Urban Enemies

by Jim Butcher

  He was thinking of Halloween, children in masks running down the sidewalk with pillowcases clutched in their hands. It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t answer him.

  “Victoria was my first love.”

  Of course she was. Humans were almost as infatuated with the idea of love as they were with the idea of their thoughts being their own. I didn’t move.

  “She said she’d stay with me forever.”

  Of course she did. What would be the point in acquiring a toy if it already knew it was going to be thrown away? Humans did the same. Their animal shelters are always full. I didn’t speak.

  “She made me a murderer.”

  Well. That was interesting. “Who did you kill?”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” he snarled. “She did. She used me as a weapon, and she killed my parents, and she stole everything they had, and she ran.”

  “Were they wealthy, then?” He nodded silently, and I smiled. “What a smart girl. She found a good target.”

  He pulled the trigger.

  His little toy gun spat a dart into my chest. I gasped and yanked it free, dropping it on the floor. He grinned.

  “Theobromine,” he said. “That’s something you have in common with a dog: it’s poison to you. I guess the worst thing in the world had to have something in common with the best.”

  I glared at him.

  “You’ll stop breathing soon. But why didn’t you stop me?”

  Because by the time I’d realized he was a threat, Barb had been down and I hadn’t known how to get away. Because my species was designed to hide and go unseen, not to stand and fight. Because I wasn’t important. I would miss so many things about being alive. I would miss so many things about being me. But I am—I was—a cuckoo, and to be a cuckoo is to be part of a hive.

  Wheels screeched outside the house. Doors slammed. The cavalry was coming, too late for me, but not too late for this fool, who’d thought he could play games with something bigger than himself. I smiled.

  “Victoria,” I said. “Did you kill her?”

  “What? No. I took what I knew, and I learned how, so that when I saw her again, I could.”

  “Good,” I said. My chest was getting tight. Breathing was getting difficult. I closed my eyes. “Perhaps now you can try again.”

  I fell.

  The last thing I heard was my assailant screaming as the rest of the cuckoos in and around Los Angeles—all the ones close enough to have heard my call—swarmed into the house with their own Barbs, mowing down the man who had come, who had killed me. They were my siblings and my enemies and my family, and they had never been my friends, but they would avenge me.

  Oh, yes. They would avenge me. The math has to balance in the end.

  The math always has to balance.

  EVERYWHERE

  A Pitchfork County Story

  SAM WITT

  The Pitchfork County series follows the struggle of the Night Marshal, Joe Hark, against the forces of darkness that threaten the world at every turn. When Joe discovered the Long Man, his mentor and long-time ally, had become one of the horrors they’d battled, he had no choice but to turn against his old boss. “Everywhere” pits the battered foes against one another once again, and sets the table for the final war against the darkness.

  The Long Man was dead.

  Mostly.

  The Night Marshal, whom for decades the Long Man had trained and empowered to fight evil, had turned on the Long Man and shattered his body. After centuries of manipulating men and women for their own good, the Long Man’s plans had finally become too convoluted for even one so ancient and wise as he to control.

  He’d failed in his mission to protect humanity from the coming darkness, just as he’d failed to keep a leash on his most powerful and promising allies. He’d paid the price for his mistakes.

  The Long Man was dead.

  Mostly.

  The Long Man crawled across the broken plain, his only companion the taste of failure’s bitter ashes. He was debased and defiled, a broken shadow of his former glory. In his struggle to save those placed in his charge, the Long Man had become the very thing he fought against. All he wanted was to rest.

  But, first, he had to return to the Father to confess his sins and accept solace among the ranks of the fallen.

  The moon of mankind came and went a half-dozen times before the Long Man glimpsed the gates of the Father’s home. The stumps of the Long Man’s scorched wings twitched against his back and the many gaping sockets of his ruined eyes wept black tears. He had returned and he would, at last, know rest.

