Guiltily, Sam thought of his wife of three years. Tabby was a petite woman, with long black hair and a wonderfully wide smile. She was shy and kind and generous. But Annalise exuded a sultry miasma. Her hot eyes charged the air around her, and her smile oozed lazy sexuality. Annalise was a vision that grabbed the libido and simply wouldn’t let go. Tabby had none of that. They were two completely different people, and Sam was ashamed to realise that he wanted Annalise on a very basic level.
The train of thought had made him uncomfortable, and he stood up making his excuses to leave. Annalise was there in an instant, sitting down next to his vacated seat and stretching languorously in a manner that invited every eye to the swollen curve of her breast. She asked him where he was going, her throaty voice so full of promiscuous guarantee that he sat back down without a word. He had drunk far too much, staying until only the two of them were left.
When she placed a flirtatious hand on his arm and asked him huskily if he would like to share a taxi with her, he had jerked to his feet in sudden panic and apologised inanely. Leaving her sitting there with a wounded expression on her perfect face, he had staggered hurriedly into the night, thoughts of Tabby at the forefront of his mind. His wife was going to be so angry with him.
Back in the present, Sam cursed again. The rain was now coming down so heavily that there was nothing but a wall of water in front of him. Gushing jets tumbled from the overflowing gutters of the buildings around him, falling to the road with an angry susurrus.
‘I could be fucking Annalise right now,’ he said to himself under his breath. Immediately, a sobering rush of guilt flooded through him. He was many things, but he loved his wife completely and he would never cheat on her. God should strike him down for thinking that way.
A second later he was lying on his back, staring up into the blinding rain. The back of his skull throbbed where his head had hit the tarmac of the road. He lay in an overflowing gutter with cold water nipping at his back and legs. More rain pooled in the wells of his eye sockets and his open mouth.
Blinking and spluttering, Sam levered himself up into a sitting position and looked around him. Nobody was about. Holding the back of his aching head and fighting the urge to throw up, Sam got back to his feet, thinking that he must have fallen over. He had a vague memory of a flash of light, but he didn’t know what could have caused it. The street lights were uniformly dull behind the wash of water, and the buildings around him were shut and lifeless. Maybe it had been lightning, he thought. Maybe God had been listening. He barked a nervous laugh. The rain hissed back.
He absently tried to scrape the excess water from his sodden clothing. He was utterly drenched. Even if he found a taxi, he doubted the driver would want the cab messed up with the mud and filth that covered him. Sam started cursing again, his vociferous litany so loud that it rose above the constant patter of the rain.
In response, Sam heard a low groan. Stopping very still and closing his mouth, Sam listened in the manner of any seasoned city dweller hearing a strange noise in an out-of-the-way street after dark – suspiciously. The groan came again. It did not sound threatening; in fact it sounded like somebody in pain. Sam stood in the rain undecided. On the one hand, he wanted to find out if somebody needed his help. On the other, he did not want to become involved. Slowly he began to back towards Quay Street.
The groan came again. It was full of misery. There was a rasping quality to it, as if whoever was making it was choking. It seemed to be coming from a dark alcove, a hundred feet or so up the road. Sam stopped. It sounded like somebody was drowning. In this weather, it wouldn’t surprise him. He turned and walked away, leaving the alley.
On Quay Street, he stood for a second with shame burning in him. Somebody might be dying, and he had walked away. A rational part of him said he was doing the right thing, not getting involved – in this day and age who knew what might happen? It was probably a drug addict thrashing around in his sleep. If he went to help, he could get robbed or stabbed with a needle, or worse. It might be a trap with a horde of desperate homeless people waiting to jump him. He supposed he could call the police, but what would they say? In all likelihood, they’d just tell him to go and have a look. No thanks. Anyway, they’d probably think he was being silly. Wasting their time. Wasn’t that illegal? Definitely best to just stay out of the way. It was on the news every day after all – acts of random kindness always ended up with the Samaritan dead or arrested.
