by Jeff Hale
Before I could even get into a proper stance he was on me again. I struck out in desperation, stabbing a dagger into his ribs as I ignited it. He howled in pain and hit me three times in the side of the head before I could even blink.
As I reeled from the impact and quickness of his strikes, my sight going grey around the edges, he lunged at me and sank his fangs into my neck. I cried out in pain, not just from his teeth tearing into my skin, but from the burning sensation that spread out from the bite along my nerves. Then I heard him make a gurgling choking noise and he yanked himself away, screaming as he stumbled back from me. My blood stained his lips, dripping down his chin as he held a hand to his throat. Cracks began forming all along his skin, fiery light pouring through them.
“What… are… you?!” he demanded, right before he exploded into glowing motes of Aetheric energy. I saw the captured spirits of the dead fade out and the skeletons and zombies crumpled lifelessly to the floor.
And just like that, Amar Nathan of the Ur-Nanshe family was no more.
What the fuck just happened?
Shaking my head, I realized that it was a mystery for another time. Right now I had to get Jessie to safety. For all I knew, Amar wasn’t the only vampire here and I didn’t need another set of holes in my neck.
I hurried to an alley not too far from the cemetery, dressed Jessie, and used my cell phone to give MAGE a call. I needed an evac and a mind wipe. A few minutes later an emergency evac team showed up, comprised of MAGE employees that were specialized in teleportation magics, a special division of the air element often used to extract captured agents, or agents who were in dire need of being elsewhere now.
Once back in MAGE HQ I handed Jessie over so she could be taken to a cell. They would heal her before they released her and she would soon have no memory of the horrible things done to her. It was her second mind wipe from MAGE, but I thought it was for the best. I heard someone say my name as I went to check on her.
“Aerick!” I turned and saw Bianca heading towards me. “I understand you know the vic?” she asked.
“I do. I go to school with her. Dated her a few years back,” I stated.
“Then I figured you would want to know exactly what happened and how she ended up on that lich’s altar,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder and guiding me to a nearby bench. I nodded. “Well, according to her she had prior contact with him. Apparently they ran into each other at some New Age crystal store and hit it off quite well. She was pretty enamored with him, but he wanted nothing to do with her. She met with him on several occasions. On one of those occasions she got a tome from him and managed to actually use it to summon a minor demon.” She was watching me closely for a reaction. It all fell into place as I remember rescuing Jessie at the Treasure Island hotel.
“That thing was a fucking demon?!” I asked incredulously, giving Bianca a shocked look. I had thought it was a fire elemental. I’d gotten off luckier than I knew.
“Yes. It was. The Ur-Nanshe family is well versed in playing on people’s vices, as well as conjuring demons. He was able to play on your friend’s lust for magical knowledge to get her to do his bidding by having her summon a demon. Demon summoning tends to leave the Aetheric mark of the caster behind in some way once the demon is eliminated. Your friend would leave no such mark,” Bianca said.
“Because she has no tie to the Aether. Fucking bastard,” I muttered. “What about Raven?” I asked, suddenly remembering the lich had banished her.
“A couple of agents in the sweeper crew say they saw a really attractive pale woman driving away in a purple Mustang,” Bianca answered, shrugging.
“That’d be her.” I shook my head. At least she was okay. I followed Bianca into her office where she continued to debrief me. She told me not to worry about turning in a report until the next evening, so I had some time to myself. Once I got home I noticed that Raven was sitting on my futon watching my TV again.
“How did you… never mind. Look, I need to take a shower after that mess,” I told her, heading directly into the bathroom, hoping she’d be gone by the time I got out. Turned out it took seven showers and I still couldn’t get rid of the charnel stench that seemed to hang around me like a shroud. Raven was still on my futon when I came back out. It was almost three in the morning and I needed sleep. She channel surfed for a few more minutes while I ignored her, then she sighed heavily, turned off the TV and got up.
