Chương 45: Chapter 44 - The Real Hero

Dustin did his best to create a smooth introduction, but that was like trying to throw a silk tablecloth over an eighteen-foot junk pile. He didn't get past "this is Mr. Northrop" before Conrad interrupted.

"You're Northrop." The corpse ducked his head in a nod.

"Yes, I'm afraid I have that dubious honor."

"You built the mansion."

"I did."

"And—""And everything else, yes." Conrad glared at him. Kappa bared his teeth. Circe said in her typical off-hand tone, "Mr. Northrop was instrumental in orchestrating your rescue. After all, it was his mind that Dustin had to read." This didn't make any noticeable change in Conrad's or Kappa's attitude, and it made only a slight difference to mine. I went from stunned to stunned and upset. There he was! The man responsible for it all! The graverobber and hoarder of death.

The man who'd created those monsters and set them against the living without knowing or caring that "the living" was going to be me and my friends. Come to think of it, maybe I did want that metal pipe. But he'd helped us. And he was standing in front of me, waiting for my reaction. He had no damn business looking so… so… normal! … I mean, you know, for a walking corpse. And there was something about his expression. It was too deep for me to understand, but it resonated with my empathy.

This was just like that conversation I'd had with Mrs. Park and Iset in Big Jacky's study. That sticky, uncomfortable, conflicted feeling was gumming up everything. I was too exhausted and overwhelmed to deal with it, so my brain rejected the entire problem. Heave-ho! —and it was gone. Darius drove up with Northrop in his car. That meant that he and Big Jacky knew all about him. That meant they could deal with him.

As I mentally dusted my hands of the issue, I remembered that I'd at least have to keep him away from Igor. Otherwise Darius and Big Jacky might not get the chance to deal with him.

"Shall we follow the others?" Circe asked.

"They may need us at the house." Conrad glanced at me. When I nodded, he said, "Yeah. Let's go." People were swarming the mansion by the time we got back. There were only twenty-five to thirty of them, but they were moving around, ceaselessly, in the kind of directed chaos that always reminded me of a hive or an ant hill. Cell phones rang. People talked. People shouted orders. We found Iset and Mrs. Park in the backyard. Igor was already gone.

The two medics attached to the Torr teams had honed in on him the moment they'd arrived, but he'd managed to fight them off, cursing the whole time and insisting that he had his own doctor. Then Dr. Belliston—his own doctor—had arrived. He'd taken one look at Igor and told him to get in the car. Apparently, Igor's… reconstruction … would require more tools than they had on hand. They had to go to the clinic. I let the medics patch up my scratches and scrapes to make them feel better.

Two strangers came up and introduced themselves to Conrad. After establishing that he wasn't hurt, they apologized for bothering him and asked if he would be willing to help the crews. That's one of the hazards of being big, strong, and useful. They didn't even glance at me. Conrad agreed to help and passed Kappa off to me. I would've felt bad for the wolfman—if anyone deserved a break, it was him and Igor — but I knew that he was more comfortable around people when he was being useful.

If he was busy, no one expected him to socialize. Kappa sat in my lap and glowered at the two medics as they worked. A young man with a clipboard came up to Mrs. Park and tried to explain that she needed to go to some kind of "debriefing." Darius, who was standing at least forty feet away, heard him, walked away from his job of telling everyone else what to do, dragged the poor guy aside, and gave him a quiet talking-to that made the young man go pale. When the talking-to was over, Darius returned to our group.

In his most considerate and professional voice, he said, "Mrs. Park, I'm sorry about that. There may be some matters that have to be dealt with, but I assure you that Mr. Noctis and I will take care of as many of them as possible before we bother you. You can—" He stopped himself, let out a short sigh, then looked back at her.

"Mrs. Park, what would you like to do?" The glorious Mrs. Dahlia Park, housekeeper extraordinaire, wielder of the shotgun, rose to her feet, looked the vampire dead in the eyes, and said, "I would like to go home and shower."

"If you'd like, I can have someone drive you."

"Thank you, that would be lovely."

"If you need anything at all, call me."

"I will." Mrs. Park turned to Iset.

