Specter Rising (Brimstone Network Trilogy) (4 page)

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. Really don’t have much of a choice.” Bram was about to explain how he never could have done it without them—his initial team—but Emily’s cell began to ring and she quickly took her small portable phone from her pocket to see who it was.

“It’s my folks,” she said, standing up and walking away.

Bram looked over to where Bogey had just been sitting and found the seat empty. His plate had been cleaned and added to the other three, and the Mauthe Dhoog was gone, likely having rifted away.

“So much for stimulating dinner conversation,” he muttered, finishing up his water.

Bram left the table, looking around at the agents mingling with one another. It felt good to see, but it also made him a little sad. He wished his father were there to see how much he had achieved, but then again, if it were not for his father’s death, none of this would have happened.

Walking through the doorway out of the dining hall,
he almost tripped over Dez as he rolled around the corner in his wheelchair.

“Hey, Dez,” Bram said, immediately on guard. It had been two days since the handicapped boy had buried his father, and not once had Bram asked how he was doing.

“Hey,” the boy answered softly, briefly making eye contact.

“Are you doing okay?” Bram asked.

Dez nodded, and then shrugged. “It is what it is,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy.”

Pangs of guilt needled Bram. If it were not for him, and his desire to see Douglas St. Laurent finally laid to rest, the man’s animated body would have likely still been around. Bram knew it was for the best, but he wasn’t sure if Dez felt, or ever would feel, the same.

“Do you need anything?” Bram asked, immediately regretting the question.

Dez just looked at him. “No,” he finally answered. “Everything’s great.”

Bram knew that wasn’t the case at all, but decided he would leave it there. Dez had to deal with his grief in his own way; Bram just hoped that Dez knew if he needed somebody to talk to, he and the other members of the original team were there for him.

“Going to have some dinner?” Bram asked stupidly.

“Yeah,” Dez answered, staring into the hall.

“Well, don’t let me keep you,” Bram said, stepping out of the boy’s path.

His thoughts were suddenly filled with the memory of the service they’d had for Dez’s father three days before. He remembered the intensity of the sadness that he’d seen in Dez’s eyes, and how it had stirred emotions he hadn’t had the opportunity to experience after learning of his own father’s passing.

There hadn’t been time for mourning then; he had a Network to build and a world to protect. Dez’s father’s service had provided him with an opportunity denied to him up until this point.

“Have a good night,” Dez said with a wave over his shoulder as he rolled himself toward Stitch’s food station.

“I’ll certainly try,” Bram answered, missing his father more then than he had in a very long time.

3.
J
OHANNA SAT ON THE WOOD BENCH IN FRONT
the train station waiting for the 7:25 back to the city.

The creepy guy Stitch had dropped her at the station just after six; there had been a 5:45 that she had missed, so she’d had no choice but to wait and to think about what she was going to do after she got back.

She’d tried to make conversation with the large, pale-skinned man, getting only grunts and silence as she tried to explain her—what did her parents refer to it as? Oh yeah, her rather caustic personality.

He didn’t seem all that interested, and dumped her at the station with not so much as a
Hey, it was nice meetin’ ya.

The ghost dogs whined around her, sniffing the ground at her feet. They were picking up on her feelings, reacting to her agitation.

And yes, she was agitated.

Johanna had always wanted to be part of something, but could never quite figure out where she belonged She’d tried to join the various clubs and organizations at school, but never seemed to make it through the first meeting without being asked to leave.

Don’t even get her started on cheerleading tryouts. Those had come after the ghost pack had manifested. The stuck-up witches still looked as though they wanted to cry every time they saw her.

Invisible ghost dogs = very scary to cheerleaders.

Johanna smiled, remembering how the pack had chased the girls around the gym after they’d made fun of her. Served them right, and besides, most of the bites were just pinches. They didn’t even break the skin.

A cold fall wind blew across the train platform and she was reminded of where she was, and how she had again failed to find that thing to be part of.

She had known about the Brimstone Network most of her life, never really thinking that she could somehow be a part of it. But when she’d heard about how the new Network was looking for members with an emphasis on people with unique abilities, she couldn’t set up an interview fast enough.

Johanna really believed this was it, her opportunity to belong and to actually contribute to something.

Sitting on the bench out in front of the train station, she scowled, kicking her booted feet as they hung over the edge of the wooden bench.

She guessed she had been wrong.

The ghost dogs whined, brushing up against her legs, flipping her hands to capture her attention. Johanna reached out to pet them.

“I really screwed up today,” she muttered.

Mostly she would blame everybody else when things went wrong—when she tried to belong—but this time she couldn’t do it. She went in to that interview with a chip on her shoulder and was just daring somebody to knock it off.

The wolf girl was just responding to the vibes she had been sending out.

Johanna slid to the edge of the bench and turned around. The train would be pulling in any minute.

But she didn’t want to go back, and if she hadn’t screwed things up she wouldn’t be sitting here.

It practically killed her to have to admit it, but she had behaved like a big jerk, and in order to make things right she was going to have to admit this not only to herself, but to the
people back at the Brimstone Network headquarters.

She got up from the bench and walked around to the back of the building and the parking lot.

“Can you guys get me back to where we were this afternoon?” she asked the ghostly beasts that mingled around her.

They panted and growled excitedly, eager to be doing something other than waiting for a train.

“All right then,” she said, starting to walk across the nearly empty lot. “Let’s get this show started.”

She figured she had at least a forty-five-minute walk ahead of her; plenty of time to get used to the idea that she was wrong, and that if she wanted to be a member of the Brimstone Network, she was going to have to apologize.

Ouch.

B
ram had never thought of his father as sentimental, but the old photo album he’d uncovered in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet while trying to clean out the office seemed to prove otherwise.

