The precog Guy Teale stood to the left of Trask. Like Ian Goodly, he was 'gifted' in reading the future, a suspect talent at best. The future didn't like being read and had kicked back more than once. Teale was small, thin, jumpy. Easily startled, he lived on his nerves. His sometime partner Frank Robinson, a spotter who infallibly recognized other espers, stood next to him. Robinson was as blond as Teale was dark; boyish and freckled, he looked only nineteen or thereabouts, which was seven years short of the mark. The pair had worked with Trask on the Keogh job some six or seven months ago; they'd helped him corner the Necroscope in his house near Edinburgh, and burn the place to the ground. That had caused Harry to escape right out of this world to a place on the other side of the Perchorsk Gate. Since then, everyone who knew the score had prayed that he wouldn't be back. And he hadn't been ...
... Until now? Trask wondered. Is this - image - is it Harry? And he suspected that they were all wondering the same thing. And just like him, they'd all be glad that it was only an image.
Paul Garvey, a full-blown telepath, stood directly opposite Trask on the other side of the circle. He caught Trask's eye through the rotation of the projection and nodded almost imperceptibly. It was his acknowledgement of Trask's thought, which Garvey had 'heard'. Yes, they were all thinking pretty much the same thing.
Garvey was tall, well-built, and had been a good-looking thirty-five year old. But then, that time six months ago, he'd tackled a murderous swine called Johnny Found and lost most of the left side of his face. Since then some of the best plastic surgeons in England had worked on Garvey till he looked pretty good, but a real face is made of more than flesh. Garvey's was mostly tissue now, and the nerves didn't connect up too well. He could smile with the right side but not the left, and so avoided the travesty by not smiling at all.
It had happened when they were tracking Harry Keogh, who in turn had been tracking Found, a necromancer whose speciality was to molest women before and after they were dead. Garvey had made the mistake of finding Harry's quarry first, that was all. But the Necroscope had squared it; later, in a graveyard, the police had discovered Pound's body so badly chewed up that he was barely recognizable. And despite everything else that was happening at the time - the fact that Harry had been a prime target - Garvey still reckoned he owed him for that.
As for Ben Trask, he reckoned they all owed HarryKeogh something, the whole world. It would have been so easy for the Necroscope to release the plague of vampirism which he carried within himself upon all humanity and be emperor here, with an entire planet for his empire. But instead he'd let them hound him into exile in an alien world of vampires, where he would be just one more monster. Harry had let it happen, yes, before the Thing inside him could take full control.
But whenever Trask thought back on that, on the alien passions which had governed Harry - how he'd looked the last time Trask saw him, in the garden of his burning house not far from Edinburgh - then his own mixed emotions would sort themselves out in short order, and he would know it was for the best:
The lower half of Harry's figure had been mist-shrowded, visible only as a vague outline in the opaque, milky swirl of his vampire mist ... but the rest of him had been all too visible. He'd worn an entirely ordinary suit of dark, ill-fitting clothes which seemed two sizes too small for him, so that his upper torso sprouted from the trousers to form a blunt wedge. Framed by a jacket held together by one straining button, the bulk of Harry's rib-cage had been massively muscular.
His white, open-necked shirt had burst open down the front, revealing the ripple of his muscle-sheathed ribs and the deep, powerful throb of his chest; the shirt's collar had looked like a crumpled frill, insubstantial around the corded bulk of his leaden neck. His flesh was a sullen grey, dappled lurid orange and sick yellow by leaping fire and gleaming moonlight. And he towered all of a foot taller than Trask, quite literally dwarfing him. But his face -
- That had been the absolute embodiment of a waking nightmare.' His halogen Hallowe'en eyes which had seemed to drip sulphur. And his ... grin? A grin, was that what it had been? Maybe, in an alien vampire world called Starside on the other side of the Mobius Continuum. But here on Earth it had been the rabid slavering grimace of a great wolf; here it was teeth visibly elongating, curving up and out of gleaming gristle jaw-ridges to shear through gums which spurted splashes of hot ruby blood; here it was a writhing of scarlet lips, a flattening of convoluted snout, a yawning of mantrap jaws.
That face ... that mouth ... that crimson cavern of stalactite, stalagmite teeth, as jagged as shards of white, broken glass. What? Like the gates of hell? That and worse, for Harry had been Wamphyri!
Trask started massively as Anna Marie English, standing on his right, grasped his elbow and needlessly, breathlessly stated, 'Sir, he's moving away from us.'
She was right, as everyone there could see. The hologram of the corpse was getting smaller, falling or receding faster and faster towards a multi-hued, nebulous origin or destiny out of which the blue, green, and red ribbons of neon light reached like writhing tentacle arms to welcome it. The smoking, rotating figure dwindled; it became a mote, a speck; it disappeared!
And where it had been -
- An explosion! A sunburst of golden light, expanding silently, hugely, awesomely! So that the thirteen observers gasped and ducked down; and despite that it was in their group mind, they turned away from the blinding intensity of the glare and what flew out of it. All except Ben Trask, who shielded his eyes and shrank down a little but continued to watch - because he must know the truth. Trask, and also David Chung, who cried his astonishment, staggered and almost fell. But they had seen, both of them: