Shadows on the Wall Chapter 93

CHAPTER 93:  Destruction

(Voiceover by David Selby):  “The last night in Parallel Time, and Barnabas, Julia, and Angelique find themselves at the mercy of a mad man … a mad man who wears the face of someone they know and love … and whom they may have to destroy if they are ever to return to their own world.”

1

             Roxanne was dead.  Sebastian didn’t feel the relief he expected; his snout wrinkled back and his yellow eyes, glaring in the shadows of the trees where he stood, unexposed, reflected back the moonlight.  If anyone looked in this direction – like Quentin Collins, who seemed to have gone insane – they would see only those eyes, hanging in space like glowing yellow coins.

            And Quentin had a sword that he was even now slashing through the air.  Sebastian growled quietly, a purring sound like a thread giving way.  I could bound out there now, he thought, already gauging the distance, tackle Quentin, knock the sword from his hand –

            “Don’t do it,” Christopher whispered beside him.

           

            Sebastian froze, became a perfect white statue in the shadows, then turned to stare at Christopher with his blazing yellow eyes.  Then he dropped his eyes and turned his head back to the action unfolding before Collinwood’s front door.  “Go home,” he said.  His voice was toneless.

            “No,” Chris said instantly.  “I want to help.  Or at least see that you aren’t killed.”

            “I won’t get killed,” Sebastian snapped.  “Unless I do, saving you.”

            Chris smiled tightly.  “Your imitation of an asshole isn’t going to send me scurrying home with my tail between my legs.”  He flashed Sebastian his real smile, and tweaked Sebastian’s actual tail, which was lashing the air angrily.

            “Quit it,” Sebastian growled.  “You’re not cute.”

            “Sure I am.”

            “Quentin has gone insane.  He killed Roxanne.”

 

            Chris hesitated for just a second.  “Good,” he said, then, more steadily, “Good.  Now she doesn’t have power over us.  We can do what we can, we can –”

            “I don’t know if it is such a good thing.  Actually.  And she wasn’t a bad person, Christopher, she just –”

            “She threatened to hurt me.  Us, actually.  That puts her in the bad person column in my book.”

            Sebastian sighed heavily.  “It isn’t that simple.”

            “Maybe not.  Doesn’t matter.  I want to help.”

            Sebastian thought for a moment.  “You really want to help?”

            Chris nodded. 

           

            “Go home,” Sebastian said, and darted from the bushes.

            Christopher glared after him.  “Not on your life,” he said after a moment, and began to edge his way through the tree line toward the house.

2

            “Poor Roxanne,” Quentin clucked.  He glanced down to look for a moment at Roxanne’s body, which had begun to shrivel and wither almost immediately.  The fluid that lay thick and black against the flagstones had already begun to congeal.  Her eyes, as Barnabas watched, faded, turned white, then fell in completely.  “I guess there wasn’t much magic left in her portrait after all.”

            Barnabas lifted his eyes to those of the master of Collinwood.  He wanted to moan; he had seen instantly that Quentin was gone.  He had observed enough victims of sorcery over the past two hundred years to recognize someone deep in the grip of a spell.  He would have to deal carefully with Quentin, but on the other hand, the feeling of doom, the pressure to act and to act now, pressed down all around him.  He caught a glimpse of Angelique out of the corner of his eye; her eyes were still black, but were there threads of blue flickering in and out of the dark shadows that had consumed her?  He thought that a very good possibility.

            Must act now.

             “Give me the sword, Quentin,” Barnabas said in as reasonable tone as he could muster, and held out one hand.

            Quentin chuckled.  “I don’t think so,” he said.  “You are clever, vampire.  Actually, you’re not, terribly.  Why would Quentin do something like that, so against my will and what I’ve bidden him to do?”

            Barnabas’s eyes narrowed.  “Who are you?” he growled. 

