by Nicky
ACT II
1
"Miss Evans," Eliot Stokes said, and glared
at the black-haired woman in the
floor-length ebnoy gown standing before him, "you
must forgive an old man's
acerbic and potentially rude forthrightness, but I
really have to say that you
haven't exactly give me reason to trust you these
days." He paused, and added
carefully, "What with the company you keep."
Maggie Evans batted her khol-lined lashes. "Professor Stokes," she purred,
"there's no reason to take that tone with
me. You've known me since I was a
child. Surely
that's reason enough to speak to me now."
Stokes' face hardened.
"Your father is dead," he said, but stepped aside to
allow Maggie entrance.
She brushed by him, a tiny smile dimpling her purple
lips, and let the black fur coat slip from her
shoulders. She hung it over the
arm of Stokes' favorite easy chair, then turned back
to face him.
"So you've heard all the village gossip,"
she said, and shrugged. "What does
that matter to me?"
"Not a lot these days, I'd wager. Which is too bad, my dear. If I didn't know
better, I'd say your attire is suitable for
mourning. Alas, I do know better."
"What on earth do you mean?"
"Let's not play insane games, Miss Evans,"
Stokes thundered suddenly, and
Maggie recoiled a little. "I know that you were responsible for
Sam Evans'
death. You
... or whatever you've become."
Maggie's eyes flashed, and for a moment — just a
terrifying moment, Stokes
thought, and felt the world spin dizzily beneath him —
they glowed a sinister
black. Just
like those of Victoria Winters, he realized.
It's the powers of
darkness, or how they manifest themselves. The eyes are supposedly the windows
of the soul, so if the soul was corrupted ...
Then the blackness faded away, if it was ever really
there, and Maggie cocked
her head and smiled charmingly. "Whatever I've become," she said,
and added a
trill of musical laughter. "Dear Professor Stokes, you are
amusing. Why, I've
become nothing more or less than I was before. Well," she said, musing,
"perhaps a little more ..."
"You have a purpose for visiting me
tonight?" Stokes was finding it
increasingly difficult to maintain a stony wall of
indifference when speaking
to her. She was
right. He had known her since a child;
why, she and his
daughter Alexis had skipped rope together down the sidewalk;
Maggie would bring
him left-over slices of cherry pie from the diner some
cold, blustery nights;
she had consulted him when she was thinking of leaving
Colllinsport for college
in New York; she and Quentin were going to be married
—
But all that was a long time ago, Stokes thought, and
warily eyed the
night-shaded young woman who now sat before him, legs
crossed daintily, long
black-lacquered nails drumming airily on the arms of
his easy chair. A long
time ago indeed, and I'm nothing but an old, old
man.
"Over the past few months," Maggie said, and
her teeth, Stokes noted, seemed
very white in her mouth, "you may have noticed
that I've begun to play around
with a new hobby."
"I'm going to assume that you are not referring
to Nicholas Blair."
Maggie laughed again.
"Touché, Professor." She sobered a little, but her eyes
were still dark and wicked. "Nicholas is helping me reach my
... potential, I
guess you might say, but I have recently realized that
there are certain things
I would like to handle myself." She leaned
forward, elbows on her knees. "You
have something I am very much interested in
obtaining."
"I am not in the habit of loaning out anything
that may be of value to a
practitioner of the supernatural," Stokes said
with a tiny moue of disdain,
"particularly if their inclination seems as bent
to the darkness as yours
does."
"Darkness," Maggie said, and tittered, but
her face was serious, and the pupils
threatened to swallow her entire eyes. "Indeed.
But I'm afraid you're
mistaken, Professor Stokes. I don't want you to loan me anything. Rather, I
just want to pick your brain. Yes, that's it. I want ...
a little peek.
That's all." She rose in one fluid motion from
her chair, graceful and
ferocious and focused as a stalking panther, and he
took a shambling half-step
backwards.
"What do you want?" he barked, but he could
hear the tremor in his voice.
You're not a month out of the hospital yet, he scolded
himself; get ahold of
yourself. But
it was difficult when a sorceress who was less of a novice than
he had anticipated was stalking him across his own
living room. Black sparks
had begun to jump and crackle between her fingers, and
she was grinning in a
most unpleasant manner.
"I told you," Maggie said. "A peek, that's all. A little tour of that big
frontal lobe of yours." Her voice was low and
deceivingly gentle. He supposed
she was supposed to sound soothing or cajoling. Her pupils had completely
swallowed her eyes, and they were nothing but black,
charred holes. The air
around her was darkening in her eagerness. Stokes could feel all the hair on
his arms beginning to stand up. He stumbled backwards, hands outstretched
behind him, groping, and he bit down on his lip to
prevent a cry from escaping
when he backed painfully into his desk, crammed
haphazardly in a corner by the
fireplace.
