Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Something was wrong with this picture, very wrong; it had to be a trap of some sorts. Sigurd kept his eyes on the door ahead and began backing slowly away. He crept back down the final flight of stairs to the penultimate level, for an idea had entered his brain, an idea that would, potentially, protect him from whatever trap his enemies may have set for him in that room.

  It could not be a bomb; he could sense that his enemies were in there, and if a bomb went off in that space they would die as surely as he would. No, the most likely possibility would be a gun, triggered by a tripwire or pressure pad perhaps, aimed at the door. A sawed-off shotgun most probably; something that would inflict devastating damage at close range.

  ‘Well, my friends, I have the antidote for that,’ he whispered with a sly grin.

  Sigurd walked up to the elevator landing and examined the broken door closely. He had noticed it earlier, hanging off the frame, anchored in place only by a single hinge. It was an antique door, constructed in a time in which longevity and quality were far more prized qualities than they were in the current era. As such it was made of a hard, heavy wood and reinforced with steel fronting; in short, the door could serve as an almost bulletproof barrier. A glass window in the top third of it was its weak point, but if he crouched, he would be able to shield most of his body behind the steel and wood.

  It would do. He holstered his Desert Eagle and gripped the door firmly by its sturdy rail-type handle.

  ‘One, two, three!’

  With his feet anchored firmly on the floor, in order to drive strength from his legs and hips through to his upper body, he abruptly fired savage power through his every muscle and sinew, and with a rapid twist of his upper body he ripped the door right off its hinges. He chuckled darkly as he heard the broken innards of the hinges tinkling on the floor, and then, gripping the heavy door in his left hand and holding it like a tower shield, he jogged back up the steps to the top floor. Once more he felt the presence of the other beastwalkers buzzing its current through his bones and across his skin, and he knew that they must, at that moment, have been experiencing the exact same sensation.

  ‘You are waiting for me, my friends, are you not? Well then, I will not keep you waiting any longer.’

  He crouched down behind the shield, his muscles locked and ready to explode into action, and with his right hand he drew his pistol. Then he charged, keeping the door-shield in front of him as if it were a battering ram. With a roar he crashed into the twin doors, smashing the rotten wood to splinters with his momentum … but there was no explosion, no gunshot to greet him; only empty silence. He backed immediately up against the wall of the unoccupied room, shielding himself with the elevator door. With wary caution he glanced out from the side of the door and pointed his firearm out ahead.

  They were there, standing in the middle of this ruined room with its peeling paint, its collapsed ceilings, and its flash-frozen storm of debris and strewn, yellowed papers spread across the floor. Just waiting, silent and unmoving, staring at him: Lightning Bird, standing, and Parvati, seated in her wheelchair.

  Sigurd did not speak; he acted on pure instinct. As soon as he caught sight of Lightning Bird, he took aim in a split-second and fired at the tall beastwalker’s face. His aim was true, but instead of his enemy’s head exploding like a watermelon hit by a cannonball, nothing happened. Yet the bullet had fired, for a huge chunk of wall burst in a shower of masonry dust and brick fragments where the projectile hit. Lightning Bird, however, stood perfectly still, as if the bullet had merely passed around him instead of through him. Sigurd knew his aim had been true, but it seemed that, somehow, he had missed his target. He dropped his door-shield and it crashed to the floor with a loud bang that rattled the walls. Then he aimed his gun at Lightning Bird’s head again and fired. This time the bullet tore out a huge chunk of the wall, and daylight from outside flooded in, its dust-encased spotlight beam hurling a jagged pool of brilliance onto the messy floor.

  And still Lightning Bird stood, unmoving and unharmed.

  Sigurd lowered his weapon and began to laugh, softly at first, but then more vociferously as the seconds passed by. Keeping his gun in his hand, he walked up to the pair of beastwalkers. He locked his molten gaze into Lightning Bird’s eyes, and felt the shaman’s eyes staring back into his, and there was not a single drop of fear in them – only scorn and defiance.

