked with a rat, met one of the Horseman of the Apocalypse and burned my clothes. And the day was just starting.

We got back to HQ. Jake didn’t even raise an eyebrow as I walked past in my leather bomber and boxers. It wasn’t the first time, after all, and quite frankly, he’s seen worse. Megan stopped to speak with Leslie while I grabbed a spare set of clothes from my office and headed over to Gearstripper’s workshop.

The only way to describe Gears’ shop is an environment of controlled chaos. One of the overhead fluorescents hung down by its wires, the bulb flickering. Bundles of cables, some of them as thick as my thigh, crisscrossed the room like a demented spider web. Little snippets of wire and cast off twist ties were all over the floor, and the handful of workbenches in the room were covered with old computer parts, mechanical engines, and some things that I probably couldn’t identify even with an instruction manual. I carefully picked my way across the room, trying not to get snagged on anything. I saw Gears squinting at a computer monitor about twenty feet away. “Hey Gears,” I called. “Turn up anything on Leevan?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “This is really weird, Vinnie. Really weird.”

“Must be bad for you to repeat yourself. What’s up?”

He gestured at the screen. “I did like you asked and went through all the records I could find on her. Leevan did medical school overseas; looks like she split her education across schools in Greece, Italy, Spain and Germany.”

“Why is that weird?” I asked.

“Because she’s supposed to have completed her schooling fifteen years ago. I broke into each of the schools she was supposed to have studied at, but from what I can see, her records were added within the last six months.”

“Some sort of computer glitch?” I asked, hoping for an easy, mundane answer.

Gears shook his head. “I already thought of database migration issues and a handful of other things. Everyone else who completed courses back in the 90's actually have record dates in the 90's. All her transcripts were added recently.”

“So she’s a fraud. Artificially created transcripts.” I carefully placed the glossy photo of Seamus McElery on the table. “Leevan touched this photo, Gears. See if you can get her fingerprints off of it and run those through the usual places.”

“Will do.” Gears turned away from the monitor and looked at the toaster-like device we’d recovered from Axlesnapper’s garage. His eyes had a distant look to them.

“Gears, you okay, pal?”

“Sorry, Vinnie. I’m just, I dunno, ever since you told me Axle was missing...” He touched the toaster. “I’ve been going through Axle’s encrypted data. Her ciphers are extremely sophisticated, but I’m pretty sure I can break them. I’ve been running a program to translate her hard drive into plain English.” He gestured absently to the toaster. “Thing is, this stuff we found at her garage, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’ve taken this thing apart and reassembled it four times now. I understand pieces of it. It has pumps, it has filters, it has gauges to measure pressure. But I can’t tell what it’s supposed to be for.” He tapped it gently with a clawed forefinger.

“It looks like a chest drain, the kind that medical companies put out for use in surgery. But that’s not right,” he drummed his fingers. The computer Gears had gestured to suddenly began flashing. He hopped over to it and began reading.

“Find anything good?” I asked.

“These are Axle’s notes,” Gears said. “One section of them, anyway.” He paused and the screen became a blur as he scrolled through the text. I stopped trying to read and decided to wait for his explanation. Gears started nodding. “Okay, she didn’t build this thing, she scrounged it.” Scrounge is a very polite gremlin term. To the rest of the world, the correct word here would be ‘stole.’

“She couldn’t figure out what it was for, either,” he said with a frown. “She spent about two weeks doing the same things I did, with no luck.”

“Where’d she get it from? Maybe that will help.”

Gears scrolled again. “Holy crap,” he said. “She got it from Leevan’s place, the Hope Clinic.”

I blinked. “What was she doing in there?”

Gears froze. “The Mother asked her to go.”

“Mother? Mille von Hassen?”

Gears nodded. “The Mother asked her to go,” he repeated. His voice was weak. He spent a few more minutes reading through Axlesnapper’s notes. “Axle doesn’t say why, but the Mother wanted her to keep tabs on what Dr. Leevan was doing. The Mother seemed to respect her, but was wary of something.”

“How did your mother know Leevan?” The possibility that Millie had shared the secrets of how to create gremlins with someone else was alarming.

Gears shook his head. “Not sure. Axle doesn’t say how they knew each other. Just that the Mother wanted her watched.”

“Were you in contact with Millie, too, Gears?”

“No,” he said, an unfamiliar hardness in his voice. “She lied to us. She made us do things that hurt other people. Even if she summoned us, I would not go.”

“Summoned you?”

Gears looked at me, then beckoned me closer. He tapped his ears. “Gremlins can hear in the hyper and subsonic ranges, you know that, right?” I nodded. “Well, there’s a certain frequency that even dogs can’t hear, but we can. The Mother would communicate with us on that frequency. It’s how she directed us during the war. She must’ve sent out a request to any gremlins who could hear her. She would’ve known that some of us came to the United States. I heard something one night, but thought I was imagining things. I must’ve been on the extreme edge of her transmission range. Axle must’ve been closer.”

“I thought you hated your mother, though. Would Axle really go back to her?”

Gears sighed. “Axle’s a more forgiving gremlin than I am, Vinnie. She used to talk about giving the Mother a second chance someday.”

I suppose I understood that. “Any chance there would be other gremlins working with your mother?” I raised an eyebrow. “Are there any other gremlins in Boston?” The only two I knew of were Axle and Gears.

