by ST Branton
Then, I went blind.
It only lasted a second, but the flash was bright enough to wash out everything white. The handle vibrated against my palm, and I looked up.
A sword.
The thing was a damn sword!
Its blade was shining and golden—the kind of thing you’d expect to see getting pulled from a stone in fairytales—but it was real. I could feel its dangerous mass just waiting at the end of my reach.
How much force would it take to drive this through something, or someone? Not much, I guessed.
The mob grunts stared, their mouths hanging open and their slack faces bathed in yellow light.
“Do you see this shit?” one of them asked no one in particular.
Pencil-Dick glowered. “Hell yeah, I see it, and I don’t like it.” He lifted his hand to reveal a stubby silver pistol.
Now or never.
I swung the sword downward. Less than halfway through the arc, gravity took over, and the thing stuck in the ground. I might have stared dumbstruck at it forever if it weren’t for Pencil-Dick’s screaming. Drops of something dark splattered down around the embedded point of the blade. It was blood. Shortly thereafter, I realized he was missing the hand that held the gun.
Brutal, but efficient.
The goon to my left made a move to close in on me. I freed the sword from the dirt and ran it through his stomach. He made a muted choking sound. Red trickled, then ran, from his mouth. On its way out, the gleaming blade sliced cleanly from his gut, up through his shoulder. I watched the body fall in pieces, and I felt nothing beyond a dull satisfaction.
These guys were not Rocco, but they would do for now.
It was Pencil-Dick’s turn to crouch, trembling, as his friend attempted to help him stem the bleeding from his brand-new stump. I drew back and let the sword draw a golden curve in the air, straight through his friend’s neck. His head rolled off into the shadows. Pencil-Dick whimpered.
The momentum from that swing carried me through into a spin, and on the return, I cleaved him more or less in half at the waist. I hardly saw him die.
I stumbled a little, caught off guard by the weight of the weapon in my hand. A hush descended on the deserted pier. The moon shone down on me, surrounded by three bodies—four, counting the dude from the river—and holding a sword that was clearly beyond my understanding. My eyes went from the golden blade to the sliced-up goons to the drenched old man, in that order.
“What the hell just happened?”
***
There was no time to wrestle an answer out of my question, because whatever I had stumbled onto, it wasn’t done with me yet.
Three dead men lay before me, and a fourth was quickly on his way. I needed to get far away from here, and leaving the old man wasn’t an option. Saving him from drowning just to let him die kind of sucked.
So I leaned in, and struggled to drag his waterlogged, armor-clad half corpse toward the relative safety of the street. That safety disappeared as the growling of an engine met my ears.
“Those little pricks just can’t resist me, can they?” I muttered. My cargo shifted his weight, nearly throwing me to the ground. “Hey, watch it!”
His head fell to the side, eyelids fluttering. The engine drew nearer. It was circling, no doubt a driver looking for his three partners, who were now resting in pieces around the pier. Sooner or later, he would find us instead. I adjusted my grip in the stranger’s armpits and pulled him as fast as I could. “Work with me here. We’re running the hell out of time!”
Incoherent mumbling was his only answer.
But I wasn’t shit out of luck just yet. There was a junked-out beater at the curb, its edges dark with rust. If it wasn’t already abandoned, no one was gonna miss that thing. I redoubled my efforts, the drone of that circling engine humming in my ear. The car—our salvation—inched closer.
Three feet from the driver’s side door, I lost patience. Dumping the stranger as gently as I could in a wet heap on the gravel, I bolted to the car and yanked on the handle. The door stuck for a moment before bursting open in a rain of rust and paint chips. Wires already hung exposed from the underside of the steering column like a gift from the Grand Theft Auto angels.
I was hunched over in the front seat when the prowling driver finally discovered us. Just as the beater sputtered to life, someone’s feet hit the ground outside.
“Hey, you!”
I jerked my head up, all ready to let the dickhead know he’d chosen the wrong bitch to screw with that night. But he wasn’t talking to me.
“Holy shitballs,” I whispered. The dude in the armor stood dripping in the spot I’d left him. He loomed head and shoulders over the thugs who were piling out of the car. I hadn’t noticed his mean-ass spear before, but I damn sure saw it now.
It looked a lot more menacing in his hands than it should have, crazy getup and all.
He swung the point so fast that it sounded fake, except its trail was laced with blood. My jaw dropped open as the spear danced through the air. It looked so simple—nothing more than a fancy stick with an arrow on the end—but it did some serious work. The man in the armor made death look a little like art; almost beautiful, if no less cruel.
By the time I snapped out of it and realized he was actually committing murder, one of the thugs lay crumpled in a widening pool of his own blood. I tried to keep my eyes from fixating on the place in his throat where the spear gouged. My heart pounded wildly. I’d just gone from perpetrator to witness in the span of ten minutes. And I didn’t like that shit at all.
“Hey, Spartacus!” I called. My throat was dry. “We gotta split. Come on!” The dude dragged his spear out of the last goon’s chest and started toward me. After two steps, he faltered. After three, he was back on the ground.