“Okay, well, I guess I’ll be getting home now,” she said, seeming to expect something.
“Okay, bye. I’ll call you when I need you for work,” I said as I dried my hair with a towel.
She sighed again. “I’ll be waiting. And call if you have time for a date sometime too.” She opened the door and looked at me over her shoulder, her hair flipping over to cover most of her left eye as she did so. “And I mean that, I will be waiting. Impatiently. Oh, and by the way, the smell was gone after shower number two, it’s probably just residual in your sinuses.” She closed the door as she winked at me.
“Well now, maybe you will get some after all,” Talon remarked, popping into sight by the coffee table.
“Can it. I got some information on Serena’s death. She was killed by an air sorcerer.” I walked over and unfolded the futon so that I could make my bed.
“What? You can’t be serious. So how do you know it was an air sorcerer?”
“Her parents finally allowed for an autopsy. They found scorch marks similar to what a Taser would leave, but no actual puncture wounds that a Taser would make.”
“Lightning spell.”
“Exactly.”
“Don’t worry, chief. We’ll get him. I’m with you on that until the end.”
“Thanks. It means a lot to me.” I flipped the covers back and slid in between them, sighing.
“Get some sleep. You look like you need it.”
No sooner had he said that, I had closed my eyes and was fast asleep. I slept like someone who hadn’t for several days, and I knew I was behind on my sleep as it was. This job had a tendency to wreak havoc on my sleep schedule. I slept, and I dreamt.
I was thirteen and it was summer break. Nina’s parents had decided to take a trip to Oklahoma so that they could check on my parents’ house there since they were still holding it in trust for me. I didn’t have any other family, so I was looking forward to seeing the house and seeing the place I grew up in. But most of all, I was looking forward to seeing Serena. I wondered how much she had changed since the last I had seen her. I remembered that the last time, she had professed that she loved me and had given me a kiss to prove it. Her first real kiss, and mine.
I still didn’t know how I felt about it. I was excited by it, sure, but it felt sort of weird too. I had always viewed her like a sister or cousin. That, and I wasn’t quite sure about girls in general yet. At least not like that.
My first morning there was a Wednesday, and I woke up bright and early at seven in the morning. I knew Serena would already be awake, so I quickly got dressed and ran across the street to her house. It was going to be a very oppressive day. I was already sweating a bit by the time I got across the street, and the scent to the air suggested it might rain. The greenery was already wet, and I could smell the newly cut grass in Serena’s yard.
Coming here from Vegas was always a reawakening for me. I could smell the freshness, I could feel the electricity of a threatening storm, and I could feel the life around me. Not that Vegas was dead, just different feelings, smells, and wildlife.
I looked up at Serena’s house, which was a light-blue, two-storied home with dark-blue trim. The front lawn was immaculate, the large oak that dominated the yard pruned in such a way to keep the tree from over-taking the house without cutting the branches completely off. There were several low, wooden flower boxes that ran along the front of the house on the left. To the right were the drive-way and the three car garage.
I started walking towards the drive-way so I wouldn’t walk across the lawn. I knew t
hey didn’t care, but I wanted to take my time. I was honestly nervous, and excited, and I didn’t know which was winning out quite yet. Suddenly the front door flew open and Serena came sprinting out of the house across the lawn right at me. My breath caught as I got my first sight of her. I hadn’t seen her in almost a year. Winter and spring break had passed this last year without us being able to see each other.
Her hair was almost platinum blonde, which was normal this time of year. All of her baby fat was gone, and she had some muscle to her, not a lot, just enough to define her body and accentuate it. Her face had matured a bit since I had last seen her as well. And that wasn’t the only thing that had matured; she had curves where there hadn’t been any before.
Her chest was what really caught my eye as she ran towards me. I never knew someone that small could have breasts that large. She was just a shade under five feet tall and probably weighed only a hundred pounds or so. She was wearing a light-blue shirt that she had tied up to just under her breasts, and really short denim shorts. I knew she’d be wearing a bathing suit of some sort under the clothes. She usually did this time of year so she could go swimming at a moment’s notice. With the combination of humidity and heat here, swimming was often the only respite you got from the weather.
