Chapter One

“Are you comfortable? Is the refreshment to your liking?”

They had found clothes for their blonde guest, a white lace dress with voluminous sleeves and a pair of flat leather shoes that looked comfortable. Nilla leaned back on her divan and lifted her snifter in silent toast. It could have been tomato juice in the glass but Ayaan doubted it. The green phantom bowed deeply, leaning on his femur staff, and moved back to one corner of the room. On her own stool Ayaan crossed her legs and wondered how long this was going to take.

They were all gathered inside of MAD-O-RAMA, where the Tsarevich was due to make an appearance at any moment. Erasmus stood behind Ayaan in a stiff posture, forced to be uncomfortable because he had failed. He was going to have to apologize. Semyon Iurevich perched on a three-legged chair near the back, his eyes very wide as if he expected to witness something monumental and didn’t want to blink in case he missed it. The fiftieth mummy stood holding the brain in the jar. Nilla made a point of not looking at it. Cicatrix was with her master, the two of them hidden inside his pretzel car throne which was still turned to the wall.

Without preamble the Tsarevich’s image appeared in the center of the room, facing them. He bowed deeply in Nilla’s direction and spoke in fractured English—the only language Nilla had. “My lady. What honor you give me. I have sought you for years now, to only glory you. How kind of you this is to come. May I introduce myself, I am Adrik Pavlovich Padchenko, who some too kindly call Tsarevich.”

“Enchanted to meet you,” Nilla replied. She looked sincere enough. “I’m nobody.”

The boy lich smiled broadly as if she’d said the most intelligent thing he’d ever heard. Then he turned and faced his generals. “With this nobody and her gracious presence, we are made ready. Most of you know what means this. We have worked so long, so hard. Tomorrow we begin!” With the exception of Ayaan, the mummy and the brain, the entire room cheered.

“There is perhaps one, though, who knows not why we celebrate today.” The image came to take Ayaan’s chin in both of his small, pale hands. She gave him her best smile though she wanted to knock him away from her. “Why, she does not know real me at all.” That elicited a few chuckles.

“My story is starting in tragedy,” he told her, walking toward the throne that hid his true body. “Is starting with being hit by car, at tender age of nine years old. Many thought I would die. I did, yet not in right away.” More laughs.

The story he told her then was either heart-wrenching or blood-curdling, Ayaan couldn’t decide which. The boy who would become the lich had been a child of moderate accomplishment—good grades, a promising future full of higher education and the chance to really make something of himself. Then came the accident. The car had nearly flattened him against a concrete wall. Most of his tiny bones had been broken, many of his organs ruptured or crushed. He was brought immediately to a hospital where it was discovered he could not breathe on his own and his heart was barely moving. After dozens of surgeries over the course of two weeks he was eventually stabilized—alive, but unable to regain consciousness.

In a country where advanced medical services were rarer than gold his family had been wealthy enough or at least desperate enough to hire specialists to try every possible remedy. Mostly they ran endless tests and rated him on various scales—the DRS, the Rancho los Amigos Index, the Glasgow Coma Scale. They tried to get him to blink his eyes, to wiggle his toes. They stuck him with pins, made him smell unpleasant odors; a nurse moved his hand around on a computer keyboard and helped his fingers twitch and spell out nonsense words.

Eventually the doctors presented their findings. The boy was not in a coma, they assured his parents. Coma victims could not react to unpleasant stimuli. He was not in that darkest of closed-off places, the persistent vegetative state, because his brain was undamaged, at least physically. He was not in a stupor, nor had he suffered cataplexy, or narcolepsy, or any of a hundred other things.

He was, the doctors whispered, “locked in.” For whatever reason his brain continued to function and his body lived but they weren’t on speaking terms any more.

“To myself,” the Tsarevich explained, “is not so bad. I had dreams, nice dreams. An angel stood in my corner and showed me pictures of world. This was in actual a television set, ha ha. Every day beautiful nymphs they came and washed my body, was quite stimulating. Were nurses, of course. I lived in fairytale land, where I am Prince Ivan, yes? You know the story of Prince Ivan? He is taken away by the grey wolf, to fabulous and magic land, and has great adventure. He even fights Koschei the Deathless, and he wins! No one ever told tale of Prince Ivan grows up to turn to Koschei. Never before.”

The causes of “Locked In” Syndrome had always eluded the medical profession. There was no real treatment, the doctors told his parents, only therapies with little hope of any real amelioration of his condition. There was very little hope of his just coming out of it on his own, though here the doctors split. Some suggested it could happen, that children were resilient, that there was always room for a miracle. Most of the doctors suggested quietly removing the boy’s feeding tube and ending what promised to be a short and extremely unpleasant life.

American consultants and Russian Orthodox priests were contacted and their advice sought. Decisions were made. The machines that kept his body going were paid for. His room was kept sterile and safe and free of intruders. Everything was kept on battery power because the local electrical grid was unreliable. All of his supplies—liquid food, replacement parts for the oxygen supply, pain medication—were ordered in bulk and fed into automatic delivery systems. When the Epidemic came the nurses deserted the hospital but the boy’s life hardly changed.

At least, until the food in the automated feeding machine ran out. For days he languished, his body quietly devouring itself. Death and life combined, tried on each others’ mantles. In that bad place, the Tsarevich said, “my angel he closed his eye, yes. I saw no more.”

In darkness he was blind and alone. His world collapsed to become a narrow space, between a blanket and a mattress, a softly respiring universe no larger than a bed. And then, without warning, he wasn’t alone.

