Infernal Father of Mine (21 page)

"Works for me," I said. "Maybe we can grab the
prisoner on the way out."

He shook his head. "No. We can't risk getting
stuck here." David sighed and pursed his lips. "Look, I know you
want to save him now, but if we don't get through, we won't be
saving anyone. For all we know, they have dozens of
prisoners."

"Fine. Maybe he'll be okay until we get
back."

The light of a portal activation caught our
attention. David motioned me to follow. We walked up to the edge of
the bubble, knelt, and waited. A group of men were herding a flock
of sheep toward the portal. My father and I looked at each other
with puzzled looks.

"Overworld people are strange," I
whispered.

He nodded.

The Gloom people waited and watched through
several more portal activations before deciding to kidnap a lone
vampire. Even though I couldn't see fangs, the pallor of the man's
face and his impeccable sense of style identified him right away.
Apparently, torn and faded jeans were out of fashion if the skinny
jeans he wore were any indication.

The women took positions on either side of the
ripper and waited until the vampire was paces away from entering
the portal. They pulled back on the rods and activated the device.
The gateway shimmered and split. Strength poured into me. David
counted down from three with his fingers. We raced into the
circle.

The first two men didn't stand a chance. David
flung one through the fog as if he weighed nothing. I ducked under
a swing from the second and punched his lights out. Jarvis took out
a gun, aimed, and fired at David. My father blurred to the side,
leapt, and landed atop the man, delivering a vicious
blow.

The women shrieked and jumped away from the
disruptor. The vampire, still in the real world, stopped, looking
around with a puzzled look.

"Did someone just scream?" he said.

"Go, Justin!" David yelled.

"Who the hell is Justin?" The vampire looked
even more confused.

I ran for the portal at full speed, reached the
split in the barrier. A blinding flash of silver energy crashed
into me like a sledgehammer. My body rebounded from the portal and
slammed into my father who was right on my heels. We skidded
backwards across the smooth obsidian floor and landed in a
heap.

"Doesn't work like that," Pat said. "It's set
up for one-way, you morons."

"Get them," Jarvis croaked, pushing himself off
the floor.

I looked up and saw the vampire backing away
from the portal, alarm in his eyes.

Bullets pinged off the floor around us. David
and I flashed to our feet, and raced from the circle of clear air,
back into the fog. The further we ran, the weaker I felt. I
estimated we hadn't gone more than a few hundred yards.

"Oh, no," I gasped. "We can't use it to
escape."

We were still trapped in the Gloom.

David bared his teeth and growled. Slamming a
fist into the palm of his other hand, he paced in a compact circle.
"Mother f—"

I grabbed his shoulder. "Look, I'm just as
pissed as you are, but this isn't going to solve anything." Elyssa
had taught me that raging rarely solved anything. "Maybe we can
backtrack to the Gloom portal instead of wasting our time at the
Grotto arch, and I'll try opening it again. The Exorcists might
have removed whatever is blocking it." I highly doubted it, but it
wasn't safe to remain here.

He sucked in a breath between clenched teeth.
Nodded. "This situation is extremely annoying." Arms folded across
his chest, he tapped a finger on his triceps and looked back toward
the kidnappers. "We should follow these people and find out where
they're based. The woman said the ripper was set to one-way. There
must be a way to allow us to go through."

"You want to steal it?" I asked.

He nodded. "It's our best bet."

"Might as well come back," Jarvis called
through the fog. "There's no way out of the Gloom. I promise we
won't hurt you."

I almost yelled back a response, but David put
a hand over my mouth and shook his head. "Don't give away our
position."

I nodded, and he removed his hand.

"We offer safe refuge from the dreams," Jarvis
said. "Safe lodging and human companionship."

David sat down, closed his eyes in
concentration. I'd seen him do the same thing just before his
crawler had torn poor Timothy's head clean off. I listened to
Jarvis as he droned on about giving up, and kept a sharp eye out in
case the Gloomies had spread out to look for us. A figure appeared
out of the fog and nearly gave me a heart attack. It was a replica
of David.

My father stood and inspected his handiwork for
a moment. "It was harder than I thought imagining how I look. I
guess I don't use a mirror enough." His doppelganger sprinted away
into the fog. Several seconds later, I heard my father's voice ring
out, though it was the clone speaking and not him.

"You're kidnapping people. Why should we trust
you?"

Jarvis replied, voice smug. "You really have no
choice."

"Tell me what you're doing with the
Arcane."

"You can ask our leader. She's the one with the
answers."

David's clone laughed. "You're kidnapping
people and you don't even know why? There's no way I can trust
you."

I heard sounds of scuffling.

"We found him!" someone shouted. "Where's the
other guy?"

"Let me go," David's clone said.

"Tell us where your friend is, or I'll kill
you," said the other man.

"He panicked and ran away into the fog. I don't
know where he is," the clone said.

"What do you want us to do with him,
Jarvis?"

"Is he a vampire?" their glorious leader
replied.

"No."

"An Arcane?"

"Don't think so. I'm thinking werewolf or demon
spawn."

Jarvis remained silent a moment before
responding. "Knock him out and put him with the Arcane. I'll let
Serena decide."

I heard a grunt, presumably as fake David was
knocked unconscious. My father laughed quietly. "I love deceiving
people."

"You're a demon. It's your job," I
said.

He winked. "Can't deny it's a fun
perk."

"The arch operators are shutting down the arch
for inspections," Pat said. "That stupid vampire must have heard
the commotion. I think we're done here for the day."