Hunching his shoulders, Sam looked up Quay Street. There, coming towards him through the driving rain, was a black cab. Sam lurched to the side of the road and threw his arm out. The cab slowed and stopped in a puddle, sending a wave of water flooding over his shins and feet. Sam hardly even noticed. The cab driver, an old Sikh with thick plastic glasses and a maroon turban, wound down the driver’s side window.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked. Sam told him his address and heard the gentle and welcoming thunk of the doors unlocking.
‘Get in then.’
Sam clambered gratefully into the back, and the cab started to pull off. The groaning from the alley filled his imagination and he squirmed. For the second time that night, he felt guilty. ‘Wait,’ he shouted.
‘What?’ the cab driver asked as the cab jerked to a halt.
‘I’ve … erm … I’ve not got my wallet,’ Sam said, making it up as he went along. ‘I fell over in that street … I must have dropped it. Just hang on, and I’ll go and have a look.’
‘Okay. I’ll wait here.’
Sam clambered out of the cab, back into the unforgiving rain, and peered into Gartside Street. It was dark.
Sam shivered. ‘What the hell am I doing?’ he asked himself under his breath before he stepped back into the alley. He quickly walked to the alcove.
The groaning had stopped. At first, he thought the object lying in the doorway was a pile of white rubbish bags. Then it moved, and Sam jumped back thinking that maybe there were rats. As his eyes got used to the gloom, he saw that the bundle was moving on its own. Wiping the rain from his eyes, Sam crouched down to take a closer look. The bundle rolled completely over, and Sam let out a cry as he saw what it was.
A naked man lay on the ground with a sword jutting from his gut. The gurgling groan came again, and Sam realised that he had been correct; the man was drowning, but in his own blood rather than rainwater. The sword must have punctured something important.
Scrabbling for his mobile phone with one hand, Sam moved closer to the man and knelt beside him. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll get help. I’ll get an ambulance.’ As he tried to pull the phone out of his drenched pocket, Sam laid his other hand on the man’s shoulder. A brutal shock ran from his fingertips, up his arm, and then it closed an iron fist around his mind. A voice that was not a voice roared in his ears, unmanning him. Such was the fury and power in that voice that Sam lost control of his bladder, and warm urine joined the water that already weighed his trousers down.
Words crushed him: Pull it out! It was a thing of emotion and will, rather than language.
Still reeling, Sam dropped the phone to the ground and gripped the hilt of the sword with both hands. He let out a cry of effort as he dragged the blade out of the man’s torso. Then it was free and he fell backwards, losing his grip on the weapon, which flew from his hands to skid across the ground. It clattered beneath a railing and out of sight.
Lying on the cold ground again, Sam rubbed at his abused temples. A figure stepped into sight above him. It was the naked man. The blood that had covered him was already washing away in the rain. He was very tall with long, wild hair.
Odd-looking, Sam thought, though he couldn’t explain exactly why. The man’s eyes were hidden in the shadow of his brows, leaving two bottomless holes in his face. His mouth opened, too wide, and Sam saw row upon row of tiny, vicious-looking teeth that gleamed even in the dull light. Then those teeth were descending towards him, and Sam let out one long terrified scream as they found his throat.
&nbs
p; Somewhere far below the street, deep in the earth and the slime of crawling things, a tiny fragment of bone rested. It was a shard of a shard, invisible to the naked eye: a slice so thin it barely existed.
The shard had been in the same general place for a very long time, though it had moved a short distance as it broke off from larger pieces, subject to the whims of the shifting earth and the upheavals of man. Burrowing animals had shoved it aside. Worms had ingested and defecated it, and the meagre acid in their stomachs had pitted and scarred it even further. The years had shrunk it to little more than a speck.
The shard of bone had lain amongst the soil and stone of the area for over two and a half millennia without doing anything particularly interesting. If somebody were to decide, on a whim, to place this shard under a microscope powerful enough to examine it, they would see nothing more than bone. A sliver far too small to tell the story of who or what it might have belonged to, what sex they were, what life they lived, or how they died … but then, humans are a race notable for their blinkered existence. No human would have noticed the spark of magic that infused the shard.
