by Gene Gant
“Don’t be so sure of that. There are sprites everywhere on this island, and they’re loyal to me. They couldn’t see you when you set your mother free, but they had no problem at all seeing her. They know where you tucked her away, and I know what they know.”
Panic flared in Draven’s face again. “You stay away from her!”
“You want to save her, boy? All you have to do is make your first kill, and I give you my word I’ll never touch her again. No need to be squeamish. Killing’s easy. Let me show you.”
In moves almost too fast to follow, Malwar swept around Draven and attacked Inky once more. He planted his foot in Inky’s chest, pinning him to the ground. Then he grabbed Inky’s head and yanked. Only Inky’s supernatural nature kept his head from instantly ripping free from his neck, but in a few seconds, even his inhuman body would succumb to Malwar’s horrible strength. Inky screamed, a long, shrill cry of agony.
Draven screamed too, a wail of insanity from a soul driven over the brink. He was on his father in a flash. With a single, desperate stroke of both fists, he struck his father’s right arm. The limb snapped with a loud, thick crack.
Malwar reeled backward, releasing Inky in the process. He cursed as he staggered against a tree, holding his broken arm. The broken bone began healing instantly, and within moments, it was whole again. When he turned around, Malwar saw Draven holding Inky tightly in his arms, tears streaming from his eyes. Inky had lapsed into unconsciousness, and Draven clearly feared he was dying.
“I can’t lose you,” Draven babbled at Inky through his sobs. “I don’t think I can live without you.”
Malwar froze. And then, as the realization sunk in with slow, sure horror, his face twisted with revulsion. “You worthless little shit,” he sneered at Draven. And then outrage burst across his features. “You dickless, worthless piece of shit! You bonded with this boy? You set yourself up to mate with a goddamned boy? You’re of no use to me or to the Grendelkin. You’re a fucking waste of seed!”
Malwar dug a hand into his mane, just below his chin, and pulled out a tiny object he wore on a chain around his neck. He clutched the object in his fist. With hatred and fury blazing in his eyes, he barked out an ancient command. “Spirit of the ring, I summon thee!”
I awoke at once, pulled by the power of the summoning. I warped myself in front of Malwar in a blaze of black lightning, where I bowed down to him. “Master, what is your command?”
Malwar shook with indignation, looking not at me, but at Draven. “Kill my son,” he said loudly, his voice ringing with venom. “Kill Draven Northbrook!”
Fourteen
NO….
I didn’t want to hurt Draven. He was only fourteen years old. Fourteen years didn’t even amount to an eyeblink on the grand scale of eternity.
Draven was just a kid. A hotheaded monster, yes, but a true kid nonetheless. I liked him. He reminded me of Angelo in so many ways. I’d loved Angelo more than I could possibly say, but I’d still condemned him to a slow, miserable death on the command of my last master. And while I went on with my life—shopping, partying with a vampire couple, making friends with an incubus and a Cat-o-Nine and a junior Grendel Kid—I’d never stopped hating myself for killing Angelo.
I was going to be the death of Draven too, another act that would haunt me through my unending days. I didn’t want to kill him; my soul burned, agonized at what I was about to do. But for me, there was no resisting the order of my master. Refusal was an utter, abject impossibility.
And so, against the desperate, anguished protests of my inner being, my body reacted like a thing unto itself, a robot following the programming input by its owner. In their true forms, the djinn are demons. My true form erupted to carry out the command of Malwar.
I’d never actually seen what I looked like in that form, and I never wanted to. But I knew from the looks on the faces of people who saw my demonic body that it was horrible. Draven stared in terror as I shape-shifted rapidly to tower over him and the unconscious Inky.
My new master had not specified the manner in which I was to carry out his command. That meant I could kill Draven in whatever way I chose. Inside, however, the reluctant part of me seized on the lack of specificity as a way of stalling. “How do you wish him to die, Master?” I thundered in a hollow, echoing voice. It would buy Draven only seconds at best. Hopefully, it would also get him a quick, merciful end instead of a prolonged one.
