by S T Branton
"I don't know, but I hope it's not an accessory to these."
Ally picked up a thick chain attached to the wall with a heavy ring. I snatched it from her hand and let it drop to the floor.
"You have to stop touching things," I scolded.
"That's what I do, Slick."
"Touch things?"
"Investigate. We need to find out what this place is and what was here, and the only way we'll do that is…"
Her voice trailed off as I added the syringe to a row of them laid out across a slate table. They carried various colors of the liquid, some more filled than others.
"Is what? Finish your thought." She didn't say anything. "Ally?"
I looked up and saw her eyes wide, her expression mesmerized.
"He's so beautiful," she murmured.
That couldn't possibly be good.
"What's going on? Ally!"
Ally didn’t move when I shouted her name. I stepped forward, then heard a noise behind me. I froze, some instinct willing my body not to spin around and confront the thing lurking in the shadows.
“Ally, what do you see?”
“An angel,” she sighed.
Shit.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“That’s right,” a voice sang behind me in a rich baritone. “Come look upon the face of God.”
“Ally, close your eyes!” I shouted. "It’s a Malak."
I knew the word meant nothing to her. She didn't know what the creature was or how much danger she was in. I did. The Malak was an angel in the same sense that a flame was a safe place for a moth to land. A Farsider so stunningly beautiful he could capture anyone by making eye contact. But that was where their appeal ended.
"Close your eyes," I told her again in vain.
She didn’t respond, and I knew he had her in his trance. I only had one option now, and it wasn't my favorite one. I closed my eyes and yanked off the lightweight shirt I wore over a tank top. I wrapped it around my eyes like a blindfold and turned, fists raised to fight the Malak.
His laughter echoed through the spacious barn, making it hard to home in on him. I heard feet scuffling. Then a fist slammed into my stomach. I lashed out into the surrounding air, finding nothing but laughter.
“That’s right,” he purred. “Follow the sound of my voice.”
“You won’t be laughing once I rip your wings off,” I muttered, but I knew I was in trouble. How could you fight what you couldn’t see?
I heard movement to my left and lunged for it. I got lucky and tackled the Malak to the ground.
We tussled on the floor for a moment, and I tried to grab whatever I could. I felt the opening of the trench coat they always wore and pulled it to me while I swung my head down. The crunch of the Malak’s nose as my forehead bust into it was loud in my ear, and I swung wildly at where I figured his face must have been.
But my tackle wasn’t enough. The Malak wedged his feet between us and launched me into the air. Strength and speed did diddly-shit to stop me from being flung, and I tried in vain to brace for a landing. The ground hit me hard, harder still because I couldn’t see it coming.
As I pushed myself off the hardwood, I heard the sounds of Ally swooning and moved toward her. I felt for her face.
“Sorry, friend,” I shouted as I slapped her hard across the cheek.
“Ow,” she cried. “What the hell, Slick?”
“You were in a trance.” I covered her eyes with my hands. Drawing my face closer to hers until her breath was warm on my skin, I hissed at her in a hoarse whisper,
“Keep your eyes shut and get to the wall.”
A sudden thump on my back made me fall forward. Ally’s terrified scream told me she was making it to the wall as powerful hands lifted me by the cuff of my jacket and the back of my pants and tossed me into a few hard, wooden crates. I frantically searched the area around me, hoping my sense of touch would trigger a memory to tell me what I felt. My hands clasped a tool. By running my palms and fingertips carefully along it, I felt the handle and long, curved blade of a scythe.
Badass.
I grabbed the scythe and swung up while climbing to my feet. It sliced through nothingness, and I slowly turned, trying to orient myself so I could find the creature. The familiar feeling of Splinter’s claws up my back and onto my shoulder emboldened me. He was impervious to the effects of the Malak’s gaze.
Be my eyes, little buddy, be my eyes.
A second later, he bit my collarbone. I reacted with a sharp thrash of the scythe. Resistance told me the blade had caught something, and the Malak screamed in pain and frustration. Feeling a little gutsy, I pulled my makeshift blindfold slightly out of the way to hazard a look through mostly closed eyes. The angel stood, holding his face. Blood gushed from between his fingers and by his feet was a soft fleshy mound. It quickly dawned on me that it was his nose. I had removed his nose. That was a fucked up follow-through of the game my uncle used to play with me when I was a little girl.
Then it occurred to me. Swiping the angel's nose meant his face was jacked to hell. Which meant his spell wouldn’t work. Awesome. I could use my eyes again.
I straightened while tugging the blindfold off, then pulled the scythe back like a baseball bat. He raised his head, and we met eyes. He dropped his hands to give me a full view of his face. After a few seconds of staring, he stepped forward, assuming I was entranced. I swung the scythe back around, stopping short of his neck. He nearly fell backward in surprise as I shook my head, smiling.
“Not too pretty now, are you?” My smile fell away. "What are you doing here?"
He moved to crawl away, and I held the scythe higher. “Unless you’re ready to meet your cousin, the angel of death, you’ll answer my question.”
