The Stars Never Rise (The Midnight Defenders Book 2)

by Joey Ruff

  The beast raged – pummeling against the shadow with its fists – and continued to backpedal while the darkness surged forward, attacking the beast’s face and flapping faster than before.

  All I could hear were the ragged yelps and savage growls of a dog fight.

  I didn’t wait around to see who came out victorious. I was on my feet and in the car before the troll backed out of the headlights’ glow. I don’t mind a good scrap, but with the addition of the shadow – the thunderbird? – I wasn’t in any shape for that fight. The last thing I wanted was to draw the aggression from both at once.

  I put the car in gear, and as I started forward, the troll threw its arms towards the sea. I caught its face with my lights as I steered around it, and its face was bleeding freely.

  The troll turned, snarled at me, and then disappeared.

  I don’t mean the bugger turned tail and ran off into the night. It vanished. Gone.

  One minute it was there, and the next, nothing.

  The winged shadow swooped down over where the troll had been a moment before, passing through the air. I saw the dark blur streaking towards my passenger door, and it pulled up suddenly, scraping the roof of the car and nearly colliding with the side of the cliff on the other side.

  I didn’t wait around to see what happened next and didn’t check my mirrors. I was disturbed. There was something far too familiar about that damned troll.

  But that was a different life, and yet…no. It had to have been a different one. The only question was, where did it come from? And, for that matter, where did it go?

  7

  It was late when I pulled up at the gates of the Towers’ family estate, where I lived with Nadia and Ape. In my line of work, it was always late when I got home, and I’d gotten used to typing my pin into the keypad with a film of sleep across my vision and half-dozing as the gates opened. I made the winding drive past the stone sentries that stood at regular intervals to the ridiculously large house.

  The rain followed me the whole way home, and while I had mostly dried off on my drive, I was soaked to the core before I made it the ten yards to the back door and fumbled my key into the lock.

  I walked into the kitchen, and it smelled warm and welcoming with a dash of cinnamon and something fruity – peach, maybe. Chess, Ape’s house brownie who did all the cleaning and most of the cooking, was on duty, but as I expected, he was nowhere to be found.

  I kicked my boots off in the middle of the floor and sloshed over to the fridge, opened a cold beer, and grabbed a chicken leg. As I ate it, I stood at the island in the kitchen, slowly peeled off my wet clothes, and tossed them onto the floor. By the time I’d finished eating, I was standing in boxers and made my way down into the basement, to my bedroom, where I found sleep with little effort.

  It had been an emotional day, and my dreams were colorful, vibrant things, images from the past that haunted. The troll had the gears in my head turning.

  Anna’s death brought nothing but grief, and in my attempts at finding peace, I became an Anglican priest. With my ability, I wasn’t assigned a parish. I was the bloke they sent out to investigate when statues of the Virgin Mary began crying blood.

  With my time at the church, I’d witnessed some pretty bizarre shit, but, for the most part, it all involved angels and demons, and it all fell neatly within my own comfortable little box of how I thought the world should operate.

  I remember well the day everything changed.

  I revisited it that night in my dreams.

  When I turned in my priest collar, I rejoined the police force in London. Because my previous employment with the CID hadn’t exactly ended well, that department didn’t want me back. So they stuck me on a beat. I carried a stick, patrolled the parks, and looked like an arse in my tidy little uniform and hat.

  The weather that day was glum. The fog had hung over the Thames and clung to the buildings, thick as cotton candy.

  It was about twilight when I came up Tower Bridge Road and past one of the many junk stores. The fog was so thick ahead of me, that all I could see was an outline of what looked like two people fighting. From the size of the silhouettes, it appeared to be a father and his young son. Fights weren’t uncommon in the area with all the pubs about. One bloke gets knackered and starts knocking off about this or that. I’d broken up my share of pub fights, for sure, but this one was different, because it appeared to have a child involved.