He sat down behind the desk, his desk, and reached for the book.

Within the yellowed volume were hundreds of pictures
of the Brimstone Facility in some of its earliest days—when his father had first taken command from his own father. The photographs were like small windows into the past, frozen moments in time.

But it was the last picture in the volume that fascinated Bram the most. It was of his father, dressed in a much more official version of a Network uniform. He looked as though he might’ve been in his late twenties, or early thirties; there was little gray in his hair or beard.

Wearing his finest uniform, Elijah Stone was approaching what appeared to be a dimensional doorway.

Bram hefted the heavy volume, bringing it closer so that he could study the picture better. Within the doorway he thought he could make out the shapes of ghostly figures clad in ornate armor, and wondered if this could be a picture of the first time his father passed from the earthly plane to the world of the Specter to negotiate the treaty between the people of earth and the supernatural warrior race.

A treaty that had resulted in the marriage of his father to a princess of the Specter royal family.

And Bram’s birth.

He considered asking Stitch about the photo, or maybe even the Archivist down in records, as he closed
the book and placed it on the side of his desk.

Bram liked the photo book and what it had captured, and began to think that maybe his tenure as the Brimstone Network commander should be recorded as well.

A smile found its way onto his face. Maybe he could ask all of his friends to participate. He’d give them each a digital camera and . . .

He noticed the smell before actually seeing the demon.

It emerged from a patch of darkness beside the file cabinet where he’d found the photo album. Bram wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen a beastie quite like this one. It was short, no taller than Bogey, and its flesh was the color of an oil slick, reflecting different colors as it slid from the cover of darkness. But the strangest thing about it was its swollen belly.

Bram tensed.

But the beast simply smiled widely, rubbing its spindly fingers across the taut flesh of it glowing stomach.

“Barnabas sends his regards,” the creature growled.

And before Bram could react, the invader’s stomach detonated in a deafening explosion, and the office was filled with hungry fire.

***

T
otal chaos.

Stitch dropped his coffee mug down upon the table in reaction to the sound of destruction.

An explosion, somewhere in the facility.

Alarms sounded as warning lights flashed in the ceilings of the winding corridors.

He was moving quickly, sidestepping nervous agents frozen in place, fear upon their faces. Stitch knew what they were wondering.

Is it happening again? Is the Brimstone Network under attack?

“What’s going on?” asked a voice now running along side of him.

He glanced over to see that it was Emily.

“I don’t know,” he said. “An explosion of some kind.”

In mid-stride she started to change, shucking off her clothes and skin to assume the form of the wolf.

“Follow me,” she said, nose twitching.

They took the stairs, her nose bringing them to the upper level, to where the commander of the Brimstone Network kept his office.

“Where’s Bram?” Stitch asked, pushing aside a door that hung loosely from a broken hinge.

“Not sure,” the wolf answered beside him. The sprinklers were raining water down upon them. The air was thick with the smell of smoke. “He might’ve gone back to his office after he ate. I was on the phone, I didn’t . . .”

Stitch bounded down the corridor toward the office. There were agents stumbling around in the smoke, their features stained with smears of ash.

“Get them out of here,” Stitch commanded, taking a moment to escort the dazed agents toward the waiting Emily.

Alone, he turned his attention to Bram’s office. The doorway was nothing more than a jagged hole now, the frame, and even part of the wall, blasted away from the force of the explosion.

Stitch did not hesitate, delving into the smoke and heat to crawl across the rubble of the Commander’s office space.

“Bram!” Stitch called, squinting through the shifting smoke. “Are you in here? Bram!”

The ground and walls were horribly charred, the desk and furniture reduced to awful, blackened shapes. The heat was intense, but he moved inside farther, searching for signs of their leader.

“Abraham, it’s me!”

Squatting down below the smoke, he searched
the floor. Stitch held his breath so as not to take in the thick, noxious fumes, desperate to stay within the office—now an inferno—to be certain that his friend was nowhere to be found.

There was a shape upon the floor, near the burnt remains of what was once a file cabinet, a shape that at one time could have been human.

Stitch felt his powerful heart leap painfully in his chest.

“No,” he said, his breath escaping in an emotional gasp.

There was movement beside him, and he spun around just in time as he was attacked.

Stitch dove to the right, avoiding the lunge of the fiery beast.

Squatting upon the floor, coughing from the thick black smoke and furnace-intense heat, he looked in awe upon the animal that writhed in the air before him.

It was a serpent composed of fire.

The burning reptile reared back with a sizzling hiss, a spray of burning liquid shooting from its open mouth.

The fiery venom spattered the floor as he managed to jump backward. The poison ate at the charred wood, dissolving it away and leaving a deeply pockmarked surface. He imagined what the spew would have done to his clothing and the flesh beneath.

The fire serpent swam through the air toward him, and he reached to his left, grabbing hold of the burnt desk and, with a display of strength, hefting it up to block the next attack of acidic spray.

He felt the desk begin to disintegrate in his grasp as the venom hit the wood.

The snake’s attack became more physical, its diamond-shaped head diving down to shatter what remained of the desk, leaving Stitch completely open to attack.

The snake recoiled, its burning eyes locked upon him as it opened its maw to attack.

Stitch stumbled back through the smoke, away from the advancing serpent. His back struck the wall, and he could go no farther, as the serpent reared back to strike.

Bracing himself, the patchwork man prepared for the inevitable. He wasn’t about to go down without a fight.

From the corner of his eye he saw the air split; a jagged tear appearing to the side of him. And within the rip that hung there beside him he saw movement.

Tiny hands reached out from within the darkness of the fissure, pulling Stitch inside just as the fire serpent lunged.

Its burning fangs snapping closed upon nothing.

4.
N
OTHING COULD HAVE SURVIVED THAT.