Chapter 12
Cole’s quick steps began covering the ground of the industrial estate in the north of the city. Cipactli hunted in packs. They were native to New Mexico, where like the vampires of Europe, they were tolerated within limits, blanketed in the protection of New Mexico’s glamour, licensed and allowed to exist. Disgusting, but there it was.
It was better than them roaming free, the Coalition insisted. In Edinburgh, far from their homes, the Cipactli were fair game. He knew these were somehow tied to Andrew; he just had to prove it. The orange dust of the industrial estate covered everything. Clothes, skin, lungs. It hung like vapour, staining anything it touched until Cole was partially camouflaged in a fine coating of it. The dust would dampen his smell; it was probably why the Cipactli had chosen the area. The Cipactli had animal instincts, and a predator sought to mask its approach whenever possible.
The Cipactli, unlike vampires, moved freely day or night. There was no optimal time to strike them. They were free to hunt and fight whenever they needed to. Henry wasn’t safe as long as the pack remained, and he’d already left the kid alone for too long. He wasn’t sure what would hurt the Cipactli, except for fire. Fire hurt everything, more or less. His obsidian fist-knives had done well back at the flat. Obsidian hurt a lot of things too.
Cole jumped another mesh fence. The search had to be methodical. Scanning warren spots. Waiting in the shadows looking for the telltale signs of lookouts and tracks. The hours passed, and he found nothing. He closed in ever tightening loops toward the far northern corner of the industrial estate.
The blue haze he had hoped to follow was long gone, and the night evaporated in a blur of careful movement and restless waiting. The balance between drinking enough whisky to drown It and not enough to dull his wits was familiar guess work. Right then, he thought it best to land on the drunker side of the coin. He might not get a second chance to resist the Fall, after It had nearly worn him a few hours ago.
Another promising secluded spot, empty. He moved on. Natalia’s protection spell had never reacted like it had today; he hadn’t known it could. He wondered, as he crept, if Natalia had felt It too. Had she sent the flare of pain in his guts somehow, to knock him back to sense?
Shame lit his cheeks painfully, his heart wiring exposed. Of them all, Cole needed her faith the most. For her to know, to have sensed It taking over? He lashed out blind, fist jarring painfully as he struck the nearest thing: a portacabin wall. The pain pushed his heart wires back in again, covering up the vulnerable parts of him.
He took the pain in his fist and wrapped it tight, focusing on the hunt with a death grip. But the hunt, a thing committed to practise and honed instinct, couldn’t stop his thoughts. The moon pulled the night around as time vanished, and the war between present and past muttered on. More whisky could drown the hot flashes of memory that looped, playing on repeat, but he needed to find the Cipactli sober enough to fight. In the fight, he would get some peace from ghosts.
Somewhere between the wind and the dust, the Cipactli hid. Their animal senses would have him cold if he came up on them the wrong way. He’d need to spot them first.
Her screams, calling his name.
He pressed his eyes, stopping. He couldn’t keep hunting like this. If they came on him, while he was distracted by a flashback … He brought the Cipactli’s faces up from memory, the skin of the people they wore on top, their animal movements. The images bleached his mind. The only refuge he had left from his own memories – hate – welcomed him home.
No matter what Cole might be, the Cipactli were evil. Everything else withered, paling next to his hatred. The flashes vanished, as he had known they would. He came finally to a set of cranes, still, like tall watchful grazers on a grassy plain. Yes, said his gut. They were here.
He found a spot outside the yard and looked across it. It was full of portacabins, arranged around a large silo, some digging machinery and the tall cranes. The entrance to the nest would be somewhere hidden among all the equipment, or in one of the cabins. As he scanned, he noticed an unusual number of boot prints leading away toward the back left-hand corner of the yard, tyre tracks among them.
He approached the area wide, coming from the yard next door and on the right-hand side as he faced it, away from the road running through the whole industrial estate. He scoped for the sentries who would be watching the obvious approaches. He had to take Cipactli one at a time to stand any chance of surviving without siphoning again. There was a line of portacabins off to the right of the yard that would allow him to close distance on the back corner, hopefully unseen.
