by J. F. Lewis
There are methods and rituals I should have been doing in my mind to make sure I didn’t lose my grip on the akashic realm altogether, but I didn’t do any of them. I got lucky and pulled the right amount through without giving the other Mousers a shot at ejecting me completely, but it was a near miss, and I could feel them trying the entire time, like little kids tugging at my legs.
One step closer to the real me, in combat mode, as Eric calls it, I see the akasha more clearly. Demonic locus points show up nice and shiny, and the supernatural hums in my ears—a symphony of vibrations, not all of them good. The gargoyles were bad news. They were more than they seemed, too, creatures of three stripes: magic, mundane, and dream; almost like me in some respects, except that I have a paw in each of four worlds. In this form, with my spirit claws extending a few inches past my physical claws, I could see and affect the gargoyles, and the memento mori, in both worlds at the same time.
Using the same trick Squidly exploited to nab Greta, I jumped past the first gargoyle. It looked like a miss, but looks can be deceiving.
Gargoyles are tricky, because they are more energy than physical. They interact with the real world by inhabiting stone. If they are inside a statue, you can hurt them, but if they release their hold on it, what’s left behind is wholly stone. You can’t kill it, it’s a statue with no more life than a brick. They are stuck though, usually able to interact with only one object at a time.
Destroy the statue and a gargoyle can manifest in another one. Call it insurance. If need be, they can easily flee to the spirit world, lick their wounds, and the next day, your statue of a little boy peeing in the fountain steps down off its pedestal and joins the fight.
To really hurt them, you have to hit the part of them that resides on the spirit plane, either when they are animating a statue or by using something that can affect them directly regardless of form. My claws, for example. Most humans can only affect the physical, which is why a gargoyle hangs between the worlds, balancing the protection of his stone skin against a stronger form that is more vulnerable to attack.
I inwardly laughed at the gargoyle’s surprise when I sank my claws into the rest of him, the part of him hanging in the spirit world, little more than an aura to most folks. He let out an anguished shout as my claws tore his spirit and I took a bite that would never grow back because I’d Devoured it.
The closest one to me saw what happened and did the smart thing: he gave up the stone, going completely physical with blood flesh, hair, real horns, the whole nine yards. He lost the protection of the stone, but grew large with strength and gained speed in the bargain. His sinews groaned under the effort, but it was the best defense against what I’d done to his buddy.
“Does your heart weigh less than a feather?” I didn’t wait for an answer, because I figured none was forthcoming. His wings tore apart under my callous fingers. “If not, I can eat you.” He screeched like an eagle, then collapsed. Another gargoyle down.
“Merde.” That came from one of the remaining five gargoyles, but I couldn’t tell which.
“Come on, boys. I—” While I spoke, one of the gargoyles shrunk in on itself, leaving a classic gargoyle statue lifeless in its place. It hung in the air at about head level just long enough for me to realize that he was breaking his own statue so he could interact with something else. Then the statue fell, hit the ground, and shattered.
Merde, indeed, I thought.
Another followed suit while a third pulled itself the rest of the way into this world and I found myself staring down two full-blown gargoyles with two unaccounted for and the fifth one grabbing Greta from behind.
Eric should be handling this.
Near the limo, Greta struggled to keep the Squidly off her chest, but the tentacles drew in ever closer, tendrils sunk deep into her shoulders for purchase. She had both hands gripped around the central gem/eye of the thing, pushing it away. Through the akasha, I could see its beak snapping toward her heart on the spirit plane.
“You want to play with the vampire or do you want to play with me?” I roared the question, hoping to draw the final gargoyle onto me, but he paid no heed.
Two rough-hewn hands made of asphalt thrust up from the road as one of the gargoyles created a new form for itself out of the street, which is something I hadn’t realized gargoyles could do. I avoided one, got snagged by the other, and became a sitting target for two eight-foot goat-horned shaggy stink beasts hell-bent on turning me into cat tartare.
