The Shroud of A'Ranka (Brimstone Network Trilogy) (3 page)

The ghouls looked toward Bram, and then back to the Mauthe Dhoog.

“We’ve got you, little boggart,” one of the ghouls barked, switching his knife blade from one hand to the next.

“You keep on telling yourself that, ugly,” Bogey said, just as he raised his stubby arms, his fingers wiggling like worms on a rain-covered pavement, and a strange song escaped his lips.

A song of rifting.

The conjured rift first appeared as a black dot hanging in the middle of the air, and within seconds it had grown to the size of a house window.

The ghouls were momentarily distracted by the opening floating in space, but soon returned their attentions to the Mauthe Dhoog, who was now smiling.

“It was nice seeing ya,” Bogey called out to his would-be attackers. “Don’t forget to come back when ya can’t stay so long.”

The ghouls looked at each other, thinking that their prey had lost its wits, and they started to laugh.

“We are going nowhere, little boggart morsel,” one of them said.

“It is you who are—” started the other, but his words were interrupted by the thick tentacle that had reached out from the other side of the rifted opening and wrapped around his throat.

“GHAAK!”

The slime-covered tentacle yanked the ghoul away, back through the hole in time and space, followed by another that sought out the remaining dead-eater.

The last of the ghouls didn’t even have time to scream as he was enwrapped in the muscular embrace of the terror from Bogey’s rift and drawn back through the pulsing black opening hanging in the air.

“That’s that,” the Mauthe Dhoog said, wiping his hands on the front of his jacket. And then he proceeded to manipulate the magicks at his disposal and to close the rift before whatever it was on the other side became greedy and came looking for more.

The passage closed with a sharp, popping sound, and Bram turned to see the three ghouls that he had laid out fleeing for their lives.

“Should we chase them?” Bogey asked, a mischievous twinkle in his dark eyes.

Bram continued to watch the ghouls as they furiously dug down into the cemetery grass, disappearing beneath the earth.

“No,” he said. “I think we’ve scared them enough. Plus, it helps to get the message out there.”

“Don’t vandalize cemeteries?” Bogey asked.

“No, that the Brimstone Network might not be as dead as they would like to think.”

Emily Larch lay upon her bed, listening to her iPod on shuffle and staring through the skylight in her ceiling up at the nighttime sky.

A new song began and she picked up the Nano, sliding her finger across the face of the player to get to the next selection.

She didn’t like that song either.

Having over a thousand songs available, which she’d loaded into the tiny MP3 player herself, Emily would have thought that the chances of getting songs that she didn’t like would have been slim to none, but that was just her luck.

Or maybe she was just in a cranky mood.

She scrolled through a few more songs before she found something that she could tolerate, and then lay back upon her pillow.

The song played, but she really didn’t hear it, totally distracted by her thoughts about the Brimstone Network.

They had made her a member of the new Network, seeing as how the old members were all dead. Bram had said
that her name was on a special list that had been compiled by his father, that her unique ability—
what a freakin’ joke
—made her a perfect candidate for a newly formed Brimstone group.

Unique ability
.

Emily felt her anger spark, and something savage stirred within her.

Her flesh began to tingle, the fingernails on her hands feeling as though they were starting to grow.

It took lots of deep breaths, and calming thoughts about beautiful fields of flowers, and waterfalls, before the sensations started to pass.

It was getting harder to keep the beast under control, especially since telling Bram and the other weirdos that made up the new Network that she would join their group.

But they had said there might be a chance they could cure her. That was a chance—no matter how slight—she was willing to take the risk for.

Emily was a lycanthrope—a werewolf, for those who weren’t up on their supernatural, shape-shifting afflictions. She had no idea why she had been cursed to change into a large, humanoid wolf whenever she got upset. Not familiar
with anyone afflicted with the same condition from her family tree, Emily just figured it was a first prize from a spin of the wheel of crap.

