by Ryan Talbot
A bellow sounded from the far side of the basement, and my illusion of invincibility died. Each heavy step that brought him closer shook the floor. The man was the size of a small bear, damned near seven feet tall, and pushing four hundred pounds.
“Abbadonna,” I whispered. Host-Bound!” Host-Bound is the quaint term the Angelics used for angelic possession. It wouldn’t do to make it sound evil, I suppose.
“It’s a Seraphim,” she scanned him with my Sight. “I do not know him.”
“Then you won’t mind me killing him?”
“I relish the opportunity to assist you, Emissary.”
The huge bastard slammed into a pillar, exploding through it without slowing. I fired two shots at his face as I ran across his path, forcing him to change direction. He barely slowed, and closed on me fast. I ripped through my memory, desperate to remember any weakness of the Seraphim.
“Seraphim,” Abbadonna whispered. “Are creatures of flame and force.”
“Great,” I spat. “Just fucking great. My best tricks are completely useless.”
“The battlefield is shaped by the mind of the soldier, not his weapon, Emissary.” Abbadonna rebuked me. “Use your brain, not your sorcery.”
I didn’t have a chance to reply, the bastard swung his meaty fist and punched my trailing ankle, shattering my tibia and fibula in a single hit. I flew off course, my mind blank with agony, and stumbled face-first into a rack of folding chairs. Sprawling over them, I hopped on my good leg, turning to rest my back against them. My Host-Bound pursuer stood, grinning like an idiot. He waved me toward him.
“I expected more out of you, Emissary,” he laughed. His voice was far too melodic to be human.
My leg burned like it was being devoured by finger-length fire ants; Abbadonna was healing me from within. I screamed out a Word of agony, and fired two shots into the prick’s kneecap.
“Now we’re even,” I snapped. I gauged the distance between us. I wondered how quickly I could get over the chairs behind me with Abbadonna possessing me.
“You think this will stop me?” He laughed as golden light poured out of his wounds.
Kicking off with my good leg, I rolled over the chairs, dropping my magazine as I did. Catching the mag in my left hand, I squeezed my Mark against it. I spoke a Word of agony and a Word of healing on the bullet. Stumbling backward on my newly healed leg, I slammed the mag home and fired the round in the chamber at the bastard’s face as he threw the rack of chairs aside. The bullet ripped a six-inch gash along the side of his head and he stumbled. The Seraph riding the human threw the man’s hands up. He wasn’t afraid of a bullet to the head; he was guarding the man’s throat chakra. A bullet there would end everything. I wasn’t interested in that. This motherfucker'd hurt me.
I aimed just below the belt line and fired. The polyester fabric of his pants exploded outward sending fibers in a puff. With a roar, the Seraphim dropped to a knee. The Word of agony was ripping his sacral chakra to pieces. The Word of healing trapped the bullet in his flesh, continually repairing the damage wrought by the Word of agony. A perpetual loop formed in his muscle, each pulse of agony hurt as if the wound was ripped anew, which it was. The Angel’s power was bound up in stopping the pain, but the healing caused even more. He looked up at me, his eyes pleading.
“End it,” the man begged, frozen in merciless suffering. “Please, end it.”
“No,” I spoke directly to the Angel inside him. “You do it.”
I turned my back on both of them and limped toward the far end of the basement.
46
Ten Skull-Kids encircled the roughhewn stairway cut into the foundation of the building. I watched them from the shelter of a pile of stacked office furniture.
“He’s been at this longer than I thought,” I said inside my own head.
“He has been at this for centuries,” Abbadonna replied. “Since he was cast out of Perdition.”
“Wait,” I ducked behind the pile of old furniture. “You knew about this?”
“We knew only that Iblis had betrayed the Fallen,” she said. “That was enough”
“How?”
“He gave details about the defense of Perdition to YHWH,” she replied. “Details known only to Lord Satan and his inner circle.”
“Why would you give him that information?” I asked incredulously.