  Time jumped and jerked and froze and then lurched forward again like a frame stuck in an old movie projector. The Father’s voice fell over the Long Man like a shadow, at once ominous and soothing.

  “You failed in your most sacred mission, my child,” the Father intoned. “Like your siblings, you underestimated the sons and daughters of dust.”

  The Father swept his broken child up from the dirt and cradled the wounded wreckage to his bosom. The Long Man fought back tears as the Father’s gentle hand swept ash and filth from his brow. Their hearts beat as one, and the Long Man’s failure crushed him into the Father’s embrace.

  “I tried.” The Long Man’s words slithered through the vaulted hall of the Father’s mansion. Their echoes bounced through the great entryway where his siblings hung, and their ruined eyes rolled in bleeding sockets as they sought out the last of their kind.

  The prodigal son averted his gaze from his sisters and brothers. Shame and horror at what he’d done, what he’d allowed to happen, made him yearn for the peace of endless rest. He could not bear the weight of his failure any longer.

  The Father lifted him like a doll and nestled him into a niche above the Eternal Throne. The golden stones embraced the Long Man. This was his home, entombed among his siblings. Together, they would watch the Father’s world end in blood and shadows. Finally, they would rest.

  Forever.

  The Father lifted the golden raiment to clothe the Long Man, but his hands froze in midair. “What have you become, child?”

  The Long Man would not meet the Father’s gaze. The centuries had shaped him with the cruelties of necessity. He was not the creature who had left this place to protect the children of dust. “There is a darkness in the world of dust. It consumes everything.”

  The Father let the golden cloth fall from his fingers. It burned as it brushed the floor. “Even you, my child?”

  The Long Man wrapped himself in grief to hide his shame. “I had no choice. The war never ends. My attempts to win it marked me with its darkness.”

  “My child, there is no place for you here.” The Father pressed his fingers into the Long Man’s chest, forcing him deeper into the niche. The golden stones grew cold and hard against the Long Man’s back, and crystalline spines pierced his flesh. “You are an abomination.”

  The tortured monster’s pride flared like the last lash of a dying sun. “I did it for you. I became this defiled thing to save your precious men. I sacrificed myself to save them—and they destroyed me. They stole my power and cast me out. Father, I have earned this rest.”

  The Father’s eyes turned hard and cold as the stone impaling the twisted being he had once embraced as his own child. “You have earned nothing. You took the gifts I gave you and corrupted them. You are of the shadow now, and this is light’s home.”

  The Long Man’s remaining eyes burned with unshed tears. “You may cast me out, Father, but I will return. I will reclaim what was mine and prove this is my place by right.”

  The Father turned his face away and the Long Man found himself crawling once more upon the broken plain. The jagged earth bit into his palms and the caustic dust clawed at his throat.

  The Long Man crawled back to the world of men, back to the place of his death.

  “So it begins, so it begins . . .” he chanted to himself in a language dead long before the sun first burned above the world of dust, “and so
will it end.”

  The Long Man glared at the world through the remnants of his body: a single feather-rimmed eye. Its pupil as wide as a grown man’s hand, the eye all that remained of the flesh that once carried him through the world of men. Only this scrap of his majesty survived the Night Marshal’s betrayal.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

  His ancient power was as crippled as his physical form. The Night Marshal had stolen most of it away in their final confrontation, leaving him with a few sad dregs of his ancient strength.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

  The Long Man waited for days following his return to this world. He watched the sun rise and fall and rise again in a cycle that tormented him with its unchanging regularity. His sole eye lay on the floor of the Black Lodge. Shadows covered it, the sun shone upon its oily surface, and night fell on it again. Nothing else changed.

  Until a lone squirrel hopped through the broken window and scampered across the ash-strewn floor in search of an acorn.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

  The Long Man blinked and a single tear oozed from his eye. He flicked his feathered lashes and the salty bead splashed against the squirrel’s face.

  The rodent screamed and shuddered from nose to tail as the Long Man burrowed into its flesh.

