“Let me guess,” I said. “Yours?”
“That’s what we thought,” she said, “but no. He said I was his favorite. He said he’d spare me.”
“Us,” Darryl amended. “He said he’d spare us.”
“So you offered him someone,” I said. “Someone expendable. A freshman.”
“George,” Trent said, his face turning horrified as he spoke his dead friend’s name. “You gave him George.”
“I know underclassmen barely earn a blip on your radar,” I said, “but this is beyond the beyond.”
The shame on Elyse’s face was evident. Her brow grew thick with wrinkles as she broke into hysterical sobs. “I’m sorry,” she said between gasps of breath. “What do you want from me? He would have killed us instead!”
“I thought you said you were his favorite,” Jane reminded her.
“It wouldn’t matter,” she said. “He was out for blood and if I didn’t send unsuspecting George off to him, the professor would have killed us.”
I stood there, shaking my head at her. “Don’t schools these days offer at least one course on ethics?” I asked.
“I’m afraid an ethical debate would be wasted on this young lady,” the Inspectre said, stepping over to the table. Elyse looked up at him. “Why? Why would you do this?”
None of us understood it, but I think it perplexed the Inspectre even more. He sounded as angry as he was confused.
“Have you seen how many of me there are at New York University?” she shouted. “Never mind the cost. All my little Stepford sister actresses are graduated and up to their implants in debt, and the best that any one of them could land was a tampon commercial!”
“So that’s how you justify all this?” I asked. “So you could do more than commercial work?”
“Think about what we’re talking about here,” she said. “Professor Redfield’s initial vision was revolutionary! Sure, he was using magic to try and bring it about, but it was only over time that he even hinted that there might be some darker purpose at work. And as far as my career, well. . . to be the first actress ever to appear in this type of film? We were taking reality to a whole new level.”
“Congratulations,” Connor said. “You’ve landed yourself on a hit TV show: America’s Most Wanted.”
“Quiet,” the Inspectre said. He leaned over the table. “I couldn’t care less for your vanity, young lady. I want to know why Mason Redfield—a man I considered my brother in arms at one time—why would he do all this?”
Elyse fell silent, letting her head drop. After a while, she looked up. “That, I don’t know,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
“Me, either,” the Inspectre said. He stepped away from the table, disgusted.
Elyse looked up at me. “Sorry we tried to kill you,” she said, “with. . . well, you.”
“I bet,” I said. “I was the last me standing, but don’t worry—I’ll still have the nightmares for years to come to remember it by.”
Darryl had his arm around her. His toughness had left him and he looked to the Inspectre. “So, what happens now?” Darryl asked.
The Inspectre walked over to the couple, staring down at them. “Well, that depends on how cooperative you choose to be.”
Elyse started nodding, eagerness in her eyes. “We can be cooperative,” she said. “Like I mentioned, there are notes and film footage, computer files. . . You’ve seen what we can accomplish without a blood sacrifice . . .”
“And with a blood sacrifice, too,” Trent spat out at them, pointing to the spot on his side where Elyse had cut him and released Professor Redfield’s army of tiny office monsters.
“First things first,” the Inspectre said, stopping Trent with a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder. “This process that Mason put himself through. . . can it be reversed?”
Elyse’s face sank. “I don’t think so,” she said. She turned to her partner in crime. “Darryl?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We hadn’t even got the process working in the first place. There wasn’t even a chance to figure out how to, umm, verse it let alone reverse it.”
“I’m confused,” Connor said.
“You’re not the only one,” I added.
Connor shot me a look that shut me up. “We’ve seen the professor in his current state. Young, agile, in shape. . . Why would he need you to kill anyone for him? Why not just do it himself? Why kill one of you, his loyal students?”
“I don’t know,” Elyse said, falling silent as she sat there, dejected.
“I think I do,” Trent said. “When you found me tied up on the floor, well. . . it wasn’t the first time we had tried to use blood that day.”
“Oh, really?” I asked.
“Ask Elyse,” Trent said.
I turned back to the young actress. The girl looked guilty. “After we were visited by the professor and. . . sent George off to him, I thought maybe we might be able to use blood for our own gain, too. I thought if we could harness the power of a blood sacrifice somehow, maybe we could use it to our advantage. So I told Trent we wanted a little. He even agreed to it.”
I looked over at Trent and he looked down at the floor. “What do I know?” he said with defense in his words. “I’m a freshman. I thought it was a hazing ritual!”
“Problem was, the ritual worked, but just barely,” she said. “We could animate certain objects or pieces from tiny bits of film, but they didn’t last very long before they quickly ran out of juice.”
“So you decided you needed more juice,” Jane said. “More blood.”
“That still doesn’t answer my original question, though,” Connor said. “Why use his own people? Why did he use George like that?”
“The professor always talked about the power of betrayal in film class,” Elyse said. “To him, it was such a classical theme—betrayal, revenge. I think he saw a real and twisted power in it.”
“Betraying his own followers would give their blood more power,” the Inspectre said. “Enough, perhaps, to complete his transformation for good.”
“Growing his strength, prolonging his stolen life with it,” I added. “One of you better be prepared to help us figure this out. It’s not just Professor Redfield I want to take down. For instance: you acted like you didn’t know about the water woman earlier, the same way you acted like you didn’t know the professor was alive. That’s my girlfriend who’s suffering from that woman’s mark. Now, give up some details on her.”
“Tell us what you know about that woman,” Jane said, her eyes showing her desperation for answers. “Please.”
“Like I said before, what woman?” Elyse repeated. “What mark?”
“The green woman,” I said. “Stop acting like you don’t know.”
“I don’t,” she said, panic on her face.
“Neither of us knows about her,” Darryl said.
“Bull,” Connor said.
Elyse looked defeated and shrugged. “Fine. Don’t believe me.”
The thing was, I did believe her. I mean, if you were going to cop to almost murdering one friend and handing the other to a recently rejuvenated madman, why lie about not knowing the watery she-bitch?
I stormed away in frustration, heading for the door.
“I think Mason Redfield may have found allies to help him in his rebirth, doing what he and his students couldn’t,” I said. “We don’t know what kind of dark bargain the professor made with that water woman, but I aim to find out.”
“Where are you going?” Jane asked.
“To find someone who might actually have some answers for me.”
28
I left the rest of the group to deal with locking up the students. I needed a break from the interrogation and I had a few things that still needed checking out with Godfrey Candella, and just as I put my handle on the door leading down to the archives, the man himself sent me a text saying he had some information to share.
Every visit down to the Gauntlet was a new adventure in creepiness, especially when it was dead silent and I found an exhausted Godfrey asleep with his eyes open at his desk, his head propped up on a now-drool-covered stack of books and his cell phone flipped open on the desk. I shook him awake and he sat bolt upright in his chair, startled. When he noticed it was only me, however, he relaxed.