The House (21 page)

There’s no
entrance way to the dungeon. It’s like whoever designed it decided
that anyone who went down there wasn’t going to be spared anything.
The corridor at the bottom was actually warmer than the staircases
because people worked down there. I had to shake my head to rid it
of memories that threatened to overwhelm me. It wasn’t just the
sight of the long corridor and heavy metal doors that had me
shivering, it was the other, stronger, sensory memories.

The smell of
blood and burning flesh was so faint that if I hadn’t known it was
there, and had the visual memories to prove it, I wouldn’t have
noticed. I had a feeling Marlow could smell it too; they cleaned
but there was no hint of bleach. I knew that they weren’t hurting
anyone at that moment. At least, they weren’t bleeding anyone
because when they did the smell got worse.

We stopped
outside the third door and Jalas unlocked it. He stepped aside and
waved us inside, grinning at me as I passed. I remembered seeing
that grin as we cracked the last person I’d ever ‘worked’ on. He
was happy - job satisfaction at its best. I’d thrown up. The man
had been as close to evil as they come - he’d slaughtered three
families and we were given the job of finding his accomplice. The
things I’d seen in his mind pushed to the surface and I fought to
keep them down.

There were
five people in the room; they were all sat down but none of them
were chained. I wasn’t sure what the point of it all was. If the
Covenant was grandstanding I was going to be annoyed. If it was my
grandfather playing games I was going to be pissed.

There were
four men and one woman sat in old wooden chairs. They were nervous
but not scared. I’d have been scared. Then again, I knew what
happened in these rooms. Most of the Covenant avoided the dungeons
at all costs; they had no wish to know what was done in the name of
keeping them safe. I’d been thrown in at fourteen.

“What are we
doing here?” Eddie stood dumbfounded in the middle of the room
looking at the people in the chairs. He had clearly figured there
was something going on but couldn’t quite get his head around the
idea of a dungeon. I found that the majority of people couldn’t,
even if they knew it existed.

“You should
really learn to ask questions sooner, Eddie,” I replied in the
sharpest voice I could manage. “I’m guessing the vampyre that
attacked us belonged to this lot.” I gestured loosely around the
room. There was a collective intake of breath from the prisoners at
my nonchalant tone.

“Yes,” Jalas
grinned. “I thought you might want to help interrogate them.” He
said interrogate like it was sexual - of course, with him it damn
well might be. I had a feeling that Jalas had more than a little
bit of a sadistic streak.

“I told you I
was finished interrogating when I left four years ago. What makes
you think that anything’s changed?” I turned to him as I spoke. If
I didn’t look at the prisoners maybe I could ignore that they were
there. He shrugged. “You didn’t bring us down here to interrogate
them. You brought us down here to air my secrets to everyone,” I
added. He smiled wider.

“What is going
on?” Hercules asked.

“I believe
that Jalas is trying to tell us that Trix worked here,” Marlow
said. He gave Jalas a hard look. “Am I right?”

“Yes, she
worked here ... with me.” I could hear the edge of a laugh in his
voice. I heard Eddie’s sharp intake of breath and sighed.

“We all had
troubled pasts. I’m sure that nothing Trix has done is worse than
what I do,” Marlow said. “Now, you said the vampyre belonged to
these witches. I say we find out how much help they had.”

“No, we don’t
need this. You don’t know what you’re asking,” I said, my voice
surprisingly quiet and calm. I felt anything but calm, the memories
were coming faster and faster, threatening to overwhelm me. I saw
face after face flash through my mind, and they weren’t all my
memories either. I saw people Jalas had hurt over the years with
his pride colouring every memory, I saw faces from everyone’s
memories all mixed up together, moving so fast I couldn’t tell one
from the next. “No!”

“Trix?”
Stripes had her arms around me and I hadn’t noticed her doing it;
my hands were over my eyes in an attempt to stop the images.
Stripes touch did anything but help - the images intensified,
focusing on her. I saw every person she ever met flash through my
head in a few seconds. My head felt like it was going to split
open.