“He fell long after Satan and his host,” she explained. “He survived the culling of the rebel Angels, but in time, his ego got the best of him. He thought that he was the successor of the Almighty. When YHWH created Adam, he bade Iblis to bow.”
“Iblis refused,” I said. “And he was cast down.”
“Yes,” Abbadonna replied. “But only to the Earth. He was not sentenced to exile as were the Fallen.”
“Let me guess,” I snorted. “Iblis decided to make friends in Perdition?”
“He crafted the twilight sun, and gave it to Lord Satan as a gift.”
“And in return?” I asked.
“Iblis was given a demesne of his own,” she grimaced. “He called it Purgatory.”
“You’re kidding me,” I scoffed. “Purgatory is real?”
“Yes,” I felt her mental nod. “Though it is little more than a graveyard for Iblis’s twisted perversions.”
I peered over the cast-off furniture, two of the Skull-Kids had started to patrol around the basement. “What do you mean perversions?” I pressed myself carefully against the furniture so as not to disturb it.
“He had a taste for godflesh,” she replied. “He seduced hundreds of dying gods and spirits to his side. But when none of his liaisons bore fruit, he took to hunting down and killing his followers.”
“So the bastard shoots blanks?” I snorted quietly. “No wonder he’s pissed.”
“No, Emissary.” She corrected. “He bore only monsters, not the divine children he desired.”
“I bet that pissed him off,” I said.
“He was inconsolable, and over time, his pain turned to madness. He used his talent for seduction to convince his disciples to turn on each other,” she continued, her tone disgusted. “He never had to lift a finger.”
The Umbral sacrifice at the hands of the Toymaker popped into my head. “Seems like he found himself in good company,” I muttered. “Twisted fucks, every last one of them.”
One of the Kids saw me and his eyes went wide, just as my sights landed on the spot between them. I smiled as I pulled the trigger. Abbadonna surged within me as the other kid stepped around my cover. My left hand lashed out on its own, tearing out the bastard’s right eye. Whipping my pistol around, I smashed the butt just over his ear, cracking his skull and leveling him.
“Emissary!” Abbadonna warned.
The rest of his pals raced toward us. A Word of force hurled the furniture at them, driving them to the ground. I emptied my magazine into any body part that showed from under the heap of cast off wood and steel. Abbadonna threw us at them, my fists ending any life that remained. We stepped away covered in blood and panting.
“You really… gotta get that… under control,” I coughed out as I fell into a crouch, gasping for breath.
“It’s you,” she chided. “Your flesh is intoxicating. It responds to your desire without question.”
‘Yeah?” I turned my head and spat blood. I must’ve bitten my tongue in the scuffle. “That’s not always a good thing.”
The Kid I’d pistol whipped began to stir and I slid alongside him and placed the hot barrel of my gun against his temple.
“Listen, Cyclops,” I ground the pistol hard against his skull. “You’ve only got a few seconds to live.”
“My life don’t matter,” he said blandly. “I’m here ‘cause you’re here. It’s in the Book.”
“I tore your fucking eye out…” I reminded him. “Think of all of the other fun shit I can do.”
“You ain’t gonna do worse than what’s already been done, man.” He chuckled. “The Book says you here to take my pai
n.”
“What fucking book?” I snapped.
“The Dreams of the Ebon Mountain,” he replied wistfully. “The Book.”
I felt Abbadonna shudder in my head. “What?” I asked her silently.
“That book was an Umbral reliquary,” she answered. “It held the soul of the Harbinger of Days, the Shield-Bearer of Beleth. Iblis must have taken it from his tomb.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Beleth, the Lady of Unquenchable Sorrow,” she answered. “She was the Umbral summoned and bound by King Solomon. He thought he’d summoned a demon.”
“This is bad?” I asked.
“Very,” she replied, sounding remarkably human. “Iblis is carrying the equivalent of a nuclear bomb, one with a hair trigger.”
“Where’s Thorne?” I asked my fearless captive.
“He’s below,” the Skull-Kid replied. “Waiting for you.”
