The Bar at the Edge of the Sea

by Tom Abrahams

  The night was cool. The wind from their movement across the open sea blew across the deck, whipping around the stern.

  He adjusted his hat to keep the breeze from prying it loose from his head. The blood moon hung against a milky black sky.

  Uriel stood beside him, holding her arms and using his body to block her from the cool wind.

  Zeke sensed her body tremble. He lifted the brim of his hat, holding the Stetson in place, and raised an eyebrow at her. He wasn’t sure the chill was from the cold.

  Both of them watched the streaks of light grow in intensity. They were as beautiful as they were foreboding.

  “This is one of those times when you regret your clothing choices,” he said. “You know, you could have picked something more…sensible.”

  She offered him a bemused smile. “You’re right.”

  The answer surprised him. He took a step back for effect. “Did I hear that right?”

  She hugged herself. “It’s cold out here.”

  “This should help.” Zeke took off his jacket and offered it to her.

  Uriel’s eyes creased. Even in the relative dark, he saw the suspicion creep onto her face, but she snatched the jacket anyway. It was too big for her and made her look slighter than she already was.

  That too surprised Zeke. Uriel was powerful. She was as strong as anyone or anything he’d seen. Lithe and sleek. Quick and fast. She was unrepentant in the ways she wielded her body for the sake of cross-dimensional balance. But up close like this, in the dark and in his jacket, she was small.

  Gabe appeared on the deck behind them. His barrel chest heaved from near breathlessness.

  “We’re getting close,” he said. “It’ll be any minute now.”

  The boat zipped across the water on plane. The gentle rhythm of its skim across the calm sea vibrated in Zeke’s joints.

  Uriel jutted her chin toward the streaks of light. “So that’s it, huh?”

  Gabe nodded. “No doubt. They’re coming toward us. See that?”

  The strong man lifted an arm the size of an outboard motor and traced the arcs of light with an extended finger. He moved closer to Zeke. The smell of a woodsy cologne masked the odor of sweat and salt.

  Zeke ignored it and studied the arcs. Gabe was right. They weren’t streaking across the sky so much as they were launching toward them before disappearing.

  Uriel narrowed her eyes as if to focus. “Are those what I think they are?”

  Gabe lowered his arm and nodded grimly. “Bolts.”

  Zeke furrowed his brow. “Of lightning?”

  Uriel said, “No, silly rabbit. Bolts as in arrows. Flaming arrows.”

  Smoke and flame are in your path,

  To reach the next, extinguish its wrath.

  Zeke nodded, then shrugged. “Can’t we just go around them?”

  Gabe shook his head. “We’re trying. Every time Phil changes course, the fire follows us. It doesn’t matter what heading we set. We’re always headed straight for it. We’ve got maybe ten minutes. Give or take.”

  From the salon steps, Lucius Mander appeared on the aft deck. He stood behind Gabe, shoulders drawn inward, one foot on the top step.

  “We can’t avoid it,” he said. “The feat demands we face it and that we overcome it. That’s the only way.”

  Uriel pulled the coat closed and held it at the collar with a fist. She stepped away from Zeke and next to Gabe. She stared down at Lucius.

  “You knew it was flaming arrows?” she asked.

  He shook his head emphatically. He stuttered his response, like a stubborn engine unwilling to start.

  “N-n-o. I-I-I c-couldn’t have known. No. No. Nobody knows. I told you everything.”

  Gabe grunted. “You told us nothing. You rhymed a bunch of nonsense about flames and smoke. Just like the last time. That first poem had nothing about killer mutant lizards in it.”

  Lucius’s eyes widened. The whites glistened in the red moonlight. “I didn’t know about the lizards. I-I-I th-think it’s different. Different for everyone.”

  Uriel took another step closer to him. He leaned away from her but held his ground, one foot on the deck and the other on the steps. Uriel didn’t appear so small anymore, despite the swallowing jacket.

  She bent close to his ear but spoke loudly enough for Zeke to hear her above the wash. Her voice almost sounded like a rumble or a growl. “How do you know it’s different for everyone if you don’t know what to expect?”

