Chapter twenty three

         "I ain't telling you nothing bitch and when the boss gets his hands on you , you are dead you hear me , dead! Do you know who I am? Do you know who I work for? We own this city and there is nowhere you can hide that we can't find you."

          I was currently watching the blustering idiot through a hole in the wall. He was tied up to a chair in the middle of a warehouse that was only two warehouses over from the one where I tortured Grekov. Four days have passed since I healed everyone at that children's hospital. Nothing important happened except for a few exams. Now that the semester was over I have a few weeks of vacation until school reconvenes and I decided to use my first day of freedom to follow dear old mom who was looking very stressed these days. 

          My little hunch paid off and instead of her usual work place she led me to this warehouse where they were holding one of Mikailov's goons and by them I meant a small man with bald head and big round glasses that magnified his eyes many fold making him look like an insect and a very tall very thin man whose appearance could be summed up by the phrase beanpole. It must have been confusing for the muscular goon to be kidnapped by two people who looked like nerds he probably picked on back when he was in school. But that was only because he couldn't see what they really were or instead of blustering he would have been crapping in his pants.

         Beneath the image of the short man with glasses was a thing which was nothing but a mass of shifting smoke, once in a while a face that had absolute horror etched in its face and its mouth open in a wordless scream would be visible in the smoke. After a while I noticed something disturbing, the faces that would appear wasn't a single one repeated again and again as I had assumed but many different ones. Thinking about what that might mean made chills go up and down my spine.

        The beanpole on the other hand was a walking skeleton with no flesh. All the bones were twice as thick as a normal man's should be and were made of see through material that I had a suspicion was extremely hard even though it looked like glass. Its eye sockets were just hollow emptiness and even though his skull was made out of see through material and had plenty of light passing through it, his eye sockets still managed to be dark pits.

        I knew for a fact that these two were powerful Atelli because of their powerful forms but when my mother entered both of them treated her with respect given to a superior. I had always assumed that my mother was at the bottom rungs of the Atelli hierarchy because of her human like appearance but from what I was observing I might have jumped to a wrong conclusion. She walked over to the goon who had now started to blabber at her. She ignored his ranting and grabbed his head between her hands,

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        "Congratulations Mr Babichev , you have been chosen to serve the glorious purpose of the shining ones. Unfortunately we do not have the time to take you to our headquarters to be awakened so you shall serve our purpose in a different way. "

        The crown of thorns on her head started to grow thin tendrils with the same black thorns on them, they slithered down her arms like tiny snakes until they reached the goon. She forced the man's mouth open with her fingers and the thorny vines entered through it. For a few moments the tendrils kept entering through his mouth until several meters of the things had entered him. They kept stuffing themselves until he stopped moving and even breathing, they finally stopped when two small tears of blood rolled down his pale cheeks.

         Beanpole and glasses cut off the ropes holding the goon to the chair and he slowly got up. He stumbled and was very jerky when he was taking his first steps but after a little practice it started to look more and more natural. He suddenly started breathing again and his pale face became flushed as circulation was restored to his body.

         He finally started to speak, again at first it wasn't very good. His voice was uneven and his words were slurred but slowly he started to sound like he did before. It looked like the man had been brought back to life, but I knew better because I could see what was going on beneath the surface.

         My mother had inserted enough of her tiny vines inside of him to literally control him like a puppet. They forced his heart to beat, his lungs to inflate and deflate, his muscles to move , and they even controlled his tongue. On the bright side at least he was dead and his soul was gone so he didn't feel any of it, but my mother continued to speak to him as if he was alive.

         "You shall now be my eyes and ears and play an important part in bringing the dawn to the people of this world. Your sacrifice will not be in vain, your legacy will be the Utopian future we build when every man woman and child has been awakened. Albert , how long will he last?"

           The short man in glasses stepped forward and injected the dead puppet goon with a syringe," This formula should keep decomposition from being noticeable for at least two weeks, in the chilly weather of St Petersburg I'm sure he will last up to three."

           "Excellent , that will be more than enough time to find out about this mysterious menace that has snuffed out the light of two of the shining ones forever."

           I was so engrossed in what I was seeing through the hole that I didn't notice the approach of the person sneaking up behind me until it was too late.

            A hand suddenly grabbed my mouth to keep me from making any noise and dragged me back.