The van driver would have raised the alarm. The Cipactli would be waiting for him. He gripped a fistful of the dirt to dampen some of his remaining smell. The grit slid down his back as he rubbed it on his face and neck. The cool, sturdy metal bars of his fist-knives were welcome in his palms. No booming firearms here; this was space for close work.
Inside, his parasite stirred in its whisky stupor, waking up as he got focused. He jumped the fence and fell in beside the line of cabins, close packed and poorly lit by the moon overhead. The gravel was soft, powdery and quiet enough for his slow feet to pass soundlessly.
It kicked again. The Cipactli were close. It could sense them. The realisation he could now interpret something of Its responses left a bitter taste in his mouth. Still, any advantage helped.
He moved to the end of the row, toward the back of the yard, and rounded the corner of the last cabin, revealing the other side to be a line of more cabins. The lane between them led from the back of the yard to the main roadway.
The Cipactli was so still – lying in a pool of shadow, flat on his stomach – he almost missed him by the side of the cabin Cole had just peered around. Its furred head strained forward, toward the line of the road. Cole’s heart rose in a drumbeat, kicking in his chest. It wanted him to rush the Cipactli and hack it to bits, making the creep toward it agonising.
He stepped the three metres between them as lightly as he could. The Cipactli’s ears craned forward and twitched. If the Cipactli turned, if it cried out …
Cole came up right behind the Cipactli, looking down on it laid out beneath him. Achingly slow, he put one foot on each side of the Cipactli’s knees. He stood over the Cipactli. He needed to get within arm’s reach. If Cole grabbed now, he would fumble. He had to get total leverage. A breeze kicked up, blowing dust through the corridor, Cole upwind and holding his breath.
He knelt, the Cipactli right beneath him. As he reached out for the its neck, uncoiling like a cobra in slow motion, one too-human hand reached around to scratch its back. The hand patted Cole’s body as he stretched toward the creature’s throat.
Cole lunged, striking, snake-quick. The obsidian fist-knife jammed into the Cipactli’s throat, spraying warmth over his hand. His free hand found the Cipactli’s canine maw and held it shut while Cole slammed his body down, pinning the creature under his weight.
Nausea rolled through him at the ugly work. Sometimes violence was degrading for all. Vocal cords cut, the Cipactli died in perfect silence. A perfunctory search of the creature’s pockets yielded nothing of use.
Cole crept away from the lane of cabins, away from the dead Cipactli, with the line of the road to his left. The cabins heading in toward the far corner of the yard were a nightmare of blind corners and hidden shadows.
After a twenty-minute search, he’d found no more sentries. He’d covered the spots most likely to contain the Cipactli nest. Four of the Cipactli were down now. There couldn’t be that many more to go. A big nest would have left more footprints, more missing people, more missing animals. Those were the ripples in the city’s pond that Nessie and the Council watched so closely.
Cole finally found the nest in the corner of the yard. He hid in the shadow of a digger while he watched the last unchecked building. The Cipactli had to be there. There was nowhere else for them to hide. Nestled against a tall wire fence, the building had seen better days. It had
been some sort of office in the past, perhaps. The rust on the hinges of the door, the broken windows along the building’s flank and the grime that slicked the brickwork like thick make-up said the place hadn’t been used in a while.
The building was illuminated by wall lights, shining over open ground. There was no cover for his approach. Crossing the gap between here and the building, Cole would be totally exposed.
The minutes drained away as he peered at the windows, struggling to differentiate shades within shadows. Was there anything inside that shell, peering out? Inside, It clambered. With a jump, like the one he’d used in Leith to kill the van-passenger Cipactli, he could vault into the building’s windows and be on anything watching in a moment.
And risk being worn by It again. No, this was happening the old-fashioned way. There couldn’t be more than a couple of Cipactli left. He’d run and gun it. Cross the space, kick the door in. Shock and awe. Pity he didn’t have explosives, or the time to improvise any.
