As the sun peered over the eastern horizon to announce the dawning of another day, Mordecai grimly pushed open the door to an all-night donut shop called Tim Horton's. He had noticed earlier that the city seemed to be festooned with them. After the battle at Curly's and launching the storm in the alleyway, his resources had been severely depleted. He needed to refuel.
The tired looked sales clerk behind the counter looked up as the man in black approached, his thin, sallow face worn. Having seen the worst Calgary's varied and colorful nightlife had to offer during his regular night shift, he didn't even bat an eyelid to see such a big and powerful man dressed entirely in heavy black leathers and clothing, wearing sunglasses at this time of the morning.
"What can I get you this morning, sir?" he asked softly, fighting the impulse to yawn as he dusted some powdered sugar off his stained uniform tunic, woven in hues of brown and cream.
"Two dozen of those," Mordecai immediately replied without removing his sunglasses, pointing to one of the many racks of freshly made donuts that were still steaming from their recent departure from the fryers. The man in black was lucky enough to get the morning's first batch.
"And an apple juice, all to go." The clerk nodded and, taking a cellophane sheet in his hand, he began to bundle the glazed donuts into a cardboard box. As he worked, he spoke over his shoulder, his voice a raspy baritone.
"Taking breakfast to the people in the office, hey? Your turn?"
"Something like that," Mordecai rasped in reply, struggling to hide his own exhaustion. He glanced out one of the many windows lining the shop's walls. He had felt the chill sweep through the air just before he stepped into the shop, a cold wind blowing out from the city's core. The psionics of the Brotherhood were working on something big.
There was no doubt in the big man's mind that it was in response to his running battle last night. The Brotherhood didn't really impress him as an organization that would sit still for that sort of thing. Combined with what he was fairly confident Braddox had passed back to the mysterious Preacher about his unwillingness to toe the Brotherhood's party line, and it was a sure bet that they were coming after him. There was no sense in being unprepared for it.
The clerk finished filling a second box with the remainder of the donuts and, closing it, he placed it beside the first box, already sitting on the counter beside the cash register. Tired fingers then rang in the sale.
"That'll be seven twenty five," he announced hoarsely after the numbers finished jumping around in their tiny windows and assumed their final amounts. Mordecai nodded and fished out a money clip from an inside pocket.
Removing the burnished steel clip from the thick wad of bills, the man in black peeled off a ten-dollar bill in Canadian currency as the clerk retrieved a bottle of cold apple juice from a cooler sitting at the counter's far end. He dropped it onto the counter top just as the bottle slid up against the boxes and returned the clip to an inside pocket, the massive wad catching several eyes inside the shop as the smattering of customers and the clerk alike blinked in astonishment at the size of it.
Shaking his head, the clerk scooped up the bill and quickly made change.
"Eight, nine, and ten," he counted back and, dropping it into his coat pocket, the man in black picked up his donuts and juice and quickly strode towards the door, ignoring the clerk's tired farewell.
The young man watched as the big man stuffed one donut, then another into his mouth before he had even reached the door, and shook his head.
"Man, that dude is going to have one helluva sugar rush after downing all those donuts!" he muttered, looking down to close the register's cash drawer. Looking up again, he found the doorway and the street beyond oddly empty. 'Eh? Where the hell did he go?'
A flicker of light announced the teleportal opening and, with a twisting of reality, Mordecai stepped into his room, a fourth donut already on its way into his mouth. Closing the portal behind him with a thought, he dropped into the small couch sitting in the far end of the room and grimly proceeded to finish off the rest of the donuts, washing down the crumbs with the juice.
That done and the empty boxes tossed into the garbage, Mordecai turned his attention to his probes, still scattered all over the city. It would be good to see what they had seen the Brotherhood doing overnight. Drinking the last of the apple juice, he placed the glass bottle on the floor as he reached out with his mind.
"Update all activity logs and download current mapping information," he said under his breath, tapping into each probe individually to prevent the Brotherhood from tracking Paladin's signal. And for a brief moment, as his mind downloaded the probes' information into his cortex, he was flying high above the city, a bird's eye view of the downtown core stretching out beneath him in the early morning light. Then, with a shifting of perception, he felt the download complete.
Immediately the man in black withdrew his consciousness from the far-flung probes, drawing his senses back into his body to resume full awareness of his immediate surroundings. Just in time to feel the bow wave of a telepathic scanning pulse sweep through the room beside his.
"Shit," he hissed tightly. "Paladin, deactivate all wards. Now!" To feel the bow wave of a scan meant the telepath was close by, maybe even in the hallway just outside. At that range it wouldn't be hard to trace the location of a warded room. If the teep managed to survive the headaches the wards would have given them, that is.
