by W A Rowland
Soon thereafter it was time to go though. The groups had assembled outside the garage entrance for one last check. Bast had given a little speech, as was her custom, and then turned into a cat, which jumped up and perched on Liam’s shoulder.
“Drop me and I will scratch your eyes out in the next life,” she said in his ear. His face must have gone white, because Cindy had started to comment on something to him, but Thea’s voice broke the silence before she could.
“Load up!” she yelled and everyone quickly loaded into the vehicles. Cindy giving him an encouraging smile, despite looking nervous herself.
“No pressure,” Liam said to himself.
“Lily, you ready?” he asked his guide, who’d been mysteriously quiet for the last couple hours.
“Good to go, joe,” she said excitedly.
“Please tell me you’re not moving from bad puns to bad euphemisms?” He thought.
She was silent. Yes, she was evolving from her dad joke phase into… well something else. Liam didn’t have time to linger on it for too long as he needed to get himself and Bast into the air.
“Ok, hold on,” he said, then focused on making his buffer bubble, ensuring to include Bast as part of his own body so as to not send the goddess suddenly flying away by the repulsion field.
There weren’t any sudden feline screeches, so he figured that was good. Next, he focused on the starting ramp, and saw that Lily was already placing control fields, this time in a much more leisurely incline. He saw her putting them in place and began adding every other one until it seemed they’d reached the limit of his range, which was still pretty significant now. Apparently interacting with Kat and Rich’s aura earlier had given him quite the power boost.
“Here goes nothing,” he said, then ran and leapt into the first field, and unlike before, the field quickly dissipated once he’d gone through it, some new technique that Lily had figured out, he thought.
Or rather, he would have thought that had he not been distracted by the cat claws suddenly digging into his shoulders and back, as Bast held on for dear life. He wobbled a bit as he spun and grabbed Bast off his back, and instead held the screeching cat in his arms. Lily could autopilot them to the facility, he’d focus on keeping Bast from falling the three hundred feet to the ground. Maybe a cat harness would work better in the future? Like a baby carrier, but for cat-shaped demigods.
“Liam, focus, damnit!” Lily yelled and Liam saw that they were approaching the facility very quickly. He focused and together, he and Lily created a holding pattern that took him in high wide loops of the old missile silo. Bast had stopped screeching, and so none of the guards below had looked up to see the odd sight.
They were a few minutes ahead of the cars still and he didn’t want to land too soon. He could see figures in security outfits on the roof with rifles, and at least one guard tower looked occupied, but he didn’t sense any Graven down below, so these were just mundanes. Looking closer, some of them had black auras though. Not just mundanes then. There were several vehicles parked in front of the building including a black Mercedes that he could swear he’d seen at the law office two days prior.
“I think Black is here. I’m pretty sure that’s his car,” he yelled into Bast’s ear, to which he got a scratch across the face. Damn cats.
They circled three times before he saw the guard in the tower suddenly slump, and the two on the roof of the control building fall over. Jax and Sarah had started taking out their security. He thought he got a glimpse of Hand stopping at the edge of a building for half a second before blurring and three figures in front of the main door falling prone, probably with knife wounds. A few of the figures with black auras looked like they’d tried to change form, but were quickly dealt with and their auras winked out.
Liam saw his cue as the roof guards were dispatched and they descended in slow sweeping circles until they finally touched down on the roof where he set down Bast, who quickly turned back into a human and glared at him.
“What’s the big idea of scratching me?” he asked.
“Well, what’s the big idea of screaming into my ear!” she replied hotly. “You do realize that cats have incredibly sensitive hearing, right?!”
“Sorry.”
Bast grumbled to herself and headed towards the roof access hatch, putting a finger in one ear and twisting.
SHADOWHUNTER
Bast and Liam had just reached the rooftop hatch when an explosion rocked the building.
“Was that part of the plan?” Liam said, eyes wide.
“Someone’s probably improvising. Get me inside already,” She said impatiently.
Liam closed his eyes and tried to focus on the idea of Bast becoming a wisp of smoke, flowing through the door. He reached a hand out and touched Bast’s arm focusing on the feeling of floating. Suddenly, something hard hit his face and he went sprawling. He opened his eye to see Bast’s hand still up from where she’d backhanded him.
“What the hell, Bast!”
“Watch your hands!” she cried out.
“I just touched your arm!” he said defensively.
“That wasn’t. My. Arm,” she said pointedly.
Liam turned red. “Sorry.” He got back up and sheepishly walked back over, this time, ensuring that his hand was actually on her arm before he closed his eyes to try again.
“Better,” she said, still glaring daggers at him.
Liam tried to close his eyes and focus on enhancing Bast again. Another explosion rocked the building.
“Anytime now,” she said impatiently.
“Maybe if someone hadn’t bitch-slapped me, I’d be able to focus better,” he said hotly.
“Next time, don’t grab a woman’s chest and you won’t get slapped!” she said. “Now focus!” She said getting visibly frustrated. Liam was starting to get the picture that Bast had not enjoyed their flight and was taking her frustrations out on him. “Shut up and I will!” he grumbled.