Two human beings cut down like blades of grass, and he couldn’t last a minute when it counted the most.
Freaking men.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” I muttered over and over again to myself, my curses barely audible over the car’s engine.
I was driving down a side street in the shitty Buick that I hotwired on the curb, with the half-drowned stranger shoved in the backseat. It had been an ordeal and a half to get him all packed in there, but grit carried me through in the end. Sure, he was folded like a paper crane, and I had to lean on the door to close it, but I couldn’t afford to care. The guy had just knocked off two people like he was out for a walk in the park, and he wouldn’t remember any of it anyway. If he did, I’d just apologize.
Assuming he woke up again.
The thought of him lying dead back there filled me with panic, even though he was breathing and had a pulse. If I had the option, I might have taken him to a hospital, or maybe I would have called the cops. But those were privileges for a normal person with a normal life.
Not for me.
Not to mention the fact that I didn’t trust a single New York cop as far as I could throw him. They hadn’t done shit when my parents died; they wouldn’t do shit now. And the hospital staff would definitely call them as soon as they got a load of the armor on this guy.
For better or worse, I was his only hope right now. I didn’t want or need that burden of responsibility, but I also couldn’t fathom just tossing him in the street, most likely to die alone. I had already saved him from drowning. The least I could do was try to get him back on his feet. Then, maybe he could fill me in on the whole sword thing. That would be nice.
First, we needed to get the hell away from the dock before someone else just happened along. The way my luck was going, it was inevitable. Hence, the stolen car.
This particular set of skills didn’t necessarily make me proud, but when you’re surviving on nothing but your wits, you have to make some moral compromises. Good and evil had a way of becoming malleable in the moment.
I stopped the car in front of my building. Normally, I would have ditched it much farther away from my place, but he was too heavy, and
I was too tired to drag him far. I extracted him from the back, and his legs hit the ground kind of hard. I winced, then figured the armor would curb the worst of the damage.
We still had four flights of stairs to conquer, which was no easy feat. He was a man-sized dead weight, wrapped in chains, and I had to drag him up steep-ass staircases with loose railings.
I dropped him a few times, and on the fourth floor, his head thumped against the landing. I winced at the sound.
“God, I hope you don’t remember this.” He didn’t even move. “I also hope you’re not dead. And I wish I spent even more time working out, because hot damn.”
I propped him up against the wall next to my door and wiped my brow with the back of my hand.
“I know I just killed some guys, but did I deserve to drag three hundred pounds all the way up to my door? I’m not sure.”
His head slipped to the side as I hauled him over the threshold. He lay in the middle of the floor while I secured all the locks and walked around my apartment shedding light on things. The wiring in the building was dodgy at best, but I’d long since gotten used to the flickering. Couldn’t deny it beat sleeping on the street.
After the workout on the stairs, getting the guy situated on my mattress was a piece of cake. I arranged his limbs deliberately so that he did not look like a body in a coffin, and then, I examined his armor. I knocked on the plate with my knuckles, as if the weight wasn’t enough proof that it was real metal.
Where had this dude come from, and why was he dressed like this? I decided I would help him, if for no other reason than to learn the answers to those two questions.
The armor came off in pieces. I laid it carefully on the floor. Underneath it, the stranger was almost shockingly well-built for a guy who looked like he could be a new grandfather.
Yet another mystery.
I was soon distracted by the discovery of an injury, a huge, black wound on the right side of his back. The wound was literally black. It looked like it was filled with ink. Eerie, vein-like lines spiderwebbed out from the center, wrapping around the side of his ribcage.
“I don’t think I like that,” I said to myself. I went to the tub against the far wall, wet a clean rag, and wrung it out in the basin. When I put it to his skin, some of the black stuff came away. “Well, that’s gross—”
He grabbed my hand.
I wasn’t one of those girls who screamed at everything, but that did the trick. Out of pure instinct, I seized a vodka bottle from the crate that was my nightstand, and I brought it down on his head. He grabbed his skull with both hands, releasing me, and I jumped back, yelling in a deep, coarse voice.
I brandished the bottle, now broken, in front of me.
“Who are you?” I demanded. My voice had lost a lot of its typical bravado. I’d had a long day, and I wasn’t looking forward to whatever this was.
He looked around wildly, searching for something. He almost jumped out of bed, wound and all, until his eyes landed on the golden hilt leaning up against the wall in the corner.
He took a breath, then turned to face me, flinching as his wound wrenched. “You struck me!”
More than angry, he sounded surprised, and maybe even a little hurt. Like I should have known better. The nerve.
“Because you grabbed me!” I shook the bottle at him. “Who are you?”
He shook his head, blinking. “I am Marcus. From Carcerum. And you strike very hard.”
“Thank you. I don’t know what Carcerum is.” I kept the bottle out in front of me.
“No, of course you don’t. You are…” He trailed off, taking real stock of his surroundings for the first time.
I felt slightly self-conscious about a lot of things: the bare floor that was stained and chipped in places, the exposed light fixtures, the toilet obscured by nothing but a haphazard wall of crates and corrugated cardboard. To say nothing of the punching bag in the corner that was little more than my old mattress wrapped around a pole and secured with duct tape. Or the furniture I’d clearly pulled from other people’s junk.