“What about Corrigan Alefarn?” I drove my knee into his back.
“You can’t get him,” the Kid laughed. “He got hung up.”
“Where is he?” I yelled in the Kid’s face.
“Yelling don’t make no difference,” he said, placidly. “You can’t get him; he’s caught up in the magic. Can’t nobody get at him, burnt up Clarence like it wadn’t no thing.”
“Wait,” I looked at the floor. “What do you mean ‘caught up in the magic’?”
“It’s all around him,” the Kid peered up at me and blinked his remaining eye. “Ain’t you heard what I said?”
“I know where Corrigan is,” I said to Abbadonna.
“Where?”
“In the center of the Nightmare,” I muttered. “There was a sun, just like the one in Perdition. All of the threads of the dream wove through it. I couldn’t see past the knot.”
“And?” She asked.
“He’s in there, bound up in the threads of a thousand dead dreamers.” I shivered.
I felt Abbadonna’s revulsion. “How will you retrieve the Disciple of Hekate?”
“I gotta get back in the Nightmare,” I said.
“Yes, Emissary,” her frustration bleeding through. “But how?”
“Say goodnight, Sparky,” I grinned at the Kid.
“Wha-”
I brought the butt of my pistol down on his temple as hard as I could. I ran my hand over my mouth, pulling away the blood from my ass beating at the hands of the Host-Bound. I drew a sigil on the Kid’s forehead.
“Emissary!” Abbadonna screamed at me. “Stop!”
“I gotta go get him,” I said, staring at the Kid. “He’s my fucking friend!”
“Consider the circumstances, Emissary. Were the situation reversed, what are your odds of survival?”
“Better than his,” I scoffed. “Corrigan’s a fucking genius, and if he gives his word, you can bank on it.”
“You can’t guarantee that you will escape,” she said. “This creature is soulless, there is no correspondence anchor for you to draw on!”
“Yes, there is,” I grinned. “You.”
“WHAT?” She snatched at me mentally.
I leaned forward and spoke the Word.
47
The transition was sudden, like unexpected static on an otherwise reliable TV. Reality shifted around me, haze playing along the periphery of my vision. The room was dark, and smelled like death. I took a shallow breath and let my eyes adjust. All around me, bodies lay dead on the floor. Each one had been carefully arranged, bones broken and re-set to mimic the sigils and signs of the darkest sort of magic. I stepped cautiously over a body. Disturbing it was likely to initiate any traps set by Thorne. I moved toward the center of the room, wending my way through the maze of corpses. Chalk lines connected each group of bodies to another. Lead chains wove around the massed formation, whatever Thorne was doing with the dead, it was a binding of some sort.
I wracked my brain trying to figure out what the purpose of the spell could be. I'd studied necromancy, but it hadn't been my strong suit. Generally speaking, if it didn't involve fire or pain, it wasn't my forte. The binding sigil, the one that tied them all together, wasn't one that I knew. I stared at the strange design; it was comprised entirely of bizarre angles and asymmetrical shapes. My hand traced the design in the air as I tried to dissect it, and identify its component parts. I had nothing. I stepped back and turned slowly, taking in the entirety of the scene. The chains were for binding, the bodies were fueling the spell itself, and everything focused toward the center sigil. Unconsciously, I took a step away from the center. Where was the break? Where was the key to this riddle?
The only way that I could conceive of uncovering the purpose of the trap was by setting it off, and that was about as counter-productive as shooting myself in the foot. Corrigan would have known simply by looking; I wasn’t that good. I closed my eyes and relaxed my mind. There was a purpose, there was a reason that this trap existed. Thorne had been using the nightmares to extract suffering from his prisoners, and he'd simply executed these people. I thought of the Host-Bound in the basement. Thorne hadn't just executed these people; he'd killed them and bound them, their souls still trapped inside. I shuddered at the thought of eternity trapped in a rotting bag of flesh.