  And then the Long Man was in the eye, but also within the squirrel.

  A part of him scurried out of the Black Lodge, bushy tail twitching and beady eyes darting. The squirrel was a start, but he needed more.

  He found the sow soon after. The squirrel dropped acorns in front of the great pink mother, one after another, a few inches of trail at a time.

  The gravid pig happily followed the trail through the fire-cracked doors and ignored the slipping of her hooves on the Lodge’s slick marble floors. The scent of death was in the air, but the scent of death was always in the air around this place. The sow’s hunger was all that was important, and she would not stop until she’d stuffed her belly full.

  The last acorn dropped from the squirrel’s jaws and landed before the eye. The Long Man shed more tears and his essence flowed out to embrace the acorn.

  The sow snuffled after the tasty morsel, and she gulped it down before sensing the danger. The Long Man pinned her primitive thoughts beneath his own. Her body quivered, struggling to resist his command, but she was far too weak to stand against him.

  The sow walked on stiff legs. She stood before the eye, trembling. Her head lowered, inch by inch, until her snuffling nose pressed against the orb’s bulging surface.

  Her lips peeled back from her teeth and the sow ate, filling her belly with the Long Man’s essence.

  Then she ran, screaming, and the Long Man was within her, too.

  Sean heard a pig’s panicked squeals and imagined the feral hog bacon he’d make in the drum smoker behind his house. Killing the damned thing would make him late for his shift at the mill, but he gave no fucks.

  A whole hog’s worth of meat would more than make up for the lost wages, and killing the porker would save somebody’s yard from getting ripped up. He rolled down the window to hear the hog better and slowed the truck to a crawl. There was something in the pig’s cry, some panic-stricken note that struck a chord of unease deep in the reptilian core of Sean’s brain. For a moment, he considered leaving the hunt for some other lucky bastard.

  And then he saw the sow.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

  The fat pig squatted in the center of the road with its head thrown back to unleash one full-throated cry after another.

  The hog didn’t react when Sean killed the truck, scooped his hunting rifle out of the rack in the cab’s rear window, and hopped onto the asphalt.

  Sean shouldered the rifle and drew a bead on the pig’s outstretched throat.

  The damned thing kept on screaming even when Sean was ten feet away.

  Sean squeezed the trigger and the bullet ripped through the pig’s neck, then blasted through the little bulb of brain nestled at the base of her skull. Blood and shards of bone exploded from the back of the sow’s neck, and she pitched over onto the street with a quiet sigh.

  “Got you, sumbitch,” Sean crowed. He stowed the old rifle on the gun rack and dug an oil-stained tarp from the truck’s bed. He didn’t have time to field dress the beast. He’d just wrap it up and throw it in the pickup’s bed and deal with the mess later.

  Sean unfurled the tarp on the gravel road next to the pig and smoothed it with the toes of his work boots. “Good enough,” he declared, and knelt down to haul the pig onto the tarp.

  The Long Man whipped the sow’s head around and latched its teeth, his teeth, onto Sean’s wrist.

  “Get off!” Sean screamed. He smashed his fist into the side of the pig’s head, to no effect. The efforts to free his arm from the pig’s jaws opened Sean’s injury ever wider.

  The Long Man slithered out of the hog and into the wound. Threads of dark essence wriggled into Sean’s blood. They streaked along his veins and arteries, seeking his heart, his brain.

  Sean’s body cracked and stretched, his bones lengthened as his skin buckled and expanded to accommodate its new occupant. Nubs of cartilage twitched alongside his spine, and Sean was no more.

  The body’s new owner staggered onto its feet and flexed its arms and knees. A twisted grin split its face.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” the Long Man crowed. “It’s good to be back.”

  The Long Man’s new body annoyed him. The thick band of beer-soaked fat around its center made it hard to move, and the layer of suet coating its organs made it slow and weaker than he’d imagined possible. He could still feel the part of himself left in the squirrel. It, at least, wasn’t slow.

