by D V Wolfe
“It’s not June,” I gagged. I grabbed Noah by the back of his suit jacket and dragged him out of the room. I pulled the door closed and we moved down the hall. Every room seemed to still contain the individuals who normally worked there, though all of them looked like someone had forgotten to poke holes in them before putting them in the microwave. Noah was running ahead of me, pushing doors open and calling for June. I was checking under desks, just to make sure she wasn’t lying somewhere, unconscious. I didn’t find anything in the piles of what were once Copia employees that looked like it might belong to June.
“June!” Noah screamed from the end of the hall and I slipped on a pile of guts trying to get out the door and into the hallway. Luke blew by me, running for the end of the hall towards Noah’s voice. I was right behind him. A door on the left opened and Noah came out, half-carrying June. She had a swollen lip and a puffy circle around one eye. She was limping and there was a long cut down one leg, through her jeans. The shredded denim was stained red and brown. The wound didn’t look deep, but it was going to need stitches. Luke bent down and scooped June up in his arms.
“You two go down the stairs. When you get to the first floor, there’s a pair of glass doors right next to the stairwell. It’s the tour area, but there’s an emergency exit out of there. Just look for the redcoats. Get June out of here,” I said.
Noah had been focused on June who was barely conscious in Luke’s arms. He jerked his head up and met my gaze. “I’m not leaving you by yourself to deal with Griffith.”
“Noah,” I started.
He ignored me. “Luke, can you get her to the car by yourself?”
Luke nodded. “She’s not heavy. We’re on this side of the lot, I should be ok. But…” Luke looked at both of us in earnest. “I don’t want you two to have to face more of these things by yourselves.”
I opened my mouth to reply but Noah interrupted. “Don’t worry about us. We’re professionals. Just take care of June.”
Luke looked at me and I nodded. “What he said. And take care of yourself. She’s going to need the hospital. Now go!”
We helped him get through the stairwell door and when it closed I turned to Noah. “Professionals, huh?”
Noah shrugged. “At least semi-pros, right?”
I started back to the elevators.
“Right?” Noah asked, hurrying behind me.
20
When the elevator doors opened on the fourth floor I had expected to be immediately swarmed by a room full of demons. Instead, the room was empty except for an older woman sitting behind an L-shaped desk.
She looked up from her computer screen and squinted at us. “Can I help you?”
Well, if the fourth floor was still civilized, might as well take advantage of it. I pulled out my badge and flipped it open.
“Homeland Security. We’re here to see Mr. Griffith?” I said.
After the first two words, the woman’s pleasant expression evaporated and she heaved a heavy sigh. “You people, again? Mr. Griffith doesn’t have time to waste with your ridiculous insinuations. He has a company to run.”
She stood up just as the heavy wooden door behind her swung inward.
“I’m calling security,” the woman said, picking up her phone.
“Now Betty,” a smooth, deep voice cooed from inside the inner office. “That won’t be necessary.”
“But Mr. Griffith,” Betty started. There was a sound like fingers snapping and then Betty’s head made a sharp ninety-degree angle to her neck and spun around backward. The old woman crumpled to the floor, the phone in her hand clattering across the desk. I looked at Noah and I realized that I had just dragged him to his doom.
“Oh Betty, always looking out for my interests,” the voice said, drawing closer. “Always to a fault.” The speaker emerged and stood framed in the doorway. It was Bill Griffith from the painting downstairs. “Sorry, you had to see that. My staffing issues shouldn’t be the concerns of Homeland Security,” he turned away from us and moved back, deeper into his office. “And even less of a concern to hunters.”
Something hit us like a wave of energy. I tried to struggle, but I couldn’t move my arms or legs or even twitch my fingers. I couldn’t turn my head to look at him, but Noah looked like he was in the same predicament. Then, we were moving. Being pulled forward by some force, our feet skimming the top of the carpet. We went by the reception desk and Betty’s corpse, and then we were being pulled into the inner office. I heard the heavy door shut behind us, followed by a series of metallic clicks.
