Mercy

by Rhiannon Paille

  “Do it then,” Tor said, glaring at the Vulture. He didn’t have anything he could use to stop them, not when they weren’t possessing bodies. Zanthos didn’t do anything and Tor gripped the bed, fingers digging into blue sheets, knotting them in his fist.

  “Don’t watch,” Zanthos whispered, his self-contained black storm covering the fragile girl in blackness. Tor felt time stop around him. He listened to the click clack of boots on the linoleum floor, someone coming to check on the girl.

  “No,” Tor seethed, his eyes blazing. He wanted to watch the Vulture devour the girl. He reached into his pocket and felt for something. It was still there, pressed against his leg, smooth, round and hot with body heat. He curled his fingers around it. “They’ll be back soon.” It wasn’t an empty threat.

  Zanthos cursed and covered the girl in a black sheet. Tor watched as her heart rate made the monitor climb. Sweat formed on her brow, a whimper escaped her lips, and the heart rate monitor went flat. Tor thought the hospital staff would react faster. This was the part where they barged into the room, pushing people out of the way and slamming paddles against the tiny girl’s chest. Tor ripped the cord out of the wall and the high-pitched beep fell into silence.

  “Get out of here,” Tor hissed at the Vulture. He didn’t wait long as Zanthos slithered away leaving a trail of brisk air behind him. He disappeared through the double doors and Tor glanced at the dead girl on the bed.

  Another girl permeated his mind, a girl he had thought about incessantly for nine thousand years. He hid her from them, from everyone, even from himself at times. But the world was a different place, it was ignorant and anonymous. Nobody would recognize her, nobody would care. All the old stories were lost, burned, or destroyed.

  The Lands Across the Stars belonged to the Valtanyana. It thrived on the chaos they created.

  They wouldn’t notice her at all.

  He pulled his hand out of his pocket and stared at the eighteenth century golden pocket watch. He glanced at the girl and back at the pocket watch. There were moments he hesitated, moments he hoped he was doing the right thing. After all this time, all the running, hiding, and fighting, he needed her.

  He couldn’t fix anything without her.

  He took the little girl’s hand and turned it over, pressing the pocket watch into her palm. Her little fingers barely curled around it. The face snapped open and Tor watched the amethyst essence crawl up her arm and settle into her heart. She gasped and opened her eyes briefly before falling back into a coma. Tor hung his head and bent over her, pressing his lips to her forehead the way any father would. He crouched by the side of the bed and plugged the heart monitor in, hearing the steady beeps as the monitor spiked. Everything he needed to start a war he saw in the brief blink of her eyes.

  Amethyst Flames.

  ***

  Chapter 3

  The Star

  Hunger.

  Krishani slithered across the desert floor, wisps of his self-contained storm brushing icy tendrils over fairy dusters and sage bushes on the south side of the hill. He engulfed a bed of cacti, hunger inside him gnawing at his darkness. It had been weeks since he fed. Less and less humans died, which only made the swarms fester with anxiety. He didn’t need to look up to know they were in the sky, hundreds waiting for the kill. He dived low, sticking to the reddish brown sandy soil and outcroppings of rocks. A mountain rose in the distance, a grayish-blue tinge sweltering off it in rivulets of heat.

  He couldn’t feel heat anymore.

  He skirted a yucca tree, narrowly avoiding its starbursts of leaves and stopped by a makeshift rocky wall. In the clearing were a cluster of Koochi tents. A painted khaki truck bounded down the gravel path, men in black sheemas perched at the helm with guns. Krishani didn’t need to know who they were, if they were there to kill people, he was there to eat.

  The hunger was so intense it blotted out every other thought in his mind. He couldn’t remember where he was from, or the days he spent as a Ferryman. All that remained was the sound of his name, a foreign thing that had changed over time. Distorted, it sounded something like Gajan.

  A shriek pierced his temples with rancid sound. He turned his attention to the truck, waiting as it rumbled closer to the black canvassed tents. He drifted over the wall and quickened his gait. The others circled, waiting for the moment. Krishani mimicked walking, imaginary steps hovering over short shrubs and flattened cacti. He neared the first tent and pushed himself to the ground. He tensed.