"What do you want to know?" he said, and his
hands were digging about through
the papers on his desk, fumbling about. I left it out, he thought, I left it
out after Julia and I had talked about Nicholas Blair,
and how she believed he
was threatening her.
I know it's here, now focus, you soft, stupid old man,
focus and find it NOW!
"Maybe I can just tell you."
"Oh, it's more fun this way," Maggie
purred. Her hair was blowing and
drifting
about in a spectral wind, and her face had drained of
color until she was like
salt, bleached and bony. "Believe me."
"What's happened to you, Maggie?" Stokes
asked, and the despair in his voice
was real. Where
the hell is it? he screamed inside, and
tried to
inconspicuously knock over a stack of papers. They spilled in a sheaf over his
fingers and see-sawed to the floor. "You've changed, can't you feel
it?"
She was nearly upon him. "Of course I can feel it," she
said. "I'm a hundred
times more the woman I used to be, a thousand. You stupid, stupid man. Can't
you see how powerful I've become? It's in the air all around you. And it's
me. Can't you
feel it?"
And he could.
It sounded like a million voices screaming in pain thousands of
miles away; his skin prickled and crawled as if ants
danced over its surface;
he smelled something charred and electrical. And at that moment his fingers
closed around it, the blessed balm he had been seeking
(but, he reminded
himself, had never tested, and there was no time like
the present, was there?),
and he seized it and held it out before him.
The effect was instantaneous.
A surge of power like an invisible fist sewn inside
his skin, his sinew, his
bones and his blood, rammed through his arm and
ignited in the symbol he thrust
out. It was
made from bronze and was roughly a cross quartered in a circle; he
had bought it in an antique shop on his last trip to
England more than ten
years before.
The owner of the shop had been a willowy woman with long red
hair, and she had assured him that it had protected
one family in Devonshire
from a malicious witch for over a century. Proven, never tested, he thought,
but the talisman was glowing with a fierce blue light,
and Maggie Evans threw
her hands up before her face and cowered away from it
with a shrill, feline
scream.
"It burns!" she cried. "Oh god, oh god, it burns!"
"Get back," Stokes boomed, delirious with
the sudden rush of power, and took a
step towards her.
She screamed again, and her arms pinwheeled as her feet
tangled together and she collapsed in an untidy
heap.
"Put it away," she moaned, and shook her
clawed hands at him. "Please,
please,
you don't know, you just don't —" Her voice died
off into a choked gurgle, and
she pressed her hands against her eyes.
"I don't think that would be very wise, do
you?" he asked pleasantly.
"Considering what would happen to me if I
did."
"I'll leave you alone," Maggie cried. "I swear, I swear —"
"To whom, Miss Evans? That's the question, isn't it." He knelt
beside her, and
held the throbbing symbol very near to her cheek. She tried to squirm away,
moaning and hissing, but her back was against the
wall. "Now this is
fascinating.
You're such a powerful witch — a baby witch, but a witch
nevertheless — and yet you're completely unable to
dematerialize. How
upsetting that must be for you at this moment."
"Shut up," she spat. A snarl of veins had stretched out across her
face and
writhed now like thick worms about to burst their
black guts across her
snow-white skin.
"But only a moment ago you were so very intent on
hearing what I had to say.
Has that changed so much?"
The look of hate in those inhuman, obsidian eyes would
have frozen a man of
lesser years and an equal amount of experience in
dealing with the
supernatural; fortunately for Eliot Stokes, he was, as
they said in the
vernacular, very much seasoned.
Her eyes narrowed.
Her lips, cracked now and as black as her eyes and hair,
tightened.
Stokes pressed the amulet to her cheek.
Maggie twisted away with a shriek, and cried,
"The Mask! The Mask!"
He raised an eyebrow.
That rings a bell, he thought, but what sort of bell?
"Mask?"
"Of Ba'al," she snarled, panting like a
dog. "Nicholas told me about it,
but I
sensed it myself.
A power greater, darker than anything I've ever felt before.
It's nearby, and I want it. I need it."
"The Mask of Ba'al," Stokes said. "I've heard whispers of it. It's been
thought legendary for centuries. Not to mention irrevocably lost."
"I sensed it," Maggie said, stubbornly,
petulantly.
"And Nicholas wants it."
"I want it."