  I’d made up my mind to investigate and called out in warning, breaking into a slight jog. As I neared, I heard a scream, and the larger of the figures started to run north, towards the river.

  “Fucking perfect,” I said with a sigh.

  When the fog had cleared enough for me to see, I realized that the person I had taken to be a child was, in fact, a man nearly as tall as me.

  He lay unconscious in the gutter, and his face and arms bore the scrapes and bruises of his scuffle. A scar was etched into his cheek from the corner of his lip to the bloody, free-flowing wound by his hairline. He looked pale, and his pulse was weak. I wasn’t a doctor, but took that to be a bad sign. Especially when the pulse felt to be getting weaker still.

  I looked into the fog, towards where his attacker had run, and could only just make out a dim shadow moving speedily away. If I could catch the attacker – the very large attacker from the look of things – I could maybe prevent someone else from suffering the same fate.

  I ran after him.

  I wasn’t in tremendous shape. I’d only just returned to the police force, after all, and prior to that, I’d been three months in a coma. Muscles tended to atrophy when not in use, and the run left me winded quickly.

  In the distance, I could just see the outline of Tower Bridge like a sentinel in the fog, and at its mouth was the form of the attacker. With no reference point, I couldn’t tell how large the man was, but at the angle he was standing, I could tell that he was broader than the average man.

  As I neared the Thames, I could hear the bellowing monotone of a ship’s horn, and the big heavy gears of Tower Bridge began to crank as the bridge began to rise.

  I focused on the man and kept forward, slower than before, but pressing on. It startled me as a horn sounded to my right, and a Mini Cooper nudged within inches of me. I hadn’t been paying attention, and I’d probably leapt in front of him, but I was focused, and it didn’t matter.

  The fog started to clear the closer I got. Eventually, I could clearly see the support beams of the bridge rising from street level, and next to one of those, with one hand resting against the top of a street lamp, was the biggest damned thing I’d ever seen.

  It looked like a toad, all warty bumps and grey skin with little tufts of hair like sprouts. It had a head too small for its body with a pig’s nose and tiny, beady glass eyes that shimmered as if wet in the dim light. Its arms hung below its knees, and on its waist was a scrap of tanned leather, the hide of some dingy animal, that barely managed to cover its nether bits.

  It saw me as I approached and snorted like a bull. Then it charged.

  I only just managed to roll to the side as the thing hit an oncoming car and flipped it onto the walk before it skidded to a stop and turned itself around.

  It rushed at me again.

  In those days, British officers didn’t routinely carry firearms. I had a pad of paper, a pair of cuffs, a torch, pepper spray, and a 14-inch wooden straightstick baton.

  I pulled the baton, wrapped my fingers around the grip, and prepared for another go. As it came at me again, I heard a loud yell. It was enough to halt the charging giant and draw his attention.

  Standing in the light of the lamp where the giant had been standing a few moments before, stood a black man, skin as dark as any I’d ever seen. He was bare-chested, dressed in only an open vest and a baggy pair of long, army-green cargo shorts. He was barefoot, bald, and covered in jewelry. Every one of his fingers bore a gold or silver ring of some kind and glistened even at the distance he stood. Around his neck, he wor
e a silver star of David, an ankh cross, a crucifix with rosary beads, a crescent moon with a star, and a few symbols I didn’t recognize. He wore feathers and something silver in his ears. In his hand, he carried a staff of thick, heavy wood, almost like a shillelagh, that stood as tall as he was.

  The man narrowed his eyes at the giant, pointed the end of his staff at it, and shouted something that sounded – I don’t know – like fucking Hindu. The wind picked up. Cans in the street began to rattle across like tumbleweeds, crumpled bits of paper began to swirl and lift, and the dust and debris around the man began to orbit his feet.

  The creature moved towards him, a bit slow and sluggish compared to the way it seemed to leap at me moments before. When it had covered half the distance, there was a bright flash of light. The man cried out in some nondescript tongue, and another light flashed briefly, this time brighter than the first.