“Lad,” someone said, calling from very far away, “lad, you’ve known so little of life. Yet now it’s time you learned of the other thing.”

In the darkness the voice spoke to him of what had happened. It pulled no punches and spared no pains explaining things in minute detail. The boy had never learned so many basic concepts—to him death had been a true abstract, to him, perhaps alone in Russia, hunger was a complete blank.

He had not known, for instance, that he was created to oversee the destruction of the entire world. He had not know that God had ordained him the angel of death.

The voice that spoke in the darkness helped him understand. And then it helped him open his eyes. In the dimly lit room, with just a little sunlight sneaking in through the closed blinds, the boy saw his benefactor for the first time. A hairy man covered in blue tattoos. Wearing a noose around his neck and a strip of fur around his arm. The tattooed man smiled, and held out his hand, and the boy rose out of his bed, cables and tubes and needles and wires falling from him like the leaves falling from a dead tree in autumn. He felt as if he floated up out of the bed, as if he were raised up by pure glory.

“Look at you, lad, you’ve been made more than you were. You’ve been made noble, no, you’re royalty now, one of three creatures in this world with any power or strength left. You’re the very prince of death, aren’t you?”

In Russian, the word was tsarevich.

“He teaches me then, how to control and instruct dead man. He shows me powers that are mine, and powers that are his. And why we have power at all. To wipe out all humans, he says. He begins to tell me who authorizes such a plan, and why it must be so. And then he goes.”

The benefactor disappeared in mid-sentence, in mid-instruction. The Tsarevich was supposed to go forth and kill every living human he could find, he knew that much. The benefactor had never explained what this was supposed to achieve. Without warning, without completing his instruction, the tattooed man had just vanished.

“Only later, only much later do I learn. Was eaten, yes, eaten by one like me. One like Nilla, you, too. One that was him called Gary.”

Ayaan uncrossed her legs. She folded her arms across her chest.

“Yes, yes,” the boy said, waving at her. “Now you know so much. Why I do not hate you, for one. Why I wanted our friend ghost.” He pointed at the brain in its jar. Ayaan didn’t look. “That is him, and I seek him for twelve years to find out rest of command. Go forth and kill so that... so that what? Now he changes tune, of course. Now he tells me sacred mission is called off. I don’t know what to do.” The boy smiled. “Is little joke, of course. I know exactly what to do. I must heal myself. I must make myself whole again.”

Ayaan frowned. She looked over and saw Nilla, whose face was a mask of perfect attention.

“You must to see this now, is not pretty, and I am sorry. But you must. I continued to grow, you see, even after car hits me. My little body keeps to growing, but lying in bed, could not grow right. I was in bed seven years before Epidemic came and started the healing process on me. Seven years I grow wrong.”

The imaginary boy vanished without so much as a flicker of light. The throne, which had once been a car on the MAD-O-RAMA dark ride, turned around on a circle of revolving floor. Cicatrix was revealed inside, her limbs tangled with those of the Tsarevich, the real Tsarevich. Cicatrix wore nothing but a slip. The Tsarevich was sucking on a cut in her thigh, sucking out her blood.

It wasn’t vampirism that made Ayaan and Nilla both shift in their seats, however. It was the boy. He had a skull shaped like an eggplant, much broader at its crown than at his chin. A single patch of hair stood off-center atop his head. His face was distorted, pulled out into a long parody of a human visage. One eye was permanently closed by a fold of flesh, the other protruded from his head so much it looked like it might fall out. His mouth contained three or four teeth growing at random angles—when he drew back from Cicatrix’s thigh a mixture of blood and saliva drooled from his lower lip, which didn’t close properly.

They couldn’t see too much of his body, which was hidden behind Cicatrix’s curvaceous form. Ayaan could tell, however, that his arms were of different lengths and only one ended in a hand—the other was a squid-like mass of fused digits growing at abnormal angles. His chest had been caved in on one side and his pelvis seemed to attach to the wrong bones.

“He cannot take solid food,” Cicatrix said, breaking the silence that had filled the room like something solid, like all the air in the room had been replaced with solid glass. “His body no longer functions so. Only blood can he eat. My blood. I eat all sugar and candy I like, and he takes away from me, so I stay slender. Is good arrangement.”

She chuckled and the monster on the throne smiled. His tongue wagged inside of his mouth and words formed. “I go now to Source. All pieces are in place. Soon, this body is no more. Soon I am real boy again!”

Ayaan’s hands were grabbing at the air before she realized what she was doing. She was pulling energy toward herself, gathering power for a massive death bolt that would destroy the two of them and probably turn the throne into dust as well. She could do it, there was absolutely nothing stopping her.

It had not been her own decision, however, to gather that energy. Maybe, she told herself, her subconscious was so disgusted by the sight of the Tsarevich that she just wanted to destroy him, to put him out of everyone’s misery.

Or maybe Semyon Iurevich had put that thought in her head.

Does it matter? she heard, the words blasting through her cranium like a chill wind off a freight train’s passage. This was the deal. From the beginning, this is the way we played the course. You put on a wonderful show, lass. You made so nice even I started to believe it. I honestly started to believe that you had come around to his side.

She didn’t turn around and look at the brain in its jar. Instead she looked at Semyon Iurevich. His eyes tracked hers perfectly.

Destroy him. Do it now. It could have been either of them saying it.

“No,” she said, out loud, and folded her hands in her lap.