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  INQUISITOR

  John & Carole E. Barrowman

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Inquisitor

  Rémy Dupree Rush and his friends Matt and Em Calder are battling to save the world as we know it. All have superpowers – Rémy can alter reality with music and Matt and Em can bring art to life – but will their powers be enough?

  With the world loosening at the seams, Rémy discovers that only he can halt the rise of the darkness and save humanity. But is Rémy up to the challenge?

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Inquisitor

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Black Orpheus invite

  Chapter 1. In the Beginning

  Rome: 623 BC

  Chapter 2. Family Ties

  Friday: Rome, Present Day

  Chapter 3. Sympathy for the Devil

  Chapter 4. Roman Fever

  Glasgow

  Chapter 5. Pick Up the Pieces

  Chapter 6. Frieze Frame

  Rome

  Chapter 7. Memento Mori

  Chapter 8. Raise a Glass

  Glasgow

  Chapter 9. American Pie

  Rome

  Chapter 10. Weep Not

  Chapter 11. Touch has a Memory

  Chapter 12. Summer Daze

  Rome: 1610

  Chapter 13. Metamorphosis

  Chapter 14. Burning Gold

  Rome: Present Day

  Chapter 15. A Pocket Full of Pebbles

  Chapter 16. Desperado

  Chapter 17. Let’s Make a Deal

  Chapter 18. A Friend of the Devil

  Chapter 19. Something to Believe In

  Chapter 20. The Real Deal

  Chapter 21. Somebody to Love

  Chapter 22. Possession

  Chapter 23. Out of Time

  Chapter 24. Everything’s True but Everything Lies

  Chapter 25. What’s Your Name?

