Imprisoned
Imprisoned
Part Nine of "North of Midnight," a Spell Weaver Novella
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Where we left off: Antonio runs out of magic just before the group can escape, resulting in their capture.
When I recovered consciousness, I felt groggy and numb. It took me a moment to realize that I was in a gloomy but not completely lightless area. It took another moment to realize that my hands and feet were manacled to something that felt as cold and hard as a stone slab.
I managed to raise my head enough to see that I wasn’t alone. Antonio, Jimmie, and Khalid were nearby, also chained in the same way I was. A little farther away, I thought I could see Umbra, Viviane Florence, and Carrie Winn. Umbra looked as if she might be moving, but the other two were unconscious, at least as far as I could tell.
The fake Dracula stood nearby, watching us. He’d hung a key around his neck, but otherwise, he looked the same as before. Elatha stood at his side, sword drawn—though why remained a mystery. None of us could possibly be a threat to him now.
“Ah, you’re all awake,” said Dracula. “All of you that can be, anyway.”
I noticed the two doppelgangers, who were also watching us with some degree of interest. Next to them was a third—Umbra’s, no doubt, though her skin looked more albino than pale, and her hair was more gray than black. She was newer than the others. Her physical body was still forming.
“We won’t do what you want,” said Khalid, who did a good job of masking whatever fear he had.
“That’s the beauty of our current situation,” said Dracula. “You don’t have to. We have what we really wanted—all of you, helpless. By the time your friends return, you will be dead, and doppelgangers will have taken your places. Elatha, I could use your help with the casting.”
“Where are we?” asked Jimmie, perhaps playing for time. Our location could hardly be as important as how we were going to get out of these chains.
Dracula gave Jimmie another one of his toothy smiles. “In a tunnel deep beneath the cemetery, The Formorians are so skillful with tunnels, you know. That’s what comes from living underground. Now, be silent, or I’ll have to gag you.”
“I think that explains how they got into the town in the first place,” said Jimmie. I was oddly comforted by the fact that the psychic connections among us were still intact. “They must have tunneled under the early warning system, which I guess doesn’t extend below ground level.”
“That’s a good point to address later,” said Lucas. “The more urgent question is how to get out of here now. Antonio, have you got any juice left?”
“He’s unconscious,” I said.
“So are the real Viviane and Vanora,” said Khalid. “That means we don’t have anyone with particularly active magic. Alexandra, can you do anything?”
“I can still see magic,” I said. “I don’t seem to be able to do anything more active, though.”
Elatha’s dark purple magic entwined itself with Dracula’s gray power as the phony vampire chanted in a language I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Romanian, as I might have expected, given his disguise. It didn’t sound like Latin, either. But it did sound sinister, even though the words weren’t chanted with any particular emotion.
Something that looked like a flash of electricity hit Jimmie. He jumped as if he’d been shocked.
“Are you OK?” asked Khalid.
“I feel weak,” Jimmie replied, his statement underscored by how much quieter his thoughts sounded.
Right next to the slab to which he was chained, a mist began to form, first white, then jumbled with color, as if someone were flinging paint around like a splatter artist on steroids. As I watched, horrified but fascinated, the mess began to resolve itself into an image of Jimmie.
“His life force is being used to power the doppelganger,” said Khalid. I could feel his anger through our connection.
That must be why the creation of a doppelganger ended with the death of the original. The doppelganger must take every drop of life force to be complete.
Jimmie’s doppelganger was still translucent and looked blurry by comparison to the original. But it became more solid with each passing second.
“The ghost that guided Antonio is still here,” said Jimmie. “I can sense him.”
“Unless he can manifest strongly enough to rip these chains off us, he isn’t going to be much help,” said Khalid.
Now that Jimmie mentioned it, I could see an occasional white flicker in the shadows.
“He has a plan,” said Jimmie. “But I don’t know if it will work.”
I was no expert on ghosts, but from what Jimmie had said earlier and from what little I’d read over the years, I couldn’t imagine how a ghost could save us. Some of them were adroit at frightening ordinary people, but I doubted either Elatha or Dracula could be scared off by some misty presence. They could interact a little bit with the physical world, but it took a great deal of power to do even the smallest things. This particular ghost was barely visible, even to my amplified senses, so it seemed unlikely that anything he could do physically would have much of an impact.
