by M. R. Forbes
“I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud. I can’t handle this shit, you know, Baldie. Tough as I try to be, it’s getting to be too much.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“First time you’ve ever said that and I believe you,” he replied. “I wasn’t looking for an apology. Not now. Fuck the blame, Conor. We’ve got two dipshits trying to pee in the pool, and you and me and Frank and Ash and Dannie are the only ones who can do anything about it.”
“I don’t think we can count Dannie. Death can watch us through her. He can make her act however he wants. I hate to say it, but we can’t trust anything she does.”
“Fuck. You’re right. She’ll always be a little girl to me, you know. Her life is my definition of tragic.”
I almost apologized again, but what good would that do?
We reached the side of the pyramid. There was an obvious depression in the dirt there, leading down to a sealed doorway.
“The one bright spot,” Amos said. “At least we made it here without too much trouble. We get the spell; we can get the hell out of here.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Silver lining.” We were both trying to find something to cling to for hope. It wasn’t easy.
I reached the door, examining it. It was a block of stone slid across the entrance, though it looked like there should be a mechanism to make it open. It wasn’t obvious from where we were standing.
“Maybe it’s in one of the other buildings?” Amos said. He pointed to a small square a hundred feet away. “Could be that one. It seems too small to be much else.”
“Worth a shot,” I said.
We headed back toward the building. As we did, something on the other side of the city seemed to collapse.
We both turned at the sound of stone falling on top of stone, and then on top of the ground. A dust cloud rose a few hundred feet away, indicating the location of the crash.
“Huh,” Amos said. “Shit’s so old; it probably collapses all the time.”
I kept staring at it, unsure. “I don’t know. You go inside and look for a lever or something to open the pyramid door. I’ll keep an eye on things.”
“You sure you don’t want to reverse that?”
“If there is a mechanism, it’s probably rusted or jammed. I don’t have the leverage.” I held up my arms. One hand. One stump.
“Good point. I’ll be right back. I’ll even run.” He pushed a smile and then jogged toward the building.
I kept watching the area near the collapse. I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the druids that lived here. How had they wound up getting involved with death magic? Why had they made this place into a death camp for users? Had they done it on purpose? The skeletons still in their beds suggested they hadn’t.
I heard Amos grunting behind me. Then I heard the echo of stone rubbing against stone, the door to the pyramid sliding away.
“Woooo,” Amos shouted. “Yes. I got it, Baldie.”
I turned around as he emerged from the structure, hands raised in triumph.
A shape rose behind him, massive and dark and poised to strike.
38
I fucking hate fucking snakes.
“Amos,” I shouted, but I was too late.
The massive head snapped forward and down, streaking toward him like a missile.
He saw it at the last second, rolling aside with reflexes nobody his size should have. I could hear the snap of the jaws as they closed on nothing but air, and then the massive creature’s head rose again, eyes tracking Amos as he stood up, shotgun in hand.
It was a snake. A giant snake, a hundred feet long at least. It’s hood expanded as it swayed over the fat Ghost, squaring off against him.
“I fucking hate snakes,” Amos said, slowly backing up, his eyes locked on the reptile.
So did I. It brought back memories of my time in New Orleans. It was the first time Samedi had called to me, bringing me way down south to retrieve them. It was my first step into this disaster, and it had involved a giant snake, too.
“Get out of here, Baldie,” Amos said. “Get the spell.”
I don’t think Amos would have normally been so self-sacrificial, but the shit with Dannie had affected his perspective. Mine, too. Maybe in the past, I would have done as he suggested, but knowing what I knew now? We were in this together. All of us, for different reasons, and my general selfishness was fading fast. I needed someone like Amos if I was going to deal with both Samedi and Death, and if we couldn’t handle a giant cobra, what chance did we have against them?
So, I did what only an idiot would do.
I ran toward the fucking thing.
“Geez,” Amos said, seeing me coming. “What are you going to do? Talk him to death?”
He jumped to the side as the cobra struck again, large fangs sinking into the dirt and raising another cloud of dust. It started shifting forward, massive body wrapping around the smaller building and giving it more reach. Amos fired up at it, his round chipping into its scales but otherwise ineffective.
I broke to the left, trying to circle it. My lungs were already on fire from the effort, and I had only covered fifty feet or so.
“Come on, you bastard,” Amos said, reloading and firing into the snake again. “I ain’t afraid of you.” He shot it a third time. It didn’t matter that his buckshot was worthless.
I reached the corner of another building, looking out past it to a wrap of the snake’s body twenty feet away.
“Keep it distracted,” I shouted.
“Already doing it,” he shouted back.
The snake struck at him a third time, and he didn’t quite get out of the way. Its teeth sank through his coat, getting stuck in the ballistic lining and lifting him as it raised its head again, leaving him dangling fifty feet off the ground, dangling from the duster.
He leveled the shotgun at the snake’s face, pulling the trigger. It made a high whistling sound as the shrapnel punched into its left eye, leaving it a mess. It whipped its head to the side, slamming him into a wall and knocking him out of the duster.