  Chapter 26. Closed for Repair

  Chapter 27. Wanted for Questioning

  Chapter 28. Still Life with Banker

  Chapter 29. Take the Cannoli

  Chapter 30. Stealth Mode

  Chapter 31. A Long Day’s Journey Into Night

  Chapter 32. Heaven is a Place on Earth

  Chapter 33. Revelations

  Chapter 34. Naked and Numb

  Chapter 35. Bad Moon Rising

  London Saturday

  Chapter 36. Flower of Scotland

  Chapter 37. Time’s Not on Our Side

  Chapter 38. Blow Out

  Scotland

  Chapter 39. Life’s Pleasures

  Chapter 40. Out Cold

  Chapter 41. Sync and Swim

  Chapter 42. The Dock of the Bay

  Chapter 43. Wonderwall

  Chapter 44. Smoke on the Water

  Chapter 45. Hungry Like the Wolf

  Chapter 46. Fire and Brimstone

  London

  Chapter 47. Tea for Three

  Chapter 48. Mind your Manets

  Scotland

  Chapter 49. Taking the High Road

  Chapter 50. Taking the Low Road

  Chapter 51. Protect and Serve

  Chapter 52. Eyes on the Past

  Glasgow

  Chapter 53. White Wedding

  Chapter 54. Trouble from Your Kind

  Chapter 55. Under Construction

  Chapter 56. Picasso Baby

  London

  Chapter 57. Downtown Train

  Chapter 58. Sound and Vision

  Sunday: America

  Chapter 59. The Mother We Share

  Chapter 60. Nuru’s Story

  Chapter 61. Annie’s Lament

  Louisiana

  Chapter 62. Wade in the Water

  Chapter 63. Sorrow Songs

  Chapter 64. Mississippi River Blues

  Chapter 65. Lavender and Grass

  Louisiana

  Chapter 66. Gator Aid

  Chapter 67. A Song in the Night

  London

  Chapter 68. Watching Airplanes

  Chapter 69. From a Window

  Chapter 70. Freebird

  Chapter 71. Leaving on a Jet Plane

  Chapter 72. Wind Beneath My Wings

  Rome

  Chapter 73. Little Red Corvette

  Chapter 74. Body Language

  Chapter 75. Under Pressure

  Chapter 76. Cheap Trick

  Chapter 77. Puppet Show

  Chapter 78. The Main Attraction

  Chapter 79. Howl

  Chapter 80. Ride Like the Wind

  Chapter 81. One Note Song

  Chapter 82. Eidetic

  Chapter 83. Rewind

  Chapter 84. The Tree of Life

  Chapter 85. Waiting

  Chapter 86. Behold, They Rise

  Chapter 87. Down in Flames

  Chapter 88. We Three

  Chapter 89. Art and Life

  Chapter 90. Altered States

  Chapter 91. Soul Deep

  Chapter 92. A Song for the Dead

  Chapter 93. Family Affair

  Chapter 94. In My Time of Dying

  Chapter 95. Midnight Confessions

  London

  Chapter 96. To the Missing

  Chapter 97. Clootie Dumpling

  America Two Months Later

  Chapter 98. Ten Mississippi

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  About John & Carole E. Barrowman

  The Orion Chronicles

  The Hollow Earth Trilogy

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  To our readers,

  imagine big things.

  ‘The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.’

  Lord Byron

  ‘Sing, Heavenly Muse…’

  John Milton

  You are invited

  to a

  gala concert performance of

  ‘Black Orpheus’

  St Peter’s Square, Rome

  Sunday

  Invitation Only

  1.

  In the Beginning

  When humans were divine and gods adored them, when time was not measured in hours, days, months or years, an angel fell from favour and was banished to Chaos. This fallen creature wandered in exile, watching the world through crevices in the darkness.

  Soon the First Watcher was not alone. Others fell. They too were destined to watch the world in fleeting moments from their banishment.

  Then the First Watcher discovered a rift that took him from darkness back to the light. Taking human form, he rose to power, seeking out three elements necessary to bring other Watchers into the light, to rule with him in a glorious Second Kingdom.

  A golden lyre.

  A sacred chord.

  And a powerful Conjuror, whose magic would bring these elements together.

  His enemies were prepared for him and his human legions, the Camarilla, and cast the First Watcher from his place of power. But they were unaware that he had left a seductive mark on the world, ready for the time when he might rise again.

  That time had come.

  Rome

  623 BC

  2.

  Family Ties

  ‘Luca, it’s time,’ his mother said, waking him from sleep as the summer-solstice sky showered stars on the marshland outside the Servian Wall.

  Dressed in unfamiliar robes, Luca found himself in a chariot, driving towards a moat of flames that circled the centre of the marsh. Another chariot raced beside him, its wheels a blur. He caught a glimpse of a girl, her wide e
yes catching the firelight and her cloak spreading behind her like golden wings.

  The chariots stopped together. Luca’s mother lifted him down and set him on the marshy ground.

  ‘Walk from here,’ she instructed, on her knees next to him. ‘Go to your father.’

  She anointed Luca’s forehead with oil, then nudged him towards the flames. He moved uncertainly, the smells of charred myrtle and ripe citrus making him lightheaded. He could hear the whole city’s prayers echoing behind him like the weeping of a thousand crows. The girl in the golden cloak stood beside her own chariot, skin like copper and eyes fierce as a hawk.

  ‘Come,’ Sebina said.

  Luca knew then that he would follow her anywhere. He took her outstretched hand and walked with her into the furnace. He felt nothing but a brush of warm air.

  In the heart of the fire, a great silver tree stretched out of the marshy soil, its limbs like arms and its trunk pocked with hundreds of piercing yellow eyes. The eyes closed one by one, until only one pair remained. Unblinking. Focused on him and Sebina.

  The eyes became part of a creature with wings of fire, its body covered in scales and swollen in the middle like the throat of a toad. Its head was human, mostly. The part that wasn’t looked unfinished, like unformed clay. It spoke.

  ‘Come to me, children. I will sanctify your powers. You will make me great again.’

  Wordlessly Luca and Sebina walked into its embrace.

  Friday

  Rome, Present Day

  3.

