The Wrong Goodbye tc-2

by Chris F. Holm

  We ran toward the building at a crouch. I kept my eyes on the ground ahead of me, scanning the uneven, sun-baked dirt for obstacles that might trip up Theresa, who ran with one hand on Gio’s back. Halfway to the unfinished, plastic-clad first floor, a line of pale gray dust cut across the earth. It stretched out to either side of us, and wended its way around the building in a ragged circle.

  Alder ash, I assumed. Part of an ancient Celtic rite intended to shield those inside from the underworld’s reach. Explained why the crows were keeping their distance. I scuffed my feet along the dirt to break the circle as we crossed the threshold.

  When the circle was broken, the crows atop the fence took flight as one, and lighted on the skeletal building frame.

  “A-a-ah! It’s impolite to crash a bloke’s party, Sam, and doubly so for bringing unwelcome guests with you. And in your case, I fear, the penalties are steep.”

  The floodlights surrounding the building cut out just as we pushed aside the opaque plastic sheeting and ducked into the building. The sudden darkness was stifling. A hand out to halt Gio and Theresa, I crouched low against a concrete support, waiting for my eyes to adjust.

  The structure was scarcely more than a shell. Steel girders and molded concrete provided a sketch of the building the architect had intended —the building it would likely never become —but it was absent any touch of warmth or light. The floor was a vast slab of concrete, broken here and there with squares of black both large and small —no doubt to run conduits for plumbing, wiring, air conditioning and the like through. In our case, they were simply pitfalls to be avoided, lest this mission of ours end with us bleeding out in a basement courtesy of a compound fracture.

  The elevator shaft was empty —a square column of concrete stretching from floor to ceiling in the center of the massive lobby, its doorless passageway a deeper dark among the shadows. There wasn’t even so much as a cable running up it one could climb —not that Gio could have, anyway. That left no way up but the stairs.

  There were two sets of them, to the left and right of the elevator, set along the lobby’s outside walls. Gio jerked his head to indicate the nearest of them, and I nodded my assent. Taking Theresa by the hand, he inched along the wall toward it, and I followed close behind.

  Turned out, the first stairwell was a bust. A good six feet of construction detritus clogged the stretch from ground floor to first landing —scraps of two-byfours, twisted lengths of copper pipe, jagged hunks of concrete run through with rebar —making any attempt to scale the stairs impossible.

  Gio indicated the second set of stairs. But this time, I shook my head. If that’s where Danny wanted us, it was the last place I planned on being. I was through underestimating him.

  I scanned the room, spotted what I was looking for: a ladder. Then I braced it against the edge of a goodly patch of darkness on the ceiling —an aperture intended, I suspect, for an air duct —and began to climb, the sawed-off clanking dully against the rungs as I ascended.

  When I reached the top, I paused, scanning the second floor for any sign of danger before I climbed off the ladder. Then I whispered for Gio and Theresa to follow. For about the thousandth time today, I questioned the logic of bringing a blind woman into this. And for about the thousandth time today, I decided it didn’t much matter; if we failed, she was as good as dead anyways —washed away with the rest of humanity in the next Great Flood.

  It wasn’t a comforting thought.

  Whatever her handicap, Theresa was lithe and silent as a cat scaling the ladder. Gio was another story altogether. By the time he reached the top, he was huffing and puffing like he had a bone to pick with some little pigs, and he didn’t so much climb off the ladder as collapse beside it.

  “Jesus, dude,” he whispered. “Your buddy couldn’t finish the goddamn elevator? And did you bother to look down when you climbed up here? There’s a hole just like this one right below it, and I’m pretty sure it don’t stop there —if the ladder’d slipped, we woulda wound up in the second subbasement or some shit.”

  “I told you, neither of you have to come.”

  “And I told you, you ain’t getting rid of us that easy. Now, let’s go kick some bad-guy ass.”

  He rolled over and scrabbled to his feet, and then muttered, “The fuck?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Dunno.” He leaned down, groped at his leg a sec. “No big,” he said, waving his hand at me like I could see for a damn by the faint light filtering through the plastic sheeting from outside. “Just got tangled in some wire, is all.”

  “Gio, don’t move.”