She would do anything to cure herself of this curse, even if it meant hanging out, and sometimes fighting with a group with probably just as many issues as she had, maybe more.

Of course her parents were clueless, unaware of her bestial condition, as well as her frequent comings and goings from the house at all hours of the day and night. It was amazing what a little magick could do to disguise the fact that you weren’t home, tucked beneath the covers fast asleep, when you should be.

Another song had started, and she didn’t really care for that one either. Emily sat up and removed her earbuds, disgusted with the fact that the iPod had decided to play only the stuff that she’d rather not hear right then. Turning off the plastic white device and bunching the earbud wires into a little ball, she bounced off her bed and opened her dresser drawer.

What sounded like breaking glass, followed by her parents’ voices raised in panic, found its way up the stairs and into her room.

Emily dropped the iPod into the drawer and pushed it shut, heading toward her door.

“What’re you guys doing down there?” she hollered, stepping just outside her room and into the hallway.

It sounded like her parents were having a wrestling match, and with an eye-roll of disgust, she strode down the hallway to the stairs to see what was going on.

“Hey, do you guys want to knock it off, or what?” she said, annoyed, rounding the corner from the staircase and heading toward the kitchen to where the noise seemed to be coming from. “What if I was sleeping or something?”

Emily froze in the kitchen entryway.

Her mother was hurriedly pulling down all the shades and closing all the blinds while her dad had tipped the heavy, wooden kitchen table on its side and was placing it up against the sliding doors that led outside onto the deck.

“What the heck are you doing?” Emily said, the question coming out as a shrill-sounding shriek.

“Everything is going to be fine,” her mother said, not even looking at her. She rushed to join her father in placing the kitchen table up against the glass of the sliding door.

“What is going on?” Emily screamed, stomping one of her feet.

Her father quickly looked away from what he was doing. His eyes were wild, and even though she didn’t want to, she could smell the strong stink of fear wafting from his pores.

The odor made the beast inside her restless.

“Go up to your room and lock the door,” her father ordered.

“I won’t,” Emily said defiantly, walking farther into the kitchen. She knew that they were likely just wanting to protect her, but they were acting like total nut bags. And besides, if there was anybody in the house who didn’t need protecting, it was her.

The wolf inside purred in agreement.

The smell hit her as if it were placed on a cloth and shoved on her face.

Blood
.

She found it at once on the tile floor near the sliding deck doors; a glistening puddle of maroon.

“Whose blood is that?” she demanded.

“We don’t have time for this, Emily,” her father said, trying to wedge the table beneath the metal door frame.

“It’s from one of them,” her mother said so fast that the words all blended together. “We killed one of them when the first tried to get in.”

Emily’s sensitive hearing picked up the sound of voices, high-pitched chattering from somewhere in their backyard.

“Them?” she asked. “One of them … one of who?”

The voices from outside were coming closer, so close that even her parents could hear them now.

The beast … the wolf inside her, could sense it like the blood on the kitchen floor. Danger. There was danger in the air.

“There isn’t time, Emily,” her mother said. She stepped back from the table, eyes huge with fear.

There were footsteps on the other side of the door, something scampering across the deck.

Emily ran toward the sink, reaching for the shade of the window above it. Taking hold of the shade, she yanked it aside to see out into the yard. Something moved in the tall grass, and she squinted, allowing her eyes to become more like the wolf’s so that she could see in the darkness.

Tiny figures, no bigger than a foot tall, were marching through the grass of her backyard from the woods beyond. They were wearing crude outfits of burlap and leather; tall,
pointed, red hats decorated their round, squat heads.

Gnomes
, Emily thought, staring at the small creatures moving on her house. They looked like the garden statues that people have in their yards for decoration.

Only these looked as though they wanted to kill you.

Carrying tiny knives, swords, and spears, they advanced toward the house.

“What do they want?” Emily asked her parents.

Her mother shook her head, staring at the table stacked in front of the sliding door. The pounding of tiny fists could be heard from outside.

