New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (30 page)

The Outsider agent got to within twenty feet of the waiting gangsters and undercover Legionnaires before something made him pause. Did he detect their presence, or notice the nervousness of the Tong members? Whatever it was, the time for subterfuge was over.

“Go go go!” Chastity shouted even as she moved. The Tong members scurried away in every direction like so many cockroaches. She closed the intervening distance as a swarm of Lady Shi’s star-shaped energy darts struck Mr. Night. The missiles didn’t seem to do much damage. A moment later, a telekinetic blast from Dark Justice slammed into the Outsider agent from above and crushed him to the ground.

Mr. Night was struggling to get up. Chastity kicked him multiple times with devastating power and precision. Her strength and resilience were now rated at 2.7 in the PAS scale. Even a Type Three parahuman should be feeling those blows.

Mr. Night moved. A fist lashed out at her, too fast to dodge. She blocked it with her forearm; bone broke. Chastity was vaguely aware she was flying through the air before a brutal crash brought her to a halt; the impact had flung her through a warehouse wall. From the hole she’d made with her body, she saw Lady Shi closing in behind a constant barrage of energy missiles, and Dark Justice hammering at the Outsider agent with a multiple energy blasts.

She hoped her companions could hold him long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

Macau, Republic of China, December 14, 2013

Christine shouldn’t have come.

The problem was, she had the best chance of shielding the team so they could spring the trap on Mr. Night. There were plenty of Legionnaires with anti-scrying powers, including Nebiru, but nobody was sure if they would be enough. Her ability to avoid detection by any and all forms of ESP still continued to amaze and amuse everyone. That made her the right person for the job. And, let’s face it, she’d have volunteered anyways. If anybody was going to kill or capture Mr. Night, it should be her. That rat bastard had set in motion this entire mess, beginning with messing with her father’s head back in 1919, among God knew how many other effed up things.

So she fought the rising tide of horror and pain inside of her and whacked Mark’s body once again, smashing him back into the ground, but not before he smacked Chastity Baal away. Christine hoped the super-spy would be okay. Lady Shi was going after Mr. Night with her energy shuriken, but much as expected she wasn’t putting a dent on him. Nebiru was concentrating in making sure their target – yeah, let’s think of him as a target rather than her dead boyfriend’s stolen body – couldn’t teleport away, and apparently that was proving to be hard enough he couldn’t do anything else. It was all up to Christine. She needed to hold him off until the rest of the Legion’s strike team arrived. ETA was under five seconds.

Mr. Night was on the move in under three seconds.

He couldn’t teleport, but, through Mark’s body, he could fly. And fly he did, avoiding her next telekinetic blast as he headed out to sea. Crap! “Target is airborne,” she reported. “I’m in pursuit.” She was supposed to hit him so hard he wouldn’t be in any shape to fly. Obviously she hadn’t hit him hard enough.

She took off after him at full speed, generating a sonic boom that inflicted a good deal of property damage along the way. Luckily, she could fly way faster than Mark ever had. If Mr. Night got far enough away from Nebiru, he’d be able to teleport once again. Couldn’t have that. She sent a full-force kinetic blast aimed at his side and sent him crashing into the water. No choice but to plunge into the sea after him.

It was dark as heck in there, but her Christine-vision was back, for short stretches at least, and at the cost of a wicked headache after more than a couple of minutes of use, but back nonetheless. The pitch darkness of the water became a collection of grays with bits of color here or there, where fish or even thick concentrations of bacteria – yuck! – showed up against the water. The biggest blob of light – all dotted up with the sickening un-life that was the stuff of the Outsiders – was clearly visible, still moving, more slowly than before because water just didn’t move aside as easily as air, but still moving pretty fast.