“Don’t want us to be interrupted,” Griffith said with a smile. “And since you are my guests…” The wave of energy holding us vanished and we both collapsed to the floor. A wave of exhaustion now seemed to come crashing down on me, quadrupling what I was already feeling from the sword, and it took me two tries to struggle to my feet. “Oh yeah,” Griffith said. “It’s best if you just relax when I bind you in that kind of spell, otherwise it tends to use all the energy you are using to fight it, against you. It amplifies it and after struggling for ten seconds, you may as well have been working a ten-hour shift as a lumberjack.” He picked up his coffee mug and turned away from us. I stared around the room, looking for any indication that this was Berith. The room looked like a normal office for the most part. One entire wall was a TV with breaking news about the international spread of a virus. The sound was muted. The wall behind the desk held framed and signed pictures of Griffith with different famous people. One wall was all windows, looking out at the plant behind the building, and the last wall held an enormous framed map of the world. Different notes and symbols had been written on the glass over it in black and red marker.
“You like my little war room?” Griffith asked, leaning back against his desk and smiling as we took in our surroundings. Neither of us said anything and I saw a flicker of disappointment in Griffith’s eyes. “Of course, at first glance, the magnitude of what we’re doing here isn’t immediately recognized.”
“And what are you doing here?” I asked.
“Giving the people what they want,” Griffith said. “War, conflict, corruption on a Shakespearean level, hate. I tell you, I was not looking forward to making this trip upstairs.” He moved over to the window to look out at the plant. “But this? This is fun.”
I was about twenty feet from him. If he spent another two to three minutes monologuing with his back to us, I could quietly draw the sword and creep up behind him to run him through. I wasn’t feeling super confident about the “creeping up behind him” part. The fact that he could snap his secretary’s neck with a single hand movement seriously had me doubting that Noah and I would make it out of this. In fact “doubting” was too hopeful. He turned back to face us before I could even attempt the “shit plan” I’d been forming.
“I never dreamed it would be so easy, but there are people who want all of this,” he gestured to the room in general, “as bad as we do.” His gaze focused on me and he smiled, his eyes burning a dark red. “And now the train is heading down the tracks, thanks to, well, you,” Griffith said, gesturing at me.
“Is that supposed to cripple me with guilt?” I asked.
Griffith smiled. “Cripple you? Aren’t you already crippled enough?”
He made a gun gesture with his thumb and forefinger. “Bang,” he said. I felt my knee give out. Pain ripped up and down my leg and I stumbled sideways into the wall.
“And I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m not the Duke you’re looking for.” Griffith chuckled. “Yes, I know all about your little vendetta with Berith.” The room didn’t shake. He smiled as if he knew what we’d been expecting to happen. “You see, I outrank him, so when I say his name, there is no wonder or fear attached to it.” He shrugged and chuckled. “Really, I’m surprised you assumed I was him. He’s a bureaucrat. The day he put together something like this,” he nodded at the TV. “is the day...well, that home would freeze over.”
My uninjured leg was going out from
under me and I slid down the wall to the floor. Griffith gave me a sympathetic smirk. “No, downstairs I’m an actual king, so it’s only right that topside, I’d be a 'king of industry'.”
Fuck. A King of Hell. Not a Duke or a Prince. A King. Great. My guess was that we were about five seconds of his Majesty’s boredom or one wrong word out of our mouths, away from exploding like the members of the third floor. Were those dead workers on the third floor the reason he’d been able to come upstairs? Blood sacrifices, blood oaths, they’d been needed for summoning and bringing up low-ring demons. I wondered vaguely about the mob. Were they all on the hook? Had they signed something that had turned their souls into blood oaths for this asshole? We were so far out of our league here. A fucking King.
Griffith studied us both closer. He met my gaze. “One of you, I’ve been dying to meet for some time now. The other of you, I couldn’t have cared less if you ever crossed my path. Can you guess who is who?”
