High Steaks

by Daniel Potter

  A screech echoed through the vault as his defenses collapsed. O'Meara's red maelstrom of energy enveloped his as the black ooze exposed the bones of his ribcage. His skull went last, a dark spot among the brightness. Then nothing.

  O'Meara cut off the attack, and a rush of silence settled over the vault. My bond mate slumped to one knee. A smile started to crack my lips but stopped as my magical sight recovered from the glare of the magics. A vaguely man-shaped blackness still stood where Lansky had been. It seemed as surprised as I was. We all stood there, watching as it slowly lifted its hands to its face and turned them over in a gesture of bewilderment.

  Thomas, snap out of it. All his defenses are down. Hit the chair now. O'Meara's thoughts jarred me from my own trance. Lansky the spirit had begun to shake, vibrating with silent laughter that prickled the fur on the back of my neck.

  Wrenching my vision away from him, I looked at the chair. It seemed to have gone back to its passive mode. I turned and donkey-kicked it right where the breakaway ward had joined its complex weave. Purple flared in the seat and where Lansky's shade stood. The shade reappeared on the throne, arms and legs encased in the spell weaving he had shrugged off before. Two crystal pylons stabbed up out of the treasure on either side of the throne, one black and one white. Jagged arcs of power lanced into the shade. There was no sound, but I heard him scream through that black thread at the edge of my mind.

  I heard Rudy's keen of pain perfectly well.

  Rainbow colors streamed from the shade's chest where the black and white power met. Another face, more round but composed of the same inky-black magic, pushed out of that wound and grinned, teeth and eyes shining electric white.

  Death. Death was back.

  Lansky wasn't yielding. Two additional arms sprouted from Lansky's shoulders and gripped the second head with spindly mockeries of hands, trying to shove Death back into himself.

  The arcs of the pylon shifted their targets from Death's head to striking Lansky's, alternating strikes. Each blow would blow a crater in the head, which almost healed before the next bolt struck. Rudy gripped his own head and began to beat it against the black staff. Whatever Merlin had done to help him no longer worked against this new assault on our minds. It felt like a swarm of dental drills at my temples. It took constant effort, but I could hold it off.

  O'Meara could not. Bastards, Rex howled under the assault as the ghosts of the war rose in her mind. Brutally maimed skeletons raised accusatory fingers and tried to gore any sense of worth, breaking suicidal thoughts out of their cages. They seized on a plan for her to immolate herself and began to draw a circle to protect me from the blast.

  Despite the beating Lansky was taking from the pylons, he leered at me. Can't save them both. I have never missed my middle fingers more.

  Grabbing Rudy and prying him off the staff, I deposited him on one of the four-eyed tass dolls to let him beat his head against something soft. Not that I was all that concerned for Rudy; his head was the hardest substance known to magi or mortals. Merlin's magics probably helped him recover from neurotrauma. Which, come to think of it, might explain a few things about Rudy.

  Rudy settled, I rushed back to O'Meara, knocking chalk from her fingers inches before the circle closed.

  "No!" She snatched after the chalk. "I'm guilty! So many... I deserve this!" She shoved me with both hands, forcing me up on my hind legs. My claws lashed out, snagging on her jacket. Her clouded eyes stared at me, seeing nothing but the ghosts in her mind as they chanted: Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! over and over. Faces flashed, of crying villagers, eviscerated spell dogs, and lost comrades before each disappeared in a flash of flame.

  It's not real, O'Meara! My thoughts felt like shouting over the growing buzz at my temples. He's in your head. He's remixing your memories!

  You're a liar, Thomas Khatt! I am a monster! I am the Ashbringer. I went after the vampire's food supply, the villagers. I wiped out so many I lost count. I deserve death, Thomas. Let me end it!

  She rolled onto her back and slammed her boots into my stomach. The rip of fabric filled my ears as my breath shot out of my throat. My body crumpled as I dived into O'Meara's mind.

