Scion of Atlantis Ch. 07

The world was dark, and empty. I floated in a void, with no sensation, no light, no ability to move. I just existed for an unknown time, barely aware of where I was, who I was. I existed in nothing, I was nothing, I was one with the nothing. Time passed, and I barely noticed.

Gradually, sluggishly, like waking after a deep sleep, I became aware of a presence in the void. It was like another person, someone nearby, warm and close, as if I was being spooned. I reached out for them, but it was like trying to grasp smoke. Even trying to connect with the presence made it seem to fade away.

However, simply making the attempt made me gradually more aware of something else. I felt some kind of string, connecting me to things, things far more distant in the void. These strings were ephemeral, and delicate, as if they were made of the thinnest thread. Some of them seemed to vibrate as I noticed them, as if they were drawing my attention.

As carefully as I could, I took one of those threads and followed it. Whether I was motivated by curiosity, boredom, or a desire to find help, I couldn't say. The surreal situation had me acting on automatic, doing something just because I could do nothing but experiment. Seizing the thread did not even make it tremble- in whatever way I felt it was "delicate", it didn't seem in danger of snapping because I was touching it. I crawled along the thread through the nothingness, and gradually became aware of something else.

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Derek still had his work buddy Campbell's tip out on him, the heavy envelope stuffed into the very bottom of his backpack. It was a pretty good cut this week, he knew from his own tip out, a thick stack of bills north of two hundred dollars. Working close to downtown meant good tips, and although front of house staff walked away with the majority of it, the boss still split out a percentage to keep the kitchen staff focused on the quality of their work.

He was standing down the street from Campbell's apartment, pretending to be standing at a bus stop while looking curiously at the large, boxy, matte black van standing right outside the door. Some kind of guys in black suits, the same kind of dudes who had turned up at work asking questions about Campbell, stood around, talking to each other and maintaining a perimeter. Derek figured that something strange was going on with his friend, that was why he bothered to come all the way down here after his shift, but this was on a whole 'nother level.

Derek's eyes went wide. Some guys in heavy body armour were coming out of the building now, each pair dragging a person with them. It was hard to tell at a distance, but one of them might have been Campbell, and the other seemed to be a woman with blue-green hair. Both of them looked to be unconscious, their limbs dangling, as they were hauled to the back of the van. What really piqued Derek's interest was what happened next. Two of the armoured guys went back into the building, and a few moments later returned with a long, black, bulky object that could only be a body bag.

"What the fuck did you get into?" he asked himself, shaking his head with wonder. He turned, and, trying to be unnoticed, slipped down the street in the direction of the subway. No chance that Derek was going to hang around and find out.

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I recoiled from the thread in surprise. Why had it showed me Derek, of all people? And what exactly were these threads? The thought occurred to me that this might have something to do with my demesne, because damn near everything else happening to me was like that, but if that was the case, why did it show me somebody I haven't seen in person since before I inhreited the grimoire?

There was another thing about the vision that troubled me. I distantly remembered what happened in my apartment, and getting captured, but now I had evidence that they were taking Rosalie and I and bringing us somewhere else. And Rosalie had killed a person. A person who meant us harm, but still, that still sit well with me. I hadn't ever seen someone die before, and now, a girl I had just slept with, who seemed to want to keep being with me, had murdered someone trying to protect the both of us. I didn't think Rosalie made the wrong choice, killing him, but it was unsettling.

Further, Aya had never told me about any remote viewing powers I might have. Even more than any of the spells I received from the grimoire, just the information gathering capabilities of being able to spy on anything in my demesne would be incredible. Again, I felt that warm presence in the void with me, a reassurance that I wasn't alone. Did it have something to do with Aya? I couldn't tell, reaching out just made the presence fade again.

Now my curiosity was fully engaged. I couldn't reach or interact with the presence, and while I think I could find Derek's thread again, I felt a little bad spying on him without him knowing. But, I needed options, I needed a solution. Selecting another thread at random, I followed it, until once again my awareness shifted.