A creature capable of seeing the magic – one capable of looking beneath the ground, through the slabs of concrete, water mains, and cables – might have seen the halo of energy that suffused the soil for a hundred feet in each direction. They would have seen it because other bone shards, very much like the first, lay scattered through the dirt. If they had watched, they would have seen something incredible.
Slowly at first, but with greater and greater speed, the shards began to squirm through the damp soil towards each other. They seemed possessed of crazed urgency as they bonded back together.
Soon, a skeleton lay in decrepit ruin where before there had been nothing. Then the true magic awoke, and the soil around the dead thing began to turn into blood and flesh. Sinew writhed from the darkness to grip the skull, working its way down shattered vertebrae, across chipped ribs, around hip and femur. Broken jaws opened slowly, and a silent scream ripped from a half-formed larynx.
The dead thing woke, far beneath the surface of the earth, in the agony of rebirth. Yet its first thought was not of fear or confusion: it was of a single-minded need to fulfil a destiny that had been etched into its flesh two and a half thousand years earlier.
‘What you’ve got to understand,’ Cam said, not hearing the drunken slur in his own voice, ‘is that the world is like a body. Like a big, round, blue and green human body. In space. With a moon and stuff. But that’s not the point: the point is that it’s like a body. And the body is dying. It’s on its way out. Oh, it used to be young and full of life and … and energy, but now it’s dying!’ He slapped his hand down hard on the bar for emphasis. ‘Dying!’ he barked again.
The shabby man with the thinning hair and egg-laced moustache nodded blearily. His eyes were glazed, and he was having difficulty getting the nuts from a packet he held in his hand, into his mouth. A scatter of dry roasted peanuts littered the floor beneath his bar stool, a Jackson Pollock tribute to his intoxication.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Cam demanded in drunken indignation. ‘This is important. Very, very important!’ He slapped his hand down again but missed the bar. For a second, he didn’t quite understand what was going on. He slid inexorably from his bar stool towards the sticky floor. When his mind did finally catch up with things, he overcompensated, throwing himself backwards so that the bar stool flew from under him, and he crashed to the floor in a thrashing heap. The shabby man began to giggle maniacally.
Bouncing back to his feet, Cam quickly pulled the bar stool upright and cast a bleary eye out for Elsa. ‘It’s okay,’ he said with as much dignity as he could muster. ‘I’m not hurt.’ He sat back down and took a gulp of his Guinness. ‘Where was I?’
‘Some eco-bullshit,’ the shabby man gasped through his giggling fit.
‘Eco-bullshit?’ Cam demanded. ‘It is not “eco-bullshit”. The world used to be young and viv … vivacious. Used to be full of energy. It had a pulse and a heart. Do you know what the heart was? It was magic.’ Cam sat back as if he had just revealed the greatest mystery of the universe.
The shabby man stared back. ‘So, what did antifreeze taste like, then?’
Cam leant forwards and gently slapped the man in the face. ‘I told you not to drink that stuff. It’ll kill you. But you need to listen to this. Magic! There used to be lots of it. Gallons of it, like beer, there to be drunk and enj … enjoyed. It was like your blood … you could feel it surging through you, in you, all around you.’
‘You slapped me,’ the shabby man whispered. His hand rose to probe the side of his face. ‘Why’d you do that?’
‘I’m trying to tell you something! You have to listen!’
‘Sorry. Didn’t know I had to listen.’
‘Now it’s dying. The flow has nearly stopped. Soon, soon there’ll be nothing but bricks and steel and fucking cars … there won’t be anything left of the magic.’
‘So what? What’s so good about magic? Just some idiot with white gloves and a rabbit in a top hat, anyhow.’
‘No,’ Cam said desperately. ‘No, no, no, no, no … you’re missing the point. It’s real.’
‘Yeah, and you drank antifreeze,’ the shabby man said and began to giggle again. The giggle turned into a choking laugh, and a shower of dry roasted peanuts hit Cam in the face. Disgusted, he wiped the damp matter away and turned back to the bar.