I found myself
lying on a stone floor with no knowledge of how I got there. It
took a moment for me to remember where I was, or had been, and what
had happened. The onslaught of other people’s memories had
thankfully stopped but I felt weak and dizzy even lying on the
floor. It takes a lot to feel dizzy lying down.

It took a lot
more effort than it should have to even open my eyes. I saw a stone
ceiling and walls and, out of the corner of my eye, part of a
chair. I seemed to be getting my senses back in pieces. I could see
but I didn’t want to move my head. My body felt heavy and
useless.

Gradually a
sense of smell started, the smell of stone mixed with the smell of
people. Then, underlying it, the smell of blood. It made me want to
get up off the floor really badly but my body didn’t seem to be
working very well right then.

My sense of
touch intensified at the same moment as my hearing returned. I
could feel the stone floor with new-found clarity, more than I
should have been able to. The sensation faded as I concentrated on
my ears and the sounds that surrounded me. It took a while but I
identified the sounds as talking. I couldn’t yet decide which
language they were speaking in, just that the sounds were speech.
Purposeful sounds from a human mouth.

“Is she
alright? I thought I saw her open her eyes. Trix? Trix, are you
alright?” A voice making sounds that I managed to identify as
English. It was a familiar voice, one I’d heard before, now if I
could just remember where. “Trix, wake up.”

Wake up? I was
awake; I wanted to tell the person that I was awake. I couldn’t
work my mouth; I could open my eyes. I opened my eyes and stared
right into Stripes’ face; at least I knew who the voice belonged
to. I could hardly believe I’d forgotten. I was struggling with the
concept of separate people with separate minds. My foray into
everyone else’s memories seemed to have impeded my own sense of
self. Or rather, my sense of individuals at all - it was as if
everyone had been mushed together.

I opened my
mouth. Talking required you to open your mouth. It was difficult
and strange, like I was trying to open someone else’s, someone with
muscles not quite the same as mine. I breathed in. Air ... I needed
more air for talking but I overdid it and started coughing. The
coughing brought me upwards until I was sitting supported by many
hands that I couldn’t identify. When the coughing subsided I looked
around. It was easier to move than it had been but still stiff and
uncoordinated. My arms and legs felt like someone had filled them
with lead.

“Hello,” I
said. It came out more like ‘heeow’ and I realised I’d forgotten to
make the ‘l’ sound. I tried again. “Hello.” Better, more like two
words than one, but understandable at least. It was like I didn’t
recognise my own body; my muscles and the familiar patterns they
followed to do basic things were hazy and unfocused. “What
happened?” There, that sounded like normal speech. Not quite my
voice but close.

“Trix!”
Stripes practically threw herself to the ground taking me into her
arms so fast and so strongly that I choked again. She relaxed her
hold minutely so I could breathe and think again. My thoughts were
slow, languid, rolling around in my head and not quite connected. I
had to get them in order. I knew that; I just wasn’t really clear
on the how.

“What
happened?” I asked again, in case the first time had been
unintelligible.

“That’s what
I’d like to know.” A voice I was sure I didn’t know this time -
there was no spark of recognition to grab hold of.

“Who you?”
Damn it, that wasn’t right. “Who are you?”

“I’m one of
the completely innocent people you had brought down here so that
you could invade our minds. It is ludicrous, you have no…”

“Imogene.” A
warning growl of a voice but one I recognised all too well. Jalas.
Jalas when he was angry, or scared, which came out as anger anyway
with him.

“Jalas, what
happened?” I felt for sure I’d get an answer from him. He liked to
play games but he normally answered direct, straight-forward
questions. Not that the question was straightforward but at least
it was direct. I realised that I was rambling in my thoughts. I had
to think; I had to organise my mind but it was still slow and yet
my thoughts jumped from one to another with almost no
connection.

“I felt you in my head ... then you screamed and collapsed.
You were only out for a minute or so though.” I looked around
towards the voice so that I could see the face to go with it. I
liked Jalas’ face. I shook my head. I
had
liked Jalas’ face. Then I’d left
and moved on. He always looked like a youngish man with a strong
nose and square jaw. His face was the most masculine face I’d seen
outside of a computer simulation. It looked like the faces on the
roman statues.

