by Rowan Casey
"I’m just lulling you into a false sense of security," I said, which earned a laugh from him. I didn’t feel any better for it.
"Get up," he commanded, and I did. I mean I didn’t want to, but my body danced to his tune. My right arm pushed down, lifting my entire right side up, but my left wasn’t half as willing, and forced him to repeat the command before it did as it was told. I fought like a madman, seriously, I’m talking every ounce of strength I had, but my muscles just would not obey my mind.
I could feel him in there, inside my mind, making me do this. I wanted to scream but my mouth wouldn’t open to make the sound.
And he laughed. He had the sheer nerve to just laugh in my face.
"I expected more from you," Holm said, voice dripping with sarcastic disappointment.
I couldn’t answer him back.
He wouldn’t let me.
"What? No witty come back? Cat got your tongue?"
I tried mental telepathy, picturing an image of just what I’d like to do to him. It must have worked because he tutted softly and said, "Lance, Lance, Lance, what is wrong with you? I mean to say, you kiss your mommy with that mouth?"
I do more than that, I thought, earning a snicker.
Great, he really was inside my head.
"Now, you paid my house a visit this afternoon? I don’t know what you think you saw, but it wasn’t what you are thinking right now. No, no, that poor boy as you think of him, he isn’t some helpless victim in this. Your mind is so utterly banal. I’m so disappointed. I’d been looking forward to this. But as with most things, the reality is disappointing. You’re just limp meat." Suddenly my left arm jerked upwards, my right the same, and I stood before him arms wide open like I was waiting to give the psycho killer a big old kiss, kiss, hey. Okay I know those aren’t the lyrics, but my French is about as good as my ancient Sumerian. You get the point.
I felt myself rising, until I was up on the balls of my feet, balancing on tiptoes.
"I want you to burn this time," he told me, and when I looked down at it my right hand was sheathed in flame. I couldn’t feel any heat from the fire, but I could see the meat beneath blackening with alarming speed. Pus wept through cracks in the charred skin as the fire spread up my arm. "All of you," he commanded. I saw the flames licking up around my feet and rising up my legs.
I was on fire.
"I want to hear your screams," he said, relinquishing his vicelike hold on my jaw and letting me howl. My shrieks echoed throughout the vast hanger, more convincing than any actor’s pretend fear.
Holm smiled at me, a condescending little smirk, and I understood. It was all in my head. He was making me see the flames. He was making my synapses scream and my nerves shred, building a grand guignol of illusion inside my head. As tortures went it was pretty fucking effective. But then I‘ve had years of practice when it comes to torturing myself.
The flames burned out.
"Ah, that’s a shame. I guess I shall just have to hurt you the old-fashioned way."
He walked up to me, until he was inches from my face and I could taste the sour stink of his breath as he grabbed my shirt and tore it open.
If you wanted a piece of me you just had to ask, I thought, as he ran his fingers across my chest. His touch was surprisingly tender and despite the weird circumstances, not a little erotic. He lingered over my pectorals, tracing the ring of my nipples before his hand sought the flat lines of my lats, feeling out every can of my six pack. "I could make you take that gun of yours, put it in your mouth and fellate it, you know. You’d do it. You’d do anything to please me." I wasn’t in any position to argue. "But that’s not what I have in mind for you, my old, old enemy. Your role has always been known. You complete the circle. You are the last of them." He turned to his faithful henchwoman and told her, "Give me the knife."
Great, I thought. He’s going to cut me.
But it was worse than that. He wasn’t just going to cut me while I was helpless to fight him. Cutting was too indelicate a word for it. He carved me.
He took the tip of the knife–which looked like some stage prop apart from the fact that the blade didn’t recess into the handle when he pushed it into my stomach, and as I bled, the edges of the wound glowed with an unearthly flame. He took his time, exact in every little movement as he carved another of the sigils into my flesh.
