Blood Vivicanti (9781941240113) (6 page)

We stopped piercing one
another. His venom was in me and now mine was in him.

We smiled at each other. We
blushed.

I was a little sad
afterward. A part of me wished that our embrace hadn’t
ended.

Red took his spacecraft and
returned to the Locomotive Deadyards. He would set all our traps
and tricks for the coming war. He would prepare the Labyrinth Fort
for an invasion.

I headed for Lowen’s dark
city.

Along the way I stopped at
the house of a Japanese martial artist from Okinawa living in
Shreveport, Louisiana. He was a gifted maker of nunchakus –
otherwise called “nunchucks.”

I got a pair. They made me
feel like Bruce Lee. I felt ready to enter the dragon.

The hole that I had knocked
into the 120th floor of the Black Building had been repaired by the
time I returned.

As though it had happened
only the night before, my photographic memory could easily recall
bursting through it with my eighteen-wheeler and then fearlessly
leaping from that hole with Red’s coffin on my shoulder.

The impact crater that I
had made when I landed was still there.

Good times.

There were few ways inside
the Black Building, but my photographic memory also told me that it
had the same flaw as the Death Star. On one side was an open
exhaust port.

I snuck into it and slipped
through the ventilation system. For once I didn’t mind my petite
size. I easily fit through the air ducts and maneuvered through
them with lightning speed.

Forget Supergirl. I’d
rather be a Jedi.

Sneakily I slipped from an
air vent on the 98th floor.

Sleeper Devils were nearby.
I rendered them unconscious, each with a well-aimed Vulcan neck
pinch.

I went up the stairwell to
the 99th floor.

I recalled Ms. Crystobal’s
discovery of a place that looked a little too much like an
all-night diner.

Curious to know if it was
still there, I opened the door.

To my surprise, I was not
looking at an all-night diner at all, but a very long white
hallway. The floor had black and white tiles. Along the sides were
rows of green doors. Each door was as unique as a person. Some were
tall, some were short, some were wide, some thin.

At the other end was a red
door.

I would have liked to
explore the hallway a little. Unfortunately it was jam-packed with
very angry-looking Sleeper Devils.

The Sleeper Devils were all
staring at me with hungry mouths.

I was a little startled by
the number. There seemed no end to them.

I took out my nunchakus. I
focused all the anger and sorrow I felt at losing Wyn and Theo. I
summoned all my hatred toward Lowen. And then I gripped my
nunchakus tighter.

The Sleeper Devils came at
me.

I went at them.

It was like two storms
colliding, a lesser and a greater.

I was not the
lesser.

I burst through the door,
ramming straight into the first wall of Lowen’s cannon fodder,
ramming them either into the walls on either side, or inside the
ceiling above.

I moved along the hallway
as quickly as I could.

My photographic memory
still recalls every face that my nunchakus mercilessly smashed to
bits.

Kung Fu helped a little. So
did Canadian Defendo.

I was a rabid
wolverine.

It took less than a minute
to get to the other end of the hallway. To a Blood Vivicanti with a
photographic memory, a minute can feel like a lifetime.

Behind me were Lowen’s
Sleeper Devils. They lay as parted as the Red Sea, some stamped
into the wall, most twitching.

Before me was the red door.
It was locked. The sign on it read:

Restricted Area

Authorized Personnel
Only

Of course I ignored it and
went in. I could never have guessed that on the other side would be
a familiar face smiling at me.

“
Wyn,” I said.

It was Wyn’s body. But it
wasn’t Wyn at the helm.

“
I’ve missed your tongue in
my neck,” the voice said in a tone that was not Wyn’s. Instead it
was pitiable and sad, and almost begging me not to cause any more
pain.

My Blood Memories gave me
the name of that voice.

“
Nell,” I said.

An instinct in me wanted to
be sick. Another wanted to weep.

“
Is Lowen going to take
everything from me?” I asked.

Nell nodded. It looked so
strange coming from Wyn’s body. His face had never shown such a
hopeless expression.

“
That’s what Lowen does,”
said Nell. “That is the work that the cosmos ordained him to do. He
is the destroyer of worlds. He is the annihilator of anyone’s
private universe.”

Nell said, “I’m sorry,” and
then she came at me, adding. “I can’t disobey.”

In Wyn’s body, she was a
little stronger than me. And she tried to pierce me.

But I was too fast for her.
And my new knack for Brazilian jiu-jitsu rendered her unconscious
in seconds.

I would have taken her on
my shoulder and escaped with Wyn’s body, but an alarm resounded
throughout the Black Building.

In another minute the room
would be filled with Lowen’s Devicanti.

And I had a job to
do.

Behind Nell had been a hub
of various power couplings.

Wyn had told me about it
before he invaded the Building. Tearing it from the wall had been
his Plan B if he could not get down to the lower levels.

With a swipe of my Blood
Vivicanti claws, I tore the hub from the wall.

Then I wadded it up like
tin foil and I tossed it at the forehead of the first Devicanti who
came charging into the room.

