The Undead Pool

“Sir!” It held the confidence of a battle won. “Entity is gone. We tripled our density, but there are a few clouds condensing in the immediate area. Do you want us to mop them up?”

Heavy boots crossed the room, tripping on something in the dim light. “Go. Yes,” Ayer said, and I focused enough to see him bending over a glowing screen. “Don’t let them out of the area. I don’t want them increasing the isolation zone.”

I was empty, and as the drug took hold, I felt as if I was dying. I could no longer feel the sun pouring through the earth. Even the circling thoughts of the undead, revolving like lighted tops in the night, were missing. Numb. I was numb and empty. I shook, alone on the floor, ignored as nothing. What if she came back? She thought I’d betrayed her. She’d kill me, make my dream no more.

A toe nudged me, and I did nothing. “If she can survive the main entity, she might be able to draw all of them in,” Ayer said. “We don’t need Landon anymore. Cut him loose.”

“Sir.”

“Wrap her up,” he added. “Put her in the chair. As soon as the ranging cloud is collected.”

“Now?” someone new blurted. “She’s almost dead.”

“Which is why you’re alive,” barked Ayer, and I groaned when he flipped me over with his boot, my arm flopping to hit the floor. “She’s a demon. Treat her like one or you’ll be someone’s toy. As soon as the ranging mystics are collected, I want her hooked up. We get them talking, and that bitch will come back.”

Swell. I couldn’t even move my fingers as they bundled me up. All too soon I was being lifted, and the rattle of a gurney intruded. My breath came out in a gasp when they dropped me onto a rolling table and the disconcerting feeling of motion made me dizzy.

“Nicely done, Morgan,” Ayer whispered, and I felt the sudden lurch of an elevator. “You survived. Not what Landon promised, but I’m flexible. You’re going to bring the mystics right to me. Very efficient. You moved my timetable up two months. Let’s see what another minute or two connected to the divine will do.”

I cracked an eye. There were three men in the elevator with me, but I could do nothing. Wrap her up. Put her in the chair. Better and better. “That’s what she does, you know,” I said, and Ayer stopped the nervous man from darting me again. “She gives you what you ask for. And you pay for it in the end.”

Ayer grunted, eyes on his watch as he took my pulse. I couldn’t feel him holding my wrist, and he looked so much like Kisten it hurt. Between the drugs and my failure, I couldn’t help my eyes tearing up. How was I going to come back from this? I was so alone.

But then a tiny whisper of tingles sparked through me, shocking me. Mystics. There were some in me, resonating to my feelings of loss and grief. Eyes fixed open, I stared at Ayer counting my pulse, seeing my hand dangle limply in his. She’d left behind what she didn’t want to think about, and now her thoughts of betrayal and loss added to my own, almost crushing me.

“Are you sane?” I asked them, words slurring, and Ayer dropped my hand.

“History will judge me, not you,” he said, thinking I was talking to him, and he pushed me into the hallway when the doors opened.

But I was focused inward toward the abandoned mystics. Pitying the tiny new thoughts she’d left behind, I took them in, wrapping them up in my own pain, giving them a place to exist within me until I could return them to her. She’d probably want these back. God knew I didn’t want them.

Twenty

Tingles of returning circulation stabbed my legs as the gurney hit a corner. The dart was gone from my thigh, but the drug was clearly in force. I could do little as I was trundled down a corridor. The lack of an echo and the ornate wall sconces led me to believe we were still in someone’s residence, probably someone with severe light restrictions by the feel of it. The outward-looking faces of the three men above me held a wide span of emotion: unease, dismay, concern, excitement. That last was in Ayer’s eyes, barely beating out his avarice. I was a thing to him. A way to up his timetable, and it scared me.

“You’re making a mistake,” I said, glad the Goddess was gone and it was just me in my skull again. “Bancroft was trained in dealing with the Goddess, and your splinter was too much for him. I don’t know if you heard, but he left this world from the thirty-ninth floor this morning.”

The gurney slowed at a door, cracked open about a foot or so. “You misunderstand,” Ayer said, his voice oily. “I fully expect you to go insane. That’s what will bring the Goddess in, and then we will sop her up like spilled milk.”

“You want me to go crazy?” I said as the gurney stopped at the open door.

Crazy? came a thought-not-mine, and I choked as the alien fear lifted through me. It was a mystic. Is that different from loss?