"It supposedly imbues its wearer with so much
magic that they become the most
powerful being in the universe."
"Something like that." Maggie closed her
eyes. "But it's dangerous. To ...
to them."
Stokes raised an eyebrow. "Them?" Then he nodded. "Ah, yes. I see now.
The
Leviathans, of course."
"Leviathans?"
"Your boyfriend didn't tell you about them, did
he. They're old, my dear,
predating human civilization by at least a
millennia. Possibly more. They
ruled this earth in a time when there was no man, no
animals. Only darkness —
the same darkness, I'd wager, that you're so fond
of." Stokes removed the
amulet from her cheek, but cautiously, and she peered
at him through slitted
eyelids, crafty, like a serpent. "They're attempting to rise again, and
when
they do, your life and the life of that miserable
excuse for a warlock you
fancy won't be worth spit." Maggie opened her
mouth; the amulet flashed blue
again, and she cringed back.
"Let me go," she whimpered.
"That wouldn't be very wise. No, Miss Evans, I'm afraid we still have a
few
things left to talk about. Like why, for instance, you came calling
instead of
Mr. Nicholas
Blair." Stokes smiled a little.
"Oh, of course. He doesn't
know
you're here, does he." She glared at him; he held
up the amulet, and she
growled, then nodded miserably. "I thought not. You came here hoping that I
could show you an easy way to the Mask of Ba'al so
that you could don it
yourself. You
were going to betray Nicholas, and why shouldn't you? All that
power, just waiting for you, all that power untapped,
all for you, just for
you. You like
power don't you? And why not? You've never had it before.
Never tasted it.
And once you have the Mask you'll be truly free, won't you.
You wouldn't need Nicholas Blair or your father
—"
"Shut up."
"— or Quentin Collins —"
"Shut up!"
"— or anyone else, ever again." Stokes
leaned back on his heels, satisfied.
Tears streaked down her cheeks, and as he watched, the
fat veins disappeared,
and the black faded from her hair and her eyes, and
roses flooded her cheeks,
and she was Maggie Evans again, that simple hometown
girl who only wanted to
not be alone ever again, who only wanted someone to
love her. She leaned
forward and fell into his arms, and he held her and
rocked her, until she
pushed herself away with a groan and covered her face
in her hands. He watched
her, unsure what she would do next, but he kept a
tight grip on the amulet.
But something was broken inside of her, he thought,
something has changed.
We'll just have to see what.
She looked at him through big brown eyes, familiar eyes,
and whispered, "I'm so
sorry. I'm so,
so ... sorry."
"You have a lot to be sorry for."
"I can't stop," she said, and snuffled once,
and wiped the tears from her
cheeks.
"I'm sorry, but it's ...
it's too late for me. I can't
stop. I
don't even know if I want to stop, Professor
Stokes. All of this ... the
power, god, the power, and you don't know —" She
broke off, and stared in
guilty silence at her hands, warring with each other
in the lap of her soiled
black evening gown.
"I can't. I just —"
"It's possible that it's too late," Stokes
said, "and I can't tell you what you
should do. I'm
not your father." She winced, and he thought that was, perhaps,
a good sign.
"This was the first thing in my life I was ever
good at." The pain in her eyes
was huge, a cavity, a maw. The darkness was still there, and it roiled
inside
her uneasily.
"Who was I before this?
Before Nicholas? Nobody. A dumb,
smalltown hick, a waitress. I was nobody.
Not good enough for ... for
anyone. Then
everything changed, I changed, and I was making a difference.
All of a sudden.
I changed things, Professor Stokes, me, Maggie Evans, and I'm
more now than I ever was before."
"I'm not going to judge you, Maggie. Everyone has choices to make. Your life
is what you make of it. But you have to be strong; you can't be
carried along
in a rushing tide of events, never reacting, never
stepping outside the bounds.
You'll lose yourself for real, and you might never
come back. Choose, Maggie,
but whatever you do, choose to be strong. Choose for yourself. You cannot let
anyone else choose for you."
"I don't know," she whispered. "I'm so tired, Professor. I'm just so tired."
She leaned her head against his shoulder. "I can't ... I can't choose now. I
don't know what to do." She touched his
hand. "Please help me. Please."
He patted her hair.
"Go back to Nicholas. Go
home. Do what you have to do.
And come back to me when you decide. I'll be here whenever you need me,
Maggie, I promise."
And he meant it. He just hoped she believed him.
2
Sky's face was grim as they drove towards Collinwood;
it loomed above them,
waiting like a crouched, watchful beast at the end of
the winding road that led
up the hill.