“We didn’t know that it would bother them,” her mother said, shaking her head from side to side. “We just wanted a nice compost pile for the garden, that’s all.”

“You dumped garbage on them?” Emily asked. “Is that what this is about?”

Her mother looked toward her with tears in her eyes.

“How were we supposed to know that they lived there?”

Over the last few weeks the world had altered dramatically, the everyday rules changing from one moment to the next. One minute it was perfectly fine to dump garbage in your own backyard, and the next you were somehow upsetting a nest of nasty gnomes.

What a world
.

The window above the sink suddenly exploded inward, pieces of glass spraying Emily. She let out a shriek, feeling her hold upon the beast slip just a bit. Dusting the glass from her hair and clothes she looked toward the sink and at the small figure that rose up from the basin.

Its face was wrinkled with dark bags beneath its eyes. The gnome had a dirty white beard, and fat swollen lips that looked like two slugs stacked on top of each other, and in its hand it held a tiny, but sharp-looking knife.

Her parents started to scream, frozen in place in front of the overturned table. The gnome opened its mouth in a scream of rage, raising its knife as it began to crawl from the sink.

She knew that there was very little she could do at the moment, but the beast inside—it was born for nonsense like this.

But she didn’t want her parents to find out about her affliction this way. Emily had kept it from them, planning on revealing her secret at just the right time.

This moment didn’t even come close to how she’d imagined she would tell them, but Emily couldn’t have stopped the change if she’d tried.

At first there was the incredible itching, as if a million ants were alive beneath her flesh, crawling to get out. And from there it just intensified, feeling as though her flesh were about to erupt into flame.

She tore at her skin, ripping it away to stop the agony.

Ripping it away to expose the fur of the beast beneath.

The torn flesh dropped from her clawed hands to the kitchen floor. The look upon the gnome’s face was hysterical. The tiny creature turned quickly away, realizing that it had bitten off more than it could chew, and tried to escape through the broken window.

Emily pounced, grabbing the foot-tall attacker in one of her clawed hands and bringing it to her mouth. Her powerful jaws clamped down upon the squirming gnome and she shook it furiously, growling excitedly as she ended its life.

The stink of fear was stronger in the kitchen, and she found herself looking toward the source.

It came from both of them in waves. Her parents. They were staring at her—seeing her in the shape of the wolf for the very first time.

And they were terrified.

Emily tore her wild, animal eyes away from the sight of her parents, and looked through the broken window out
into the yard. The gnomes were still there in the grass, still attacking her house.

She let the rage of the beast enflame her, bounding up onto the kitchen counter and out through the window into the yard. Emily wanted to lose herself in the beast’s anger, wanted desperately to forget what she had seen in her parents’ eyes.

A look more hurtful than a bullet to the heart.

HIS DAD WAS HUMMING A BEATLES TUNE
.

Desmond St. Laurent leaned heavily upon his crutches, feeling stronger than he had in quite a long time, but still not strong enough to deal with what Bram had asked him to do.

Dez watched his dad move about the small room, removing things from the boxes they had brought from their wrecked home in Maine and putting them away in some kind of order.

Since the attack upon their home, he and his dad had been staying beneath the ruins of an old monastery, on the island of Lindesfarne, near Enland. Supposedly the location was only temporary until the new Brimstone Network was more established and Bram figured out the best place to set up shop.

“How’s this?” his father asked, distracting him from his thoughts.

Douglas St. Laurent was holding a framed picture against the wall.

“Looks fine,” Dez answered, using his crutches to get across the room to his wheelchair. He suddenly had the urge to sit down.

Bram’s request of him made him feel very tired.

His father used a hammer to bang in the nail, and then hung the picture on the wall. Stepping back, the man admired his handiwork and stepped aside so Dez could see.

“What do you think?” the man asked, smiling.

The picture was of Dez and his dad. They were both dressed in heavy winter clothes and sitting on top of a pretty high snowbank.