Instead of a proper explanation, X yelled, “The furnace room, jackass!”
“Furnace room?” Nadya blinked.
“It’s in the basement,” X explained further. “It’s got a big nasty lock on it to keep the delinquent children from going down there. But with your boom stick there, you shouldn’t have any problems.”
For a building the orphanage’s size, there would have to be a huge, fuck-off, fiery blast furnace down there. It may not have been the warmest place, but there’d never been any deaths via hypothermia at Nikolaevna’s. At least, not as far as Nadya knew.
“Nice,” she said, nodding. “I’d kiss you…”
“But we’re really not into that kinda thing,” X finished for her with a triumphant little smile on her face.
“We are most definitely not…” Nadya agreed. Although she was thankful for the tip from her id or whatever X was, the smile really made her want to fire a shotgun blast into her.
“Yea, yea, yea, yea…” X muttered. “I can take a hint.” And then she was gone again.
If Nadya was going crazy, at least the crazy wasn’t being a lazy bitch. She gripped her katana, unlocked the door and exited into the hall, heading for the stairs.
Let’s see how Father Frost likes a nice, roaring fire, she thought, unknowingly mimicking her doppelganger’s triumphant smile.
VII. The Final Countdown
Nadya leapt down the stairs four at a time. Her katana was slung across her back and she had the shotgun in her hands. Part of her considered the possibility that she might trip, tumble down the stairs and wind up with her own katana stuck through her. She quickly decided that was defeatist thinking and leapt down another five steps to land on the first floor.
See? No more wounds than I started out with.
“You will not escape my wrath!” Ded Moroz called after her. Nadya turned and saw him standing at the top of the stairs looking generally displeased.
Well, I did kill his granddaughter and scorch the fuck outta his face. She flashed him a grin. “Bring it on, ya crispy old fuck!”
Ded Moroz lifted his staff and slammed it against the ground. A flash and a shockwave of icy destruction roared down the stairs towards Nadya. She jumped to the side, out of the path of the shockwave as it covered the stairs, the walls and the ceiling with a thick layer of frost.
“Goddammit,” Nadya muttered. “How many tricks does this asshole have?” She pushed herself to her feet and put some distance between herself and the stairs. Where the hell was the door to the basement?
She rounded a corner and pressed her back against the wall, letting her eyes slip closed. She started to do a mental walkthrough of the orphanage. Her limited recon earlier in the day had been cursory at best. Still, a door with a big ass lock on it stuck out.
As it came to her, she imagined an overhead map of the orphanage and mentally plotted the quickest path from Point A to Point B. The B standing for Burn the Fuck Outta Father Frost and Have a Happy Damn New Year. She opened her eyes and headed in the direction of the basement.
She only made it a few steps before Ded Moroz’s snarling voice filled the hall. “Whore!”
Nadya stopped and turned to face him. “Hey, let’s go with ‘bitch’, okay? It’s more accurate.”
He glared at her in silence. Nadya glared back, slowly lifting her shotgun to aim at him. Ded Moroz brought his staff down against the floor and Nadya watched as ice rapidly travelled down the hall.
“Fucker!” she yelled, leaping up as the ice neared her. She did a split and was thankful that the hall was narrow enough for her to plant her feet on either side of it as the flash flood of frozen death traveled underneath her.
Firing the shotgun, she blasted Ded Moroz back out of the hallway then dropped back to the floor. Her boots crunched through the ice. Pumping a fresh shell into the shotgun, Nadya turned and hauled ass.
The lock on the basement door was a big bastard, to be sure, but it was old and rusted. Nadya wasn’t sure if the key that went to it would even work. Luckily, I’ve got my very own skeleton key. Guaranteed to open any lock on the planet or you get a full refund and a personal apology from the deity of your choosing.
Case in point…
Nadya blasted the lock—and a very large chunk of the door—into oblivion. That’ll need replacing. Don’t want any idiot kids wandering down there. Just idiot me and idiot Father Frost. Speaking of which…
“Hey, Ole Man Frosty!” she yelled. “Giving up already? You’re even more of a little bitch than your granddaughter! And let me be clear here, she was most definitely a little fucking bitch!”
