Shadows on the Wall Chapter 111

CHAPTER 111:  Pieces

 by Nicky

Voiceover by Donna Wandrey:  “Danger for everyone in the town of Collinsport.  For Angelique has been torn from her powers, and those powers have manifested in a very dangerous manner.  And while Julia strives to maintain the humanity of the monsters who surround her, there is one human among them on this night who would seek to become a member of the living dead.”

1

            “Does it hurt dreadfully?”

            Barnabas looked up at her with his good eyes – the other, it pained her to see, and she figured it always would, was completely overgrown with a patch of flesh still so new it glowed pinkly at her – and then sighed heavily.  “No,” he said at last.  “Angelique did her work well.  There is no pain at all anymore.”

            Julia nodded.             

            “How is she?” Barnabas said.

            “She is in her room,” Julia said carefully.  She didn’t want to talk about Angelique, not even now, after all they’d been through.  She wanted a smoke.  She would kill for a smoke.

            Which means, she thought desolately, no smoke for me.

            “I must speak to her,” Barnabas said, and began to rise.

            Julia laid a firm hand on his shoulder, and he sank back into the softness of the chair.  His eyes grew narrowed, accusatory, and she could almost hear him, the vampire part of him, hissing, “You betrayed me!”  “Let her be, Barnabas,” she said, her voice as firm as the weight of her hand on his shoulder.

            “We still don’t understand all that has happened this night,” he growled.  “She may be in severe danger, Julia.”

            “Or she might be dangerous,” she snapped back despite herself.

            His eyes grew wide.  “I don’t believe you,” he whispered.  “After all that she’s done for us – after all that we’ve been through, especially the both of you – that would think, that you would dare to think –”

            “I’m thinking of her as well,” Julia said.  Her voice was deadly cold, and she hated it more than he did, but she couldn’t help it.  “I have to.  Especially because, as you point out, so much has happened tonight that none of us understand.”

            “That isn’t the reason,” he growled, “and you know it.”

 

            “Barnabas,” she said sharply, and knelt down beside him so that they were face to face, “I came to save you this evening.  So did Angelique.  We both love you, in case you hadn’t noticed, enough to risk our own lives for yours.  Look at me,” she hissed as his eyes flickered away from hers, and his jumped back to hers and widened, like a little boy’s.  “I need you to understand this, because there are times, and we both know this, when you willfully forget vital facts and pieces of information.  I will not allow that to happen now.

            “One,” and she held up the pointer finger of her left hand, “Angelique was seduced by the Enemy in the future, or fell under its spell, enough so that she was willing to kill me to have you.

            “Two,” and she added the middle finger to lay beside the first, “neither of you are accustomed to thinking terribly clearly when it comes to the other.  Now that both of you are in, shall we say, a more precarious state of health, I think that fact bears repeating.

            “And three,” and she added her ringless ring finger, “she is human again, which means that she doesn’t have her powers to help mask her pain.  I believe that seeing you in the state she’s in now could only be harmful.  For her, Barnabas.”

            “That’s very big of you, Doctor,” Barnabas said nastily.

            She slapped him then.

 

            He stared at her, then lifted a hand to his cheek.  No imprint glowed there; there was, she realized, no blood pumping through his lifeless body to rush to the veins and capillaries there.  “Julia,” he whispered.

            She rose.  “That’s more like it,” she said.  “I’ve been wanting to knock some sense into you for a long time, Barnabas.  A long, long time.”  She began to march smartly toward the stairs.

           

            He half-rose.  “Where are you going?” he cried.

            “To check on my patient,” she said.  “Lieutenant Forbes may not be a gentleman or a scholar, but he is a human being.  Plus I want to make sure he hasn’t defaced Josette’s room or scratched open his stitches or something else equally as asinine.”

            “I’ll … I’ll wait for you here,” he said.

            “You do that,” she said.  “Then I’m going back to Collinwood.  I’m exhausted, frankly.  I haven’t had even my customary ten minutes of nightly sleep.”  Smiling grimly, she mounted the stairs.

