“Talya, Talya, come on, it’s going to be okay.” Angkor passed me the pistol and went to her empty-handed, crouching down in front of her and catching her wrists as she tried to claw at herself again. “It’s going to be okay, alright.”
“Ya… s’yel… ya s’yeh-s’yeh-“ She was hiccoughing so hard that she couldn’t get the words out. It was clear she was beyond English. I kept the guns at my sides and down low as I joined Angkor to the side of her.
“You did nothing wrong,” I said to her in Russian. “Talya, listen to me.”
“I ate them!” She shrieked at me in the same language. “This stupid thing… this… other me… it… I..!”
Her words cut as she retched, clasping at her stomach, and then vomited a bloody mess of torn fabric and metal onto the ground. I stepped back as she went to hands and knees, throwing up what looked like sections of zippers and D-ring buckles, pieces of half-digested nylon and plastic. Anything she’d eaten that was inorganic came up again. Angkor winced, and patted Talya on the back as she choked and hacked.
“Oh my god.” She caught the three words out in a strangled grunt before it kept on going.
“Listen to me.” I went to one knee on her other side, trying to avoid the blood and gristle on the floor. “Listen. These men were dead. They were already gone, Talya. You did what you needed to do to live.”
“No, no no no no.” Talya heaved and wept, her face a red mess of tears, blood and snot. She looked no older than twelve like this, her tenuous maturity stripped away by trauma. The violent retching was already beginning to subside. Weeder bodies were as efficient as they were alien.
“It’s alright,” I said. “You didn’t hurt anyone. Your Chiah, your Ka, it knew they were gone. It wanted you to live.”
She peered at me through swollen eyes, and then at Angkor. Wordlessly, she knelt back, and then folded against his chest and curled her fingers in against his skin, shoulders hunched, head bowed. He held her close, one hand around her back, the other over her hair, and murmured wordlessly as he rocked her. I stayed down, unsure of what to do, but suspecting that it required staying in place to provide support or comfort, or at least a translation.
Angkor seemed to know what he was doing, at least, and Talya gradually sagged into his arms. The hiccoughing and gulping slowed.
“I’m sorry,” she rasped. “I can’t control it. I don’t even remember wh-what happened.”
“You were hurt very badly,” I replied. “Duke freed Vanya and fought his way out to help him escape. He went the same way as Mason. It’s that knife he was stabbed with, I’m sure of it.”
“I can guarantee it is,” Angkor said grimly. “The Temple have StainedGlass weapons.”
“Somehow, I doubt you’re talking about artful church windows. Tell me everything in the car,” I said. “We need to get back to the clubhouse, and soon. Vanya has an army at his command. He’s the Organizatsiya’s recruitment specialist. If he’s got mental sway over Duke and Duke talks, he’ll lead them straight to the clubhouse.”
“Josie’s in there. Clubhouse. Clothes.” Talya croaked. She pushed herself back gently from Angkor, and I looked away as she stood and stumbled away into the house.
“Man… she’s so young,” Angkor said, once she had left.
“She’s not that young. Even someone hardened in the street would have a fit if they inadvertently committed cannibalism.” I picked myself up and started for the bedroom. I needed my holsters, my familiar, and the other small things I had left over from my trip to the warehouse.
“I don’t mean her HuMan self. I mean her entire Axon. Her soul, you know.” Angkor shook his head. “She’s a freshly minted shocktrooper. The latest in Anti-Morphorde technology.”
“But the American Lion is extinct,” I called back.
“Exactly,” he said. “When prehistoric super-predators start getting incarnated back on a world like this, it’s a really bad sign.”
The trip to the clubhouse was tense. I drove with Binah riding on my shoulder, her face to the wind as she meowed excitedly out of the car window. Talya was huddled in the front seat, a sheathed machete in her lap. Angkor took up the backseat. He had claimed Talya’s shotgun and the axe that Duke had tried to murder me with. Now that we were on the road, he was all business. When I checked in the rear-view mirror, he had his eyes closed, his face still and composed with the quiet concentration of a magus. He was surely communing with his Neshamah. It made me sick with envy to see it.
