by Tim Marquitz
“Cyrill will lead you to a cell of Eidolon that has been going about their destructive business directly under the nose of God’s watchdog, Jesus.”
“What does Christ have to do with all this?”
“He was tasked to clean up the mess left behind by the war, but the Eidolon have been making it difficult with their play at rebellion.” He gestured to Cyrill for her to continue.
“Many of my people have been recruited to take the fight to God and his army; to keep them busy with raids and insurgent strikes.”
That was what Longinus and I had popped into the middle of when we arrived, what God wanted us to stop. “If Jesus is on the defensive, the Eidolon can do whatever they want on planet.”
Cyrill nodded at my verbal musing. “The Felurians know they will never be the winner no matter the outcome of the battle for Feluris. They are easily swayed to the cause for they fear the end has already been determined for them.”
“So they’ve nothing to lose?”
She responded with a slight smile. “And such cooperation has led us,” she motioned to Baalth with her eyes, “to information regarding the possible whereabouts of the leaders of the Eidolon.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” I started for the door, reloading my pistols as I went. Cyrill followed a moment later, having snatched up a small pack.
“Be warned, Frank,” Baalth told me. “I can do little to help should things become difficult.” He smiled and bowed his head. “It is good to see you, once more.”
And surprisingly enough, it was good to see him, too. As difficult as he could be, Baalth had always been there for me, in his own way. His being on Feluris was like having a tiny slice of Earth with me. It gave me hope I might recover more than just that sliver.
I didn’t respond to his comment, only turning and walking out the door after Cyrill triggered the magical locks. As good as it was to have someone in the know on my side, old habits die hard.
You never show a demon your hand.
Thirteen
The trip from Baalth’s hidey hole was more casual than I’d expected. Cyrill pulled out what passed for a hoodie in her world and gave it to me to wear. It was yet another stinky whiff of how different and yet how much the same things were no matter what part of the universe you came from. It hung down to my knees and I nearly swam in the thing, but at least it made walking across town a little easier. My face hidden under the deep hood, hands buried in the pockets, and an alien at my side, kept all the curious stares away.
We’d circled off toward what I imagined was the outskirts of town when I noticed there was no one around. All the locals had vanished. There was no telling if we were just in a rougher part of town or if it had been vacated for better accommodations. Regardless, the lack of ears made me think I could open my mouth and ask a couple of questions. “How’d you come to know Baalth?”
She glanced over at me. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason, really.” Actually, I was kind of curious to know if he was hitting it, but no point in being blunt. “I’m just inquisitive. It’s in my nature.” I gave a toothy smile I hoped conveyed friendliness and not my usual lecherous charm. Beyond the obvious, I was also wondering how Baalth had managed to snag a minion after being on the planet for only about a week while being completely powerless. It definitely spoke to his ability to coerce folks. There was a tongue joke there, but I let it slide.
Cyrill grinned. “If you must know, he promised me power, a place at his side, far from here, once he has regained his prominence.”
I pitched the same grin right back at her. I don’t know what bullshit, Arizona beachfront property Baalth offered her, but she was neck deep in the stink and thinking it was roses. Had to hand it to the old boy, he was working it like a boss. Trapped on Feluris with God in possession of his magic, looking like a second-rate Skelator years off the ‘roids, Baalth wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, if ever, but he was still a stud.
“What do you do for him?”
Cyrill’s gaze snapped toward me, flickers of heat in it as her smile faded. “You ask a lot of questions, demon.”
It’s not curiosity that kills the cat but the quest for vicarious thrills. I raised my hands in surrender, having pushed my luck too far. “No need to get hostile.” Baalth was hitting it good.
She huffed and walked on, speeding her pace a little. I let her lead the way. While she wasn’t Karra, Cyrill had a nice enough ass to wile away the rest of the trip on. I needed something to keep my mind off what was really going on; largely because I had no fucking clue and it was bugging the hell out of me.
