by N. P. Martin
“What?” the park cop said. “We didn’t call you.”
“You didn’t have to,” Leona said.
The cop looked at me as if for an explanation. “Hey,” I said with a shrug. “Count yourself lucky the professionals are here.”
“Screw you,” the cop said. “We got it under control.”
“Oh really,” Leona said, pushing past him, throwing the other cop—a young guy with curly dark hair who looked like it was his first day on the job—a look that made him avert his gaze immediately. “I don’t see the suspect in the back of your squad car, so that must mean he’s still out there hurting people.”
“Actually,” said the younger cop, almost apologetic for interrupting. “He’s down by the lake there, feeding on…someone’s dog.”
“A dog?” I said. “He hasn’t hurt anyone then?”
"Yeah, he has," the fat older cop said. "He's attacked three people so far. Luckily they all managed to get away. He took a chunk outta one, though. A jogger. She's in the back of that ambulance over there."
“So why haven’t you stopped him?” Leona asked.
“Because the kid’s a fucking animal, that’s why,” the older cop said. “I ain’t risking going near him. We don’t get paid enough, right?” He looked to his partner for confirmation, who just nodded weakly.
“You called anyone else?” Leona asked.
“Yeah, of course. Local precinct said they’d send someone out. That was a while ago.”
“Okay. Call back and tell them everything is fine. Also, get the fuck out of here and let us handle this.”
“You gotta a real attitude, lady, you know that?” the cop said, looking Leona up and down.
Leona stepped toward the cop, towering over him. “Are we going to have a problem here?”
The cop dropped his head slightly. “No problem.” He headed back to his squad car. “Come on, Jimmy. Let’s leave this to the professionals." He threw Leona another look before plopping his weight into the car and driving off.
"You learn your diplomacy skills in the Army too?" I asked her. "They could use some work."
“I don’t have time for diplomacy,” she said, striding across the grass toward the fledgling vamp currently sucking on a dog by the lake.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, catching up with her. “Who needs diplomacy when you’ve got guns and a badge, right?”
“Exactly.”
“So how you going to handle this kid?”
“That depends on him.” She already had one of her Berettas in hand.
“He probably has no control over himself,” I said, alluding to the fact that newly turned vamps are always consumed by their hunger for blood. “They usually have other vamps around to help them through the initial turning process, and to help them control their hunger.”
“I know that. So where are they?”
I couldn't see anybody else around, either people or other vamps. That didn't mean the vamps wouldn't turn up at some point, though. Vamps in general thought of themselves as a separate species to humans, and also superior to the human race itself, which meant they liked to handle their business themselves. They didn't like people like Leona or myself getting involved.
The newly minted vamp was by the lakeside, hunched over the body of a large Golden Retriever, his head buried in the dog's neck while he sucked the blood from its body. The vamp looked about thirteen years old. He was dressed all in black, and his filthy long hair hung down over the dog's bloodstained coat. Tendrils of smoke also rose off the kid's body. At that early stage, the fledgling vamp still maintained a tolerance to sunlight. Soon enough, though, he would lose that tolerance and the UV rays of the sun would fry him. If he weren't careful, his whole body would explode into flames like a Tibetan monk at a war rally.
“Disgusting,” Leona said as she eyed the kid vampire. “Disgusting and infuriating that he's killed that beautiful dog. I ought to stake the fucking thing on principle alone, which I'd do in a blink if there weren't extraneous variables involved. This is just one of many reasons I wish we could simply eradicate them.”
“We could just do nothing, you know,” I told her. “If he keeps absorbing the sunlight he’ll explode soon enough.”
"I have stake rounds loaded." She pointed her gun at the kid just as he looked up at us and snarled, fresh blood dripping copiously from his open mouth, which was full of small, pointed teeth, along with two longer incisors that were a good inch in length. "I can just take care of him now." The stake rounds were, as the name suggested, bullets made from weighted wood. A precisely aimed shot to the heart could instantly induce the Final Death, but only in the case of younger vamps.
You didn't want to fuck with older vamps. Not much could stop them, and you had to get close enough first, which wasn't always easy. Not that I was any kind of vamp hunter. I'd had cause on occasion to take a few out, but mostly I did business with them, sometimes mediating between different groups to prevent a street war that would inevitably cause collateral damage. Other times I did favors in return for information or magical knowledge. For the most part, though, I avoided vampires because they tended to be too sneaky, and thus hard to trust.
"Or we could take the kid to his own kind," I said, knowing it wasn't the kid's fault he was behaving like an animal. He obviously hadn't been turned on purpose. If he had been, his Maker would be with him, looking after him. He was probably jumped somewhere and left for dead, waking up with an unquenchable thirst for blood, as often happened.
Leona looked at me like I was as bad in her eyes as the dog drinker before us. “They’re vermin, Creed. Why would you want to save it just so it can kill people in the future?”
“They don’t all kill, you know. Some of them have other means of quenching their thirst.”
She shook her head. "I don't care. I'm following protocol and protocol says I put this thing down now."
