07- Black Blood Brother

by Morgan Blayde

  I ran to the door and flung it open. A gargoyle stood there, his winged back to me, Circe’s father in his claws. The gargoyle unhinged his jaw and bit off half the man’s head. The corpse was dropped. The gargoyle whirled about, spying me.

  “I’ve got the kid. Clear a path for me out of here.”

  The other gargoyles were tearing apart the Villagers, pissing freely on them, smacking them with wings, paying no regard to who was male or female, injured or resisting. If it moved, they went after it. A few of the Villagers dredged up enough shadow magic to launch alchemical attacks. Most of these proved ineffective as Bella’s influence sapped power from her children. I did see one gargoyle go down as a Villager generated a black shadow sword. The sword lasted long enough to lop off a gargoyle’s head, which stopped it cold. These were fast impressions as I ran behind the gargoyle lumbering ahead of me, headed back for the tunnel that had brought me here.

  Minutes later, I was back in the subway. The gargoyle left me there, going back to complete his killing. As I followed the monorail track, I pondered just what I was going to do with the mask inside my shirt. Selene would want it. I doubted that was a good idea. I doubted anyone having it was good, but just throwing it away invited disaster, too.

  By the time I got back to Able’s body, and the hole in the street, I had a temporary solution worked out. I laid Colt down and checked his vitals. No change in his condition. I needed to get him to his mother. Therefore…

  I concentrated and used my soul link, summoning my demon sword from my armory on Earth. The black blade appeared in my hand. Its red aura cast a bloody sheen over the oily black rock. The rock looked like it was bleeding. With the sword in hand, my system took a jolt of killing frenzy from the demon blade. Its voice rang in my head: About time. Whose soul do I get to drink?

  Before he got out of control again, I took out the closed mask and dropped it over the pommel, giving my sword a face. He said: What the hell?

  I sent him back to my armory. He and the mask vanished together. I picked up Colt, figuring Selene could locate us now, out of the concealing presence of the mask. “Selene! Come get me.”

  A dusting of red star-points fell down from the upper street. A woman-shaped glow formed next to me. The light-play faded and Selene stood there. Her gaze took in Colt in my arms, then moved to me. Her face showed exasperation. “I smell another woman on you.”

  I looked her straight in the eyes and mixed a lie in with the truth, hoping she wouldn’t look too deeply into my thoughts. “It was necessary to save him. She’s dead now.”

  “Where’s the mask? It did this to our child, right?”

  “Can you help him?”

  As she glanced at his sleeping face, her expression softened with love. She smiled, brushing a strand of hair off his face. “He’ll be fine in a few hours. This will teach him not to ignore his Momma.” She held out her arms. “Give him to me.”

  I did.

  Holding Colt, she stepped back. “I need to get everyone out of here. Bella will soon be strong enough to close off this dimension.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  She kept backing away. “Not you. You have another role to play.”

  “What role? And where are you going?”

  “I have one advantage over Bella. She is still a prisoner of linear time. She doesn’t know what I know. You’re going to have to trust me that this is for the best.”

  I had a very bad feeling in the pit of my soul. “What’s for the best?”

  “That I’m letting her kidnap you right from under my nose, of course.”

  Shadow thickened on the ground between us, a pond of darkness welled upward, becoming Bella, purple arms and face sticking out of a matte-black cloak. She had the velocity of a bullet, appearing, enveloping me in darkness, carrying me backwards. We hit the surface of another shadow pool. This one brought us into a universe of darkness where the green light of my wrist lens did little more than tinge us both the color of an avocado.

  The passage to elsewhere felt like sinking in an ocean trench; the shadow had a crushing pressure that made breathing hard. And then somehow, we flipped and surfaced. I crawled on hands and knees to a familiar bank. Looking higher, I saw a path that led between two obsidian pillars. I rolled over and looked up at a cavern roof with a starscape made of glowworms. She’d brought us both back to her former prison.

  Why are my limbs so heavy? Even hard to breathe.