  But it was too late. From somewhere in the darkness, I heard a tinkle of shattered glass. And then, the room began to shake.

  “Gio,” Theresa whispered, “what the hell did you do?”

  I grabbed the wire from his hands and followed it. It terminated in the center of the room, its end tied around the jagged neck of a wine bottle, which had until recently been perched precariously atop a folding chair. But it hadn’t contained wine. The black stain that spread across the floor beneath the chair smelled of iron. Of death. Of blood.

  I noticed something else, then, too. A pattern on the floor, encircling the chair and the growing stain. It glowed a sickly green, intensifying as the blood soaked into the concrete. At first, my mind could make no sense of its elaborate symbology, but as the glow intensified, it resolved itself before me. It was less a language than a sort of stylized image, one that conveyed greed, temptation, seduction, absorption —followed by a hollow eternity of oneness, of torment, of relentless hunger.

  I might not’ve recognized the language in which it had been written, but I realized at once what these symbols said.

  Abyzou.

  “Guys,” I shouted, all pretense of stealth abandoned, “we need to move!”

  I ran back the way I came. From behind me came a horrible rending sound, as if the very fabric of reality had torn apart.

  And then a sickly wet slithering of tentacles against concrete.

  And then the chitinous clicking of the demon’s beak.

  “Don’t look at it!” I shouted.

  “Don’t look at what?” Gio replied in alarm.

  “No problem on my end,” Theresa said, though the bravado in her voice rang false.

  I came upon the conduit so fast, I damn near fell in. Then Gio and I hoisted the ladder up through the hole, and tried to brace it against the one above.

  But we were too late. A tentacle lashed out from the darkness, glistening in the watery light filtering through the plastic sheeting from the street, and swatted the ladder. It clattered across the room and skittered off the unprotected edge, tearing loose a sheet of plastic and toppling to the dirt lot a floor below. When it hit, it loosed a flurry of surprised shouts, and a pop-pop of startled gunfire. The police were closing in.

  I aimed the sawed-off at the darkness, and it thundered in my hand. Then another tentacle wrapped itself around its barrel and yanked it from my grasp.

  A wet dragging sound filled the air as Abyzou approached. I caught a glimpse of glistening gray skin, and felt a sudden pressure in my mind. Join us, it said. Join us and never be alone again. Luxuriate in ecstatic, excruciating want for all eternity.

  I clutched my hands to my head, and tried to shake the thoughts. Only when I pressed tight my eyes did they ease, but even then I couldn’t banish them. Beside me, I heard Gio whimper and hit the ground.

  “So hungry,” he muttered. “It’s so goddamned hungry…"

  But there was no fear in his voice. Instead, he sounded full of sorrow. Sorrow and longing.

  I fell to my knees. I knew if I didn’t do something soon, Gio would succumb, and he’d forever be one with this queen bitch of the underworld. But for the life of me, I couldn’t muster the will to stop her.

  “Jesus Christ,” Theresa said, “what the fuck is wrong with you two?”

  A wet fwack like hitting a waterbed with a baseball bat, and the cursed creatu
re squealed. The pressure in my mind suddenly eased. Another couple, and I once more found my feet. I opened my eyes, and the pressure once more intensified, though not so badly as it had before. And what I saw amazed me: damn near seven feet of Afroed black woman going to town on a massive, squid-like hell beast with a length of rebar like it was some kind of unholy piñata.

  If Abyzou had an ass, Theresa was seriously kicking it.

  “You boys OK back there?” she yelled. Her voice was hoarse from exertion, and she was covered in green-black gore, but I could swear her tone was positively cheery. And still, she kept on swinging.

  “Getting there,” I managed. “You?”

  “Right as rain.” Fwack. “This bitch keeps trying to show me something,” she continued. “I can feel her rattling round my brain, trying to trick my eyes. Sucks for her they ain’t worked in years.”

  “That’s my baby!” Gio cheered, though when I looked at him, I found he was facing in the wrong direction, his eyes buried in the crook of one elbow.

  “Now, you boys got a job to do. I got this chick.”

  “You sure?”

  “Hell yes, I am. I’ma teach her a lesson for hitting on my man.”