  The possessing spirit watched the Night Marshal, Joe Hark, through the bar’s front window with stolen eyes. The asshole rolled a bottle of beer between his palms. He twisted it this way and that, like a child trying to figure out how to operate a pistol found in his daddy’s nightstand.

  He watched Joe wrestle with the demons baked into his very soul. The Night Marshal had fought and killed a hundred different monsters, but none held a candle to the one inside him. All the power he’d stolen from the Long Man was useless in fighting his thirst for another drink of the booze that had nearly killed him.

  The Long Man waited in the cab of Joe’s truck for hours. It was boring and fascinating. Did his old enemy struggle with this weakness every day? The bottle of beer in his hands had the trappings of ritual, a spell woven to ward off the darkness.

  The Night Marshal’s former master wondered if it worked.

  When Hark left the tavern, the Long Man hunkered down in the passenger’s seat. He half turned toward the driver’s door and levered Sean’s stolen rifle up at a slight angle.

  Joe’s eyes went wide when he opened the door and saw the weapon aimed at his chest. A cold rage settled into those eyes. “The fuck’re you doing in my truck?”

  For a moment, the monster hesitated. Power rolled off the Night Marshal in heavy waves. Power stolen through bonds Pitchfork’s onetime guardian had forged between them himself.

  The moment passed and it was evident his old enemy didn’t recognize him. “Get in the truck. Close the door.”

  The monster wearing Sean’s skin wondered if the Night Marshal would follow orders. Joe wasn’t an easy man to scare, and even the rifle aimed at his heart didn’t make much of an impression.

  “This better be good,” Joe said. He hauled his lanky frame into the truck and slammed the door. “Now what?”

  The gun hung between them, a promise of violence whose time hadn’t quite come to pass. “Drive.”

  “Anywhere in particular?” Joe leaned on the steering wheel and shrugged. “I mean, I got plenty of gas, we can go wherever your heart desires. Just speak up.”

  The Long Man flicked his eyes toward the road. “Head north on 44.”

  They rode in silence for half an hour, until Joe’s captor had to
ask, “Do you even recognize me?”

  The Night Marshal chuckled. The sound was as cold and dry as winter’s first frost. The glow from the dash cast an unhealthy green glow onto the Night Marshal’s face. His eyes sank into deep pockets of shadow and his teeth glinted like knives when he spoke.

  “You got no idea how many people might want to point a gun at me. It’s a long list, and no way I can keep all their names straight.”

  A stolen tongue rasped over stolen lips. For three decades he’d kept an eye on the Night Marshal, watching him grow from a rebellious young man into a useful tool and then into a dangerous adversary. And yet, he’d always held out a slim shred of hope they would find themselves once again on the same side of the war.

  “Why couldn’t you just follow orders?”

  The question got Joe’s attention and triggered a cold memory. “Didn’t I kill you a while back?”

  The possessed body smiled. “Almost all of me. But just almost.”

  Joe considered the original question. “It’s my job to kill the monsters. Somewhere along the line, you forgot that. Turned into one. Weren’t no going back after that.”

  The Long Man sighed. “The war is still out there, Joe. That power you stole won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to use it. Someone bigger and meaner is going to come along and rip it out of you if you aren’t careful.

  “Just give it back to me. Let me carry the burden. You’re too weak for it.”

  Joe laughed. He steered the old truck onto the highway. “Wasn’t too weak to kill you. Hell, if what I did didn’t put an end to you, somethin’ tells me you can’t kill me with a bullet.”

  The rifle’s barrel dug into Joe’s ribs. The monster ground the cold metal against the bone and smiled as the Marshal’s features twisted with pain. “Believe me when I tell you it will still hurt.”

  The Night Marshal shook his head. “Maybe. But I’m not letting you get back in the saddle.”

  They rolled along in silence for another twenty minutes before they approached an exit. “Get off the highway here. Something I want to show you.”