The 49th Mystic Page 37

  With one last deep breath, I left the trees, bent over, sprinting for the northeast corner.

  Five steps before I reached it the shot came, snapping over my head. Still at a full run, I dived into a roll, palmed the gun at my waist, and came up firing in the direction of the gunshot.

  The bullet wasn’t on any target, but I didn’t stop to consider my bad aim—I was already sprinting to my right, angling for the corner, searching for that ladder with a string of rapid clicks.

  Its shape came into view when I was ten paces out, and I hurled my gun up on the roof, still at a full sprint.

  They might have seen me running, but unless they were hanging out the window, they couldn’t see me taking to the ladder. Blood pumping through my veins, I launched myself into the air and landed on the ladder a third of the way up.

  Then I was up, surprised by my speed under the influence of adrenaline and Other Earth agility.

  I rolled onto the roof, out of sight, hoping they thought I’d ducked around the side of the hospital.

  Palming the gun with a prayer that it would still function, I crossed to the air conditioner closest to the stairwell door and felt along the bottom edge until my fingers found the hidden key. Relief washed over me. Without the key, I would only be stranded.

  Ten seconds later I unlocked the dead bolt, let myself into the upper stairwell, and shut myself in.

  Silence. No hum of light bulbs. Without power, the hospital would be dark where there were no windows. They would be as blind as me.

  But I could see in the dark.

  What is lost that can never be lost, Rachelle?

  The question whispered through my mind, and I paused in the darkness on that top step. The world seemed to still around me, and for a moment I felt disoriented. Like the stairwell I was in didn’t really exist. Like I was just dreaming all of this.

  It did exist, of course, but I felt momentarily dislocated from it, suspended in time. Raw stillness.

  What is lost that can never be lost?

  I lifted my sleeve and stared at the glow of the white and green bands tattooed deep into my arm. These I could see, blind or not. My breathing thickened.

  What is lost that can never be lost? Me, I thought, but Me was the Second Seal.

  And then time crashed back into my awareness, more acutely than before. Strange how my experiences in Other Earth didn’t align as easily with my perceptions in this world. Which was a problem, because Talya had said that the key to saving Eden was the Third Seal, and it was now the sixth day and I still had no clue where to find the Third Seal.

  One step at a time. Baby steps.

  I clicked and followed the shapes and shadows down the stairs and around one corner to the first-floor hall entrance. I didn’t hesitate at the door. Nor when my clicks showed me two guards running down the hall toward me, knowing the sound of their gunfire would bring others.

  I sprinted directly for them, closing the twenty paces with quickness I didn’t know I had. They both jumped back, guns rising.

  But I changed my course before they could fire. Leaped high to my left, took two long strides on the wall, and flew toward them from an angle that required them to adjust their weapons.

  Then I was there, silent as an arrow in the night, leading with my left foot as I brought it around. It was my speed, not my weight, that gave my blow its force. My heel snapped the first guard’s head back before slamming into the face of the second. They dropped like two sacks of grain.

  I landed like a cat beside them, heart slamming.

  Only then, crouched in that silent hallway, did it occur to me that the safest place to keep someone alive in a building that was receiving gunfire would be the basement. Underground, where few ventured. The basement where, for all we knew, Vlad Smith had been holed up for the last week.

  I hurried back to the stairwell and slipped in, breathless. Moving on the tips of my toes, I flew down the metal stairs to the lower level. There were no windows in the basement. It would be pitch-black.

  I hesitated at the entrance to the basement hallway, then pulled the door open. I clicked as softly as I could. The hall was empty.

  My mind spun. If Vlad was down here, he might hear my clicking. I held my breath and eased down the corridor, acutely aware of the slightest sounds.

  But it was my fine-tuned sense of smell that stopped me halfway down the hall. I could pick out the familiar smell of bleach and disinfectant mingled with a general medicinal scent I’d come to associate with the hospital. But now another scent hung in the air, however faint. Dirty socks. A hint of vanilla.