  As Sigurd got closer to them, he threw back his head and let out a booming cacophony of laughter – and then, with an expression of ferocious aggression contorting his features, he whipped his gun up and emptied the clip into the body of the shaman.

  This time Lightning Bird smiled; a mocking grin of triumph as again the rounds seemed to pass through him without effect, blowing out more of the wall behind him. Sigurd dropped his pistol and with a roar he lunged forward, striking for the shaman’s throat with his open hand as if his fingers were the jaws of an adder claiming a shivering rodent.

  His hand, however, passed through nothing but air.

  Sigurd stood for a moment, frozen with confusion as his body straddled his enemy’s – and then, in a moment of sudden fright, static electricity raised every hair on his body with its charged energy. There was a blinding flash of light and a thunderous explosion, a sound that morphed in his ears from a sharp bang into a protracted roar, like a jumbo jet taking off in the room, as a vein of lightning hit the spot where he was standing.

  Sigurd was hurled against the far wall, and a tremendous core of heat, as if a chemical inferno had been ignited inside his body, burned its skin-flaying pain out from his core to every extremity of his body. He roared in agony, spraying out spittle and blood through gritted teeth, but through the torture he summoned his own power, and its red-tinged shadow smoke swirled through his every cell, smothering and choking out the crackling blue light of the snaking tendrils of electricity invading his body, until their collective fire had been extinguished within him.

  He lay on his back, his body smoking like a discarded cigarette butt, and crushing pain pulsed through his veins with every pump of blood that his damaged heart sent through them. Through blurry eyes he stared at his two enemies and saw them starting to vanish like phantoms dissipating in a rising mist; they were simply dematerialising, evaporating into nothing.

  And then, despite the agony, Sigurd chuckled hoarsely when he realised what had happened. All along, the room had been empty; he had been shooting at mere projections, materialised from another place.

  ‘So Parvati,’ he whispered to the disappearing ghost, ‘after all these years, your once-lost powers are finally starting to return. Well, now I have even more reason to find you, and to snatch you from the Rebels. And once I have you, I will extract what is inside of you, like squeezing juice from a ripe orange. If you are crushed, pulverised to mere pulp in the process … so be it.’

  As the last traces of the apparitions vanished, Sigurd heard shouts and frantic footsteps coming up the stairs. With a groan he heaved himself up onto his hands and knees, and on shaking, pain-crippled limbs he crawled over to where he had dropped his Desert Eagle. He picked up the pistol and with burn-blistered fingers he pulled a fresh clip of ammunition from his jacket and slammed it into the firearm. As the footsteps and shouts drew nearer, he dragged himself over to where the elevator door was lying, and this he grabbed with his left hand, pulling it over his body while propping his back up against the wall so that only his head and shoulders were peeking out from behind the improvised shield. Two police officers then ran into the room, their guns drawn and their flashlights cutting like car headlamps through the gloom.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ the first, a chubby young East Asian officer with a square chin and a thick goatee, shouted. ‘Smells like a fuckin’ cookout in here!’

  The second cop, a stocky middle-aged woman with a shock of bright ginger hair, saw Sigurd hiding behind his door-shield, and immediately she aimed her pistol at him.

  ‘You! Hands where I can see ‘em! Do it now!’ she shouted h
arshly.

  Sigurd grinned with savage delight, and then rapidly raised his Desert Eagle and fired. The shot took her head clean off her shoulders, and her decapitated body toppled backwards through the doorway, stumbling and jerking before it collapsed into a bloody heap in the corridor. The other cop stared with fear-wide eyes at the gruesome sight, paralysed with shock. Sigurd broadened his smile, and then shot him as well.

  The first bullet tore a football-sized hole in the man’s chest and flung him against the wall, as if he had been kicked by a mule. The second shot blasted through his stomach, eviscerating him and doing almost enough damage to almost detach his torso from his legs. Sigurd threw the door off of his body – which was badly blistered and still smoking from the lightning strike – and then stood up. Without even as much as a glance at the two people he had just murdered, he limped out of the room, already running plans and strategies through his head.