He could stand there thinking it to death all night, but he’d got the drop on the Cipactli well enough; it was time to cash in. There was a rusty-hinged door on the side of the building. He broke cover in a few leaping bounds, barrelled toward the entrance and hit the door, full tilt, shoulder down, tearing it from its frame.
Wood cracked around him as he fell through. Two faces sat in the room beyond, coated in glamour magic which covered snouts: one flat-toothed, the other sharp. They looked at Cole in shock while splinters rained down on their small table.
Sat in a halo of flying debris, their cards in their hands, motionless, the driver and his buddy blinked. Cole’s shotgun swung up smoothly. The trigger sighed and banged with the voice of the gods, point blank into the flat-toothed Cipactli. The ferrocerium round ignited, iron and super-heated shot tearing the Cipactli’s head apart.
Before the headless corpse could hit the ground, Cole levelled the barrels at the sharp-toothed Cipactli – the driver – who still clutched his cards like a ward. The double trigger-pull on his side-by-side depressed again, and the driver’s head burst, leaving his torso in his seat.
The thunder of a Cipactli war cry broke the night, and Cole spun. Another Cipactli came on, freight train, tusks ramming into his ribs. His feet were picked up and lost to the passing air as the thing’s head drove him on.
He beat the stock of his gun down on the Cipactli’s horned face, but the creature’s weight carried him into the wall on the other side of the room. Cole crumpled, pain folding him. He slammed his shotgun stock into the Cipactli’s face over and over, throat burning as he screamed.
Finally, the Cipactli’s bones gave way and the creature collapsed, limp. Cole’s world spun, threatening to blacken. He braced himself on the remains of the wall he’d been slammed into, standing slowly.
The wound was bad; cold spread from it. Three more Cipactli entered the room. There were too many Cipactli here for them not to have tripped alarms in the city-wide net. ‘Come on, ye bastards!’
They stood watching him cautiously, but it wouldn’t be long before their leering hunger and the smell of his blood drove their caution from them. Taking them one at time, he would be pushed to the limit. Three at once was unstoppable, immovable. The end.
But there was always a choice. It swirled. All that was left now was how many he would take with him. Time to sell his life as dearly as he could. It seemed fitting that the monsters of his childhood had come back to finish the job. Maybe his sister’s ghost would finally leave him alone.
He cracked the gun, ejecting the spent shells. The Cipactli wouldn’t let him finish reloading, but he had to try. One started forward. He thrust the gun at them. ‘Come on then! I’ll shove this up your fucking arse!’ The Cipactli halted, looking at the others.
Pain and numbness washed down one side. Bone-weary sleep seeped into the wound. He didn’t need to see it to know a lot of blood was leaking out.
The three Cipactli were a nightmare blend, not even bothering with their glamour. A hyena-faced man with a gleaming insect exoskeleton. He had a scorpion’s tail curling behind his armoured body to Cole’s right. The other, a mixture of bat and human blended into the one, came on in the middle. A shaggy wolfish creature to Cole’s left. The three were looking to attack from different sides simultaneously.
They had him penned, herded into corner of the room. A slithering stir moved in the rope of his guts; It climbing up his spine, whispering gibberish he could not understand. Hopefully, It would give the bastards food poisoning.
Motion blurred in from both sides. His shotgun clattered as he went for the fist-knives. Maximum damage, zero defence. He attacked hard to his left, toward the wolfish one. If he could break past them and somehow get to the door, he could hold there. They couldn’t come at him more than one at a time.
He collapsed his weight toward wolf-man, air passing in a rush. He gouged for its face and eyes. The Cipactli flurried back, surprised.
Cole flashed the daggers at head height in a feint and attacked low, looking to puncture the wolf-man’s abdomen. The Cipactli fell back and grabbed for Cole’s arm, barely keeping the keen edges of Cole’s fist-knifes away.
The wolf-man suddenly halted, and they crashed together, a flurry of limbs. Teeth flashed in Cole’s face as he ducked under the wolf-man’s shoulder. They grappled. Cole pushed into the Cipactli’s centre of gravity, instinct knowing if he stopped now, it was over.