I had to shake
my head again to get my thoughts back on track; I’d never lost it
this badly before. It wasn’t like it had been building and it
wasn’t like me to lose control suddenly. I’d briefly lost control
when I was attacked by the vampyre because of all the chemicals
flooding my system, but there had been no warning this time. No
impending panic, nothing. I’d never even come close to doing
anything like that before either. It was like I’d had a huge power
jump but that just didn’t happen, ever, to anyone.

“Someone
please explain what just happened to me because, trust me, nothing
I did was on purpose.” I stared at each person individually, the
five I knew and the five I didn’t, silently begging them to give me
an all-encompassing, brilliant explanation for everything. None
came.

“Your power
was not so strong four years ago,” Jalas said unhelpfully.

“I know
that!”

“Your power
should not have increased, not by this much at least. A little
could be because you were only eighteen the last time I saw you and
power can keep growing until you reach your peak. But your power
feels a lot stronger than before. You have never accessed more than
one person’s mind so deeply before. In fact, it is something that
only the most powerful telepaths can do,” Jalas said in a voice
that he could have used to discuss breakfast or what the weather
was doing.

“I thought
grandfather decided I was just an empath, not even a telepath,” I
replied. “You don’t ever gain enough power to go from one to the
other.”

“What are you on about?” Eddie asked. I’d forgotten that for
shifters these names and definitions meant almost nothing. They
stayed away from witches as much as possible. At least the fact
that I could understand them meant that my head was starting to
work at normal speed again. “Empath? Telepath? You’re a shifter ...
a l
é
aina.”

“But she is a
true-born,” Marlow said before I could voice my amazement that
Eddie knew the proper Greek name for my second form. “She has power
from both parents, like Shayana and I.”

I nodded. “It
gets complicated but when I was fourteen and they tested my power
they decided that I was mostly shifter with empathic ability thrown
in. But I still don’t think I could be a telepath. I didn’t hear
thoughts, just memories, thousands and thousands of memories.” I
was looking at Jalas; I had a feeling that some of the memories I’d
seen didn’t fit with the age he professed. Some of the things I’d
seen suggested that he was much, much older than seven hundred and
three. I had a distinct impression of statues that looked a lot
like his face and bore more than a passing resemblance to the ones
in the museum. Those roman statues.

“But an empath
cannot enter more than one mind,” Jalas said.

“And a
telepath cannot see auras,” I added. “That’s what I do.”

“Couldn’t she
be both?” Hercules put in. “I mean it’s all magic right,
immeasurable, so why can’t she be both?”

“Because
nobody has ever been both,” Jalas explained. He was slipping into
his lecturing voice. I shivered. He didn’t lecture about magic; he
lectured and taught about torture and nothing else. “We have been
analysing power as witches for thousands of years and never in all
of our observations, of which I have read every one, has there ever
been anyone who fits into more than one category. That’s why we
have categories; if people fitted into several of them it would be
pointless.” I caught the edge of a lie in his voice but it was so
faint I let it pass.

There was
something about Jalas that was wrong, different. I wondered at
never having noticed before. I didn’t like that I was beginning to
suspect that he was a couple of thousand years old himself. You
just don’t lie about having a couple of thousand years, it’s not
allowed. It would make him one of the oldest amongst us.

“Stop with the
witch lecture, it doesn’t matter. I’m going home.” I stood up, glad
that I stayed that way without any obvious swaying. The room only
span a tiny bit. I stayed very still for a moment before taking
Stripes’ hand, which was nearest, and heading for the exit with as
much dignity as possible.

“No, you’re
not,” Jalas said.

“Yes. I am,” I
replied firmly, my voice at last sounding like my own.

“No, this is
unprecedented. We need to put you through tests. You need more
training to deal with telepathic ability; it is different to the
training for empathic ability, longer, more intense…”