She heard a howl of rage in the not so distant distance and smirked before ducking through the door and heading down the stairs. The change in temperature was immediate. By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, she was sweating.
The floor of the basement was dirt. The walls were brick. The stairs led her into a narrow room with two doors leading out of it. One was labeled ‘Storage’. The other was labeled ‘Furnace Room’.
Jackpot.
Pulling the door open, a blast of heat struck her. “Goddamn,” she muttered before moving inside. The furnace was dead center in the room and, by the looks of it, was going full blast. Well, it was a cold night.
Nadya looked around the room, her mind racing to come up with a plan. She approached the furnace, the temperature skyrocketing with each step she took. Sweat poured down her face and soaked into her shirt. The salt content made her wounds sting.
There was a door on the front of the furnace to allow access to the fiery innards. No fucking way was she about to grab hold of it to get the door open. She was rather fond of her hands and wasn’t looking forward to melting the flesh off of them. Slipping out of her leather jacket, she wrapped it around her hands and grabbed the metal handle of the door, giving it a hard yank.
The door opened with a screech of despair. The opening wasn’t small, but it was going to take some work to get a full-grown man through it. A full-grown man who wasn’t into the thought of being burned alive, even more so.
Aside from the furnace, the room was empty. That left her with the shotgun and the katana. She’d worked with less. And at least the lack of items in the room gave her plenty of space to move around, provided she didn’t fall against or into the furnace. All things considered, she’d choose getting frozen to death over getting burned alive.
Nadya heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. Planning time was almost up and the only thing she could think of was to throw everything she had at the asshole and try to get close enough to manhandle him into the furnace.
It was better than having absolutely no plan to speak of. But not by much.
The door to the furnace room burst open and slammed against the wall, revealing a thoroughly pissed off Ded Moroz. “End of the line. Bitch!”
“Thank you!” Nadya responded. “Finally, a name I can agree with!” She finished her statement with a shotgun blast to his anger-filled face. At close range, the blast should’ve taken his head off and put an end to his days of flash freezing small children. But what the blast should’ve done and what it actually did were two totally different things.
Ded Moroz’s head snapped back, the damage from the shotgun visible for only a few moments before it began to heal at a rapid pace. By the time he’d brought his head back, it was almost totally healed. He gave her an evil grin that showed off his yellowed, crooked teeth.
Swinging his staff at her, Nadya brought up the shotgun to block. It struck the weapon against the barrel. The barrel froze and then shattered.
So much for Weapon A, Nadya thought, chucking the destroyed shotgun at him. Unsheathing her katana, she held it at the ready, uncertain how effective it would actually be.
One thing was for sure; she definitely didn’t want him touching his staff against it. So instead of using the weapon to deflect his staff strikes, Nadya dodged them. Her body moved fast and fluid, curving and turning as Ded Moroz sta
bbed and swept the staff at her in a flurry of attacks. With each swipe, the staff left ice crystals in its wake that quickly melted from the intense heat of the furnace room.
Ded Moroz advanced on Nadya steadily. Grinning at the girl’s lack of offense, he pressed his attack and drove her further into the room, too preoccupied with his need for vengeance to notice his surroundings.
Nadya wasn’t quite so blind. It wasn’t hard when the heat radiating from the open furnace door was right at her back. She took another step back and then launched herself forward and to the right of Ded Moroz as he attempted to slam the tip of his staff into her chest.
The sudden movement caught Ded Moroz off guard and he found himself stumbling forward. His eyes widened with horror as he saw the flames of the furnace leaping in front of him. Instead of striking Nadya in the chest, his staff went into the furnace.
Nadya spun and lifted her katana. The blade struck Ded Moroz along the back of his neck. The razor-sharp blade easily severed his vertebrae and cleaved through his throat. A look of shock was frozen on his face as his head rolled forward off his shoulders, bounced off his outstretched arm and fell into the furnace.
