I managed to make it out of the Department and the Lovecraft Café without running into the Inspectre. I felt a little ashamed avoiding him, but not enough to actually seek him out. Happy to be out of the Department, I walked down through the Village heading for home and dreading looking through all the files Allorah had given me. Around West Third, my phone went off in my pocket with a short burst.
An incoming text. I flipped it open.
HEY HON, from an unknown number
JANE? I typed back.
WHO ELSE SILLY?
WE FOUND CONNORS BROTHER. HIS FRIENDS ARE WORKING ON GETTING YOU BACK.
IVE SEEN HIM.
THE BROTHER?
YES. THIS BUILDIN IS COMPLEX BUT I CAN TIE IN TO SOME OF ITS VIDEO SYSTEMS.
REALLY?
YES. IVE SEEN YOU TOO. I MISS YOU.
I MISS YOU TOO. WE WILL GET YOU OUT OF THIS.
HURRY. SO TIRED.
TIRED?
HIDING FROM THE SYSTEM IN HERE. IT SEEMS… ALIVE. I THINK IT KNOWS IM HERE. SOMEONE PLANNED THIS. Then, a final TIRED and nothing after that.
I stared at my phone for several minutes, hoping for something more, but found only disappointment.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I closed my phone, overwhelmed by a strong and sudden depression, and hurried home.
I keyed into my apartment and went down the hall to my bedroom. I threw down my shoulder bag and pulled out the red resin heart I had bought Jane right before she had been sucked into the machine world. I sat down and put my other hand to Jane’s pillow. I pushed my psychometry into it, my power crackling to life and pulling me back to the past. I guided myself back in time. A vision of Jane that was as clear as any HDTV picture resolved in my head, the sounds and sensations of her voice talking to me the night before.
I took my time, lingering in the moment, not wanting to leave such a vivid and clear vision of my beloved. She seemed so real to me, but no matter how much I wanted to stay in that moment, my psychometric power was taking its toll and I was forced to pull out of the vision only when I felt the dangerously low pull of my blood sugar calling. I fell back weak on the bed, the sting of tears filling the corners of my eyes. There had to be something more I could be doing about helping her.
I lifted myself from the bed, barely able to gather the strength to stand. I worked my way down the hall and keyed myself into the one locked room in the apartment. The White Room-my neutral sanctuary away from every possible psychometric episode. I left the door open, the hallway light spilling into the room doing a more than fair job of lighting up the whiteness of the walls. I threw myself down into the white chair in the center of the room and helped myself to the only small splash of color in there-a roll of Life Savers. With a heavy heart and a bit of hypoglycemia, I peeled off the candies one by one and swallowed them whole. In minutes, I felt my low sugar correct itself, but right now there was nothing that could correct the pain I felt until Jane was free of whatever the true heart of the Gibson-Case Center was.
That would have to wait until the vampire Nicholas got back to me. Until then, my body craved sleep and I gave in, drifting away with visions of vampires dancing in my head.
17
It was just past dusk when the call came in from Nicholas, rousing me out of sleep in the White Room chair I had zonked out in. I headed back to the Gibson-Case Center. At this time of evening, the lights within the center made it come alive as if it was a living organism. I entered the main lobby, intent on stopping by the information kiosk where Jane had disappeared before heading back to the secret door leading to the castle. I was surprised when I got to it and found Nicholas actually working there. The back of the kiosk had been dismantled, and little green blocks of circuit board were strewn everywhere. His long brown hair was falling out of its ponytail onto his face, causing him to constantly blow it out of the way as he examined the circuits and machinery. When he noticed me watching him, he stood up straight and gave a formal nod of his head.
“Won’t be but a moment,” he said in that thick English dialect of his. “Just have to put this back together first.”
With Matrix-like speed, Nicholas flew into action reassembling the machine. The parts looked like they were leaping off the floor back into the machine with only the hint of his hands grabbing for them catching my eye. In seconds, the machine was up and running, the only slow part of the process being the main screen of the directory booting up.
“There we go,” he said. He gestured toward a nearby arch farther along the shopping promenade in a direction I hadn’t been before. “If you’ll walk this way…”
We headed off through the archway into another section of the building that opened up to another, larger glass-covered atrium. Through the center of it ran an elevated platform that looked like wrought iron that I had seen in old pictures of Pennsylvania Station before it had been modernized. Along its rails a train car made of frosted glass and iron arrived into the station with a dull hum. Nicholas bounded up the steps to it.
“You have your own monorail?” I asked, taking the steps two at a time to catch up to him. When I reached the top of the stairs, Nicholas was already standing in the doorway of the car, holding it open for me. I stepped into it, looking around at the other passengers. Vampires? Humans? Other? I couldn’t tell, but suddenly being enclosed with the lot of them caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end.
Nicholas seemed to sense my distress and put a hand on my shoulder. It was freezing. “Don’t worry,” he said, looking at the other occupants of the car. “They don’t bite. Well, not most of them, anyway.”
“Comforting,” I whispered.
We rode on for several minutes in silence. I simply couldn’t speak as I took in the marvels of modern architecture all around us. Iron and glass cathedrals built in the name of commerce and luxury rose up all around us, the train itself just another sleek element weaving its way through it all. I would have ridden on forever if Nicholas didn’t prompt me to follow him when the train slowed into the next stop.
We headed down another set of ironwork stairs and off into what looked like an Old World dining district full of people. Once we were sufficiently blended with the crowd, Nicholas fell in beside me.
“So,” I said slowly. “Do you get this a lot? Your building eating people?”
Nicholas paused before answering, as if carefully choosing what he said next.
“There’s a lot that goes into running a complex such as this. Those guards you encountered the other day, for instance.”
“The living statues?” I asked. “What about them?”
Nicholas walked, his arms folded across his chest as we pressed on through the crowd, most of whom looked like they had just gotten out of work. “They were created to make people disappear in a way entirely different than your girlfriend ‘disappeared,’ if you catch my meaning.”
The color drained from my face as I remembered them swiping at me with their stony claws, and I paused, feeling a little faint at the thought of it.
“Not that anything like that happened with your Jane,” Nicholas said, steadying me with his encouraging tone. “At least, I don’t think so.”
We continued walking through the dining promenade of the complex in silence as I waited for Nicholas to say something more. When he didn’t speak up, I did instead.
“Do you have any idea how this happened?”
“Maybe,” he said, and then started off again, this time at a vampiric pace that I could barely keep up with. I broke into a run, hoping not to draw the attention of other people.
“Nicholas!” I whispered, even though he was well ahead of me. I doubted he could hear me so far away, but he stopped and turned to look back. “Could you slow it down a bit? So not preternatural here.”