  The flashes seemed to daze the creature for a few seconds each time, but it recovered quickly. The troll moved to the curb, picked up a trash can, and hurled it at the man. He dodged, and the can wrapped itself around the light pole; papers, banana peels, and other rubbish exploding out.

  It went like that for a moment, with the black man sending flashes and twirling the wind around somehow by waving his staff and the giant hurling objects at him. I thought the lights and wind were meant to disorient the creature somehow, but it only seemed to faze it for a few seconds each time.

  I watched the exchange, not entirely sure what was happening. I didn’t know what the giant was. I’d seen things, weird-ass supernatural beings, but nothing like this. Furthermore, I’d known a bloke who could throw fire around like a circus act, but, while I couldn’t put my finger on it, something about the man before me was different.

  Before long, I realized I couldn’t just sit by and do nothing – it wasn’t really what I did. So I took my baton in one hand, my pepper spray in the other, and ran towards the creature.

  I dodged its flailing limbs and struck its knee with three quick strokes before it turned and howled at me, its roar like a wind tunnel and smelling like cabbage and rot. I lifted the pepper spray and emptied it into its face: its eyes, its mouth, its open, upturned nostrils.

  It lurched back, and then I felt something tighten around my waist. I was lifted into the air and tossed ten or fifteen feet, colliding with the hard road.

  I could feel the scrapes on my hands and face and cold on my elbow where I figured my jacket had ripped. As I struggled to get to my feet, I felt hands on my arm, and looked up and into the crystalline eyes of the black man.

  “That was foolish,” he said in a thick, Caribbean accent. “Brave, but stupid.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” I said. “What the fuck is that thing?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I said.”

  The man began to pull away, but I grabbed him by the elbow and stared into his face. “You’d be surprised what I believe.”

  He studied me for the briefest of moments, and then he said simply, “It is a troll.”

  I let go of his arm and cast a glance at the creature just as it moved to the nearest lamppost. It put both hands along the pole’s shaft, twisted it, and tore it free of the cables and stonework that had held it in place.

  “How do we fucking kill it?”

  “We don’t. All we can do is slow it down and lead it away.”

  I wanted to argue, but as I looked down, the only weapon I had was a sodding baton. I turned to the black man. “You’re clearly the expert on this thing. What do we do?”

  “I hold it off for a moment until my partner returns.”

  “You mean the bloke with the scar?”

  He looked at me curiously. “Did you see him?”

  “I don’t…don’t think he’ll be returning.”

  He hung his head low for a moment and then looked up at me, smiling a toothy grin, and the yellowish white of his enamel was a stark contrast to the dark mocha of his skin. “So jus’ you and me, then?”

  “You seem awfully dapper for just losing your mate.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll grieve later. Besides, I never liked that man.” He laughed a cheeky bit and said, “If you’re still willing to help, I will take you up on the offer. But I will warn you, officer, you will get hurt.”

  “I’ve handled worse.”

  Again he considered me, then nodded.

  “I’m John Swyftt.”

  He didn’t look at me, only past me as the troll smashed the lamppost through the roof of a BMW. “I do not give out my name,” he said. “Names have power.”

  “Okay. What do people call you?”

  He looked at me and said, “Solomon Huxley.” I extended a hand to him, and he shook it. I noticed that as dark as his skin was, lines even darker traced across the entirety of his arm: tattoos. Strange, occultic symbols, pentacles, runes, and various tribal designs were etched on his skin from the top of his hand to his shoulder, across his chest, down the other arm. I looked into his face and noticed the ink lines traced across there as well, and the middle of his forehead bore a large, open eye.

  He laughed and then said, “Duck.”

  “What?”

  It didn’t have time to register before he pushed me back to the ground and lifted his staff in time to catch the lamppost that had been swung at the back of my head like a baseball bat. With the force of the blow, the staff should have shattered and the post should have been buried midway into his ribcage, but as it happened, Huxley angled his staff to send the post into the air and he slid about a foot backwards as though he were on ice.