Malwar glared at Draven with growing disgust. “Tear him apart,” he replied. “Slowly. Piece by piece. I want him to die screaming in agony. I’d do it myself, but I won’t foul my hands with his filth. And when you’re done with him, tear the head off the incubus. Then I want you to place your sleep curse on the Cat-o-Nine and bring her to me.”
There was unmistakable glee beneath the rage in Malwar’s voice. After recognizing what I was and the threat I posed to him, he’d come up with a way to neutralize that threat. He found my soul ring, probably through the sprites. Then he waited, knowing I would try again to strike him down with the Curse of Wazim. He waited for the perfect moment to reveal his ownership of me. That moment had come, and now he relished the idea of having me betray my friends.
Something in me screamed, in rage, in protest. But I had no choice.
I lunged at Draven.
MY DEMON hands were huge, powerful, covered with shiny dark skin. With Inky clutched in his arms, Draven leapt aside, just seconds before I could grab him with those hands. I twisted, following his motion in swift, unrelenting fashion. Just as Draven’s feet touched ground again, I was there, arms outstretched, coming at him.
He gasped, stunned at my speed and ferocity. He dodged to the side, and under other circumstances, he would have evaded my headlong charge completely. Carrying the dead weight of Inky’s unconscious body slowed him down, and I managed to clip Draven’s shoulder with my grasping hand as he moved. That glancing blow tipped him off balance, and he staggered.
His chances would have improved considerably if he just let Inky go. But Draven would never do that. He would die protecting Inky. Pulled by Inky’s weight, he fell, sprawling clumsily on his left side. Inky tumbled from his arms, rolling several feet away from him over the sloping forest floor. Draven quickly got to his feet and tried to go after Inky, but I was hot on Draven’s trail, and he had to face me instead.
He should have leapt far away and saved himself, at least temporarily, but that would have left Inky helpless before me. With a defiant shout, Draven raised his fists and delivered a one-two combination of strikes across my chin. Those blows would have knocked me on my ass in my human form. Unfortunately, my demon form was far stronger than my human form, stronger even than Draven. The blows didn’t even make me blink.
I grabbed at Draven with both arms. He jumped up and over my head, landing just behind me. As I spun around, he jumped again. By the time I turned back, he had scooped Inky into his arms.
I made another sweeping grab for them both. This time Draven jumped straight up in a powerful, desperate leap. I grazed his foot with the tip of a finger but nothing more as the leap carried him up through the treetops.
I could have followed him, but I knew Malwar wanted to watch Draven die and listen to his tormented screams. With a chop of both hands, I opened a passage. One second later, a bolt of black lightning slashed the air in front of Malwar, and Draven smashed to the ground with Inky.
The vicious landing stunned him. He lay with Inky beside him, both of them helpless. The towering Malwar folded his arms over his chest, a pleased smile spreading across his face.
I strode across the forest floor, keeping my eyes down to avoid looking at my new master, my soul dying inside me. Draven moaned. He turned his head slowly from side to side, struggling to collect his wits, as I stood over him. I reached down and grabbed him before he could even force his eyes open.
I held him by the neck with my left hand. I grabbed his left wrist in my right hand, ready to tear off his arm. That would be followed b
y the amputation of his other arm. Then I’d take his legs apart, starting with his toes, popping them off one at a time. As commanded, I was going to slowly turn Draven into a screaming, bloody mess.
Fifteen
IN THE forest, Mina wasn’t meditating. She wasn’t contemplating her inner selves during the time Inky was drawing Malwar into the forest and Draven was freeing his mother from her prison; during the time Draven abandoned the plan and leapt across the island to confront his father; during the time Malwar took possession of my soul and ordered me to murder my friends. After everything was over, I learned she’d been communing all that time with the life force inside the island.
The life force wasn’t a separate entity, as it first appeared. It was the power of several thousand entities, the collective will of the earth sprites. Earth sprites could be found on every continent and even at the bottom of the sea. This island, however, was their home country, the place of their race’s birth. And no matter where an earth sprite moved in the world, a part of its consciousness was always anchored here to form the grounding soul of its people.
