by Steve Vera
A young woman squealed in delight as she was engulfed by a disembarking veteran in his dress blues. He dropped his military bags as he caught her, burying his face in her shoulder.
Cirena ignored them. “We could have killed him and left this godforsaken world forever.”
“Or we could have fucking died,” he said, jabbing a finger at her face, his anger finally bursting through his composure. “Deos existed for millions of years in the Underworld before the damn Red-cloths let him out. Nobody in the history of either world has ever been able to kill him. Not only would Earth be at his mercy, but so would Theia. The risks were too high.” The last sentence he said delineating each word.
“We had an agreement,” she growled.
“Cirena, enough,” Tarsidion said.
She tore her anger off Gavin and flung it at the giant exotic.
“We might yet turn this to our advantage. Asmodeous will not expect us to be able to wield magic.”
The sides of her nose twitched and her eyes bore through the big man like diamond drills.
Oh, how he loved his brothers.
“Why do you both always take his side?”
Jack stepped closer to Cirena and looked up the four inches she had on him. “Because if it wasn’t for him we’d all be dead, and you know it. Asmodeous would have never been entombed in the first place.”
Cirena licked her lips. “That’s not the point. We had an agreement.”
“What do you want me to say, Cirena? If it had been up to me, yes, I would have cracked open that puppy and let Asmodeous have it with both barrels just like the way we planned, but it was Stav’s call and we back his play, plain and simple. So quit your bitching.”
Cirena’s eyelashes fluttered furiously.
Jack turned toward Gavin. “It doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten, though,” he said, pointing.
Tarsidion put his hands on both of their shoulders. “Let’s have this conversation somewhere else, shall we?” he said. “I don’t feel like getting arrested.”
Cirena gave them all one last good glare and then turned on her heel, striding briskly toward the escalator that led to the exit. Jack and Tarsidion fell in behind her. Gavin stared after them a moment and heaved a sigh, but there was a tinge of a smile in it.
Just like old times. Almost.
*
The drive home was quiet. There was much to discuss, but the car seemed hardly the appropriate place to begin. Or the living room. Or anywhere, really.
“Aw, shit,” Jack muttered as they turned down Gavin’s street.
“Aw, shit” was right. Amanda’s light metallic green convertible Volkswagen Beetle awaited in the driveway.
“Who’s car is that?” Cirena asked as Gavin’s Audi pulled in behind it.
“Gavin’s betrothed, Amanda,” Tarsidion answered.
Jack arched an eyebrow.
Cirena stiffened. Gavin glared at Tarsidion, who raised both hands in the air apologetically.
“You’ve taken a woman?” Cirena asked in the quietest of voices.
“I have,” Gavin replied after a good four seconds.
A very long pause followed. “When?” Cirena asked.
Gavin shook his head. Their lives very well might be ending in two days, and this was the conversation he was most dreading? “Two years.”
“Two years!” she demanded. “Two years, and this is the first time you have the courage to tell me?”
“Cirena, you haven’t spoken to me in over four years.”
“Coward,” she muttered darkly.
Gavin stepped out of the car. Man, she was pushing his buttons today. And it had only been a half an hour. There were more important issues pending, like saving one, possibly two worlds from impending doom. And saying goodbye to Amanda.
The very thought elicited a cement block in his guts. This is not how it’s supposed to be.
The front door to his house opened just as a chorus of slamming doors sounded behind him. Out poked Amanda’s beautiful, full-of-life face, draped in those untamable honey-brown locks. There was a peculiar expression on her face, one he’d never seen before, and then it dawned on him. She must have gone in the basement. This would require some explaining.
“Planning on invading a country or something?” she asked sweetly, her face pasted with a stiff, plastic smile that would have done any flight attendant proud.
“Switzerland,” Jack answered. “I love chocolate.”
Her smile disintegrated. “Where’ve you been keeping him, Gavin? He’s a riot.”
“I told you I’d call.”
“That was, like—” she glanced down at her watch, a Movado he’d gotten for her on their one-year anniversary, “—twelve hours ago.” She looked back up.
He could feel Jack’s smirk. “The strangest things amuse you, Juekovelin,” he mumbled in their native tongue.
“What did you just say?” Amanda demanded. She tromped down the stairs of his front porch. “What’s going on, Gavin? You’ve got guns, knives, swords, for crying out loud, as well as enough jewelry and gold coins to buy a government. And what’s with all the seeds? I want to know now—what is going on?”
The slight cock to her head, her hands on her hips, the considerably higher tone in her voice told Gavin all he needed to know. She was going to make a scene. All he wanted was to feel the cool of her body against his own one last time.
“Perhaps you should introduce us,” Cirena said, stepping forward.
Amanda’s expression cooled as she took in Cirena. Her eyes flashed between them suspiciously. “I’m Amanda, Gavin’s fiancée.” She extended her hand. “And you are?”
“Be nice, Cirena,” Gavin said between his teeth.