"I was left here to make sure no one came looking around," he said through gritted teeth.
"What is this place?" I demanded. "What was kept here?"
"It doesn't matter." He shook his head. "None of it matters. There's nothing you can do now. Nothing." His voice grew higher as he slipped into a spate of cryptic speech. It reminded me of Burne’s apocalyptic and frantic babbling, the words only barely linked together with any sense. "The joyous end of the world is near. There's nothing you can do to stop it, and I’m not afraid. All true followers of Hobbes would gladly die for the cause."
"You better be afraid. And you better start making sense, or I'm going to do more to you than mess up your pretty face."
He laughed, sending droplets of blood through the air to settle on my skin.
"I know who you are, Sara Slick, and I know what you do to my kind."
Before I could ask anything else, he reached forward and grabbed the blade of the scythe. In one swift movement, he plunged the tip into his stomach, twisted it, and yanked it up. His torso split open, and he gave one final, crazed smile before collapsing to the ground.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The burned town and bloodied barn were fifteen minutes behind us when Ally finally spoke.
"What happened?"
It was like her brain had decided it was going to come back and needed a recap.
"We found another Harbinger lair, but a Malak guarded it."
"Which is…" she guided.
"The Far version of an angel. Only not the good, harp-playing kind. You got sucked in by their biggest weapon. They’re so beautiful they entrance anyone who sees them, which means it's easy for them to capture or kill the people they’re after. Unfortunately for them, it also means there aren't many of them."
"Why not?"
"They’re pretty entranced by themselves, too. They’re so vain it’s rare for them to find another they think is good enough for them, so reproduction is extremely limited.”
"I guess that's an upside. Why did he…"
She gulped, and I knew what she was thinking. The image of the Malak sliding to the ground while a pool of blood spread around him had seared itself into my memory.
"He's a follower of Hobbes. His derange
d loyalty means he would rather die than reveal anything about the cult or what they’re going to do. A lot of them want to die for Hobbes."
A surge of frustration rushed up inside me, and I slammed my fists against the dashboard. Ally jumped.
"Oh. Okay. Now we've gotten to angry Sara," she commented.
"I'm sorry. It's just… I need answers. I'm seriously confused. I'm more than a tiny bit pissed off. And I'm working on borrowed time, which means I don't have the wiggle room for any of this shit.”
"What are you going to do?"
"I need to talk to a Farling. They'll have more insight. And there's only one person from The Far I know."
Ally sighed.
"Give me the address he gave you. I'll get directions."
I gave her the information Archimedes had provided, and she put it into her phone. She didn't seem delighted about the idea of going to talk to him, but it was becoming increasingly obvious I wasn't going to be able to do this on my own, even with Ally there to help. We needed what Archie knew.
Considering my current living arrangement, I wasn't the person who should be judging other people's houses, but I was surprised when we pulled up to the address the Philosopher had given us. The neighborhood looked like one that had been sitting there for decades, full of comfortable, cozy homes where you would visit your grandmother and eat butterscotch candies.
Archie's house was the one you skipped when you went trick-or-treating. The mostly brick house had windows and trim that used to be painted white but had peeled and faded to blotchy wood. The neighbors on either side must have loved the lawn that looked like a tiny jungle and the assortment of broken, rusted cars I saw cluttering the backyard.
"Is this it?" Ally asked.
"It's the address he gave me."
We sat in the car staring at the house for long enough that the front door popped open and Archie came out. He squinted, then gestured for us to come inside. We got out of the car and walked up a cracked sidewalk that was gradually being reclaimed by nature. The steps leading up to the porch didn't look like they had nearly as much structural integrity as I'd like, and I braced myself to rush up them in case they crumbled. They held, and Archie ushered us into a living room that looked pretty much like the outside of his house.
"This is charming." Ally looked around at the piles of boxes, crates, and unidentifiable junk on the floor and furniture.
"Come with me." Archie didn’t give any explanation or apology for his house.
That made me like him more.
He led us on a weaving path through the living room, into an equally cluttered dining room where one small space had been carved out of the mound on the table. A hallway led past two closed bedrooms and a bathroom, then finally to a door. Archie opened it, and we made our way down a rickety wooden staircase into the basement. From my experience in the upper portion of his house, I didn't hold out a tremendous amount of hope for it. I expected floor-to-ceiling boxes and possibly an assortment of new friends for Splinter.
Instead, I walked into something spectacular.
"Wow." I looked around at the elaborate displays, intricate equipment, and containers of various materials. "This is like a steampunk Dexter." I looked over at him. "The smart little science kid one. Not the murderer one."
"Are you sure about that?" Ally held up a glass vial that appeared to contain an eyeball.
"What did I say about touching things?" I snatched it out of her hand and put it back in the wooden stand.
"I don’t know these Dexters you speak of, but welcome to my workshop. How was your search?” Archie responded.
As I told him about the town and the barn and the creepy angel, he turned toward a desk and leaned over it, clearly working on something. There was a Bunsen burner, and he adjusted the flame under a beaker. Something sputtered in the container, and he tipped the contents of a test tube into it, changing the color from amber to a dark purple.