  Gio protested, but he was no help to her down there and knew it. So reluctantly, he came with. Since Abyzou had relieved us of our ladder, we were forced to take the stairs. I’d hoped we’d already avoided —or, in the case of Abyzou, triggered —any protections Danny’d enacted, but if I’m being honest, I knew damn well we hadn’t.

  Each floor was separated by maybe twenty steps, with a landing in the middle. The stairwell was molded concrete, with no handrails, no windows, and nowhere to hide should trouble come. We crawled forward in utter darkness, worried with each movement some fresh hell would be unleashed. It wasn’t until we reached the landing I realized Danny’d been cleverer than that. After all, he didn’t need to kill intruders —just delay them. And this latest ploy of his would do exactly that.

  See, that last flight of stairs leading up to the third floor was not so dark as the preceding stretch —and with thousands upon thousands of shards of skim to illuminate it, why would it be? Danny’d never struck me as one with much facility for magic, but it looked for damn sure like he’d been studying. God knows what trap he’d rigged up at the base of the stairwell, but summoning Abyzou had been a nifty trick —and this was no slouch, either. Countless shards of needle-sharp skim hovering in the stairwell, aligned like molecules in a crystal, each one aiming a pointy end our way. Each of them was so small, its glow was almost undetectable, but together, their faint phosphorescence reminded me of whitecaps on a moonless night, or of an early morning fog.

  “We have to go back,” I said. “We have to find another way.”

  “There is no other way,” Gio said. “We got no ladder. We got no time. The cops’ll be here soon, and you can be damn sure Danny knows it. Which means he’s gonna make his move, and quick. Here, take this.” Something hit me in the darkness. It was Gio’s bowling shirt. His Bermuda shorts followed shortly after.

  “Uh, Gio —are you naked?”

  “Relax, dude —I still got skivvies on.”

  “If there’s a plan here, I’m not following.”

  “Use my clothes to cover your exposed skin.”

  I shook my head, and then realized he couldn’t see me by the skim’s pale half-light. “Gio, this won’t work. Skim’s too sharp. If you had a leather jacket, maybe, but even then there’d be no guarantee. And if I get so much as pricked, it’s lights out.”

  “You don’t get it,” he said. “I got better than a leather jacket —I got me.”

  “Gio, no. I can’t let you do this. You’re not among the living anymore —which means you’re not immune. This shit will knock you for a serious loop. I got dosed with a single shard, and I damn near didn’t come back. God knows what this many will do to you.”

  Gio sighed, steeling himself. When he spoke, his voice was calm. “I ain’t worried about coming back. Long as my lady’s here, I’ll find my way. And as for God, I sincerely hope he’s watching.”

  He was up before I could stop him. A short, fat man in boxer-briefs streaking wild-armed up the stairs, and screaming bloody murder all the while. The unlikeliest badass I’ve ever seen —and that includes his sightless lady-friend.

  I had no choice but to follow after.

  The shards of skim reacted like a swarm of killer bees when the plane was broken, homing in on him with laser precision. Each pinprick brought with it a bead of blood. Each shard that disappeared beneath his flesh dimmed the staircase slightly. Soon, there was no light left in the stairwell, save that which flickered like distant lightning within his flesh.

  The flight was ten steps long. He made it five or six before he fell.

  Then he was gone, swallowed by the skim’s forced slumber, and I was through.

  The set-up of this floor was different from the other two. For one, half the damn ceiling was missing. Broken concrete exposed steel girders and night sky, and afforded me a glimpse of the storm clouds coalescing above us, blotting out what few stars pierced the city’s glare. On one distant hunk of crumbling concrete across the roof from where I stood sat a gathering of crows, their outline disconcertingly like that of a hunched old man.

  This floor was also the only one to feature any internal construction. Metal studs framed out what looked to be a second, smaller pentagram before me, oriented opposite the one laid out by the perimeter of the building such that its outermost points touched the innermost of the larger one.

  Two pentagrams set at odds to one another. Good and evil. Profound and profane. I wondered which the larger represented. I suspected I knew the answer.

  Plastic sheeting was tacked over the metal studs, blurring the star-shaped room beyond from view. Beyond the plastic, candlelight danced, the light it cast through the plastic putting me in mind of a lantern’s glow.