"You'll look after the house?" Iset sounded amused: "What's left of it, yes." Darius escorted Mrs. Park toward the crowd of cars. As she passed Northrop, she barely gave him a glance. After everything she'd been through, he probably wasn't worth more than that. The two medics finished my care and left to find some other way to be useful. I stood up from the camp chair that they'd put out on the lawn and looked around, trying to spot one familiar figure in all the chaos.

The longer I looked, the bigger the knot of disappointment in my stomach became. Where was Big Jacky? Had he already disappeared to do some other work? Dustin was standing beside me.

"Emerra?" he said. I shook my head.

"It's nothing." He smirked.

"Would you like to try again?" Oh. Right. There wasn't much point in lying to someone who was both an empath and a telepath. I rehoisted Kappa on my hip and said, "I was looking for a friend of mine. I thought he'd be here—""Mr. Noctis," Dustin said. I had no way of knowing if he'd plucked that from my head or learned about it some other way.

"He's here."

"If he's here, why isn't he here- here?" Dustin grimaced and scratched one of his eyebrows.

"Umm, I'm afraid that has to do with me."

"You?" He stepped closer so he could lower his voice.

"I don't know what secrets are in that man's head, but I'm not allowed within twenty meters of him." A slow smile spread over my face. That made sense. I would've preferred to see the man of many secrets, but I felt better knowing that he was somewhere in the area. It was comforting to think that we had rated high enough in his life that he'd put off everything else to be here. Dustin said, "If you want, Circe and I can—""Don't bother finishing that statement, Dustin Walman," I said.

"I see Big Jacky more than I see you, and I don't know how long I'll get to see you for." Call me a prophet, or call me a pessimist, but my premonition was spot on. Less than a minute later, the same young man who'd tried to kidnap Mrs. Park came over and succeeded in kidnapping Dustin and Circe. A woman came up to me and Iset.

"Ms. Iset?" I pointed to the mummy still sitting on the ground. The woman looked nonplussed for the barest of seconds, then the expression was gone. Being cool and unflappable in the face of the unknown had to be the most important requirement to work with a Torr team. Someone wearing a scary mask probably jumped out at them during their interview, and they only got the job if they didn't scream. The woman addressed herself to Iset: "Excuse me, but Mr.

Vasil wanted me to tell you that they've opened the front doors and are starting to move things out of the mansion onto the front lawn. He wondered if you'd want to oversee the process." Iset sighed.

"Well, I have to keep my promise to Mrs. Park." She held a hand up. I helped her to her feet. I planned on following Iset to the front of the house to avoid the young man with the clipboard (I didn't know what a debriefing was, but it sounded boring), but I didn't get more than two steps before someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. It was Mr. Northrop. A rush of temper made my neck and head feel hot.

During the walk back to the mansion and the whole time we'd been there, Northrop had stayed in the background and said nothing. I'd forgotten he was there, and I wasn't all that pleased to be reminded that he was. He motioned for me to come closer. I stayed where I was. He put his hands behind his back and took a step. It was toward me, but also off at a slight angle, as if he wanted to talk to someone behind my right shoulder.

"Would you mind accompanying me?" he asked. I almost looked over my shoulder to see if someone was there. It was too bizarre to think that he'd be talking to me.

"What's going on?" I asked. He turned his head to look at me.

"There's an important job that I must see to." If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. When our eyes met, it was no passing glance or social courtesy. He was dropping silver coins down a well to see how deep it went. He was plumbing for my soul. I found myself nodding and wondered which of the many voices in my head had given my neck permission. Kappa stood up on my arms so he could get his mouth closer to my ear.

He tried to whisper, but he wasn't good at it, and Northrop was only two feet away.

"Conrad doesn't like him," Kappa "whispered."

"He's bad." I thought I saw Northrop grimace, but before I could decide if that's what it was, it transformed into an exaggerated smirk. He clasped his hands behind his back, rocked back on his feet, peered up at the sky, and hummed. It had the right tone to sound thoughtful, but it was too loud to be anything other than a performance, and every movement had been as exaggerated as his smirk. He suddenly bent at the waist to bring his head closer to Kappa's level.