Another explosion, this time the roof directly beneath them shook visibly.
“Now, Liam!” Bast ordered.
“Just shut it!” Liam said and got a mental image in his head of Bast just flowing away as a cloud of smoke. Smoke couldn’t talk or slap you. He opened his eyes and Bast was gone.
“I killed Bast!” he panicked.
Suddenly, Cindy was standing next to him. Liam shrieked at the Latina’s sudden appearance.
“Hi, Sarah says Bast is fine and to stop panicking,” she said nonchalantly and then disappeared.
Liam felt like he was getting emotional whiplash from the last few minutes. The door creaked open next to him, and he heard a sibilant voice whispering from the darkness inside. “Come,” it said and he saw a ghostly hand formed from smoke beckon him forward.
“Bast?” Liam said, alarmed.
“Yess… Come,” the voice repeated and floated down the stairwell.
Liam tentatively took a few steps forward. He saw blood on the stairs, but couldn’t see beyond due to the unnatural darkness. He stayed a few feet behind the floating shadow mass as it descended the stairway, making no sound at all. A few feet down the way, a face down body was revealed as the mass passed it. That appeared to be the source of the blood at the top as it looked like the man had been hit by something and then fallen down the stairs.
Liam couldn’t see any kind of wound except for the blood dripping from under the man’s head. Maybe Bast had hit him with a pipe or something? At the bottom of the stairs, the unnatural shadow split and rushed along two different hallways. Liam heard shouts and gunfire echoing around the corners. This was soon followed by screams and wails of agony, then silence.
Liam saw the shadows from the left moving back towards the right-hand hallway along the baseboard and decided to move that way. He rounded the corner of the hallway and found a scene from a nightmare. Men and women in dark outfits were slumped against walls. Blood leaked from their mouths, noses, eyes, and ears. Bast definitely hadn’t hit these people with a pi
pe. It looked like they’d just exploded out of their heads. He made his way gingerly down the hallway, trying to avoid the quickly pooling blood. He continued until he found the shadowy form of Bast floating in front of a large vault door.
It was different, because this time, the shadow had actually formed into an approximation of Bast’s body and it floated in front of the door.
“Airtight,” the sibilant voice hissed out as it looked at the door.
“You can’t get through?” Liam asked.
“Unsure,” she said and began to float towards it.
At that moment, Hand and Thea came around the corner, mouths agape.
“What the hell happened down here?” Thea said, a shocked expression on her normally placid features.
“Death,” the voice said as it dissipated and floated into the crevices of the vault door.
“Liam, what was that?” Hand said, looking more afraid than when they’d been fighting the were-pack at the landfill.
“That’s Bast,” Liam said, swallowing hard.
The three were all silent for a moment while they digested that the shadow monster was indeed their leader. After a few seconds, faint screaming could be heard from the other side of the door and the large locking pins along the side suddenly snapped open and the door began to swing in.
The room immediately inside looked much like the hallway had. Bodies and blood everywhere, except the people in this room were wearing some kind of black robes, instead of the security uniforms. They were all armed, though it looked like one had been using a chair as a weapon, so Liam thought it might be safe to assume that the major resistance was over with. Until they got to Black that is.
“Liam,” Lily chimed in.
“Welcome back, are you ok after the enhancing?” he asked her.
“It still takes a lot out of me, but that’s not what I need to tell you. I sense something old. We shouldn’t be here,” she said and he could hear the worry in her voice.
“Is it Black? I think we can take him with three of—”
“It’s not Black. He’s here, but there’s something else here too, like Julian, but even older. Something terrible,” she explained and he could feel her shudder in his head.
“We’ll be careful,” he said and turned to the others.
“Lily is saying there’s something big down here. Like Julian big,” he told them.
“But that’s not possible, Sarah would have felt it if he was here. He’s still a were and she can sense them,” Thea said.
“Unless they have something else. Something that she can’t sense,” Hand said gravely. “We should be careful either way,” Hand said and slowly made his way into the room.
Inside, they found several doors and hallways open to what was essentially a foyer. In the middle was a statue of Black and his wife, both holding glowing balls of power in their hands. On Black’s forehead was a Greek alpha letter, and Anita had an omega Symbol on her salaciously exposed thigh.
“Cult much?” Liam said staring at the statue.
“I think that confirms that this is Algos we’re dealing with. That statue is pretty close to how he used to have his followers represent him in ages past. Guess he moved on to a dualist cult with Anahita though,” Thea observed, while Hand just nodded.
“So, which way do we go?” Liam asked, looking at the three hallways after a moment.
“When in doubt, stay to the right,” Thea said and headed that way.
Ten minutes later, they found themselves back in the foyer from the right side.
“So apparently that’s a loop. Middle it is,” she concluded.
“Hey, have y’all seen any sign of Bast in the last little bit? I think the enhancement might be wearing off soon. It just feels like it’s going to wear off soon,” he said worried.
“She must have gone down the middle, let’s go,” Thea said. “Hand, scout ahead.”
Hand nodded and was gone, a little dust kicking up where he’d been.
