A slit of soft yellow light appeared at the edge of one of the back windows. Just for a second. There were thick blankets hung over all the windows and someone had opened one just a peek. I stood up, my knees creaking a bit as I did. Okay, maybe risk an invisibility spell to …
I saw white light behind my eyes as the blow caught me in the back of the skull. I went down, face-first into the dirt and leaves. I rolled over to see a twelve-gauge combat shotgun pointed at me. The man behind the gun had a grim, tired face and long dreadlocks. He was dressed in a black T-shirt, black hoodie, and jeans. I recognized him from the picture Caern had shown me. It was Joey.
“How many with you?” he muttered quietly.
“Just me,” I said. “I’m not with Ankou, I’m not with anyone. I’m here to help you and your son.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “How did you find us?”
“I spoke with Caern before she died. I was hired by Ankou to find her, but after I talked to her, and saw Garland, I couldn’t. He must have had me followed or something. I tried to stop what happened, but I was too late. I want to help you, I swear it.”
“You’re lying,” Joey said. “Get your ass up. We’re walking inside. I don’t want to make a lot of noise out here, but you try anything and I’ll cut you in half.” I nodded and got to my feet with a groan. As I stood I threw a handful of sand and dirt into Joey’s eyes. I pushed his arms and the gun down toward the ground as I drove a forearm into his face. I felt his nose break and followed the arm bar with a southpaw uppercut. He fell down on his ass, dropping the shotgun. I picked it up and aimed it at him. Joey looked more scared than anything and I knew it was for his son in the house, not for himself.
“Sorry about the nose,” I said. “Yeah, I am lying. The truth is Ankou threatened to do worse than kill me and I told him where to find Caern. I was chickenshit, trying to save my own ass. I’d say I’m sorry, but I figure that would be like spitting on her and the baby’s grave.” The sadness and the anger warred in his eyes. “I’m here to help you, Joey, you and Garland. I took care of Ankou, but that fucked-up cult that you got Caern away from in L.A., they want Garland and I’ll be damned if I let them get him.
“I’ve got money, a lot of money, and some fake IDs for both of you. A friend of mine cooked them up before I nearly got him killed. They’re good enough to get you two into Mexico, through TSA to anywhere. I’m here to help. I swear it.” I dropped the shotgun at Joey’s feet. “You want to kill me, I wouldn’t blame you. If you do punch my ticket, the car keys in my pocket are to a Trevita parked about four blocks down. There’s a case in the car with the bearer bonds and the IDs. Hell, keep the car too. Ankou won’t be needing it.”
Joey got to his feet. He wiped the blood from his broken nose. He left the shotgun in the dirt. “We weren’t there,” he said, more to the night than to me. “I wasn’t there. We had a stupid argument about fucking dishwasher detergent. Can you imagine that shit? Goddamned soap. I was tired and I didn’t want to go get it and she said she would and I got pissed and we yelled at each other and I headed out the door and Garland, hell, Garland, he wanted to ride along with his daddy. So the last thing I said to her was ‘Be right back,’ and I slammed the fucking door.
“She was the best thing that ever came into my fucked-up life and I wasn’t there to help her, to save her, I let her slip away not knowing how much I loved her, thinking I was pissed at her. Goddamned soap.”
“She knew, she told me,” I said. “I know that doesn’t mean shit right now, but maybe one day you’ll feel it. She loved you. You were her hero, you saved her life a long time ago. Don’t forget that.”
Joey picked up the shotgun. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get Garland and get the hell out of here.” We broke the tree line and entered the backyard. Garland was standing next to a plastic jungle gym designed to look like a tree house with a slide. The boy was in an old, faded, and too-big L.A. Lakers jersey over footie pajamas.
“Dad?” the boy said. “They’re coming. Hi, Ballard.”
“Who, son?” Joey asked, looking around.
“Bad men,” the boy said. “Real bad men.” I opened my Ajna, my third eye and I sensed them too.
