by Lee Isserow
“So, are you going to explain what a Racecar Telegraph is?” Ana asked with a glare.
“Zacar Teloah, The Roving Death―”
“Well that's not at all ominous. Why don't these things ever have fun names like 'The Veracious Kitten Parade'? I'd have no reservations about fighting that.”
“She's a cat person,” Rafe explained.
“Dogs are stupid,” she added
“Getting back on track,” Lincoln growled. “Because you want me to dumb it down. . . Teloah is a supernatural brood species that has one purpose―”
“Does it make waffles?”
Nightblade decided it would be best to just ignore her irreverent interruptions. “To spread―”
“Like butter?”
“As far wide as it can, until it runs out of hosts―”
“Then what?”
“In the breeding cycle, it spreads until it has fulfilled its purpose. Then it lives in those hosts for aeons, knowing that when it does cease to exist, it will have done what it was created to do.”
“So. . . It was created. . . to destroy.”
“Such is life.”
“Oh gods, he's as bad as you are,” Ana said to Rafe. “You people don't have to talk in cliches and aphorisms all the damn time!”
“More to the point,” Rafe said, taking the focus off Ana's amusement for a moment. “Why don't you call in more Circle-jerks to deal with this?”
“I was initially sent out to investigate rumours of a potential Teloah outbreak. But in truth, it's not a big enough threat to warrant more than one operative at this juncture.”
“I know I'm new to this,” Ana said, timidly. “But do I have to be the one to ask how big a thing has to get to warrant your bosses doing anything about it?”
“When we lose London they might consider it being worth their time.”
“See?” Rafe said. “This is what I was talking about, gotta love magickal bureaucracy. . .” He cast his eyes across the grand entrance of the house, all too aware of how quiet it was, not even the faint sound of flies buzzing in some far off room. “You sure it's in here?”
“One of them is. Well, one and four gestating. We have sixteen active hosts at last count, sixty four total.”
“At least we caught it early. . .” Rafe said, turning to Ana. “You remember the rapture glyphs I taught you?”
“Glyphs!” Lincoln said with a scoff. “Don't you use enchanted clothing, like a professional?”
“Enchantments are lazy, glyphs are guaranteed,” Rafe snarled. “Do you remember them?”
“That's a stupid question,” she said, tracing out the glyphs on the palm of her hand, protecting her aura from being mesmerised.
“Why is that a stupid question?” Lincoln asked.
“She remembers everything.”
“Not everything,” she corrected. “Just everything I see.”
“And hear.”
“Some of what I hear.”
“Everything. You literally remember everything, and then use it to make me suffer.”
“Impressive,” Nightblade said, interrupting their banter, mostly so he wouldn't have to suffer through it any longer. Whilst Ana was busy casting, his eyes navigated the curves of her body.
“Genetics, she muttered. “Not impressive.”
“Impressive nonetheless,” he said with a smile.
“Quit undressing my partner with your eyes, and let's get to work,” Rafe grumbled, casting the glyphs on his own palm, before leading the way through the closest door.
Lincoln picked up pace and slipped in front of him, grabbing hold of the door handle with the intent to tug it open for Ana, gesturing theatrically before he did so. The door was steadfast, and did not open.
She stifled another laugh at his expense, as he realised the door needed to be pushed rather than pulled, and awkwardly reached into the room to open and hold the door open for Ana to enter.
“Such a gentleman,” she said with a mocking tone as she walked through.
“Such an arsehole,” Rafe said, as he followed her in to the room.
The first room was not the dining room. Nor was the second or third, or fourth or fifth for that matter. It seemed as though the family that lived in the oversized property each had their own living room, library, study and so on.
As they continued to explore the house, Lincoln insisted on holding doors open at every possible opportunity, and Rafe was beginning to wonder if this was some labyrinthine joke house. The kind of thing created by an architect who wanted to drive the residents mad, or perhaps was tasked with designing a residence for a particularly affluent Minotaur.
Finally, the soft buzz of flies was in earshot, and as Lincoln held the door open, Rafe's hand slipped to his hip, fingers tracing out a sigil against his belt. As Ana walked ahead, the leather at his waist contorted, elongating down, forming a sheath that contained a slim knife with a matte leather-bound handle. He pulled the coat back over the sheath, hiding it from view, and hoping it would stay that way. It was only being conjured for use as a last resort.
The dining room was five times the size of the modest house they had investigated earlier in the day. Ana tiptoed around the obscenely long table, ten empty chairs on either side, one empty at the far end, with four people lying face-first in their dinner up by the very dead body at the head of the table. Flies darted manically around them, and Ana leaned down to look at the closest of the bodies, each of which still seemed to have some life in them, moving subtly in small motions, as if the slightest, shallowest breath was keeping them going.
“Are they―”
“Gestating,” Rafe growled, before she could finish the thought. They weren't dead, but they weren't alive either. At least not alive in human terms.
Lincoln pushed straight between the two of them, circling the table, and took a seat to join the family. He inhaled deeply, the lilting corners of his mouth settled into a straight line, his pupils edged wider as the breath entered his chest.