Angelique shivered; she hated it.
But Sky was here, and she
wasn't sure how that made her feel. We're so alike after all, she thought, and
shouldn't that make us perfect for each other? But I just don't know. I don't
know if I'll ever be really sure. Or comfortable. Or safe.
"I can feel it," he said, and she just
blinked at him. His face in the
darkness was white, but Hecate, he was a handsome
man. His jaw was like iron,
square and beautiful, and his eyes were gray and
flinty. I missed him so much,
she thought now, and felt a pang inside her like metal
striking metal; I didn't
know how much I missed him until he was back again,
and I love him, and I can't
help it.
"I can feel it, all that darkness.
It's like poison up here. Like a
cloud. What's
going on there, Angelique? What's
happening?"
"I don't know," she said, and chewed at her
fingernails. She examined them
suddenly in the green glow of the dashboard, and
frowned. She'd chewed them
down until they were ragged. A drop of blood, perfect, like a black pearl
in
the darkness, had bloomed from one torn cuticle. "It's changing things,
whatever it is.
And people. Everyone at
Collinwood, for all I know."
"And you're sure."
"Sure?" She laughed, a hard sound, too
hard. Too much like old times. The
laughter choked and died in her throat and suddenly
she was just tired. "I'm
not sure of anything anymore."
"About the effect this ... whatever it is will have on the world."
He was
staring straight ahead, not looking at her. She suddenly felt very cold.
But determined.
"Yes," she said as they pulled into the
driveway. "Whatever is responsible
for
changing things the way they have can only be stopped
by magic, or some other
supernatural force.
There is no other answer, Sky. I
can feel the darkness
too. It's
... difficult." She dropped her
eyes, then opened them wide when
she felt his hand slip into hers. He squeezed, and she returned it gratefully.
Then the contact was broken, and he slid out of the
car and began to march,
very much the business man, towards Collinwood. She followed him, holding her
breath.
"Angelique!"
And froze in her tracks. It was Julia calling to her from the edge of
the
trees, and as Angelique turned to greet her, she saw
that someone else was with
her.
Barnabas.
My god, it's Barnabas.
He couldn't meet her eyes either, but his face was
white in all the darkness,
and he seemed ...
ashamed?
"Angelique?" It was Sky beside her, running
his arm around her waist, holding
her tight ...
and she breathed a sigh of relief.
Because she hadn't wanted to
pull away, hadn't wanted to run to Barnabas. That part of her life was over;
she saw that now, finally. Barnabas Collins was in her past, safely,
where he
belonged. Sky
was her future. She loved him, and he
loved her, and she would
die for him.
How nice it felt to admit that.
She snuggled against him.
"Barnabas," Angelique said, and her voice
was soft, and gentle, completely
unlike the voice some of them knew, "Julia. This is Sky Rumson. My husband."
And that was that.
It was easy; why had she always been so afraid?
Barnabas was shaking Sky's hand, and Sky shot her a
quick glance, because he
could feel how cold the other man's hands were.
"Sky is here to help," Angelique said,
because Julia's eyes were very wide, and
her nostrils were flaring like a frightened horse, and
of course, Angelique
realized, it has to be because she's in the presence
of a warlock ten thousand
times more powerful than Nicholas Blair. "He's on our side, Julia. Everything
is going to be all right."
Julia nodded, but she still didn't trust him. Angelique couldn't be bothered
with that right now.
There were a thousand things more important, and one of
them was before them.
Collinwood. More than sinister,
sheathed in shadows,
looming above them with one light burning.
"It's there," Sky said, and his voice was
slightly strangled. "I can feel it.
Pulsing, like in waves." He closed his eyes. "Something's happening up there.
There's power, and ...
and someone is trying —" He gritted his teeth. "Damn.
I can't see it, exactly, but I can feel it." He
held up his hands, and stared
at them all simply.
"I'm draining." And Barnabas.
"Can't you feel it?"
Barnabas nodded slowly. "A little," he said. "I think. A little pulling,
like a tug." He tapped his forehead. "Up here."
"It's Victoria," Julia said. She looked at the ground and shuffled her
feet a
little, and her fingers drummed against her
thigh. She wants a cigarette,
Angelique thought wisely; I don't believe I've ever
seen her without one.
"How do you know?" Barnabas sounded
concerned, but wary at the same time.
Julia's voice was flat, completely without
emotion. "Because they know,"
she
said. "I
know what's happening to Vicki because they know it too. And they
hate it."
"Julia," Barnabas said, "who are you
talking about?"