  Lucius curled his lower lip under his teeth. His eyes darted from his feet to Zeke to Phil to Uriel.

  “Others have tried and failed,” he said, finally. “Each time, the challenge is different. It’s similar but different.”

  Zeke interrupted. He waved his hands in front of his face. “Hold on. I don’t get this. How is it that this iteration of Earth, or whatever, is magical, but my version wasn’t? How is it you’ve got attack lizards and volleys of flaming arrows that come from nowhere? Not to mention these poems that seem like they’re mythical? Passed down from generation to generation. But they’re not. It makes no sense.”

  Gabe scratched under his neck at his DO NOT FEAR tattoo. He frowned in a way that told Zeke he was considering the question. Then he pointed at him.

  “It does make sense, Zeke,” he said. “Ever heard of the Bermuda Triangle? The Loch Ness Monster? Big foot? The Devil’s Sea? The Cyclops?”

  Zeke rubbed the sides of his nose with his hands. He searched his memory. None of those things sounded familiar. Not even from Li’s contraband books. Maybe the Cyclops? Probably not.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “They’re all myths from my Earth,” said Gabe. “All of them. They exist because they’re real. Most people never believed them. They passed from generation to generation as whispers or as the currency of conspiracy theorists. But believe me, they were real. And I bet if you searched hard enough in your own version of Earth, you’d find something mythical. You’d find some scary story that made it tough to sleep, gave you nightmares, had you second-guessing the noises coming from underneath your bed. Whatever that thing was, it was real. The boogeyman exists.”

  Zeke tilted his head to one side. “The boogeyman?”

  “A scary monster who comes for you. He’s ethereal. Neither alive nor dead. He goes bump in the night.”

  Uriel waved him off. “You’re mixing metaphors, so to speak. Too much. Too soon.”

  Her hand went to Zeke’s chest. One corner of her mouth flashed a sympathetic half-smirk.

  “You only understood part of your world, Zeke,” she said. “There were monsters there. Mythical things afoot. I would have thought you’d understand that, having seen Theo and what he did to me.”

  She searched his eyes, jogged his memory. Zeke opened his mouth to speak. He said nothing. Now he was the one who felt small. After everything he’d witnessed since his death, even before he understood that he was dead, he knew he should readily believe the world exists in layers.

  There was the outer layer, the one everyone saw. It existed without question or thought. It was the accepted physical world. Sky and the dirt. Sun and Moon. Ice and fire. Blood and guts. Life and death.

  Beneath that layer were the things people understood were true about the world despite not being able to touch or see them. This was the experiential world. Love and hate. Hope and despair. Dreams and nightmares. Life and death.

  Then there were the things in which some believed, and others didn’t. Religion and faith. Myths and monsters. Angels and demons. Life and death.

  These things, these layers, were real. Even if they didn’t touch the five senses, they were real. Zeke understood it in that moment. And he knew the threads that connected all the layers. Life and death, they ran through everything. Forward and backward. Up and down. In and out.

  “Who is Theo?” Lucius asked.

  Gabe deferred to Uriel. “You want to take this one?”

  Uriel checked the sky. Zeke joined her. The streaks we
re larger, the flicker of the flames distinct against the faint red hue of the black sky. He tried to count the number of arrows, but it was impossible.

  “Long story short,” Uriel said, “Theo was one of us. He was a Watcher who’d gone AWOL. He lived in Zeke’s city, a place called the Protectorate. Nobody knew he was one of us, that he was trying to affect the balance of things on his own. Then, out of nowhere, he revealed his power. He ended my time in Zeke’s world.”

  Lucius’s eye twitched. “Watcher?”

  Uriel pointed to herself, then Gabe. “That’s what we are. We’re Watchers. Our job is to maintain the balance of good and evil. We watch for things that upset that balance and try to right it. Even it out.”

  Gabe picked up the explanation. “Sometimes one of us gets too big for his or her britches, and they disappear and take their power with them. When they do that, it not only upsets the balance, but it changes the mythic quotient. The longer the Watcher stays, or the longer their power stays, the more upset the balance becomes, and the more we find things like that.”