“You said something about stained glass weapons before, Angkor.” I called back to him, pushing the car as fast as I dared. We really, really did not need to be pulled over tonight.
“StainedGlass. Say it like a German noun. Like you’re capitalizing words together.” He didn’t open his eyes. “You seem pretty smart. How much do you know about the history of the Wars?”
“Some of it. Please feel free to rehash.”
Angkor sighed. “Short version of the history of Everything is that our reality is basically a huge beastie floating in a sea of hostile nothingness, right? It used to have a shell. That shell was Eden, also called the Ah-Za-Naur, or the Glass Land. The shell got broken when the NO-thing figured out how to mimic the behavior of living things. It broke the shell and the whole thing collapsed like a cell wall.”
“Something about him becoming thirty thousand miles tall. But the first virus, in essence,” I said.
“Right. So the pieces of Eden got scattered all around the Theosphere. Most of those shards were absorbed by GOD’s body as it began to stir up from the sudden pain and exposure. A lot of them embedded, still healthy and vital, but small. Some of them, especially the powder fragments, got infected and turned bad, and they’re in evidence in the world around us today. You know how viruses have those thirty-sided crystalline heads? In biology, we call those things nucleocapsids: they’re this bizarre crystal structure that carries the payload of RNA that a virus uses to change a cell.”
“Right.”
“That nucleocapsid head of a virus is like nothing else in nature, and that’s basically because they’re tiny fragments of a ruined Eden. The common name for this is StainedGlass, because, you know.”
Talya shuddered on the seat beside me, her hands tightening around the machete.
“StainedGlass is a kind of monster in its own right, once it gains enough mass. It carries a kind of Morphorde called a Yen.” Angkor’s eyes flickered open. “Yen is a virus that attacks your soul. It goes straight for your Phitonic mass, which is like… the energy that powers you to exist in concept and in reality. It corrupts you and turns you into a vector. It’s one of the few Morphorde that can infect Weeders. With enough Phi, it can replicate itself into shards big enough to be shaped into weapons.”
“Like the sacrificial knife The Deacon was using.” Fear lanced through my chest, and I gripped the steering wheel more tightly. “I was stabbed with glass like you describe. Mason vomited it on me.”
“Yeah,” Angkor said. “You were.”
I pressed my lips together. “Will I have this Yen?”
“HuMans have more resistance to Yen than Weeders do,” he said. “Because we’ve got a barrier between us and our soul. What the virus does is tempt you to break the wall down. They call it a Yen because it causes hungers of various kinds. Physical, sexual. You start wanting more and more stimulation, and depraved behavior scratches the itch. You rape, you wallow in filth, you crave money, power, fame. It eats at you until you break down and it can get into your soul. It’s like rabies in that way, but instead of needing to bite people to feel relief, you do nasty shit to yourself and other people.”
“Or children,” I said.
“Yeah.” Angkor shifted uncomfortably. “Or children. But I think you’re going to be okay until we get the HookWyrm out. If you have it, you’ll know once you’re back in contact with your Axon.”
Turn signals, change lanes, take the exit. The air was becoming hazy, and it smelled unpleasant. I focused on th
e moment, moving through the familiar activity of driving to clamp down on the nausea curdling in my gut. “Is there a cure for it?”
“Yeah. Gift Horse blood.”
Well, we were all out of that. I’d killed the only Gift Horse I knew of. I turned onto Marcy Street, and slowed as the haziness thickened to fog and smoke that pressed through the gaps in the windows and doors. It stank, sweet and rotten and pungent. It obliterated the sky in a brownish-violet miasma, but further down the road, we could see red and orange light struggling violently against the cloak of filthy magic.
Strange Kitty was burning.
Chapter 35
Small figures passed in and out of the fray on the road ahead, and then a large one as an insectoid creature stumbled down the gravel pathway. It was a skeletal black scorpion the size of a minivan, screeching through three severed heads that had been melded into one tri-lobed horror. Its back was on fire, and it was hacking at small figures swarming around its feet.
“Brace!” I gunned the engine and aimed the car.