“Hole in one,” Nadya smirked as Ded Moroz’s headless body dropped to his knees. “Score for the home team. And the crowd goes fucking wild.”
Dead Ded Moroz’s only response was to fall forward. His bloody neck stump touched against the side of the furnace and sizzled as his flesh was burnt. Note to self, decapitation also works.
Just to be sure, she sheathed her katana and reached down, grabbing a hold of the back of his shirt and lifting him up. Once Ded Moroz’s body was successfully fed into the heart of the furnace, Nadya kicked the door shut.
Grabbing her jacket off the floor, she slung it over her shoulder and left the furnace room. She glanced down at her watch.
23:59:55.
“Five…four…three…two…one,” Nadya counted down. “Happy new year.” She pulled the furnace room door closed behind her. “Hell of a way to spend a birthday.”
Damned Pretty Woman
Matthew Baugh
I knew right away that the crowd was a lynch mob. There’s a feel you learn to recognize. It reminds me of cheap whiskey; it can make you giddy or sick to your stomach, depending on your tolerance.
It didn’t look like the typical lynching. There was no rope, just a woman tied to a stake, firewood piled up around her feet and an eager crowd watching, some with torches. I knew the woman, the local schoolteacher. Her prim dress had been torn, exposing the pale skin of her neck and shoulder. I felt my stomach tighten. There was no way I was going to let this happen; I hate lynchings.
Besides, she was mine to kill.
I’d ridden into Poker Flats two weeks earlier. It was pretty much what you expect from a one-horse town: mostly clapboard buildings lining one dusty road. Fortunately it was big enough to have a hotel. I signed in and my name drew a funny look from the beady-eyed little clerk.
“Dave Mather?” he said with a smirk. “Seems I heard that there was a gunman of that name working for the Santa Fe Railroad up in Royal Gorge.”
I didn’t see much point in answering him so I didn’t.
“You in town for anything particular, Mr. Mather?”
“I am,” I said, fixing him with a look that said he should stop asking questions. He understood and handed me the key.
Once I was in the room I tossed my saddlebags in the corner, then lay on the bed and closed my eyes. After a time I fished the letter from my pocket that had brought me here. It was in a lawyer’s envelope with the Letterhead of Daedalus Crenshaw, Esquire. Crenshaw was the man who had given me my family legacy, a book that dated back to Cotton Mather, my witch-hunting ancestor in old Salem.
I opened the letter and my gaze settled on a familiar passage.
Joshua Thorne is dead, it said. We have shattered his Starry Wisdom Church here in Arkham, but some of the most dangerous members have escaped our net. One of these, Thorne’s consort, a woman named Sarah, has gone west. We have traced her to a town called Poker Flats in the New Mexico Territory. We need for you to find her and kill her before she can begin to spread the church’s pernicious evil again.
I closed my eyes again and pictured Thorne’s face. I’d shot the son of a bitch in the foot the last time I’d seen him. I should have put my bullet in his heart and prevented a lot of suffering.
I checked around the next day and learned that Sarah Montgomery had been in town about a week and had taken the job of schoolmarm. She seemed to be well thought of by the townsfolk, though a few of the women were suspicious of a pretty woman in a spinster’s job.
She was pretty too; for all that she tried to hide it. She kept her strawberry blonde hair in a tight bun and hid her dark eyes behind spectacles. The few times I was able to watch her with her students I found myself liking her. She was quiet and proper but she had a warm way with them that shone through her prim exterior. If there was a trace of Thorne’s wickedness about her, I sure couldn’t see it.
“What is this?” I asked, catching a farmer by the arm.
“They say she’s a witch, mister,” he replied.
“Excuse me, stranger,” another man said. This one was a blonde man wearing a black shirt and a preacher’s collar. It seemed to me a strange costume for this sort of gathering.
“I’m afraid I have to ask you to stay out of this,” he said. “This is a difficult thing we have to do. It’s not for outsiders’ eyes.”