  He pointed at the glowing stabs of light in the sky. A constant stream of bolts arced toward the sky and dropped back to the sea.

  Lucius’s expression eased. Recognition spread across his face.

  “The Kalevanmiekka belonged to a Watcher?” he asked.

  Uriel nodded. “One named Josephine. She disappeared on your Earth thousands of years ago.”

  Zeke recalled the explanation Pedro had offered in the cantina. He tried to remember the different names of the sword. The British called it Excalibur. The Greek called it Harpe. The Japanese called it Kusanagi. And the Finnish called it Kalevanmiekka. Kaleva’s sword.

  He squinted past the glimmering arrows toward the black sky beyond them. Almost behind them, from the spot where the arrows appeared to originate, was a familiar constellation called Orion’s Belt. At that belt was a collection of stars known as Kaleva’s sword. The fire was coming from the stars. Or it looked that way.

  He closed his eyes. Rubbed them with his knuckles. Opened them. It was an odd optical illusion, but even as he felt the boat’s course shift under his weight, Zeke could swear the nonstop salvo emanated from the stars.

  Uriel drew his attention back to the boat by shoving his jacket into his chest. He took it with both hands and held it against his body.

  “Thanks for letting me use it,” she said. “I’m good now. I have a feeling it’s about to heat up.”

  Zeke tossed the jacket onto one of the seats. He checked his pistol. It was snug at his hip.

  The barrage of arrows intensified ahead of them. The sky brightened with warm firelight.

  Beneath his boots, Zeke felt the boat’s speed quicken. He grabbed onto a gunnel to maintain his balance.

  The Riva Cantata was a large yacht. The helm oversaw a broad bow, which narrowed to a point. The helm, its salon, and its four cabins were covered. The stern was exposed with a deck. It was the only part of the yacht open to the sky.

  Gabe withdrew his fighting sticks from the small of his back. He expertly twirled the escrimas in his hands. As he spun them, they glowed blue. The power from the sticks extended into his arms like a liquid leeching through a straw. The sticks spun faster and faster.

  The first bombardment of the flaming arrows mostly hit the water on the port side, missing the boat and steaming into the ocean.

  A half dozen hissed through the air on target, forcing Gabe to deflect them with the sticks. Some of them stabbed into the deck. He widened his stance to broaden the effect of his effort as another volley sailed toward them.

  Phil abruptly shifted course to the right. The foursome on the deck fell into each other.

  Lucius, on one knee, covered the top of his head with his hands. His chest heaved. His face was tight with fear. He struggled to stand and find a spot under the canopy that covered part of the deck.

  “Shouldn’t we get inside?” he asked.

  Zeke didn’t answer him at first. He was on his side, partially underneath Gabe. The man crushed Zeke’s torso as he worked to free himself. Another volley of arrows came. They sounded like wings flapping as they pierced the air and then peppered the deck in quick succession.

  Zeke felt heat in the back of his leg, which quickly radiated toward his feet and into his back. He tried moving Gabe. But the big man didn’t budge.

  The boat shifted course again. Suddenly. Gabe’s weight rolled to one side, and Zeke dragged himself out from under the oversized Watcher.

  Uriel screamed, “Gabriel? Can you—”

  Fire spread across the edge of the deck where it met the water, forming a thin wall along the port side of the stern.

  Zeke’s eyes scanned his surroundings. They darted from the flames to the twisted expression on Uriel’s face, to Lucius bracing himself against the salon hatch frame, to Gabe’s frozen expression.

  His own eyes reflected the firelight, giving them the illusion of life, but Gabe was gone. His body sizzled and smoked. He was riddled with more than a dozen blackened arrows. One of them was in his neck, stuck in the middle of his tattoo. His sticks remained clutched in his grip; however, the blue glow was gone.

  Uriel slid to his side, oblivious to the latest incoming bombardment, which struck the top of the boat above the helm. Her body started throbbing a faint blue.

  Zeke swallowed hard. Forgetting his own pain and swelling with adrenaline, he stood. He took two giant steps toward the stern. In a quick motion, he drew the pistol and aimed it toward the rain of fire headed toward them in what was the largest of the salvos yet. Hundreds or thousands of arrows descended on them.

