Inimicus

2 Spiritual vs. Physical

2

Spiritual vs. PhysicalJonah stayed prone on his bed, wide-eyed, winded, and disoriented.

That was one of the strangest dreams, visions, or whatever it was, that he'd had in his life, and that was saying something. It had been so jam-packed with details that he didn't even know where to begin, but when he tried to start, his brain seemed somewhat short-circuited. Some Protector Guide—at least he thought, because it was hard to recall—had reconstructed a damnable dream he'd had once before, and then invited himself into it. He'd known everything about Jonah, but Jonah barely remembered a thing about him. If Jonah concentrated very hard, he could almost recall that the guide promised that he'd forget his name, and damn if he hadn't been right. Jonah couldn't even remember what the guy's name sounded like.

He closed his eyes tightly. The trick of only looking into his mind had assisted with rejoining mental puzzle pieces in the past, but it didn't seem like it would oblige him this particular morning. But he had to try something. The information seemed too important to let it slip away.

There had been a café—no—a diner. He couldn't remember the name of that, either. Some morning customers got an early start on feeding their faces, and there was also a portly, annoying waiter that pestered a guy who seemed…off.

Jonah frowned as he lay in the tangle of blankets. His memory got hazier by the second.

The scene shifted to some sort of room. Yeah. That was right. He'd been in a room where some person dripped blood in ashes and roused a cold fire. A cold fire that—spoke?

Did Jonah remember that right? No, he hadn't. The fire hadn't actually spoken. Jonah had seen words splashed across his mind. That cold fire and the hooded person intimated a conversation through thought. They hadn't spoken a single word.

He shook his head. Things were fading like trapped heat from a window in winter.

Stop trying to recall everything, he scolded himself. Focus on the essentials.

And there were essentials. That hooded person intimated something about “lambs” moving forward with some plan, and there had also been something about how they'd been itching to kill Jonah Rowe.

Itching to kill him.

Then Jonah remembered something with perfect clarity. It was the one recollection that no amount of hazy memory would deter.

The Inimicus card.

That word and that card prompted Jonah to pull himself from the bed and stand so as to allow blood to flow through his body in a simpler way.

Jonah remembered that the presence in the fire referred to that hooded person as Inimicus. That damned word again. Jonah had very little knowledge of it, but the bit that he did know was unnerving enough.

A few months ago, the 49er, a vampire who also happened to be one Creyton's most loyal followers once upon a time, had a fit of reckless ambition and attempted to take Creyton's place as Alpha. When it became clear that his plot would flop, he'd thrown a card on the ground that depicted an open eye, an exposed blade, and the term Scius. But Jonah witnessed the card transform into a new picture that showed a closed eye, a sheathed blade, and the term Inimicus.

Jonah's friend, and resident Latin expert, Malcolm Mercer told him that Scius and Inimicus were “gloved” cards in a mythological game. Scius was the obvious enemy, while Inimicus was the enemy you never saw coming. It was supposed to be a game, a myth…but this was the second time Jonah had seen the supposedly mythological term.

The presence in the flames identified that disguised figure as Inimicus. Who was that cloaked person? It had to be that guy from the diner. Who else could it have been?

The hooded figure made it clear that they wanted to kill Jonah, and that guy certainly looked capable of killing.

That jolly waiter hounded that man in an attempt to get him to show emotion. And then Jonah saw the cloaked figure drop blood into a box of ashes. That couldn't have been coincidental.

The one thing that Jonah couldn't understand was why the man bothered to disguise himself. He hadn't done so at the diner, so it seemed, at least to Jonah, to be a pointless triviality. It wasn't like he could know that someone in a dream state watched him walk into the place, could he?

A faint smack made Jonah jump and turn, but he shook his head. His wallet, which he'd perched on the bedside table the night before, had fallen and hit the floor. Jonah picked it up, and looked over some of the things within it: his driver's license, his check card, a faded picture of his grandmother, and an as-yet-unused blank check. It was the blank check of all things that pulled on Jonah's attention. Not the possibilities that it provided him, but its source, Turk Landry. That man was an appallingly opportunistic Eleventh Percenter who used his ethereality to pose as a psychic medium and made himself obscenely rich in the process. But the guy had one good quality: a remarkably sharp spiritual attunement.

Jonah made a wry face. Spiritual attunement was something he wished he had at this particular moment. He'd been so sharp in that dream-vision; connections made sense, shifts and transitions were like unthinking reflexes, and he'd gleaned so much just from people's feelings. For God sakes, he'd witnessed a mental conversation, and got every word. But that was a dream form. A spiritual form.

That was all well and good, for as long as the ride lasted. But now he was back in physical form.

The Protector Guide warned Jonah that he wouldn't remember his name and many other things when he woke up. He recalled that part just fine. It was almost as if the Guide had thrown Jonah a bone with a…Spectral Event? Yeah, that's what he'd called it. Thrown him a bone from a spiritual standpoint while conceding that his wakeful, third-dimensional mind would maintain all that he'd seen.

“Thanks for that,” grumbled Jonah. “Whatever your name was.”

If only Jonah had a way to remember as much information as he could before it disappeared like snowflakes in hell…

Something registered in Jonah's mind, and he looked out of the bedroom window. Despite looking, he didn't really see anything, because he only registered one thing in his mind. His writing.

It was interesting how Jonah only had this realization now. He's always been a writer, but was plagued with a deep writer's block that was lenient enough for him to write editorials and school assignments, but not enough for him to write full-fledged novels.

He shook his head so as to detach the negative. Those were concerns for another day. It wasn't like he wanted to write a novel at the moment. He just wanted to maintain important data.