They were bigger than I was, but a lot of that was wing. Even so, it gave them a weight advantage to go with the numerical one. Each gargoyle also sported enough upper-body strength to flap those massive bat wings attached to his shoulders.
Blackbirds can fly away. Dezba’s words went through my mind, and I came close to giving in. It would be so easy to cross back over to my homeland, leave the physical world and all this crap behind for a while. Sure, it would mean a helluva throwdown back home, but what were they going to do? Kill me? Here, maybe, but there? No way Sekhmet’s favorite son goes down on his home plane. I remembered Dezba’s body against mine, juxtaposed it mentally with the sensation of staring into Eric’s aura, and the decision was made.
A swing, aimed for the head of a Mouser.
A punch, strong enough to knock out a Mouser.
A bite . . . Heh.
You’d be amazed at how wide a cat can open its mouth. Ever seen a lion roar? When I go silver-maned and furry, mine’s bigger. And you can take that any way you want.
He screamed. Losing an arm up to the elbow will do that to a being. Gargoyles don’t taste like chicken. There’s a surprising similarity to turtle. I’d expected a muttonesque flavor, but turtle’s not bad. A very earthy, gritty taste, but palatable. Thick claylike sludge oozed gray-brown from the wound.
Twin fists from the other all-in-this-world goat boy hit like hammers between my shoulders, driving me down in a serious face-meet-asphalt moment. I scraped the pads of my paws in a failed attempt to catch myself and did an excellent job of loosening at least one molar.
A bewitched passenger stared at me out the window of a Ford Taurus, the blank glaze on the man’s face nothing like the Veil of Scrythax’s effect. Squidly, I thought to myself, that’s some powerful flashy blue mind magic you’ve got there.
Two more asphalt hands rent the street on either side of my throat. Wincing even as I did it, I swung both arms outward, smashing the earthen constructs at the expense of another road-face impact.
Strong but brittle.
Duly noted.
A swift kick to the asphalt hands gripping my ankle and I freed myself long enough for the other big gargoyle to land on my back, wrestling to get me in a full nelson. I hate it when they know my biggest advantage and effectively deny it to me. Eric would have been challenged, perhaps amused even. Not me.
Reaching up with both paws, I grabbed for the spot where the gargoyle’s wings attached and found it. Metallic silver claws dug into the base of his shaggy brown wings. The left wing gave with an appetizing shredding of sinew and the sound of muscle ripping free of bone.
“Non!” From the voice, I could tell it was the polite gargoyle who’d showed up back at the Pollux. “Pardonnez-moi! I shall release you! I concede. Your forgiveness, I beg!”
Eric accepts apologies. It’s in his rule book.
Crunch!
A single bite meant he’d never fly again. The rest of the wing, I shoved in like one of those creatures on The Muppet Show: no chewing—just one long thrust into my nigh-endless gullet. Slurp.
A cry of anguish more bleat than scream sounded in my ears. His grip went slack and I turned, free of him. “You concede? It may work that way in Europe, but in the States . . .”
But there was no need to finish. He was broken—in shock.
Taking advantage of the lull, I jumped onto the trunk of the Le Baron in front of Lisette’s limo, keeping my feet clear of the ground. Can gargoyles use metal too? The thought froze in my head, stunne
d into repetition by the cacophonous thump of Squidly striking against Greta’s sternum with a hollow reverberating sound like a taiko stick against a six-foot Japanese taiko drum.
Squidly’s gem flared blue and Greta’s eyes flared blue to match. Not to be repetitive, but . . . “Damn.”
27
GRETA:
SQUIDLY
Water flowed in under the beach house door. Cold from the ocean, it tickled my feet, the salty sea smell filling my nostrils. A broken television glared at me from the midpoint of the wall, its screen ruined by Daddy’s fist. I looked down to find myself still clad in a dirty nightshirt, thighs smeared with traces of blood and something else.
“Oh.” I knelt down. Water lapped against me, soaking through the nightgown. I washed myself. Residue from my pre-Daddy life swirled away. “I’m in my head.”