  Unexpectedly, an explosion went off below him, a landmine, and chaos erupted. Gunshots covered the village; another explosion rang out from under the tent on his left. He turned and braced himself, a man in full khaki robes passing through him.

  Krishani shuddered as he entered the body, feeling the man’s blood singing in his veins, flames rolling along his flesh and into his muscle tissue. Krishani held onto the body, the man’s feet, his feet, running in no particular direction, into the sun, which only made the pain worse. His feet melted like tar, sinking into the ground, face planting in the sand. Krishani strained against the terrifying pain etched to every part of the man. In the moment between the last breath of life and death, Krishani took everything. He took the man’s most recent memories, took his darkness, and when he thought Krishani couldn’t hold on anymore, the saccharine purity of the man’s white matter soul broke out of the body. Krishani devoured it in a millisecond, savoring the lightheaded high. His mind blanked for a moment until he exploded out of the body and ran smack into another.

  The woman tripped, falling on her face. She was feisty, trying to run, but Krishani felt another gunshot hit her back and she flopped like a fish out of water. For Krishani it was like riding a bull. She twisted and heaved, her eyes spilling tears. She screamed, muttering in Arabic about her family. Krishani recognized the dialect and the cadence of the syllables. He didn’t try to calm her; it was better when they died in a fit of anger and this woman was livid. She pounded the ground and intensified her own pain as the hand of death washed over her. Krishani didn’t like it but most of them prayed in their final moments. He recognized the familiar prayer, having spent months in the same area, stalking the grounds, waiting day after day for bombs to go off. When it was done he didn’t let go. There was no salvation for the weak, and hunger won out against mercy. If it wasn’t him it would be one of the others.

  No escape.

  She pinched her eyes shut when it happened and as Krishani rose out of the body he tried to take a breath only to be run roughshod by two men, one who was fully alive and another that wasn’t. Familiar pain ran over him in waves, but with every soul it was worth it. Tiny pieces of this man’s memory embedded into his form. Thousands of years, thousands of memories crowded his form.

  The fighting continued but Krishani found himself on the ground, inside the writhing bodies of the dying. In the dark ages he’d wait until the whole village was slaughtered before taking a soul, but Ambrose came, and Jenima and Noelle and it became impossible. They blessed villages before death found them.

  Cheaters.

  Krishani found if he wanted a soul it was better to live inside it like a parasite until it died. The Ferrymen and the Valkyries couldn’t have it if he was there first.

  He stumbled in the body he was in, reaching the edge of the village, squinting at the horizon. When he was in a body, the original host had control. He couldn’t make the man do anything. This one wasn’t injured but he was in the open, being really stupid. Screeches from the herd pulled Krishani out of his stupor and he left the man, unable to hang on while the man contemplated his escape plan through an unforgiving desert. Even the cottonwoods were dying, their gangly roots dried and cracked from the root up.

  Krishani felt them in the air, nearly finished with the village. A few men cowered inside a tent beside him while the men from the khaki truck approached, guns aimed. Krishani felt the urge in his bones and snaked around them, causing a chill to race through them. Bullets pierced the nothing
ness of his self-contained storm and hit the men in the tent. Eight more gunshots rang out and Krishani devoured every one of their souls, lapping up wispy white smoke like water.

  He stumbled a bit, drunk on white matter and clenched his fist, joining the swarm and following them to the next cesspool of the sick and dying.

  O O O

  Hospitals were not Krishani’s forte. A blinding pain mushroomed across his form as he shifted, making himself look as human as possible. It didn’t make much of a difference, but in a hospital, there was a chance someone could see him. He smoothed icy black wisps of energy into combat boots and a long black trench coat, pitch-black arms, fingers, an abyss for a face, the illusion of slicked back hair. He felt them, souls on the brink of letting go, modern medicine singing in their veins like poison Krishani recoiled from. Those liquid solutions and powdery pills kept people alive long after their expiration date. Krishani breathed it in, savoring the saccharine smell of souls. He almost forgot why he was there in the first place. On the white matter of eleven souls he could live comfortably for days, maybe even weeks, following the herd was only a necessity, one he would forgo if he could possess a body for longer than seconds.

