Queen of Wands-eARC (29 page)

* * *

“Trying to give a cat a bath in the shower is a baaad idea,” Barb said, toweling her hair as she walked out of the bathroom. Lazarus darted past her, yowling.

The agents had wanted to question them immediately but they’d given in to the argument that both needed a shower badly. So the foursome had returned to Barb and Janea’s hotel. Barb and Janea had driven in a different car by mutual agreement with the agents. Their rental car now smelled like rotting skunks.

“Cedar said you were all dead,” Randell said. “At least what we could get out of him. He’s nearly as bad as Thane. All he’d do was scream about blackness and repeat that you were all dead.”

“Which was why there wasn’t a welcoming committee,” Janea said. “O ye of little faith. Actually, that’s
exactly
what ye are.”

“So what was it?” Graham asked.

“Not sure,” Barb said.

“It wasn’t a Shambler,” Janea said. “Underestimated the threat again. It didn’t respond to the Jagana spell or the Jugu powder, which a Shambler would have. And Shamblers don’t have those eyes. I’m going to have to call a researcher at the Foundation to see if they have a clue. But the good news is, it’s dead. Which, I suppose, explains why you got the Calling. If I’d gone in there expecting a Shambler we all
would
be dead.”

“The professor is,” Barb said, shaking her head. “I should have listened to Lazarus.”

“No sign of the girl?” Randell asked.

“There were three openings off of the lair,” Barb said, tightly. “All used. We had a dead team member, one who was catatonic, and neither Janea nor I were cave experts. I turned the penetration at that point.”

“In case it sounds like we’re being ungrateful,” Graham said, looking at Randell sharply, “good job on taking out whatever that thing was. And thank you for recovering the professor and Th—” He paused as his phone beeped, looked at it, and flipped it open.

“Agent Graham… Yes, sir. You’re sure. Yes, sir, right away.”

He closed the phone and looked at Barb with a flat expression.

“You’re sure this thing is dead?”

“All are not dead that sleeping lie,” Janea said, her brow furrowing. “But it’s as dead as anything like that can be. Why?”

“We’ve had another attack.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Your creature has been identified,” Augustus said over the video link.

Janea had sent a report to FLUF before heading to bed, and the next morning she and Barb had headed back to the FBI forward base after a brief stop to drop off the rental car and pick up a new one.

Graham had headed to the site of the new attack, so it was Barb, Janea and Randell receiving the call.

“The creature is a
skru-gnon
.”

“A child of foulness?” Janea said, her eyes wide. “Oh, no, no, no…”

“And what is a…
skru
…” Barb asked. “That’s Tibetan again, right?”

“A
skru-gnon
is an unholy mating of human and Old One,” Germaine said. “It is a way for Old Ones to enter into the world.”

“And more,” Janea said, her eyes closed. “The children of the foul are…” She paused and opened her eyes, slitting them slightly. “The children of the foul are the children of
gar gyi dbang phyug ma
, the mother of all demons.”

“Tiamat again?” Barb asked, exasperated. “Doesn’t she
ever
learn?”

“No,
gar gyi dbang phyug ma
is not Tiamat,” Janea said, shaking her head. “It was assumed at one time that they were the same but they’re not. The Gar is an Old One, not an Old God. It was said that it was banished—or vanished, the translation is tricky—from this plane before the first civilization of man arose. It was the creator of the Shamblers, they were of its essence but separate…” She paused as she saw the looks Randell and Barb were giving her.

“Okay, look, this is pre-science,” she said. “And it’s all legend. Tibetan and Incan and some from Basque, of all places. But this is the best guess on the part of the researchers. The Old Ones do not reproduce sexually. Most of them don’t reproduce, period. The Gar, though, can. It mostly reproduces asexually, fissioning off creatures like Shamblers. But the Shamblers cannot reproduce. All of the remaining Shamblers that haven’t been destroyed were created from the essence of the Gar.”

“So what’s a
skru
…” Barb asked.

“
Skru-gnon
,” Janea said. “A child of foulness. The Gar can, somehow, induce reproduction in human females. Only humans, not animals. Through them it can produce a mixture of Old One and human, an unholy union, as Augustus said. They are much more powerful than Shamblers or any of the other creatures it produces by fission. They may be the souls of Old Ones brought to this plane.”

“So that…thing,” Barb said, closing her eyes.

“Was born out of the body of a woman,” Janea said, her face firm. “The worst possible sort of rape, the highest violation of the credo of my goddess. If Freya had a fraction of the power of the White God, she’d be turning up in
person
to kill this Old One.”

“The worst part is that they can, in turn, reproduce,” Germaine said. “They can only reproduce by…the term means ‘breaking selves,’ which is assumed to be fission. But that means they are able to once again flood the planet with their minions. And the
skru-gnon
are, of themselves, powerful and fell creatures. However, there has not been a child of foulness found on earth since the very dawn of history. There are indications that, yes, the Old Gods battled the Old Ones for power on this planet and won in the very dawn of man. Gods versus the Titans is the most commonly known myth. If so, there should be
no
skru-gnon
on earth: they would have never allowed them to remain. But now there appear to be at least two.”