           

            Oh Barnabas, she thought with sudden mournfulness as she approached the door of Josette’s room, oh Barnabas, Barnabas, what am I going to do with you?

            Forget him.  Let him go.

            “I’m done.”  Hadn’t she said those words less than twenty-four hours ago?

            She didn’t know what to do.  What to feel.  She shook her head.  The craving for a cigarette dug at her with its tiny clawed lizard feet.  She would check on Nathan, she would check on Angelique, then she would enjoy one – one! – ciggy on her walk back to her own sweet bed at Collinwood.

            She paused mid-knock.  There was something happening inside Josette’s room; a sound, small, a moan, a gasp, and something else … something familiar …

           

            Julia laid her ear against the door.

            The sucking sounds …

            “Oh god,” she whispered, and threw open the door.

 

            Tom Jennings glared up at her from the place where he crouched beside the bed, the still, white form of Nathan Forbes clutched in his hands.  Tom’s mouth leaked great gouts of blood that flickered black in the firelight.  He grinned at her, and his eyes flashed red, like sullen embers, the eyes of a wolf.  “Julia,” he said.  “My dearest, my most darling.  Did you miss me?”

            The cross was in her hand in a moment.  She didn’t wait; she held it up, and winced as it flickered to life and threw forth an elven blue radiance that Tom shied away from, cried out, dropped Nathan’s lifeless body to the floor, and then leaped to his feet with feline grace.  “Put that away,” he whimpered.

            “You know I can’t,” she said.  “What did you do to him?”

            “I think that’s obvious,” the vampire said.  “What he asked me to do.”

            She gaped.  She hadn’t expected this newest wrinkle.  “Why would he …”  Then she understood.  And she wasn’t at all surprised.  “He wants to be a vampire,” she said slowly, “so that he can … so that he can …”  She couldn’t finish the sentence.  It was too horrible.

            Tom shrugged.  “Not the most altruistic of men, but who is these days?  I’d do the same thing.  Hell,” he said, chuckling with monstrous amusement, “I have done the same thing!  And I’d do it again.”  The humor faded.  He took a step toward her.  “I need you, Julia.  I love you.  I want you forever – in a world without end …”

           

            She had lowered her arm, lowering the cross at the same time.  Stupid of her.  She raised it again, and it flashed with that magical blue brilliance.  “Get out of this house, Tom,” she said, choking back a sob.  “Next time I’ll have a gun with me.  Loaded with silver bullets.”

            “Could you destroy me, Julia?” the vampire said, cocking his head in a curiously canine manner.  “Could you really?  I know you still love me, that a spark of that love remains.  I can feel it.  Like I feel you.”  He was fading away, gradually, like the mist of morning.  “You’ll come to me.  I promise you.  You’ll come to me for help … and soon … very soon …”

            And he was gone.

 

            Cursing, Julia knelt beside the still form of Nathan Forbes.  She felt for a pulse; for a moment there was nothing, and then, yes!  There it was.  The tiniest flutter, like a baby bird beneath her fingers, struggling to live and breathe …

            She shook her head.  She’d go downstairs and fetch her medical bag.  Gritting her teeth, she stalked swiftly back to the door and into the hallway; and Nathan Forbes better pray, she thought furiously, that I have enough of the serum left for him and Audrey and Barnabas.

2

            The woman who was not a woman at all anymore hovered a mile above the ocean that gnashed and wailed far below her.  She wore nothing, but her body – which wasn’t even really a body, if anyone cared to examine it – didn’t feel the cold of winter, approaching.  It was mostly energy, magical and otherwise, and glowed entirely a shimmering, shining silver.  It wasn’t required that she maintain this shape, but it was … it was comfortable, she thought.  Familiar.  Easier.  Of course, everything was easier now.