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Mingze tugged the curtain on the window again, wearing nothing but his boxers as he peered outside. This neighbourhood was far from the height of wealth and privilege, but a straight up police raid was among the last things he expected to be woken up by in the middle of the night. Worse, it had woken up his poor grandfather. Mingze never received the full story, but something about his grandparent's emigration from China left both of them with a deep seated anxiety for any kind of armed state authority, and while his grandfather was usually well put together and mentally tough, tonight the old man damn near had a mental break.

Finally, the guys in suits finished packing up their van, and with deep bass rumble of the engine starting up, it departed down the street. A few of the suits remained, but the party, whatever it was, was clearly wrapping up. Whatever agency or ministry they represented, they didn't seem to be interested in hanging around longer than they needed to.

Making the situation worse, Mingze's sister was still out with her friends. That alone wasn't really unusual. She was in university, after all, and even though she still lived at home, she had her own life to live, with friends that she made in her program. Mingze wished her well for it, his sister had a lot of trouble in school and didn't have many friends up until now. But her absence did nothing to help soothe his grandfather's nerves.

Mingze stepped back from the window, running a hang through his hair and frowning. He turned to the bent old man with one cloudy eye standing next to him, clinging to his cane and wearing a threadbare housecoat. "They're going, grandpa," Mingze told the old man, gently putting a hand on his shoulder, "They're not here for us, and I'm sure Yan has just been drinking with her friends. She might even be staying overnight with one of her school friends."

"It doesn't matter if they're here for us or not," his grandfather replied in Cantonese, "They shouldn't be here at all. Our neighbours are good people, tiger son. They don't deserve to be made to live with a gun pointed at their heads. Even the noisy ones."

"I understand, grandpa," Mingze told him, doing his best to usher the older man towards his bedroom. As annoying as it was, being a young man having to take care of his aging grandfather and a college age younger sister, he couldn't help but smile when his grandpa used that old country pet name for him. "Do you want me to put on your TV? Or to get you one of your books?" At least the delicate older man was no longer trembling. They had managed to back him off from the brink of a panic attack.

"No, no, I am tired, and as you said, they were not here for us or Yan," the old man said gently, gently shaking off the younger man's hand on his shoulder, and padding down the partment hall while leaning on his cane. "Could you put on the radio for me, please?"

"Of course, grandpa," Mingze reassured him. The older man had shuffled his way into the bedroom, decorated with dozens of framed photos of Mingze's parents and grandmother, elementary school artwork and artifacts of his grandfather's previous life as a cook and eventual restaurant owner. He sat down heavily on the bed, while Mingze clicked on the ancient bedside clock radio, carefully adjusting the volume so that the dulcet piano of the classical station wouldn't disturb his grandfather's sleep.

Before Mingze could leave, his grandfather reached out and put a hand on my arm. "You should put on one of the westerns you like so much," he said softly, "You seemed really concerned about those officers. I worry sometimes about you, that you fret too much. It is not good for your heart, to be anxious, though you come by it honestly having to take care of your troublemaker sister." The last was said with an obvious tone of affection.

Mingze smiled at the older man, and tried to hold back a chuckle. Here he was concerned about his grandfather's anxiety, and the old man was worried about Minze worrying. "Thank you for worrying about my health, grandfather," he replied gently and reverently, "You get some rest. I'll give Yan a text, find out what's going on with her."

"You're a good brother, Mingze," his grandfather replied as he slowly swung his legs into bed, and settled back down. Mingze was still smiling when he flicked the bedroom light off.

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I slid away from the thread, trying to puzzle out exactly what all this meant. I didn't know that Mingzy lived in my building, but knowing now what his family felt about the police, I wasn't surprised that he tried to cover for me earlier today. How much of it was my demesne making him subconsciously want to be nice to me, and how much was his actual intention, I couldn't tell, but at least it was a mix, and I wasn't somehow forced him to stick his neck out for me.

Also interesting was what happened with his grandfather. I didn't know a word of Cantonese, but when I was listening in on Mingzy's experiences, I borrowed his fluency as well. I tried to recall a single individual word of the language, and came up blank. Whatever knowledge I gained during the vision didn't stick with me, except for what I directly experienced, watching over people's shoulders like that.