‘Moron,’ he muttered under his breath. He finished his Guinness, belched, and then looked for Elsa to pour him another one. His vision was swimming, which was a good sign.
Soon he’d be unconscious, and Elsa would cart him into a back room and leave him there to sleep it off. He was enough of a regular that she allowed him that small liberty. He turned and glared at the shabby man, who had stopped coughing and was now muttering to himself about Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee drinking antifreeze out of champagne flutes.
The problem with humans, he thought to himself, was that they knew everything and nothing. Depression swamped him. Cam could feel the world dying around him and he hated it. He had been born too late, and he was out of time. There were only a few of his kind left now, and they were slowly disappearing: dying, as the Earth died beneath their feet. The world had been raped and the magic was nearly gone, and when the last of it had finally dribbled away, he would fade. He should have had a life that spanned millennia, but he would be lucky to see his eightieth birthday. A mortal span – how depressing.
‘Elsa!’ he shouted. ‘Elsa, I need another drink …’ As he started to look around for the landlady, a tidal wave of magical energy hit him square in the face. Cam flew backwards, and his head slammed against the hard floor. For a second, he watched the lights in the ceiling pirouette rather prettily around each other.
The voice of the shabby man came from very far away. ‘That’ll teach you for slapping me,’ he slurred. It hadn’t been the shabby man though, Cam knew. It had been something unbelievable. Something frightening. ‘Bloody hell,’ Cam said.
Heavy drops pattered down on the windscreen, obscuring Mark’s view of the street. He stared at the address opposite, trying to ignore the feeling that he was looking out of a fish tank. He wanted to use the wipers, but that would mean movement and noise, and that would risk drawing attention. He could see well enough to notice if anybody left the house.
Shuffling deeper into the thick hooded top he was wearing, Mark stared out into the night. The road he was on was dark. Two of the street lights were out, and the driving rain dimmed the rest. The terraced houses seemed to huddle together for comfort in the darkness and the cold, or maybe they were crowded together for safety.
The road he was parked on lay off Alexandra Road in the middle of Moss Side, the most infamous suburb of Greater Manchester. It was not nearly as bad as it had been, Mark thought. Hell, even in the 1970s when the gang-related violence in the area had led to Manchester being dubbed ‘Gunchester’, it had not been that bad. There
had been worse times, but people forget.
Still, it was a deprived area with all the problems that deprivation brought. He had been here for hours, sitting in a beaten up old Ford Escort, which was parked at the side of the road. He had arrived after dark with the intention of staying until just before dawn if necessary. He could not read a book for fear of missing his target. He could not listen to the radio for fear the noise would draw somebody’s gaze. All he could do was sit and stare at the house.
‘Why do you do it?’ he asked himself out loud. A surge of hatred flooded through him. The blind emotion answered his question. Gritting his teeth against the hurt and the pain, Mark focussed more intently on the house. This was his third night. He knew that sooner or later the target would have to leave. Its kind were too arrogant not to. Then Mark could take care of business and return to his warm home. He wondered if he should bring somebody else in – a mercenary to do this business for him. Sergei and his band of cut-throats would be ideal, and they were already on the books. It was a question that he had asked himself a million times over the years, and just as he always had done, he dismissed it. He had to do this himself for two reasons: First, he was the only one who could. Second, he needed to see them die.
The front door opened an inch. For a moment, Mark thought it was his imagination. Then the door swung wide and somebody scampered out into the rain. Darkness hid any detail, but the figure had the tell-tale hip swing of a woman. She appeared to be wearing sunglasses. Mark watched as the woman walked quickly up the road, her shoulders hunched and her head bowed against the elements. Mark pulled a large syringe from the glove compartment of his car. The needle was five inches long. He looked at it distastefully, then tapped the tip a couple of times. He pulled his clothes up around his armpits to expose his chest.
Positioning the sharp point over his heart, he drove it all the way in with one powerful thrust. He sat there for a second, paralysed by the pain, hating the feel of strange steel in his body. Then, with barely a whimper, he pushed the plunger and felt the cold wash of liquid that drenched the inside of his chest.
Immortals' Requiem Page 3