  I pushed aside a sheet of plastic and stepped into the room.

  “Sam,” said the stranger with Danny’s accent, “so nice of you to join us!”

  Us.

  He said us.

  Which made sense, on account of he wasn’t alone.

  She was slight of build, and stunning in all the obvious ways. Sun-kissed hair spilled down over shoulders both shapely and deeply tanned. A spaghetti-strapped tank top of heather gray barely contained a pair of breasts just this side of ostentatious. A glimpse of midriff peeked out above a skirt that started so low and ended so high, in simpler times it would’ve caused a riot. Her legs gleamed with reflected candlelight, and went all the way to the floor.

  In her hand, she held Psoglav’s skimming blade.

  I turned my attention back to Danny, who was wearing a strapping lad of twenty-five or so, with pale blue eyes and teeth so white they seemed to glow. He looked unperturbed by my arrival. In fact, he appeared the picture of confidence in his yarn-dyed linen shirt and khaki shorts, a pair of leather sandals on his feet. “Who’s the skirt?” I asked him. The gnawing feeling in my gut told me I already knew.

  “Who’s the skirt?” she repeated back to me, her crisp Balkan accent an added barb to her mockery. “Honestly, Sam, is that any way to greet an old friend?”

  Ana. I should have known. All the magic. All the planning. Danny never could have managed this without her.

  I took a step toward them. Danny raised a hand and waved at me a ludicrous revolver. Seriously, the thing was so big, Dirty Harry would’ve thought the thing excessive. And the way Danny was holding it, he was just as likely to break his wrist as hit me. But I knew him well enough to realize his carelessness was affected. He could put a round in my chest at twice this distance. So I stopped moving. Stayed put.

  “That’s a good chap,” he said. “You’d be wise to stay outside the circle, or I fear I’ll be forced to get quite cross.”

  I eyed the circle. I hadn’t noticed it until he’d called attention to it. The last one I’d seen was alder ash, the sacrifice of the
trees’ lives enough to protect an entire building from the underworld’s reach. This one was smaller, only ten feet across, and made from blood.

  “Yes,” Danny said, “the loss of life required for this little parlor trick, and the one you encountered downstairs, is unfortunate —but I assure you, I had the good grace to get the poor indigent who unwit tingly donated it nice and pissed on decent whisky before I tapped him. In all likelihood, it was a better death than he had coming.”

  “Yeah, you’re a real peach,” I said. And then, to Ana: “How can you go along with this? Don’t you realize what’s at stake?”

  “Go along with this?” she said. “Why, Sam, you’ve got it wrong. Do you think our Daniel could have planned a rite so intricate as this? Do you think he has the skills to carry it out? I learned long ago, Sam, no one is coming to rescue me —so I decided to take it upon myself to do so.”

  Of course. It seemed so goddamn obvious in retrospect. Only Ana could have conjured Abyzou so easily. Only she would have the mystical mojo to pull all this off.

  “So it’s been you all this time? You who set Danny up as a runner for Dumas? You who sent him to double-cross me?”

  “I’m my own man,” Danny protested. “My decisions were my own.”

  “Sure they were. So you’re saying it sat OK with you, stealing the Varela soul from an old friend?”

  “It was a necessary evil; the ritual requires a truly corrupt soul. The energy it releases upon its destruction breaks hell’s bond of servitude as it fuses soul to flesh forever. Hence the young, choice meat-suits —we’ll be stuck with them from here on out. And besides, you’re one to talk of bloody loyalty. I’ve not forgotten what you did to Quinn.”

  “Damn it, Danny —I’ve told you a thousand times, I’m not the one who got Quinn shelved.”

  “Yeah, right,” he spat. “I suppose Ana didn’t hear you rat him out, then.”

  My God. All these years, I’d had it backward. Danny hadn’t turned Ana against me. Ana had turned Danny.

  And that’s when the pieces clicked into place.

  “This building,” I said to her. “The design, the construction —the research to get the ritual just right. Inserting Danny into Dumas’s operation. Hell, calling in an angelic air-strike so you could get your hands on a grade-A skimming blade… the groundwork to orchestrate all that must’ve taken years.”