Few things pissed me off more than people wasting my time, but demons wasting my time was at the top of my list. If he was going to splatter us to kingdom come, I’d rather he just got on with it.
“How do you get anything done around here with these mind games?” I asked.
“Oh,” he smiled at me, “everything else is a mind game. Passive-aggressive, two-faced, petty. But war, war in its truest form, is pure, elegant and honest.”
I thought he might have been dipping into his own drug manufacturing a little too much. “I’ve never thought any of those things about war,” I said.
“Think about it,” he said, pushing off from his desk and coming to stand over me. “What is the most basic animal instinct?” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “To feed, to be the aggressor. Humans are just animals. They tell themselves bedtime stories about the things that separate them from the rest of the animals but they are the same at heart. They. Want. War. They need it. They crave it for survival. Aggression is strength. Strength is power.”
I could see Noah out of my peripheral vision, moving around behind Bill, inch by inch on the carpet.
“Think about it, Bane,” Griffith said. “Can’t you feel it, right here?” Griffith reached his hand out and put his fingertip to my chest above my heart. A chill like the sudden onset of a fever hit me. I could feel my forehead breaking out with sweat. My vision had become tinted red and I was angry. There was more anger surging through my bones than I had ever felt in my entire life. My gaze focused on Griffith and Noah. I wanted to pound their faces into the carpet. I wanted to rip out their throats with my teeth and put my gun against their temples and empty an entire clip.
“See,” Griffith said, his voice like fingernails on a chalkboard. I tried to lunge for him, needing to dig my thumbs into his eye sockets. “I think you get the picture.” He waved his hand through the air as if he was batting away a fly and my vision began to clear, my heart rate slowing back to normal. And now my leg was hurting worse than before because I had lunged forward on it.
“Is that,” I panted, “what you did to five of your employees yesterday? Gave them a ‘taste of war’?”
Griffith picked up a pack of cigarettes off his desk and went over to push open a tiny side window pane. He shook one out. “They did that on their own.” He looked up at me. “I’m telling you, you leave the humans alone long enough, they’ll do it to themselves. I’m just here to speed the process up. I mean, we have forever, but they certainly don’t.” He lit the cigarette and took a draw on it, looking out the window.
“Now that we’ve had our mono a mono,” Griffith said looking at me with a smile. “I’d like to make up for some lost time,” he turned to look at Noah, “with my son.”
21
“What?!” Noah spat. “Bullshit!”
Griffith shrugged and tapped some ash off the end of his cigarette out the window. “I understand you’re probably angry. I missed all those birthdays and t-ball games and craft days. Man, you really liked gluing macaroni to things, didn’t you?” Griffith grinned at Noah who was starting to turn white. Griffith looked back out the window. “I was in town, on a survey trip, as it were, about eighteen years ago, at least in your time. Anyway, and there was this sexy young thing, working at the coffee shop. She would read the customer’s palms and their tea leaves. She was wild.” He looked at Noah. “Had a mop full of wild orange curls and skin like milk. And she was young with a body that made the biker I was wearing stand at attention.”
Griffith had to be screwing with us. I’d never heard of a demon mating and having offspring with a human. It wasn’t possible as far as I’d ever heard. And if any other hunters knew, they would have said something.
“She had this mole on the back of her calf that would drive her crazy when I licked it...hmmm memories,” He looked over at Noah and sighed. “I wish I could say that I loved her.” He chuckled. “The truth was, I needed to drop a marker. I had my ascension to plan, but I needed something to anchor myself to this place so that I could get back without any kind of delay. It’s an old ritual. Most demons don’t even consider it because to mate with a human is...deplorable.” He shrugged. “But, it did allow me to fly under the radar and be the first of the Kings to make it back upstairs. So, to do it, I knocked your mom up. When you were born, there was an earthquake in Pennsylvania. You had split the void, half-human, and half-demon.” He shook his head. “Don’t fret though. You are just a marker, a means of passage. I knew that you would carry my demonic blood like a homing signal and like would find like when the time was right.”