  He would capture Parvati and extract the knowledge and power that had been hidden in her brain from her. He would do it. He had to.

  Whistling an old Viking rowing song, he walked casually down the stairs, descending into the shadows … ever into the shadows.

  54

  LIGHTNING BIRD

  12th October 2020. Albany, USA

  Lightning Bird felt himself falling, accelerating with wild speed through an abyss lined with streaks of light and colour, filled with mere abstractions of ideas, of thoughts and of imagined things; a vortex of preconsciousness in which he had no control.

  But she did, somehow.

  And then, through the giddying swirl of crazed lights and colours there was something solid, something stable: his own body, suspended in space, still and unmoving as a corpse. Now he – his soul, the flame of consciousness that was the purest essence of him, disembodied – was cannoning toward it with the speed of whip-cracking broken barriers of sound.

  With a jarring jolt he was back, and air came flooding into his lungs like ocean water surging through a breech in a deep hull. Blood, slow and cool, began to move again through his veins. Painful pins and needles gnawed their agony through every one of his extremities, while a powerful nausea surged from the pit of his stomach up his throat, causing him to involuntarily spew the contents of his stomach all over the floor.

  Despite his immense discomfort though, his immediate thoughts were with her: Parvati. Swaying groggily in his chair – a heavily stained, rat-eaten easy chair from a long-lost decade – he spun around to see if she was all right. Jun was sitting next to her, holding one of her claw-like hands, and the diminutive teenager’s usually expressionless face was twisted into a scrunch of consternation.

  ‘What just happened?’ Jun asked. ‘It looked like … like you two died for a few seconds.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Lightning Bird croaked. There was far too much to explain, and he had neither the time nor the energy to do this now. ‘We’re fine.’

  Jun turned his attention back to Parvati, and it was clear that he wasn’t convinced that she was okay. Usually, for anyone but Lightning Bird it would have been impossible to tell just how Parvati was feeling; whether she was caught up in effervescent elation or entombed in the ice of a raging blizzard of depression, to an outsider there would have been no discernible sign of either. Her face was permanently frozen in a half-grimace – the same static half-grimace that she had worn for decades, ever since near-death at the hands of the Huntsmen. Jun, however, seemed to possess a rare intuition; the moment the boy had first laid eyes on Parvati, something deep inside him had clicked, and he had been drawn to her by an irresistible force. Some sort of unspoken link had been forged between the two of them, a bond that was eerily similar to that which Lightning Bird shared with Parvati. By now the shaman knew that if Jun was looking concerned, there was something to worry about with Parvati.

  In her mechanised wheelchair – that space that was simultaneously her salvation and prison – she sat paralysed, with her withered arms cocked at unnatural angles, and her hands curled into claws. Her eyeballs could move, but not the muscles around them, so no matter what she was feeling the same empty stare was projected from those two dark orbs. She could speak in strained whispers, but it took an extreme effort to part her lips even a crack. Even the power of her beastwalker blood had not been able to repair the immense damage done to her; indeed, it took almost all the magic infused into that blood to simply keep her heart pumping.

  As for walking, her legs simply weren’t there. A beastwalker who had been able to transform into an Asian elephant, and a former senior member of the Eastern Council, she had almost succumbed to the same fate as that of the rest of her peers of that esteemed group. It had only been through the greatest of miracles that she had survived the immensity of the violence wrought upon her by the Huntsmen and their beastwalker allies, who together had obliterated the Eastern Council. While Parvati had survived the purge, the damage done to her body and mind had been extensive, far beyond what her powers could repair. Indeed, it had been so severe she seemed to have lost the ability to shift forms at all.