Sorry kid, I thought. Nothing I can do for you.
Leona aimed her gun at the kid again, but as she did, something happened. The kid's reddish eyes turned completely black, which is something I'd never seen before. Then his head snapped toward me like some force had pulled it that way. "Creed," he snarled in a voice that was too deep—too evil—to be his own. "The darkness is coming, Creed, and you can't stop it. Soon all of you will be consumed by it." The vamp—or whoever or whatever had taken him over—grinned lasciviously at me with sharp, bloody teeth. Then it began to laugh like it knew what it was saying was true and that everyone in the world was fucked, and there was nothing I, or anyone else, could do about it.
“Who are you?” I demanded in a voice that probably sounded less disturbed than I actually was.
The entity in the vamp didn't answer me, just kept laughing, grinning and staring at me with those eightball eyes. Then I heard a shot and the kid vampire in front of me exploded in a burst of blood and guts, bits of it showering down into the water, staining the green grass around it. I looked at Leona, who was staring at the mess she had just made, the gun still in her hand. She turned her head to look at me. “He talked too much.”
Saying nothing, I looked over at the rippling lake. The fish were coming to the surface, nipping at the bits of gore floating on the cloudy, crimson water.
A chill went through me, causing a shiver in its wake, along with an innate understanding of the implications by some subconscious element of my soul.
14
Playing With Fire
I DIDN’T SAY much on the journey back to Freetown. Neither did Leona. It was like we were both trying to process what had just happened at the park. It wasn’t every day that a dark entity took over the body of a fledgling vamp and spoke to you direct, underscoring your impending doom. Needless to say, the experience had disturbed me. It seemed to disturb Leona equally as much, but as her army training taught her and as she did with everything that hinders her functionality, she seemed to readily and habitually compartmentalize in order to both be ready and able to focus on the ta
sks at hand. In this case, driving me home to the Sanctum in East Oakdale. After that, she would be on to another case. There's always another case for Division and thus Leona, just as there'd usually been for me as well. That is until the curse heralded by this blasted spell brought an immediacy unavoidable, taking with it the important cathartic release that having something to keep you busy and from thinking provides. Now I had just one case: The Case Of Saving August Creed’s Ass…And His Soul.
After telling Leona I would call her, and after her telling me she'd be there if I needed her (with a hint of rare sympathy in her eyes as she did so), I went inside the Sanctum to find Blaze sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace. The wolf got up to greet me, and I crouched down, so his big head was level with my face as he nuzzled his snout into me. Things weren’t always so relaxed between me and Blaze. It took the wolf a few years to get to the stage where he didn’t feel like attacking me out of innate aggression and general suspicion of humans. A few times in the beginning, he did jump me and pin me to the floor, even putting his jaws around my throat once. It was a timely reminder that Blaze was a wild animal—and an elemental creature—and wouldn’t be domesticated like a dog. Eventually we reached an understanding that entailed me not trying to tame his wilder instincts, and in return, he would put those instincts to good use when I needed them. Based on that understanding, our bond grew, as did our friendship.
Putting my arms around his thick neck, I gave Blaze a hug for a moment. "Someone's messing with me, Blaze," I said. "And I intend to find out who.” The wolf pulled away and fixed me with his yellow eyes, letting me know he was there for me, as he always had been since I rescued him from Babylon all those years ago. “Thanks, Blaze. I know I can always count on you.”
And Leona, of course, who had been surprisingly supportive so far, given that she didn't even remember who I was. On some level, she seemed to trust me, and for that I was grateful. It was difficult sometimes, not showing her how I really felt about her. And while a woman like Leona wasn't exactly into relationships, the relationship I had with her previously was the closest I'd ever had to one. Living your life pursuing magic and sorting out other people's problems didn't leave much room for romantic entanglements. There had been a few women over the years (one of them a vampire) who I had shared a closeness with, but none as deep as with Leona. She seemed to get me, and I got her. That in itself was a rare thing, and it enabled us to be close, but not too close. Enough to give each other what we needed while still giving each other the space to do what we each needed to do. It worked out pretty well before my life went sideways.
I flopped down into the well-worn armchair by the fireplace. Logs were stacked on top of the grate, but the fire wasn't lit. Staring at the logs for a moment, I mumbled a few words and directed a small dose of magic at them. Flames appeared instantly in the grate, licking at the logs until they caught and started crackling in the heat.
Every time I lit the fire and stared into it, I was reminded of the huge fire that was always burning in the family Sanctum back in Ireland. My father would often sit in one of the two chairs by that fire with some ancient book in his lap, sipping at brandy and smoking cannabis as he read. Sometimes I would join him, sitting in the other chair with my own book, and he would look over at me occasionally as if I was distracting him.
My father was hard on me and my siblings growing up, forcing us to spend hours every day studying and practicing. Even when he left on some business trip or expedition to some far-flung corner of the realms, my mother would oversee our studies in order to avoid backlash against all of us, should he return to find we'd made no perceived progress. Although thankfully, her oversight was in a much more relaxed manner. I loved those times spent with my family when my father was absent. We loved and protected each other, until that is, my father—with his ego that could never get enough—overestimated the limits of his power and fucked it all up for everyone. Something I still haven't forgiven him for over three decades later.