Why do you serve the Grendelkin called Malwar? Mina asked the collective.
Because he is mighty and terrible, the collective replied. Because he is cruel to us if we do not. If we disobey, if we do not move fast enough in doing what he demands, he crushes us and eats us like a toad eating flies. He does the same to our cousins, the sprites of the air, of the fire, and of the water. He is a terror upon us all!
Everything you say about Malwar is true, Mina replied. And yet you aren’t helpless in this.
Who will help us? the collective asked bitterly. We are tricksters, mischief makers. The rest of the world looks with disdain at the sprites. Not even the other faerie kind will aid us.
In this, you don’t need anyone else’s help. You have it within you to stop Malwar’s abuse of your people. You just have to fight back against him.
Fight him? Are you mad in all of your souls, Cat-o-Nine? We are nothing to the strength of the Grendelkin. We cannot match him in savageness and cruelty.
You don’t have to match his sadism, Mina responded. You only have to overcome his strength.
How can we overcome his strength? He breaks us like sticks!
Individually, yes. But I’ve been studying you since I came here. You, the group spirit within this island, are a mighty thing.
No. We are mites in a world of big things. We are nothing.
I disagree. Together, the earth sprites put up a shield around this island that has kept humans away from it for thousands of years. There are billions of humans in the world, far more of them than there are Grendelkin and sprites. If you can keep the entire race of men away, there is nothing to stop you from overcoming one monster.
No! We can’t do it….
It took a lot of talking and a lot of time for Mina to argue with the collective about the reality of its own might, so long that at one point, she came close to giving up. She had sent out one of her souls, the ghost that had greeted Inky, Draven, and me on our first visit to her house, and that spirit watched as my demon form took over and captured Draven. The ghost watched and grew alarmed as it saw me prepare to slowly kill Draven. Mina almost let the collective surrender to its fear and doubt, giving in to her own fear that she was the only being on the island who would try to save Draven and Inky from me. She would try despite the knowledge that, acting alone, her effort was doomed to fail.
But then, something happened, something that had seemed improbable only moments ago.
The collective rose up.
DRAVEN STRUGGLED against the pressure of my hand around his neck. He grabbed my forearm with his right hand and pulled himself up enough that he could breathe. There was no reasoning with me: I was a plane on autopilot, and Draven could see that. He looked instead at his gloating father.
“Malwar,” Draven gasped, his voice shaky with fear but his eyes defiant and challenging. “Kill me if you want, but… let Mom and Gray and everybody else go. I’m… the one y-you hate.”
“Wait, spirit,” Malwar commanded, stopping me just before I tore off Draven’s arm. He stepped closer and leaned over to glare into Draven’s eyes, revulsion glowing stronger from his face. “Are you begging now? Are you so fucking weak that you’d beg me for the lives of a human cow and a faggot incubus?”
“I’m not… begging you for shit.” Struggling for air, Draven spat the words as best he could. “I’m telling you… j-just let everybody else go. You got me. There’s no reason for you… to hurt the others.”
“No reason?” Malwar roared his disdain. “Your worthless mother birthed me a girl when I need a son to carry on my bloodline. She’s still young enough to breed, but she’s obviously defective, so why would I spare her? And do you really think I’m going to let this little pretty princess of an incubus walk away? Through the soul ring, I can see now that even this djinn, who tried to help save you from me, would plow your little ass to hell and back if he got a chance. The whole lot of you sicken me to my gut.”
Rage twisted Draven’s face. He pounded at my arm with his fist, trying to free himself as he glared back at his father. “Fight me, dammit!”
Malwar sneered. “I wouldn’t disgrace myself by even touching you. I do want to see if you’ll at least die with a little show of manhood by not screaming on your way out of this world.” He spat at Draven and raised himself to his full height. “Spirit, kill him now.”