Doppelganger Jimmie was solid now, but he still looked paler than the original, and his eyes seemed unfocused, though he was looking in Jimmie’s general direction. I guessed it must take a short time for the doppelganger to replicate enough of Jimmie’s mind to begin functioning.
The ghost presence caught my eye again. It had now fluttered over to a point right behind the new-made doppelganger. As I watched, it flowed into it.
The doppelganger jerked, and its eyes came into focus—but they didn’t look as I had expected them to look. The three female doppelgangers looked complacent. This doppelganger looked mad—fighting mad. I could see the ghost’s energy flicker in the doppelganger’s eyes and knew that he had either been hiding his power or conserving it. Either way, he was stronger than he had looked. He had a firm grip on the doppelganger.
Dracula and Elatha both looked puzzled, and the magic connecting them to the doppelganger twisted suddenly, as if they had lost control of it.
“Possession,” said Jimmie.
I didn’t know much about possession, either, except that I’d seen the effects on Janice. The ghost couldn’t have been strong enough to produce a similar result.
But moving into a doppelganger’s body while the doppelganger mind was still taking shape? Maybe that was possible.
“Ladies, some help please,” said Dracula, his voice sounding strained. Doppelganger Viviane and Doppelganger Carrie looked confused. They hadn’t yet noticed the change in Doppelganger Jimmie.
The doppelganger’s face went blank for a moment as Dracula and Elatha tried to reestablish control and complete the spell. Then its face twisted with rage as the ghost of one of their victims pushed back successfully. He turned and pulled the magic toward him as if it were like physical ropes rather than strands of power, pulling Dracula and Elatha off balance in the process.
“Come!” the doppelganger yelled. “Come now!” The voice sounded similar to Jimmie’s, though perhaps a little higher-pitched. But I could feel and see magic in the words. Had the ghost had magic in life, or was he somehow drawing power from the spell Dracula and Elatha were casting? Instead of a deep purple mixed with lifeless gray, the ghost magic was more of a silver white—like the ghost had looked before possessing the doppelganger.
Elatha pulled away from the casting and raised his sword.
“No!” said Dracula. “Disrupting the doppelganger magic could have unforeseen consequences. There’s a lot of power—”
But Elatha, who had never seemed fully in accord with Dracula, took off Doppelganger Jimmie’s head in one smooth stroke. My heart started beating far too fast, as if I had just seen the real Jimmie decapitated, and Jimmie screamed as if he had felt the sword stroke. I wanted to look away but couldn’t.
Blood sprayed from the wounded neck as the body slumped to the ground. But perhaps because the doppelganger was still forming, it didn’t die as I would have expected. The decapitated body fell, but it continued moving as if trying to crawl away, and the eyes looked up from the severed head as if it was fully aware. The sight was sufficiently grotesque that even Elatha paused for a moment, uncertain what to do next.
During that second of hesitation, the chamber filled with ghosts, too many of them to count. They had heard the doppelganger’s call—part Jimmie, whom ghosts seemed to bond with easily; part ghost, and thus one of their own. They had heard, and they had come.
I imagined Dracula and Elatha could have overcome one ghost easily enough. But overcoming forty or more might be much more difficult.
They surged into Doppelganger Jimmie, whose body still retained a large part of the doppelganger creation magic. Its purple and gray strands twisted upward from the neck as it struggled to form the semblance of a new head.
Elatha swung again, but Dracula pushed him enough to throw off the stroke. “The magic must be undone carefully—” began the fake vampire.
Doppelganger Jimmie, head reformed enough to have eyes that could see, dove under Elatha’s blade, then rose quickly, grabbing Dracula’s key hard enough to rip the chain off his neck.
I couldn’t imagine what good that would do. DJ would never have enough time to get us all unlocked. But apparently, the key was magic. Before Dracula could stop him, DJ raised the key in our direction and twisted it to the left in midair. All of the manacles restraining our arms and legs clicked open simultaneously.