"Wards deactivated, Mordecai," Paladin's soft voice replied from inside Mordecai's coat. The man in black nodded in satisfaction. If a scan had caught the warded room, it would be like he had thrown up a giant billboard, with flashing neon lights, saying a powerful psionic could be found here! With this mystery just beginning to unravel in front of him, and the threat of the Brotherhood beginning to loom in earnest, he wasn't quite ready to be found yet.
Just as he felt the wards fall completely under Paladin's directive, the man in black sensed the scan wash over the room, the EM energy accompanying the sweep making his enhanced senses tingle. Knowing that even the slightest amount of unusual brain activity could trigger the teep's alarms, the big man slammed down tight locks on his neural output to remain undetected. Tight, very tight locks indeed, to avoid the power of this particular sweeps.
For a long moment Mordecai was virtually brain-dead, leaving only core processes functioning in an effort to remain out of sight of the scanning telepath. And then the scan was past, moving on to the next room, apparently without finding him. Breathing a sigh of relief, Mordecai slumped back into the couch's depths, perspiration beading his forehead.
"Burn me, but that was close!" he muttereed to himself.
And far from over: from experience he knew that any teep worth his or her salt made a backhand sweep to confirm their scanning path. Hunkering down in anticipation, he kept his neural activity to a minimum. No sense going out and looking for the teep pushing the scan, only to stumble into a wire fight when he was totally drained of energy. Tensed, he waited for it.
Sure enough, like clockwork, the backhand sweep suddenly was racing back through the room, forcing the big hardwire to drop back to brain-dead status. He peered out from behind tight mental shutters to watch as the sweep went through the room, poking into every nook and cranny in a somewhat more thorough second scan before it finally moved on, going back in the direction it had come from.
This time Mordecai could hear the footsteps of at least five men as they strode past the door to his room, walking heavily down the hallway before disappearing down a stairwell. 'The teep and his mover/burner escort. Shit, they were close! That little toss up at Curly's and the battle in the alleyway has got them big time spooked, if they're willing to take scan teams building to building looking for me,' he grimly thought, carefully watching with meta-senses as the team continued on their way, moving out of the Arms after completing their scan.
Finally satisfied that they were gone, he pulled off his jacket and began to peel off his shirt, revealing the black neuron armor beneath. It quickly joined the jacket and shirt on the bed in preparation to take a shower.
Time to lie low for a while and let the food put sugar and resources back into his body, maybe even catch up on some sleep. If the Brotherhood was so stirred by his activities that they would risk a citywide scan, he needed to be wary if he wanted to prevent another immediate confrontation. There were enough bodies already laying about to threaten the Shield. There was no need to add to the body count and further jeopardy.
And while he was confident that he could take them, putting innocents at risk was not part of the game plan! Mordecai had to wait until a time and place showed themselves, one that suited him more. 'Not to mention, I want some time to digest this information in my head, now that the algorithm has cracked the teep's encryption,' he silently mused, dropping his pants and underwear onto the bed before striding naked into the bathroom to turn on the shower. 'I'd much rather know what I'm facing than get caught with my pants down.' A grin touched his face as the water hissed into motion in the shower. 'No pun intended.'
The day flitted by quickly as Mordecai spent the time going over the decrypted files the teep had downloaded into his brain, eating and sleeping in between. Most of it left him feeling disturbed, frustrated and flat out angry. The Brotherhood's conceit at suggesting their obvious superiority over Normals as a reason to initiate wholesale genocide was chilling and infuriating. Especially if they were no more than just organized criminals that happen to be psionics.
But, for some reason Mordecai suspected the Brotherhood was more than just some psionic criminal syndicate, much more. It wasn't the data itself that pushed the big man towards that rather grim conclusion. That was merely a set of numbers, locations and a brief overview of something the Brotherhood called 'Project Armageddon'. No names of targets, any conversion tables; anything that would make sense of the jumbled information other than the text he had already uncovered.
That, of course, meant there was a key out there somewhere, something that could be used to translate the numbers and figures into something more coherent. And the presence of such a key suggested that this Brotherhood was much more organized, much more focused than a mere syndicate would be. Why would any crime body go to such lengths to insure that vital information remained safe, even with pieces of it falling into the hands of outsiders?
Not only that, but the shear scope of what the Armageddon Project entailed also suggested a global presence. No, the Brotherhood was much more than what he had found here. All he had to do was discover the true nature of the Brotherhood and how much territory exactly they covered. And that meant he would have to intensify his investigation, even in the face of heavy Brotherhood resistance.