“The Dugpa,” I said to Joey. “Coming from the beach.” I knelt by Garland and unwrapped Caern’s purple quartz bracelet from my wrist. I put it around the boy’s neck, like a choker. “Garland, this was your mamma’s, and her mamma’s before that. It’s from Faerie, did your mom tell you about the First World?” He nodded as he examined the jewelry. “It’s powerful,” I said. “It will hide you from hollow men, from bad people looking for you with the sight, what you and your mamma have. Never take it off, you hear me, you never take this away from your skin, and you stick close to your dad.” The boy looked at me with large, wise eyes and nodded. They were Caern’s eyes. I stood and turned to Joey. “You two get in the house. Hide.”
“You’ll need help,” he said.
“That shotgun won’t make a difference,” I said. “Your son needs you. If anything happens to me, Garland will know. If it does, you make a run for the car. Get the fuck out of the country and do it fast, y’hear?”
Joey nodded and led his son toward the back door of the dark house. The boy looked back at me and then they both disappeared inside. I cleared the cobwebs of pain and fear from my body with some cleansing breaths and ran toward the beach down the old worn path through the stand of trees. I cleared the tree line and found myself at the edge of the rocky cliff. There were old, worn, concrete stairs with rusted metal rails that led down to the rocky beach below. The moon was hidden behind clouds and I could sense that will had placed those clouds there, so I brushed them aside.
“Iam celare, tacere sororis,” I whispered, and the bright, pilfered light of the moon came out of hiding and illuminated the sea and the beach. There were six men. They had landed in a large rubber raft with a muffled outboard motor on it. The raft had been dragged onto the land. All the men wore black tactical gear, black ski masks, and night-vision goggles that made them look vaguely insect-like as they spread across the beach, moving toward the cliff face and the stairs. They were all armed. A second raft, with six more assassins, was closing with the shore.
As the accusing moonlight pinned them, I pulled energy from the air, sifting it through my seething Muladhara lens and gestured downward as the waters roughened and the dark clouds swirled. “Ignis caeli ardebit inimicos meos,” I called up to the winds, even as the men heard me and raised their weapons. Lightning, like an angry serpent, crashed down from the sky. It struck and killed two of the men, tossing their bodies into the air. I felt another’s magic deflect my lightning and send it dancing across the now-choppy ocean until it dispersed.
“Shit” was all I had time to say as I scrambled back away from the edge of the cliff, toward the trees. There was a hiss and whine of angry bullets as the surviving killers and the landing occupants of the second raft fired their silenced weapons up the cliff at me. I felt a hot iron burn itself into my shoulder with the force of a freight train. I fell back onto the ground from the shot. Before I had time to regroup, I felt the mystical attack on top of me. Foul, poisoned Manipura-driven force engulfed me and tried to smother me, snuff out my life force. It was brazen, reckless magic driven by a level of power I had seldom encountered in a mortal magician. My first instinct was an animal one, to shake myself loose, but I quickly sensed, as my lungs began to seize, that was exactly what my opponent wanted me to do, and the spell coiled tighter about my aura, like a massive python of black cracking energy.
I was on the ground struggling to breathe, to stay conscious, and I knew the Dugpa’s assassins were hustling up the stairs while their patron kept me busy. I had less than a minute until they could pump my twitching body full of bullets and then move against Joey and Garland. No. That was not going to happen, damn it.
I forced my body, my instincts, to shut the fuck up. I accepted the spell, its twisted harmony, its mad entropy. I let the monster
play, if it killed me it killed me; if this was my last breath, then it was. There was no future, no “next,” there was pure crystalline breath, the mind of the infinite, the sun, radiating from my core.
The coils of the spell loosened. I was water, I became my Svadhisthana chakra; pure life force; pure, clean, fluid, slowly eroding the hungry, insistent magic wanting to devour me. I let it devour me and in doing so I devoured it. I slipped loose from the spell. It was a hell of a trap, and it had been built just for me. My life force, my soul was my weakest spot, and the last thing I would have ever relied on to overcome such an attack. Another few seconds of resisting and I’d be dead. As it was, I was feeling pretty rough as I crouched. I saw the masked face of the first Dugpa to reach the top of the stairs. I let the monster slither away and guided it toward the killer. He seized and fell back down the stairs as the spell devoured him. I heard his companions shout as he crashed into them. He was no wizard and he had no mystic aikido to employ against the black tantric spell.
