Vengeance (14 page)

"Huh?” He was bemused. Then shook his head when he realised she didn't know why he'd been so late home. “No, it's over.” A half-truth, making it sound as though he'd ended it. “I'm sorry. It got out of hand."

"You're bloody right it did...” Her voice trailed off. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I promised myself I wouldn't lose my temper. It looks like I failed there, too."

"What?” It was as if her words made sense on their own but not as a whole. Then he worked out what she meant. “No, it wasn't your fault."

"It must have been,” she said. “If it wasn't, why'd you do it? If I was a better wife...” Her voice trailed off again.

"I was a fool.” He felt even worse at her misplaced guilt than at his adultery. “Look, I'm really sorry. I can't undo what I did, but let's take a few days to calm things down. Stay at your mother's if she doesn't mind. I really don't want to give this bug to you or the kids."

"I'll look in tomorrow.” She looked so forlorn that he wanted to reach out, but it would have been misunderstood. She whispered, “Goodbye,” from the doorway, but he never heard her.

When she'd gone, he fell into an uneasy sleep and dreamt. He was on land again, this time in a park he and Brie had visited years before they'd had the children. But now it was Eve who walked around the gorse on the heathland until they came to a bench, close to a nearby village. In the dream, she leaned down and took him in her mouth, sucking vigorously. When he came, she lay there as if satiated. He became aware of a curious sensation, a sticky dampness reminiscent of childhood, when in desperation he'd wet himself. Eve lifted her head and smiled at him. The lipstick smeared all around her mouth was actually blood. He looked down in horror, at the blood pumping from an open wound in his lap.

The spellhound and Ben were well away from the city, the bike's headlight cutting through the darkness. It probed this way, then that, with the bike's movement. Beyond its reach, the darkness this deep was nearly absolute. But the spellhound could compensate, its vision extending into both the ultraviolet and infrared spectra. Ben watched where the light shone, whilst the spellhound peered into the darkness away from the light. One or the other of them should see their quarry.

Then Ben played the light across the shape perched on the summit of the submarine mountain. They were almost past before he could turn the bike around and focus the beam on the object. It was part of an engine, but the design was unfamiliar to them both.

The spellhound tapped Ben on the shoulder. “We've found what we're looking for."

"We gonna to take her down?"

"First, there are some things you should know."

"Yes?"

"This will be dangerous and messy. The alien has property belonging to my principal."

"So ... what you've told me so far isn't the truth?” Ben said.

"Not the whole truth, no.” The spellhound paused. “It's probable the creature won't give it up without a fight. One or both of us may be killed.” The spellhound had no intention of letting the creature live if it had handled the spell but thought it better not to tell Ben that. “Take the bike and wait at a safe distance."

"No chance!” Whatever reservations Ben may have had about being lied to seemed to be overcome by the thought of being sidelined.

"You must. If I return I'll take you down there and show you, whatever it is. But if I fail, you must fetch help. If I don't return in an hour, sound the alarm, whatever the consequences. Please: We have no idea of these creatures’ intentions, or their abilities. If I fail, they mustn't survive. Agreed?"

After a long pause, Ben said reluctantly, “Okay."

"Then proceed."

Slowly, they inched down the side of the mountain. At intervals the beam would illuminate another piece of debris.

The spellhound kept watch in the darkness outside the beam, and it saw their objective first. The spaceship lay in the bed of the valley, apparently deserted. The hairs on the back of the spellhound's neck rose. It was not as dead as it seemed. There was life in there.

For two days Jacques shivered in bed. He heard Brie mutter, ‘Poetic justice,’ when she checked on him but didn't have the energy to respond. When she moved back it was into the spare bedroom. She called the healer and took him to the clinic. Every test failed to find a physical cause, and after twenty-four hours they conceded defeat and sent him home.

Brie gave in to his urging her to return to work, though she was clearly uneasy at doing so.

