Thrilled to Death

by James Byron Huggins

  I sat. I listened. I replayed a very full day over in my head.

  “You gained weight,” she said. Judging by the slight and the annoyed look plastered over her incredibly beautiful face, it was obvious to me that this wasn’t the first thing she’d said. I daydreamed hard, it was kind of a curse. She’d made me a drink already. As I said, Gale didn’t take orders, she simply gave you a cursory once-over and would make you a drink. Take or leave it. “And you’re aging terribly.”

  I feigned a sunny disposition that was ripe with sarcasm, took my drink and lifted it in a makeshift salute. “Thanks, Gale. Nothing like a good solid kick when you’re down.”

  She had a feline grace amplified by a Cheshire grin as she bowed down to meet me eye-to-eye. Hers were a powerful collaboration of green and sea blue swimming together in concert. They moved like a living constellation, and I was again reminded that I was walking in a world of giants while very much a man.

  My fear must have been palpable, and she sated by it, because Gale shifted from her predatory mannerism to something mercifully softer. I daresay it was an attempt to comfort me. I was about to dive into the proverbial deep end while wearing cement shoes and she knew it.

  We sat in a companionable silence; the music started again and while I expected her to return to the perch at the end of the bar to regain a front row seat to the show, she stayed with me. Whatever fruity concoction she had cooked up was pure magic, smooth and yet with enough bite on the ass end to remind me I was still numbing all my worries, if only for a small while.

  “I did not expect to see you here again, Janzen. What’s it been, a year?”

  “Makes both of us, but I kind of fell into something and wasn’t sure where else to start. And yeah,” I mumbled distractedly while the music took me away. “About that.”

  While Gale was a frightening thing, if you knew what it was you were looking at, there was a kind of comfort in the fact that she was not looking on me with pity. “Are you really waiting for me to spur you on?”

  I barked a laugh. “I was doing deliveries—”

  “—Deliveries?” she interjected, disapprovingly.

  “Hey, it’s a job. Anyway, deliveries, and I come across this house. As luck would have it, I get to this place just as it’s being attacked.” I wouldn’t bring up a run of the mill mugging or breaking and entering to her and she knew as much. This was something different, the pause I had purposely timed when retelling this story is clueing her into as much and now I had her undivided attention. “...By a Stalker. An Ancient, one of the Cura—”

  “Do not speak that name here,” she snapped with an unremitting authority that made my mouth audibly click it shut so fast. “And one of those haven’t come into the realm of man in centuries, Janzen. Centuries.” Another spell of silence, this one less agreeable, was shared between us. “Swear it.”

  I’d heard from many that once you attached your name to something it carried a different kind of weight, that there was a power in it. “I do,” I said. Now, this whole anchoring your name to a statement was new to me, so I clumsily did a crisscross over my heart. “It couldn’t have been more than a few miles from the bar. Now, what I need to know is who has the kind of reach to not only call one of those up from the Abyss and get it through the In-Between, but leash it as well.”

  The implication of her being one of those suspects was hopefully nullified by the fact that I came to her about this very issue and, truthfully, while I knew Gale was a power, I wasn’t sure if even she had the reach to bring one of those over and make it do her bidding. Bidding. Christ, I felt so corny just thinking it.

  “That’s not a simple task, Janzen, but you may not be looking for so big a power as you think.” I was missing something, and judging by the very expectant look written across her face it was evident that it should be fairly obvious.

  “I don’t know,” I said, hesitantly. “That’s some major power.”

  “There are only two types of people who would do something of this magnitude,” she said. One long, elegant finger ticked off from a fist. “A master...” she was baiting me, now. Waiting until I filled in the elongated silence drifting between us.

  It took me longer than I would have hoped, but not as long as it might have for some; the epiphany dawned on me as if a physical blow. All this time I had immediately jumped to the worst case, I wasn’t breaking this down from every vantage point and seeing clearly. I was afraid and dealing with my own doubt, fixated on my own insignificance that I hadn’t even entertained that this could be so some rank amateur in way over their head, or some precocious punk aiming too high too fast. “...Or a fool.”

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  PROLOGUE

  The abomination tearing down the rain-slicked street sending shards of grit in every direction was an unstoppable force. Bulbous ape-like arms ending in cruel curved claws found easy purchase on the street, twisting the asphalt into submission and launching the creature forward. Its reptilian head was thick with bone at the crest of its skull, and it had a broad snout full of jagged teeth that tore through everything that had been thrown at it so far. As if that wasn’t enough, there was a spiked, three-pronged tail slashing behind it—each barb armed with a different venom. Gruesome stitching infused its hide with magical runework, showing the Frankensteinian beast for what it was—a collage of the most fearsome creatures in the realms, all patched together to create a singular killing machine.

  An idling truck lay ahead of it in the street, its frame battered from the fight. In the passenger seat, Johnny B. gripped the neck of his guitar and stared down the beast. “Any ideas, Muscles?”

  The soldier sitting in the driver’s seat wouldn’t have answered even if he’d heard the question.