  Zeke’s trigger pull kicked the gun in his hand. Concentric circles of electric blue waves pulsed and turned back the arrows as if they’d hit a solid wall.

  He didn’t hesitate. Zeke braced himself and fired another shot at the same spot in the sky. This one turned back the next incoming shower.

  With the revolver aimed skyward, Zeke shot a glance toward Uriel. “I’ve got three rounds left! That’s it.”

  Uriel offered a meager nod at Zeke and stood. She balled her hands into fists and launched her body onto the boat’s roof with a single, impossible leap.

  Standing atop it, her body electric blue, she crouched on one knee. Over her shoulder, she locked eyes with Zeke.

  “Get ready to shoot,” she said. “Now.”

  Zeke obliged. Another trigger pull blasted a volley into the sky. Its power continued on to dispel the next volley, extinguishing the flames and threat.

  At that very instant, Uriel uncoiled her body and shot skyward like a missile. At the apex of her ascent, she clapped her hands together, and a monstrous displacement of air and energy washed across the sky. Ripples of blue light spread in expanding concentric circles.

  The volleys stopped and Uriel dropped from the sky. She landed at the bow of the Riva Cantata, dropping to one knee that bent the boat’s frame. As she landed, a pulse of energy shot through the boat.

  It hit Zeke like a punch to his sternum, and he staggered back onto his heels before steadying himself. Then he looked to the sky, to the constellation of stars, which now seemed somehow dimmer than before, flickering like distant candlelight.

  “Is he dead? How could he be dead?”

  The sad voice belonged to Lucius. He was on his knees in front of Gabe. His hands hovered over the big man’s body as if magnetically held there. His eyes searched Zeke’s for an answer.

  Zeke holstered his gun and kneeled beside the body across from Lucius. He removed his hat and held it over his chest. Beneath it his heart pumped. He tried swallowing back a dry throat before he spoke.

  “Gabe’s not dead,” he said. “Not really. He’s just finished with this mission.”

  Lucius sat back on his heels. “How does that work? When I—if I—”

  “You’d go back to the bar,” Uriel said. “It goes on your record.”

  She had moved to the edge of the deck, her back to the water. The blue hue that
emanated from her tattoos slowly faded. Her hair was wet and it reflected the moonlight, which made it appear deep purple. Streaks of black mascara rolled down from her eyes.

  “Record?” Lucius asked.

  Uriel took a solid step forward and away from the rearmost section of the aft deck. Her arms folded across her chest, fingers tapping at her elbows. She started to speak when Zeke stopped her.

  “We don’t have time for this,” he said. “We need to know what’s next. Where do we go? This boat is faster, I’m sure, than whatever that pirate is sailing. If we’re going to reach them in time, we need to focus on what matters.”

  “But—” Lucius began, but Zeke shook his head to silence him.

  He stood tall so he could look down at his charge. He saw himself in Lucius. The uncertainty. The guilt. The endless search for answers. He didn’t like what he saw. It wasn’t productive or helpful. It was, among other things, pitiful.

  Zeke squared his shoulders. He spoke using both hands, his movements and tone emphatic. He was sure of himself. He was in command.

  “No buts,” he said. “No more questions. Questions only lead to more questions, and more questions. And none of the answers matter if we don’t stop the pirate from finding the sword, wielding it, and shifting the balance of power in the wrong direction.”

  Lucius glanced past Zeke at Uriel, as if in search of an ally. He didn’t find one.

  “Do as the man says,” Uriel said. “Tell us where we need to be.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Let me show you something.”

  Barach held out his hand. Li was hesitant. She eyed his inviting smile, the likes of which she’d seen far too many wicked men use to take advantage of others where she came from.

  He wiggled his fingers, inviting her to take them. “I don’t bite.”

  What can I lose now? she thought.

  She stood and did as he asked. He held her hand as a parent would a child, cupped together. The fingers weren’t laced as they would be between two lovers. Li wasn’t sure if she was relieved by that or disappointed.