Jarvis shouted a volley of curse words. "Load
up the equipment and we'll head back."

"I've got the mule ready," Pat said.

"Maybe you could figure out how to make us all
horses so we could ride in style," Gavin said. "I'm sick of making
the hike."

"I can only dreamcast one thing at a time, so
you'll have to just walk."

"Shut your complaining trap," Jarvis
said.

"Hope I can keep my clone from melting," David
said.

I turned to my father. "You seemed to whip it
up pretty fast. How'd you do it?"

"Meditation. It's a skill that's kept me sane
over the years." He blew out a breath. "We'll have to use our
senses to track these people through the fog, and keep a safe
distance. We don't know how skilled they are at dreamcasting. They
might have their own creatures guarding them."

I shuddered at the thought of bumping into a
nightmare like the crawler. "True."

Within a few minutes, Jarvis and crew headed up
the winding driveway leading from the Grotto and headed down a road
I knew led to the southwest side of town. Even without my incubus
senses, following the group wasn't too hard with Jarvis
occasionally shouting orders, and the wheel squeaking on the cart
they used to pull the ripper.

We walked for miles. My legs and feet ached. I
found myself agreeing with Gavin's sentiment about conjuring a
horse to ride on and put it at the top of my list of priorities
when and if I had time. If Timothy could create a dinosaur, surely
I could dreamcast a beast of burden. Dreamcasting Elyssa to give me
a piggy-back ride seemed undignified, even if it wasn't really her.
We crossed a wide swath of railroad tracks I recognized as the ones
used by MARTA, the rail transport system in Atlanta. While I hadn't
come this way before, I remembered driving by while on the nearby
interstate in the real world.

Once past the tracks, we crossed a road and
headed down a street. The heavily worn asphalt was pockmarked with
holes and laced with cracks. Bits and pieces of gray granite
littered the surface, as if fallen from the back of a truck. We
followed a curve in the road and suddenly stood in a huge clearing,
free of fog. David and I hurriedly stepped back behind the curtain
of gray, and poked our heads into the clear air.

A large gray fortress stretched before us on a
landscape of dead grass and bare patches of red clay.

"A quarry," David said, pointing to a nearby
sign which stated
Bellwood Quarry—authorized personnel only
beyond this point.

"Why is there no fog here?" I asked.

He shrugged. "No idea."

We examined the area from our hidden position,
watching as the Gloomies wheeled their equipment inside. No fence
guarded the perimeter, nor did there seem to be doors barring entry
into the grim gray structure.

"This Serena must be a mad scientist," I said.
"Because nobody in their right mind would willingly live in a place
like this."

"This building doesn't exist in the mortal
realm," he said.

"I've never been here," I said, "so I wouldn't
know."

David ran his eyes up and down the length of
the area. "I wonder if they dreamcasted it into existence, or built
it."

I shivered. "I can't imagine how much
concentration it would take to keep a building like this from
melting away."

"I wasn't expecting anything like this." He
rested his chin on a fist. "There's no way we could sneak in and
steal the ripper."

"Is your clone still intact?"

His eyes narrowed. "I think so. I don't know if
there's a limit to how far away it can go, but I'm not particularly
worried about it."

"I wonder if we could use it to
spy."

"It's essentially a puppet. If there's a way to
have it transmit what it sees and hears, I don't know how to do
it."

We watched the building for several minutes in
silence. I didn't know what to do at this point. "Should we go back
to the Grotto?" I asked.

"You heard those people. The arch operators
shut down the Obsidian Arch for safety inspections." He folded his
arms and stared into space. "It could be days before it resumes
operations."

"We don't have many options at this
point."

David seemed to mull it over. "Even if we steal
a ripper, we'd have to hope they didn't notice it was gone. It's
not like there's another Obsidian Arch to use it on."

The last thing I felt like doing was walking,
but we had no choice. I extended my senses toward the fortress,
hoping to get an idea about the number of people inside, but the
structure lay too far away for me to reach.

An iron grip took me by the bicep. David
grunted. Before I could look to see what had me, someone pushed me
forward into the clear area. A humanoid creature without a face or
other features on its pale white form held David in a similar
fashion to me. He struggled, but the thing marched him forward
without missing a beat. The one holding me pushed me along at a
similar pace despite my attempts to resist.

"They're dreamcasted like Timothy's raptor,"
David said. He bared his teeth, but didn't resist the things
herding us along.

I added in my optimistic two cents. "We're so
screwed."

The guards took us inside the fortress and
shoved us inside a holding cell along with the Arcane Jarvis and
the others had captured earlier. The man was still
unconscious.

"Guess we get the tour anyway," David said in a
grim voice.

The windowless cell was constructed of smooth
gray stone. I ran a hand along the surface and found it neither
cool nor warm, much like the atmosphere of the Gloom. I sat down on
the bare floor and looked at the door made of the same material as
the cell walls. If the place had been dreamcasted, the creator
hadn't used much imagination in the process. Then again, maybe
simple construction made it easier to maintain.

After what seemed like an hour, the door swung
open, and Jarvis appeared, flanked by two of the pale mannequin
creatures. "Looks like you decided to join us after all," he said.
"Clever trick with the replica, but you didn't hold its shape for
long."

"Is this what you call hospitality?" David
said, standing. "Or do you plan to show us to the guest
rooms?"

Jarvis snorted. "Unless Serena has a use for
you, ain't much chance of seeing the outside of this
cell."