“Which means that someone has managed to bring the Gar back,” Janea said. “And if so, we are all in serious trouble. That means that the stars have aligned: the Old Ones are returning.”

* * *

“We need to figure out where these things are being produced,” Barb said.

“That’s pretty tough,” Randell replied, thoughtfully. “Okay, I’m trying not to get totally weirded out by the conversation, but here goes. Let’s say that this was your run-of-the-mill serial killer.”

“We could wish,” Janea said.

“They’re bad enough,” Randell replied, darkly. “But this is about that sort of investigation. We’d look for specific clues as to the person’s identity. DNA, trace materials like fibers, car tracks.”

“Well, the thing makes tracks,” Barb said. “Problem being, you have to follow it through caves. I’m not sure how many more cave teams I want to lose.”

“At one level, I’m thinking as many as it takes,” Randell said. “But that’s not the point. The point is, there would be clues as to where they came from. Who they are. Where they live.”

“But with these things…” Janea said.

“Yeah,” Randell said. “They don’t have fingerprints. They don’t have ID. They don’t use cars. I think we’re just going to have to go through as many cave teams as necessary to find the lair.”

“Maybe not,” Barb said. “Look, Janea, what do we know about the Gar?”

“Not much,” Janea said. “And I’m working off of rusty memory. I’ll get Chao Lin to send me a full download on it. But…It’s large. I mean
really
big. The size of a mansion or maybe even a factory. It’s going to be noticeable if it’s above ground.”

“Does it eat?” Barb asked. “Drink? Defecate?”

“I’m not sure if it defecates,” Janea said, smiling slightly. “But it eats. That’s one of the things that is mentioned. It was mostly fed captives but it is generally carnivorous. Very carnivorous. One of its alternate titles translates as something like the Stomach That Walks.”

“So it has to be getting food from somewhere,” Barb said, musingly. “How did it get here?”

“That’s a puzzler,” Janea said, shrugging. “There’s a summoning spell in
De Voco Turpis
, but I know it doesn’t work. It’s been tried, trust me.”

“Who would try to summon something like this?” Randell asked, angrily.

“Who would kill a dozen, a hundred, women?” Janea asked. “The Gar gives its earthly acolytes power. Power over others, money, you name it. Anyone crazy enough and ambitious enough. And smart enough. There have been attempts to summon the Gar for centuries. Someone finally managed.”

“They’d have to have some pretty serious occult knowledge,” Barb said, crossing her arms and looking at the far wall. “That’s the point. The Gar doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It was summoned by someone with serious occult knowledge and access to some pretty obscure texts, at a guess. That’s the first point. Second, they’ve got to be somewhere in the vicinity. These things didn’t travel here from California. Third, it has to eat. A lot of food, probably meat, is going to nowhere.”

“Okay,” Randell said, nodding. “Now we’re cooking. You’re getting to our meat, if you don’t mind the pun. So we need to start looking for large food stocks going nowhere, who has been accessing obscure occult texts in this area and who in this area, has that sort of occult knowledge.”

“And I’m thinking that the ichor might tell us something,” Janea said, musingly. “I mean, it’s biological trace material. There’s all sorts of things you guys do with that these days. Right?”

“True,” Randell said, then frowned. “The good news is, I know who the samples got sent to. We’ve got our own local lab, which isn’t normally the case. And our blood sample guy is a real wizard at anything along the lines of biological samples.”

“Your body language is screaming that there’s bad news,” Janea said, smiling.

“Yeah,” Randell said, grimacing. “The bad news is, it’s Stan.”

* * *

“Stan, tell me you have something,” Randell said as the threesome walked into the lab.

Most FBI offices, even regional offices, which Knoxville was, do not have a major forensics department. Knoxville was unusual for two reasons. The first had to do with its proximity to Oak Ridge. During WWII, keeping German spies away from the Manhattan Project was a major priority for the FBI. And during the Cold War the priority was nearly as high.

With the thawing of the Cold War, it would have only made sense to dial back on some of the facilities in Knoxville. However, a combination of bureaucratic finesse and long-term congressmen had kept the Knoxville office at nearly the level of its heyday.

The second reason was less political and much more mundane. The University of Tennessee, also based in Knoxville, had one of the premier forensics departments in the United States. The Knoxville office could, therefore, draw upon top-flight students from the UT department and worked as a cross-pollination point with UT forensics.

The Knoxville FBI forensics department was, therefore, second only to Quantico in its level of knowledge and skill. And it arguably had a slight advantage in pure biologicals.

Unfortunately for the field members of the local office, the advantage rested mostly on the slightly stooped shoulders of one Stan Robertson, PhD.