“What is all this?” he asked.
“Look, I know it’s not much, all right?” I said defensively. “I’m not in the greatest situation. I couldn’t take you to the hospital. I’m sorry.”
“Hospital?” He looked at me with genuine bewilderment. “What do you mean by ‘the hospital?’”
I stared at him. Either I’d dropped him harder than I thought, or he was really committed to his character. I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Just tell me what you’re doing here. I’ve had a rough night. And some of it is your fault, so you better have a damn good explanation.” It wasn’t exactly fair to come down on the guy who’d narrowly escaped drowning an hour before, but I was exhausted and hungry and wanting to put it all behind me so I could move on.
Marcus pursed his lips, thinking. Finally, he said, “I will tell you my story in exchange for yours.”
I rubbed my face. “Oh, come on. I’m not the one who dropped into the river out of nowhere and almost died in it. I don’t carry around a huge sword made of light or some shit. I don’t wear armor!”
He was unruffled. “What is your meaning?”
Seriously, this guy. “My meaning is that you have a ton more explaining to do. And it would be cool if you could start that sometime this year.” Frustrated, I got up and stalked to the old oak dresser I had painstakingly carted back from someone’s curb, not unlike the way I’d muscled Marcus’s ass up those steps.
I grabbed a fresh set of clothes. “Don’t look. I’m changing.”
I had no energy to bother with any more than that, so if he looked, I didn’t know. It felt amazing to get into something dry—grey sweats and a well-worn tank. Comfort clothes. My mood automatically lifted about ten notches.
He was facing away from me when I turned around.
“So?” I asked.
He glanced over his shoulder. “An exchange of information seems fair under these circumstances,” he said.
Another question for the ages: why the hell did he talk like that?
“In other words, you won’t say jack unless I feed you something first.”
He nodded. “My body does require occasional sustenance.”
“What? That’s not what I meant. Ugh.” I threw my hands up. “Fine. Whatever. My name’s Vic. Five years ago, this rotten scumsucker killed my parents, and I’ve been looking for him ever since. As a matter of fact, I found him tonight, and I would have killed him if you hadn’t shown up.”
“Ah.” He nodded in understanding. “A quest of vengeance.”
“Something like that.” I sat down in front of the mattress with my legs crossed. “Your turn.”
“I know something of revenge,” he said almost wistfully. “It never helps.”
“Your turn,” I repeated pointedly. No way was this guy going to play my therapist. Thankfully, he seemed to get the message.
He stretched out, flexing his fingers, and then stopped short. I watched him pat himself down for something. “My flask,” he said. A note of urgency entered his voice. “Where is it?”
That made me anxious. I pawed through the armor laying on the floor behind me. It was on the belt next to where I had found the sword, which was now just a hilt again.
I didn’t let myself think about that. Nor did I let myself think about the mysterious golden meteorite that appeared right before this guy showed up in the river.
The flask was ornately carved and small, but it was surprisingly heavy in my hand. I gave it to him. Marcus nodded his thanks. He took a deep draught. “Better. Now, I am ready to speak.”
I wasn’t focused on his face anymore. The wound in his back had just shrunk, its tendrils receding before my eyes. When I brought my attention back to his features, his hair was unmistakably darker and a bit longer, as well. The lines around his mouth and eyes didn’t cut as deeply into his face.
I blinked. The man I had assumed to be at least middle aged, if
not older, had just dropped twenty years in a matter of a few seconds.
“What just happened?” I gestured around my own face. “Here. What just happened here?”
Instead of answering, he simply raised his flask a bit. I stared at it and then stared at him. I found myself at a total loss for words. Maybe the hunt for Rocco had taken a greater toll on me than I thought. Maybe I was finally cracking up.
“Okay,” I said. “I mean, okay.”
He arched his eyebrows. “Are you ready to listen?”
“Yes.” I rested my chin in my hand. Maybe his story would help me feel less crazy, and it wasn’t like I had cable. “Go for it.”
“As you wish,” he said. “I will tell you everything.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Many millennia ago, it was not just humans who roamed this world. There were gods among you, and monsters, and some who were both. Humanity was enslaved by these gods, used as workhorses and playthings. The toll on human civilization was staggering.”
I ran a hand through my hair, fighting the temptation of sleep from the corners of my mind. “Really? That isn’t what I learned in Sunday school.”
Rather than laughing, Marcus looked confused. “You have most likely learned a world’s worth of inaccuracies about the higher beings, but I assure you that your legends are but a shadow of the truth.”
He took a second to gather himself, then pressed on. “The gods were insatiable in their lust for power, and impatient in their dealings with one another. A great many wars were fought, won, and lost among them, all in the name of this petty squabbling. Some of them centered around the humans’ place in the order of things. So, it is ironic that these conflicts also killed your people by the millions each time. They were treated as cleanses, necessary to refresh the world and renew it for a fresh crop.”
“I’m gonna level with you here, dude,” I said. “That’s screwed up. Sounds like your gods need to reevaluate their priorities.”