  The elf seemed like a slight thing next to Grove, but he was tougher than he looked. The leather-clad goth rock’n’roller was just about to ask again when the engine roared as Grove floored it.

  “Right,” quipped the elven karaoke king. “We ram it. Brilliant.”

  Grove smashed the horn, clueing in the two others trying to stall the monster to his impending kamikaze attack.

  Only Xander could stand toe-to-toe with it for more than a minute, but with another thundering backhand, the monster sent that burly shapeshifter tumbling into a lamppost. Its flickering light extinguished like the last vestige of fight in him. The Regulator stood nearly eight feet tall in that form when upright, yet this hodgepodge creature towered over him. Even with Xander’s supernatural speed, it seemed able to track and intercept his every approach with a well timed swat. The scent of a near-kill proved too irresistible though, so when the truck barreling down the proverbial pipeline came within striking distance, the aberration couldn’t act quick enough, fixated as it was on its fallen prey.

  Grove snatched Johnny by his studded collar and dragged them both out the open door—or rather, the opening that remained after the door had been torn away in an earlier skirmish.

  The SUV smashed headlong into the beast’s colossal body, crashing to a cold stop from sixty miles an hour. Thick arms clutched the flanks of the battered vehicle, crunching the side panelling and collapsing the frame, reducing the once-mighty vehicle into an oversized accordion.

  Xander, his canine head bloodied, turned to watch the savagery as the beast shredded the truck. The Concrete Monk lay motionless on the other side of the road beside a bloodied brick wall, unconscious and face-down in grime. The man had managed to stave off the nightmare on his own for longer than any of the rest could.

  Johnny B., the last one still largely unscathed, straddled Grove, who had taken the brunt of the beating from their impromptu exodus from the truck. “Come on,” he said, frantically trying to
pat down the hard-bodied warrior. Both of them soaked, in the middle of the road, a flamboyantly dressed elf straddling him, it might be hard to live down on another night—but this night was different.

  Tonight was the night they’d tried to put themselves between a friend and a Blind Judge, the enforcer of the In-Between’s laws, a juggernaut sent to deliver the council’s judgment to those who dared disturb the precious Balance.

  Barely conscious, the soldier spat a mouthful of blood while pawing weakly at one of the magazine holsters on his hip. Luckily, Johnny B. seemed to take the cue for what it was, scrambling to flip it open just as the gigantic surgical nightmare shifted its possessed, narrow-slitted eyes to them.

  Johnny B. started crooning a slowed-down rendition of Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory. There was nothing commercial about his solemn reimagining of the song. A shaky hand retrieved the gadget stowed away in the magazine holster; a small black device with a big red switch on its side.

  With an awareness no mere beast should have possessed, the monster’s eyes widened just as the punk rock elf flipped the switch, a devil-may-care smile plastered across his face.

  ***

  Just down the road, Janzen was fighting against the hammering of his heart, the boil of his blood, and the burn of each struggling gasp of air while sprinting to try to help his friends. His people. His family.

  Close enough for a front row view but too far away to offer any kind of help, he felt a wave of heat from the explosion as it washed over his rain-streaked face, illuminating an expression of pure horror. The Blind Judge, huddling around the mangled truck, surrounded by his closest confidants, his dearest friends, stood at the heart of a gigantic fireball some four stories high. The aftermath left smoldering asphalt, flipped cars, sheared and broken telephone poles, and shattered windows as far as the eye could see.

  Behind him was a puddle-rumbling boom, then another.

  The fire hissing in the distance had nothing on the one in Janzen’s steely eyes.

  “You,” Janzen heard himself say, though the voice couldn’t have belonged to him. The wet in his eyes wasn’t from the heavy rain, and the rage that flowed through his veins was too much to keep bottled up.

  Behind him stood a towering machine, a dire contrast to the beast at the center of the eruption. Where the latter was a network of limbs and parts scavenged from enslaved beasts, this golem was forged from mythical metal and shaped carefully into an indestructible tank. Its expressionless countenance was illuminated by the rich sigilwork etched across its behemoth metal mass.

  A second Blind Judge squared off with the artificer.

  Alone. Again.

  CHAPTER 1

  Two Days Earlier

  “You could use this for like, so much stuff. I mean, anything. Corporate espionage I would have been okay with.” Grove had the bastard I was berating in a hurtlock, making him a captive audience to my monologue. The scumbag in question was Nicholas Greene: late twenties, greasy black hair, unflattering clothes. He had that whole I-live-in-my-parents’-basement vibe. He was gangly and malnourished, and his room looked like an altar to off-brand energy drinks and discount pizza. If I was going to give the word “disappointing” a face, his would be it.

  “But spying on babysitters and moms? Come on, man.” I looked at my hands. In one was a mason jar full of some kind of gunk; he’d called it an elixir. In the other I held a soldier figurine, which I waved at Grove. “Kind of looks like you.”

  Grove glowered at me and tightened his grip, squeezing an unflattering yelp from Nick. Being pinned between my buff business partner and a computer desk wasn’t an enviable position.