She stared at him for a moment, and her face was blank
and white in the
moonlight.
"The Leviathans," she said.
3
Roger Collins was possessed yet again, and he loathed
it, mostly because it
made him very tired.
He sat on the child's bed and stared at his hands, folded
in his lap, and ground his teeth together as pain like
the slashing of machetes
gored and gouged his brain. His vision was black in places and red in
others,
and his entire body pulsed and was numb, then pulsed,
and then became numb
again. But he
couldn't move, even if he wanted to, because they didn't want
him to. And he
had to listen to them. He had to
obey. They lived in his
brain, and they hissed like a nest of serpents.
Amy Jennings raged before him, her tiny hands now tiny
fists, and as he watched
she slammed one viciously against the wall of her
room. She left a little mark
behind, and plaster puffed out of it in a plume of
white plaster. He winced;
Liz would never forgive him if she knew what he'd seen
and hadn't done anything
about.
"That bitch," Amy spat, "that vicious dog-bitch."
Roger closed his
eyes. To hear a
child speak such abominations ... it was
... well,
abominable. Amy
turned and glared at him with flat, hooded cobra-eyes. "She's
going to ruin absolutely everything."
"Maybe that's for the best," Roger
said. Exhaustion — the kind of
exhaustion
that came from three months of an hour of sleep a
night (or sometimes less) —
made his voice brittle. Even living with Laura had given him better
peace of
mind.
"You don't dare to speak like that," Amy
said, and her voice was dangerous.
"Why not?" Roger said, and managed to smile
a little. "What's the worst your
people can do to me?
Kill me? That would be a blessing
at this point."
"We can kill your son," Amy said. "We can kill your sister and your niece
and
all your friends.
We can do it in front of you.
Make you watch. Make you
drink their blood if we want. We can do anything. You shouldn't forget that."
Roger bowed his head.
"Right," he said.
"You're omnipotent. I'll try
to
remember."
"Won't matter soon," Amy said. "She can only block us for so long. And she
won't want to soon."
"How is it possible that she's blocking you
now? You all being so omnipotent."
Amy's face went dark.
It was a terrifying expression, a look so black and so
murderous, resting on the porcelain features of a
child. But it flitted away a
moment later, and Roger understood that, for all her
posturing and snarling,
Amy had no real power.
Neither did the monsters that possessed her and spoke
through her in such obscenities. That didn't mean that they wouldn't
eventually, but for now —
"Because of her father," Amy said. "Do you remember her father?"
Roger stared at her.
"Vicki is an orphan," he said.
"How on earth could I
possibly know —" He broke off. An idea was dawning on him, a most unpleasant
idea, and he suddenly felt like the world's greatest
prat.
"You're beginning to understand," Amy said,
"if that astounded chimpanzee look
on your face is any indication."
"Fenn-Gibbon," Roger whispered. "That awful, that beastly man —"
Amy nodded.
"Oh dear lord," Roger said. His face was very pale. "I saw the resemblance to
Louise, of course, but I thought that's why Liz hired
her. Sentimental
reasons. She
said the baby died with Louise."
"She lied to you."
"And Fenn-Gibbon ... Victor ...
Victoria. Of course." He
thought he might
vomit.
"Liz always said he had powers, and I never believed her."
Amy's face was smug.
"Bet you know a thing or two about power now, don't you."
"And he was one of you?"
"He promised to bring us back," Amy
said. "His powers were vast. Like the
scope of the universe.
But she undid him. His own
daughter. Trapped him,
never to return." Her smile was crafty
again. "Unless."
"Unless?"
"Unless she becomes one of us. Accepts her destiny, as it was meant to
be."
"And what is her destiny?"
"She will open the way for us. For our leader. Through Victoria Winters, the
Leviathans will take back this world. We will claim it from our place beyond
the sea, from the darkest of the darkest depths. It will be ours again. All
dark.
Forever." Amy crossed her arms and smiled beatifically. "I think it's
time we bring some authority to our presence." A
shadow of greed flitted across
her face.
"Do you have it?"
Roger nodded.
"I stole it from Carolyn." He held it up; it caught the light
and sparkled.
Amy snatched it from his hand and watched it, her face
alight with a child's
simple sense of wonder. It dangled on the end of Paul Stoddard's
silver chain;
a horrible thing, a totem, a talisman. It was crystal and jade and emerald and
ivory and was carved in the shape of a serpent with
two heads. Their eyes were
rubies.
"Yes," Amy hissed, "I think the time
has come. The time has come at
last."
TO BE CONTINUED ...
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