The Tome of Bill Series: Books 5-8 (Goddamned Freaky Monsters, Half A Prayer, The Wicked Dead, The Last Coven)

by Rick Gualtieri

  Oh yeah, a shower was definitely going to be a necessity before we poofed outta here, or at least it would be as soon as I...

  That’s it! The bitch needs to die!

  What the...?

  I tried to sit up, but immediately my guts cramped as a shudder racked my body. I curled up into the fetal position to let it pass, and that’s when I caught sight of my hand. Charred from the flames of faith, the claws extended at the end of it were still plainly visible – but they were longer than usual and still growing.

  Oh no!

  All at once, my mouth felt cramped and I realized my fangs were likewise elongating past their usual length.

  “What are you doing?” I asked to nobody but myself.

  She attacked us. I’m coming out.

  “No!”

  I tried to force Dr. Death back down, but he felt like an irresistible force in my head – raging to be set free.

  “Go away!”

  Rather than focus on fighting Dr. Death, adding to the anger I could feel radiating from inside of me, I instead tried to think good thoughts – the Nintendo system my parents had gotten me one Christmas, the first time I’d felt a girl up in college, that time Tom and me got shitfaced on cheap tequila and the cops caught him taking a shit in my mother’s herb garden, Sheila ... not as the unstoppable warrior of faith, but as I’d first met her. Her smile, the only thing I remembered from the day I first interviewed with Hopskotchgames.com.

  Yes, focus on the good things in life.

  It was touch and go for a moment, but at last, I felt the change within me reaching a parity with my thoughts.

  What are you doing?

  “Now is not the time,” I replied to myself. “Leave me alone!”

  She...

  “Doesn’t deserve this.” I concentrated on the good, forcing every negative thing in my life to the back of my head.

  I don’t know how long I lay there in a pile of smoldering cow shit. Could have been seconds or hours. I wasn’t sure. Sights and sounds filtered through to me – voices, movement above me, the rumbling of engines. However, nothing really registered for a while. I was too busy, locked in a contest of wills, focusing every inch of my being internally.

  What I do know is that when I finally looked up and saw Sally’s face staring down upon me, I felt like me again. Probing with my tongue, I was delighted to find I had lips again. Whatever time had passed had been enough for my healing to take over.

  She reached a hand down to me, then scrunched up her nose and apparently thought better of it. She was a real sweetheart, I tell ya.

  “Want to talk about it?” she asked, her look not entirely unsympathetic.

  I sat up and brushed myself off a bit for all the good it did. “How’s Sheila?”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, she told you she was leaving.”

  “She did?”

  “Uh, yeah.” She backed up and leaned against the house, looking at me like I had two heads. “Half the place came out here looking for you after we heard the explosion, but you were all like ‘Go away! Leave me alone!’”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, you looked kinda pissed ... rolling around in your shit pile there.”

  “Wait,” I said, standing up. “Did she say anything?”

  “Well, once everyone saw you were okay, they decided to give you guys some alone time.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I might have overheard a little.”

  Normally, I would’ve been pissed, but right then, I was grateful that Sally was a nosy busybody.

  “Spill.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Would I be asking if I did?”

  “Beats the fuck out of me. You might have some weird-ass quirks I don’t know about.”

  A small part of me was tempted to ask Dr. Death if he wanted to come out and play now, but I held my temper and paused for a moment to consider things. I wasn’t sure what had just happened with regard to my inner psycho. Until I was, it was probably best to keep it to myself. “The ... incident sort of scrambled my circuits for a little while there.”

  “No shit. What did you do to piss her off?”

  “I kissed her.”

  “Must’ve been one heck of a bad kiss.”

  It had been quite the opposite, in fact, but rather than bask in the moment, I was far more interested in hearing why Sheila had disappeared. I expressed as much to Sally.

  “She seemed pretty upset about what happened.”

  I looked down at myself and shrugged.

  “Not about blowing you up, although maybe she felt bad about that too. She didn’t really elaborate.”

  “Go on,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Well, all the while you just kept mumbling things about leaving you alone, so I’m pretty sure that didn’t help, but anyway, she kept apologizing, saying she thought she had it under control, but it got away from her...”

  “Her power?”

  “I guess so. But she said something about getting caught up in the moment.”

  “Caught up in the moment? You mean she liked kissing me?”

  “I don’t fucking know! Like I said, I was eavesdropping, not hitting her up with a survey.” After a few moments, she added, “Maybe. That could be the case. After a few minutes of you ignoring her, she kind of broke down. Was sort of pathetic to watch.”

  “And?”

  “And she said that maybe it was fate.”

  Oh crap.

  “That maybe Icons and Freewills weren’t meant to be together and that trying to go against it was maybe tempting destiny in a way that wasn’t meant to be.”

  The tale Alex had told me of the doomed lovers – Edgar and Vara – briefly flashed in my memory before I was able to push it away. “So she left? Where? Is she coming back? Is she...”

  “Relax, Don Juan. She left with the Templar. The plan hasn’t changed ... well, much anyway.”

  “So that means...”

