Anthem's Fall (41 page)

The armored stranger’s gaze had not lifted from Kristen for a moment. Behind the young man’s back, a group of security personnel stopped trying to wedge open the barred doors and hurried to the stage. Kristen was thankful to see them coming. Her fear under his watch was inexplicable. She should have been laughing at this foolishly dressed stranger, yet something she could not be certain of was holding her back.

“Who are you?” the man demanded, oblivious to the rest of the ballroom.

“Who are
you
?” Kristen shot back.

He stared at her expressionlessly. “I am Emperor Vengelis Epsilon.”

His statement was met with a moment of stifling silence.

“This isn’t the time or the place for some immature prank.” Professor Vatruvia stood from his chair and glared at the newcomer, Vengelis Epsilon. “Very poor form, young man. Not the time or the place.”

The man calling himself Vengelis ignored him. “I need to speak with you. Now.” He was still looking only at Kristen.

“Please do as he says! Do
whatever
he says!” the woman Kristen had seen enter the ballroom alongside the handsome psychopath was now hurrying down the aisle. Everyone in the audience had by now risen from their seats. But with nowhere to exit, all eyes were beginning to watch the peculiar drama unfold up by the podium.

As the beautiful young woman ascended the steps to the stage, she called out directly to Kristen. “Give him whatever he wants!”

“I need you to tell me everything you know about the technology you were just discussing,” Vengelis said. The coolness of his features flickered with a wild anticipation as his gaze bore into Kristen.

“Now wait one minute!” Professor Vatruvia said. He stepped between Vengelis and Kristen, placing a firm hand on Vengelis’s shoulder. Vengelis slowly and reluctantly drew his gaze away from Kristen and looked at Professor Vatruvia. They were about the same height, but the stark contrast between their appearances was staggering: the arresting splendor of this Vengelis Epsilon next to Professor Vatruvia’s corduroys and beige sport coat.

“Don’t, Vengelis.” the beautiful young woman said.

Vengelis knocked away Professor Vatruvia’s arm and grabbed him by the throat. Professor Vatruvia’s neck and cheeks turned a dark shade of purple crimson and he choked and flailed in agony.

“What the hell are you
doing
?” Kristen demanded with incomprehension, at last finding her voice.

The security men shouted and hustled to the stage. Kristen watched in shock as the young man lifted Professor Vatruvia into the air by his neck. Her mentor gurgled and desperately pointed his feet to find footing, but the toes of his loafers only groped at the wood. Vengelis stared at him emotionlessly for a moment before turning and hurling him into the rear wall of the stage. Professor Vatruvia’s body was thrown backward, and his shoulder blades hit the hard wall with an awful smack; the exposed supports behind the drywall splintered loudly from the impact.

Kristen immediately recognized the peculiar young man’s strength as unnatural and recoiled in panic and disgust, holding her arms out and aligning the podium between her and the strange man. The hotel manager stood and gawked, a dark stain running down the front of his trousers.

Vengelis turned to the impending security guards, and Kristen dashed over to Professor Vatruvia’s side, kneeling down to him in repulsed disbelief. He was unconscious, his head limp in her hands and his eyes dilating blankly at the ceiling. Kristen wheezed with fear as she looked away from his face and turned to the confrontation between the mysterious man and the security guards. There was a hardened NYPD officer leading the group of three Marriott Marquis security personnel. The cop must have been in the room before the doors were barred, and the hotel security guards followed uneasily in his wake as he approached the stage. There was a no-nonsense look about the officer, and Kristen could not have envisioned a more fitting person to intercede this Vengelis figure.

“Get on the ground now!” the heavyset cop bellowed, reaching a thick-knuckled hand down and unclasping the holster to his gun.

Kristen watched in disbelief as Vengelis gave the cop a scornful smirk and made no attempt to hit the ground. The cop pulled out his handgun and pointed it straight at Vengelis’s chest.

“
Stop
! Oh god! Don’t fight him!” the beautiful young woman pleaded. “He’s with the people who are attacking Chicago! He’ll kill you all!”

“I don’t know about all of you, but certainly you,” Vengelis said, staring down the barrel of the pistol and speaking only to the cop.