  Sympathy for the Devil

  The First Watcher had endured an eternity bound in a painting like a specimen in an apothecary jar. He stretched his gnarled fingers out of the canvas into the conditioned air of the sacred chamber. As each crooked finger broke through, his flesh snapped and sizzled like electricity before a wire burns out. He knew nothing about electricity, but he understood a great deal about burning: the reek of flesh when it seared to bone, the stench of everlasting terror.

  The First Watcher had answered to a host of ancient sacred names: Afriti, Moloch, Scaramallion, Lucifer – and Inquisitor. His current favourite. It was a name that suggested sovereignty, arrogance, malevolence: all qualities the First Watcher admired and had rewarded in humans. He liked that the name suggested his dark personal relationship with the divine.

  An alarm clanged double time.

  The Inquisitor’s fingers retracted in a whiff of foul air.

  *

  An acolyte of the Order of the Camarilla, dressed in a white hooded cassock with long bell sleeves, rushed into the secure vault, breathless and sweating. She stopped to let the heavy steel doors seal shut with a whoosh of air. A computer monitored the vault’s humidity, temperature, and the painting’s pulse. It was this third line of vitals, like sharp mountain peaks on the screen, which had caught the acolyte’s attention. With a shaky swipe, she stopped the deafening alarm.

  The First Watcher was awake.

  The vault was a rectangular space the size of a shipping container. Surgically clean, it was dimly lit with only a ribbon of emergency lights on the floor. On the smaller southern wall, an arched grotto had been moulded into the steel walls, holding the painting in an ornate gold frame. The painting, a double portrait, showed a roll-top desk strewn with artefacts: a compass, a violin, a metronome and a stack of scrolls. The desk stood between the Inquisitor, cloaked in velvet and ermine and seated on a throne-like chair, and his disciple, Don Grigori. The surface where Don Grigori had once stood was flat and dull, the paint flaking away.

  The edge of the canvas was glowing as if it had been outlined in neon yellow paint. With head bowed, voice trembling, the acolyte stepped close to the painting.

  ‘Your Eminence?’ she whispered. ‘Your Eminence, can you hear me?’

  The figure of the Cardinal was fluttering on the canvas.

  ‘Your Eminence?’

  A cloud of bluebottle flies coughed from the Inquisitor’s painted smile. The question was faint, but distinct.

  ‘Are you a believer?’

  ‘I am,’ replied the acolyte, kneeling before the painting.

  The painting was pulsing now as if a human heart beat beneath the canvas. The Inquisitor’s head stretched out into the vault, flesh dripping from his skull. His eyes dangled like onyx pendants from their sockets and loose skin hung from his thick jowls like lumps of suet. Thin strands of light kept his entirety harnessed to the canvas like a thousand fiery reins holding back a chariot. The grotesque face twitched.

  ‘Are we ready?’ his voice boomed, shedding flakes of thick paint on to the white concrete floor.

  ‘We are close,’ said the acolyte, ‘but…’

  ‘But what?’ A second wave of fat flies spewed from the canvas.

  ‘It is Luca. His commitment to our cause is weakening.’ The acolyte paused and swallowed. ‘His loyalty is unpredictable.’

  The flies swarmed in spirals like a hundred tornadoes rising to the ceiling, choking the air vents.

  ‘I will handle my son.’ The Inquisitor’s face swelled before settling again, his tongue bleeding ochre onto the floor. ‘What of the Conjuror? Is he finally ours?’

  ‘Soon. The Conjuror and the lyre will be in our possession soon.’

  The Inquisitor’s gnarled hand shot out from the canvas, dragging the acolyte up to meet his slack, doughy face. ‘No more failures. It is time to bring me back.’

  She squirmed, panting, from the terrible grip. From inside one of her bell sleeves, she pulled out a sketch pad and began to draw, sketching and shading, her fingers a blur of light scoring across the page. She felt euphoric, like she was floating outside of herself, her cheeks flushed pink and her heart fluttering in her chest. She had been prepared for this moment since childhood. Like her father and grandfather before her, she was a blessed child of the Camarilla, her future inescapably linked to the Inquisitor’s wellbeing, to his eventual metamorphosis. He was the source of her family’s vast wealth and entrenched power. He was everything.

