The Brimstone Network (Brimstone Network Trilogy) (10 page)

“Your obligation to us will be fulfilled and I will do for you what Elijah Stone and all his specialists were unable to do.

“I will save your darling sister’s life.”

T
he first sign that his sister … that Claire was sick came at their parents’ funeral.

Tobias remembered it as yet another moment in his life when something that he loved was violently taken away.

It had been a cloudless spring day, the entire Brimstone Network showing up to pay their respects to two of their own.

He remembered standing in front of the memorial dedicated to them. There had been no remains, the rogue witches taking even that from him and his sister. An altar had been set up alongside the marble memorial, covered in a white sheet, with framed photographs of his parents during happier times. There was a photo of them on their wedding
day, one of them holding him as a baby, and of the newborn Claire as well, his young face peeking into the photo from the corner, ecstatic about his new baby sister.

That picture had always made him laugh.

Anyone who wanted to talk about Jeannine and Gareth was invited to speak. They all had the most amazing things to say. The members of the Network really loved his parents, but it did nothing to squelch the anger that was growing inside him.

The anger he was feeling toward the group for making him and his sister orphans.

It wasn’t long after Elijah Stone’s words of condolence were spoken, and the guests were slowly leaving him and Claire to their final good-byes, when his life was again turned upside down.

Standing before the marble sculpture of two winged angels holding hands in flight, he heard Claire’s sad, tiny voice tell him that she wasn’t feeling too well.

He’d gone to put an arm around her, to assure her that everything was going to be just fine, when he’d noticed the heat radiating from her body. Tobias remembered how he felt it coming through her clothes, and the smell of the material as they started to burn.

Tobias cringed remembering the sight of his little sister, kneeling in a blackened patch of grass, crying hysterically as he was dragged away by Elijah Stone.

They say he would have been killed—
incinerated
—if Stone hadn’t figured out what was happening, and pulled him away from her. But he had wondered so many times since if he might have been better off.

It took an especially equipped Brimstone medical team, with a combination of magick and drugs, to halt the progress of Claire’s condition, which they determined was some sort of supernaturally mutated virus placed upon her as a curse by the rogue witches.

A final piece of revenge against the people who wronged them.

The scientists, doctors, and magick users of the Network were forced to put her into a state of suspended animation while they searched unsuccessfully for a cure.

And Tobias waited, denied the love of his only remaining family member, spending hours, day after day, year after year, waiting for her to be returned to him.

Elijah Stone had promised that they were doing all they could for her, but Tobias’s hate for him and the Brimstone
Network continued to grow deep within the secret darkness of his soul.

Crowley had been drawn to this malice. The sorcerer had promised that he could make Claire well again. All Tobias had to do was betray the organization that had taken away nearly everything that he had ever loved.

It wasn’t much of a decision.

I
’d like to see my sister … before I go.”

While the Network was being attacked, Claire had been taken from the Brimstone medical unit and brought to Crowley.

“It is a crucial stage in her treatment,” Crowley explained. “And I would strongly advise against any interruptions.”

Tobias felt helpless. It reminded him of the time just after his parents had been slain.

“Begin your mission,” Crowley suggested. “Search through the empty remains of the Brimstone Network, be sure they really are no more. When you return, you will be reunited with your sibling.”

From the darkness around him Tobias heard the sound of movement. Instinctively he tensed, watching the shadows
for signs of danger. The beasties stepped, crawled, slithered, and flew out of the inky blackness of the underground chamber.

A spell of defense leaped to Tobias’s lips, and his hands started to glow as if afire.

“Calm yourself,” Crowley stated, a pale skeletal hand dropping down upon his shoulder. “They mean you no harm.”

A troll, bloodstained battle-ax slung over his shoulder, came to stand beside them.

“In fact, they will do anything that you say,” the sorcerer went on.

Tobias’ skin crawled with the sight of them; every creature of darkness that he was familiar with, and some that he was not. “So I guess they’ll be going with me?” he asked.