Lowen was watching the
whole scene through what he called his “spirit-link.” He had it
with his Devicanti and his Sleeper Devils. Through it, he could see
all they saw, all they smelled, all they experienced. He knew all
their thoughts and feelings.

However, his link with Nell
had weakened once she entered Wyn’s body. It seemed that a Blood
Vivicanti body was much stronger than he had expected. He had made
her more powerful than he could have ever imagined.

She had not realized this
yet. She was too dependent on him, too close to him. She had loved
living under his power and influence for so long that she knew no
other world than the misguided trust she placed in him. She did not
know freedom in her new body because she did not yet know the power
she now had.

In many ways, she was a lot
like me. I could have shown her much.

Lowen was far from the
fighting. In his office, he was standing with his hands behind his
back, a contemplative look on his face. He was staring out over the
vastness of his empire, a whole city that he had turned into his
Sleeper Devils.

He closed his eyes just as
the first explosion rocked the Building.

He opened them again in
surprise and frustration. His spirit-link told him that something
bad was happening.

The explosion happened
because of the hub that I had torn from the wall. It disrupted the
power going to several key facilities in the building. And without
power some facilities merely shut down.

A few detonated rather
violently.

Outside the Black Building,
close to the top, a chain reaction of explosions came from the
interior.

Shards burst outward,
scattering in all directions like a rain of shooting
stars.

Sleeper Devils in the
streets looked up together. They thought it was Christmas
snow.

Not long after that, Nell
came stumbling into Lowen’s office, wounded and worried.

She was ready for him to
hurt her for failing to catch me. She had no idea that she was now
powerful enough to hurtle him across the room like a
comet.

“
Don’t worry,” he said
without looking at her, just barely able to read her thoughts. “I’m
not going to hurt you. We want Mary Paige to escape just as she
wants us to follow her.”

Lowen turned to Nell. He
looked at her in her new body, Wyn’s body. Lowen nodded his
approval.

“
Assemble the Sleeper
Devils,” he said in a commanding tone. “Assemble the
Devicanti.”

He looked her in the eye
with dead seriousness. “And get Ms. Crystobal from the drawer in
the Wardrobe.”

He paused.

Then he added, “Don’t open
the pocket watch.”

Lowen went to the 120th
floor where he had once stashed Red’s metal coffin.

The floor’s dimensional
plane had not changed much since the night I stole Red from there.
The floor was still lined in black metallic plates and it still
stretched on beyond the far distant horizon.

Only the low-hanging
ceiling was different. It had been a grand view of a galaxy’s
interstellar phenomena all clustered together. Now it was a whopper
of a vortex, the swirling mass of red clouds, flickering with
galactic lightning, as if a wormhole had opened just overhead and
was threatening to swallow the whole wide world.

Assembled along the
vastness of the 120th floor was an immense army of Lowen’s Sleeper
Devils.

In front of this host were
the Devicanti.

A pulpit as tall as a tower
stood where Red’s coffin had been. It had a winding stone stairwell
to the top.

Lowen ascended the pulpit
and looked out over his army.

Nell returned from the
Wardrobe with the pocket watch. She went up the pulpit too and
stood beside Lowen.

“
My Sleeper Devils, my
Devicanti, my children,” he announced in an amplified voice, “the
girl Mary Paige is hoarding my inheritance.”

The host howled and yelled
and spit.

“
She has stolen your
future,” Lowen said.

The Sleeper Devils shook
their fists in the air.

“
I took the empty shells of
your lonely and loveless lives, and I have poured into you my love.
I made you in my image and likeness.”

The Devicanti shouted the
loudest.

“
Now I will finish what is
incomplete in you. Now I will fill up everything lacking in you.
Now I will perfect all your imperfections.”

The host stomped their
feet. They cried out their outrage. The noise was louder than
thunder. It was more violent than an earthquake.

“
Retrieve for me the Origin
Blood,” Lowen called out. “Bring to me the Red Man and his
spacecraft. Within it, resides everything that you are lacking. To
be filled is to do my will. So go and know this: We do not go to
war just to make one girl a simple Sleeper Devil. No, we go now to
make every Sleeper Devil a powerful, beautiful, graceful, Blood
Vivicanti! You will all become my beloved Devicanti!”

In one voice, the whole
host of Devicanti and Sleeper Devils shouted out in reply:
“Yes!”

Nell was the only one who
shed a single tear.

Lowen’s army marched from
the Black Building.

He was at the head. Nell
was beside him as always. They were the only two Blood Vivicanti
among the host. Following them were two hundred Devicanti. Twenty
thousand Sleeper Devils followed last of all, a great caboose of
men and woman and children that were not quite zombies.

It was an army bred to
consume every soul on earth.

The army marched along the
railway tracks that led straight to the Locomotive
Deadyards.

Red and I were inside. We
were hiding in the tin roof’s rafters.

He looked at me. His
expression was impassive for a moment, but then his mouth pouted in
sympathy. He reached out and touched the top of my hand.

I turned my hand
over.

We held hands. Our fingers
inter-locked.