I placed my hand on the ground and anchored myself, becoming the earth. I sent pulse after pulse of root Muladhara energy through the cliff. My head swam from the concussion I was pretty sure Joey had given me when he coldcocked me with the shotgun. My lungs burned and my body ached from the spell I had narrowly escaped. What I was trying to do now, most wizards in the world, in history, couldn’t do on the fly. The enormity of it threatened to eclipse my mind, my will.
Too big, it’s too big …
But not my fucking ego. I am Laytham-motherfucking-Ballard, and I am the greatest wizard to ever stride this earth, I am an ass-kicking, pillar-of-salt-turning, motherfucking god, a goddamned rock star, I’m fucking Thulsa Doom with a better agent. The immovable object quivered, shook.
I stalled. It was too big, it was too much. The next Dugpa’s head came into view, then his chest, his raised gun. There was another appearing behind him and another after that. All black-clad, like the night itself was sending its army to kill me, to kill … Garland. Garland, his eyes, his mother’s eyes. You are all that stands between that little boy who never hurt a soul, and the hungry night. You’re it. If you die, they take him.
I was no rock star, sure as fuck no god. I was a tired, guilty, selfish, old man running from his fears, from his failures. I was ready, this was as good as it was going to get. That boy was going to live a good life, and that was worth the bad one I had wasted. I released a single breath, felt my Sahasrara chakra take over, gently pushing instead of violently pulling. I begged, instead of ordered, and I felt the world open and yield, felt the other mage’s attempt to stop what I was doing crumble like a sand castle.
A large section of the rocky cliff face, including the stairs, collapsed, crashing and tumbling down on the beach below. I heard the shouts and screams of the Dugpa assassins as they fell and then only the sound of the settling earth and the relentless waves.
I stood, shaking. My whole body felt twitchy and weak, as if I had physically pushed the weight. Each breath was fire. It was only then that I realized I had been hit again. I was bleeding from my chest as well as from my shoulder. I walked back to the edge of the cliff, carefully looking over the side. I got dizzy for a second but didn’t fall, couldn’t fall. Below there were boulders and debris everywhere along the beach. In the silver light, bodies were scattered about the rockslide, unmoving. The two rafts sat alone at the edge of the encroaching sea. That was easier than … I … thought it … The Dugpa work through misdirection, they never come at you straight on.
“Damn it!” I said. I immediately started hacking for my effort. My lungs felt like they were made of molten lead, I couldn’t get a good breath. My cough brought up bright red blood. I spit over the cliff and headed back toward the house and the yard as quickly as I could.
The back door was locked. I kicked it open and nearly puked and passed out for my effort. I stumbled into the nearly demolished 1950s-style kitchen. Cabinet doors were reduced to splinters, their hinges partly melted as if by terrible heat. The oven was crushed, crumpled like a tin can. Every drawer had launched itself across the room and the cracked, stained tile floor was littered with old rusted cutlery and now fat, dark drops of my blood. Some of the knives and forks were impaled in the walls, still vibrating from the impact.
“Joey!” I called out as I moved through the debris and into the darkness of the hall connected to the kitchen. “Garland!” The house was cold, colder than outside, and the place smelled of stale piss and something else, something familiar to some corner of my awareness. I saw scraps of light ahead, hidden under thick plastic shower curtains, hung before a doorway. I pushed the curtain aside, focusing my strained concentration, raising my defenses, preparing to fight.
The living room was lit by several battery-powered lanterns. Joey braced against a wall, his body partly hidden by shadow. He was panting and wincing in pain, bleeding from a deep, ugly gut wound.
I turned and saw Garland, his face slack with fear, and before the boy, in the harsh LED light, was Crash Cart, its multiple cabled arms sprouting scalpels and whirring circular bone saws, dripping with Joey’s blood. It turned its mangled half-face toward me, and beneath the blood-clotted surgical mask I thought I saw it grin. Two of the tulpa’s oil- and blood-slick tentacles were obscenely wrapped around the boy’s chest, but it hadn’t hurt him. Joey struggled to bend over and pick up the still-smoking shotgun off the floor; its barrel had been cut in two. “You can’t have him,” the father growled, fighting to hold his insides in.
Garland looked to me, pleading. Everything was dimming. I could hear my blood swelling in my veins, in my skull. I fought to remain present in this nightmare.