One corner of Gears’ mouth quirked up. “It’s not like we hold conventions or anything, Vinnie. Axle and I were friends during the war, so we came over here together. But just because I don’t know about them, doesn’t mean they aren’t here.”

I nodded. It’s not like I had a half-god detection sense, either. Then something occurred to me. “Gears, have you spoken with Doc Ryan about the autopsy he did on that neo-gremlin? Can you see if these new ones can hear the same frequency? Maybe we can use that to listen in and see if we can find out where they’re being sent.”

“Good idea. I’ll rig up some radio equipment to that frequency, too, just in case.”

That reminded me of the night we went to Axle’s garage. “When that neo-gremlin screamed, you said it was loud, but I couldn’t hear it. Was it on that frequency?”

Gears paused. “No, it was close, but it wasn’t the same one. I’ve never heard anything quite like that before. I’ll set something up to monitor that one too.” He tapped another folder on the screen with one of his claws. “This one’s still encrypted. I’ll keep trying to break it, we might learn more.” Gears turned and looked at me expectantly as Megan came in. “You know, Vinnie,” he said with wide, innocent eyes, “a guy could get hungry doing all this work for you.”

I laughed. “All right, Gears. How about I have Petra make you a batch of that peanut butter fudge?” Gears stood up, his eyes brightening.

“Oh, now you’re talking, Vinnie.” He began bustling about his worktable.

Megan and I went back into her office. She stepped up to her white board and wrote “Lucille - Abducted by plant golems” with the list of the other missing people.

“Tell me again what you saw,” Megan said. I recounted the scene again, the plant men, Lucille’s limp form, the van that carried them away.

“I don’t suppose the rat saw the van’s license plate?” Megan asked.

I shook my head. “I didn’t include that in my instructions.”

She tsked. “Let’s check out the apartment. The kidnappers may have left something behind.”

The Caulborn keep files on all the paranormals in the area, so we knew the address and apartment number that Lucille had been operating from. We got inside and went up to apartment 7-C.

The door wasn’t locked. “Let’s see what’s inside.” Megan said as she swung the door open, 9mm in hand.

The apartment was furnished in a Victorian-goth motif. Based on our intelligence, the vampires used it as sort of a brothel. People could come in and have relations with a “vampire,” never realizing that they’d be doing it with the real thing. The thought turned my stomach. Did any of those people realize they were engaging in necrophilia? Was the vampires’ mind control that good? I pushed the thoughts from my head; they were just wasting time. But the vamps could take blood from those who willingly gave it, and many did. Since they weren’t actually preying on people, Galahad didn’t crack down on them for it.

We pushed inside and tried the light switch. Nothing happened. “They forget to pay the electric bill?” Megan asked as she produced a small flashlight from her magic shoebox.

“They probably don’t have lamps,” I said, pulling my own light out. “Ambiance for this sort of operation would be candles. Besides, vampires can see perfectly in the dark.” I opened the thick curtains to the room and dust puffed up into the air. They’d probably never been drawn before. There was a faint scent of flowers in the air. It was the same scent that the plant golems had given off. My heart rate picked up a notch. “Stay sharp,” I said. “I smell golems.”

I readied a burst of fire and Megan had her ray gun out as we did a circuit of the apartment. There were no golems in the place; it was utterly deserted. The scent those things left behind could linger, I guess. Once we were sure we were alone in the apartment, we resumed searching. Megan turned in a slow circle, her flashlight beam erasing the shadows in the room. “Hello, what’s this?” she asked, focusing her light on a small pile of black specks next to a chair.

I squatted down next to her and squinted at the specks. They looked like seeds. “No idea. Let’s gather a few and have Doc Ryan take a look.” I scooped some up and dropped them into a plastic bag from Megan’s evidence kit.

I moved into the kitchen while Megan went into the bedroom. The fridge was completely empty. The freezer had a handful of type AB negative blood packs. I ran my light around the apartment again. There were no signs of a struggle. I frowned. There was no way Lucille wouldn’t have put up a fight. Even if they’d pulled her right from her coffin, she’d have fought back. So these golems were either sneaky enough that they could surprise a vampire, or they were strong enough that they could easily overpower her. That made me shiver.

“I think I found what you’re smelling, Vincent,” Megan called.

I joined her in the bedroom. There were three long-stemmed red roses sitting atop a coffin. I wasn’t sure how we’d missed them when we did our first pass of the room.

“This isn’t enough to make the whole place smell of flowers,” I said. I picked up one of the flowers and sniffed it. Not surprisingly, it smelled like a rose. I handed it over to Megan. It animated and drove its stem into her wrist. She cried out as the stem thickened and burrowed its way further into her forearm, its thorns tearing her flesh. The color drained from the flower and Megan’s skin took on a faint green hue. Megan’s eyes rolled back in her head and she started to fall backwards. I caught her with telekinesis and pulled her into my arms.

She collapsed against me, whimpering. Her breathing was ragged and her body shook. The now colorless flower had driven even further into her arm; only the petals were visible above her wrist. “Hang on, Megan,” I said. I used my powers to lift her, then picked her up and started for the door. “Everything’s okay. You’re going to be fine, I promise.” The words were out of my mouth before I realized it. A burning, constricting sensation wrapped around my chest, and I staggered despite Megan’s weightlessness. A man appeared just a few feet from me, dressed in a rumpled black suit. He was built like a gorilla and almost as hairy. His glowing red eyes took me in, and he arched an eyebrow at me.