  The troll hadn’t expected the move and nearly fell forward with the momentum of the swing, but caught itself and brought the pole down again. As the glass dome at the top of the light post came near the troll’s face, Huxley thrust out an open palm and called out a word in that same, bizarre tongue. As the glass shattered, the troll screamed and dropped the pole.

  I’d managed to stand once more. Shaking, the troll staggered backwards a few paces, hands cupping its face. Huxley turned to me and said, “Do you see anything we can use as a weapon?”

  I looked around frantically. “Like what? I can’t pick up light posts. The mailbox over there would be a great missile, but…”

  He smiled broadly and turned to the five-foot, red cylinder, the carved words “Royal Mail” and a golden crown inset on its side. He pointed his staff at it, spoke a word of power, and the mailbox began to tremble.

  “Distract the troll,” he said to me.

  “What?”

  He didn’t say it again, and I looked at the creature that still grappled and pawed at its face angrily. I tightened my grip on the baton and charged the creature, thinking, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  I struck the troll – first in the gut, then the leg – as it grabbed blindly for me. I kept out of the way, swatting at its wrist and fingers with the baton. As I swung again, the troll caught the straightstick and tore it out of my hand.

  I heard Huxley shout, “Duck!” from behind me, and this time, didn’t hesitate. The mailbox came hurtling through the air, the black base and broken, sharp jags of concrete aimed like the tip of a spear at the troll’s head.

  Just before it struck, the creature moved, and the mailbox swallowed the troll’s arm to the elbow, concrete flaking from the base. The troll howled and shook its arm furiously. It beat it against the ground, cracking the pavement, but the mailbox stuck true and didn’t budge.

  The troll spun. Then it ran to the mouth of the bridge, towards the Thames, and it leapt from the shore into the waves below.

  I spun to Huxley who watched it go with a vague smile.

  “We’ve gotta go after that bloody thing.”

  “No need to rush,” Huxley said. “I know where it’s going.”

  8

  I woke.

  The memory lingered like the scent of bacon or the perfume of a one-time lover, and I fought for a moment to hold on to it. I still had quest
ions about the troll, but I was pretty fucking certain it was the same one. Somehow.

  I showered and dressed, black jeans and a t-shirt with a white ring around the neck and sleeves. It was the only thing I had clean. Chess didn’t do laundry.

  In the kitchen, I found Ape. His birth name was Terry Towers, but due to the copious amounts of reddish-brown hair that covered his body like some kind of sasquatch, the pronounced brow, long arms, and monkey-ass strength, I called him Ape.

  He was my partner.

  “Good morning,” he said. He poured a cup of coffee and drank from it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why are you so cheery?”

  “We’re meeting an old friend today, remember.”

  “Not especially.” I eyeballed the mug in his hand with envy. “You gonna pour me one?”

  “You going to stop leaving your wet clothes in the middle of the kitchen?”

  I shrugged. “Probably not.”

  He flashed me a warm smile and slid me a mug. I didn’t return the look. “Another late night? I thought you said the thing with Jamie DeNobb wouldn’t take very long.”

  “It didn’t.”

  He was quiet a moment. “How’s Anna doing?” he asked reluctantly.

  “Fine.” My voice was more sour and defensive than I intended. He looked at me. “I got a call from Stone.”

  “Oh?” he said, his mood brightening.

  “Seven’s dead.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Now I have to find my information somewhere else.”

  “Good luck with that. The way you treated him, I half-expected if it ever did happen, it would be at your hands.” He paused, moved to take a drink, and then asked thoughtfully. “Is that insensitive to say?”

  “I ain’t fucking mourning him.”

  He moved over to the picture window that overlooked the backyard, the driveway, the barn, and a rather large apple tree. “Some storm last night.”