All this Eidolon crap being connected to her disappearance was just a presumption on my part, however good of one. I needed something solid especially since Longinus hadn’t tried to contact me. There was no telling if that was good news or bad, but I didn’t think he’d rescue Karra and not say anything to her about me. At least, I hoped not.
And with that, the joy of Cyrill’s ass turned a horrible kind of bitter. Fortunately, her hips stopped sashaying as she came to the corner of an intersecting street, and I there was no struggle to quit watching. She jumped back and hissed.
“Damn it.” Cyrill grabbed my hand and yanked me back the way we’d come. She dashed across the street and dove into a narrow alley just fifty feet from where she’d had her fit. “Eidolon,” she whispered, pulling me down to my knees beside her in the wreckage of the alley.
I restrained a smile. I’m not sure what she thought I was going to do when I found the Eidolon, but I was pretty certain it would involve gunfire and explosions and screams and lots and lots of noise. Hiding was kind of the opposite of all that.
And then I saw why she was hiding.
Over where we’d just been, a huge truck, the kind that carries soldiers, poked its nose around the corner and crept onto the street. It was weird seeing it because there hadn’t been a single vehicle anywhere in town, but the roads had to be there for a reason. I wondered for a moment if they’d all been destroyed in the battle, but it seemed more likely Jesus and his folks had absconded with them all to help limit the movement of enemy troops. It looked as if they missed a couple.
The front cab of the truck was squeezed tight with striped passengers, four of them squished together like sardines, but the green canvas covering the back made it impossible to know if there were more inside the bed. It came to a shuddering halt and parked in front of the building that had blocked us from their sight just a few seconds before. Another truck rolled up a moment later, its engine rumbling, followed by what had to have been fifty aliens on foot.
The soldiers stomped up to the building across the way, and one of them threw open the doors, the aliens filing inside a couple at a time. All but the drivers of the trucks, who stayed in their seats, hopped out and followed after. As the Felurians went inside, there was a sudden wash of magical energy that seemed to seep out of the building. It was like the doors had been holding it back, some kind of ward, maybe. The power didn’t pound against my senses as though it were being wielded, but was more like lapping waves. There was an awful lot of it, but it felt inert. I couldn’t pick out the normal sense of life that comes with magic when it’s connected to a living being. This came across as more ambient energy than the serpentine flutters of physically bound magic.
The metallic clunk of a round being chambered ended my philosophical debate on the differences between inert and active magic.
I turned to see the barrel of a massive gun pointed our direction, a tiny little girl on the opposite end of it: Rala.
“Step away from the stranger,” she ordered, motioning with the gun to mean Cyrill.
I exhaled, glad to not be on the receiving end of a threat, for once. Even so, I knew I wasn’t getting off that easy. The last thing I needed was for Miss Mousey to shoot Baalth’s new pet. There would be no way to weasel my way out of the blame for that. Even without his powers, I had no doubt Baalth could find a way to hurt me. It’s what he does.<
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“What are you doing, girl?” I crept forward, hoping to get between the two women. A lifetime of common sense and practical experience railed inside and called me a dumbass for even thinking about it, but there I was, once again, sliding right into the middle of a threesome I had no business—or interest, for once—being involved in.
“She’s one of the Eidolon, Frank.” Rala didn’t even look at me. She simply shifted to keep Cyrill in her sights.
Cyrill snorted and shook her head. “I’m no Eidolon, child. Now put the gun away.”
Rala stepped closer, the gun steady in her small hands. “Lift up your shirt.”
While I was all for that, I didn’t think we needed the woman at gunpoint to get a quick look-see. I raised my hands and drifted toward Rala, real slow. She’d spent too much time with the old coot; some of his crazy had clearly rubbed off on her. I readied my magic, just in case, but I didn’t really want to use it. With the Eidolon just across the street, there was no way they wouldn’t notice a spell being triggered. Besides, I don’t know how to do quiet.