  At first it looked as if the Inquisitor was being tugged unwillingly into reality, his wraith-like body still attached to the canvas. But suddenly the vault seemed to inhale, the walls sucking in on themselves; then exhaled again, its walls regaining their original shape, leaving the acolyte on the ground gasping for air. High on the ceiling, one by one, the fat flies ruptured, covering the chamber in foul buttery bile.

  *

  The Inquisitor had been bound for centuries. His flesh was weak, his muscles trembling. His time away had not strengthened his body the way he had hoped. He studied his hand with displeasure, its tissue-paper skin mottled with brown age spots, its veins like thin yarn running up his arm, its bones visible. His legs, too, were snaked with thin black veins that popped and bled through his skin when he tried to straighten his body and stand. His legs could not support his weight, feeble though he was, and he crumpled to the ground.

  ‘Come, Eminence,’ the acolyte whispered, lifting him. ‘Let me help you.’

  Swinging his arm over her shoulders for support, the Inquisitor shuffled towards the door of the vault. He tightened his grip, soaking up the acolyte’s bewitching brew of terror and anticipation. She choked, turning as white as her robe.

  ‘There now,’ the Inquisitor murmured, absorbing all that she was and all she would become. ‘Better. Much, much better.’

  4.

  Roman Fever

  On the other side of Rome, head down and a leather messenger bag bouncing against his hip, Callum Muir dodged clusters of tourists swarming the Piazza di Spagna. He couldn’t risk his face being caught in the frame of one of the hundreds of photos being taken in front of the white steps Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck had made famous decades ago. He needed to stay off the radar for a few more hours.

  Callum Archibald Mathieson Muir didn’t want to be the thirty-fifth Earl of Dundonal. He wanted to challenge the destiny his birth dictated, to piss off his dad and the old-school expectations of what a Dundonal heir could be
and should do. And so, a week before sitting his final exams at Edinburgh University, he had fled to Rome. In a city where – according to a Muriel Spark story he’d once read – artists were treated like gods, at last he could be the creative he’d always wanted to be. He didn’t regret the decision, but survival without his substantial trust fund had required him to revive certain special… talents he’d developed during his years of classical education at posh Scottish boarding schools.

  He’d also fallen in love.

  In front of the crowded Barcaccia fountain, a young couple taking a selfie backed into Callum. He quickly ducked from their apologies, and cut to their left before bounding up the front steps of the three-storey town house next to the Spanish Steps that along with the Trinità dei Monti church anchored the historic neighbourhood.

  He stood in front of the Keats-Shelley Museum’s security pad, wiping his clammy hands on his trousers before punching the buttons. The panel pulsed yellow then flashed red.

  Wrong code. Shit. The light flickered. Yellow. Wait. Wait. Thirty seconds before he could try again. He exhaled, calming his wired nerves. The meeting to seal the deal was only an hour away. He needed to get in and out of the museum fast.

  He scanned the square. Expensive boutiques, designer shops, pricey flats and luxury hotels shared the public space with travellers living from their backpacks, musicians and artists busking their talents for a meal, budget newlyweds snogging on the steps, and crowds of tourists on discount tours, their colourful flags waving in the late afternoon breeze. A mobile phone store and a Starbucks nestled near the massive church that loomed over the square. Rome: rich and poor hand in hand, the ancient seducing the modern.

  He noticed a busker bent over a guitar in the shade of a gelato cart on the far side of the fountain. She wasn’t very good, picking Lou Monte’s ‘Roman Guitar’ on her sticker-covered instrument, but she knew how to entertain, and a small crowd was gathering appreciatively, dropping coins inside the open case at her feet. The busker looked up, caught Callum’s gaze, and smiled, sending a chill up his spine.