            Quentin shrugged.  “Quentin’s body,” he said.  “Quentin’s hands.  Quentin’s sword.”  It hissed through the air.  “Beyond that … who’s to say?”  He laid a finger aside his mouth for a moment and gazed upward.  The effect was both childlike and chilling.  “I know!  Why don’t you kill him?  I won’t suffer at all –” and as if to prove its point, the thing that spoke from Quentin’s mouth drew the sword across the palm of his hand, and a wound opened like a lipless mouth and began to ooze blood “—but he will.  Your friend Quentin.”

            “Stop it!” Barnabas roared.

            “You need to get inside the house, don’t you, Barnabas.  Well that’s fine.  That’s marvelous.”  Quentin stepped aside and gestured at the front door gallantly with a tiny bow.  “Be my guest.  It is my house, after all … again.  At last.”

            Barnabas looked at his former host suspiciously.  “Why do you want us inside Collinwood?”

            “For the same reason that Victoria does,” Quentin said.  “There is a power in the Collins family.  I knew it long before I was killed, when I strove to gather the entire family into this house.  I could use you still, Barnabas Collins, and perhaps, even –”  It laid its eyes on Angelique and they widened for a fraction of a second, then grew dark and hooded again.  “—even the others in your company,” it finished lamely.  “So for the moment our purposes mesh.  Go ahead, Mr. Collins.  Enter Collinwood.  Come home.”  Quentin uttered a spate of laughter that caused Barnabas, Julia, and Angelique to recoil, but especially Angelique.

            For the laughter was her own.

            “We will end this, Quentin,” Barnabas swore, and put a hand on the other man’s shoulder.  “If you’re in there at all, if there is any way you can hear me, I promise you – we will end this.”

            “End away, Mr. Collins,” Quentin said and laughed that bone-chilling spate of laughter again.  “Be my guest.”

            The laughter echoed in their ears even after they were inside the house and closed the door behind them.

 

            “My god, Barnabas,” Julia said, “what did he mean … ‘for the same reason that Victoria does’?”

            “I don’t know,” Barnabas said miserably.  “But we must find her, Julia.”

            “No,” Angelique said instantly.  Her eyes snapped with her fury.  “No, Barnabas.  We will not find Victoria Winters or Victoria Collins or whoever she is in this time.  Haven’t you learned that lesson yet?  These are not the people we know in our time.  The spirit runs counter in almost every case, which means –”

            “—which means that she could possibly be saved,” Barnabas snarled.  “I have to give her a chance, Angelique.  I have to save Quentin if I can, and Daniel, and the rest of the family, and I have to save Victoria as well.”

            “I’m not going to argue with you,” Angelique said.  “We have very little time, and every second that we waste arguing I lose more of the magic I’ve been able to gather.  It will take everything I have to make the room change, Barnabas.  And,” she declared, drawing herself up to her full height, “if we lose our chance – if we become trapped in this time forever – then I will never forgive you.  Never.”

            “Angelique is right,” Julia whispered.

            “Julia!” Barnabas cried.

            “She is,” Julia said.  She looked up at Barnabas with hollow, haunted eyes.  Her mouth trembled with exhaustion.  “And you know she is.  This isn’t our world.  These are not our people.  You can’t save everyone, Barnabas, even if you try – and these people will just have to fend for themselves.”

            “I won’t believe that,” Barnabas said.  “I have another chance with Vicki, don’t you see that, either of you?  I can save her this time!  I can talk to her, make her see reason –”

            “She isn’t the Vicki we knew,” Julia said as gently as she could.  “Please, Barnabas, try to see that.  For all our sakes.”

            Barnabas opened his mouth to respond when a terrible ululating cry rose from behind the closed doors of the drawing room.  “Vicki!” he said and made a dash for the doors.

            Julia and Angelique’s eyes met in identical expressions.

            Finally Julia sighed.  “After you,” she said, and together they followed Barnabas through the drawing room doors.

3

            “Those screams,” Elizabeth said.  She seemed to have regained some of her composure since their return to their own time, but Carolyn could see that her mother was shaken by the experience of traveling between worlds.  She squinted through the dimness of the hallway that led from the East Wing to the main part of the house.  Yes, she could see them now, undeniably.  Several strands of her mother’s hair had turned white.  “Oh Carolyn, where are they coming from?”