 

            She remembered everything.  The energy composing her core fairly pulsed with the memories of the lives of the women she had inhabited over the past several millennia:  the wise woman with sea-green eyes, the first of her kind, and the tribal scars that held spells and secrets bound to her body, betrayed by the chieftain’s son whom she loved, and so she used her powers to bring down ruin upon the heads of all the men of all the tribes; the witch-woman who prowled outside the windows of the huts of the Picts, stealing their babies for sacrifice to the black and evil demon-god who promised her powers; the sorceress dwelling on one of the isles of ancient Greece who supplied potions and granted the wishes of local maidens who sought her out and who transformed bodily foolish young men who dared approach her into reptiles and amphibians and pigs; the witch ordering sacrifices of Mayan maidens for the good of all the people; the Puritan woman cursed to be a servant, but rising above her station; the young blonde girl with sea-green eyes cursed to servitude on the island of Martinique, but rising, rising above her station; the witch Miranda; the witch Cassandra; and now she was the sum of all these disparate pieces, but more than they as well.  She was all; rising, rising; she was everything.

            She was a goddess.

            She should return to earth, she supposed, and then wondered, What’s the hurry?  What’s the rush?  There’s time, isn’t there? 

            Her lips that weren’t really lips at all curled into a smile.  It might have been a gentle smile if she were human; her face, if observed, would have appeared mask-like.  Her eyes were black pits.

            She would return to earth, she decided.  After all, there was so much to do.

3

 

            Danielle winced as Edith ran her hands for the final time over her leg, where the wound she had sustained during the dissolution of Seaview had burned and leaked for the past hour or so.  “Sano, sano, sano,” Edith whispered, and there:  the wound was gone.  But it left an ugly pink scar in its wake, and Danielle rolled her eyes.  “You might have erased that as well,” she said tightly.

            Edith’s enormous almond-shaped eyes flashed up to Danielle’s and widened.  She said nothing, though her mouth grew fainter and more pursed until it was gone completely.  “That’s the price you must pay,” she said at last, and suddenly Danielle realized that the witch was nearly quaking with fury, “and you’re damned lucky that it’s the only one.  A wound any bigger than that would have required substantially more magic … and a far bigger sacrifice than a simple scar.”

            “Sorry,” Danielle muttered.  Her eyes juttered away from Edith, who flounced away from her anyway, and scanned the room of the house to which they had retreated after Angelique’s wrath had cooled.  It wasn’t much – an old monastery Petofi knew of, on St. Eustace’s Island.  Ironic, if you asked Danielle, but it had proven accessible for all of them, even the vampire.  Whatever white magic had once possessed the place was all but faded now.

            Danielle’s eyes narrowed.  Her mouth curled into a sneer.  She rose and walked across the room to the place where Roxanne Drew sat, staring out a glassless window into the night.  It would be dawn soon.  She and Tom would need new coffins, and it was not in Edith or Petofi’s powers, it seemed, to simply conjure them up. 

 

            “If you’ve come to tell me that this is all my fault,” Roxanne said without turning around, freezing Danielle in her tracks, “then you needn’t bother.  I know.  I understand my culpability.”

            “Bon,” Danielle said, and laughed.  “You should allow the sun to rise and greet you full in the face.  Let it crumble you to the dust you should have been a century ago.”

            “Perhaps I should,” Roxanne mused. 

            “I don’t understand what you could possibly have been thinking,” Danielle said, “changing the witch like that.  You gave her more power –”

            “Power I assumed she would use to help us,” Roxanne said, and blinked.  “How could I have known that she would turn against us so swiftly?”

            “Did you know what that … that dagger would do?”

            “I had an idea, yes.”

            “You have scattered us,” Danielle said furiously.  “Ruined us!”

            “Perhaps you’re right,” Roxanne whispered.  She rose then, and smoothed out the wrinkles in the peasant blouse and skirt she wore, both colored a deep, burnt sienna.  “I’ll make this right,” she said, and for the first time turned to face Danielle. 

