Part II: Beyond the Veil

A Cure for Quietus

Chapter 10: Many Happy Returns

Content warning: This story contains explicit content and supernatural sex that may offend some readers. All depicted characters are 18 years or older.

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“We are pissing off pretty much the whole tri-state area right now.”

Sophie aimed a hard glare over her shoulder in reply to Derrick and looked past him at the glossy white control chamber, the curved walls covered with projection displays of every sort, from trajectory graph charts and scrolling strings of numbers to flashing interface windows that meant nothing to her. A dozen workstations, each with its own pair of black swivel chairs and an assortment of glowing flatscreen monitors, filled the room, all of them facing the center; only two of the five people present right now offered them any notice, and Derrick alone gave them his full attention, darting back and forth between different desks and relaying orders over his headset to a technical team scattered throughout the skyscraper.

“Not if this works,” Michel answered him. “Status report?”

“Receptive state confirmed,” Derrick called out with a glance at a monitor. “She’s taken the bait, we’ve just got to reel her in. All available power’s running through the ley line, ninety-four percent efficiency.”

When her father had first emerged from their family’s century-long obscurity to announce a new headquarters in Seattle, the question of why Seattle had come up several times. He always had a ready answer to give at the press conferences, delivered in his regal French accent: Seattle’s a beautiful city, an economic powerhouse, and he’s a great lover of Nirvana and coffee. That always got a polite chuckle. Nobody ever mentioned that, among the city’s many offerings, Seattle also held the distinction of having hosted a ley line survey that provided a detailed block-by-block map of its spiritual energy flow. He would have feigned surprise if they had.

Derrick stood behind a workstation, his palms braced against the desk and eyes fixed on the monitor readouts, but the centerpiece of the room held everyone else’s attention: a glass column the size of a walk-in closet that stretched from floor to ceiling, a holding tank that contained a black carbon-steel pedestal and a thin pink smartphone atop it. Even through the inch-thick glass, Sophie could make out the spiderweb cracks that covered the phone’s flashing screen, the rust-red stain seeped into them.

Michel’s fingers caught Sophie’s right palm to hold her hand. She found herself squeezing his hand back as she stared into the chamber.

Melissa, the Eurydice program’s creator and foremost expert, took a step past Sophie’s right shoulder, her wide brown eyes fixed on the tank as well. “We should be seeing a manifestation any moment now…”

Something burst within the tank, an eruption of cold white light that coated the glass from top to bottom in fingerprint whorls and streaks of frost. Dewdrop beads of condensation dripped down the crystal pillar and Sophie squinted past them at the serpentine swirl of light and shadows twisting and congealing behind the translucent layer of frozen glass.

“She is not a happy camper in there,” Derrick said. “Interior temperature’s at negative thirty-five Celsius and falling. She’s soaking up all the heat.”

A thick, heavy shape thudded against the glass, something that pushed through the rime for just an instant to give a formless impression of frostbitten flesh and gangrenous black bone. It pulled away and vanished into the whirling, glowing white blizzard, and ice swept the glass again. Then another hard thud, a glimpse of ragged bones raking the surface before lifting again, leaving a streak of blood across the glass.

“The glass is reinforced,” she heard Nicolas say, perhaps more to reassure himself than anyone else in the room, and Sophie glanced out of the corner of her eye to find the burly security director staring wide-eyed at the tank, hardly breathing, one hand grasping the useless gun on his belt.

“Yeah, but the glass isn’t what’s keeping her inside,” Derrick replied, and the technician turned his attention to Melissa. “This is going too slow. We have to ramp up the feed before the shielding starts to buckle.”

“We are running every drop of power in a five-hundred-mile radius through this ley line. Do you have any idea what’ll happen if it ruptures?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” Melissa said, and she turned her gaze back to the tank.

The process, as Sophie understood it, involved converting electromagnetic energy into the same anti-entropic field that generated life. Orgone energy, the qi, the vital force — the name didn’t matter. Ley lines mapped the natural flow of such energy around the world, the spiritual circulatory system of the planet. Major cities usually coincided with intersecting lines: whether that was because the energy attracted the cities or the cities attracted the energy flow was a matter of esoteric debate, and just as trivial a concern right now as the name used to describe that energy.

What mattered right now was that ley lines converted geomagnetic fields into spiritual energy. What mattered was that the Delanne Institute had spent three years figuring out how to tap into the ley line system, to feed electromagnetic energy into it and extract life energy from it.

Sophie tried to calculate the amount of life energy that could be converted from the Pacific Northwest grid. She came up with “a lot.”