           

            “Downstairs,” she said.  “Mother, do you still have the coin?”

            Elizabeth held up her hand.  She had it pinched between two of her fingers.  “I don’t understand any of this,” she said.

            “It doesn’t matter,” Carolyn said.  “We have to find Barnabas.”

            “Why find Barnabas when you can have me?”

            Elizabeth’s brow furrowed while Carolyn’s eyes widened.  “No,” she whispered.

            The white face that burned in the corner beside them was Tom’s.  His red lips split into a demonic grin, revealing his teeth – all of them.  “Yes,” he said.  “Welcome back, ladies.”

4

            It isn’t too late.

            “Too late,” Quentin Collins muttered through numb lips.  It was so hard to think.  Hadn’t he been with Daniel in the hospital?  He could remember dim flashes, pictures, a shadowy room, hands that wove and stroked the air, but something was wrong, terribly wrong with those hands –

            You can still save them all.

            “Save them,” he sighed.

            And what about his own hands?

            He was holding something.  He squinted at it. 

            A torch.  It was a torch.  Why was he holding a torch?  He thought he almost knew.

            It’s good, isn’t it?

            That voice – so familiar –

            Good. 

            The torch burst into a single, solid sheath of flame.

            He held it up before his face.  He began to grin.

            “Good,” he said, and turned towards the house that rose up against the darkness before him.

5

            Victoria screamed again as, together, she and Alexis flew across the room.  Alexis’s face was transformed; her eyes, grown wide chillingly blue, were full of flashing shards of insanity, and her mouth wreathed in a dreadful smile.  Her hands were also encircling Victoria’s throat, and the nails, filed to points, dug painfully into her flesh.

            But her screams were of anger, fury, cat-like in their intensity, and not at all afraid.

            They struck the wall as the drawing room doors flew open, but neither woman noticed.  “Let me go!” Victoria hissed, and swiped her own claws in Alexis’s face.

            “Can’t,” the other woman panted.  They hung suspended in space together, like dancers, like lovers.  “We need you, my sister and I.  We need you for the end.”

            “Angelique is dead!” Victoria spat.

            “Oh?” Alexis grinned and said, “Obruro,” and Victoria rocketed across the room again.

            “Vicki!” Barnabas cried.

            Both women turned to look, shocked, at the three people who stood silhouetted in the doorway.  “We can use you too,” Alexis sang.  “Don’t you worry.  She has something very special planned for you three, I promise you that.”  Her head whipped back in Victoria’s direction; she flung out her hand and cried, “Tego!” and Victoria was lifted bodily with invisible hands and slammed against the wall with bone-shattering force.

            “No!” Barnabas cried and made a dash for Alexis.

            “Barnabas, don’t!”  Angelique’s face, despite the dead black eyes in their center, registered panic, and she held out her own hands.  A green ball of energy glowed there, and as it grew larger – despite, Julia could see, the effort it took her to create it; the black was draining from her eyes even as she watched – Angelique threw her hands forward and the energy flew out in a stream.

            “DIE!” Alexis shrieked.  A black bolt flew from her hands toward Barnabas.  The green magic from Angelique’s fingers intercepted it, shattered it, and it fell away and faded into nothing.

            “You’ll be sorry you did that,” Alexis hissed.

 

            “I probably will,” Angelique panted.  Her eyes were blue again, and wide with terror.  They met Julia’s.  “I have no more power, Julia,” she whispered.  “Oh my god, what are we going to do?  What?”

            But Victoria, who had been gathering her own powers, ignored them all.  She strode over to Alexis and seized her by the hair, dragging her to her feet.  Barnabas saw her face and blanched.  It was white as a bone, and her eyes were completely, unremittingly black.  She was grinning, and her teeth were triangular, serrated, the teeth of a great white shark.  She said nothing, but even as Alexis squalled with fury, Victoria held up one finger so that the other woman – and Barnabas – could see how long her nailed had grown.