Wide-eyed, Talya fumbled the machete out of its sheathe as we thundered down the road. The rats and possums that were attacking the scorpion scattered when they saw us thundering towards them, but the Morphorde only spun around, front legs raised like a tarantula’s. The car was big enough and the hood sturdy enough that we hit the DOG like a snowplough. It screamed with a high, tortured whistling sound as its legs crumpled and it collapsed. I backed up, tires screeching on the wet road, and drove at it again as it stumbled up to its knees and coughed a gout of slime onto the hood. The stuff melted the windscreen where it spattered, but it rolled off the paint and we hit it with a satisfying crunch. The Morphorde went under the wheels, limbs flailing.
“Whatever you do, don’t shoot them! Stab them! Put honey on your weapons!” Angkor cried out as he threw the back door open and rolled out. A spidery limb shot out from around the side of the car on my side, stabbing at anything within reach. Talya screamed, fumbling for the door, and I followed her with Binah tucked under one arm as it banged on the window and then broke it in with a shower of broken glass.
“You have to shift!” I yelled at her, pulling my knife. It felt too small for this fight.
“I can’t!” She yelled back. “I can’t, I’ll lose control again!”
The scorpion creature was bumping the car up and down as it struggled to free itself. Down the gravel driveway, a Morphorde like a giant bacteriophage – a virus that looked like a bizarre crystal moon lander – was being savaged by five raccoons. A dying fox was impaled on its stamping needle legs, but the DOG was stumbling with the jerkiness of the walking dead. Bursts of automatic gun fire rang out from behind the back of the club. Whoever was back there had assault rifles.
“Josie is in there,” I said. “They’ll take her back and they’ll kill her. Do what you were born to do.”
Talya’s eyes hardened, and she held the machete out to me without a word. I took it, and she undressed carelessly, throwing her clothing to the ground. Her skin was still bloody as she stepped out of her borrowed jeans, her eyes on the car as the huge Morphorde finally heaved it up and flipped it off. Her eyes focused, intent and predatory, and she took off at a run towards it with a high-pitched shout, tearing and distending into her Ka on her way across.
“Come on!” Angkor grabbed my arm, and pulled me off as the prehistoric lion and unnatural demon collided with a roar. I glimpsed Talya hanging from its back, raking bones and chitin from its belly as it thrashed and collapsed onto the road.
We ran across the street, past the smoking club, and emerged into the chaos of battle. Dead animals and people were scattered across the yard, some of them mutated beyond hope or sanity. Motorcycles and cars were trashed. The clubhouse was whole, but the entire yard was given over to combat. There were a dozen mutated Weeders and ten men with rifles battling six of the Tigers. A bear was grappling on the ground with a DOG all too like the one that had killed Vassily, an amorphous mass of giggling mouths and snapping jaws. Jenner’s tiger was taking cover from the heavy fire; Zane’s cougar and three wolves were cornering another one of the scorpions, snapping at its legs as it reared and stabbed at them with scythe-like claws. Of the child, there was no sign.
Angkor and I drew our pistols and split without speaking. I rolled behind one of the upended Lincolns, sighted down, and popped a round that took one of the advancing gunmen in the back of the head. He spiraled to the ground, and the others around him scattered, drawing fire from the windows. Three of them fell, mowed down, and their corpses began to bubble and twitch on the soil.
“Shit.” That was where the DOGs were coming from. Every single one of them were DOG-bitten carriers.
The other gunmen carried on as if they didn’t notice their fallen comrades, even as Doberman sized cockroaches peeled themselves out of the remains of the corpses and began to tear at them, shoving unnaturally rotted flesh into their maws. I almost reflexively shot one of them, and only remembered just in time. Instead, I holstered Wardbreaker, poured honey over the machete blade, and charged into the fray.
The nearest bug pivoted towards me as I ran at it, throwing its legs up like an angry spider as I closed in and chopped down, breaking it apart like a coconut. The honey clung, and the creature screamed as its carapace cracked and its innards burned. The others whirled and ran at me, their exoskeletons grinding as they scuttled forwards. I backpedaled, keeping an eye on the ground. If I fell and they swarmed me, I was dead.