They followed for a few moments before they heard a monstrous roar. “Shit, let’s go,” Thea said and took off towards the noise. Liam cursed and followed as best he could.
They rounded a corner and saw a room with large glass windows looking inside, like interrogation rooms in a police station. The roaring was coming from the room on the end.
“Oh God! That’s it. That’s the presence!” Lily screamed in his head.
“Thea, Lily says that’s it,” Liam said. At the end of the row, Hand was looking through the window with an expression of disgust on his face.
“Hand, what is it?” Thea asked running up next to him and stopping, staring at the beast. Inside was a creature, easily seven feet tall, with emaciated ash colored skin. Bone spikes grew from its joints and along its limbs. Its head was covered by an incredibly large deer skull with huge antlers. The eye sockets glowed a midnight blue as it screamed against the glass, pounding on the window.
“Holy shit, what is that thing?” Liam said coming up short.
“Wendigo, big one too,” Thea said studying it.
“It’s been hunting for a very long time. See the antlers; this one is over two thousand years old,” she said.
“What the hell is a Wendigo?!” Liam said, not understanding.
“Native American mythology pegs them as spirits of famine and winter. They’re hunters though. They’ll sleep for a hundred years in their caves, then appear and hunt for a few days before going back to sleep. Myth says that once one gets your scent, they’ll never stop hunting you. Also incredibly difficult to kill,” Thea replied.
“So, is this glass…” Liam started as the Wendigo slammed a spiked fist into the window again.
“Thick enough. It shouldn’t be able to scent us from in there, but that won’t be the case for very long if we stay around. Eventually, either the glass or the wall is going to give out. Why would Black keep something like this?!” she said disgusted.
“Would make a nice weapon to release on someone he didn’t like,” Hand pointed out.
“Scent a person with their clothes and set it loose .Easy way to make sure someone you don’t like is good as dead,” Thea finished the thought.
“We should see what’s in these other rooms, in case he has some other surprises,” Hand said, then turned and walked towards the other two windowed rooms.
He flicked a switch on the next one and a light turned on revealing an empty room with a large table, and several bloody torture implements inside.
“Interrogation room. Recently used too,” Hand said.
“Someone’s in this one,” Thea said from the third room.
Through the window, Liam saw Jessica, his old office place nemesis hanging by her hands from a post on the wall. Her clothes were shredded and bloody wounds covered her back. She hung limp against the post, her feet a couple inches off the ground and swollen like they’d been broken, and the way her shoulders looked, made Liam think at least one was dislocated.
“She’s the one Black grabbed the other night. Jessica,” Liam said looking at the limp girl. He never liked her, but no person deserved what he was seeing. A nine-tailed whip and several hammers lay on a table nearby, still dripping with blood.
“Must be how he’s feeding his guide, kidnapping people and torturing them to eat their fear and pain. Hand, can you get her out of there and to Steven? Those cuts are deep, she’s gonna bleed out without treatment,” Thea said, and Hand nodded.
A large foot slammed against the door to the room, breaking the lock and sending the door slamming inward. The noise apparently woke Jessica, who started screaming.
The screaming elicited a roar from the Wendigo. Hand tried to talk to the terrified woman, but one look into her wide eyes as they cut her from the pole told them she was already gone mentally. Her eyes held no soul, just pain and terror as she let out hoarse screams, her mouth frothing.
“Hand, get her out of here, she’s gonna upset the neighbors,” Thea said coldly, giving the girl a wan look.
Hand gingerly held Jessica’s hyperventilating, crazed form to his chest, cradling her head as best he could as she squirmed to get away, and ran, ramping up his speed slowly as to not hurt the girl any more than necessary.
Liam watched them go. “I used to hate her,” Liam said sadly. “I used to imagine what it would be like if she just disappeared.”
Thea made a grunting noise. “We all hated someone at some point, Liam, whether it was right or not. Now, you see the bigger picture though, and how stupid it is to hate people when there are bigger monsters out there,” she said as she walked back to the end of the row, glancing at the Wendigo, which had gotten extremely quiet.
“What’s gotten his attention?” she said suspiciously.
“We should go,” Liam suggested, shaking himself out of his malaise.
Thea nodded and they exited the hall opposite the door Hand had used.
Minutes later, they rounded a corner to see Bast in her normal form, standing in front of another door.
“Took you long enough. We need to get this door open, get the stones and get out of here,” she said emphasizing the “get” of each statement.
“Liam, can you boost me?” Thea asked, pointing to clenched fist.
“I can try,” Liam said, remembering to grab her wrist before closing his eyes. A repeat of his embarrassing moment with Bast on the roof replaying in his head, making Lily chuckle.
He thought back to the memory of doing it before and felt energy leave him. It was definitely easier each time he did it, but he still didn’t quite know how it worked.
Thea grinned and charged the metal door in front of them, punching it right above the lock. A chunk of the wall came away with the deadbolt and the door swung open. Bast and Thea rushed in.
Inside the room was a pedestal with three core stones on it. Each the size of a clementine, they glimmered with an internal light: one orange, one purple, and the last with an opalescent hue, but there were only three.
“Bast, I thought they needed five and mine was the last one?” Liam asked.