It was on this thought that the big man finally flopped down, for a final time, onto his queen-sized bed to catch a bit of sleep before the evening hours fell once again, the time for renewed activity. But it wasn't his internal clock that jerked him abruptly awake as night descended once more onto the city. Blinking as he sat up in the dark, his mind churning as he attempted to determine what pulled him insistently from his slumber, Mordecai was fully aware of his surroundings when the tingle washed through him again.
Instead of throwing up his shields and preparing for battle, however, the man in black relaxed. Smiling, he threw back his covers and headed back to the bathroom for another shower. It was time to go out!
Like a beacon in the night, the tingling led the man in black deep into the city's heart. Instead of heading towards the giant skyscrapers of the core, however, this time he was led towards the glittering strip of dance clubs, country music bars and late night pubs that formed Calgary's other heart. The heart that pulsed frenetically in time to the heavy music that filled their rooms with dancers and other people of the night. Here the Normals of Calgary partied, trying to fill their lives with a sense of excitement beyond the drab existence of their everyday lives.
Like moths to a flame, they came, drawn to the energy of the place, seeking to renew the fires of their own souls by drinking from the virtual Fountain of Youth, its waters the scintillating, rhythmic music that throbbed insistently to bury itself in their very bones with its power. And not only did this flame call to the youth of Normality, but to the young of the Others, the night lovers and the people of the dark. They too came to renew themselves, if not in the music and nightlife, in the blood and life of the Normals they fed upon.
Mordecai frowned as he walked along the glittering avenue that was home to these places of resort and recreation, eyes ranging over the crowds that surged excitedly to one favorite haunt or another. The golden auras of psionics mixed liberally with the violet and scarlet of the vampires, the dark blue of the werewolves and the much more populous Normals with their pale auras of pink and orange. Indeed, the nightlife was rich tonight!
But the big man found himself being drawn to none of these places. Instead, it was to a nightclub by the name of 'The Black Cat', near the far end of the strip, that Mordecai felt himself being pulled towards. It seemed to be a wildly popular spot that had a long line stretching out in front of its doors. The man in black let his intense gaze sweep over the line, filled to overflowing with the beautiful people of the city, young and perfect. With bodies sculpted by personal trainers and/or surgery, they wore the latest fashions, which bared as much flesh as was decently possible. And then a little more.
The big man however, didn't find what he was looking for in the line up, though several hopeful gazes from both men and women were thrown in his direction. The powerful-looking hardwire was unconsciously handsome. If he wished, his bed would never lack for companionship. And it didn't matter to this lot that, despite the fact that, in stark contrast to the butterfly-brilliant costumes of the socially aware all around him, he was garbed head to toe in grim, forbidding black.
In fact, if Mordecai's gaze lingered too long on any one of the people in line, their features sloughed away to reveal the death's head. Even those of different sub-species, like werewolves and vampires, weren't exempt; they too wore the death mask. If anything, such fringe peoples would be wiped out even faster than the Normals, if the Brotherhood had its way.
Mordecai's jaw muscle rippled with irritation as he grimly pressed on along the line. The reappearance of the death mask meant his powers were completely restored. That included his ability to gaze along separate possibilities. It also meant that his two clashes with the Brotherhood hadn't significantly altered the future he had seen when he first stepped off the plane in the airport.
Worst of all was the fact that he now knew why that future was going to happen. 'Not if I can help it,' Mordecai thought darkly, stepping past the line to move towards its head, the colorful dragon's head that shifted uneasily at the mouth of the cave that marked the Black Cat's entrance, the double doors leading into the club itself. Several brawny bouncers who, like him, were sheathed head to toe in black, the gatekeepers to this den of perverse pleasures and diversions, currently warded them.
Their heads swiveled around to take him in as Mordecai drew closer, quickly evaluating his size and strength before he got too close. And several of their faces grew grim as they realized that he was equal, if not slightly larger than all of them. Grimly they waited on his advance.
"Hey, pal," one of them growled, a large African American with the soft slurring of Jamaica on his lips as he spoke. His cornrowed hair was pulled back into a stylish tail, a carefully trimmed goatee decorating his face. "To the back of the line, like everybody else!"
Mordecai glanced at the man, his face neutral as he noticed the bouncer's broad shoulders straining the black tee shirt he was wearing, a dancing black cat outlined in white on it's breast. The back of the tee was printed with the name of the club and a set of cat footprints angling upward from left to right.
Quickly calculating, he estimated what it would require to take the man out, his own face remaining carefully blank. At the same time he lightly swept all the bouncers with a telepathic scan. Might as well know exactly what he was up against.