“I said to lift your shirt.” The girl sidestepped me again and marched forward again, the barrel of the gun just a few feet from Cyrill’s face. There was no way I was gonna insert myself without getting shot so I eased off.
Cyrill growled. “You’re making a mistake.”
“Just do it,” Rala answered.
The muscles in Cyrill’s jaw clenched and unclenched several times before she relented. “Fine, but this isn’t what it looks like.” She yanked her shirt up, revealing the whole of her torso and lean side.
“See? What did I tell you?”
Honestly, I had no idea what the girl was rambling on about. Cyrill’s bare boobs hung out in the open, and I swear they were corneal magnets. My eyes were drawn to her chest. If Rala was trying to prove Cyrill was a woman, or even a tranny with a nice rack, she’d succeeded admirably.
“The tattoo, damn it.”
At the tone of her voice—you know, the one that signifies when a woman just remembered she was taking to a man—I noticed a dark blotch on Cyrill’s side, way up near her armpit. Sadly, at seeing it, my field of vision widened and the magical spell of free boobage was broken. I sighed as the shape of the phoenix came into focus.
Shit. No wonder she knew where to find the Eidolon, she was one. “Seriously?”
“I said it’s not what it looks like,” she answered.
“Pull your shirt down and tell me a story.” Never in my life did I think I’d say those words in that order. This wasn’t one of those Penthouse Letters moments, I assure you.
She covered herself and I could have sworn I heard my penis whine.
Cyrill cast a quick glance toward the street before saying anything. “My job was to infiltrate the Eidolon, earn their trust and inform on them.”
“Which is why you’re lurking about in an alley?” Rala asked.
“I haven’t had the opportunity to insert myself…” I had something she could insert. “…and they would realize something was wrong if appeared out of nowhere, leading an alien along.”
Hey now.
A solid thump sounded across the street, drawing my attention as the Eidolon folks cursed and carried on about being careful. The aliens were lugging a number of long cylinders that looked similar to oxygen tanks. I could feel the slight waft of energy coming off them, the same energy I’d sensed when the doors opened. One of the aliens had dropped his. Apparently Rala looked to see what happened, too.
The next thing I knew, there was a gun going off, loud in my ear that had only just started to get rid of the damn hum from earlier. I spun and saw Cyrill wrestling with Rala, the pistol pointed toward the sky. The report still echoed in the alley, and I knew by the frantic sounds in the street that it’d been heard by the Eidolon.
Cyrill knocked the gun loose and flung Rala onto her back. The little alien hit with a grunt, her lips peeled back in a fierce snarl.
“We need to go before we’re spotted,” Cyrill barked, her voice suddenly drowned in an immense roar. Both of us snapped our heads around to look at Rala who was suddenly, and very decidedly, no longer Rala.
Where the mousey alien had just been, was now a shifting mass of growing flesh and strange, muscled appendages tearing her clothing into shreds. Rala’s face, already a bit long to begin with, had stretched even more, her jaw and neck elongating almost comically. Jagged teeth erupted from her mouth, which split her cheeks wider and wider. Her tongue lengthened and sharpened into a point, a frothy, reddened tendril that flicked in our direction.
Cyrill staggered back at seeing her, her hands digging for something at her waistband that I couldn’t see. I just stood there like an idiot. Why change what works?
Rala’s arms twisted and grew longer, the elbows snapping backwards as leathern wings exploded away from them like a parachute being deployed. Her eyes were alight with energy, reddened fire crackling in their depths. She’d grown upward, gaining height and mass as the little girl alien disappeared completely to be replaced by what could only be called a dragon.
A sharp, serrated tail whipped overhead and slammed into wall just beside Cyrill. The woman ducked and rolled as the wall toppled down behind her in pieces, filling the alley with roiling dust and booming thunder.
