Drynn

by Steve Vera

  “He just came to right now,” Stan said defensively.

  “Then you should’ve been on your way to tell me.”

  He was a thick slab of a man, with sullen eyes and a pitted face that showed the scars of adolescent acne. Though he wore an impeccable side-vent charcoal striped suit, there was something raw about him, something primal that seemed to be at odds with his attire. His eyes were sharp and penetrating; definitely a professional.

  “Officer Stewart, you will excuse us.” His voice was quiet and controlled.

  “I’ll sit in if you don’t mind, Special Agent Ahanatou,” Stan said.

  “It wasn’t a request.”

  Stan looked at Skip for approval.

  “It’s okay.”

  Stan nodded and stood. “Holler if you need me.”

  Skip nodded, maintaining eye contact with this Ahanatou character. “Thanks, Stan.”

  And then they were alone.

  “How are you feeling, Mr. Walkins?” Ahanatou asked in clipped syllables as he looked down at Skip.

  Actually, his chest felt as if it had been lit on fire, but besides that… “You can go ahead and skip the formalities, Ahanatou. Let’s get down to it.”

  “Indeed,” Ahanatou said, pulling up a chair. He sat down and suddenly they were eye level. “Mr. Walkins. You will be so kind as to tell me exactly what happened late Monday night, early morning Tuesday at the Blackburn Cemetery. Leave nothing out.”

  “I would be delighted,” he said, shifting in his bed. The move cost him. “Just as soon as you tell me why you’re here. Where’re the county boys? Where’s State?”

  Ahanatou’s face soured. “That’s not the answer I was looking for, Mr. Walkins. I don’t think you are aware of the gravity of the situation we are in.”

  “By all means, enlighten me.”

  Ahanatou licked his lips. “Very well, Everett.”

  “Don’t ever call me Everett. You call me Everett, and I start looking around for some poor shmuck in a cardigan sweater vest. Skip is just fine.”

  “Very well, Skip.” Ahanatou stood and began to pace. “What I am about to tell you does not leave this room. You tell nobody—not Stan, not your woman, not God. Do I make myself clear?”

  “How ’bout my dog?”

  “Your file mentioned you were a wiseass.”

  “Somebody’s been snooping.”

  Ahanatou considered Skip a moment with cool, professional eyes. They were set deep in his skull and placed close to his eyebrows so that they got lost in the shadow of his brow. The man calmly picked up the chair he’d just been sitting in and launched it at the door. Though his expression was neutral, his eyes did all the talking.

  “Do I have your attention now, Chief Walkins?”

  From outside he heard Stan’s voice, and then others. The door remained closed.

  “That was a perfectly good chair,” Skip said, somewhat mollified.

  Ahanatou stepped forward, a close relative of a snarl twitching his left nostril up, dug a folder out of his attaché and threw it down on the bed. “Look at these and tell me if you really think I’m the enemy.” He glared as Skip opened the folder.

  The photos were in high-definition color, one of those cameras with a ka-billion pixels. What they revealed far surpassed a thousand words. Skip doubted if there were words within any language that could convey what he saw in the pictures.

  “Where are these from?” he asked quietly some time later. Something in his stomach had curdled and died.

  “Rolling Creek, White Sulfur Springs, Watford City, North Dakota and I just got word that we have another case in Fargo. It’s always at night, no direct eyewitnesses, though a woman in Watford City is convinced she saw Satan fly across the moon with a screaming child in his hands. The kid’s bones were found—a four-year-old named Brandon Pawlowlski—snatched from his crib through a window. The babysitter didn’t make it either. The bodies were butchered and eaten, brain and heart always first. We’re finding body parts eighty-seven miles away and if any of this leaves this room, I’m going to feed your balls to you. Raw.”

  Skip had no snappy comeback, nothing more to say. He went through the pictures again, mesmerized by the carnage. He could almost feel ice forming in his arteries.

  You were there, Skip. You could have stopped this.

  Ahanatou studied Skip’s face intently. “It begins at the cemetery.”

  Just as Stan had surmised.

  Ahanatou walked back to the chair he’d hurled, picked it up off its side with a scrape and placed it back on the floor by Skip’s bed. “Now,” he said, sitting once again, lining up their eyes, “you were about to tell me everything that happened at that cemetery.” His voice was perfectly neutral, inviting almost, though his eyes looked capable of launching a pair of 81mm mortar rounds right into Skip’s face. “Leave nothing out.”

  Skip actually contemplated how he might go about telling him the truth, imagined how his story might be received, but no matter how hard he tried, at the end of the day all he could see was himself locked in a padded room, drooling Thorazine. “Here’s the problem, Ahanatou. If I tell you what I saw, you’ll either have me committed to the nearest mental institution or have me arrested for bullshitting a federal officer. I desire neither.”