  She slogged out of the shallow water, up the bank a little, and stood beside me, staring down. “This place is shielded. She won’t find you here.”

  “I take it you intend to keep me?”

  “You are my friend. You put your life in my hands to prove it. And you are beautiful. The Red One does not deserve you. She has her child back. Let that be enough for her.”

  “She’ll look for me. She’ll rip the whole world apart until I turn up. That’s how she is.”

  “I am almost strong enough to push the outsiders from my world. She may resist at first, but then she will take her child to safety because she cannot protect him and fight me at the same time. And the moment she is gone from here, my power is supreme. I will seal off this space so no one can come or go for a thousand years.”

  Cronos’ mask…I really hate being right about curses.

  She knelt by me. “It will be all right—in time. We will have each other and this world to play with. You will forget your former life and learn to be happy with me. I can wait.” Her hand slid into the gap of my chainmail, a soft caress down my torso. There wasn’t anything sexual in the touch; it just seemed like something she needed to do.

  I tried to lift my head off the bank. That I already lay at an upward incline didn’t help. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Hope destroys happiness. You won’t give up on your past until it’s gone beyond retrieval. I need you to sleep now. Drift into my sheltering darkness, my prince. When you awaken, a year will have passed, and all my plans will have unfolded. The Red One and her spawn will be gone, and you will have no choice but to be happy with me. When you see the palace I will create for you, the many wonders…”

  I couldn’t feel my feet or hands any more. Sensation bled from me, moving up my limbs. The light of my comm weakened, dimmed, or perhaps it was my eyes going dark. I had to try to stop her or it would be too late. “You know what it’s like to be betrayed, to have everything taken away. You know the suffering. How can you do the same thing to me?”

  She leaned over me, just a darkness amid more darkness, her face slightly glazed by the failing green light. Something fell on my face, a tear? Maybe the shadow of a tear. She kissed me. The taste of poison again, the sweetness of belladonna berries, deadly nightshade. She pulled back enough to free my lips. “There’s a difference; they left me alone, with no other voice, no other touch, no one to care. I am not so cruel. I will be with you, my love. I will be with you forever.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “I am greater than the sum

  of my splintered selves.”

  —Caine Deathwalker

  Just how long do you intend to sleep?

  Hmmmph?

  Caine, the empire you’re building, it’s going to slip away. What’s Selene thinking, letting this happen to you?

  Ugh!

  Very articulate, Caine. Use your words. I know you’re asleep, but this is a dream, you can change your reality here, if nowhere else. Come on, am I going to have to kick your ass?

  Dragon?

  One word. Well, it’s a start.

  So dark…

  Bella’s darkness fills you. Your body’s in a kind of suspended animation. Think of me, of my golden magic. It’s yours, too. Call it closer. It’s part of you. She can’t take it. She can only hide it from you.

  Gold fire…

  Right. Let it warm your thoughts. Let it fill you and roll the shadows back.

  So hard…to focus.

  Part of us has carried shadow magic all our life, our inheritance fr
om our father. That part is in collusion with Bella. It doesn’t want to fight her.

  Fight her…

  Yes, fight her!

  Another voice intruded on me in the darkness, the voice of my cock: If you won’t do it for dragon or yourself, do it for me. There are too many hot women in the universe. It would be wrong to deprive them of my attentions.

  I wondered: Do you ever think of anything other than pussy?

  My cock screamed: There is nothing else!

  Dragon said: Caine, the golden fire, see it in your memory, feel it in your soul.

  My soul. Yes, this darkness, it is the shadow I’ve always carried, but I am also light. Golden light. I saw it, faint, a mere suggestion of a glimmer at first. A dim, brassy star. Then its core pulsed, a lick of yellow in the endless night. A star, spinning off golden lightning. Brighter! Brighter!

  That’s it, Caine. We are dragon born. Take my strength. Use it as you always have.

  I called the golden fire, my mother’s gift to me. The star went nova. It swelled a thousand times bigger, thinning the darkness, pushing the shroud off me. A riptide of golden light dragged me into the star’s heart. Its fire thawed the ice from my thoughts, from my soul. I left Bella’s darkness behind.