“Drown.” The voice sounded thin and reedy, like Grandma’s voice might if carried via tin-can telephone.
“I can’t drown, silly.” Water rose, lifting my nightgown. “I’m dead already.”
I stood still. The water rose to my thighs. It felt foreign. Unwanted. Teeth set, I waited.
“You will drown in your own mind. And then you will be mine.”
“You do not have my permission to fill my beach house with water.”
“Drown.”
Water touched my elbows, the cold making me shiver. My heart raced. Okay, so maybe, in this, my happiest memory, I was still alive.
“Do not make me go upstairs and wake him.”
“Wake who? You are alone”—something touched my ankle under the water—”with me.”
“You’re not Grandma.”
Rough squidlike tendrils wrapped around my legs. Fear, a treacherous sliver of it, gnawed at the back of my mind. What if I could drown? I couldn’t move. Couldn’t react. I knew where I needed to go—to the happy and safe place in my mind—but as the water rose over my chest, all I could do was scream.
But in my head, that’s enough to bring him running. I didn’t even have to call his name—just scream.
“Yes.” Tentacles moved higher, a filthy caress across my belly and around my throat. “Scream while you can.”
“What the fuck is going on down there?”
Daddy!
“How?” Water rushed in over me as the door exploded inward, and I knew that outside the beach house there was nothing but ocean. Tentacles wrapped around me, dragging me under even as the voice asked, wonderingly, “How can he . . . ?”
Daddy shouted my name above the water. His voice was muffled, but the concern in his tone still came through.
And then my awareness broke through in both places, inside my head and outside of it, simultaneously coherent like any other time a vampire has tried to control me. It’s been done once or twice. Daddy can do it, because that’s as it should be. Nobody can deal with the version of Daddy that’s in my head. Most can’t even deal with me.
“I’m not afraid, Grandma.” Lisette stepped backward, eyes wide, frightened even in her Empress form. A quick glance showed me an older car idling in the far right lane. Six cars ahead of us, drivers had moved on, but for a half-dozen car lengths in all directions, the drivers patiently waited for Grandma’s permission to move.
Grandma’s memento mori writhed between my boobs, tentacles tightening convulsively around my neck. I plunged my hand through the sides of the car trunk, ripping it open to reveal a cooler, lawn chairs, and what I wanted: a tire iron. Auntie Rachel once stopped Fang by jamming a tire iron through his engine block, so I rammed the iron home, through the memento mori’s large gem, through my chest and deep into my own heart—which, based on the pain, will clean out sinuses if they’re stopped up. I mean: fuckin’ ow!
Grandma and her memento mori screamed in unison. Talbot leapt from the trunk of one car to the bed of a big truck, evading the grasp of the gargoyle that had been holding me before the memento mori got me. Two others lay on the ground trying to make the asphalt heal their wounds or something. Each of them seemed panicked and blubbery, mumbling to themselves in French.
“I think I left my stake in the car.” I waved at Lisette. “Be right back.”
“Tuez-la!” Grandma yelled in French, but I knew what she meant: Kill her.
In this part of downtown, newly refurbished buildings stood side by side with old ones, and the trees that once lined the streets were mostly gone, replaced by iron grids over sad-looking mulch. Wood. Wood. Wood. I need wood. I could punch through a wall, try to find a two-by-four. . . . I rolled through the glass of an abandoned furniture store with a lease sign in the window before I could change direction. I had a new plan . . . and it was much more fun.
The injured gargoyles came after me as expected. I ran out through the back, feet covered in cuts and glass, but they weren’t holy wounds, so the pain was small and fleeting. The rear fire door wrenched free of its brick moorings when I hit it, and up the fire escape I went. One tiny jump for a vampire . . . At full speed, the edge of my vision blurred and I imagined a sonic boom (or maybe it was real, but I suspect it was only in my head). A series of rapid-fire jumps conjured a further image, one of Ricochet Rabbit from those old cartoons.
Gargoyles followed in slow motion. Each footstep hurt less and less as the particles of glass reached their maximum depth. Rooftops vanished below me as I raced back in the direction of Lisette, raised up my arms, and did a swan dive from about five stories up.