  “So, with this stuff—” I lifted the jar. “—you can form a psychic connection?” Next, the toy soldier. “And with some Focus you can actually see what it is he’s seeing? That’s a nifty trick, man. Real nifty. How’d you even figure this out?”

  “I—ow, uhm, well, argh!”

  With a theatrical sigh, I gave him a look of doubt before nodding for Grove to relent. Not without his own qualms about it, he more shoved than released Nicholas. We were both a little peeved; this case was earning us pennies on the dollar because we’d taken it from a scared sixteen-year-old girl.

  She swore to us that a toy kept creeping around the house of the kid she’d been babysitting, and it got so bad that she was starting to have nervous breakdowns. The once valedictorian-bound teenager was now being drug tested by her exhausted parents and counseled by an overpriced shrink who kept reinforcing the suspicion that she was, in fact, crazy.

  At first we had no idea how to approach the case—how do you catch a phantom stalker? Turned out it wasn’t hard, and didn’t involve magic at all, just some rudimentary detective work. Nick here was quite a fan of hers on Instagram, and he’d left a trail of electronic hearts a mile wide leading us right to his door.

  “Talk. This whole pathetic social outcast thing doesn’t earn you much sympathy with us. You were stalking a 16-year-old, Nicholas. That’s fucked up, you should probably get some help before you hurt somebody worse than you already have, or somebody hurts you worse than we already have.”

  After a beat to let the threat sink in, I held the jar up.

  “How’d you get this?”

  “I bought it,” he said in a sullen tone. My silent partner complimented my sour look with a slap to the back of Nick’s head. We made a good team in this respect; everything else was a damned disaster. Still, when it came to the presentation of a unified front, we couldn’t be outdone.

  “Ow! What? I did.”

  “If he’s gotta hit you for every snide remark you make, this is going to be a long day—and as of an hour ago, we switched from the young lady’s dollar to yours.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  Grove slapped him again. Couldn’t tell you how he knew to do that one. Just a sense, I suppose.

  “I bought it,” he whined, rubbing the back of his head, shifting a sneer to the bruiser behind him. “At that carnival thing that just came through, some guy way in the back; he made a big thing about being able to ‘see through the eyes of all’. I don’t know, seemed hokey until he grabbed me with some of that stuff on his hand, and I could see me through his eyes. It was kinda creepy, but cool.”

  Interesting. Something like this wasn’t a cheap parlor trick.

  “How much?”

  “Five grand.”

  “Five grand! How the hell did you manage five freakin’ grand?”

  “I design games,” he said, gesturing to a poster hung up on the far wall. It was Kingdom Killer, a wicked game about a wronged barbarian gaining hellish power in order to take down the establishment that wiped out his archaic tribe. I was in the middle of playing it through for my third time.

  “No way! I love that game. Holy crap, how do I slay th—”

  Grove cleared his throat.

  “Right. Okay. So, you bought this stuff, and I assume he gave you instructions for using it?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, he told me the whole, like, way to use it, what to do, everything.”

  Cradling the mason jar of pungent-smelling goo, I screwed the lid on and turned all of my attention on the kid.

  “Tell me everything.”

  ***

  Daydreaming was one of my least favorite habits, but one I caught myself doing frequently. I found my stupor interrupted when Grove took his hand off the steering wheel and pointed to the jar I’d been staring at. Grove was young, but only in body; his eyes had a clear-sightedness that spoke volumes. We’d spent the last few months as partners, working and living together, building a rapport that was quickly becoming seamless.

  “Small stuff is easier to control, but apparently the drawback is this stuff’s exhausting for even a little bit,” I said. I’d gotten a kind of cursory breakdown of how the goo worked from the twerp we’d snatched it from. “Not sure how it work
s, and it’s gotta be some incredible stuff if it’s able to give a passageway to power for someone who isn’t naturally gifted. The more you use, the more you can control, the more it’ll drain out of you. I suspect it’s habit-forming.” We’d installed a tablet on the center console which picked up on what I said and relayed it to Grove with closed captions. Probably not ideal for driving, but it was far more reliable than lip-reading. I caught a glimpse of his face. His expression was quizzical, not skeptical. We had too much trust for that, at this point, though it was good to see him starting to question everything with a newly-educated mind.

  Grove didn’t have any magical talent, for him this was all a scholarly pursuit. It was easier to fight something you knew, and although we hadn’t come across anything heavy since the Stalker, it was good to see the Boy Scout sticking true to the old motto: “be prepared”.

  “Did you see him? Clothing loose, unwashed, like he’s been ignoring basic hygiene and not taking care of himself. For him to be able to write code and design on that level takes solid know-how. I know a lot of those guys tend to be reclusive, and that contrary to popular belief, even though their community is tight-knit and, they do go out. He’s been fixated on this stuff, and even when you had him twisted like a pretzel he was seriously considering making a grab for it. He was acting like… like an addict. My guess is that this guy gave him just enough to get him hooked, and knew he’d have a customer for life. So, the next time that carnival comes to town, we’ll be there.”