"What do you think he meant?" I fretted. "When he said he knew who I was and what I did to his people?"
"You know your name is famous. That shouldn't come as that much of a surprise," Archie reminded me.
"I know, but the other part. It seemed strange. Like he was telling me he knew the truth and other people didn't."
Archie nodded as he dipped a narrow rubber hose into the liquid inside the beaker and fed it into another container. It changed color as it moved through the tube, shifting from the dark purple shade to bright blue to a noxious green as it fell into the next beaker.
"There are a lot of conspiracies about you."
"Why?" I was confused. "I figured they arrested me for murdering a bunch of Farsiders."
The truth was, I didn't know why I was supposedly so heinous or what people said about me. I'd picked up a few bits of information throughout my time in The Deep, and the only conclusion I came to was murder.
"Right." Archimedes gave me my first real confirmation. "But why? That's the thing. It's so much of a story. You’re part boogeyman and part folk hero. Everyone hates you, but at the same time, there's a huge following of people who are trying to figure you out. None of them could explain it. How could a human child commit such horrific murders? And why? Everyone seemed to have ideas about it, but among all the conspiracy theories, one voice stood out. Hobbes."
Ally spoke up. "Who is this Hobbes?"
Archie carefully dropped an arrowhead into the liquid, which had turned darker as it cooled, and gently swirled it around.
"No one knows," he told her. "It’s probably not his real name anyway. But he wrote a treatise about how the Pax Philosophia is failing Farsiders. Have you heard of Mein Kampf? This thing rivals it. Hold on." He set down the container and walked over to a stuffed bookshelf. His fingertips ran across the spines of the books for a few seconds, then grabbed one and offered it to me. "Here."
"You have a copy?"
"I’m well-read. It's all about how The Near is taking more and more, committing greater and greater atrocities against Farlings. Hobbes rails against it and says The Guild’s covering it up. You know his prime piece of evidence?"
"What?" I didn't need to ask. I figured I already knew the answer.
"You. In that book, he calls on all Farsiders to rise against the evil Nearsiders before being brought to nothing. He wants to bring down the Pax Philosophia and wage war on the humans."
Ally noted, "That Malak was completely obsessed. He eviscerated himself in honor of Hobbes. Why would anyone be so devoted to a raving lunatic?"
"That's the thing." Archie went back to his rune. "His followers may be raving, but Hobbes isn't. He makes some fair points."
"Oh, fantastic," I snapped.
"It's true. You might be innocent, but every day we hear about Nearlings brutally killing Farsiders," Archie continued.
"It goes both ways," Ally jumped in. "I've been investigating for years since Sara disappeared and I've found out some seriously strange stuff. Of course, I didn't know about all this before we found each other again, but now that I do, it makes sense. All these odd stories I've been chasing about humans dying in bizarre ways. It was all The Far."
Archie nodded.
"I've heard about those things, too. No one is going to say Farfolk haven’t done their fair share to The Near. The Farsiders are getting restless. Everyone is saying the Pax Philosophia is starting to crumble. The Philosopher’s peace is fragile now. Hobbes's cult is preparing to give it the final blow."
My mind churned, piecing it all together. Realization settled in, sending a wave of chills down my spine.
"That's why they bought all the runes. This is what they're preparing for. They're going to create a spectacle."
"Why would they want to do that?" Ally asked.
"The Pax is based on secrecy, right? What better way to destroy it than to reveal the existence of Farsiders to the human world? Then there would be no choice but to go to war." I shivered. "They want to do this and do it with a bang."
"And Charleston
is Ground Zero,” Ally agreed.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“So now what? Ally asked. We know the Harbingers are planning some grand entrance, but we don’t know where. How do we stop them?” Ally asked.
“There isn’t much else we can do today,” Archie pointed out. “It's getting late, and both of you look exhausted. I think the best thing to do would be for everyone to get some sleep and come back to this early tomorrow and see what we can do.”
“We don’t have time for that,” I shouted. “They could initiate their plan at any moment.”
“I think we have more time than you believe,” he stated, his face turned toward his desk.
“Explain.”
He faced me and sighed like he was lecturing a bunch of preschoolers. “Whatever their plan is, it involves a rune, right? A big one. That’ll take time to make.”
“That…” I let my argument trail off. “That makes sense.”
I thought about the almost ten years it took for Solon to finish the lense.
“How much time?” Ally pressed him for answers.
Archie cocked his head. “Honestly, I don’t know. Probably more than twenty-four hours, which thanks to Slick they haven’t had yet. I say you sleep, then we hit this thing fresh tomorrow.”
I wanted to argue with him, to tell him we needed to keep going, but he was right about me being exhausted. It wasn't only my body that was tired from my lack of sleep and everything I'd gone through in the last few days. My mind felt drained, and I knew it needed some time to recharge before I'd be good for anything. Ally and I said goodbye to Archie and got back in the station wagon. I had her bring me to a spot a few blocks away from the hotel and drop me off.