I didn’t wait to see if he got up. I sprinted to the side of the creature, jumping onto it and putting my hand on its side. There was so much death magic here, it was just waiting to be used, and I was the only one who could use it. I pulled it in from the fields around me, pushing it out to the snake. It hissed and writhed as I poured disease and decay into it, seeking to kill it from the inside out. Its body contorted, slipping and rolling, and without a second hand, I had no way to find purchase. I was thrown from it, knocked off and onto the ground.
I picked myself up, getting to my knees.
It had turned my way, its head dangling over me.
It was very, very pissed.
I should have listened to Amos in the first place.
I reached into my pocket, taking out the pistol he had given me. It was a peashooter compared to the size of the cobra. I almost laughed at myself for drawing it.
The snake swayed a couple of times, sizing me up. When it froze, I knew it was about to strike.
An echoing roar split the air, and I felt a sudden burn on my back, my bond with Ashiira heating up. Then he appeared in all his dragon glory, eighteen feet of scales and sharp claws, dropping down on the snake’s head and digging in.
He slashed across it, leaving deep marks with his talons as he swooped past and rose, getting the creature’s attention. It started moving, rebalancing itself to face the young dragon. He turned and hovered for a moment, opening his mouth and releasing a gout of flame that washed across the snake’s face. It dipped down, escaping it, then snapped up, stretching to reach out for him. He rolled over in the air, avoiding the attack, spiraling around its outstretched body and cutting it with his claws.
I got up, running over to where I had seen Amos hit. He was still on the ground there, awake and alert, sitting up with his back against the wall.
“Baldie,” he said as I reached him. He put his hand on his leg. “I think it
’s busted.”
“At least you’re still alive,” I said.
“And useless.”
“Just hold tight.”
“I have to say; your dragon friend makes one hell of a cavalry.”
I looked back, finding Ash swooping ahead of the snake again. The reptile had a dozen slashes across its body, each of them leaking small amounts of blood. It would take a few hundred more to bring it down. He was just too small.
“It isn’t enough,” I said.
“Maybe that is,” he replied.
I heard the growling, and then I saw them. The lobizon, lumbering toward the snake’s body. Their fur and flesh was rotting as they ran, the magic of the city attacking them the way it had attacked Frank and Dannie. They weren’t in control of themselves, so they ignored it. All twelve of them leaped onto a portion of the creature, biting and clawing and digging into it.
It turned away from Ash, its head snapping down at them, picking the first off and swallowing it whole. Ash used the distraction to come in again, strafing it with fire that burned the top layers of its scales.
It wasn’t sure which way to move, or who to attack. It reached back toward Ash while the lobizon continued shredding it from the ground.
Then the wisps joined in, flying high over the city, hundreds strong. They landed on the snake’s neck, digging it with their sharp teeth, biting and cutting and sending ribbons of blood pouring down.
I got to my feet again, walking toward the cobra.
“Where are you going?” Amos asked.
I ignored him. I reached out with my hand, the death magic stretching from it, an invisible tendril that reached into the creature. I used it to tug on the snake, to extract its life force as I had with Ms. Silver, bringing it to me. It was weaker now, unable to keep up with the numerous attacks on it. It couldn’t resist the magic, and it started to slow.
I held the tendril, walking back to Amos. I knelt beside him, putting my hand on his broken leg.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Relax,” I said. “I think this might work.”
“Think it might work? What the fuck are you doing?” He tried to pull his leg away, but couldn’t. “I don’t want some undead zombie leg. Get the hell away from me.”
“Shut up,” I said. “This is for Dannie.”
I continued pulling the life energy from the snake, but now I attached the tendril to Amos’ leg, feeding it the life I was taking. The snake was a bloody mess, but it knew what I was doing to it and had decided I was the biggest threat. It turned our way, slithering toward us.
“I’m not going to forgive you for this,” Amos said. “Turn me into fucking Frankenstein.”
I ignored him. His leg was cold. Very cold. It was taking a lot of energy because of his resistance. I continued ripping it from the fast-approaching cobra.
Its head hovered over me a second time, looking down on me with its remaining eye. The wisps had abandoned it, and the lobizon were almost all dead from the effects of the city. Ash was still up there, angling for another attack. He wasn’t going to make it in time.
I kept my hand on Amos’ leg as the head started to drop. It didn’t snap down like it had before. It fell lazily under the effects of gravity, hitting the dirt in front of me and raising a cloud of dust at the impact. Its eye blinked a couple of times, watching me suck its life away.
Then it died.
The thread of its life energy snapped, a whip-crack that knocked me away from Amos and back onto my ass. I felt dizzy and tired, weak and sore. I leaned over and vomited, nothing but mucus and blood.
Ash swooped over me, making sure I was still alive. He didn’t touch down in the city. He flew past, landing beyond the enchanted walls.
Amos and I were alone again. He pushed himself up, testing his leg, glaring down at it with a look of horror.
I turned my head to see it, too, wincing when I did. I had managed to knit it back together, but not the way I had intended.