            But Danielle was gone, standing next to Edith, whispering in her ear.  “I’m sorry, cheri,” Danielle purred, and allowed a hand to rest on Edith’s shoulder for a moment, then slide down her back, lower, lower –

 

            Edith relaxed against her.  “I know,” Edith whispered back.  “I understand, my love.”  She traced Danielle’s chin with her finger lovingly, emotions she hadn’t shown for another human being in more than a century and a half.  They hadn’t discussed it, either woman, just as they hadn’t discussed the room they had shared together at Seaview, a room that was now destroyed.  We’ll take one in this dreadful place, Edith thought now, and twined her fingers with Danielle’s.  We’ll make another.  We.

“We aren’t finished yet,” Roxanne called to them, but they ignored her.  “I swear it.  I will –”

            “I’m afraid that you are, though,” a man’s voice said from the doorway, gloating.

            The three women spun in tandem.  It would have been amusing, the synchronized movement, under different circumstances.

            Roxanne’s face twisted into a snarl.  “You bastard,” she spat.  “How dare you come here now.  How dare you –”

            Which was the moment that Gerard Stiles revealed the pistol he held.

            And fired a single silver bullet into Roxanne’s chest.

4

            Nathan’s eyelids fluttered as he rose back to consciousness. 

 

            The Countess had come into his room, he thought muzzily, what could she possibly want?   Then he groaned.  Come back to reality, Forbes, he thought; that’s the doc.

           

            She saw then that he was awake.  Her eyes narrowed.  “You idiot,” she said quite clearly.

            “Ow,” Nathan said, and touched his head.  It throbbed.  So did his throat.  So did everything else.  “I’m alive,” he said at last.  “How?  Why?”

            “Because I broke up your little tryst,” Julia said.  “Tom is my ex-boyfriend, by the way; did you know that?”

            “So what?” he croaked.  “Why’d you stop him?”

            “Because what happened to Tom is partially my fault,” she said with obviously straining patience.  “Barnabas made him a vampire after Tom came snooping around.  If Tom made you a vampire, and you in turn made Chris a vampire …”  She purposefully allowed the sentence to trail off.  “Do you see?  I love Chris.  I won’t have his blood on my hands.  Or in your mouth.  You idiot.”

            “I love him so much,” Nathan groaned.  “You have no idea how I feel, Doc.  Like I’m all torn up inside.  Like nothing will ever make it better.”

            “And becoming a bloodsucking fiend will?”

            “You love Barnabas Collins,” Nathan said petulantly.  “You’re fixing up that vampire girl.  You can’t think we’re all bad.”

 

            “You don’t understand what it is to be a vampire,” Julia said.  “Not even I do, not completely, but I know more than you.  When they bite you – after you die – you come back.  But you aren’t you anymore; not completely.  The vampire-mind takes up residence inside you, and it forces you to commit acts that would have repelled you in your former life.”  Her eyes narrowed.  “Though, when it comes to you, Lieutenant, I question your scruples enough to realize that perhaps you wouldn’t change so much after all.”

            “Thanks,” Nathan said.

            “Vampires delight in bloodshed and cruelty.  It’s their nature, Lieutenant; even if you managed to turn Chris into a vampire, he wouldn’t be the man you loved.  Just as Tom isn’t the man I loved; not really.”

            “And … Barnabas Collins?”

            “Barnabas is different,” Julia said tightly.  “He is the victim of a curse.  For some reason I cannot fully fathom, that difference has allowed him to maintain a semblance of his humanity, little pieces.  Sometimes the pieces are bigger than others.  I have not observed that same semblance in other vampires I have encountered.” 

            “My arm hurts,” Nathan said petulantly.  “What’d you do to it?”

            “I administered a drug I have developed,” Julia said, rolling her eyes, “a serum designed to help current vampires revert to their former human state, and to prevent their victims from succumbing to the disease itself.”

            “You think it’s a disease, huh?  I thought it was a curse.”

            “I believe both definitions to be true,” Julia said stonily.  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Lieutenant Forbes.  The sun is rising, and I am bone tired.”

            “What makes you think I won’t try it again?” he called to her.