“If she slips beyond the veil,” her father was saying, and he let go of Sophie’s hand to step closer to the glass, his eyes narrowed, “this was all for nothing. Keep it steady, match any fluctuations but don’t exceed them.”

“Yes, sir,” Derrick answered, and he continued his restless pace around the room as he tapped his earpiece to relay the orders to the rest of his team. “We’re at thirty-eight gigawatts and rising,” he announced from another control terminal. “Thirty-nine, forty. Washington’s tapped out, Oregon and Idaho are on fumes. Interior temperature’s still going down, we’re at negative fifty-eight Celsius. It’s like the South Pole in there.”

“What are we looking for?” Nicolas asked.

“Beats me,” Derrick replied. “I thought we’d know it when we see it.”

“We will,” Melissa insisted. “It’s going to work, we just have to…”

Another hard blow rang from within the frozen glass chamber — not against the wall this time but across the floor. Then silence, a tensed, ringing silence that found the group exchanging hesitant glances between each other and the frozen column. Derrick’s voice broke the tension.

“Energy differential’s dropped to zero,” he read from a screen. “The ley line output’s stable now and temperature’s rising fast in there. We’re hitting the freezing point, crossing it… We are back at room temperature.”

Sophie couldn’t make out the tank’s interior any better now: the streaked layers of frost that’d covered the glass had given way to a thick white fog. Michel turned from the pillar. “Can we ventilate the interior?”

“I don’t think we’ll need to,” Melissa replied. “It should dissipate on its own.” It’d already started to fade, in fact, and Sophie drifted among the terminals and empty seats to stand a few feet back from the hazy glass.

The mist receded second by second to reveal the familiar black pedestal and pink smartphone. But a new shape now lay across the polished floor, her face hidden beneath a long messy tangle of auburn hair, body sprawled forward to expose her pale freckled shoulders and the small of her back, the slight swell of her hips and bare derrière. Her naked form pulsed with a faint lingering glow; Sophie blushed in sympathetic embarrassment and cast suspicious glances at some of the men in the group. Derrick’s face fell in a shameless gawk that only caught itself when he noticed Sophie’s look; her father spared one impassive glance to the girl in the tank.

“What are we looking at?” he snapped. “Give me a vitals scan now!”

Derrick stood staring at the tank, and he shook his head to try to make himself focus again — and found that Melissa had reached one of the projected displays on the wall first. “Thermal imaging scan’s picking up circulo-respiratory activity,” she said. “Breath rate is twenty-three and going down. Heart rate’s also elevated, one hundred sixty-six, and also trending downward. Body temperature ninety-nine point six.

“Congratulations,” she concluded with a grin. “It’s a girl.”

“We cured a ghost,” Derrick said, his voice soft, and then he started shouting into his headset. “Yeah! We just fucking cured a ghost!” Sophie turned to see Melissa shaking her head at the younger man’s outburst, and noted her clenched smirk and the way she bounced on her heels.

“Good job everyone,” Michel offered with a restrained half-smile.

Sophie spun back toward the glass pillar and the woman stirring within, watching as she lifted her head to reveal bright gray eyes that blinked and focused on the people around her. She pulled back into a crouch and then gasped at the sight of her nude form, wrapping her arms across her breasts with a flush of embarrassment. Then she pressed her fingers to her elbows, more deliberately this time, then felt up and down the lengths of her arms. Then her knees and legs, then her sides, and finally her cheeks and face, forgoing her modesty to press her palm against her lips, to grab her nose and chin, then to sweep her fingers back through her hair.

The girl behind the glass caught a faintly familiar face among the observers and fixed her wide-eyed stare on Sophie, a pallid woman with straight black hair and dark eyes. She mouthed a silent question: “Sophie?”

Sophie beamed and gave Barbara a wild nod, then mouthed her reply.

“Happy birthday.”

The Delanne Institute has conquered death, and the world stands on the brink of a new era. David, Isabel, and the resurrected Barbara uncover the mysteries behind Sophie and the Eurydice Initiative while Michel Delanne learns there’s a cosmic price to pay for breaching the walls of the afterlife… The Eurydice arc concludes with “The Infernal Machine,” starting September 15th!

Want to catch up on Isabel, David, and Barbara’s supernatural adventures but not sure where to start? The “Ghost Country Series” list now brings all their stories together into one chronological collection. Just click here!

Each week I’ll be posting a chapter from the Dreadful Desire erotica series, a collection of taboo, sometimes forceful — but never degrading — sexual fantasies. You can find links to my Medium stories in this handy compendium…

And now there’s a Dreadful Desires novel! The five-part supernatural romance The Fallen Sky is available in an omnibus edition that contains the complete erotic fantasy adventure. You can find it on Kindle and Smashwords!