But now I was about to do the same thing, wasn’t I? I was planning on summoning forces that were very likely beyond the limits of my control. But I wasn’t about to do so out of ego or some selfish grab for more power. I was about to do so out of necessity, for survival. I also wasn’t planning on putting anyone else at risk in doing so.
That didn't make it any easier, though.
I was getting ready to play with fire, and how burnt I got depended only on the whim of whatever demon happened to respond to my call.
And going from experience, I feared I might just end up incinerated, soul and all.
15
The Library Of Dark Magic
I SPENT THE next several hours inside a room in the Sanctum that didn't exist on the plans of the brownstone (one of many hidden rooms in the place). The hideaway was subbasement, accessed via a magically sealed and hidden trapdoor in the corner of the main basement, a trapdoor only visible via a Reveal Spell I spoke whilst waving my hand over the blank floor, which then gave access to the Sanctum's Library of Dark Magic.
As the name suggests, it is where the most dangerous and outright evil books are kept. Books that are full of spells and instructions for accessing the darker regions of the universe like the Myriad Hells and all kinds of other dark and sinister dimensions that most sane people would have no need or desire to access or travel to. These dark pockets of the universe were filled with entities and things that could only be described as monsters, beings that would rip a person apart and devour their very souls on the spot if you made yourself known to them.
The kind of dark magic contained in the books that lined the wonky shelves is just the sort being practiced by the bastard who killed that girl and put the curse on me. To access a dimension like Kiroth and the dark lord Rloth, one would have to be very familiar with the practices outlined in the books I was now about to look through myself. And unfortunately, the only way I was going to counter the black magic spell I was under was to use black magic myself.
A rusty ladder led down from the basement into the library. Therein a maze of narrow corridors has been created through its endless rows of bookshelves all exuding their own kind of dark energy that never fails to raise my heckles, and to cause occasional times when I recoil in fear. I didn’t exactly make it a habit to go down there. When I took over the brownstone, my uncle warned me not to enter the dark library unless I really had to, telling me that there were books and artifacts down there that would try to seduce me into touching them; into opening them up and using the dark magic inside.
As I now stood in its stifling atmosphere, the narrow walkways instilling a regularly occurring sense of claustrophobia, I once again resolved myself into getting in and out as fast as possible. Already I could feel the strange pull of some of the more powerful books, their tendrils of dark influence trying to probe inside my mind, begging me to open their pages as they tried to lure me to them the way a Venus Flytrap lures a fly with the promise of sweet rewards before springing its deadly trap.
The book I was looking for was a centuries-old tome written in an arcane language that very few could read (not without a Translation Spell) and still fewer could even handle without going mad or being dragged down into total darkness forever. The book's title roughly translated into The Book Of Many Hells And Demons. It was kept at the back end of the library, locked up inside a large trunk along with the other more dangerous books in the library.
The trunk at the back of the library was nestled underneath a shelf of books. One of those old time trunks with a rounded lid, the kind you might expect to be filled with priceless treasure gathered up by bloodthirsty pirates. The books and artifacts inside were as invaluable as it gets, but only to the right people and to those who knew how to use them.
Taking a breath, I undid the Locking Spell originally designed by my uncle years ago. The spell required my blood on the lock, so I took a small penknife out of my back pocket and winced as I drew the four-inch blade across my left palm. As the
blood welled up in my hand, I smeared it over the locking mechanism. A few seconds later there was a clicking sound that felt loud and ominous in the narrow confines of the sub-basement library.
Before opening the lid on the trunk, I wrapped a handkerchief around the cut in my hand. You did not want to drip blood on to any of the books in the trunk, which would be like dripping blood into the mouth of a hungry animal. It would make it ravenous, and it would hunger for more. Same thing with the books. Blood would ignite the dark magic inside, and the books would get overexcited. Things would get out of control quickly, to say the least.
I popped open the lid on the trunk and was hit with the stench of what can only be described as flesh rotting from the inside out: the stench of bindings made from human flesh and text from human blood. In a nutshell, from the essence of death and decay itself. The stench was down to the human skin that bound the books and the blood on many of their pages. It was also down to the rotten essence of the books themselves. I gagged a few times as I quickly sorted through the books until I found the one I was looking for, taking it out of the trunk and immediately shutting the lid, the locking mechanism engaging again by itself. Relieved to have sealed the trunk and its sickening smell, I took a few deep breaths, as much to steady my nerves as anything else.
The binding of stretched leather made from waxy and bumpy human skin, like that which feels as though it were cut directly from the worst patches of a leper's skin, to give a visceral experience that's cold and horrible to behold. Filled with a large number of thick parchment pages, the binding struggled to enclose its necessary volume required for the vast amount of information it contains. It was also heavy, much heavier than your average Bible. The pages were thick parchment and there were many of them. There needed to be, to hold the vast amount of information inside.