The tiger broke out of her cover during a lull in the gunfire, barreling out with a roar that vibrated through the blade in my hand. Jenner smashed into one of the men as he reloaded, seizing him in a paw and hurling him to the ground to crush his face. And then she threw him at me.
I stumbled back around the car as the body landed in the cluster of bugs, who scattered, and then reformed around the new corpse. One of them wormed its way under the chassis and struck at my leg before I realized what was happening. Jenner fell on the rest, tearing them apart with teeth and claw, while I kicked and chopped down at the gnashing mandibles that had shredded my pantsleg and the skin beneath. I drove the machete down through its carapace and twisted, and it squealed, purple-black ichor bubbling up and frothing around the sticky blade. I glanced over to see Angkor fighting three of the things with the ax, his face a mask of grim focus as he smacked one back, cleaved the head of the next, and then got hit square in the leg by a glob of acidic slime that set his clothes to smoking.
Angkor limped back, reaching down into his pocket to clutch at his injury as I ran forward to help him, dodging under the lines of fire as bullets spanged and zinged across the increasingly decrepit cars we were using for cover.
“Na Vazeal!” He cried the words out like a command, and slashed his hand out towards the pair of bugs as they gathered around him and lifted their hooked claws to pull him down. I was almost there when both of them burst into green flames, wailing in agony, and fell back to thrash on the ground as huge growths erupted from their carapaces, sending insectoid limbs and pieces of chitin tumbling to the ground. Angkor stumbled back, exhausted.
His yelling had caught the attention of two men with guns. We were close enough to the house that I could see them properly for the first time. They weren’t battle-hardened Mafioso: they were neatly dressed, slacks-and-collar shirt guys with Mormon hair, and they were fumbling on their safeties and reloads. There was something not right about their expressions. The impression I had was of people trapped inside human-shaped prisons, banging on the walls while their bodies locked, loaded, and advanced on our position.
I caught Angkor’s wrist on the way past and dragged him down behind a stack of tires as a burst punctured the air. They made dull sounds as they hit the tires well above our heads. The gunman was shooting high: further evidence for lack of training.
“These guys don’t know what they’re doing,” I said, gulping air between words. Men with my build aren’t made for running. “They’re expendables
. They don’t know how to use those guns properly.”
“Someone wants them to get shot.” Angkor grimaced, pulling his melted clothing away from his leg. “The Deacon. Fucking hell… get the honey out and pour it over this. I’ll cover us.”
I complied without question, unscrewing the lid while Angkor bent around the stack and fired three precise shots. He ducked back just before I poured. The honey hissed on contact, and Angkor gnashed his teeth, his face turning purple with the effort not to scream.
A flicker of movement caught my eye, and I looked back to see more of the bacteriophages skittering down the gravel pathway. They were dividing as they ran, feeding off the dead animals – Weeders, I realized. The dead were small animals, some of them bristling with StainedGlass, some of them merely dead. Each one of bacteriophage’s legs was a feeding tube: They liquefied the corpses and sucked their innards into their weird crystalline bodies on their way into the lot. Each time they fed, every bullet that hit them, they split into more creatures.
My heart froze in my chest at the sight of them. The dead animals were the souls of those Weeders. Every one that the Morphorde consumed was gone. They would never incarnate again. My fear reached a brief crescendo at the realization of what I was seeing, and then abruptly faded as my ears filled with a blurry whine. The haze of battlefield dissociation fell over my senses like a shroud. There was a point where the cocktail of hormones and overstimulation made sound and fear irrelevant. All I had to do was survive before those things got us, got me, and ate my body and soul.
The remaining Twin Tigers shapeshifters roared and snarled as they fought on. From the street, I heard a woman’s high-pitched scream, louder than any HuMan throat could produce. It raised the skin on the back of my neck.
“Talya,” I said. “She’s being overrun.”
“Fucking Morphorde. They just keep coming.” Angkor rapidly dropped his empty clip, slammed a new one into the pistol, and looked alongside at me. “We need to get out of here. I agreed to help them out: I didn’t agree to have my fucking Axon turned into a Slimfast smoothie by Phitophages.”
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 32