The cop shifted his stance uncertainly, his shoulders squared with the gun. He had surely never witnessed someone elicit such staggering confidence while being held at gunpoint. Kristen found herself unable to speak as she kneeled by Professor Vatruvia and watched the stand off. Dark blood was beginning to soak through Professor Vatruvia’s blazer. Kristen moaned and pressed her index finger all over his neck to find a pulse, but could not find one. Her fingers were numb, her surroundings fast becoming overwhelming.

“I suppose I have to make an example of someone. It might as well be you,” Vengelis said to the police officer.

The cop pushed his gun toward Vengelis threateningly. “The nation’s on high alert, kid. I won’t hesitate to shoot your ass if I have to. Get on the goddamn floor and put your hands behind your head before I blow you away.”

Vengelis inclined his head with a sarcastic expression and took one step forward. The cop fired a round straight into his chest. The room grew dead silent as the tinny burst of the gunshot echoed across the walls and vaulted ceiling. Kristen waited for this bizarre Vengelis to stumble and collapse but instead he shrugged and shook his head, entirely unharmed. The cop hesitated for a moment, and then unloaded four more rounds straight into his midsection. Vengelis stood entirely unfazed as the stage filled with a sharp sulfur smell from the gunshots. Five mangled bullets fell smoking to the stage at Vengelis’s feet.

As though the very gravity had shifted in the Lutvak ballroom, the hundreds of attendees in the audience all flowed and pushed against the far wall, pressing and heaving at the blocked double doors in an attempt to get away from the demon on the stage, yet the firmly secured doors held strong against their efforts.

“No!” the beautiful woman called.

Vengelis took another step forward, and the cop fired another round, this time straight into his face. Another bullet hit the stage floor as Vengelis ripped the handgun out of the cop’s hand. The man tilted his head and stared at the empty bullet shells at his feet in astonishment. “W-what are—” the cop said.

Vengelis grabbed the officer by his belt and the scruff of his neck and spun, heaving the man across the entire ballroom. The cop’s body soared flailing above the display tables and connected high on the opposite wall, falling limply onto the very shoulders of the pushing and recoiling audience. An unspeakable splatter of gore was left high above the crowd, where the body had bounced against the crown molding.

The room instantaneously filled with heated screaming and bawling terror. The sound of the tumult was horrible as Kristen hopelessly and frantically gave Professor Vatruvia something that resembled CPR, though she had no idea what she was doing. She saw Vengelis glance back to check on her location before turning to the guards that had been standing behind the cop. Kristen looked up at his back with a perplexed expression. Why was he so interested in her?

“Are you satisfied yet?” Vengelis said to the trembling security guards, none of them even armed with guns. “Or do I need to kill more of you to prove that I am God?”

Kristen felt nausea rise. She thought of only one thing, escape. While Vengelis was turned to the security guards, she rose and dashed off the stage, sprinted past rows of abandoned chairs, and dived headfirst into the standing audience. She hastily slithered and squeezed her way past a number of tall men and tried to blend in with the mass. The shoulders surrounding her were a comfort, now she was one face in a crowd. She lurched and swayed, nearly being taken off her feet as the crowding audience pressed and shoved around her.

“SIIILLLLEEEENCCCEEEE!” Vengelis Epsilon’s voice tore over the ruckus of the room.

Miraculously, the room fell silent almost at once. Evidently the audience feared their supernatural guest more than they clung to hysteria. Kristen held her breath as her powerfully beating heart thumped again and again against her ribcage. She ducked to stay out of his sight, and even pressed the side of her face into the shoulder of a middle-aged woman’s blue cardigan.

He had been shot six times and was not dead. A bullet had bounced off his face.

They could have been blanks. Kristen kept telling herself that. They
could
have been blanks. But there was no way she could logically explain how he had thrown a grown man across the ballroom. Kristen suddenly realized she was shivering from head to toe, her extremities growing cold.

“Come out,” Vengelis’s voice rang emotionlessly across the subdued ballroom. “
Now
.”

Several hundred voices remained dead silent, and only the sound of pushing and shuffling feet rose from around her. She could hear the woman behind her and the man next to her breathing. They were as horrified as she was.