“A dear friend.” Cirena smiled pointedly.
“All right, enough of this,” Gavin snapped. “Amanda, Cirena. Cirena, Amanda.” He looked at Amanda. “You want answers, fine. In the car—now. You,” he said, pointing directly at Cirena, “you cut me some slack. Go inside with Abbot and Costello over here and get everything ready. We leave tonight. Noah can meet us at the Bastion.” The last words he said in their native language.
“If you don’t tell me what language you’re speaking, Gavin, I’m going to go in the house, get your George Benson and break it over your head.”
“Get in the car.” Gavin unsheathed some steel in his voice.
Amanda blinked. “Fine,” she fumed, climbing in.
He met Cirena’s eyes with cold fury. “Why are you doing this? The Overlord approaches and you want to pick a fight?” he demanded, his face scant inches from her own.
Amanda watched it all from behind the windshield.
“Do you love her?” Cirena asked by way of answer, her face strangely open.
He sighed. “Yes.”
Cirena flinched. “I thought you could never love another. I thought your heart was ‘an empty, wretched place incapable of ever loving again.’ You told me you could never love another after Alyssandra—”
“I would have wagered all that I possess, my life included, that this could not be…and yet it is.” Gavin took a deep breath. “I have found happiness here, in this place.” Gavin took in his home, the trees, the air around them. “Now I must say goodbye to it. Cirena, please.” Her name was a plea. He looked into her eyes,
past the heavy-lidded ice, and reached for the ghost of the woman he knew.
A long moment passed between them. Finally, blessedly, her eyes spider-cracked and from between the shards of her anger and pain, Cirena remembered him, too. Her chin dipped, ever so slightly. “We’ll be waiting.”
She turned and made for his house without a backward glance.
“Thank you,” Gavin whispered.
“You are good,” Jack observed, nodding in impressed amusement as he followed Cirena’s curves into the house. Tarsidion brought up the rear silently. At least one of them minded his business.
Amanda waited for him in the car, arms crossed, legs crossed, purse on lap.
Gavin cleared his throat. “Building a barricade, dahlin?”
She refused to meet his eyes. “Who the hell is she?”
Gavin shut the driver’s door. “I thought you wanted answers.”
“I do. And that’s a question. Who is she? Ex-girlfriend?”
“No.” He put the key in the ignition and backed out.
“Oh, this had better be reeeeally good,” she muttered, uncrossing her arms to cover his hand with her own as he shifted. He studied the contrast of her skin against his, fingers interlaced over the gearshift. Despite her anger and pain…she’d already forgiven him.
It would be the little things he’d miss the most.
Chapter Nine
As a rule, Kevin did not like walking balls of lint. He looked down at the Maltese prancing across the sidewalk on his heels and shook his head; the little fur ball had actually grown on him. So had her bossy, brunette owner. Kevin grinned.
The night was crisp, scented with burning wood, and while Kevin ambled down the sidewalk under illusions of grandeur (imagining himself as a world-class boxer in training), the little pooch stopped. He didn’t even notice until his arm jerked back. Mildly annoyed, he gave the leash a good yank, but the dog didn’t move. She’d sunk into the grass with her head down, tail between her legs.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Don’t feel like taking a squirt?”
Normally the pooch would at least give him the courtesy of a cocked head or a wag of the tail, but not this time. Just a single, high-pitched whine that whistled from her throat.
Kevin sighed, a smidge of irritation creeping in. The deal was simple—easy walking pooch equals occasional walks by Kevin. His girlfriend had trained the dog well, which was the whole point. She had trained him well, too, evidently.
“C’mon, pooch, let’s go.” Kevin gave the leash another good yank.
The dog whimpered but refused to budge.
“What is your deal?” he asked, kneeling beside it. To his surprise she was shivering, trembling the way she did during thunderstorms when Lacey pulled her into bed with them. “What are you scared of? There’s no thunder out here.”
As if to mock him, a sudden burst of flapping wings and startled squawks exploded from the tree above them, launching his heart into his throat. He looked up into the sky to find the culprits who’d snatched a year from his life, but they were already gone, vague shadows vanishing into the night. Kevin brought his attention back to the maple and studied it as his pulse began to stabilize.
It was dark out tonight. Not one splash of moon or starlight made its way through the blanket of clouds that had rolled in late that afternoon. Normally, that wouldn’t have mattered—this street was well lit—but oddly enough, all the streetlights were out. Why hadn’t he noticed this before? Raised under the artificial light of the suburbs, this was the darkest night he could remember.
“How ’bout we do this whole walking thing later, pooch?” he asked the dog, gathering her up into his arms with one eye on the tree. Somehow the top seemed darker than the rest. He didn’t especially feel like walking beneath it, so he didn’t. He calmly turned around and started back the way he’d come. There was something ominous in the air tonight and he wanted no part of it. The dog could piss on the carpet for all he cared; he’d clean it.