 
No you don’t
. She placed a force field ahead of him and he crashed into it, going at a good few hundred knots. She hoped it hurt. To make sure it hurt, she created another wall and smashed him between them, in her now-trademarked double-smack of death. A normal human or even most Neos would have ended up as a smear between the two flat planes of force, but Mark’s inhuman resiliency – the resiliency she’d given him – kept him alive, if not well. She flew/swam closer. The inevitable migraine was already getting started, and seeing the hideous darkness inside Mark’s body was making her sick. She had to…

Kill him. You have to kill him before he gets way.

I know
. But could she?

Mr. Night’s color palette changed, and Christine realized he was teleporting away. He’d gotten far enough away, after all.
No!

She slammed into him. She was still grappling with him when he took them into the dark place between places.

Uh, oh
, her brain piped in, but the rest of her was too angry to care. The first thing she did was to drop her Christine-vision; she didn’t want to see this place through it. She also held on to Mr. Night, and although he was inhumanly strong, he couldn’t break away. She’d wrapped herself in psychokinetic power, blended her shield and her aura and combined them into an invisible suit of powered armor, and when he tried to push her away, he found that he wasn’t strong enough.

“Let Mark go, you fucking asshole!” she screamed at him while they tumbled through the endless darkness.

The insane half-faced smile on his face didn’t change. “He is mine!” he roared back. “He let me in, freely and of his own free will!”

“Liar!”

“Does it matter? Don’t worry, you’ll be joining him shortly. We’re off to see the Masters! They will show you things, so many wonderful things!”

Uh, oh
. That definitely was a tour she didn’t want to take. She kept her hold on him, though, because if they became separated here, she had no idea how she’d make it back. Mr. Night was no longer fighting her. Instead, she felt his energies shifting subtly as he steered them somewhere else.

There was one thing she could try. Mark had cut the connection between them when he felt the Outsider Taint spreading inside of him. But that connection hadn’t been severed permanently. The dreams and the brief telepathic contact proved that. Problem was, she’d been trying for days to reach him again, and she’d failed every single time. Well, this time it was for all the marbles, so she might as well try again. She poured all of her will into reestablishing contact, hoping it would work now that they were at close range.

She felt something, a stirring on the other side of their connection. Mark had heard her. The other thing she felt was a burst of pain in her head, as if her skull had gone all Mount Vesuvius on her. Nothing else to do; she pushed once more.

Everything went poof.

The Darkling Plains, Time Undetermined

Bad. This is a bad place
.

As first impressions went, it was downright terrible. Christine landed on some rubble, bounced off it, and ended up half buried in a pile of gray sand, or maybe powdered ash. Everything around her was gray or black, no colors anywhere except for some stains on a wall that were rusty-red like dried blood. The sky was deep gray, almost black, with no sun or stars in evidence.

This was the place of her nightmares about Mark; her visions about Mark, to be accurate. While she’d been moving on and getting it on with John, Mark had been trapped in this colorless Hell. Which made her the Worst Significant Other Ever.

This was no time to wallow in self-guilt. Christine rose to her feet, and realized she was wearing the clothes, weapons and pointed ears of her favorite
World of Warcraft
character, the Elven rogue, Snipe. That only happened when she ended up in Dreamland. She hated being in that weird mental realm. You could suffer and die there, but it rarely took, which meant you could suffer and die over and over again.

Mark was trapped in a dream world created by Mr. Night. That had to be at least as bad as it sounded, if not worse. She had to find him.

She turned down the volume.

She could feel his near-panicked worry painfully loud and clear as well.

As if Mark’s thoughts had summoned them, several figures came around a corner and started moving toward her. Their leader didn’t have a head; well, he did, but he was carrying it under one arm. He was wearing a white outfit that matched the unnatural pallor of his skin. She knew him well, from brief but intense acquaintance. Archangel. None of the others looked familiar, except for a guy who reminded her of pictures of Joseph Stalin.

The hungry ghosts charged her, growling obscenities and brandishing assorted pointy things. Uh, oh cubed.