“What complete moron sent this foul stuff to
my
lab?” the lab tech shouted, waving a vial in the air. “Blood, yes! Epithelials, of course! Saliva, urine, body parts, naturally! But it would take a moronic Republican—oh, sorry, oxymoron!—It would take a Republican to send this idiotic hodge-podge to me! And I note that the sample bag is signed by one Special, as in ‘I took the short bus to school, Agent Randell Smith!’ So you would be the moron,
ey
?”

Stan Robertson was five foot seven, sixty-ish, with thinning light-brown hair going gray and a lean, muscular figure. His face also turned beet red when he was angry. As he was much of the time.

“That would be me,” Randell answered evenly. “So you don’t have anything?”

“What is this stuff?” Stan shouted. “It is not, let me make this plain, any of the above, ey? It’s not even degraded human biologicals. Nor any mammal. I haven’t gotten through the full spectrum of reptiles, fish and amphibians, ey?”

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Randell said. “By the way, Stan Robertson, PhD, Mrs. Barbara Everette and Doris Grisham. Dor…Miz Grisham prefers to be called Janea.”

“Whatever,” Stan said. “There are two distinct samples. Very distinct. If I was to make a bet, they’re two different
species
! The DNA is just
bizarre
. The cell structure is as alien as anything I’ve ever seen.”

“There are cells?” Janea asked.

“Yes, there are cells,” Stan snapped. “If you can call them that.” He walked to a monitor and flipped up an image. “You want to tell me what that is?”

The cells on the monitor were stellate in shape and appeared to be almost jet black.

“That was in this junk,” Stan said, waving the vial again. “Then there’s this!”

The second picture was of more cells, but curved like a banana. The only similarity was that they were, again, black.

“That was from the first sample I got,” Stan said. “And those were really weird. They were reproducing like mad. I was afraid I had a pathogen on my hands but they weren’t infectious in any normal test. But as long as they had a food source they continued to reproduce. They would consume just about anything, proteins, agar, sugars, but they had a real fondness for potassium enhancements. Don’t get me into doctrine of types, I’m not a Christian whack-job, but they went crazy over banana. Continued to reproduce down to minus one hundred degrees Celsius, and they don’t degrade until four hundred degrees Celsius. Getting complete clearance of them is going to be a job, let me tell you.”

“Internal cell structure?” Janea asked.

“Which one?” Stan asked. “The banana cells are less odd. They actually
have
mitochondria. There are some structures that might be equivalent to Golgi bodies but for the rest I’m stumped. They have DNA but not nuclear DNA. The star cells are semi-viral—that’s the best I can do. They don’t have mitochondria, and how they process oxygen without mitochondria is a good trick, they don’t have nuclear DNA, they don’t even have bacterial
ring
DNA, and they don’t seem to have any internal structure at
all
. They’re closest to a coronavirus but they’re
not
coronaviruses. I don’t know what they are. Alien is the best I can do, and that’s as good as you’re going to get.”

“That’s from the second attack?” Janea asked. “The stellate cells, that is?”

“Second sample, yes,” Randell said. “You know what he’s talking about?”

“Uh-huh,” Janea said, distantly. “That means it’s probably not a
skru-gnon
. Interesting.”

“What in the blue blazes is a shu-gnon?” Stan yelled. “What is this…” He paused as one of the machines started beeping urgently and walked over.

“Now that’s odd…” he said, rubbing the back of his head. “That’s… Okay, that’s impossible.”

“What?” Janea asked, walking over to the machine.

“The banana cell,” Stan said, gesturing at the readout. “It has human DNA.”

“I thought you said it
wasn’t
human DNA,” Randell said, walking over and looking at the readout.

“It’s not,” Stan snapped. “Anybody but a moron would know that! But it has
some
human DNA and that sounds really really stupid. Wait…this is
impossible
!”

“It’s a match,” Janea breathed.

“It’s
not
a match,” Stan shouted.

“Okay,” Janea said, her voice tight. “It’s a
near
match.”

“What?” Randell said. “Would either one of you make some sense?”

“None of this makes sense,” Stan shouted. “It can’t be…It’s…”

“Would you hit the link, please?” Janea asked, pointing at an icon. “Or do you want me to do it?”

“Fine,” Stan said, hitting the icon.

The image of a young black woman appeared, a mug-shot photograph. Thin and with a worn face, probably from heavy drug use.

“Lorna Ewing,” Randell said. “Street name, Fantasy. Missing person, Louisville, Kentucky, probable foul play. This thing’s…related to her?”

“Sibling or child,” Janea said. “Let me be clear. Child.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” Barb said, shaking her head. “I had hoped you were wrong.”

“Okay,” Stan said, calmly. “I am missing pieces of information. I do not
like
to be missing pieces of information. I cannot do my job if I’m
missing pieces of information
!”

“Are you going to shout about ‘impossible’ and ‘morons’?” Janea asked, sweetly.