“Aerick!” she yelled as she ran towards me.
I had no idea how to react. Once she got to me she wrapped her arms around me in a tight hug. I returned the gesture, picking her up in the process. I could smell the faint scent of lilacs mixed with the stronger scent of sun block.
“Oh my god, Ricky, I cain’t believe yer here!” she exclaimed. Her soft voice held a southern accent like it was the most natural thing in the world. For her, it was.
“Neither can I. I couldn’t wait to see you again.”
“I know, I know, neither could I.”
“You’ve… changed.”
“I have? Oh, yeah, those, um… ya don’t…”
“No, no, you’re fine, I was just… surprised is all. You look good.”
“Really? How good?”
“Oh jeez, Serena, you’re not gonna start this again are you?”
“Start what?” Serena asked, trying to sound innocent.
She was always trying to get me to say how much I liked her, or how pretty she was. Her mom called it ‘fishing for compliments’.
“Hey, let’s go to the park, see what we can find in the woods back behind it,” I said, trying to get out of her trap.
“Okay, sure. But how good do I look?” She pinned me with an expectant gaze from her brilliant green eyes.
“You look great, okay? Jeez,” I acceded grudgingly.
“As good as that Holly girl you’ve been talkin’ about?”
“Holly? Huh?” Now it was my turn to try and sound innocent. Truth was I had a crush on a girl in my class named Holly and I had the feeling that Serena didn’t like it.
“Holly. That girl you’re always talkin’ about when we talk on the phone. Last I heard she was ‘so pretty, and so perfect, and so nice.’ Wish ya would talk about me like that.” She pitched her words so that they mocked me when she rattled off my supposed list of Holly’s virtues.
“I never said that. And to some of my friends I do talk about you and how nice and pretty you are. I have this one friend, Malcolm, who wants to meet you.”
“Yes, ya did say that, and I’d like ta meet yer friends, but not ta be their girlfriend. I want to be your girlfriend, if ya hadn’t guessed, ya big dummy,” Serena said with a huff. She had her arms crossed as we walked down the street towards the park.
“That’d be weird. You’re like a sister to me.” I was trying to avoid the subject entirely.
“Uh-huh, and ya kissed me back last year!”
“I… I… wanted to see what it was like is all.” In truth I had liked it, despite the fact that it made me feel weird. Maybe kissing just made you feel weird like that.
“Uh-huh. Ya liked it. I know ya did. You were all red and ya stammered a lot afterwards.”
“Well, you also live really far away from me. We couldn’t be boyfriend and girlfriend just because of that,” I tried to justify lamely.
“We see each other all the time and we talk on the phone all the time.” She was really pushing for this. To tell the truth, it’d be nice to say I had a girlfriend, especially one as pretty as Serena, except that everyone who had heard me talk about her thought she was a close cousin or something.
“Yeah, well… I dunno, Serena. I mean you are a nice girl, and a pretty one too. I just, I’m not sure. I’ve never had a girlfriend before. I don’t know how all this is supposed to go. I mean, I know we, like, hold hands, and kiss sometimes, like I’ve seen at school, but what else? We just hang out like we always do?”
“Yeah, somethin’ like that I guess.” Serena seemed to be thinking pretty deeply about it.
“Well, you’re still way over here. What happens if I meet some girl in Vegas that I really like that likes me back?”
“You tell her ya already have a girlfriend, silly.”
“I dunno.”
“It’s okay, just think about it okay, darlin’?” With that she skipped ahead of me, humming Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” as she did so.
We made our way through the park, which was a large sprawling affair. The sandbox housed a merry-go-round and the jungle gym equipment, and it was a fair distance from the swings, and both were several yards away from the hill. The hill had a picnic table on it as well as the small rocking horses, elephants and such. There were other picnic tables scattered about the park as well.