I fell back on standard operating procedure number one: Cover your ass. All hell breaking loose, I moved out of the line of fire. The Eidolon guys were shouting behind us and drawing closer while dragon-girl trashed the alley in an attempt to swat Baalth’s pet. Cyrill took full advantage of the size differential—the one that kept Rala from moving much without bringing the buildings down on top of herself—and slipped past her. I was torn, Rala’s accusation hanging in the air.
Each of the women had directed me toward the Eidolon, meaning they both knew something, but I couldn’t trust either. Baalth might well have his pet piece of ass enthralled, but the opposite might well be true. He wasn’t exactly operating on a complete charge, and there was no telling what was going on there. Then again, there was nothing to confirm Rala was being honest with me, either, beyond Cyrill’s tattoo, which could be exactly what the woman said it was.
I sighed as gunfire stole away the luxury of ordered thought. Something smacked into the wall above, shards of shattered brick raining down around me. The Eidolon had gathered their people and were making their way across the street, laying down cover fire with their weird ass weapons. I looked away from the massing aliens and realized Cyrill was gone. Rala hunched her massive shoulders and roared at the far end of the alley where I presumed the other woman had gone.
Caught between a dragon and a firing squad, I chose the lizard. She whirled about as I got close, the red glare of her eyes sizing me up like I was a pudding pop. Her wings rose into the air and she let out another, bestial shriek aimed over my head at the Eidolon, and then collapsed without warning. There was the sudden whiff of brimstone as Rala toppled. She was back to being a girl before she even hit the ground.
She lay slumped in the debris. Her chest rose with desperate effort as she tried to draw breath. Spittle glistened at her lips, tiny bubbles forming at the corners of her mouth. Another shot whipped past my head, followed by another. The Eidolon were closing in, and they’d made my decision for me.
I scooped up Rala and ran. She was a limp rag, her face rolling into my chest as I held her close to me. While I still didn’t know which one of the two women were telling the truth, or whose side they were on, it didn’t feel right to leave the girl to the mercies of the Eidolon. They’d proven they were a shoot first and ask questions later kind of organization. Besides, with Rala as naked as the day she was hatched, it was pretty easy to tell she wasn’t sporting one of the phoenix tattoos, let alone any others. That wasn’t exactly definitive proof of anything, but it did make me think she might not be treated too kindly by the bird boys if they found her unconscious in the alley.
Confusion and ignorance my natural element, I ran and left the
thinking for later.
Fourteen
A handful of blocks from the alley, I found a ramshackle building that didn’t look like anyone had set foot in it in centuries. Though, to be honest, I didn’t have to look very hard. Damn near most of them in the area fit the bill for what I needed. After glancing around to make sure no one was watching from the surrounding area, the Eidolon somewhere in the dust behind me, I forced the door without making it obvious and went inside. Stale air hit me as I entered and sealed us in.
Whatever had happened to Feluris was more than just the recent warfare between God and his kids gone wrong. Much of the city was deserted, and it was obvious it had been that way a long time. While Rala and Vol sounded like true citizens, lamenting the violation of their world, it was painfully apparent there wasn’t that much to lose. Maybe it was one of those things where a person who has so little values it more, but I didn’t understand it. Desboren was a dump by even my standards, and that’s saying something.
I moved deeper into the building, letting my senses loose. Able to catch a flicker of Rala’s life force but no others, it didn’t seem as if anyone else was there, lurking in the dark. She might be different than the other Felurians—turning into a dragon is the very definition of different—but she was still an alien life form. If I could pick her up against my senses, I was fairly certain I could the others. It was just like pinging humans. There wasn’t much of an interaction, and they didn’t feel any of it, but it was clear they were about.
Rala watched me through slit eyelids. Her breathing had shifted to normal a while back. She was biding her time, most likely unsure of what I intended. I may have saved her from the Eidolon, just like she might have saved me from Cyrill, but Rala didn’t know me from spit. I let her have her paranoia by keeping my mouth shut, and set her down in a dark corner. Hoodie off, I laid it on top of her and wandered into the next room.