            “Don’t!” Barnabas cried.

            Too late.

            Victoria drew the finger across Alexis’s throat and screamed with laughter as blood erupted in a fierce spray and shot across the room, darkening the carpet with black streaks and spots.  Alexis’s eyes rolled up in her head, and as Victoria released her, her body struck the drawing room floor with a dull thump.

            For a moment there was utter silence.

            “Victoria,” Barnabas whispered.  It was too much – too similar to what he had endured in his own time only a few weeks before, too similar to watching his own beloved Vicki Winters destroy Sky Rumson, Roger Collins, and try to destroy David, Quentin, and even him.  “Vicki, please.”

            “Don’t call me that,” Victoria said, and drew herself up proudly.  “My name is Victoria.”  She held up her hands; they had begun to crackle and pop with dark energy.  “And you – you will be nothing.”

            “I want to help you –”

            “Help me?”  She cocked her head curiously, horribly.  “With what?”  She laughed.  “You want to destroy me.”

           

            “No, please, listen.  I can save you –”

 

            “Or stop me, at the very least.  Save me?  I don’t need saving, dear Barnabas, foolish, idiotic Barnabas.  But I can use you.  Don’t you know about this house, ‘cousin’ Barnabas?  It needs us – the Collins family.  It needs us as much as we need it.  There’s a power in that equation, and I have figured out how to use it!”

            “She’s mad,” Angelique moaned.

            Victoria’s eyes narrowed.  “Why, you look just like her!  I suppose your name is Angelique too.”

            Angelique said nothing.

            “Doesn’t matter,” Victoria said, shrugged.  “When I destroy you, you’ll be nothing too.  But perhaps I can still use your power.  This doesn’t have to be a complete waste of my time.”

            Barnabas wanted to scream.  It was all too much like the last time, and everything was slipping, slipping, slipping out of his hands –

            “I grow wary of all of you,” Victoria said, and raised her hand.  They glowed; her eyes glowed.  “Now.”

6

            “Don’t struggle,” Tom said; his hands gripped Carolyn’s head even as Elizabeth hammered blow after blow upon his back and shoulders.  She was a gnat for all the good she did; Tom’s mouth widened, revealing his terrible fangs, and he drew his head back –

            “Let her go.”

            Tom froze, then lifted his head.  His grin widened.  “Baby brother!” he crowed. 

            Chris was staring at him, his face a grue of horror, fear, and a terrible, aching sadness.  “Tom,” he said unsteadily.  “You don’t want to do this thing.”

            “Of course I want to do this thing,” he said.  “I was made to do this thing.”

            Carolyn’s terrified eyes darted from brother to brother.

            “Help her, Chris!” Elizabeth cried.  “Oh please, help her!”

            “He can’t help her,” Tom spat.  “And why should he?  Let’s all be vampires!  It’s about time, don’t you think?  We’ll all live forever, here in the house on the hill, live forever, live forever, live –”

            “Who did this to you?” Chris moaned.

            “A goddess,” Tom said dreamily.  “Or someone who might as well be a goddess.  She freed me, brother, just like she’ll free the rest of us.  She’s powerful.  She made me powerful.  She’ll make you powerful too.”

            “You’re a monster,” Chris said, choking, “a nightmare –”

            Tom’s face darkened, and he flung Carolyn to the side.  She struck Elizabeth, and the two women fell to the floor of the hallway in a tangle of limbs.

            And the coin fell from Elizabeth’s hands and disappeared into the shadows.  No one noticed.

            “Come to me, brother,” Tom said, and held out his arms.  His hands were long and white, dreadful fingers, and beckoned, flickering in the dimness of the hall.  “Please.”  His teeth were long and sharp.  “We’ll rest together, I promise you.  And then you can be strong like me.”

            Chris’s eyes grew wide and distant.  He took one shuddering step forward –

            —and Tom screamed like a wildcat.  His mouth juddered open and he shrieked and shrieked as blood flew from his gaping jaws in freshets. 