  I landed in a village of round huts with tall thatched roofs. The sun hung in the air like a great eye, witnessing all. People were strewn in the shadows, thin, dark skeletons. Nobody in this village had eaten for a week or more. They all stared straight ahead, occasionally wiping at tears and snot that had long since run out. One person moved listlessly at the town's water pump.

  My path through the village followed boot prints in the muddy dirt. They wound through the village, occasionally staggering as if they had been pushed. The village was not small. Far larger than anything I would call a village. The architecture varied as I walked; square buildings of the same red brick were interspersed with more modern wooden buildings. A few had metal roofs instead of thatch. All were occupied by people drained of any perceivable will. Not one village, I realized. All of them combined.

  Behind me, I could hear my own demons howl. I ignored them as the dirt beneath my feet grew slick and muddy. The metallic sweetness of human and canine blood filled my nose as I approached the center. A step further and the huts around me were a conflagration of roaring flame. A whoosh and the people were transmuted statues of cinder and bone, their expressions still unfocused and sad.

  "I'm sorry," I found myself muttering as I steeled myself to look up at the village center.

  An O'Meara stood there, but not the one I knew. Physically, she was perfectly recognizable despite wearing armor similar to Lansky's, making her appear to be a medieval tank on legs. A golden helmet struggled to contain her mop of red hair, as if the chin strap prevented the hair from ejecting it from her head. Flames reached out of the seams of the armor to lick at the air. Deep bruises under her eyes reduced them to cold, sunken things that saw everything and hated it. A small silver shield adorned her left wrist, and her right gripped a short sword with a broad blade. Nigel - the black cat I had seen in O'Meara's court of past familiars - clung to the top of her helm as if it were the only bit of dry land in a vast ocean.

  Slowly, she walked towards the center of the village as shadows materialized out of the air to strike her. Clawed hands and tusked maws met her shield and the flat of her sword. Her movements were mechanical, meeting their attacks without looking as they howled for her blood. The blade did not lash back at them, even as they became a storm around her. O'Meara let go of her weapons, and they whirled through the air, no need for her arms. Yet some blows broke through her defenses, striking at her armor. Still she continued as the villagers began to wail in pain as the creatures pulled on the last of their reserves. Killing the villagers while trying to protect them. Nothing slowed O'Meara's careful walk until she reached the center and the howls of rage gained a note of pleading.

  A terrible grin lit her face as she made that final step. That small patch of ground was no different from the next, but to her it was the heart of her enemies, and it beat with a pulse as she set her boot upon it. She clasped her hands together, channeled for a brief moment, and opened them again. A shimmer of heat and then everything was made of flame. Roofs, people, brick, and even the very dirt - it all burned as if it were seasoned pine.

  Why are you showing me this, O'Meara? I asked as flames consumed every one of my senses.

  I'm a monster, Thomas, and we both know what you do to monsters. O'Meara's voice echoed around me.

  There were plenty of excuses O'Meara had at her disposal. The villagers had already been drained to a point of near death. It had been a war. And a few villages did not hold a candle to the scale of deaths that had happened in the mundane world. Neither pilot who dropped the nuclear bombs that ended World War II ever expressed regrets.

  She did not reach for them. I did. I'm not going to kill you for something you did during a war.

  The war was for power, Thomas, nothing more than that. We were not attacked. I knew that. The flames around m
e were fading, revealing mounds of bodies. One pile stank of overdone and charred meat, the other of rot and fecal matter. The ones O'Meara had killed and the ones that had followed her command. That's all I got for it.

  O'Meara, this is not you. Not anymore. Things were moving in the shadows of her mind, and my own demons were crawling up my spine. The crunch of my jaws breaking the neck of a pretty white cat formed the rhythm to a chant. Killer. Murderer. Bloody judgment.

  I'm done with Rex. I'm done hiding from all this. I've always known I've done terrible things, but he never let me remember them. If you won't kill me, will you forgive me?

  Wrapping her in a hug of warmth, I shielded her from the black tendrils that rooted through her memories. O'Meara, I love you for who you are now, but I cannot absolve you of this. We looked out onto the memories of devastation, both knowing that redemption, if such a thing existed, would trace a path back through those burned lives. If you go, I will be at your side, I told her.