The thought, however annoying, gave Jonah an idea. He grabbed a pen from the bedside table, open his notepad that he used for his grocery lists, and began to pace, racking his brain.

“Approach it like a story,” he whispered to himself. “Like a story. Where does it start?”

He walked to the notepad, scribbled the words, “It Starts,” and resumed pacing.

It was indeed a challenge, because a great many of the memories had already slipped away.

“Come on, Jonah,” he prodded himself, “no need to focus on the negative. The story started—in a dream! A manufactured dream!”

He wrote that bit down on the notepad and left it again.

“Okay…the dream…which led to…led to…”

He shrugged and jotted down the words, “Led To.”

“The next part's easy,” he told himself. “The diner with the evil psycho.”

Jonah recorded that.

“That was pretty quick right there,” murmured Jonah. “The diner, which switched to the creepy room.”

He wrote some more.

“Blood and ashes—immaterial. But that cold fire…with that presence…”

Jonah attention sharpened. He knew that presence in the fire. There was no point deluding himself. It was Creyton's presence in that fire.

But how could that be? Creyton got destroyed—again—that night in S.T.R! He should be on the Other Side!

Jonah forced himself to focus. As jarring as that realization was, he had to focus on the Spectral Event. Had to write down details before they disappeared.

Painstakingly, he filed the questions about Creyton's presence away, and wrote down, “Cold fire with Creyton's presence.”

“Okay, okay,” he mused. “Creyton was—was pissed about the 49er trying to take his place. That also ticked off this Inimicus person, who is itching to kill me.”

Jonah scribbled down the final notes. He couldn't recall anything else. When he got the last note out, though, he noticed something that made his eyes widen even more than they did when he realized that it was Creyton's presence in that cold fire.

His random jotting of notes had actually created a haphazard message. He had been so deep in thought that he hadn't even realized what he had done. He'd just yanked fragments from his mind and put them down on paper. It seemed that throughout his yanking, he'd subconsciously attempted to make connections that his eyes hadn't seen.

He had to get his reading glasses to figure out all that he had written. The stilted, broken words seemed useless when he wrote them down, but when he read it as a whole, it took on a brand new meaning.

The broken notes translated to:

It Starts

With a manufactured dream

led to

the diner with the psycho

switched to

creepy room

cold fire with Creyton's presence

49er's screwup

led to Inimicus

who wants to kill me

Jonah stared at the message. His own writing told him that the man in the diner, who had to have been Inimicus, planned to rectify the 49er's failure and come after him. He wanted to succeed where the 49er had failed with his Haunts, mind games, and vampire army.

But now Jonah had to revisit the thoughts that he'd filed away. How could Creyton be in that fire? Jonah knew for a fact that Creyton's essence, or whatever it had been, got snuffed out that night in S.T.R. when Jonah rescued Vera and used the nurse's healing endowment to attack him. As Creyton's disguise had been artificial and impure, his form exploded the minute such pure essence hit him. So how did he get into that fire, and make it burn cold?

And where did Inimicus come into play? Was Jonah right about that guy in the diner? Was he the sheathed blade on the card, the embedded enemy that Jonah would never see coming?

But if that was the case, then the dude at the diner would be in for a rude awakening. According to Malcolm, Inimicus was supposed to be an enemy that you'd never expect in a million lifetimes. Thanks to Jonah's dream encounter with the Protector Guide, he'd already seen the guy's face.

He had to make doubly sure that the guy's image was another memory that didn't fade. He'd have to call Reena so she could do a sketch image STAT. If he could remember the guy's face, a name wouldn't be necessary. Jonathan could help him fill out all the blank places. If this guy was in league with Creyton, Jonathan probably knew everything about him.

Jonah just had to remember his face.

His thoughts moved back to Creyton's essence in that fire. What was his goal? To use his tool for vengeance? To live vicariously through his lackey?

Jonah looked over the words on the notepad and snorted. This wasn't the first time a strange message had been encoded in his own writing, and, though he went through some truly dangerous crap, all had ended in a Creyton's vanquishing. And now he was a damn fire who gave telepathic orders to a secret spy who wasn't so secret anymore. With Jonathan and his friends on his side, plus the fact that the secret guy wasn't so secret anymore, he liked his odds. He just had to call Reena to get the face sketched out.

He reached for his phone when movement from another room made him push the morning's thoughts away. It wasn't the time or place for them; he was a guest in someone's home. This would be a good day, and there was no room for fear or suspicion.

He returned his gaze to the window when the inevitable knock came.

“You up, Jonah?” said a voice that accompanied the knock.

“Yeah, Nelson,” replied Jonah.

“You decent?”

Jonah shook his head. “Dude, did you think I went to bed in a damn speedo, or something? Come on in!”

Nelson opened the door, laughing as he did so. “You can never be too careful, man! Have you been up long?”

“A little while.” Jonah filed the thoughts further away. “Had an odd dream, and needed to gather my thoughts and whatnot.” Hey, it was true enough.

Nelson shook his head. “You're friends with the Sybil from the TV show now. You think those weird dreams come from hanging with her?”

Jonah snorted. “I'm certain that's not it.”

“Well hey,” Nelson shrugged, “she is a pretty woman.”

Jonah raised an eyebrow. “You'd better not let Tamara hear you callin' some other woman hot.”

“She knows she's the only one for me,” said Nelson dismissively. “But come on, dude! She's got breakfast ready.”

Jonah nodded and followed his friend, not even bothering to register the fact that all remaining thoughts of the morning's dream slipped away from his head.