“Glad to see you still on your feet, Ballard,” Brett Glide said, stepping into the light. “Better late than never, I always say.” The Dugpa was dressed all in black, like his men on the beach. “Those were some impressive workings back on the beach. You are as good as they say you are, almost as good as you think you are. Even if you have mastered the technique to keep Crash Cart from affecting you, the boy and his father are not so lucky, and you’re barely on your feet.”
“Still got a little hitch in my giddy-up,” I said, filling my body with Manipura energy. “Unless you want what your boys on the beach got, Big Kahuna, you call off your monster. Leave the boy be.”
“Wow,” Glide said, smiling and shaking his head. I wanted to kick in his perfect teeth. “I have to tell you, you got style, I’ll give you points for that. Bleeding out, exhausted, and beat to hell and you still act like you’re going to win this. God, it’s a shame you didn’t join us.”
“You wouldn’t have liked it if I had,” I said. “I would have gotten rid of you and your bat-shit crazy-ass stepdad day one.” Glide chuckled. “Runs in the blood, I guess. He’s as fucked-up as his old man. I had a nice long chat with step-granddad in the joint.”
“My grandfather is a prophet, a messiah,” Glide said, some of the fake Hollywood smile sliding off his face. “You don’t deserve to breathe the same air as he.”
“To be honest, Brett, I didn’t want to. Manson could’ve used a shower, or some patchouli—the hippie stuff—maybe a little Febreze, at least.”
“Shut your fucking sewer of a mouth, you old fucking relic!” Glide shouted, the facade gone. He was red-faced with rage and his voice made Garland jump. Crash Cart’s “arms” slid more tightly around the boy, like snakes covered in blood clots. I held up a hand to Glide.
“Mellow, dude, mellow,” I said. “Your karma is already fucked up pretty good, no need to push it to eleven.” Glide got a grip on himself. I could feel his defenses wavering a bit as he attempted to chill. If Garland wasn’t in the line of fire, I would have gone for it then. Glide patted down his hair and put his smiling mask back on.
“Garland?” Glide said to the boy in his best hippie Mr. Rogers voice. “My name is Brett and you’re going to come with Crash Cart and me now. It will all be okay, son. I promise. We’re going to take you somewhere safe where y
ou will be loved and cared for and in time all these nightmares from before will fade away.”
“Damn you, Glide,” Joey said, forcing himself to stand. He was soaked in blood, sweating, fighting to say conscious. It was pure love, pure desire to save his son, that was keeping him from dropping. “You leave him alone, you son of a bitch, or I’ll kill you!” He took a step away from the blood-painted wall, toward the Dugpa. “Garland…” He collapsed, unmoving.
“Do you like Xbox?” Glide said to the boy. “You can have every Xbox game they ever made and some special ones too, just for you, programmed by some of my family.”
Garland looked to me. “Bad man,” the boy said, nodding at Glide.
“Yep,” I said. “Very, very bad. He’s talking about you forgetting your mom and dad, kid.” I grunted as I knelt to look Garland eye to eye. I sat on the floor, cross-legged in a full lotus position, ignoring the screaming pain in my chest as I folded my legs. I almost passed out but I didn’t. “Don’t worry, Garland, you and your dad are going to walk out of here and I’m going to make the bad man and the monster go away, and you’re going to help me.”
Glide chuckled. “You really need to rein in that ego, Ballard. It’s over. You’ve got nothing left. Garland, if you come with me right now, we’ll get your daddy some help, get him to a hospital, to a doctor. You don’t want Daddy to die like Mommy did, do you? It would be your fault if you didn’t come along willingly right now. You don’t want to kill Daddy, do you buddy?”
“Look at me,” I said. My fingers were already beginning to make the motions, the complex new mudras I hadn’t had much of a chance to practice. They had to be perfect for this to work, my form had to be perfect. No goddamn D.T. shakes, no fear, no pain, perfect, or the boy was gone. Just once, just goddamned once, don’t fuck it up. “Ignore him, kid, he’s the fucking boogeyman. He can’t hurt you or your dad, neither can that ugly, gross thing holding you. See, the hollow man wants you to give in to him yourself. It gives him more power, and old Crash Cart there, well, he really is just a bad dream. We can take ’em, kid. Look at me, listen to me.”
The Night Dahlia Page 34