  Vlad was here.

  Ignoring the warning bells that told me to run, I gathered my resolve, touched the wall to guide me, and crept forward, keenly aware of the scent, stronger now. I dared not click, but I didn’t need echolocation to find the three doors in that hall. Two on my left, down and across the corridor.

  One directly ahead. And as I moved toward it, that scent grew stronger. Imagined or not, it didn’t matter. I could only follow what senses were available to me, trailing my hand along the wall.

  My fingers touched the door frame and I froze.

  Still no sound from inside. Could I hear the faint flickering of flame? No, but I could smell his scent. And if I could smell him, would he soon smell me?

  I found the doorknob with my left hand and the gun in my waistband with my right. Before I could lose courage, I yanked the door wide, clicking like an insect.

  He was seated on a chair not ten feet from the door, feet propped up on the counter, reading something by the light of a lantern. I knew it was him because of his glowing eyes and now the faint tinge of red at his fingertips as well. And I knew that the form on the gurney to my right had to be my father, hooked up to an IV.

  Even before Vlad looked up, I knew that he’d mistaken my approach for someone else. And when he did look up, he didn’t have time to react because I pulled the trigger and sent a bullet into his chest.

  Then another. And a third, jerking the trigger in rapid succession.

  Now he reacted, first with shock. Then with a soft chuckle. “Touché.” The word died with a final wheeze as his lungs shut down.

  Relief flooded my body. I’d killed him?

  But his reaction made it clear that death wasn’t something he feared. I wasn’t even sure bullets could kill him in this world. We had to move quickly.

  I spun to my father, who hadn’t moved. A dozen thoughts collided in my mind, the loudest being that Shadow Man was keeping him sedated. Asleep in this world.

  Awake in Other Earth.

  And with that single, isolated thought, I was sure that Vlad had manipulated me into writing my father into the book. Having crossed, my father could now use the book. Vlad had been a step ahead of me all along!

  But my father was still sedated, which meant he was in Other Earth right now, under the influence of someone who was working with Vlad to open the gateway for him to cross.

  The Book of History had crossed with my father?

  Dread washed over me. I had to wake him before he used the book!

  I rushed to my father’s side, knocking over a tray in my hurry. “Dad?” I shook his face. “Wake up!”

  He was out cold, veins flowing with narcotics. I ripped out the IV and shook him again. “Dad!”

  I knew sedatives well enough—following my mother’s death, my father had studied them thoroughly, desperate to learn how she could have died. I also knew that only time or another drug, like an adrenaline injection, could wake a person from anesthesia.

  Vlad would have taken no chances, surely. He might need to wake my father as well, if only to apply his own forms of manipulation. I could only hope . . .

  I searched the counter next to Vlad’s slumped form with a string of clicks. Two syringes. One small, maybe Propofol or some similar drug. One larger, self-contained. My heart leaped.

  I snatched up the large plastic syringe and fumbled with the seal. A thump startled me. I
half expected Vlad to be rising. He wasn’t. His hand had fallen from the chair’s arm and struck the side of the counter.

  Shooting the drug into my father’s thigh would slow the effect by a good thirty seconds and bring him out slowly—time I didn’t have. I ripped the plastic sleeve off the syringe, frantically searched his inner arm for the bulge of his vein, the prick from the IV I’d just pulled out. I lined up the needle with the pinprick on his arm, slipped it in, hoping I’d hit the vein, and injected a small amount of adrenaline into his bloodstream.

  Nothing happened. So I gave him more.

  When nothing still happened, I shot half the contents into his arm.

  He came up with a snort like an electrocuted bull, and I jumped back.

  “Oh, God!” he bellowed.

  “It’s me. Rachelle. Try to keep quiet.”

  “Oh, God!” He clutched at his chest. “Oh, God!” Gasping.

  Silence no longer mattered. We had to get out, that was all.