  He would have possessed the man trying to escape the Koochi tents in the middle of Afghanistan but that man didn’t have a hope in hell and Krishani didn’t feel like dying of dehydration again. He walked through the hallways, ice-cold air billowing across the floor. A small brown-skinned woman sitting on a red plastic chair outside a room gasped as the cold passed her, crunching her feet to her chest. Krishani tried to recognize the surroundings, but since the modern world appeared out of nowhere, everything looked the same. He could have been in England if it wasn’t for the suffocating heat and East Indian staff populating the nurse’s station. He avoided machines haphazardly littering the hallway as he searched for someone with a fatal wound, someone easy to take.

  He rounded the corner, passing a shock of cold in their direction. A doctor in his thirties shuddered involuntarily but continued speaking in perfect Punjabi to the nurse behind the counter. They were so desensitized even the chill of a monster like him couldn’t scare them. He used to be feared, but now he was an unusual blast from an unfaithful air conditioner. He neared the burn ward and passed it, not interested in living through the pain of skin grafts. He’d been through every kind of torture in the past nine thousand years. He died too many times to count, devoured too many souls, and lost himself in the cacophony of seething hunger.

  He neared the cancer ward and passed it, most people who were terminal had cancer these days, but there were always stragglers, ones who had unidentifiable diseases nobody could cure.

  His preference.

  Anger burst into him as tiny spots dotted his vision. He turned to the room he was planning to invade with his unmistakable cold and found a girl, long brown ponytail, bronze skin and shining golden aura crouched beside the bed. Her hands were pressed together in meditation, head bowed. The boy on the bed looked about seventeen. If his body could handle it, Krishani could have been with him for months, maybe years. The want rose in the back of his imaginary throat as he stared at Gemma Yessenia, the Valkyrie bitch that had taken over for Jenima when her ten thousand years were up. Gemma turned her head slightly to Krishani but didn’t openly acknowledge him.

  “You can’t have this soul, Vulture,” she thought, the pinpricks of her small words filling Krishani’s form with sand. He recoiled, but want pressed against him and like a house in a flash flood he was split into pieces and carried by the strong current.

  “I need it.”

  Gemma shook her head perceptibly, her golden aura glowing brighter. “You can’t be fed here.”

  “I don’t want to be fed,” Krishani spat, banishment whiplashing against his form. He felt it suddenly, the reason the doctor didn’t flinch, the reason there were no souls he could devour. She blessed the hospital and was protecting this one boy. Krishani stilled, fighting against his nature to flee from blessed souls and hoped she would break, let her guard down for a millisecond. It was all he needed to devour the boy and possess the body.

  Gemma turned to Krishani, a terrible expression on her smooth face. Her cracked lips pressed together in a line, her Valkyrie wings folded and hidden behind her shoulder blades. Her face registered shock and Krishani wanted to smirk. He’d caught her off guard. Jemina knew full well what Krishani liked to do with bodies that weren’t quite dead. Somehow Elwen hadn’t bothered telling Gemma about him. He would have been pained if he wasn’t so empty inside. She steeled herself. “You’re a necromancer?” Her tone registered horror.

  Krishani shrugged. He was a wraith, a vulture, the bogeyman, an angel of death, a demon, and the devil depending on the person and the place. Necromancer was just another fancy title on the long list. The waiting became unbearable. In one lightning fast move he came as close to Gemma as he dared, which meant the doorframe to the room. She stood and leaned over the boy, whispering in his ear. She looked at Krishani seeming unruffled and when she neared him her golden aura pushed him out of the way.

  “You sicken me … Krishani … Mekallow … Mekelle.” Her brown flats clacked against the linoleum floor. Krishani stared after her, his eyes wide as she turned the corner. He couldn’t think anymore, his mind circling three little words he forgot centuries ago.