Doppelganger Umbra, slower than the original but finally in motion, tried to tackle DJ, but she was also less coordinated than the original, and her leap missed him.
Wasting no time, Khalid, Lucas, and I jumped to our feet. Jimmie, with the doppelganger magic draining him, was too weak to stand. But even the sight of just three of us free got Doppelgangers Viviane and Carrie moving. They raised their hands in our direction and tried to hit us with what I assumed was Lady of the Lake magic but produced a spray of water about equal to that of a garden hose.
It would be a while before their magic reached the power level of their originals, but they would never get the chance if we could help it. Khalid and I took them down with a couple punches.
“You have to kill them,” whispered Umbra, who, like Jimmie, was still lying on her slab. “They will keep drawing power from their originals.”
Khalid, Lucas, and I glanced at each other. It was clear that none of us particularly wanted to slaughter doppelgangers, even though we knew it would have to be done at some point. Right now, helping DJ seemed more urgent.
He was unarmed, though he’d managed to knock out Doppelganger Umbra. But Elatha had a sword and knew how to use it. Dracula was no longer protesting and had a grayish aura around him, an indication that he was readying to attack with magic, perhaps of the soul-stealing variety. We had only seconds before the battle would be lost.
“I’ll take Elatha. You two take Drac,” said Lucas as he charged the Formorian. He was the best unarmed fighter among us, so his strategy made sense. Much to my amazement, he somersaulted over Elatha’s sword stroke and drove him back with a scorpion kick. Before Elatha could respond, Lucas had already moved just out of range of the sword.
DJ pretty much had a head right now, and with Elatha distracted, the doppelganger was free to attack Dracula. The self-styled king of vampires found himself in a perplexing situation. He tried soul stealing against DJ, but all those ghosts inside of the doppelganger must have scrambled that particular magic, which anticipated only one soul per body.
The ghosts had also energized DJ in a way I didn’t understand. He was now stronger and faster than the original Jimmie. He dropped Dracula with a single, well-aimed punch. However, Dracula, still conscious, managed to roll away in time to avoid an equally well-aimed kick.
Khalid and I were now in arm’s reach, but Dracula executed a trick I thought only worked in the movies—he became mist, and our blows had nothing to hit.
“Vampires can’t do that!” I said, as if my protest would cause him to solidify again.
“He’s no vampire,” said DJ. “He’s…much more.”
“Watch him,” said Khalid. “We’ll go help Lucas.”
Lucas needed the help by then. The space was too cramped for him to make full use of his capoeira skills and speed. Elatha was rapidly backing him into a corner. Khalid, also a fast mover, tackled Elatha from behind. While the Formorian was distracted, I came in low with a body slam from behind, more than enough to throw him off-balance. That gave Lucas enough time to sweep his legs out from under him. He fell but managed to retain his grip on his sword, so we couldn’t just move in and knock him out.
To complicate matters, he began oozing the purple fog his women excelled at creating. Having neither Antonio’s love magic nor the sunlight from Apollo’s sword, we had no choice but to back off. We still had no idea what that stuff could do.
At that point, I felt that weird sensation of my soul trying to separate from my body. My head snapped in Dracula’s direction, but he was still mist, and he was no longer emitting that kind of magic—or any kind, as far as I could tell.
I saw the eyes of the others become unfocused as the magic reached them as well. How long could we fight it? We needed to know where from where it was coming.
It didn’t take long to find the source—Janice, or more correctly, whoever was possessing her. It didn’t appear to be Dracula at this point. But whoever it was used Janice’s lips to give us an evil smile as she scraped our souls out of our bodies.
She looked disdainfully at the mist that had been Dracula. “You’ve made a mess of things, haven’t you? Well, I’ll take care of them from here.
“From what I understand of the doppelganger spell, it doesn’t require a soul to be in the original body to work.”
She gave us another smile that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Satan’s lips, and I felt burning agony as she ripped my soul out of its body.
“North of Midnight” is related to the Spell Weaver series.
(Coincidentally, today is the twelfth anniversary of the publication of the first volume, Living with Your Past Selves.)
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FELICES