So assuming that the threads around me represented connections that I've made to my demesne, one of them had to lead to Rosalie. The last I'd seen of her, she was also captured, just having whatever knockout drugs were in those injector guns pumped into her arm. Rosalie had once again become the subject of violence because she stopped to help someone in trouble, someone who just happened to run by her. She had to have just about the worst luck of anyone in the world. The small ball of guilt, gaining mass in my guts like a bezoar, seemed to swell all the bigger. I had to find out what happened to her.

I memorized which thread I had followed to Mingzy, and although I thought it would be difficult remembering which was which, once experienced the identity of each thread seemed seared into my brain. Touching the threads gingerly, I felt that some of them held a certain resonance, as if I could put my ear to them and hear transmission from the other end like a child's tin can telephone. I found one of the threads that had people talking at the other end, voices that I thought were familiar, and followed it.

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I was in my apartment, in the kitchen, looking out towards the hallway. Broken glass littered the narrow strip of floor between the galley-style rows of counter, stove and fridge, and straight across the hall, the bathroom door hung open. In the bathroom, Rude was standing in front of the mirror, his sunglasses hanging from his breast pocket, touching his jaw tenderly. Elena stood out in the hall, leaning against the doorway and peering in at him.

"He got you good, huh?" she asked, turning away from her partner to examine the nails on one of her hands, "We've got to start taking it easy on the hemo shots. Already the supe is giving me a hard time about it. Sooner or later they're gonna start thinking we're half-vampire ourselves." She sighed, shrugging, and far a second her eyes, hidden behind dark lenses, seemed to meet mine. If I was experiencing things from back in my body, my heart would have stopped. If I had breath, I would have held it. But her eyes moved on without registering anything, turning her head in the direction of the living room, and crossing her arms.

"Yeah, but this was personal," Rude muttered, slowly pulling off his suit jacket and hanging it on the corner of the bathroom door. As he turned towards me, I could see his strange right eye, which had been facing away from me up til now. The iris was a bright, virulent purple, and thin, pale scars stood out against his dark skin, framing the eye with angular lines. It looked like the rumours were true, at least the part about Harvesters having some kind of durgery done on them. Rude began unbuttoning one of his cuffs, and rolling up his sleeve. "They had slipped away this afternoon because we underestimated them, and for that we got our asses kicked. That needed to be addressed, because if we went back to head office without having closed the book on them...." He trailed off ominously.

Elena sighed, shaking her head. "This poor kid," she muttered, still examining the living room. Behind her, Rude pulled a small pocketbook looking box from inside his jacket, and then from that produced a small, plastic, single-use syringe filled with a bright red liquid. He flicked off the cap, stabbed the tiny needle into his wrist, and pressed down on the plunger with a grunt of pain. "All he wanted to do was live this humble little life, when some fucking wizard came by and burdened him with it's supernatural bullshit."

"Don't humanize them, Valentine," Rude told her, conscientiously replacing the cap before slipping the injector back into it's box, and then buttoning his sleeve back up. "It didn't belong to our species anymore. It gave up that right the second it accepted power from that wizard." Next, he pulled on his jacket, taking a moment to button it closed and adjust his tie. The injector box went back into it's pocket, and the sunglasses flicked out to return to his face. "Start seeing them as human, and you might hesitate at the wrong time, and let one escape, or maybe get somebody killed."

Elena, or I suppose I should start calling her Valentine, sighed. "Yeah, but you start thinking of them as animals, then shit like this afternoon goes down," she said bitterly, shaking her head, "Neither of us expected that a werewolf would come out of nowhere to defend a wizard, and a newborn wizard at that. 'They will always surprise you', that's safety tip numero uno from orientation, and we got cocky and forgot."

Rude snorted, stepping up the doorframe, and looked down at his partner. "We got two in one day, of two different species. The fact that it was possible at all got us access to a crisis intervention team, and I don't think any of the brass is gonna regret it." He smirked arrogantly, before putting a hand on Valnetine's shoulder. "We should be celebrating, not arguing."