 

            The stake that burst from his chest glistened black with gore.  A moment later it vanished.

            Chris’s eyes widened; he grimaced and fell backward, his hands out in a warding off gesture.

            “Christopher,” Tom croaked.  He reached for his brother just as he began to dissolve, to decompose.  The skin on his face withered and grayed; the hair began to fall out in clumps; the eyes fell backward into the skull, and as he collapsed to the floor, still twitching and shivering, his hands began nothing but bones encased in gray dust.

            Sebastian stood behind him, his wolf’s face grim.  He still held the stake he had used to impale the vampire in one paw.

            “No!” Chris cried.  He ran by Elizabeth and Carolyn, huddled against the wall, clinging to each other, and began to rain blow upon blow on the shaggy creature that stood over him.  And Sebastian let him do it.  Finally he held out his arms, and Chris fell against him, allowed himself to be enfolded, sobbing still.  Sebastian’s terrible eyes fell on Elizabeth and Carolyn.  “Go,” he growled.  “Run.”

            Scrambling to their feet, they did as they were told.

            “I’m sorry,” Sebastian whispered, stroking Chris’s hair, but gently, so as not to scratch him, “baby, I’m sorry, I’m so –”        

            Chris looked up at him with a tear-stained face.  “Why?” he whispered.  “Why did you do it … like th-that?  Why?”

            “He was going to kill you,” Sebastian said.  “He has killed others.  He was a monster, Christopher, as you said.  He wasn’t your brother anymore.”

            “He was,” Chris sobbed, “oh god, but he was!”

            “A vampire isn’t really a person anymore,” Sebastian said soothingly.  “And even if there was something left of your brother in there, he was going to kill you, make you like he was.  I couldn’t let that happen.  I love you too much.”

            Chris searched his face.  Then he bowed his head and stepped out of Sebastian’s arms.  He wiped his face with the back of his hand.  “I’m sorry,” he said, and knelt beside Tom’s shrunken body, which was curled into a comma on its side.  “Tom,” he whispered, and touched the thing that looked as if it had been burnt for hours in the sun.

            He frowned suddenly, and reached over Tom’s body into the shadows that lay beside it.

            “What is that?” Sebastian asked.

            Chris held it up into the light.  “A coin, I guess,” he said.  “It looks weird, though.”

            Sebastian took it.  He held it up into the hallway’s dim light and squinted.  “Funny symbols,” he said.  He sniffed it, then grimaced.  His black lips drew back from his teeth.  “Phew.  Smells like magic.  Dark magic. I wonder what it –”

            His eyes widened.

            “No,” he moaned.

            Christopher’s face was white, whiter than it had ever been.  He was frozen, utterly unable to move, because he was held in the grip of something unspeakable.

 

            The corpse of Angelique Stokes Collins was still recognizable, Sebastian thought dimly, though it was naked, covered in purple skin that threatened to slough off, and where it had already sloughed off giant white patches of bone glowed.  The most prominent of these lay on the side of her head, where none of her dank blonde curls could conceal it.

            “Let him go,” Sebastian snarled.  Panic ran wild inside him, but he couldn’t let it out.  Not now.

            The Angelique-thing was trying to smile.

            “Sebastian?” Chris whispered.

Sebastian roared, leapt forward, claws extended –

            With the swiftness of a serpent, Angelique’s head dipped down, and her wicked little teeth dug into the flesh of Christopher Collins’ throat and tore away his carotid artery.  It gave way with the smallest of sounds, but that was lost under Sebastian’s howl of anguish and rage.

            He couldn’t touch her.  She was surrounded by some kind of force field – magic, he thought bitterly, goddamn magic – and so he was forced to watch as she lapped the blood from the giant hole she had made in his lover’s throat.

            Christopher’s head lolled back bonelessly on his neck; his eyes stared blindly, terrified, into nothing.