  “I just injected you with adrenaline,” I said, speaking quickly. “We have to get you out of here. You have to climb the stairs. Down the fire escape. Can you do that?”

  He was panting. I could only imagine what kind of horror I’d just pulled him from.

  I grabbed for his hand. “You’ve had a nightmare, I know. But right now . . .”

  My words died in my throat when I felt his two bloodied fingers in my hand. Two fingernails were missing. He was being tortured in Other Earth.

  Revulsion rose from my gut, and for a second I thought I might throw up. His fate was in my hands. I had to keep him awake. We had to move!

  “Okay, listen to me. I need you to focus now. We have to get out of here and keep you awake. If you go back under, you go back into that same nightmare. You understand?”

  “I . . . It’s real . . .”

  I pulled his legs from the gurney and grabbed his hand. “Stand up.” But he wasn’t moving. “Stand up!” I tugged his arm.

  This time he stood, shaking from the shot of adrenaline, but more than fully aware. Why was he hesitating?

  Something else was bothering him.

  “Dad, you have to trust me, please. We have to get out!”

  “Okay.” He followed but with some reluctance, I thought.

  I felt like a child leading a Saint Bernard on a leash, but we managed, first to the dark hall, then to the stairwell, where he twisted back.

  “What is it?”

  “I have to kill Barth,” he said.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Poor choice of words. “This isn’t about killing anymore. It’s about saving Eden!”

  “You don’t understand! He’s got the whole valley rigged with explosives. If I don’t kill Barth by noon, we’ll all die.”

  My father’s desperation to kill Barth and kill him quickly suddenly made sense. Vlad had played everyone, knowing that if my father went after Barth under duress, Barth would return the favor. Fearing for my father’s life, I would eventually write him into the book if only to pull him out of his madness. Talya had said Vlad wasn’t permitted to take life with his own hands, but blindness and deception were far more effective than guns. They were the Shadow’s weapons.

  “No one’s going to die,” I said. “Not Barth, not you, not me. He can’t blow up this valley until he has what he wants. He still needs both of us, but we have to go.”

  Where to, I didn’t yet know. Baby steps.

  “What are you going to do?” he croaked.

  What is lost that can never be lost?

  “I’m going to find the Third Seal. Hurry!”

  36

  BA’AL STOOD over the sacrificial table, infuriated. The Albino lay spread-eagle on the stone surface, head tilted to one side, unresponsive.

  The priest Nastros, his most experienced interrogator, was frantically checking the man’s eyes, pulling up the lids to expose them to the torchlight. What he’d anticipated being a rather straightforward exercise in persuasion had taken far too long already.

  He had here, on his table, the father of the 49th Mystic in the other world. So then, Vlad had come to their aid from that dimension, as Teeleh had foreseen. The leverage this father might provide them could not be underestimated.

  Thus, the man must remain alive. Plied but alive. At least until he used the book to open the gateway for Vlad himself. Only then could Vlad force the 49th to betray herself and all Mystics in both dimensions.

  “He’s dead to the world,” Nastros said. “I don’t understand it. He seemed to faint for no reason.”

  “No man faints without reason,” Ba’al snapped.

  “But you saw it yourself. I had numbed his pain so that he took up the quill.”

  Ba’al took the ink pen from the Albino’s fingers and set it beside the open book. Learning that the man wrote with his right hand, they’d applied pain to the left. Why the man had resisted writing for as long as he did was a mystery. He’d convinced himself that he was in a dream and yet remained stubborn, concerned about his daughter.

  That changed when they extracted the fingernails. He’d already put the pen to the page when he inexplicably collapsed. Could the book do this to a man?

  Ba’al lifted both hands above his head and slammed his fists down on the man’s chest. “Wake!”

  “My lord, we’ve tried the potions . . .”

  Like a man possessed, Ba’al beat on the Albino’s chest with as much strength as he could gather in his frail form. “Wake!” Then three times, robes fluttering about his flying arms. “Wake, wake, wake!”