  I looked down and saw that I’d given myself form. I had a shadow for a body with thicker darkness where my heart beat. This was my personal darkness, my shadow magic.

  Floating beside me was a three-foot golden dragon. My inner dragon had always been small in the back shadows of my mind. He was still small to me though not in shadow any more.

  I stared into his golden eyes. “My head is free, but I’m still out cold, dreaming in Bella’s cave, right?”

  My cock said: Fuck, yeah.

  Dragon said: Being aware, is half the battle. Now, maybe we can break out of this spell.

  “Got any idea how?” I asked.

  My dragon sighed: Not a clue. You’re the one that’s read every occult grimoire you could get your thieving hands on.

  Something caught my gaze. “Hey, is that a sunspot?”

  Huh?

  In the golden furnace that surrounded me, all but my own darkness had been banished, but here was a spot of absolute black, expanding like a tunnel from hell. Had I done something to call Bella’s attention to myself? Was this her, invading my dream?

  The portal hung before me, a disk eight feet across. The tip of a giant sword poked out of the hole. The platform looked like a catwalk, missing only a few scantily clad models. A man stepped out of the portal and walked on the sword. He stopped a few feet away, balanced on the sword’s tip. He wore black denim jeans and an untucked black shirt with silver threads running vertically through the weave. His was an older copy of my face with a little silver at his temples. It wasn’t Able, unless he’d been resurrected without his chin scar. It could be a future version of myself, but I suspected worse—I often do, and am seldom disappointed.

  He ignored the dragon and spoke to me. “Hi, son. How are things?”

  My father, or rather a dream of him. “What do you want?” I asked.

  “A few moments of your time. First, a message from your mother. ‘I hope to one day earn your forgiveness for doing what I thought was necessary. You probably hate me. You have that right. I’m not going to tell you how to feel. I will tell you that I’ve thought about you every day, and I will always love you.’” He fell silent. Comfortable in silence, he waited for my response.

  “Fuck you. Fuck her. Fuck you both. Fuck the sword you walked in here on. And finally, go fuck yourselves up the ass with a rusty serrated knife.”

  He grinned. “Tell me how you really feel.”

  I sighed. “What’s the point? You’re not here. This is just my subconscious mind jerking me around. My mother doesn’t love me. If she did, she could have managed to send me one lousy little note, a birthday card, a high school graduation gift, a stupid phone call in the middle of the night from an untraceable phone. A friend of a friend of a friend could have slipped me an encoded message. No, she gave up on me, on being my mother because I wasn’t dragon enough for her.”

  Floating next to me, Dragon winced.

  My father looked at him, then back to me. “We gave you up because the future needed us to make that sacrifice. Everybody’s future. You had to grow up the way you did to become insanely strong. An evil is coming to the multi-verse that would have swept us all away—except you’re there to stop it. I could tell you more, but—”

  So, necessity’s the real bitch? I stared a hole through him. “I understand; the security of the temporal multi-verse is at stake.”

  He smiled. “Exactly.”

  I wanted to beat that smile off his face, much the way I’d done with Able. Instead, I smiled benignly. “Take a message back to dear old Mom for me.”

  He didn’t look happy, but he listened. Maybe he suspected the amount of pain I wanted to inflict.

  I said, “Tell her she has a grandson named Colt, and that she’s not going to be in his life, either.”

  “That’s cruel,” he said. “You’re being a dick.”

  My dick said: I am a dick.

  I said, “You’re a dick. You and mom are both dicks. Such massive dicks that even my own God-given cock looks small in comparison. You can tell her that, too.”

  “I will. And she will cry. And another little piece of her soul will wither and die.”

  “I’ll consider forgiving her when she’s dead.”

  His cool evaporated; I’d finally pushed him to the point where I saw killing rage in his eyes, but he didn’t act on it. He boxed it up and closed the lid on his heart, calming himself by sheer force of will. Despite my anger, part of me was a little impressed with his control.