“Is he. . .” Ana stuttered. She didn't need to finish the sentence, Rafe knew what she was thinking. Nightblade had become mesmerised by the Teloah's aura, and everything in his being was trying to join them, to become one of its brood.
He reached out and grabbed hold of Nightblade's shoulder. The magickian turned swiftly with wide, angry eyes, bearing his teeth, foaming saliva collating around his gums. He growled, and launched from the chair, teeth clacking, fingers clawing.
Rafe's body was faster to react than his head. His knee raised up to his chest and he hurled a foot into Lincoln's gut, throwing him back. His former friend's head bounced off the table, body falling on to the floor.
A harsh, grating high pitched scream filled the air, the four human incubators pulling themselves from their plates. Their breeding cycle had been interrupted, and a survival mode triggered. They turned to Rafe with angry glares, irises encapsulated by impossibly wide, black pupils.
“Well that's not good. . .”
They rose from their chairs, gazes fixed on Rafe, their throats becoming bulbous and fat. The two on the far side began to crawl across the table, the two closest raising their arms up, hands clawed to grab him.
“Not good at all. . .”
Each of their jaws clicked and cracked, dislocating, hanging low on nothing more than the skin that held them below the skull, as something forced its way out.
“This is going to be disgusting, isn't it?” Ana asked. Rafe nodded. He didn't have the words to describe what was about to happen.
A grey, gelatinous goop filled each of the diner's lower jaws, dribbling out the sides of their mouth, a snail trail spattered on the ground as they approached him. At the back of their throats, something was thrashing about, a series of dark gelatinous purple tentacles edging out of the infected family members' mouths, emerging all the more with every disgusting gargle and cough they spluttered.
The closest of the brood, a young girl with curly red hair, hacked the thing in her throa
t out before the others, revealing it to be a glutinous basketball-sized mass of violet jello, with a myriad angry barbed appendages that whipped back and forth violently in the air, still connected to her body by a snake of thick, viscous goop that disappeared down her throat.
Rafe grit his teeth and began to cast―but Ana was way ahead of him. With an almighty crash, she threw a crack in reality between the main body of the angry glob monster and the girl, the light of the room refracting through the angles of the fracture between realms like shattered glass hanging in mid-air. The tentacled head fell to the floor with a splat, its many arms continued to lash about franticly.
The girl's eyes went wide, and she stopped in her tracks, gasped for breath. She wheezed over the top of the gloopy snake with a severed head that was dribbling ooze as it flicked back and forth out of her mouth.
Rafe lifted up his boot and stamped on the tentacle snot beast that thrashed about on the floor, which only seemed to anger the three remaining family members. Tentacles burst out of their mouths one by one and they came for him.
“Care to go again?” he asked Ana,
She was only too happy to oblige. With three carefully aimed strikes, she shattered through to the mirror realm, sending the remaining mouth monsters to the floor, where each of them received an unceremonious stamping.
Rafe was all too aware that it wouldn't stop them from regurgitating more tentacles, but it would distract them for a few minutes whilst the organ brewing in their guts coalesced more tendrils―and a few minutes was all he needed.
“Help me get him up!” he shouted, as he ran over to Lincoln, reached under his arms and started to drag him out of the room. Ana joined him, grabbed hold of his feet, and together the two of them carried him out through study and living room, parlour and library, until they found the front door again, and dropped him outside.
Rafe glared at the magickian, who looked to be sound asleep on the gravel driveway.
“Is he going to become one of them?” Ana asked.
“Unfortunately not,” Rafe snarled. “Would have liked an excuse to hit him some more. . .”
He turned back to the house and reached under the folds of his coat, his fingers found the leather-bound handle of his knife. He slid it out of the sheath, revealing an inky, ebony blade that seemed to absorb all the light hitting its surface
“Is there a cure?”
Rafe glanced back at her and shook his head, walking across the threshold of the door.
“What about a glyph?”
“No,” he spat. As he headed back inside.
“There's got to be something!” she shouted, her voice hoarse with desperation. “They're innocent people! It's not their fault some goopy bastard decided to hold up inside them!”
Rafe stopped, bit his lip, and turned back to her. His coat spun through the air, and her eyes dropped, catching sight of the knife in his hand.
“You're going to kill them?”
“There is no 'them'. There's an 'it'. An 'it' that's going to spread and spread unless we cut off each of its limbs.”
“They're not limbs, they're people!”
“They haven't been people since the spores crawled up inside them. They aren't who they were―they'll never be who they were ever again―all they are now is four demonic Typhoid Marys that need to be put down.”
He stormed off before she could respond, leaving her in the driveway with Lincoln's body. Every second spent arguing was a second the Teloah would be recovering, and he needed to get to them before that happened.
Ana watched him walk away. Her rheumy eyes followed as far as they could as he got deeper into the house, slipped through a door, and left her line of sight. But she could picture it all too vividly. Him grabbing the family members one by one, throwing them face first into the table or floor, taking his black blade in a tight grip and ploughing the dagger into the base of their necks.