He was going home.
He’d only taken a couple of steps when the distinct sound of wood creaked behind-above him, as if something were shifting in the upper branches of the tree. He spun around, aware that his breaths came much quicker, and walked backward, inexplicably nervous about turning his back on the tree. The branches almost seemed to be bending down, as if something heavy rested in them.
There was nobody out tonight, Kevin noted. No college kids coming and going, no joggers or dog-walkers. The retirement home across the street from his apartment complex was quiet. Nothing stirred.
This is stupid.
Kevin turned around and walked forward quickly, relieved to see the door to his building not a hundred feet away. Behind him, he heard the tree lurch violently, as if something gigantic had pushed off its upper boughs.
He whirled. The abrupt swaying of the tree was followed by the flapping of frighteningly large, unseen wings. Leathery. Like a bat the size of an elephant. The dog bolted from his grip, scrambling and scratching his chest.
“Ow! Dammit, that hurt!” he howled as the dog took off.
He would have chased the dog except that he became transfixed upon an apparition that defied reality. It happened so fast he tried to convince himself what he’d seen was not real, but Kevin knew what he saw.
He had no name for it.
A huge mirage of perverse darkness glided through the sky and landed in the sycamore right next to him with an explosion of rattling branches and leaves. Kevin took off. Didn’t need to think this one through.
It would have helped had his legs not turned to a couple of piles of al dente pasta. It would have helped had he continued to breathe. Until this moment, Kevin had never known true terror. Tonight, his horizons expanded.
It wasn’t that far to his door. Only a hundred feet or so—a third of a football stadium, the thirty-three yard line. Those special-teams guys ran that in mere seconds, but it took him fourteen years just to take one step. He dared a glance over his shoulder. The sycamore snapped as the darkness launched itself at him.
Mesmerized, Kevin watched the darkness pump toward him, sailing over him like some great, amorphous bird of prey. It landed between him and his door.
Logic dictated that he run screaming for his life, but he didn’t. He stared, hypnotized, his feet cemented to the concrete sidewalk. He was looking at a living mirage, taupe flesh glimmering behind a thin veil of black smoke that softly eddied around it like a cape in a breeze.
A smell like burning copper, wet rock and rotting meat assailed his nostrils, invoking images of a great, dark cave with a pile of bones in the back.
“Step forward,” a guttural whisper commanded from inside his head.
Kevin recoiled, gripping his head as if he were under attack by a swarm of invisible hornets.
A cold, heavy presence pushed into his thoughts, knocking aside mental boundaries like papier-mâché walls, rifling through his thoughts and memories with wanton disregard.
It hurt.
Talons clawed at his mind, left it open to bleed. Kevin could feel its hollow hunger. “I wish to crack your skull and taste the sweetness of your fear,” the presence boomed inside his head. He could almost see its jaws.
He tried to pivot away, tried to break the connection with the monster that feasted with hunger on fear. His body defied him. Kevin took a step forward.
The whisper within his thoughts laughed in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from the center of the Earth. He could almost see an outline behind the veil of eddying dark, but the shap
e suggested something too horrible to be real.
Another step, and then another. Soon he would be within arm’s reach.
Where was everyone? Where was the world? Couldn’t they see what was happening here? Couldn’t they see this pillar of darkness commanding him forward so that it could crack his skull with its jaws and suck his brains out? He opened his mouth to scream, but all that came out was an asthmatic whistle.
“Come to me,” the Darkness beckoned. There were eyes behind that wreath of blackness; he could see them boring into him with an amber, wolfish hue.
He saw his own death there and vomited in his mouth. His foot lifted to take another step and hovered, trembling above rotting leaves. He bared his teeth and resisted—hell no, was he going to march to his own death! He screwed his eyes shut, bracing himself for a Herculean struggle, but the moment he broke eye contact, the presence in his head disappeared, releasing the tether. Kevin stumbled back.
Amazed at his sudden reversal of fortune, Kevin launched across the parking lot at Olympian speed. He ignored the fwoosh of flapping wings, pissed himself as he heard a deafening roar that belonged no place on this earth and screamed for his life.
For the merest fraction of a second, he actually thought he would make it. Only a dozen more steps to go. His hopes fireballed as white pain lanced through his shoulders, his back and his chest and, unbelievably, he began to levitate, legs dangling in the air.
Up he soared, a scream lodged in his throat. Tendrils of fetid, oily blackness rushed down to him and swirled around his head, and from above…the flapping of the devil’s wings.
Consciousness did not desert him immediately. Jumbles of emotions and random thoughts flashed across his mind. He wanted Lacey. One last beer. And his mommy. There were two unanswered voicemails on his phone from her. He would never hear her voice again. Below, doors opened, and people stared up and pointed. His last thought was to smile and wave goodbye, but the pain ripping through his shoulders forbade it. Vaguely, from beneath of the haze of agony, a headline from the paper on the kitchen table flashed in his head.