The flesh around it was puckered and dry and looked a thousand years old. Some of the bone was visible through it; a disgusting amalgam of magic and flesh.
“What the hell did you do?” Amos said.
I wasn’t sure. I had acted purely on instinct to fix his broken leg. It was fixed, but it was also no longer a living part of him.
“I’m sorry,” I said, struggling to get to my feet.
“Sorry?” Amos said. “You’re fucking sorry?” He rumbled toward me, and I thought he was going to knock me back down. “You turned me into a fucking freak. This ain’t normal. This ain’t natural.”
“I had to,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice.”
He slowed up in front of me. He was pissed, and he had every right to be. He stood there, glaring at me, struggling to decide what to do. I kept my hands at my sides, ready to accept his decision.
The anger dissipated from him. He spat some blood on the ground beside me, and then returned to the snake’s head, grabbing his coat from where it had gotten stuck on its tooth. He slipped it on and shrugged.
“Tell me Baldie,” he said. “You think there’s any money in hybrid-zombie porn?”
39
Dead men tell no tales.
We entered the pyramid.
Amos was still giving me shit about what I had done to his leg, alternating between being completely pissed off and being some measure of grateful. Apparently, his weight was giving him pain in his knees, which were already pretty much garbage from his years as a Ghost. He had done more running than anyone his size should ever have to, and the cartilage was wearing thin. His leg didn’t hurt now. At all. The downside? It was held together with death magic. It was no longer alive.
I didn’t have it in me to tell him that the magic might fade once I was dead, leaving him a cripple and in a massive load of pain, or that he should try not to go more than two hundred feet off the ground or into any magical dead zones. Not with everything else that was going on.
“No,” Amos said. “It really ain’t bad.” He bounced on the knee a few times, trying to see past his gut to watch how the bones absorbed the shock. “I’ll get used to the fact that I look like a crawled out of a movie makeup truck.”
“Good,” I said. “Can you shut up about it now?”
“Heh. I’m thinking about what I’ll tell the girls in Vegas about it, too. Yeah, ladies, I got this fighting a hundred foot fucking cobra in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Now, take off your panties and-“
“I said, can you shut up about it now?”
He gave me his signature lopsided grin. “You know the rest anyway, don’t you Baldie? Not that you’ll ever experience it for yourself.”
“I’ve had my share,” I said. “It never mattered much to me.”
“That’s what virgins say,” Amos said. “I know you got a kid, so you ain’t a virgin. Unless you ain’t the father? Heh. And there was that one time with Dannie.”
“She told you about that?”
“Yup. She said it was like kissing her brother.”
“That’s not what she told me half an hour ago.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Was this before or after we learned she’s not really back from the dead?”
“Before. What does it matter?”
“It probably don’t.”
There was a smell inside the pyramid. It was musty and clean at the same time, a weird scent like life and death had gotten their wires crossed and created some kind of in-between state. It was a somewhat familiar smell, the scent of death magic, for one. But also the odor of Death. He wore it on his suit like a cologne, and I knew for sure where it came from:
The netherworld. The afterlife. Whatever you wanted to call it. The small sliver between one and the other where souls could be called and retrieved like packages.
It was present here. It was almost overwhelming. Every time we turned a corner, I half-expected Elvis to pop out of the shadows.
What had the druids done here? Had any of t
hem survived the aftermath?
Not that there were all that many corners. The pyramid wasn’t that large, and we covered a lot of ground in very little time. There was nothing inside. No deadies. No snakes. No ancient immortal wizards. There weren't even any rodents, bones of rodents, or dying vegetation to contend with. The place was empty and old.
And it had that smell.
We navigated our way through the whole thing. We looked in every nook and cranny and crevice. Not only did we not find anything that even remotely resembled a spell, we didn’t find anything at all. Cold walls. No doors.
What. The. Fuck.
“I’m thinking wild goose chase,” Amos said as we entered the frontmost chamber of the structure for the third time, this time coming from the left passage. “The pyramid is a lie.”
“I think you’re right,” I replied.
We had covered every inch and found nothing. There couldn’t be any hidden doors here, not when all of the non-death magic was being suffocated and destroyed.
I could sense the magic. How were we supposed to reach it?
“You didn’t see anything in the building with the lever?” I asked.
“Nope. Just an old stick to release a rope on a pulley. We’re lucky the thing didn’t bust when it started moving. I didn’t think they had pulleys and shit back then?”
“We didn’t think they had civilization at all back then. Anyway, we wouldn’t expect the druids to make it easy, right? Not if the secret they’re guarding is as big as it seems.”
“Tarakona got in. Or somebody got in for him.”
“Which means there’s a way in, somewhere.”
“Stands to reason.”
“Let’s take a look around outside.”
“Are you sure there aren’t any more snakes out there?”
“No.”
“Then maybe I should stay in here. I told you, I fucking hate snakes.”
“Come on.”
We left the pyramid, crossing to the nearest building. We looked inside, finding a couple of tables thrown in the corner, and lots of dust on the floor. Nothing.