  O'Meara paused, our minds pulling closer together, protecting each other. I'm not sure I will ever be ready for that, Thomas.

  What soldier ever is? Those are not boots I've worn. Let the philosophers and judges argue about the ethics of the soldier while we focus on making sure something like that never happens again.

  We each flowed into the other, letting each into the parts of ourselves we usually locked away. We presented each other's insecurities, my fear of attachments and her sense of abandonment from all of magedom. In the light of our warmth and affection, it all seemed stupid and petty. We both had the same ambition: to make the magical world a better place. And even if we were not bonded for every second of the time, we would be doing it together.

  We knew where to start.

  45

  Burning Hunger

  We opened our four eyes and found that the thing had grown in our absence. The black thing's thighs bulged against the arms of Death's throne. Lansky's head had seemingly dissolved, but Death's had gotten mired in one of the thing's many armpits.

  Other faces had appeared, too. Lady Ezial screamed from the thing's hip. Jet's horns rose from a bicep. Other faces emerged like piercings in unexpected and painful places. The creature's many hands had seized the two crystal pylons and strained against them. Spiderweb cracks were starting to travel through the pylons. If they broke, the grief thing would be free to unleash its hunger on the world.

  Not one head focused on us as we stood up on our six feet, each lost in their own personal agony, but we felt its naked frustration howling in our heads. "Sorry, Death," we smiled. "We went through the seven stages and decided we liked anger best." A flick of telekinetic power lifted the spell ripper and Inquisitorial sword into our hands. Tass coated our fangs and claws. We needed no circle; we were a single point in space and time. The sword twirled, our tail lashed, and both our bodies were standing on a mountain of tass.

  The crystal pylons shattered, and it surged out of its cage like a lake from a broken dam. Towards Rudy, who lay where Thomas had left him, slamming his head into a four-eyed doll face. Our hands flung the spell ripper, its blades buzzing through the blackness. Our feline body followed, snatching Rudy away from grasping tendrils. There was no safe place to deposit him, so we swallowed him whole and stowed him in the sideways pocket.

  A wall of blackness surged between our two bodies as the howl of hunger denied shook the vault. We smirked and blew the wall apart with tass-infused flame breath from two throats. The howl's tone shifted to agony. Faces surfaced from the blackness to spit gouts of a bewildering variety of energies. Together, we layered ourselves with ward after ward as we tore at the thing with claws, blade, and magic. With each strike, we burned away the blackness.

  Still it swelled around us, and we became an island of light in an ocean of hunger. Beyond the dark of the monster, we could see the strands that it had tied to the souls of the people above, feeding not only on the life energy of the magi but the thousands of people who had worked for Death, Ezial, and Lansky.

  We shifted our tactics, bringing a ward of golden fire around us and slowly expanding it like a balloon. Distorted faces of the dead gnawed at the barrier, only to burn their maws on it. Roaring, the blackness shrank back from us, gathering in the far corner of the vault. Its surface bubbled and frothed as we continued to box it in. We readied a final pulse of energy that would cleanse it from existence.

  Then it began to shrink, its mass flowing up into the corner in which it was huddled. Only as the silver mirror of the spell ripper dropped out of it did we realize that the blackness was flowing out of the vault. It had used the spell ripper to tunnel out of the ward! Fragmented and maddened by hunger, the black thing still had Death's knowledge of the vault.

  We struck.

  Fire mixed with hope and solidified with tass, a napalm of light issued forth from our mouths to burn the blackness. Unable to move, it screamed without sound, flooding the vault with its pain. We did not stop until the slit in the ward had been revealed, made along an invisible seam where the fiery countermeasures would not burn. Only the man who had made it would have known of that weak point. Reaching in, we tore it open like the Jaws of Life bending the frame of a car. Beyond it lay a tunnel of purple.