Behind the park was our destination; a spread of forest that had so far escaped being cut down in order to make room for more houses. We raced across the park, laughing and joking the whole way. Once we got to the forest I bent over at the waist and put my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. I glanced up at Serena, and noticed that she was smiling at me, her green eyes sparkling.
I nodded once, then motioned towards the forest. She bobbed her head in return, and we headed in. Once in the forest itself, the air got more humid, if that was even possible, and we could make out various sounds including bird calls and insects buzzing about. The heat dropped a bit though since we were out of the direct sunlight.
I hopped over a small creek and turned around, willing to help Serena if she needed it. She made the jump with ease, and I turned to head deeper into the forest, when I felt a shove from my left side, sending me tumbling into the creek.
The creek was about four feet deep at this spot and I came up sputtering water. A pond smell was emanating from the creek; not a bad smell, just a natural water smell. Luckily, I was just wearing shorts, a tank-top, and sandals which I flipped off and tossed up to the bank. I looked up and saw and heard Serena laughing musically.
“Why the hell did you do that?!” I spit more water out.
“Hey! Language! I did it because I wanna swim.”
Serena hated it when I used bad language. She was of the belief that everything could be said without resorting to such ugly words. Her words, not mine.
“Swim? In this crap? Who knows what’s in here?” I protested.
“Language, Rick!” she growled at me, then smiled sweetly. “It’s just a natural creek, nothin’ but fish, slugs, snakes and stuff in there. Maybe some crawdads. Possibly leeches.”
I watched as Serena started to strip out of her shorts, and then her shirt, which brought part of her shiny blue bikini top with it, and I caught a glimpse of her breast before she could pull it back into place. It was the first time I had ever seen a bare breast in my life, well, one that was actually real and not in a magazine. I found that I couldn’t breathe properly all of a sudden.
Once she was done, she jumped in after me. We splashed around for a bit, though I was still distracted by what I had seen. After a while I stepped on something smooth that was definitely not rock-like. I reached down into the water, managed to catch hold of whatever I had ste
pped on, and brought it up to discover a turtle. Serena swam over to me.
“Oh, cool! I’ve never seen a wild turtle before,” she exclaimed as she came right up to me. She was only a couple of inches away from me, and her chest was just breaking the surface, so it looked like she didn’t have on a top except for the straps that were tied around the back of her neck. I found myself short of breath again.
“Y-yeah. Neither h-have I,” I stuttered.
“What’s wrong? It’s just a turtle. Don’t need ta be scared.” Serena had a confused look on her face.
“Nothing. Nothing. Just uh…” I stared directly at them for a second then lifted my eyes to hers. Our faces were inches apart, and despite the pond water odor, I could still smell sunblock and lilacs on her. She moved slightly closer and I could feel her up against me. I almost, almost kissed her at that moment, but I managed to stop myself.
We both took a step back and looked away at the same time, an awkward silence filling the air between us. I lifted the turtle up to eye level and looked at it for lack of anything else to do at that exact moment. It was pulled into its shell. The shell itself had spines long the outer edges, and was dark green in color, almost black. I headed towards the bank of the creek, where my sandals were laying.
“Where ya goin’, Ricky?” Serena called after me.
“Home. I want to see if Nina’s folks will let me keep him,” I said as I slipped my feet into my sandals.
“You cain’t do that! He’ll die! He’s used ta livin’ out here in the creek,” Serena protested as she climbed up to where her clothes were.
“He’ll be fine. Besides it’s not like turtles move around a whole lot.”
“Rick? Who knows more about animals? Ya’ll, or me?” She was frowning now.
“You. But I mean, just let me take him home. He’ll be fine in one of those aquarium thingies.”
“Terrarium, stupid. See ya don’t even know what yer supposed to get for it. What does it eat? Do ya know that?”