"But surely," he said, "with such an excellent protector as yourself, she has nothing to worry about." I bristled on Kappa's behalf. My little bog-buddy didn't really understand the concept of sarcasm. Northrop added, "You should come with us in case I try anything untoward." Kappa looked up at me, his tiny brow crinkled with confusion.

"He means if he does anything he's not supposed to," I guessed. Kappa considered for a moment, nodded once, and squiggled out of my arms to drop to the ground. Protectors weren't carried. Protectors walked. Northrop led us toward the short wall west of the mansion. Since the opening had been blocked with rocks, we had to jump over it. We followed the trail out into the wild yard. As we passed the bench that Conrad liked to use, I said, "Where are we going?" Northrop slowed until we were walking side by side.

Kappa walked between us.

"To the other entrance," Northrop said.

"What are you talking about?"

"Did you make it down to the wine cellar? I presume that you did."

"Yes," I said darkly. I didn't think this guy had the right to presume anything about me. Northrop left the trail and headed into a grove of scattered trees. The forest that spread up the mountain started there, growing thicker the deeper in you went. Northrop said, "I didn't want the people who brought me corpses to haul them up to the front door, and it would've been difficult to get them down the stairs into the wine cellar." My blood chilled as I walked. I didn't know why.

Northrop had already told us that he was the man who'd built the mansion and, yes, everything else. I had processed the fact enough to get mad about it. Why was I getting spooked now? He went on, "They would knock on the door in the middle of the night, and I would meet them out here. I thought you would've found this entrance, but it sounds to me like you haven't." Because my blood was chilled, it was easy to feel when it started boiling.

"How can you talk about it so casually?" I demanded. Northrop stopped and turned to me.

"Do you have any idea what me and my friends have been through?" I said.

"What you put us through?" Northrop only watched me. His performance face had vanished, leaving only that deep expression that I'd seen before—the one I couldn't understand. The one that had upset me. What was it? What would it have looked like if his face had been whole? Never mind. I wanted answers.

"Well?" I not-quite-shouted.

"No, Emerra," he said. His voice was soft and serious.

"I only know the most passing and unimportant information. I can tell you how many bodies there were. I can tell you the spells I used to raise them—how much energy it took. I can tell you how much money I spent to buy them and what condition they came to me in. But I've never been at their mercy. I've never had to fight them. I can only imagine what it was like. But it's all I've been imagining for the last two and a half days, and it was bad enough.

If I spent the next hundred years telling you how sorry I am for what you went through, I wouldn't have the time or words to convey it." He meant it. I could see it in those eyes of his. I finally recognized the expression; he was hurting. Seeing it made me hurt too. All the pain, fear, and stress of the longest two and a half days of my life ganged up on me. It brought a layer of tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat.

"Why did you do it, Northrop?" I squeaked around the lump.

"Come," he said.

"We have to move." He turned and kept walking. Kappa stayed beside me. After wiping furiously at my unshed tears, I followed Northrop with Kappa at my heels. We caught up in time to hear him sigh.

"I did it because I was selfish," he said.

"Painfully and blindly selfish. One life wasn't enough for me. I became obsessed with the idea of living forever. Other people stopped mattering—if they had ever mattered to me. That was both why I did it and how I could do it."

"How does setting up an army of zombies help you live forever?" Northrop stopped beside a large boulder and kicked at the dirt and debris gathered around its base. His foot nudged something, and he bent to brush back the dirt. There was a large flat rock similar to the ones that made up the walls and roofs of the zombie crypts, only smaller, with a one-and-a-half-inch hole near one edge. Northrop put two fingers in the hole and pulled it back.

The back edge of the stone caught in its tight-fitting frame, and it swung up as if it had hinges, revealing a ramp that led down to a stone-lined passageway. Kappa crept over and peered into the hole. I looked up at Northrop.

"They don't know that you're doing this, do they?" I wasn't sure who "they" were, but I suspected it included Darius Vasil and Jack Noctis. Northrop didn't bother asking me to specify.