And almost immediately he smiled as he identified one of them as a psionic, a softwire telepath. The man literally jerked as he felt the scan lightly brush over the shields protecting his mind's core. Then he was stepping forward, an almost genuine smile on his broad face to take Mordecai's hand in a firm grip.
"Hey, man!" he said, giving the hand a quick yet firm shake. At the same time he slapped the man in black on the shoulder. "Long time no see! Why didn't you give me a shout when you came into town?" And, at the same time, a soft mental voice spoke into Mordecai's mind.
- Welcome. Here's entry to the club, courtesy of the Tyrell Nation. - And then it was gone, leaving the man's out loud voice as he turned to address the other bouncers.
"Hey, no worries about this guy, fellas. He's with me." He then turned back to Mordecai as the other bouncers, including the big Jamaican, returned to their monitoring of the slowly moving line, apparently satisfied. And, by some of their expressions, relieved.
"Got anybody else with you, buddy?" An open invitation to show largess to the Normals. This guy was no member of the Brotherhood, Mordecai swiftly concluded. Instantly understanding, he nodded.
"Yup, sure do, Alec." Using the man's name which he easily plucked from the teep's mind to perpetuate the facade, he turned to point to a knot of young women, about college age, that were clustered about near the end of the line, talking excitedly amongst themselves as they stared in his direction. Considering the club's capacity and how slowly the line was moving, the young women had no real chance of entry on this night.
Upon seeing the big man point towards them, several jaws dropped in astonishment as eyes flew wide in surprise at his pointing them out and subsequent wave when they realized it was them that he was gesturing at.
"C'mon, you guys!" he called out with a smile. "I found Alec, just like I told you I would." Then, not waiting for the young women to join him as they rushed forward with excited giggles, he nodded in thanks to the Tyrell nation member before stepping past the bouncers and in through the doors.
Where he was immediately assaulted by the lights and sounds of a nightclub, the music filled with bass and pulsing through the soles of his boots as he stood for a moment in the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Here was the virtual Fountain of Youth, the wellspring of modern energy from which the assembled masses would drink, in the hopes of revitalization.
However, as far as the big hardwire was concerned, it was filled with death, each happy face that floated past him in the dimness melting away to reveal a death's head. And so, as soon as he could discern shapes, he was grimly pushing into the crowd, using his powerful body to make a path through the thickly packed bodies. They almost sensuously writhed against him as he moved past, unaware of their impending doom, instead drinking as deeply as they could from the wellspring of energy surging around them. For his part, Mordecai was pulled forward by the tingle towards the back of the room where several booths were set up. To him, the wellspring was dust.
As he stepped free of the dance floor, Mordecai slid on his sunglasses, shielding against the dancing lights and flaring strobes that spasmodically filled the darkened room with artificial flashes of multicolored lightning, arcing down from the black painted roof. His heightened senses were more than capable in dealing with the additionally reduced light now reaching his eyes.
And for a brief moment he was tempted to shield his nostrils with a flow of psyken as well, a barrier against the wild and spicy scents that the dancers wore to enhance their sexuality. A miasma of lust and desire that did nothing to keep Mordecai's senses sharp.
An eyeblink later he was stepping forward once again, intent on the booths, ignoring both the looks being thrown in his direction by those who wished his company and the dancing lights and smells. Eyes narrowed, he scanned over the bank of booths, searching.
And almost he immediately spotted the telltale aura of a vampire. By the brightness of the violets and purples, she was a powerful one too. She was surrounded by Normals: one male and three young females. As if sensing his presence, she looked up, a fresh-faced creature that looked as innocent as the three Normal women she sat with.
Upon recognizing what he was, her eyes narrowed dangerously. Only to widen in surprise as he put his finger to his lips. There was a moment of silent communication between them and then he was stepping on, intent on finding what he had coming looking for. That left the puzzled but relieved vampire to return to her conversation, a discussion on how the recreation drug Ecstasy was best used.
It would benefit neither if they had followed their natural inclinations. Even though one or more of the Normals accompanying the vampire would surely become prey at the end of the night. With the Brotherhood breathing down his neck, Mordecai didn't need the extra attention and the vampire certainly didn't want to be revealed. So, silently, they had agreed to maintain the status quo, knowing full well that next time it would be different.
The man in black then spotted the bright aura he was looking for.
"Took you long enough to get here," a woman's voice, colored by the accents of Scandinavia, spoke softly as he dropped into the booth directly in his path.
"I was ... delayed," he smoothly replied to the woman that he found sitting across from him with a slight smile.