  He asked, “Feel better?”

  “You don’t have the right to ask.”

  “True, but I am going to ask you to take this. Your future survival will depend on it. I promise you, when you read up on this, you’re going to want it.” He reached into a front pants pocket and pulled out a gold chain necklace. The chain had a finger of black quartz on it that was darker at the bottom tip, and had a few glossy zones inside, hints of yellow.

  I looked at my floating dragon buddy.

  He looked at me.

  I asked, “Well, what is it?”

  He shrugged his length. A black quartz and gold necklace.

  “Use your dragon-senses, half-wit. I want an assessment of any magic tied to it.” It’s always best to look a Trojan horse in the mouth and stare up its ass as well.

  Dragon sighed, and stared at the necklace. One low-grade spell, function unknown, magic appears neutral in orientation. The crystal is true black quartz, aging into its color due to rare earth radiation, gamma or x-rays. If I had to guess at origin…

  “You do,” I said.

  I’d say it’s from Am Monadh Ruadh, the red hills, in the eastern highlands of Scotland.

  I looked back at my father. “Keep it.”

  “You’ll need it.”

  “Pay me to take it.”

  He stared at me.

  I said, “If all time and space depends on me, and I’ll need this, then you should be perfectly willing to bribe me.”

  “You are a real piece of work.”

  “I’m what your absence has made. That was the point, right? Everybody else’s future is more important than my happiness. That’s incredible selfishness of everyone, but fine. That means I get to be selfish, too. So, pay me!”

  “How much?”

  “Information. How do I deal with Bella?”

  “How have you managed up ‘til now?”

  “With wit, weapons, tattoo magic, and the help of my friends.”

  “Keep doing that.”

  I looked down at the shadow that was my body. “Tattoos are gone. A shadow magic spell circle stripped them away.”

  “Then they weren’t yours to begin with. What is ours, is ours forever.” He lifted a hand and used a finger to draw a spell symbol—one I
used to have on my skin, inked in with dragon blood. It was the magic symbol for Dragon Fire. The lines he drew remained on the air, solid shadow. This was a variation of how I created shadow knives and swords. He said, “If you want your tattoos back on your body, just put them there. You have the shadow magic to do it. You just never thought of it.”

  I looked at my dragon.

  He stared blankly back. So easy…!

  My father stared at me, still holding out the necklace. “Is that payment enough?”

  “It will do. I snatched the necklace from his hand.

  My dragon said: Mine. I saw it first.

  I ignored him and draped the necklace over my head. It felt possessed of actual weight, like it was more than a figment of this dream. Probably, I expect weight, so I get it.

  My father turned his back and walked away. Just as he reached the portal, he called back over his shoulder. “Oh, you can keep the sword.”

  “What sword?”

  He stepped into the portal and vanished. The black hole closed. The runway was still there, a sword pointing at me. With the portal gone, I saw that the blade extended well away from me, ending in a hilt. It was a straight katana, not unlike my demon sword, but no red aura around it.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” I asked.

  My dragon said: Go surfing? This is your subconscious. Why ask me?

  “Doesn’t matter. I think I have the answers I need.”

  I closed the eyes of my shadow self, and created a mental image of falling out of the golden star, which reduced its size. I visualized it receding to the where it was nine inches across, a ball of energy wreathed with lightning, hanging right in front of me. In my mind’s eye, I reached out with shadow arms and gathered it to my chest in a hug. I summoned memories of warmth and fire, and felt furnace heat sinking into my body.

  Opening my eyes, I saw only darkness around me, the endless black of Bella’s power. In contrast, my body shone an incandescent gold. No longer shadow, I gleamed as a being of light. Writing in space as my father had done, I extended a finger and made a ring. I filled it with the symbol of Dragon Fire. The glyph hung in the void against the black backdrop as I pulled my hand back. I willed the pattern to grow until I was dwarfed by it, until it bisected the dark universe that held me, and then I willed it to activate.