"They do not. Which is why I brought you with me." Still bent over the hole, he turned his head enough to look at me out of the corner of his eye. For a moment, I saw him as he must have looked in life. The rotting features were whole again. He had thick eyebrows, a small, sharp nose, and a wide, expressive mouth. His mouth was bent up in a wry smile. He said, "Who better to keep an eye on me than you?" A faint shiver made the hairs on my arms rise. Northrop turned his attention back to the hole.

"Do you have a light?" I felt my pockets. My cell phone was still there and still intact. Battery at low.

"I don't know how long it'll last," I said.

"It'll have to do." Northrop went down first. I turned on the flashlight function and followed him. Kappa jumped down and scurried between us. The walls of the passageway looked the same as they did in the basement, minus the doors. It stretched off toward the mansion. For a while, we walked in silence. Then Northrop spoke.

"No one had conquered immortality before. It would take years of experimentation, and the first step was preserving and raising the physical remains. That's why I needed to experiment with all the bodies. I needed to understand the process and effects of the spells." It took me a second to realize that he was answering the question I'd asked as we'd arrived at the boulder.

"And those freakish animal-zombies you made?" I said. I had framed it like a question, but it came out sounding like an accusation.

"Augmentation and improvement," Northrop said.

"I didn't know how old I'd be when I died, or what kind of injuries I might have sustained in my life. It was possible I'd have to fix my body or build a new one."

"With freaking shark's teeth?" Northrop's quiet chuckle echoed back to me.

"Forgive me," he said.

"I know you're angry. You have every right to be. But the way you express yourself!" He turned to me.

"I'm very glad you're alive." I stared at him, feeling all weird about his abrupt statement. He kept walking.

"I know that the rest of the world sees me as a heretic and a monster—I accept that—but I won't lie and tell you I feel guilty about the desecration. They were bodies. Bodies become dust. To alter them is no different than plowing a field or digging a garden. I felt that way then, and I feel that way now."

"They were people that someone loved."

"They were the bodies of someone loved. What mattered—what was sacred—were the memories others had of them." A small rush of annoyance surged through all the other emotions wriggling around in my chest. I knew that religious people had a different take on bodies, but my thinking was more in line with Northrop's. A horrifying thought.

"And the traps?" I nagged.

"Setting them up like an army? Programming them to kill?" Northrop stopped so suddenly that Kappa bumped into his legs. The bog-monster bounced back and shook his head. Northrop didn't move. That kind of stillness was only possible because he was dead. Even his lungs and heart were motionless. Were the neurons in his brain even firing? —or was this all coming from his soul? He turned toward me but stopped halfway so he was facing one of the walls. He gazed up at the line where the wall met the ceiling.

I could see his rotten profile.

"You have friends," he said. If he'd added, "and I'm holding them all hostage," I couldn't have felt more threatened. What did it matter to him if I had friends? What was he going to do? When I didn't answer, Northrop motioned to Kappa.

"The little creature seems fond of you. Mr. Walman was undoubtedly—""Yes," I said, scooping up Kappa and holding him close, "I have friends."

"Do you worry about them?" Kappa looked up at me.

"Every day," I said. A sad smile appeared, then died on Northrop's face.

"Good." His chin lifted slightly.

"But I wonder if you could understand me, Emerra. I had no friends when I was alive. The only person I worried about was myself. I didn't think about who I'd hurt by setting up those traps, and I never worried about who might be killed. I only saw that there would be people who tried to get in my way, and I wanted to stop them." He looked at me.

"Blind selfishness. As I told you." Kappa's grip on my shirt tightened.

"But you see it now?" I said.

"I was made to see it," Northrop said. The memory of Mr. Grant's face popped into my head. He was one of my favorite therapists. The rinky-dink-shrinky shrink. Five feet, two inches of pure empathy. He was usually smiling, but that day, he'd looked so stern and serious. I remember how my heart had shrunk to the size of a worm when he asked me the questions that had forced me to say, out loud, how my foster parents must have felt when I'd run away from them. Before that moment, I'd never worried about it.

All I had cared about was how I felt. My stomach soured.

"You felt bad?" I asked. It sounded childish, but I had to know.