In Dreamland, the rules were different than in the real world, and they changed depending on the wishes and the willpower of the people involved. Christine didn’t have her usual superpowers while she was there. On the other hand, she wasn’t a powerless human, either. Her Snipe persona had a host of little roguish spells, at level 90 proficiency. She used a basic ability and vanished in a puff of smoke before the ghost mob reached her. The pack of d-bags milled around uncertainly while she tiptoed the eff away from them.

She was. There were a good dozen bands of marauding dream critters – they weren’t ghosts; she was pretty sure they were nothing but bad memories given form, just to torment the actual ghosts trapped there – but she stealthily slipped past them until she reached a section of ruins with three fairly intact walls; it had been turned into an impromptu fort by barricading the fourth wall with a pile of debris. Several people carrying a variety of improvised weapons stood within the fort; two of them were keeping watch by the barricade.

One of the guards was Mark.

She got a bit weak in the knees when she saw him, and her eyes stung. Seeing him should have been the best moment in her life, but amidst the intense joy Christine also felt sick to her stomach, and so guilty about everything she just wanted to curl up and die.

She set her feelings aside. There was no time.

“Here,” she said out loud, and dropped her stealth.

“Get in here, before the ghosts decide to rush you,” were his first words to her. Always practical, Mark was. Christine did as she was told; the others looked curiously at her but didn’t say anything. She only recognized one of Mark’s new friends – Medved, the big Russian dude, and Mr. Night’s previous stolen body.

Once inside, she and Mark looked at each other silently for a few seconds.

Mark was the first to break the silence. “What’s with the pointy ears? Love the outfit, by the way.”

“I become this gaming character of mine whenever I end up in Dreamland,” she explained.

“Neat. I’m gonna have to try that game one of these days. Do they have big dumb berserker types in it?”

“You could be an Orc, but they are Horde, and my characters are all Alliance. I suppose you could be a Dwarf.”

“I think they prefer to be called ‘little people’ nowadays,” he said in the deadpan tone she’d come to love.

She started to laugh, but burst into tears instead.

In an instant, he was there, holding her in her arms; he was shaking. “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said, and even though he had no face she knew he was sobbing as well.

“I thought you were dead,” she said. “I thought you were dead, Mark, we all did, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey,” he said, tightening his embrace. “Hey. You got nothing to be sorry about. You didn’t do this to me.”

No, but a few months after we buried your notional corpse, I ended up in bed with John Clarke
, she thought but didn’t say out loud, and made sure the thought didn’t seep through their mental connection. This wasn’t the time or place to fess up.

They stopped talking for a bit, and just held each other, probably longer than they should have. “You mentioned time was of the essence,” he finally said. “We’ve beaten off a ghost attack already, but they usually try to get us a couple of times a night. We’d better get down to business before they come back.”

Christine read between the lines: every day and night must be an endless series of raids and small battles, ending in victory or death by torture, only to start all over again the next day. A Tim Burton-Marquis De Sade collaborative version of Valhalla, torture-porn style. Just the kind of thing to appeal to Mr. Night.

“Okay,” she said, still holding on to him, and avoiding looking him in the figurative eye, because if she did she’d start crying all over again. “Out in the real world, I’m being teleported by Mr. Night, kinda like he did to Janus, back at that base in New York.”

“Fuck. Janus was never the same after that.”

“Yeah. Mr. Night said something about meeting his Masters.”

“How do we stop him?”

“Well, he’s using your body.”

“I know. I can tell.” From the way he tensed up, she knew he was thinking the same thing she was: her trip to an alternate timeline where Dark Christine Dark ruled the earth, side by side with her consort, Mr. Night – who resided in Mark’s body. History seemed to be repeating itself.

“Yeah, it’s all kinds of bad. On the other hand, it is
your
body. Maybe you can take the steering wheel away from him.”

“Yeah. I guess I might.” He paused for a second before going on. “Even if I reclaim control, I’m still fucked, you know that. The Outside stuff got into me. I remember what your other self said about that.”