At once, I yanked on Draven’s arm, intent on tearing it off his shoulder. His dense Grendel Kid flesh resisted for several long seconds, but bit by bit, his skin began to tear. Draven’s eyes grew wide and bright with intense pain, tears welling up in them an instant later. But he kept staring at his father with hatred, even as his shoulder dislocated with an audible thick whump.
Then something swelled through the forest from all directions to surround us, invisible but pressing inward so forcefully that it bent the treetops down. The soil beneath us rippled like a carpet of snakes, and the earth bucked powerfully under me. The motion tore Draven out of my grip, tossing him one way and me the other. I landed on my back, and the invisible force pressed down on me, holding me in place.
“What the hell is this?” Malwar growled, stumbling backward. The ground behind him split, and a gigantic claw of earth and stone rose up to seize him in a powerful grip and wrench him into the air. Malwar roared with fury as he struggled to break free. The earthen appendage grew tighter, squeezing until he could no longer move.
Mina’s ghost form rose up from the wriggling earth to hover in front of the startled monster. “Malwar, the earth sprites no longer want you here. They give you this one chance to leave their island now if you vow to never return or to harm any sprite again.”
“This is your magic, cat,” Malwar said, “not the sprites’. They don’t dare defy me.”
There was a furious whirl of motion among the bent trees as leaves, sticks, and loose dirt whipped about and gathered themselves together, forging a single, massive shape. Roughly a minute later, a thick, squat, manlike thing as big as a grizzly bear, made up of dirt, sticks, and leaves, shambled forward to face Malwar.
“We do defy you, Grendelkin” came the voice of the collective, not from the assemblage of forest detritus standing in our midst but from everywhere around us. It was thousands of tiny voices, speaking together in one rumbling roar. “But we are not monsters like you. We give you one chance. Leave this place. Vow never to come back. Vow never to harm any sprite ever again. Vow to never harm this Cat-o-Nine, who is now our friend, nor any of her friends standing now on this island. Do these things, and we will let you have your life.”
Malwar was not cowed. He roared again. “Little shits! I’ll kill you all! I’ll eat every single one of you! I’ll kill your whole race!”
And in that defiance, Malwar sealed his own fate. He struggled again to break the grip that held him. The figure of sticks and dirt waved one of its huge hands, and on that signal, the claw b
egan to drag Malwar down. Alarm flashed across his face as he realized what was happening, that the collective will of the earth sprites was too much for him to overcome, that it was taking him down to where their life force pulsed, the heart of the island. “Spirit of the ring—” he cried out.
I never knew what command he was trying to give then. The earthen claw swelled to cover his mouth before he could finish it. Mina’s ghost form hovered alongside the massive figure of sticks and dirt, watching together as Malwar was drawn down into the ground. Off to his left, there was movement as Draven walked up beside Mina’s ghost form, his uninjured arm around the waist of a groggy but conscious Inky. Draven’s face showed the pain he felt from his dislocated shoulder, and over that was the hatred in his soul as he stared down at his father. But love was just as obvious in the tender way he held on to Inky.
That love was apparently too much for Malwar. He wrenched his head back and forth, freeing enough of his face that he could speak again. He had only seconds left, plenty of time for him to command me to save him. In Malwar’s case, hatred trumped rationality. Shooting a blazing glare of disgust back at Draven, he shouted, “Spirit of the ring! Bury my son alive at the bottom of the ocean!” And then Malwar was gone, pulled down into the heart of the island.
Mina’s ghost form turned anxiously to Draven, along with Inky and the ponderous form of sticks and dirt. The force of the earth sprites’ collective will pressed down even harder on me, trying to restrain my actions, trying to stop me from carrying out Malwar’s final command.
I didn’t want to do it. But I had to.
Draven vanished in a bolt of white lightning, and Inky screamed.
I FELT it the instant I was free, the moment when Malwar was separated from my soul ring as he sank below the ground’s surface into the life force of the earth sprites deep below. There was no point in searching the ground where he vanished; the curse removed the ring at the moment of the separation and hid it again, to be found by yet another who would own me. Like his father, Draven was gone too, buried even deeper beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.