The scorpion creature behind him would be on him in moments. Wolf-man’s feet skidded as he fought to stop Cole breaking for the door. It yelped when Cole’s daggers found the soft flesh of its belly and thigh.
Cole willed the Cipactli to fall back as he dug holes with his fist-knives. The guttural barking coming from the wolf-man was agony, but still it refused to give ground.
A thump knocked Cole’s back. For a moment he thought the scorpion-man had tried to latch on and missed. Then his legs burned in an ice heat, his spine seizing up. Breath stopped, air seeming to leave the room in a vacuum.
He’d have taken wolf-man with him, except his arms shook and juddered. It looked on, climbing higher and higher into his twisting spine which buckled under the weight of the scorpion’s poison.
Three leering Cipactli heads watched him. His body thrashed, muscles tightening in useless spasms. ‘You spoiled the meat!’ Wolf-man’s mouth was flecked with bloody mucus as he knelt.
Their eyes roamed, picking a muscle to start eating while they argued. They were going to eat him alive. It screamed, banging on the cage of his ribs. The wolf-man picked up Cole’s leg, watching his calf spasm while he lowered his muzzle to smell the flesh.
The three Cipactli’s eyes sparkled, enjoying Cole’s helplessness. Wolf-man openly salivated. The other Cipactli knelt, picking over Cole’s body like butchers over a carcass.
‘Kill. Me.’ His throat burned acid, the words hardly recognisable.
The scorpion-man made some noise approximating a laugh from his hyena face. ‘We prefer our meat breathing.’
He flopped around like a fish on land, wating to be rent by tooth and claw. It needed just the slightest link. His whole body was pressed to the ground; the oily black stream pulsing forever below the surface was an easy reach away. He lowered himself into black magic and there – It waited.
The hungry, animal faces of the Cipactli looked confused for an instant before his aura washed over them. They grabbed him and pinned his limbs to the floor. The poison, crippling him a moment before, was a fiery sting in his veins. Cole was still vulnerable, but instinct told him – It told him – not to fight.
His hands were wreathed in shadow gauntlets. It swam into his right arm. His right gauntlet punctured the air in a small twist of the wrist. A swirling black orb, haloed by green light, appeared where he had pierced the air. It hung like a tiny tear in reality. It crawled down his left arm and punched his other gauntlet out. A point behind the wolf-man winked into existence, a tiny ball of dirty white, spinning and hardly visible.
&n
bsp; Reality blinked.
Cole was no longer lying on the floor. He stood behind the Cipactli, who were still kneeling, but now pinning nothing. The world swam in mirage; he struggled to tell up from down as the Cipactli turned toward him. It was like he’d just travelled through a portal.
Wolf-man came at him, swinging. Cole punched out, wild, disoriented, and the creature’s head came apart when his gauntlet stabbed through it. Cole’s arms, now extensions of blackened, smoky blades, cut from wolf-man’s head down through the neck and sheared down the side of his spine.
In a blaze of off-white light, strength flowed from the Cipactli into Cole, up his leeching blades in a wash of iron blood that burst in his mouth. Warmth spread back into his side. Somehow, he had healed. Or had he just done something worse? The two other Cipactli flooded the air with the metal taste of fear as they scrambled back.
Cole lashed out quickly with his gauntlets, tasting ribbons of both the Cipactli. The blue shine of his tracking splinters glowed within them. Now he had them marked, he could find them again. He reached in for the wolf-man’s organs.
Mum’s leg in a pool of red outside the shattered door.
The image shattered the spell. His blades shrank down, halving in size. The two Cipactli were moving for the door. He couldn’t let them carry on, loose in the city. It wanted to feed, fighting to control his arms and legs. His gut armour flared again and burned, holding It in check. The bat-faced man was going to reach the door; Cole jumped at him. The Cipactli yelped when his fist-knives severed its neck arteries.
It reached along his arms, willing Cole to feast. Could Natalia feel what was happening to him again? The corrosive shame that she might ate through. It nestled inside his limbs, trying to wear him. He fought It, levering her plates of protection, pushing It under.
The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1) Page 15