I don’t know what dead god he intended me to play host to, but I was beginning to get a good idea of just how I would die tonight.
I tried to fight it, but the best I could do was say, "You know what they say, big knife, small dick."
The tip of the blade dug just a little bit deeper than it probably had to, eliciting a wince. I wasn’t about to give Holm the satisfaction of knowing he’d struck a nerve. "It tickles."
He wasn’t about to be put off by my juvenile sense of humor, unfortunately. He finished his carving, and as he drew the knife away the sigil flared a bloody blue, searing the mark into my skin as he said some weird word of binding to complete the ritual. The pain ripped through me, and any thought of a smart-ass answer fled my mind. It was all I could do to hold myself together.
He said something else, another twisted incantation made to seal my fate.
"Do you know me now?" he asked.
"Daddy," I said. "Is that you?"
He backhanded me across the face. I spat blood.
"I guess not."
"Maleagent," he said like it was supposed to be some earth-shattering revelation.
"Bless you," I said.
The truth was, I knew the name. And I knew who he had been. I had known from the moment I set eyes upon him. How do you forget the man who ruined your life, or at least set you on the path to ruining it yourself? Maleagent, Prince of Gorre. Yeah, I knew who he was all right. I remembered all too well how he had kidnapped my friend’s wife, and how my rescuing her had stopped me from wanting to do anything heroic for any of my following lives. I’d never meant to fall for her, and had tried to resist–more than Sam Lake would have ever tried, that’s for sure. I’d never encountered Gorre, though I had heard rumor that it was an Otherworldly place. Now I understood. He was a Prince of the Demimonde. I wanted to say no wonder I didn’t have a fucking chance when he set me on that path to Guinevere, but that’s too easy. We always have a choice. But there was no escaping the fact that I’d been manipulated by a prince of lies.
"Ah, so you do remember me. Well, that makes things much more satisfying."
"For you," I said, though it may have sounded like I said something a little more obscene.
"It’s all about drawing the circle to a close. This world is dying. Can’t you feel it? There’s no magic here. No power. It’s rotten to the core. We used to have a word for this back then, we called it Sourland. And that’s what this is now, Sourland. Just look around you, everyone worships lies."
"And your way is so much better, I assume?"
"Yes," he said with surprising conviction, but then you remember what I said about every bad guy thinking they were the heroes of their own story?
"So, sell me on it," I said, like I was negotiating for my life, which in a way I was.
"I don’t need to sell you anything," he said, taking all of the fun out of the negotiation.
I tried to flex my fingers, but I had absolutely no control of any of my muscles beyond the ability to talk.
"What about you?" I said to the faithful production assistant. "What do you get out of this?" I was talking for the sake of talking, trying to get even a twitch out of my pinky finger to tell me I had a shot at regaining control. It was all about buying time.
"Oh," said Holm, suddenly interested. "Why don’t you tell him my dear?"
She didn’t say anything. Instead she pulled up the tails of her shirt and started to unbutton it.
"As much as I enjoy a good strip show…"
I stopped talking. The entirety of her very flat stomach was a mess of carvings and inked in sigils. She was more than just complicit. Sh
e was his masterpiece. She wasn’t going to help me. She had given herself over to whatever shadow demon was going to slip out of the Demimonde when the Veil came down, and done so willingly.
"And now you see what she gets out of our little arrangement. She shall be a goddess. Not many people get to say that."
"Okay, so what’s the plan? Torture me for a few hours before you kill me? Surely you’ve got better things to do than that?"
"I do," he agreed. "But I can always make time to hurt an old friend."
11
He left me for dead.
One thing I pride myself on is my ability to take a battering. That’s how you win most fights. It’s always the person most willing to get hurt who walks away victorious in the end. It’s not just about skill or stopping power behind your punches. If you are willing to get really hurt you are always going to get some good punches in, and the other guy may be the better fighter, but if he’s frightened of getting hurt you’re going to end him. Of course, when you can’t actually throw a punch it’s pretty damned academic.