He slept most of the day and dreamt again. He was back in the market, but now it was empty. A stallholder appeared. It was Brie, horribly disfigured. Blood oozed from her ears, and her head was tilted at an unnatural angle, as if broken. She said, “Some primitive cultures believe that if you take the essence of someone, you capture their soul."

Hestyn appeared from behind a pillar, clutching a book. His mouth was bloody, and Dream-Jacques could see his tongue was mutilated. The boy motioned to him, ran his finger under a sentence, ‘There are more than forty different vampire legends, many of them contradictory.'

His other son, Danny, stepped out from behind a bookcase. His eyes were sightless, and he intoned. “Some believe dreams are coded messages."

Hestyn underlined another sentence in a book. And another. The litany of the bizarre went on and on and on until Jacques awoke, his mind reeling, worried he was losing whatever sanity he still possessed.

Somehow he dragged himself to the message wall.

He was back in the healer's clinic within an hour. They reran the tests but still found nothing. He heard them mutter ‘All in the mind.’ This time they kept him for forty-eight hours before they conceded defeat.

Brie took the next week off. The boys would stay with her mother until the healers could find what was wrong. Her concern had finally overwhelmed her anger at his infidelity.

Jacques dreamt for the last time. He was back in the house with the same dragging noises. Then footsteps approached. A door opened, and Eve entered. She was as lovely as always, but there was a cold inhumanity about her he had never seen before. What he'd thought was a fur coat was actually her hair, an unusually thick, orange-brown down. She stood upright, but a brushlike tail swished. Where her mouth should have been were whiskery tentacles.

"Hello Jacques."

"It's you, isn't it?” he asked.

"What is?” Her voice was innocent, but her smile was colder than a January night in the Arctic.

"All this,” he said. “The dreams."

"Oh yes, the dreams.” She laughed. “It was interesting, watching you grope your way toward the truth.” She snorted. “There's no such thing as a meeting of minds, at least ours."

"So much for Reynard getting worse,” Dream-Jacques replied. “That was just a pretext. My use to you, whatever it is, is over, isn't it?"

She laughed mockingly. “Not quite."

"So where does that leave me?"

"Don't get too righteous,” she said. “You'd prefer to think of me as some kind of monster. But as any woman would, all I want is to look after my family. I warned you I'd never leave Reynard. I warned you people get hurt. But all you could think of was yourself. Well, Reynard's going to recover, with your help."

There was a noise from the doorway, and Reynard wheeled his wheelchair into the room. Jacques looked at absolute nothingness.

The ship, two globes joined by a thin rod, was a ruin, parts scattered all over one side of the mountain, the aft section almost completely separate, a gaping hole at the front through which schools of tiny fish swam.

Slowly, checking in each direction, the spellhound swam towards the stricken vessel. The hairs on the back of its neck formed a stiff crest. Why it was so scared, it couldn't tell. There was the part of it that was calm and analytical, and that part barely kept it from regressing to a primeval beast, gibbering and capering in fear.

It swam toward the hole at the front, its heart beating faster with every stroke with which it neared the ship. It reached the gaping wound, and its terror lessened the moment it entered the ship. Experimenting, it leaned through the gap and felt its heart race again.
Ultrasonics
, it thought with satisfaction.

But there was more to it. There was something here; something old, injured, something—not evil, but simply
alien
in every sense of the word.

The spellhound stopped. In front of it swam a woman. As it studied her, her face changed. Then she became a man. The changes came faster and faster; man, woman, androgyne, man again.

"Succubus,” the spellhound said. “You'll have to try harder than that. There's nothing within me to latch onto. Or rather, there's too much. I contain multitudes. But I control them."

Snarling, the creature flung itself at the spellhound, who extended a claw, slicing into the creature's head. Retreating into androgyny, becoming a sexless doll that the spellhound thought was probably its true shape, the succubus retreated, oozing a pseudoblood, toward the back of the ship.

The spellhound followed it from the front part of the ship to the back, only stopping when it came to the fissure that nearly split the ship in two.