  His true name.

  He almost collapsed from the pressure, unwanted memories filling his mind making the sand increase. He wanted to vomit but without a body he couldn’t. He fled the hospital letting out a loud screech as he found the sky, not caring where he was going. He fought with the wind until he descended, landing in the slums. He recognized it as Calcutta, and the home of the only person from his past he saw frequently.

  He wished he didn’t know Shimma.

  He neared a shack, boards holding up parts of a house with shoddy workmanship. The family inside was with a shaman, lighting incense and whispering an incantation over another man’s body in the back of the shack. Family members conglomerated in the living room, an old woman clutching a middle-aged woman’s hand tightly, their faces contorted in worry.

  All of them reacted to the cold, and the old woman cried out in Bengali. Krishani recognized the word death on her lips and she was hysterical, calling the shaman, telling him to banish Krishani. The shaman prayed harder, pressing his hand to the dying man’s chest in a vain attempt to give him safe passage to the other side. Krishani found it amusing, as nobody but Gemma, and Kazazar could really stop him from devouring a soul. He slid into the body, feeling heat press into him. Fever. He reached the center point of the man’s essence, finding the white matter. The man tried to resist but the Vulture was too strong and too seasoned. Krishani lapped up white matter like air and poured himself into the sternum, anchoring himself to the body.

  Krishani woke with a start in a foreign body, a hysterical old woman fainting beside the bed, the shaman clutching a small red book, a look of shock on his face. He began rejoicing in Bengali about a miracle, about Shiva bringing back their brother. Krishani couldn’t stand it. He leapt to his feet, and though the fever raged on, forcing dotted lines to appear in front of his eyes he fled the shack without another glance in the family’s direction. Cries rose from behind him but none of them willingly chased him into the slums.

  He focused on his feet, making every barefoot step count, hearing his heart beat singing in his ears. He was alive and all he had to do was stay that way for as long as possible.

  O O O

  India was a shithole, but it was the only place Shimma felt safe anymore. She swept the cards off the small round table, the hard wooden chair digging into her back. She used to do this at the market place a few blocks away but lately there were too many crazies for her taste. This house had been abandoned for several years. She wasn’t taking anymore clients for the night, looking to get some rest in a tangle of blankets pulled over a floor. She went to blow out the candles when she heard someone outside, panting, fo
otsteps squishing into sewage. Whoever it was, she wasn’t interested.

  “Move that curtain aside and I’ll slice you from navel to nostril,” she called, a laziness to her sweet voice. She used to lure men with her beauty and coy vocals, but these days, it was better to sound scary and mean it. She waited; shuffling her multi layered skirts around, wanting desperately to take off the corset pinching her lungs together. It was embroidered in gold, stretched overtop a loose fitting beige top. Her skirts were beige, burgundy and dark green, all cut at different lengths. Her hair was wrapped in a tight babushka, blonde hair falling to the small of her back. She wore big gold hoops for earrings and completed the look with an imaginary wart off center from her lips on her left cheek. Her blue eyes skated around the shack. The breathing ceased, she stood, leaning over, ready to blow out the candle when the curtain of colorful quilted fabric moved. She stumbled back, cursing herself for not listening closer. She grabbed the back of the chair but went down, taking the chair with her. She held it out in front of her, the glazed over black eyes of her intruder too obvious to mistake. He might have had brown skin and chunks of coal for eyes but unlike most people she’d recognize him anywhere.

  “Krishani,” she seethed, righting herself and putting the chair beside the table. Her tailbone hurt and she rubbed it as she settled behind the table, gingerly taking the fat white candle on the right side of the table in her hands. She brought it to the large one on the left side and lighted it, then set it down. She picked up the deck, a very old thing and shuffled idly while Krishani turned a fraction of an inch, his eyes cast to the floorboards.

  “I don’t know that name,” he said, his tone lethal. A shudder rippled through Shimma but she didn’t stop shuffling.