            She paused.  “Because,” she said, and turned to him, smiling a deadly little smile, “I’ll kill you if you try.  With my bare hands.”

            And she was gone.

            Nathan relaxed against the pillows.  He frowned.  Perhaps she was right, he thought; perhaps trying to become a vampire wasn’t the brightest of ideas.  Ah, well.  There were other ways to Christopher.  He’d find them.

            “Not a bad idea, you know,” a voice said from the window.  It was distorted somehow, Nathan thought, frowning, as if the being that spoke didn’t quite have human vocal cords, a human mouth.

            He turned his head, and found that he was absolutely right.

            The shaggy white werewolf dropped into the room and landed on all fours.  It shook itself delicately, then rose to its full height … standing on two legs.

            Nathan’s bladder wanted very badly to let go.

            The wolf-thing grinned at him with a mouthful of teeth the size of piano keys.  “Killing you with my bare hands,” it said, and demonstrated them for him:  long fingers, ever so long, and each tipped with a wicked black claw.  “To keep Christopher safe?  I think tearing you to pieces is exactly the solution I need after all.”

 

5

            “Get behind me,” Edith growled, and without waiting for a reply, she shoved Danielle away, then blocked her wholly with her body, her arms spread, her face a writhing mask of hatred.

            Gerard Stiles turned away from the collapsed form of Roxanne Drew, and cocked an eyebrow at them.  “Ladies, ladies, please!” he said calmly.  “Why, that’s a fighting stance!  And a fighting stance means you’re going to be difficult, and you being difficult means this is going to take a bit longer than I planned, and I really have better things to be doing.”

 

            “Like dying, I suppose,” Edith snarled.

            “Mrs. Collins,” Gerard said sadly, shaking his shaggy head, “surely you learned the last time you tried to play how sadly outmatched you are.  It’s nice to see you again, by the by.”

            “Wish I could say the same,” Edith said, and thrust forth her spellcasting hand.  Black energy that collected in her eyes also danced from her fingertips and flew in a stream toward Gerard …

            … who held up one hand and, with a disinterested sneer, murmured, “Dissolutum.”

            And the magic fell away harmlessly.  Dissipated.

            Edith gaped.

            “My master’s power is stronger than yours,” Gerard said.  “Which is why he sent me here.  Your little cabal is interesting, I’ll grant you, and he sends his regards – he’s encountered you all in one way or another over the past hundred years or so – but he wants me to let you know that he can’t just go on allowing you to interfere.  And you were just about to interfere, weren’t you.”

            “Your master,” Edith said, “wants to destroy the world.”

            “All the worlds,” Gerard said quickly.  “All of them, my dear.  Not just this one.”

            “And why would you allow that to happen?”

            “Why, faith, my dear!” he said in mock-shock.  “I have faith that my master knows best, and that my master’s plan is meaningful, not just for me, but for everyone.  You have faith aplenty, don’t you?”  He blinked at them, the question serious.  “Hasn’t your own master resurrected you time and again, helped you use the powers inside you, while magnifying them with his own, which are, admittedly, not inconsiderable?  I should think you’d understand faith above everyone else here, Edith Collins!”  He shook his head again.  “Unfortunately, your faith isn’t enough to save you.  Because when it comes down to it, faith isn’t enough. 

            “Because we are more powerful than you.

            “And power trumps faith.”

            “I’m getting that,” Roxanne said from behind him, and before he could turn, registering his shock, the vampire had backhanded him, sending him flying across the room.

            Danielle put her arms around Edith and, grinning, snuggled against her.

 

            “Vampires turn to dust when they’ve been killed, dummy,” Roxanne said, baring her fangs, “especially when they’re as old and as powerful as I am.”

            “I’ll remember that for next time,” Gerard said.  He held the gun again, but Roxanne kicked it delicately from his hand with the tip of her leather boot.

            “There won’t be a next time,” she said, and knelt beside him.  “I’m going to enjoy sucking you dry, Stiles.”

            “Forgive and forget, Miss Drew,” Gerard said.  “Why, if it weren’t for me and the master, you wouldn’t be here right now!”