  She had once possessed vast knowledge and considerable abilities, as had most of her senior brothers and sisters of the Eastern Council, but most of those powers had lain dormant since the attack; they had been compartmentalised into parts of her mind to which she no longer had access – or, at least, that she was no longer able to access at will, as she once had. It was not all lost forever, though; sometimes her powers would sputter back to life at random, unexpected moments – as had just occurred in this instance, in which she had been able to project both her own consciousness and Lightning Bird’s across New York State to the place from which they had escaped a few hours earlier, in order to stall their relentless pursuer. And she had, briefly, managed to harness the power of lightning, although it had only been a mild strike compared to what she had once been capable of.

  Her eyeballs roved across the room, settling briefly on Jun, and then moving over to Lightning Bird, who was vomiting. Rancorous, bitter bile was rising quickly up the back of her own throat too, and it soon filled her mouth, an alarming volume of it, which she could do nothing about, being unable to open her lips.

  However, after he had finished retching, her friend turned around and noticed her discomfort immediately – he was able to read subtle cues in a way that most could not – and despite being in agony himself, he heaved his body up off of the chair and lurched over to her on swaying, pain-poisoned limbs.

  ‘Can I help?’ Jun asked. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Help me … steady myself,’ Lightning Bird gasped.

  Jun jumped up and did as he said, gripping the shaman’s belt with both hands and digging his heels into the carpet. He was not strong, not by a long shot, but he was able, at least, to prevent the tall beastwalker from toppling over.

  With his trembling right hand Lightning Bird gripped the armrest of Parvati’s heavy wheelchair, and with his left he grabbed an old newspaper from the floor, placed it on her lap, and then gently opened her lips with his fingers, allowing the warm vomit to drip out in thick chunks and viscous, goopy strands. When he felt that he could stand stably enough on his own, Lightning Bird let go of the chair and gripped her shoulders, nudging her forward so that she could expel the last of the vomit that remained in her system.

  ‘You can … let go now,’ he said to Jun, who quietly complied.

  Lightning Bird then shifted Parvati back in the chair and staggered back to his own seat, into which he collapsed.

  Parvati’s roving eyeballs fixed on him, and he knew she wanted to speak, so he pricked his ears and listened. Like many of the older members of their kind, she had once been able to speak without words, to communicate her thoughts and intentions directly into the mind of another. This ability, like so many of her powers, had also been lost in the Huntsmen’s attack. Now she could only whisper barely audible phrases from her paralysed mouth, the garbled words indecipherable to most. Lightning Bird, however, had spent enough time w
ith her that he could understand most of her hoarse ramblings. Jun too was beginning to develop a knack for interpreting her rattling rasps.

  ‘My powers,’ she croaked, the strained syllables almost unintelligible, ‘they returned, just for an instant.’ Her words were like the scraping of dry leaves across a patch of rough concrete, drawn by a reluctant zephyr.

  ‘They did, Parvati, they did,’ he rumbled in response. ‘It is a good sign. A very good sign.’

  ‘Maybe it is a bad sign.’

  Lightning Bird frowned, as did Jun.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The world is entering a new phase, a phase of darkness hitherto unknown. A phase in which the Light is so desperately needed that the universe has deemed it necessary to return my powers to me.’

  Lightning Bird leaned back and clasped his hands on his lap, while the expression of worry on Jun’s face simply intensified.

  ‘I understand, my wise old friend,’ Lightning Bird said. ‘I did not think to look at it this way.’

  ‘We must analyse such things from all angles, most especially unconventional ones,’ she wheezed. ‘Often the most unexpected approach provides the clearest answers, and—’ Abruptly her eyeballs froze in their sockets, and the words were trapped fast inside that little brown throat, as thin and flimsy as a young child’s. A few seconds later an avalanche of panic gushed from mouth. Jun clutched her hands in his, trying to will a semblance of soothing calm into her, his eyes widening with fright as she babbled.

  ‘Where am I?! What is this place?! Who … who are you? Who are you?!’

  Tears welled up in Lightning Bird’s eyes; no matter how many times he witnessed these episodes they never failed to stab their dagger blades deep into his heart.

  ‘Help me … help me … help me help me help me, help help help help help help!’