I lost count of the blows I took to the ribs and the entire right-hand side of my face was swollen, bruised and bloody by the time he’d stopped fighting.
Between spitting blood I had suggested he suck my dick, which he decided to interpret as kick me between the legs with ball-busting force. I wasn’t going to be availing myself of Madame Evienne’s charms tonight, that much was for sure.
I played dead, letting my eyes close and head loll on my neck after a good eighty or ninety second barrage of fists and feet. I couldn’t fall because he had my body pinned there, suspended on tiptoes. He grabbed a handful of my hair and lifted my head up to see if I was out of it. I blew him a kiss and he hit me some more, until finally I really was out of it.
I didn’t come around for nearly an hour. When I did I was very much alone and appeared to be lying in a ditch in the middle of an enchanted forest. Sound stage number six. It felt like a long way back across the worlds to the door, but I dragged my ass bodily back through each and every make-believe world until I was back on the gantry, sweating and shaking from the exertion.
I was in a bad way, but I was still alive. And alive meant I was still going to be around later, so win-win.
I leaned on the rail for longer than I would have liked, but it wasn’t as though I could call security to help me out. I checked the time on my cell. I was well into single digits in terms of time left.
I opened the doors, and bright light and heat hit me full on, hard enough for me to actually step back into the cold and dark of the hanger involuntarily. But I couldn’t hide in here if I wanted to actually get to the bottom of how I died, and where, and actually find a realistic way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and, you know, survive.
It was a long walk back to the Mustang. I really didn’t feel like much of a conquering hero as I staggered and stumbled most of the way. No one even looked twice. No one asked if I was okay or needed a hand. They just assumed I was some stunt man or a character actor they didn’t recognize working through my shtick. It was depressing.
Back in the driver’s seat I called Grimm, intending to tell him I knew how I died, and that I’d just turned myself into the final sacrifice needed to pierce the Veil, but he didn’t pick up.
I put the mix tape on. The old man’s musical taste is inappropriate at the best of times. It’s as though the damned thing is sentient and shuffles to pick the song most guaranteed to piss you off. Claudia Brüken happily half-screamed how the first cut wouldn’t hurt at all and I wanted to hit Twitter and call her out, tell that actually the first curt hurt plenty, and the second sure didn’t make me wonder. But she was right about one thing, the third one had me on my knees. So, one out of three. Not great but could have been worse.
I drove off the lot, not sure where I was going to go. I was in no state to face off with Holm again, and it was still a few hours before Evienne was hosting her party. It felt like I needed to use the time wisely.
But if I couldn’t kill Holm what could I do?
I tried to remember everything he’d said when he’d been taunting me.
There had to be something, a logical next step. A way to fight back.
I ended up going back to the office to lick my wounds so Sindii could patch me up. She wasn’t exactly Florence Nightingale, but she’d put this Humpty Dumpty back together again with far more success than the king’s horses.
She winched every time she touched my tender ribs, and guessed, "Three or four broken ribs. What the hell happened to you?"
"Funny you should say that," I told her. "This," I said, resting the palm of my right hand across the sigil carved across my heart like I was giving some sacred vow, "if I’m right, and I’m pretty sure I’m right, is the key to that fiery pit."
She cleaned around the raw edges of the wound, soaking the blood up with a damp cloth and then with any number tissues because we didn’t have a clean towel in the office. I looked at myself in the mirror. No one would call me a heart throb now. I’d do well to pass for a palpitation. The skin around the sigil itself was angry and raw. Surprisingly it didn’t hurt so much, or maybe it was just that everything else hurt so much more that the cuts just stung by comparison.
"We’re going to need to get you cleaned up properly," she said, and I whole heartedly agreed.
"Do me a favor," I said, holding out the bone handled letter opener that she used to gut the offending mailshots that crossed the transom. "Cut it. I can’t do it myself. I’m not big on pain. You know me."