The center sigil danced with thanatonic energy; it pulsed in time to my heartbeat. That was weird. The sigil wasn’t mimicking the rhythm; it was feeding on me. It was feeding on the cells of my body as they died and drinking in the energy they released. As disturbing as it was on the surface, it gave me an idea. Without waiting for confirmation, I stomped on the sigil.
Reality lurched again and spiraled around me. A tight vortex of thanatonic energy surrounded me, vicious black winds tore at my skin, and stole the breath from me. I slammed into the ground and flopped around gasping for air. Without touching to test, I knew that I’d broken my right ribs. I’d have been shocked if they weren’t powder. As soon as my eyes opened, I stopped struggling and stared.
“Beckett,” he whispered hoarsely. “What kept you?”
Corrigan hung from his wrists, suspended by thick barbed vines, over a pit filled by a mass of agitated red widows. His skin hung loosely from his wasted frame and thousands of tiny cuts covered his wrecked flesh. His eyes were dim with fatigue and starvation and they rolled wildly in their sockets. Unkempt hair, limp and gray hung around his face, shadowing his frightful eyes. His bare skin was riddled with fang marks. Something had torn away at his legs and chest.
“What the fu—” I let the words fall away. Nothing I said could have done justice to the shock I felt.
“I could use a drink,” he said, then chuckled madly.
“Me too,” I muttered as I stood to inspect his prison.
“How’d you find me?”
“No terminus binding,” I said absently.
“What?”
“The sigil, it was drawing,” I said. “But not binding or emitting.”
“And?”
“Every source must have a terminus,” I recited his lesson back to him. “The sigil was drawing energy that didn’t leave. I knew it had to lead to a fissure, at least.” I looked back up at him and shrugged. “But I figured it was a gate.”
“And?”
“Everything dies, everything decays,” I pointed up at the sun-like glyph on the ceiling. “I knew whatever it was bound to was drawing a massive amount of energy and the only thing I could think that would need that much power—”
“Was the sun?” He grinned weakly. “You aren’t half as stupid as you should be.”
“You did it,” I asked. “Didn’t you? You made it look like the twilight sun, so I’d know?”
“I should’ve made it look like a neon sign…”
I flipped him off and reached out to touch the thick black vines that held him.
“Don’t!” He shouted hoarsely as my hand got too close.
“Why not?” I jerked my hand back.
“It summons the big one,” he pointed at the small widows with his chin. “And she’s
a merciless bitch.”
“I think we’ll be okay,” I said. I shoved my Mark against the vine and spoke a Word of destruction.
The Widow dropped behind me, the clatter of her carapace against the ground vying with the screeching of her young for the most horrifying sound of the year. I spun around.
“He’s with me,” I said firmly.
“I’m forbidden to let him escape, Liar,” she warned.
“You won’t stop us,” I stepped closer to her. “And you know it.”
“I could tear you apart before your mouth twitched the first syllable of a Word. This is my domain, Liar.”
“No,” I reached out and touched her face with a single finger. “It’s not. It’s Thorne’s, and you’re a little slave girl.”
“Jason,” Corrigan warned.
“We’re in your head right now, Corrigan,” I explained. “We’re here because he wants me here.”
“He’s right,” the Widow’s human eyes looked up at Corrigan. “You’re not half as stupid as you appear.”
“I got here through one of his Desolate Sons,” I sneered at the name. “He bound them all to your prison, just so I’d get here.”
“That’s insane,” Corrigan said. “Why go through all the trouble?”
“To show me just how serious he is,” I waved my hand at the rapidly decaying vines that were slowly releasing their hold on Corrigan. “To show me that I’m not untouchable.”
“You’re awfully certain he’s after you, Jason,” Corrigan fell forward as the vines gave way.
“Yeah,” I grunted and caught him as he fell. “Well, the prick’s made it pretty clear.”
“You are the Catalyst,” the Widow said. “He will stop at nothing, Liar.”
“No,” Corrigan laughed as I lowered him to the ground. “There’s no way.”
“It is so,” the Widow reiterated, her tone sharp enough to cut.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Catalyst,” Corrigan began. “Is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and end.”