Valentine shrugged his hand off. "You celebrate all you want," she told him in a bitter voice, "I still think something's up. There was no reason for them to return here, unless they legitimately had nowhere to go, and how often do any of them circle back to a place we already found them? Even if the wiz was brand spanking new, the wolf should have known better." Adjusting her jacket, she went on. "I'm going back to the head office, I want to sit in on the interrogation."

"Suit yourself," Rude told her, striding past her to go for the door. Giving the kitchen and the hall one last glance, Valentine followed him out. By visualizing myself doing it, I managed to follow them to the busted, taped-over door, but it seemed that I could go further from there, so matter how badly I wanted it. I caught another snippet of conversation, I didn't make out most of it now they were out of sight, and I found myself rooted in the apartment, but I definitely caught the words "black site".

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The void snapped back into focus around me, as I drifted. That was not what I was looking for, but it was useful information nonetheless. I ran the scene through my head a few more times, trying to memorize it, and maybe pick out additional context. One thing was clear- the Harvesters didn't seem to know how my powers worked any better than I did. Less, even, or else they wouldn't have stood around casually discussing "work" in the very centre and most obvious part of my demesne. Abandoning that thread, I search through the forest of connections, searching for something, anything that would stand out.

I felt that resonance again, as if one of the threads was deliberately seeking my attention. Delicately, I took the thread, and followed it, as I had done to all the others.

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In the dimly lit kitchen, the grey man sat, stooped over while he carefully stitched a gaping cut on his thigh, his pant leg soaked in blood. His magical powers were great, but the closing of flesh remained beyond him, a secret to be ripped from, perhaps, the next so-called "Scion" to fall into his grasp. He struggled to focus on punching the needle through his skin just so, as the chorus of moans, wails, and babbling voices washed over him, keeping him constant company ever since he first conducted the ritual. He was used to it by now.

Another wordless moan, this one very real and not just from the crowd in his head, was emitted from a pathetic, huddled form in fetal position, in one of the dark corners of the kitchen. The grey man didn't twitch, didn't so much as move to acknowledge it, but it was noted.

The ogre had been a surprise. Somehow, the grey man's quarry of the last few weeks managed to survive their fall long enough to pass on their grimoire to someone new. The grey man wasn't particularly put out by this, at first- the Scions grew their power ever so slowly, after all, and the pup who had been given the grimoire didn't have enough time to learn more than a few spells. By the time he was out of the public eye enough for the grey man to make an attempt, though, it was in the company of a number of interesting individuals. A skinchanger, an elemental, and an ogre. Even the [GIRD] spell failed to give the grey man the physical strength he needed to overcome the ogre, and confronting the group of them would have required more spells than just that, if the grey man had only known.

It was a disappointment, and a setback, but not the end of the grey man's hunt, he reflected as he tied off the crude stitchwork, sealing up the last of the cuts inflicted when the ogre pushed him onto the shattered glass of the office door. The ogre was less prepared for the effects of [IGNITE], and while the ogre bellowed and tried to put out the flames that consumed his loudly vile suit jacket, the grey man was able to make his escape. The pup had slipped his ambush, but grimoires had a tendency to call to each other, and that resonance would lead the grey man to his quarry once again.

His work done, he sliced off the end of the thread with a chef's knife he found in the kitchen. The pain of the cuts still remained, but the grey man was long beyond the concerns of the flesh. He only needed to listen to the incessant babble if her needed a distraction, after all. The only desire that mattered, his only real concern, was the rush he received when claiming a quarry. It was what he lived for.

The grey man rose ponderously from the kitchen table, taking the knife with him, letting his arm dangle at his side while he stomped over to the elderly couple who lay on thier sides, in heaps where he had left them. They were bound with masking tape- the grey man's magic was powerful, but he knew better than to rely on that magic alone- and the two pairs of eyes looked up from the tear-stained faces. No doubt they were concerned about the grey man sating some perverse lust upon them, but he was well beyond such desires.