  But the man did not stir.

  A terrible fear seeped into Ba’al’s veins.

  “You will wake him or you will take his place,” he rasped. “You will wake him and encourage him to write the words of his own will before he has drawn ten breaths. Do you understand?”

  The priest dipped his head. “He will wake, I swear it. And he will write.”

  USING ECHOLOCATION without thought, I moved quickly through the trees, praying my father wouldn’t go after Barth. I had to keep him awake and trusting.

  What is lost that can never be lost?

  The finger kept trying to point my thoughts to the Third Seal, and each time the world seemed to quiet momentarily. I recalled Talya’s words: Remember, set your eyes on what is unseen, not on the finger itself. It only points. If you focus your attention on the finger alone, it will block your sight of that to which it points.

  But that didn’t seem to help.

  We were well south of the hospital before I pulled up. I hadn’t heard any more gunfire. An eerie silence had settled over the valley. Above us, the clouded sky seemed to press down, sealing us in as much as protecting us from the wasteland beyond.

  “Rachelle . . .” My father held his bloodied fingers gingerly. “You’re clicking again. Is it back?”

  My blindness. For a few seconds a terrible self-pity gripped me. A rage at having seen so clearly, then losing that gift. But I didn’t have time to let it crush me right now.

  “Yes,” was all I said.

  “I’m sorry . . . I . . .”

  I turned and wrapped my arms around him. For a moment I was just his daughter again, and I wanted it to stay that way.

  “This is all my fault, not yours,” I said through the knot in my throat. “I’m so sorry, I had no idea that you would end up where you did.”

  “It’s okay, it’s . . .” He rubbed my back. “So the dreams are real?” Still struggling to believe. “Ba’al is real?”

  He was in Ba’al’s Thrall. Dear God, help him. I pulled back and gently lifted his wounded hand. “If they weren’t real, Vlad wouldn’t need you to write him into the book, into Other Earth. Whatever you do, tell me you won’t.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise. But I can’t go back there. I thought I could handle it, just a nightmare. But if you’re saying . . .”

  “Nightmare or not, it doesn’t matter. Like any storm,
to the extent you put your faith in it, it masters you.” A bell went off deep in my mind and I hesitated, feeling oddly separated from my words. “Just don’t write.”

  What had I said that struck that bell? To the extent you put your faith in it, it masters you. Like the disciples in the storm. Why are you afraid? Oh you of little faith.

  What is lost that can never be lost? Faith? It made no sense.

  “. . . are we going?” I heard my father ask.

  I tilted my head up to him, reminded of his frailty. He was like all the residents of Eden, fractured in every conceivable way, no longer knowing what to believe after learning they had lived for so long in an illusion.

  But wasn’t that also true of the whole world?

  Lift your eyes and see what is unseen. Change your perception.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Late morning, I guess.”

  “And you’re sure the explosives will go off at noon?”

  “I don’t know what I think anymore, but I believed it when he said it to me in the shed. Noon on the sixth day if I didn’t kill Barth. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Assuming you’re right, if he doesn’t get what he wants, it would be like him to bring the whole town down with him.”

  “Maybe. His objective goes way beyond Eden and he still needs me, so I doubt he’ll let me die. But everyone else . . .” I didn’t need to finish.

  “Then no matter what we do, Eden will end up under a pile of rubble. Anyone who survives the explosives will be exposed to the fallout when the sky collapses.”

  My pulse spiked.

  “With any luck, Vlad’s dead,” I said. “If not, he still needs you as much as he needs me. So we need to put you where no one can get to you.”

  “Where?”

  I took his hand and headed toward the center of town. “The prison below the church.”

  “Lock ourselves inside?”

  “Only you. It’s you they need now, not me.”

  A beat passed as he wrestled with this thought. We’d reversed roles. I was now his protector and he was beginning to accept it, at least for now.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Baby steps. Just one at a time, like clicking through a dark labyrinth. I began to run with my father close on my heels.