            “No,” Sebastian whispered, “no, no, NO!”  He slammed one paw against the wall of the East Wing and shattered a hole through the paper and plaster.

            “Doesn’t matter,” Angelique said, and to Sebastian’s horror, he saw that she was a little more restored, that the bald patch on her head was covered now, that the skin did not sag so much on her bones, that the purple tinge was less purple, more like flesh –

            He wanted to vomit.  He wanted to tear her throat out.

            “Doesn’t matter at all,” she said again.  “It’s almost over.  The destruction of the Collins family is at hand, just as I foresaw – just as I wanted.”

            “I’m going to kill you,” he snarled.

            “You won’t.  I am eternal.  You will see.”  It laughed its wicked laughter.  “Oh, but you’ll see –”

            And as Sebastian Shaw put his face in his paws, the door to the East Wing began to swing open.

7

            Julia was staring death in the face for the thousandth time this year, and she knew it.  She had been a fool to assume that she had escaped from Vicki’s wrath, for here it was again, just as it had been the last time:  those same empty black eyes, the dark energy crackling, her teeth sharp and serrated –

             — and Angelique was desperately chanting to no avail –

           

            — and the magic was flying, was free, was going to strike them both and obliterate them; I don’t want to die here, Julia thought madly and closed her eyes, I wanted to hold him one more time –

            Julia opened her eyes.

            She wasn’t dead.

            Angelique wasn’t dead.

            How are we not dead? she asked herself.

            Barnabas was making a sound.  It was a dreadful sound, something between a moan and a howl, and as Julia forced herself to look at him, she saw why.

            “Oh, Barnabas,” Angelique whispered.  She took Julia’s hand and squeezed it.  Julia let her.

            Barnabas knelt on the floor, cradling the body of Victoria Collins in his arms.  Her eyes, dark brown, human, glared forward sightlessly.  Her head hung at a terrible angle.  Her neck was broken.  She was dead.

             “Keening,” Julia thought remotely, the physician part of her, the part she hated sometimes most of all; the word for the noise Barnabas is making is called “keening.”

            “Barnabas,” Angelique said gently, and touched his head.  He looked up at her, his face stained with tears.  “Barnabas, thank you.  Thank you.  You saved us.  Julia and me.  You saved us both.”

            “I killed her,” he said hollowly.  “Again.  I killed her again.  All my fault, all my fault –”

            Julia looked closely at Angelique.  The magic was gone.  How in the hell would they ever get home now?

            Angelique glared at her and shook her head.  “Barnabas,” she said again in that deceptively gentle tone, “we have to go.  Now.  Can’t you feel it?  That sense of doom, of time running out, my darling, can’t you feel it?”

            “Yes,” he said.  He laid the corpse of the woman who was not his Vicki, had never been his Vicki, on the floor as delicately as he could.  He kissed her once on the forehead, then rose to his feet.  “You have no magic left, Angelique.  You used it all up saving me, didn’t you.”

            “We’ll find a way,” she said, “I know it.  We just have to get to the room first, we just –”

            Whatever she was about to say next was lost in the sudden roaring sound as Quentin Collins kicked open the front door of Collinwood and began to ignite whatever flammable substance he could find with the giant glowing torch he clutched in one fist.  His eyes glowed with madness.  Barnabas uttered a curse.  He was still under the spell, then, whatever force it was that had captured him. 

            But Julia had seized his hand and Angelique the other, and, screaming, they dragged him out of the drawing room, into the foyer, and up the stairs.

            “That’s right!” the Quentin-thing behind them shrieked.  “Run!  Run, rabbits, run, if that’s all you can do – because soon you won’t run anymore!”

            And then he continued on his merry way, and fire followed in his wake.

8

             “You can’t stop me.”  Angelique Stokes Collins spoke in a voice that was almost human; when she grinned at them, flashing her teeth, they were stained red with gore.  “No one can.  The Collins family will be destroyed, and this house will be mine.”