“More loyal troops have never been gathered,” Crowley said, a smile on his skull-like features.

Tobias sucked in a deep breath. He knew what was expected of him, what he had to do in order to get his sister back. He had already done the worst of it; all he had to do was get through this final part.…

He glanced over to where the representatives of the Circle had stood and saw that they had gone; four piles
of ash was all that remained to show that they had been there.

He looked back at Crowley.

“Gone,” the sorcerer stated, as if reading his mind. “Back to their respective worlds to await confirmation of the Network’s demise. You have a large job to do.”

Tobias nodded. “Then I’d better get going.”

He picked a patch of shadow and concentrated upon it.

The magick teachers of the Brimstone Network had said that he excelled at spells of shadow traveling, that in all their years they’d never seen anyone who could wield the spells that opened doorways from one patch of darkness to another so expertly.

Tobias always believed that it had something to do with the amount of darkness that he kept bottled up inside him.

He tossed the words of a spell at the shadow and a passage opened, shimmering like a pool of water as he moved toward it, the foul creatures that he was to command close behind.

“Wait!” Crowley cried.

Tobias turned toward the sorcerer with an exasperated sigh.

“I’d like to go too,” he began, one of his hands reaching
up to his left eye, the long fingers digging into the socket.

Tobias was repulsed as Crowley removed the eye. The sorcerer held it out before him, on the palm of his hand. The disembodied organ suddenly began to quiver and pulse, wings like those of a dragonfly emerging from the sides of the slimy orb. The wings began to flutter, drying the excess ooze from their veined, translucent surface and, within seconds, had taken flight, hovering in the air in front of Tobias.

“Just as good as being there,” Crowley said, his smiling face made even more grotesque by the missing eye.

Tobias simply turned away, heading toward the doorway into darkness.

A flying eyeball trailing close behind, and a gang of monsters at his heels.

T
he cottage was cozy, much larger on the inside than it appeared outside.

Stitch knelt by the stone fireplace, tossing in a few more logs to make the flames burn even higher to chase away the damp chill.

They’d found Stitch’s arm on their walk from the plane to the cottage. It had fallen in an enormous patch of pumpkins,
some resembling huge, misshapen orange boulders lying amongst snaking vines and withering weeds.

Bram had thought it odd, knowing that the pumpkin wasn’t native to England, and wondered if his father could have had anything to do with the planting of the autumnal fruit.

“That should do it,” Stitch said, interrupting his thoughts. The artificial man stood there before him flexing his newly restored arm.

“Is it all right?” Bram asked.

“A little numb,” Stitch answered, making a fist. “Should be fine shortly, once the shoulder and arm get reacquainted.”

Stitch had sewn the arm on himself using a needle and some thick fishing line they had found in the cottage. He’d also used some screws and a piece of wood to repair his broken leg. Bram half wished that repairs to his own person could be so easy; maybe the thought of what was to come wouldn’t have been quite so scary.

The study where his father had planned for future generations of the Network was cramped, filled with multiple file cabinets, a wooden desk, and a chair the only furniture.

Bram reached out to one of the file cabinets and pulled
open the drawer. It was stuffed with file folders, and he could imagine his father sitting behind the desk, reviewing the countless folders as he searched for just the right people to join his organization.

“This is where he did his reviews,” Stitch said from the doorway. “I guess nobody knew about this place. All the information in those files he gathered himself.”

Bram chuckled. “No computers.” He removed one of the thick files, leafing through it.

“He didn’t trust them,” Stitch said. “He believed it was too easy to pluck important information from the minds of machines or something to that effect.”

“I guess,” Bram agreed with a shrug, putting the file back. He pulled open more drawers; files, files and more files. “This is going to take forever,” he said, already feeling his eyes burn. “Did he leave us anything … any clues as to whom he might’ve liked better than others, or is it totally up to us to decide?”

Bram shook his head and ran an exasperated hand through his short hair. “I don’t even know where to start.”