            “You made me a monster,” Roxanne snarled.

            “We gave you immortality!”

            “An eternity of misery,” Roxanne said, and slashed the five claws of her right hand across his face.  He screamed.  “Which I am happy to share with you.”

           

            She was lowering her fangs down to the pulse in his throat, slower, slower …

            … and stopped as a cheated, furious scream rose from the throat of Danielle Roget.

            Roxanne stopped and lifted her head.

            She roared like a lion.

            The energy-goddess-magic-thing that still bore a resemblance to Cassandra Collins held up the head of Edith Collins in one hand.  In the other she held the witch’s heart.  The eyes blinked; the mouth worked furiously; the heart throbbed.  The body’s other pieces lay scattered in a mess of blood and internal organs at the creature’s feet.

 

            Simultaneously, all turned to dust and slid through the creature’s fingers.

            “NO!” Danielle shrieked.  “NON!  NON!  NON!  I will not allow this!  I will NOT!”  She tried to rain down a fusillade of blows upon the Angelique-thing, but she didn’t appear to be substantial enough for any kind of damage at all.  Howling, Danielle sank to her knees, smearing the blood of her nascent lover across the stone floor of the monastery. 

            For a moment, with the exception of the unfortunate Danielle Roget, no one moved.

            Suddenly a stream of smoke rose from Roxanne’s shoulder as the first rays of the sun fell across her.  She shook her claws in the Angelique-thing’s direction, and then, in the blink of an eye, she had vanished.

            Gerard stood shakily to his feet.  “Thanks,” he said.  “I’m not sure why you’re helping me, but let me tell you how –”

            The Angelique-thing cocked her head.  “Helping you?”  Those inhuman lips twisted into a smile without mirth, without humor, or anything mortal.  “I’m not helping you, Gerard Stiles.  I plan to destroy you as well.”

            At Gerard’s side, the air wavered and quivered, and a pair of enormous crimson eyes danced into being.  “GO … AWAY,” a voice hissed from nowhere.  “LEAVE … USSSSS … ALONE.”

            “You haven’t the strength to materialize, I see,” the Angelique-thing said.  There was, Gerard realized uneasily, no emotional resonance in that voice; it was hollow, metallic, incurious.  He began to feel afraid, even with the master at his side.  “How unfortunate for you.”

            “YOU CAN DO NOTHING AGAINST ME.”

            “I can, though,” the Angelique-thing said.  “And I will.  I have much to do.  And I’ll do it.  But I’ll take my time.   You – even you, daemon –”  And the red eyes widened at this pejorative.  “—won’t see me coming.  I am more than the most powerful being in the universe.”  It smiled again, that humorless flexing of it simulated lips.  “I am the universe now.”

             It shimmered and vanished, leaving behind only its voice, as if to mock the Enemy and the dog at its side.

            “ALL WILL DIE,” the Angelique-thing’s voice promised.  “ALL WILL DIE.  ALL.  ALL WILL DIE.

            “AND YOUR PLAN WILL BE FOR NOTHING.”

            She – it – was gone.

            Stiles and the Enemy turned to regard each other.

            Stiles flew across the room again, as if struck by a great invisible force.

            The Enemy’s voice, panting now, was weaker.  “You fool,” it said.  “Daring to banter with these creatures when you should have killed them immediately.  I should kill you now.”

            “Please, master,” Stiles whined, writhing before nothing, “please, no … not yet … not until the time …”

            “If I didn’t need you,” the thing’s voice said petulantly, “I would, have no doubt of that.  We must speed up our plans, Stiles.  The alignment must happen.  Our pieces must be moved more quickly along the board; white and black have come together; the bonding time is now.

            “The Collins family must be joined.

            “I will know their power.

            “I will taste of it.

            “And I will be free.”  It chuckled with sudden, monstrous good humor.  “After three hundred years, I will finally be free.

            “And then … yes, and then … I will destroy this Angelique myself.”

TO BE CONTINUED ...