The rear half of the double-wide was taken up entirely with servers and computers and monitors and wires and… I counted ten screens before I gave up, and made it only halfway around the room. There were no lights beyond the flickering of multiple monitors and the glow from at least seven computer towers, each in its own violently bright color.
The temperature was noticeably warmer in there, due to all the active machines, I guess, and I came to appreciate Viljo’s cranked up
AC.
The geek planted himself in a chair and rattled something off on a few different keyboards. Instantly, the monitors went from their swirling idle phases to windows that seemed to open up into different locations in cyberspace. Viljo didn’t think I saw him shut down the porn windows, and I smirked to myself.
“So, should I tell everyone why I am blowing up their phones, or is it to be a surprise?” Once he focused on that monitor, his eyes never wavered from it. I was left talking to the back of his head.
“It’s possible that the demons have put a hit out on us.” I scratched at the black marks on my arm absently. “One had a trap waiting for me up at the cabin.” A trap that he’d had to have put in place months ago. Chilling, really, when you think about it. I suppose immortal creatures really aren’t constrained by things like “time.”
Viljo’s fingers paused on the keys. “That is… not possible. The contracts…”
“They’ve found a way around it.” I finally spotted a footstool, buried under a stack of gaming magazines. Shoving the pile off onto the floor, I dragged the stool over so I could have a seat next to Viljo. “We have to warn everyone to watch their backs.”
In a few keyboard taps and a half dozen clicks of the mouse, Viljo had the message winging across the ether. “Should we warn the Order, also?”
“No.” And if the bastards had warned us in the first place, God knows how much of the last few days could have been prevented. I added that to my mental list of “things to punch Cam in the face for.”
“Okay then. Alert sent. When Ivan calls, you get to talk to him.” Viljo rocked his chair back, folding his hands over his stomach. Images and screens kept flickering up and down over his monitors, almost like the network had a mind of its own.
One Web site caught my eye, and I leaned forward to see better. “What’s that?”
Even in the darkened room, I caught his blush. “Just… something I have been working on.”
“So you’ve sold your soul, now what?” I read off the screen. “You made… a self-help Web site. For people who’ve sold their souls.”
“It just started out as a way to tweak my Web design skills. Practice, you know?” His hand twitched at the mouse, obviously dying to minimize the window to keep me from looking at it. “Then I started getting hits, and… well, most people treat it as a joke. Something funny. I added a contact address, though. In case anyone really wants to contact a champion.”
“Any takers?”
“Not yet.” Finally, he clicked the window closed, to keep me from prying. “But I am getting over two hundred thousand hits a day. Word-of-mouth traffic has been huge.” He brought something else up on the screen, some kind of log detailing who viewed the site and from where. “Ivan thinks it is a brilliant idea.”
Of course he would. I suppose I could see the value. For every thousand people who thought it was a joke, there was that one person, alone and scared, who might reach out. It could be helpful. “Keep me posted on how it goes.”
We kind of ran out of things to talk about, then. Outside of demon slaying, we really didn’t have a lot in common. After a few moments of awkward silence, Viljo looked at me. “Want to wager on who calls in first?”
“Hm. Sveta will be last.” Time zones would dictate who called in first, and I had no idea who was where at the moment. But Sveta, the one and only female champion and poster girl for rebellion and authority issues, would most certainly drag it out as long as possible.
Viljo snorted and gave me a sly grin. “I think she will be first.”
“What do you know that I don’t, Viljo?” I was still giving him a suspicious look when the phone beside his keyboard broke into the opening riff of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.”
Viljo made a big show of picking it up to answer it and setting it to speakerphone. “Why, hello, Svetlana.”
I could hear her even with my ears half functional, swearing in her heavily accented English. “Viljo, I swear by all that is holy, if this is another of your ‘system tests’ to get me to call you, I will come there and stuff that phone up your scrawny little ass!”
The geek put his hand over the phone, giving me a grin and a shrug. “She loves me,” he mouthed. “No, my sweet Ukrainian blossom, this is actually an alert requested by one Jesse Dawson, currently occupying my ottoman. Would you like to speak to him?”
Though she didn’t say yes, he pushed the phone in my direction. I rolled my eyes and flipped the speaker off. Raising it to my ear, I caught the tail end of a mutter that sounded like, “I don’t have enough vodka to be awake this early.”
“Sveta?”
There was a bit of startled silence at the other end of the line. Then she said, “Oh! You really are there. I thought Viljo was making lines at me again.” Her accent, so similar to Ivan’s thick Ukrainian, made me smile. Man, I hoped we’d gotten to everyone in time. Ivan was getting on in years, and if a demon managed to ambush him somehow.. .
“No, it’s really me. Are you all right? Have you noticed anything strange?”
“Mmph.” That was the sound of someone struggling with a pillow. I made that same noise often. “Stranger than Viljo?”
“You haven’t been contacted for a contract? No strange creatures lurking?” What else might they do, what else? “No strange men following you?”
She was quiet for a moment. “You know… there was a man yesterday. I saw him several times throughout the day, but he seemed to be traveling with a tourist group and I thought on it no more.”
“What did he look like?”
Her patience was getting thin. I had to wonder what time it was, wherever she was. “I don’t know. Like a man. He had dark hair and nice buttocks.”
Ew. “Could he have been a priest?”
“How am I supposed to know this? He had no collar, no… what is the word?… cassock.”
She had a point. I felt stupid. “All right. Well, if you see him again today, go up and talk to him. Find out if he is one of the Order, and if he is, stick close to him. I don’t think he’ll object.”
Sveta yawned hugely, right in my ear. “As entertaining as seducing a priest might sound, is there a particular reason?” She was already drifting back to sleep, I could tell.
So I explained things to her. In graphic, smelly, oozy, Catholic-y intrigue-y detail. By the end, she was listening intently, and Viljo looked like he might puke. “If they’re coming for you too, you have to be ready.”
“ Tak. You are right. Thank you for the warning, Jesse Dawson.”
“Take care, Sveta.”
Viljo was already back on the computers, fingers flying over multiple keyboards, so I just set his phone down beside him. It rang almost immediately (a normal ring, I noted, not the special one he obviously had for Sveta), and he snatched it up without looking. “Chen.”
What followed was a rapid exchange in Chinese that totally flew over my head. Who knew the little geek spoke Chinese? I should have known, though. I mean, Viljo was GMontag, who took down the Great Firewall of China for three months, once.
I guessed Viljo was talking to Chen Li Zhao, a Chinese-born champion who typically worked his own large corner of the world. Whatever they were saying, the hyperactive geek was dead serious this time, relaying information back and forth with brisk efficiency.
As he spoke on the phone, several windows popped up on his screen, other champions logging in to Grapevine in response to his urgent text messages. Window after window after window, and Viljo’s phone kept ringing. God, how many were there? Way more than the ten or so I thought we had left. There were people on those screens I’d never seen before, faces that were totally foreign to me. Viljo knew them all, though, and I made a mental note to ask him what the hell was up with that later.