“What’s she done?”
The preacher wet his lips. He looked like a man who didn’t want to be here. I imagined that he’d been carried along by the mob just like most of the others. Of course, that’s no excuse to my way of thinking.
“If you must know,” the Preacher said, “Sarah Montgomery witched two men to death this morning. We’re Christian folk in this town. We don’t like doing things this way but scripture says, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”
That sounded to me like a good verse for a frightened man to cling to if he wanted to justify himself. I couldn’t really hold his fear against him, from what I’d read Sarah Montgomery had probably earned it. Just the same, I’ve never been able to abide a lynch mob.
I pulled my Colt .41 from its holster and pointed it at the preacher’s chest. His face lost quite a bit of color. His mouth moved like it was trying to make words but had forgotten how.
“There’s not going to be any burning today,” I said.
“You… you can’t do this,” the man protested. “This is the Lord’s work.”
“Maybe the Lord sent me to take care of this problem for you,” I replied.
“That’s blasphemy!”
I cocked the pistol.
“If you don’t believe me, I can arrange for you to ask him yourself.”
He understood that. The crowd parted as he led me to the stake. I tossed my knife to him.”
“Cut her free.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “She may look innocent but don’t let that blind you. Our Lord teaches us that, ‘…the Devil hath power T’assume a pleasing shape.’”
I didn’t answer, other than to glare at him. That was enough to shut him up. I’m told I have a killer’s eyes. I’m not especially proud of that, but I’ve come by it honestly.
“Mister, I don’t know who in Hell you think you are…” a man said.
I didn’t think the rest of the sentence would be worth listening to so I shot him in the leg. I felt a touch of regret at doing it and hoped he’d recover okay, but I did it without any hesitation. I couldn’t possibly handle a crowd that size if they decided to charge me, it was best to let them see that I was serious right off.
I fished two gold double eagles out of my pocket and tossed them in front of the crowd.
“One of you, saddle two horses and bring them here. We’re leaving.”
We rode all night. I didn’t figure anyone would try to follow us, but there was no poi
nt in taking chances. We stopped in a cluster of cottonwood trees on the bank of a good-sized creek.
“Mr. Mather,” she said. “I’m very grateful for what you did. You took a terrible risk.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t care for lynch mobs. Besides, it wasn’t that big a risk. They were just farmers and shopkeepers.”
“A farmer’s bullet could have killed you just like anyone else’s,” she replied. “I’m not worth that. It might have been better if you’d let them do what they were going to.”
“Let them burn you?”
She shuddered.
“I know it’s hard to understand, but trust me, please. I’m not worth anyone’s life. If they do follow us, I hope you won’t take that kind of risk again.”
I stared at her. This wasn’t the sort of talk I’d expected. Tired as I was, I wasn’t having much luck making sense of it. It didn’t help that she was so pretty. Her dark eyes made me think of a spring I’d come across years ago, deep and mysterious yet bubbling with life. It seemed to me that I could look into those eyes for days and never notice the lost time.
“If they do follow us,” I said, “I’ll put lead in the lot of them, starting with that jack-leg preacher.”
“I hope you don’t. They’re really good men. Brother Murchison has been kind to me.”
“Until he decided to light you on fire,” I replied.
“They were frightened,” she said. “Very often the only difference between a good man and a monster is fear.”
That seemed awfully forgiving of her. I tried to read her face. I didn’t see anything that made me doubt her, but I find women harder to read than men. That’s doubly true for a beautiful woman.
“Being frightened is no excuse,” I said.
“No, it isn’t.” After a moment she smiled. The expression seemed very sad.
“Poor Enos Murchison isn’t cut out to be a parson,” she said. “He doesn’t have any training and he lets himself get caught up in flights of fancy. He doesn’t even know the Bible very well. That quote he made about the Devil assuming a pleasing form is from Shakespeare, not scripture.”
Both Barrels of Monster Hunter Legends (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 1) Page 32