  Ahanatou had unusually thick eyelashes for a guy. They snapped up and down once as he blinked before he answered. “I read your file, Walkins. Wiseass you may be, but you’re a credible wiseass. I saw what you did for the Air Force, and Captain Harrison of the Philadelphia police department had good things to say about you as well.” He leaned closer. “No human being did what I saw. If you give me your word, I will believe whatever you tell me.” His eyes were such a deep shade of brown as to be black. “What. In the hell. Did you see?” His choice of words were more apt than he could know.

  Skip closed his eyes and pattered the bridge of his nose rapid-fire with his middle and index finger as he unbelievably entertained lunacy. He licked his lips and opened his mouth to utter the word “gargoyle,” but it died on his tongue. It just sounded too insane. When Skip opened his eyes, Ahanatou was six inches from his face.

  “Tell me,” the big man said and up this close, Skip noticed Ahanatou had his own dark circles camouflaged within his dark Middle Eastern skin.

  Ahanatou’s phone chimed. He glared down at it, mashed his finger against some button and then resumed his glare, but it was too late. The connection was broken; Skip wasn’t saying a damn thing. No padded room for him.

  “Was it the kid in sunglasses?” Ahanatou demanded. His phone chimed again and this time, he threw it against the door, where it smashed into three pieces. He did it without breaking eye contact. “Was it?”

  “No.”

  “Then who?”

  The door to Skip’s room opened.

  “I said I wasn’t to be disturbed,” he boomed, whipping around to confront the intruder, some midlevel special agent with thinning red hair who looked as if he would have preferred to confront an angry honey badger.

  “Assistant director, line one.” The agent’s gaze flicked over to Skip and back to Ahanatou. “It’s an emergency.”

  Ahanatou’s ensuing sigh was more growl than breath. “We’ll continue this later. I will get what I want out of you. Until then, get used to your room, because you’re not going anywhere.” Ahanatou then stood, kicked his chair to the side and stalked to the door, opened it and slammed it behind him with enough force to crack a tectonic plate.

  “Well, that went well,” Skip said to himself. He let out a big fat sigh and lay back against his pillow. Th
ere was a lot of pain throbbing in his chest. He peeled back the gauze bandage over his wound just enough to get a look at his stitches. Not too bad. Seventeen in all, though the fourth one looked a little sloppy. Loose. Tsk, tsk. The skin on both sides was angry and puffy and felt like it, too; his drugs must be wearing off.

  Skip picked up the nurse call button and clicked it three times. Already a plan was forming.

  Chapter Eight

  Cirena walked through the throngs of disembarking passengers like a queen among peasants, tall and dignified, bordering on haughty.

  “Here comes trouble,” Jack muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

  Gavin nodded. He wasn’t looking forward to this.

  The first thing that jumped out at him was that she’d cut her hair. Her shoulder-length raven tresses swayed gently by each of her strides, which were long and crisp—with just a hint of swagger. Gavin noted with faint amusement the reactions of the men who crossed her path, almost smiling as a wife smacked the side of her husband.

  “Contrudia rakush laquisine,” she said, greeting them in the formal manner of their order: a soft touch to the notch between the clavicles, a touch to the heart and a bow of her head as her hands came together, right fist in left palm.

  It struck Gavin odd that she would do this. They’d agreed long ago to forgo the formal greeting of their order in public; it tended to attract attention.

  Even so, the three of them returned the greeting on reflex. Gavin pretended he didn’t notice the attention they garnered from a businessman juggling a handbag and a laptop as he walked past.

  Cirena was even more beautiful now than the last time he’d seen her, which didn’t seem possible. She’d already been a ten. Her raven’s wing dark hair took on a night-blue hue in contrast to her alabaster skin. She was stunning, yes, but her cold beauty was deceptively softened by heavy-lidded purple eyes and an exquisitely vicious mouth.

  The four of them stood a moment, the din of the airport fading as each regarded the other. This wasn’t how their reunion was supposed to happen.

  “So this is how the end of the world begins,” she finally said in the tongue of the Seers—the language of their homeland. Her voice was rich and sultry in sharp contrast with her icy exterior.

  “Nice to see you’re optimism hasn’t faded with time,” Jack said in American English. Like Gavin, Jack preferred the casual unpretentiousness of it.

  “Forgive me if I do not share your enthusiasm for an early demise,” she responded coolly, keeping with their native tongue.

  “Forgiven,” Jack said with a wave of his hand.

  Her amethyst eyes glittered, unamused. “Of course, we would not find ourselves in such tidings had we done what we had agreed we would do.”

  A dark flick of her eyes told Gavin all he needed to know. Time had not healed. Gavin could feel her anger churning beneath the surface of her porcelain skin like a school of piranhas circling a bloody, bleating goat.

  It figured.

  It was an old argument but it still cut deep—the reason they hadn’t spoken in over four years. Four to one, and Gavin had overruled them all.

  He made no apologies. How the hell was he supposed to know that there would be an outside force capable of waking the Lord of the Underworld? On Earth?

  A world where magic did not exist and only magic could be used to free him.