Curled in a makeshift nest was something clearly not of earth. It watched the spellhound through eyes like saucers, and whiskers waved above its mouth. It had four tentacles where arms and legs should have been.

The spellhound wondered why the creature showed no fear: Then as it swam toward the alien, it discovered why, as its mate flung itself from the shadows.

Jacques dictated to the voice wall. “Whatever my mental condition, I must assume I'm not completely mad. My strength is failing quickly, so I'm leaving this message; I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because I don't want her to spend the rest of her life not knowing what really happened.” He coughed, bubbles rising through the water.

"I woke from that dream even feebler than before. I worked it out; there were five days between dreams, then four, three—so, today or tonight I will dream again. Eve's magic is clearly linked to my dreams. Before long I fear I will sleep again, and this will be my last sleep from which I will never wake.

"I'll enter a dark world where I don't understand the rules, but where Eve does and can bend them to her will.

"I must stay awake to finish this, I must—"

At that instant the spellhound wounded the succubus, cutting the connection.

Brie found his lifeless body later, and with a cry of grief, covered him with her own but was too late to revive him.

The battle was short but fierce. The spellhound slashed with claws extended, ignoring the wounds it suffered from the creature's teeth and claws. A cloud of blood stained the water.

The spellhound seized the struggling alien in a grip that never weakened despite the creature's frantic struggles, though these gradually grew feeble.

This was the old woman's mystery customer. The spell was hard to recognise, it was so tainted by the alien's inhuman odour, but the spellhound caught the merest trace as the succubus, urged on by the alien, attacked again. The spellhound shrugged it off, never letting go of the alien.

Why the Spell of Succubation?
the spellhound wondered and realised with her reply the alien was telepathic.

We must feed. Without bait, how can we catch prey?
The succubus changed into a beautiful woman, then another spellhound.

"You waste your effort."

? The thought came.

"I'm neuter."

Radiating frustration and disappointment, the succubus reverted to its natural state.

"You must have been here for centuries."

We are long-lived. And don't need to feed often.
Images of a roller-coaster descent through first air, then water, fighting gravity and the ship itself. Then an eternity of isolation in an alien world and the knowledge that they would die alone and unmourned. Solitude, enervation, starvation. A lone swimmer taken and the realisation that here was sentience to dine upon.
But we need bait for our prey. The spell allowed us to create a creature that could better feed us.

"You feed on thought?"

More the energy of the brain.
There was something the creature was trying to hide. It was too easy, holding her now, although she still spasmed occasionally and, distracted, the spellhound's grip loosened slightly.

"You must have landed before The Interdiction or found a way of getting through the Bubble. They'd never have let you into the system any more than they would allow humans to leave.” The spellhound's curiosity was piqued.

No one's stopping your little humans from leaving their nest.
There was puzzlement in the alien's thoughts, but again there was the feeling that there was something else that the alien was trying to hide.

Before the spellhound could worry at the problem anymore, tentacles wrapped round its throat. The creature's mate. For a microsecond it cursed its curiosity, then fought back. Survival was everything.

Your thoughts taste strange
, the alien crooned in its mind. There was a momentary image of a stasis locker and a fly struggling in a spider's web.
We've had to live off near-mindless things in the sea. Grown used to strange delicacies.
The aliens had found the spellhound's weakness; not sex—curiosity. The spellhound slashed again and again with unsheathed claws. When it caught a vital organ or a major artery, the blast from the female's psyche almost blew the spellhound's brain apart, and even as the spellhound's organic parts shut down in shock, the second alien's grasp weakened momentarily from the psychic blast.

It was the moment the spellhound needed. Its inorganic backups took over, and it writhed and slashed and snapped with its teeth at the strange flesh. The alien was weakened, and that gave it impetus. It needed no second invitation but bit, growled and slashed, until there was nothing left. Then its backups shut down, and for a few moments it drifted motionlessly, completely senseless.