Noah threw up, but it didn’t look like there was much left in his stomach. He dry-heaved. Griffith nodded at him as if he understood perfectly. “I understand. This is probably a huge shock to you. I would have liked to tell you in my true form, but,” he looked down at himself and then doubtfully at Noah. “But if you’re doing...that,” he motioned to Noah heaving on the carpet, “when I look like this? Then I’m not sure you would be able to handle my true form.” He moved to stand over Noah and shook his head. “Pity. I would have liked to think better of any offspring of mine. There must be more of your mother in you than me. I had expected you to still be here. It would have been so much quicker to just turn you and your mother to dust and erase both of you from ever living here. Technically speaking, by the laws of the Council of Kings downstairs, your existence, isn’t completely legal. Oh well, you’ve now served your purpose.”
I shoved what Griffith was saying into the back of my mind. He was advancing on Noah and he was distracted. Now was my chance. I’d been pushing on my knee and I was relieved to find it wasn’t broken. My knee cap had moved to my inner leg as if it was trying to go down my pant leg. It was dislocated. I bit down on my tongue as hard as I could so I wouldn’t scream out loud when I forced my kneecap back into place.
Noah was curled into the fetal position now, his hands over his ears and crying. “You liar,” he screamed.
“So disappointing,” Griffith said. He lifted his cigarette-free hand in the air and I stumbled forward, pulling the sword from its sheath. I held it down by my side and I was a foot from him when the wave of energy caught me again, freezing me in place. He turned to look at me, amusement dancing in his eyes. “A present?” he said, looking at the sword, “For me?” The sword was jerked effortlessly out of my hand and I felt the nerves on my palm burn because of the tight grip I’d had on it. He caught the sword in his cigarette-free hand and then put his cigarette between his lips and took the sword in both fists. “Good weight to it,” he said around the cigarette. He went back to holding it with one hand and he pulled the cigarette back out of his mouth, trailing smoke behind it. He pointed at the sword. “You know, there’s something about legends that make their subjects larger than life. We all know the story of the Ukkin sword, but until you hold it, you never think it’s going to feel like a regular sword.” He spun the hilt in his hand. “Huh, it’s kind of disappointing.” He shrugged and dropped his cigarette into the ashtray on his desk.
&nb
sp; “Still,” he said, moving towards the TV and swinging the sword around him, “it’ll make a great visual aid at the stockholder’s meeting. The American dream is like this sword, all story, and little substance.” He turned to look at me again. “And the stockholders will like it because what we’re selling is a lot like this sword too. Big promises, big guns, bigger dicks than the other guy. Meanwhile, we’re selling the same kit to, well, everyone. Then it’s time to take our finger off the button and step back. After that it’s like a fucking game of frisbee, watching the power and the death and disease, bounce from one country to the next. Nuclear winter will cause humans to freeze and starve, but they’re so stubborn, they’ll come back with everything they’ve got left and trade it for more weapons to go after the guys who went after them.” Griffith chuckled and held the sword like a golf club, swinging it back and following through. “Even as their children are crying out from hunger and their forces have been decimated. One more rocket, one more bomb, one more chance to screw the other guy. Even if it kills them too. Aggression, I tell you, humans invented the most ruthless forms.” He shrugged. “I just want to supply the demand.”
Griffith moved back towards me, the sword extended out, the blade, which was pristinely clean, even after the black goo it had been smeared with less than an hour before, was pointing directly at my nose. “Still, I’m not completely unfair. Since you brought me the sword, I’ll let you choose. Beheading with it? Nice and fast? Or do you want, maybe a stomach puncture all the way through so you can bleed out slowly and watch me tear my son limb from limb? Maybe a little of both? Stab, cut a little neck, stab, cut a little more, you get the idea. Maybe I should have my son choose…,” Griffith paused. There was smoke coming from his jacket. Flames were licking up his pant legs and from the bottom of his coat.