He looked to Stitch for some words of wisdom and encouragement, but found the man staring off into space.

“Hello?” Bram asked, waving a hand in front of Stitch’s face. “Anybody home?”

Stitch blinked and shook his head. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I just remembered some stuff that was filed away for the appropriate time.”

“Anything to give us a hand with all this?” Bram asked, gesturing to the multiple cabinets.

“Oh, yeah,” Stitch said, and he left the study doorway.

Bram followed, curious.

“He was always a bit paranoid,” Stitch said from the living room. “But over the last year or so he suspected that something really wasn’t right, that something very much like what did happen, could.”

Stitch knelt beside the fishing tackle box that they’d found the needle and thread in, rummaging through it as he spoke. “He knew that if the old Network was somehow destroyed, a new Network would have to be formed, and it would have to be a new Network in more than just name.”

Bram didn’t quite understand. “More than just in name,” he repeated. “And what exactly does that mean?”

Stitch pulled a nasty-looking knife from the tackle box, one that would have been used to clean fish. “Exactly that, a new kind of Network would be needed.”

He strode back down the hall toward Bram, who backed into the office.

“All of these are fine specimens,” Stitch said, pointing at the file cabinets with the curved blade. “But not the kind of agents who could bring the agency back from the brink.”

“What’re you going to do with that?” Bram asked, eyeing the knife.

With one hand, Stitch started to unbutton his shirt. “I just remembered something.”

And before Bram could even utter a word, Stitch plunged the blade into his belly, cutting a long, vertical gash in his stomach.

“What are you doing?” Bram screamed, watching in disgust and horror as Stitch stuck his hand into his own stomach and pulled out something sealed in a plastic bag.

“Here are the people he was considering,” the patchwork man said, tossing sealed files onto the desktop.

“Here are the special agents of the new Brimstone Network.”

8.
TOBIAS COULD STILL HEAR THEIR SCREAMS.

He had just emerged from the passageway of shadow, into the now desolate Brimstone Network communications center.

Remembering how it had been.

Crowley’s winged eye hovered in the air beside his head—observing—its insect wings moving so fast that they appeared as a blur.

The bodies of the dead were gone—even though he could still hear them—removed by those the Network protected. He wondered how the world was feeling now, knowing that they no longer had anyone to help them against the things that went bump in the night.

Guilt roiled in his gut, almost painful. It wasn’t the
world’s fault that his parents had been killed, his sister afflicted with a mutating curse, but it would have to pay the price for his misery.

The beasties swarmed from the darkness, eyes twinkling hungrily. They smelled the death in this room and were excited by it.

But that was all that could be found, the lingering aura of the lives that were taken. Tobias didn’t want to be there anymore, and besides, if he was going to find clues to a contingency plan, it wasn’t going to be here.

The monsters were wild, scrambling over the communications equipment, searching for anything to satisfy their bloodlust.

“We won’t find anything in here, troll,” Tobias said to the stocky creature beside him, ax slung over his shoulder.

“Cracklebones,” the troll said as he moved toward the room’s exit.

“Excuse me?” Tobias asked, momentarily confused.

“Not troll … Cracklebones,” the leathery-skinned monster said, hooking a thumb at his broad chest.

The troll was telling him his name.
Wonderful
, Tobias thought.
Now I’m on a first-name basis with the creatures of darkness.

“Fine, Cracklebones,” he said, striding across the floor, avoiding the gaping holes that had been made by the invading, monster forces. “You’re more than welcome to stay in here with your … friends, but if I’m going to find answers, it’s not going to be in here.”

He walked through the doorway, out into the hall, and thought for a moment that he might actually be left alone, but Crowley’s eyes buzzed around his head, and then he heard the scrabbling of claws, and the thumping of many feet as the monsters—his soldiers—followed.

Power had been cut from most of the building, emergency lights the only source of illumination. Of course with no power, there were no elevators, so they were forced to climb the stairs. There were signs of violence even there, bloody handprints decorating the white walls as they ascended.