  “We’re prepared,” he said.

  “Prepared?” she said. “The time to fight him would have been at a time of our choosing, while he was entombed and in possession of the low ground.”

  A passing child tapped his mother and pointed up at Tarsidion. The woman looked, blanched, grabbed the boy and hurried past. Not only was the plainsman gigantic, but Tarsidion always looked as if he were contemplating a new career as a murder spree specialist.

  “Perhaps we should discuss this elsewhere,” he rumbled in their native tongue, taking note of the stares that inevitably followed him.

  As if to punctuate his point, two uniformed FDA agents carrying a metallic suitcase walked briskly through the milling people and approached the quartet. They were young and serious-looking.

  “Your cases, Ms. Arkeides,” the first agent said.

  The other agent glanced nervously up at Tarsidion.

  “Thank you,” she said, primly accepting the cases.

  “Chastity belt?” Jack asked.

  “Lipstick,” Cirena answered, signing a clipboard one of the agents had handed to her.

  Jack smiled wider. “At least you haven’t completely lost your sense of humor.”

  “Thank you, gentleman,” she said, dismissing the FDA agents with a cordial nod, and then turned to them. “Where’s Noah?”

  “In Montana,” Gavin answered. Though it was the language he’d grown up speaking for the first sixteen years of his life, as of last year, he’d officially lived here on Earth longer than he’d lived back home. He didn’t even know which to call home anymore.

  “And are we any closer to discovering how this catastrophe could have occurred?”

  A sheepish silence.

  “Nope,” Jack answered finally in English. “We don’t know shit. Noah says the only witness who was there is in the hospital.”

  Cirena’s moistened her lips. “Do we know anything?”

  “We know that the tomb was opened late Monday night,” Gavin said. “That whoever opened the tomb also killed Ainima, the guardian, and…” Gavin paused. “Joanna’s dead.”

  All of their shoulders deflated, even Cirena’s. Tarsidion bowed his head.

  Gavin continued. “Local news is beginning to report a string of murders from Montana to Minnesota. It hasn’t been picked up by national yet because of that midair collision over Austin yesterday, but six people in just under two days. It will be picked up.”

  “They’re calling them butchered,” Tarsidion said. Each of them knew exactly what that meant. Seventeen years of imprisonment had left the Overlord very hungry and very angry.

  Gavin continued. “Latest victim was found in the suburbs of Alexandria, Minnesota, around five this morning.”

  “Which means he’s traveled roughly eight hundred plus miles in two days. He’s got another seventeen hundred to go,” Jack said, doing the math while looking up to the left. “That should give us about four more days before he’s here, give or take a half. Then it’s game time.”

  “Game time?” Cirena asked. “When he gets here, we’re all going to die.”

  “We have the Bastion,” Gavin said.

  “We should have opened that tomb like we agreed. Now we are at the mercy of his cunning.”

  Gavin massaged his temples.

  The original agreement had been to open the tomb after ten years. They figured a decade of cold, starving darkness for the Drynnlord would make him weak, disoriented and magicless, while they’d have the high ground, the best science had to offer and magic. They’d figured out how to extract it from this world. It was an agonizingly slow process, but good old Noah had figured it out. They’d even contemplated building a reinforced bunker around the tomb so that he wouldn’t be able to just fly off when they opened it. But the closer the day had approached, the more fear and
dread had twisted Gavin’s insides.

  What if they failed? What if he escaped? Then two worlds would fall prey to his hunger and it would be their doing. As long as he was entombed, Asmodeous could hurt no one. Maybe he would have died in there. Starved to death. The only key in existence that could open that tomb was barricaded and guarded eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds a day on the other side of the country. Here. That tomb should have remained sealed forever.

  When the ten-year mark had come, Gavin had faced his friends and brethren and informed them of his decision. There would be no opening of the tomb. The risk of failure was too cataclysmic. They would be not be returning home.

  They had not taken it well.

  “Lucian would have never made that decision,” Cirena said.

  Gavin flinched.

  “You hit below the belt, Cirena,” Tarsidion rumbled.

  “It’s true,” she responded, unapologetic. “We had every advantage, and now we have none.”

  “We still have the Bastion,” Jack said.

  Cirena shook her head in annoyance. “It’s not the same.”

  Gavin couldn’t decide if he was more hurt by her words or pissed. The woman had no filter—never had. The most damnable thing about it was that she was right. Lucian, their true leader, would have never backed out. Gavin’s older twin by three minutes would have believed in their abilities, believed that good always triumphs over evil and opened that tomb.

  He would have wanted to go home.

  “Maybe so.” Gavin met the full brunt of her glare. “But Lucian is dead.” It was as if somebody else was speaking. “And despite whatever anger you harbor, we made the right decision and I would make it again, given the same information.” His voice was climbing. “Contained, Asmodeous presented no threat.”

  Cirena leaned toward him. “A lot of good that did us,” she said, switching to English.