  “You still have a shot at meeting up with her in the middle, assuming we all don’t come down with a bad case of being dead.”

  For a moment, my spirits lifted, but it didn’t last. How many times were we going to go through this before I accepted it – that it just wasn’t going to work, at least not without one of us perpetually being blown to smithereens?

  Christ, other couples had issues like hating each other’s friends or not liking the same TV shows. I had to pick a girl for whom seemingly any emotional upheaval – good or bad – could lead to a fiery blast of anti-Bill magic.

  I shook my head, having no fucking clue what to do, and then went and leaned against the house alongside Sally.

  She wrinkled her nose. “You might want to do that upwind of me.”

  “Sorry.”

  In response, she smiled. “It’s okay. I probably shouldn’t kick you when you’re down.”

  “Never stopped you before.”

  “Hah! Now that does sound like me. I just wish I could remember those good memories.”

  “Me too,” I replied softly.

  “Although I doubt there’s anything nearly as good as you kissing an Icon and blowing half your face off.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The first time we kissed, it kinda blew your mind.”

  She stopped and stared at me. “Wait a second. We kissed?”

  “Yep.”

  “Us?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “As in you and me?”

  “That’s pretty much the gist of it.”

  “How ... why?”

  Geez, talk about another ego boost to make my night. Oh well, there was probably no need to outright torture her. “It was right before we did it.” Okay, maybe a little torture wouldn’t hurt.

  “What?!”

  I couldn’t help but let th
e grin escape onto my face. “Gotcha!”

  “I was gonna say, since when did my standards drop so...”

  “But the kissing part was real.” At her dubious glare, I continued. “It was the first time you met Sheila ... or almost met her. She was out on a date with Harry Decker.”

  “The skull?”

  “He wasn’t a skull at that point, but he was still a walking cum stain.”

  She turned toward me, interest in her eye. “Go on.”

  “Anyway, we were out grabbing a coffee when I saw them. She turned toward me, I panicked, and so I planted one on you so she wouldn’t recognize me.”

  Her eyes grew wide, so I held up a hand. “Relax. It was just to cover my...”

  “Not that,” she said, her eyes turning glassy. “Keep going.”

  I didn’t like the look she had on her face, as if she suddenly felt sick. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes ... keep talking.”

  “Okie dokie, then. So anyway, after that, we ended up in an alleyway where I might’ve said a few things and...”

  “And it was ... deep, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, not what I was saying. I pretty much just wanted to kill the dick, but you...”

  Sally suddenly doubled over. Tremors racked her body and then turned into a full-on seizure.

  “Oh no.” I grabbed hold of her to keep her from tumbling over into the mulch pile, but she was shaking so badly I was certain I’d lose my grip. “Sally! What’s wrong? Talk to me!”

  Just as quickly as it began, the spasms stopped. For a moment, she went limp in my arms. Quick as a flash, though, she seemed to recover. One little wobble and then she was standing back up straight. The hell?

  She looked me in the eye and, for just a second, I saw what appeared to be recognition. “I told you to hold on to your humanity for a little while longer.”

  Holy shit! “Yeah, you did.”

  “I told you it was one of your more endearing traits.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Clear as day. I...” She hesitated.

  “What?”

  “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I was proud of you. You held on to yourself where I ... err ... a lesser vampire, that is, might have given way to the anger and torn Decker’s throat out.”

  “In retrospect, that might not have been a bad idea.”

  “I don’t know, don’t remember that much, but you didn’t. That’s the important part. You stayed you. That’s when I first suspected that maybe I...”

  “You what?”

  “It’s ... fuzzy. I’m not sure.”

  Fuck it; it didn’t matter. What did was that she’d gotten another little piece of herself back, that once again she’d managed to tap into some emotion that allowed her to knock down another piece of the wall in her brain, the wall put there by the most powerful vampire on the planet.

  I couldn’t help myself – I threw my arms around her in a great big hug. It had been a kiss that had ruined part of my life this night, but in some strange sort of cosmic symmetry, it had likewise been a kiss that gave a small piece of my friend back to me. Maybe fate wasn’t so cruel after all.

  “Bill?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but get your fucking mitts off of me. You smell like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.”

  No, maybe fate wasn’t cruel. People, on the other hand ... they could be assholes.

  Part 2

  Raising the Stakes

  Our plan had originally been to leave at the same time as the Templar contingent, but since we’d already blown that, I figured a quick shower wouldn’t hurt us too much more. Besides, Sally was right – I did reek.

  By the time I came back downstairs, smelling nice and soapy with maybe a spritz of some cologne I’d found in the medicine cabinet, I found everyone in the living room.

  Tom, Ed, and Sally were busy pulling guns out of her duffle bag. Adam and Mike stood nearby, hopeful looks on their faces as they stared almost rapturously at the weapons. Oh God, those two packing heat. That was gonna be lots of fun.

  Dave was off to the side, a large backpack slung over his shoulder and a notepad in his hands that he was busy scribbling on. I made a mental note to see what he was writing about and, if necessary, burn it.