She imagined the grey goo that was once blood oozing out of the wound, him tightening the grasp he had on the knife even further and twisting his wrist. She could practically hear the loud crack as he severed the spinal column to paralyse the limbs. And worst of all, she could picture him turning the bodies over―two of them children, not even teenagers, but actual children―and ploughing the blade into their guts, tearing it upwards across their abdomens, cutting through the thing that lived inside them, and casting something to burn it up from the inside out.
She felt cold. A shiver ran over her entire body. Her mind was blank, all levity of the day wiped out in an instant. A pit hung in her gut, and thick tears were welling, desperately attempting to gain the weight required to fall.
“Pretty cold, him going in like that. . .” said a mutter from behind her.
Ana sniffed, wiped her eyes clear of tears, and glanced over her shoulder to Lincoln.
“We do have all day. . . Could have put them in stasis, frozen them, all kinds of ways to stop the spread.” He rolled his eyes and sat himself up, snorting a solemn chuckle. “But that's the Rafe I know. . . Always handy with a blade. And more than happy to put it to use as and when the situation arises.”
Ana didn't want to believe a word he said, especially the indication that Rafe was “happy” to use a blade. That wasn't the Rafe she knew. The Rafe she knew―the Rafe she cared for―would never take pleasure in killing. She had to do something, had to stop it, and started making her way to go back into the house. But it was too late.
The door Rafe had disappeared through opened, and he came back out with a slow, reluctant pace. His eyes were fixed on the knife in his hand as he wiped the grey, slimy blood substitute off the blade with a cloth.
She had no words. No quips. No put-downs. No wry statements or comical observations.
Five people were dead. It was possible that four of them could have been saved, or like Lincoln had said―it was possible they could have been held in some magickal limbo until a cure was found.
Rafe seemed almost in a hurry to make them good and dead, and as he walked past her, looking down to his hip as he slipped the knife into the sheath under his coat, it felt as though he was wilfully refusing to meet her eyeline. As if he were entranced by the blade. Mesmerised by the kill.
Ana swallowed hard over a lump in her throat, and tried to stop the shiver that was still making its way across her skin. She hated herself for thinking it, but seeing this side of Rafe, she was beginning to wonder if she actually knew him at all. . .
Chapter 16
As far away as possible
Rafe adopted a slow pace, circling back and forth on the driveway, eyes fixed to the ground. Ana observed him in her periphery, monitored his fixed expression. There were no discernible clues that he was experiencing anything close to regret. Nothing but a steely gaze on to the gravel underfoot. It seemed to her as though he was readying himself. Preparing for a slaughter.
Lincoln stood to the side of the house, consulting the map for their next destination before conjuring a door. As it pushed itself out of the brickwork, ebony gloss forcing its way out from the red clay, Rafe glanced up from the driveway.
“How far has it spread?”
“Another fifteen houses to go.”
He grunted. “Lucky we caught it early.”
The statement caused Ana's jaw to literally drop wide open, a loud huff exploding out, followed by a barrage of a verbal assault. “Lucky?! You call this lucky? Five people are dead, and you think that's lucky! What the hell is your definition of luck? Sitting at a poker table with two pair, and your opponents all dying of brain aneurysms? Finding a penny on the ground after a horrific fatal car crash? Your rent being dropped after your building was burned to cinders?”
“That seems overly dramatic. . .” Rafe muttered, still refusing to meet her eye.
“Dramatic?!” she shrieked, stomping over, grabbing him by the lapels of his coat. “You think I'm being dramatic?”
“This feels pretty dramatic,” he said, with a deadpan tone that sent her rage boiling
hot and heavy.
“You think this is time for your wry retorts? When you kill people that results in drama, you idiot! I didn't sign up for murder!”
“Murder is a human concept, applying only to humans. This isn't murder, this is putting down.”
“Really? You want to talk semantics? They were people!”
“Were being the operative word. You're new to this Ana―”
“New to murder?”
“New to the line of when human ends and non-human begins. As soon as the seeds of this thing were sown, the bodies around that table stopped being human and became something else. You haven't seen a brood before, you haven't seen how crazy it can get if it's left to run loose. You think a few deaths are bad? It'd be a hell of a lot more if we hadn't caught it this early.”
Ana didn't have any words to sum up what she was feeling. She pursed her lips and tried not to scowl too hard as Rafe held the door open for her, shoving her shoulder into his as she walked through.
“Women, eh?” Lincoln said, with a soft chuckle.
Rafe glared at him, “Glyph up. Don't want you getting excited and blowing a load as you join the brood all over again.”
Lincoln's smile evaporated as he traced the glyph on his palm, following Rafe through into the dining room of the next house on the list.
As Rafe pulled his blade from its sheath, Ana couldn't bear to watch, let alone hear the squelch of flesh as it slid into their necks, or the crack of the spinal cord being severed. She left the room, closing the door behind her as Rafe approached the body at the head of the table.
Her legs felt weak, and she leaned her back against the wall for support, dropping down to ground level, taking deep breaths, wondering over and over to herself if this entire thing was a mistake―from packing in her old job and life, to joining a man she apparently didn't truly know on a series of misadventures. One thing was certain: she felt as though she was way out of her moral depth.