"I did, and I do," Northrop said.

"For a supposed genius, I can be a slow learner, but I had time enough to think while I was dead, and this situation has forced the point home at the end of a knife. But that's not the worst of it." He continued down the hall. I pulled Kappa closer. Protector or not, if there was a "worst of it," then my bog-buddy was getting carried. I ran after Northrop.

"What do you—" Northrop let out a sharp hiss to cut me off. He whispered, "We're close to the main basement." I lowered my voice with only a fleeting thought about how on earth I'd been suckered into sneaking around my own home with a man whose carelessness would be the source of my nightmares for months to come.

"What do you mean, 'the worst of it'?" The hallway split into two branches. One led to the left. The other was the main hall that Igor, Conrad, and I had explored. I could see the first of the still gaping doorways. We slowed as we got closer to the split, and Northrop stopped when he reached it. We both listened hard. There were lots of noises coming from above us, but there were none in the basement. Other than my cell phone, there was no hint of light.

Northrop snuck into the main hall and headed toward the workroom where he'd kept the skull, the contract, and his journal. He said, "After I'd refined the spells used to augment and raise physical bodies, I had to experiment with spiritual matter, otherwise there'd be no way to secure my soul in the spell. Unfortunately, no matter how good my ability to manipulate magic was, I could only manipulate natural magic. I tried for months to bridge the gap between natural and spiritual magic, but I never got close.

The demon I was working with offered to help. You know about the demon?" He turned into his workroom. I ducked under the low doorway and followed him in.

"We know about the demon," I said. Northrop stopped a few feet inside the door. His body was rigid, and the words came out in a rushed whisper: "Where is it?" I lowered Kappa to the floor and swept the light over the room, looking for who-knows-what.

"The table, Emerra," Northrop said. I fixed the light on the table. The journal and chains cast long angular shadows.

"Oh, god." Northrop closed his eyes and raised a hand to cover his mouth. Kappa jumped on the table and turned to watch us. I took a step closer to Northrop. Seeing his distress made my throat tighten until my voice came out in a panicked squeak.

"Northrop, what is it? What are you looking for?" He curled the hand that had been covering his mouth into a loose fist that rested over his lips. He spoke around it.

"There was a body on that table. A small one. Seven inches. No tail. Red—""You mean the last zombie?" Northrop moved the fist away from his mouth and whirled to face me.

"A zombie? Vasil only uses that word for the ones that rise." He was staring at me, his blue eyes wider than I'd ever seen them. Not sure what else I was supposed to do or say, I nodded.

"It rose?" I nodded again. Northrop turned away from me, then turned back. His hands were everywhere—by his face, touching his head, held out in the air as if he was telling the empty room to calm down.

"My god," he muttered.

"I did it. My god—how much magic—No, you wouldn't know. I can't ask." He swore under his breath, then looked at me.

"You saw it?"

"We had to fight it," I said.

"Fight it how?"

"It used magic to raise all the skeletons you had stored here."

"It used magic?" Another nod. Northrop swore again, and he didn't bother doing it under his breath. He took a step toward me.

"Did it escape? Emerra, please! This is important!" I took a step back.

"No! It didn't escape."

"You're certain?"

"I'm certain!"

"What happened to it?" I motioned with my head toward the worktable.

"Kappa ate it." Kappa sat on his butt, put his hands between his legs, and blinked up at us. For a moment, there was silence. Then Northrop laughed. It sounded like there was a hint of madness in it—mad from relief or mad because it was coming out of the mouth of a heretic magician, I couldn't tell—but the laugh was such a wild and alive sound that it brought a smile to my face. Northrop walked over to the table and hunched so he could look Kappa in the eyes.

"Never before have I so longed to study excrement." Kappa tilted his head and made a trilling noise. The word "excrement" had probably confused him.

"Tell me, friend," Northrop said to him, "how did it taste?"

"Crunchy!" Kappa announced.

"Like a big bug!"

"Thank you." Northrop raised a rotting finger. Kappa's nose wrinkled as it got closer, but he didn't back away. Northrop tapped the tip of his finger bone on Kappa's nose.

"You may have saved the world."