"I do," she said, taking the letter opener from me. I’d expected her to demure and to need a bit of convincing. She seemed far too eager to take a knife to my chest, to be honest. The tip of the blade stung as it sliced in, and it definitely drew blood as she carved a slow deliberate line from my left nipple to my right, and then formed a triangle with my belly button. It should have been the sort of meddling that screwed up the symmetry of any arcane sigil, but looking in the mirror I could see that the blade of the letter opener hadn’t damaged the mystical symbol in the slightest. Life could never be that easy, could it?
Sindii went to cut me again, but I caught her wrist. It was pointless. The sigil had been sealed and was going to need some serious juju to break it–which typically I didn’t have and my go to guy for the whole mystical symbols thing had done some sort of deal with the universe to trade his own magic for my second go around, so I was on my own.
Ish.
I had an entire round table of knights freshly woken from their eternal sleep, and I had Arondight, though admittedly in a more modern form. I tried to think. who amongst them used to wield a dagger, preferably one with connections to the shadow world of the Demimonde?
"Give me a sec," I told Sindii, and called Grimm. He might not have magic, but he had a mind. He knew what was going on here better than the rest of us combined, and we were definitely dancing to his tune. "Question," I said as soon as his voice came on the other end of the call. "Where would I get my hands on a weapon?"
"You already have a weapon," he told me.
"A specific weapon."
" Arondight is a very specific weapon."
"An otherworldly weapon," and before he could say I already had one, I said, "a dagger. Arthur used it to kill Orddu, the witch."
"I remember it," Grimm said.
So he should, Arthur had damn near cleaved her in two with it.
"I need that dagger. Now. No questions. Where do I find it?"
"What makes you think it’s anywhere to be found?"
"I said no questions, Grimm. You brought me back or woke me up or however you want to phrase it, now you get to trust me."
"You want to go on a quest hours before you die? Are you sure this is the best use of your final hours?"
"What is it with the no questions thing that’s so hard to understand? All you need to know is that I have worked out how I am going to die, and I’m going to do everything I can to stop it from happe
ning, and that means finding the dagger."
"White hilt," Grimm said. "That was what he called it, wasn’t it?"
I nodded despite the fact that he couldn’t see me.
"It had another name. A tongue twister."
"Carnwenhau," the ancient druid named it in his native tongue.
"That’s the one. Where is it?"
"Gone," he said.
"Like we were, so how do I bring it back?"
"I don’t have the power."
"Again, that’s not what I asked, old man. You answer like a politician. Where is it, let me worry about how it comes back."
"The blade was used to slice time itself," Grimm said, "and was destroyed utterly in the process."
"I’m not loving the sound of that, but the fact you said you don’t have the power means someone does, right? So, less metaphysics more Google Maps, where it is?"
"Everywhere the sun slices time and the moon governs."
"Well, that’s a help," I said. "I know exactly where that is. It’s right next door to what the fuck are you talking about?"
"The white hilt was lost to time, though there are several places across the globe where it could be recovered as the sun gives way to the moon. There are a few in Los Angeles, one outside Union Station, one outside the Greenwich Observatory, another in Carlsbad, one in Death Valley, though this is vertical, not armillary or horizontal."
"How can it be in all of these places at once?"
"Because it isn’t in any of them. It is trapped somewhere between here and the shadow realm. The blades of the sundials cut through the mists of time and, with enough power, a righteous man can reach through into the shadows and withdraw Carnwenhau. The blade has many properties, some mystical, including the ability to shroud its wielder in shadow. This shadow isn’t mere shadow, of course, it puts the wielder a step out of time, so they exist in both realms at once. There is much that can go wrong should a man draw Carnwenhau, including the wielder finding himself draped in the shadow realm. And this is the blade you seek?"
"I’m not fussy. Do you have any other magical daggers which could do a decent job of some crude plastic surgery in, say, a couple of hours?"