“Girl! I know you are still in here. Come out.”

Kristen pressed her eyelids shut and trembled silently. She could actually see her heart beating like a sledgehammer through her shirt.

“I will ask you nicely only this last time, girl. Then I will kill a person in this room every
second
until you grow the courage to show yourself.”

It was as though the voice of Lucifer himself was singling her out and beckoning her from the masses. Kristen became suddenly concerned that she might pass out. She felt dizzy and lightheaded with a sense of overwhelming dread and public humiliation. The terrible sounds of men and women whimpering in fear enveloped her from all sides. What the hell was going on? What could he possibly want with her? Kristen tried to anchor her mind with the things she knew; yet she knew nothing. The entire convention was trapped in the Lutvak ballroom with some sort of . . . Kristen could not seem to bring herself to guess what he could be. Where was Ryan? Was he with her somewhere here in the panic of the ballroom? Kristen prayed he would not try to protect her and get hurt.

“Not brave enough?” the voice of Vengelis called. “So be it.”

“N-n-no! Please! Don’t hurt me! N-no!” a man cried out from the stage. Kristen knew it to be the manager whom she had just been standing alongside. He began to beg and yelp, the otherwise silent and frightened ballroom echoing with the sounds of his frantic struggle. “Oh god, no, please not me!”

“I’m here!” Kristen heard her own voice suddenly shout, though it was barely recognizable to her. She blinked down at her sneakers in resignation. The few people standing in front of her hastily moved out of the way. Kristen pushed past the shoulders of the audience and revealed herself.

W
ith wobbly steps, Kristen Jordan emerged out of the trembling crowd and stood to face Vengelis Epsilon. The scene in the room was dreamlike despite her willful effort to focus on the things that were concrete. Help was coming. The entire nation was on alert, and it had something to do with this person calling for her. Help had to be on the way.

The baffling Vengelis was standing on the stage, holding the hotel manager in the air by the collar of his shirt. Vengelis’s body was not even in a tensed position, and his arm held the husky man clean off the ground with seemingly no effort at all. Kristen could feel the fear coursing from the audience behind her. The beautiful young woman sat on the stairs leading to the stage with her hands wrapped round her knees. She was looking at Kristen emphatically, and Kristen saw she had scrapes on her arms and hands.

“There you are,” the man calling himself Vengelis said. “Come here.”

Kristen stood her ground and looked up at him carefully. He raised the hotel manager farther into the air. The poor man was being strangled by his own necktie, his face turning purple as his lips gasping for breath.

“What do you want?” Kristen called.

Vengelis turned to the young woman on the stairs.

“Madison. Explain if you will.”

The beautiful woman’s—Madison’s—face flushed upon being addressed. Although her attractiveness matched that of Vengelis, Kristen could tell by her unconcealed fear that Madison was not with him. There was a traumatized and demoralized look to her that said more than her words possibly could. Despite her appearance, her voice was surprisingly steady. “He just wants our cooperation. If you do what he says, I don’t think he’s gonna hurt you.”

“To that I will hold,” Vengelis said. “Now come here. I want some clarification on both
you
and the presentation you were giving.”

“Drop him first,” Kristen called.

Vengelis gave her an oddly approving expression and released the manager at once, who collapsed with a clatter onto the stage and rolled into a fetal position. Kristen moved to the stairs and torpidly ascended the steps past Madison up to Vengelis. The manager violently hacked and wheezed from the stage floor. Terror was pumping through her, and she looked with disbelief at the body of Professor Vatruvia in the corner. She could feel hundreds of pitying eyes burning into her back as she crossed the stage, but no one from the audience volunteered to speak up against the manifest nightmare standing by the podium.

“Well?” Kristen asked with a soft voice, now much closer to the mysterious man than she wanted to be.

“Who are you?” Vengelis’s tone was peculiarly suspicious.

“Kristen Jordan.”

Vengelis stared intently at her for a long moment. She watched his eyes move slowly from her jeans to her hair to her glasses. “Were you the one who came here on the
Traverser I
?”

His bizarre words passed over her head and into the open space of the ballroom.