  There was only one place it would be going. Five years of war had taught us that, once wounded, there was only one place this hunger went. Home. The casino.

  We would not use O'Meara's old tactic. We rose through the rock, steel, and concrete on twin wings of plasma, blasting through the fragile wards that protected each floor of the casino. The surroundings were a blur, our attention centered on the circle made with our contiguous minds. Our final gambit began to take shape as we emerged into the entranceway to the casino of the magi.

  Where the clatter and bling of excess had once greeted us, only a festering darkness remained. It fought against the streams of light we shot into it, only grudgingly revealing the casino beyond the doorway after we'd speared it with a dozen shafts of light and heat. Yet it refused to yield colors to us, and we stepped into a gray world.

  The magi of Vegas lay where they had fallen, surprisingly unconsumed. We quickly identified the figures of the Blackwings, slumped against each other, hands clasped together. Our hearts rejoiced in their not-entirely-dead-ness.

  "Inedibles." The word sizzled with acid as it rolled from the mouth of the thing that sat on Death's throne. It was a mockery of a man, a puppet of swirling blackness, a huge head built solely to accommodate the gigantic maw. The two white spots that indicated eyes appeared to be last-minute additions. The body of the thing did not sit on the throne so much as it engulfed it; dozens of shadowy pseudopods extended, merging into the surreal grayness of the room. "No farther!" it roared. "I will consume a magus for each step you take. There must be some in this pile that you psychopaths are fond of."

  We stopped moving.

  The black thing hissed. "You grieve, not for Death, nor Lansky, nor even for Lady Ezial, who was your ally. Who in this room makes you two hesitate? Which ones do you have plans for? Tell me!" It did not have teeth to bare at us, but black oozed from its fearsome maw and bubbled at its feet.

  We laughed and pulled against each other, both reluctant for what came next.

  "Stop laughing!" A fist of shadow pounded on the ground next to the throne, like a small child's temper tantrum. "What is so funny?!"

  We pulled back our laughter and hid it behind grins. "All of them." Our eyes panned the fallen crowd and did not see a certain owl that might have been the exception. Ceres and Doug were there. Ceres's eyes were shielded from view by her glasses. Doug's were open, the only open eyes among the fallen. "Release them all, sever your ties, and we will leave you in this pocket."

  "No. I do not understand. This is what your little squirrel wants. These magi are the core of the council. While not the head, they are its body. It will wither without them. Let me have them, and you can rebuild. Take two of them. Two magi, plus their familiars. That is my offer to end this s
talemate." It leaned forward.

  We brandished our own weapons. "And let you feed on all of Vegas? All the mythics that work for them? All the mundanes?"

  "Unless threatened, I will sup lightly. Normal life will resume."

  For a moment, we wavered. We could turn around, close the door, and sever this place from the rest of our reality. Nobody in the room was an innocent. Yet that wasn't a true thought. Thomas had passed judgment on people he did not know once before, and we would not do so again. Not while other options existed. Even if that option was not healthy for us.

  "We have an alternative option," we said, our minds slowly pulling back from each other, untangling into two selves once again.

  I don't like this plan at all, was O'Meara's first separate thought.

  Superpower responsibility, I chided her with a mental nosing. When you can do something that nobody else can, you bloody well go and do it.

  The thing's little eyes had narrowed to slits of light. "What alternatives?"

  "How'd you like your very own familiar?"

  I broke my bond with O'Meara and sent Mr. Bitey zipping towards the black figure on the throne.

  Hunger cannot refuse food. The link was forged before the thing knew what it had done. Readying the weapon O'Meara and I had forged, I plunged through the link.

  46

  Souls Are Yum

  FEED!

  The thought slammed into me like a brick wall dropped off the roof of a building. How long had it been since I had eaten? Surely that driver could have stopped at a drive-through on the way to this circus.

  I peeled the alien desire off and threw it back into the mind that spawned it - only to have it jump right back on me like a swarm of alien facehuggers. I forced myself to focus on my surroundings, doing my best to ignore the hunger as it scrabbled inside my ribs.