Her head came up at the final second, but she did the human thing: she reacted with surprise instead of moving.
“Qu’est-ce—?”
“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” See! Now why hadn’t Dad been there to hear that?
I hit Grandma in the wings, driving her to the ground, smashing her face against the street. She threw her arms out in front of her. Bones snapped. Some hers. Some mine. Black ichor, zombie nastiness, flowed out from the wounds. It pooled at my knees and around her chest. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t give her time to heal. I forced her over onto her back, her left wing ripping as she rolled onto it at an unnatural angle.
I hit the sweet spot over her sternum just right, popped it, and went straight for the heart. Grandma’s chest cavity was rotten on the inside. The obsidian flesh of her uber vamp body was full of rancid meat and pus. In the middle of it all, one organ was beautiful and full, untouched by corruption: her heart. It came free with a wet snap, more easily than a human’s, and I leapt up, ignoring the pain in my knees, attempting to run on legs that’d broken.
“What on earth?” Talbot looked at me, eyes wide, nostrils flared, and smelling like fear. A grunt of annoyance passed my lips when my broken legs wouldn’t support my weight.
Gargoyles hit the ground behind me and Talbot leapt forward to engage them, silver claws gleaming in the night.
“Greta, run!”
“I’m trying!”
Seizing Grandma’s heart between my fangs freed up my hands, and I began to crawl. Her blood hit my tongue with all the heat of tobacco and none of the taste, kicking my regeneration into overdrive. Shards of glass pushed out of my feet as I stood on knees reknitting with audible pops and snaps. She tasted like Dad.
Now all I had to do was get Grandma’s heart to a piece of wood so that I could impale it. If you can’t bring Muhammad to the mountain . . .
A cry of rage broke through the night, and the street filled with the scurry and screech of rodents (winged and otherwise). Clumps of rats erupted from the sewer drains. Bats, a billowing cloud of them thick enough to block out the moon, descended upon the street. There was nowhere to run, and I could not get away. Vermin came from everywhere, tearing at my skin, gnawing, ripping, and biting. I struggled against the tide, smashing some with my arms and others with my fists, but there were too many. Vanishing under the wave of living fury, I smiled before my face was torn away.
Good girl, Grandma, I thought. Very cool. You think you have me? Then come try to stake me. I need a stake anyway.
Soon, my nerve endings gone, the pain faded and I waited. Rats fought over the tender morsels within my skull and it made me want to watch Tatsu 7 something fierce. A hazard, I suppose, of watching anime from inside a human skull too many nights in a row.
Come on, Grandma.
The body is just an interface. Except for Dad, most vampires don’t see with eyes or hear with ears, not really. They can, but if vampires adapt, if they give in, all of those senses are really activated by the magic that makes them undead. Maybe that’s why I’m hungry all the time. Living like I do, always on when I’m awake, consumes the blood that powers me faster than other vampires. They let the meat be more than it is, and I don’t.
Do you really think it’s muscle that lets a vampire be superstrong, that human muscle, somehow supercharged by blood, lets us move so fast and grow claws? No, the body is just an interface. Since Grandma could still use her powers with her heart ripped out, I knew she knew, but what I was counting on was that, despite all that knowledge, she didn’t truly understand. Hardly any of them do.
If I concentrated, I could feel little pieces of myself in a thousand different stomachs, catching glimpses of my nearly bare skeleton. I looked so . . . thin. Concentrating on holding back my regeneration and on keeping my bones together, concentrating on keeping her heart locked in my jaws (though the rodents refused to touch it), I waited.
If the rats noticed my bones didn’t pull apart as they should have once the tissue was gone, they didn’t say anything or give any warning in a language Grandma understood. I lost track of Talbot, but from the sound of things, he went toe-to-toe with Grandma and lost. I heard a scream like a skinned cat and assumed it was him. Poor kitty. He wasn’t part of the plan, though. I didn’t need him.