  Christy was checking a large circle that had been drawn on the floor. I stepped forward and felt a slight hum of power coming from it. Our conveyance for the evening, I presumed. Off to the side, just outside the circle, lay Harry Decker’s skull. A dim purple glow continued to emanate from its empty eye sockets. I’d been kind of hoping his spirit had departed back to whatever Hell he was damned to be sodomized in, but that wasn’t the case. So much for this being a pleasant journey.

  “Everyone present and accounted for?” I asked, knowing that at least one of our number – perhaps the most powerful among us – had been driven away by our aborted tryst earlier.

  “Hey, Bill,” Tom said amicably, “you get all the shit outta your teeth?”

  “No, but I see you haven’t gotten all of it out of your brain either, so I guess we’ll both have to deal.”

  He chuckled, and I stepped past him.

  “How’s it looking?” I asked Christy.

  She turned toward me. For a moment, her gaze was hard, a testament to the fact that she was still angry, but then – thankfully – it softened a bit. Guess she’d been one of the folks who’d checked on me and probably put two and two together. The hell with it. I’d take some pity forgiveness. I wasn’t proud. “I’m just about ready.”

  “Are you going to be ... okay doing this? Apparating us to...” Her glare cut me short. “I mean, sending all of us?”

  A small smile crossed her face. “That’s not going to be a problem. My sisters charged up the circle before they left. There isn’t really much for me to do other than to release the power.”

  “Sounds like a capacitor.”

  “In a sense. At the end of the day, magic is just another form of energy. It can be harnessed and contained.”

  “Cool.” I glanced to the side where I had the eerie feeling Decker’s skull was watching me. Holding up my left hand to cover that I was pointing with my right, I asked, “So, is everyone coming with us?”

  If only your subtlety was as great as your stupidity, Decker mind-blasted, you might have a chance of coming out of this endeavor alive.

  Gah, what an asshole. “Listen, you skinless shithead, I will gladly skull fuck the magic right out of your gourd.”

  Silence descended upon the room for a moment, until Tom added, “You tell him, Bill!”

  Try it and I shall show you the true meaning of power, you pathetic excuse for...

  “That’s enough, both of you!” Christy snapped. “Yes, Bill, everyone is coming. Harry too. I need his help with that Jahabich binding spell. His knowledge of ancient arcana is superior to mine and...” She hesitated for a moment, as if she found what she was about to say distasteful. “...his time beyond the veil seems to have given him some extra insight.”

  That immediately set off Adam and Mike, talking among themselves and wondering which of the myriad D&D pantheons he’d ended up in. Dorks. Besides, it was painfully obvious that someone like Decker would end up in a place where he’d be polishing Demogorgon’s knob for eternity.

  “Is that a good thing?” Ed asked, speaking above them.

  “It’s ... it’s not natural,” Christy replied, a pained look on her face. “What awaits us is supposed to be an unfathomable mystery. Breaking that wall is wrong.”

  But quite useful, my ward, Decker opined. I have seen things that would have melted the eyes from my mortal head, conversed with beings forgotten for eons, gained knowledge that could shake the world to its very foundation.

  “Prove it,” I said, smelling bullshit from a mile away. “Make good with the vulgar displays of power.”

  Brainless dolt! As if I need to
answer to you, the one who was my undoing in this...

  “It was your own damn fault,” Christy blurted out, her face turning red. “If you hadn’t become obsessed, had considered for even a moment that your damned prophecy might be wrong, then maybe you wouldn’t have been killed.”

  Blasphemy!

  “It’s a fact. I’ve spent time with the Icon. She no more wants to kill us than anyone else.” She glanced around the room and shrugged. “Most people in this room anyway.”

  And that will be your undoing, child.

  “No, it was your undoing.” She sounded sad for a moment, but then her voice hardened again. “I’ve decided to make my own fate, forge my own path.”

  Then you will die.

  “If so, I will die as my own person, not a slave to the...”

  “This is all truly fascinating,” Sally interrupted, her tone saying otherwise, “but are we going to argue metaphysics all night or go and kick Vehron’s ass before the Templar get there and fuck it all up?”

  “Hard to argue with that logic,” Ed said, the look on his face mirroring what I was feeling – she sounded like the Sally we knew.

  Christy apologized and went back to her preparations, but not before – much to my amusement – picking up Decker’s skull and stuffing it into a velvet bag. I shared a smug grin with Adam and Mike. It was pretty much the strategy we used when Dave had once burdened us with a wisecracking sword that he used to mercilessly mock us in-game.

  Within minutes, she was ready. We all gathered inside the circle, a tight fit for our group, as Christy chanted a few words. When she was done, she started to say, “May the White Mo...” before catching herself. “May fate smile upon us.”

  I had just enough time to add, “I sure as hell hope someone will,” and then there was a bright flash of light as reality blinked out around us.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I’ve said it before, but I am really not a big fan of being poofed from one place to another. It’s kind of like those freefall rides they have at amusement parks, except instead of falling down, it feels like you’re falling in all directions at once. It’s hard to explain otherwise, except to say that I was glad I hadn’t eaten a big meal before doing so.