            “Quentin is burning the house, you fool,” Barnabas snarled.  His eyes glowed a dull crimson, and his fangs hung over his lips.  “This house won’t be yours; it won’t be anyone’s.  It will be nothing but ashes.”

            Angelique clapped her hands together, delighted.  “But that’s perfect!  Don’t you understand?  Once this house is gone, I will rebuild, just me and Quentin.  He will live as I live, for all eternity, just the two of us!”

            “Killing,” Sebastian growled.  “You kill to stay alive.  Someone will find out.  Someone will destroy you.”

            “Will it be you?” Angelique taunted him.  “You can’t touch me; none of you can touch me.  And I am immortal.”

            “The room, Barnabas!” Angelique Rumson hissed.  “We must get to the room!”

            “The room won’t save you now, my dear,” Angelique Collins retorted.  “My, but you are a pretty one.  How fascinating to think that I have my own double in that other world.”

            “We are nothing alike,” Angelique Rumson spat.  “You are not me.”

            “We shall see, my dear,” Angelique Collins tittered.  “We shall see.”  She threw her head back and laughed the chilling laughter they had all heard from the throat of Quentin Collins.  “Go, then,” she said, and waved a dismissive hand in their direction.  “If you –”

            The fire exploded into the hallway quite suddenly, and in the moment before it did, Angelique Rumson saw confusion pass over the face of the woman who could have been her twin.  Then she understood.  Angelique had lost control of the situation, had lost control of Quentin; he was never supposed to come up here this quickly, not with his torch and the fire, and she had dangerously overestimated her own powers.

            “No!” Angelique Collins screamed a moment before the fire found her, tasted her, and found her good.  She wheeled around the hallway in circle, waving her arms, and fire exploded from every place that she touched.  The bodies of Tom and Christopher ignited. 

 

            “Come on!” Julia cried, and led them all toward Angelique’s room.  Behind them, the swirling fireball scarecrow was screaming and screaming, and the fire it caused block the doorway that would lead them back down the stairs, into the conflagration Quentin had created on Collinwood’s first floor.

            “I can’t leave him!” Sebastian cried, agonized, but Julia’s grip on his furry arm was like iron, and so he followed her, and cast only one anguished glance over his shoulder, but the fire was too bright, and it devoured everything in its path.

            They made a mad dash into Angelique’s room, the four of them, and Barnabas slammed the doors behind them.  “We don’t have any time,” he said, gasping.  “The fire – it will burn down those doors in minutes, seconds!”

            “Ouch!” Sebastian growled, and dropped the coin that he hadn’t been aware he had continued to hold in his paw.  It struck the floor, rolled around, caught the light, then fell onto its side.  “It burned me,” he said apologetically. 

            Angelique knelt beside it and held it up into the light.  She wheeled around and held it up into Sebastian’s face.  “Where did you get this?” she demanded.

            “I found it,” he said defensively, “on the floor in the hallway, just now.”

            “What is it?” Julia asked, casting nervous glances at the doors.  Smoke was beginning to fill the room from the cracks under them, and the roaring of the fire was growing louder.

            “It’s a talisman,” Angelique said, “very old.  I’ve seen it before, long ago, when Nicholas Blair first came to see me on Martinique.  It’s used in rituals for transformation.”

            “Transformation?” Julia said.  Her eyes had begun to glow.

            “Angelique,” Barnabas said, “can it help us?”

            “I don’t know,” she said.  “It’s been a long time –”

            “Try!” Julia urged her.  “Think hard!”

            Angelique closed her eyes.  “I … I think … I –”

            “Too late!” Sebastian roared.  The doors to Angelique’s room were kicked open.  Laughing, laughing, laughing, Quentin stood outside them, brandishing his torch.  His hair was on fire.  He seemed not to feel it. 

            “Barnabas,” Julia cried, her voice shrill with terror, and clutched onto the vampire at her side, “oh, Barnabas!”

            Angelique’s eyes flew open, china-blue.  She began to smile.

            “Transfero,” she said.

            And the room stood empty.

TO BE CONTINUED ...