“Yes, I suppose you thought you did,” Brother Al said.“Not to mix this up any more than we have already, but I just got back from a one-way trip to the past, and my wings are tired.You’d better clap that man on the stand in manacles.Anti-Wyrd ones, while we’re at it.”
“What the hell is going on?”Judge Volkheim asked.
“This would be the immolated body of William Corcoran,” Brother Al said, tossing it forward.It moaned, clutching its stomach.“Did you really think a flame spell would undo the curse of the Routshammer, Vic?”
Vic stood up, hands glowing, eyes burning blue like some eldritch flame.
“Back off,” he said, to another jailer.He snapped a finger, and flames ate the vampire alive with a shriek and a splatter of blood.The crowd gasped.“Is this what you wanted, you bastards?You interrupt my plans not once, not twice, but now three entire.Fucking.Times?I can’t take it anymore.I thought I’d do this the clever way, sneak out of here with a spring in my step and start a brand new page of existence.But not now.No, no, no.Now I’ve HAD IT.I’m killing everyone in this room, and I’m starting with the little bitch that started all of this!”
“Nagi,” I said.
There was a splatter of flesh that shot from Nagi’s fists.Vic’s head was separated from his body.Where it fell on the floor, dark fibrous bits of necroscopic tissue snapped like snakes.Twisting, snarling tendons reached out from the spine, yearning to reform, but Eddie jumped forward with a set of silver manacles and clapped the decapitated head in chains, binding it up in a tight wrap around Vic’s outstretched hands.
“You bastards!”Vic’s disembodied head hissed from his grip.“And silver chains?Really?”
“Again, what’s going on here?”Judge Volkheim asked.
“Pizza’s here,” an intern said, rushing into the room.
Everyone stared at him.
“I’ll just leave it over on this table in the corner,” he said, carefully.
“That man on the stand is not who you think he is,” Brother Al said.“That’s William Corcoran himself.”
“You bastards!”Corcoran’s head howled.
Chapter11
“I’d like to take the stand,” Brother Al said.
“That will be a little difficult given we have the… apparently newly accused strapped into the chair,” Judge Volkheim said.“Look, I damn sure don’t know what’s going on and it’s been hard for me to follow as is.So somebody better start talking, and soon, and I don’t give two brass farthings where you are in the room when you do it.”
“We came up with this plan together,” Eddie said.
“All four of us, including Abe,” Nagisa said.
“It was the only way we knew how to get him,” I said.
“And by ‘him’ I assume you mean… William Corcoran?Is that right?”Judge Volkheim asked.
“That would be correct,” Abe said.
“How did you determine it was him?”Judge Volkheim asked.
“It was the Arcade,” I said.“I told you we’d circle back around to it.”
Brynholf rolled his eyes.
“Well,” Judge Volkheim said.“We’re in this far.You may as well continue.”
So we decidedwe’d go in through the Arcade to find the secret entrance to Feedworthy.
Eddie used his tire iron and smashed in the front glass door of the Arcade.He and I entered quietly, stealthily, stepping over glass shards and trying our hardest not to be noticed.You can only be so invisible when you break a door open, but we tried anyway.
“That was louder than I meant it to be,” Eddie said.He looked paranoid, his head twisting here and there at the slightest sound or warble from an arcade machine.
No alarms had gone off.There was nobody inside.The only sounds that weren’t electronic were our squelching footfalls on a dank carpeted floor.I can’t tell you how weirdly familiar it was to walk on carpet sticky from spilled sodas.Kinda nostalgic, actually, now that I mention it.
