by Riley Mason
What were you doing here? I think to myself as I look it over. The assembly is Wicca, that much is apparent to me. What time period and what region of the world it belongs too isn’t clear at first, but my guess is Voodoo. I can see a half-smoked cigar laying on the mantle, it still puts that sour scent into the air.
At my feet as I lower the light is a bloodied machete, the blood looks fresh despite being partially dried to the blade. I don't know what to think, I don’t think this was Courtney but it’s hard to tell. It would make sense that something was summoned, something that hasn’t been seen in a very long time.
I swing back to the trapdoor and look up it as if it wouldn't’ lead into her apartment anymore. When it does I have no choice but to believe that she was responsible for amendment to her apartment.
I hear the growl moan behind me and the dance of four heavily muscled limbs press down on old floorboard. I know what it is before it has a chance to make any real move. The growl is a music that my ears can recognize anywhere.
I turn and see its white eyes moving beyond the cast of shadows that dance in the room and the orbs glowing back as might light touch eyes that have no pupils in them, casting white shine on leathered skin.
I fire three shots and the creature folds, all three shots went into its head and somehow, the firing, the explosive sound of my weapon in a room that reused the sound, my heart slows itself down as if I were relaxing on a couch.
I know someone had to have heard that, the police especially. I pull my phone and snap six pictures in quick succession of the mantle in the abandoned apartment and tuck the phone back into my pocket but then I hear another growl and turn.
Now there’s five sets of eyes staring at me through the darkness.
Chapter 17
Gabriel stood there and listened to the account that the man had given him. It wasn’t going to be easy, not any single part of it was going to just come to him.
He could feel his eyes flash black, the demon inside of him stirred in its sleep bringing back the flash of black over his pupils. It didn’t escape the man that they were holding in custody. He saw it and his face lost all shade of color the second it happened. “Go on,” Gabriel told him before the man had a chance to get too excited.
As the prisoner went on explaining, Gabriel could feel a heat growing in his hands. It was subtle at first, only in his palms and then stretching out to his fingers. The event that this thing called the True Night was a viable thing that he could make happen. It would be enough to start up the entire conflict again. This time, this time the side that he chose would be different. This time he would make sure that the Chaser’s wouldn't unite to stop him, they wouldn't know how if they tried. Not with what was inside of him now, what part of his mind was reserved for something more ancient and wise then any of them.
He had never forgotten that most of them had tried to kill him. It was the fact that he had taken Arinna captive in the hours that followed the war. He had no preclusions that she wasn’t direly important to them. To a lot of them, she was a martyr for what she was capable of. Most of the abilities that she had brought to life during the war were things that none of them had ever seen including himself. A woman like that didn’t come around often, a servant like that never came around. She could change a lot of fortunes for the person that she was loyal too and Gabriel had the ability to force that loyalty out of her.
Most of the men that had come to try and rescue her had met fates worse than they had ever thought they would meet during the war. Gabriel wasn’t forgiving to what they were trying to do. They were trying to separate someone that had an importance to him beyond words and beyond measure. They wanted to steal her back for their futile cause, to try and restore a balance to the supernatural. They had no idea, the supernatural didn't need balance, it needed structure.
When he was done, Gabriel was more interested in the True Night then he had been beforehand. It was fresh in his mind, it was an idea that that he could see through to the end, but he was going to need her. That much was clear. He was going to have to reunite with Arinna, force her to make this work for him.
“I need you to stay completely still now,” he told the man and the prisoner did what he was told.
“Bring him in,” Gabriel called out and three men escorted a man with crippled legs into the room. The man looked like the skin was peeling off his body, hive and rash had broken out all over his face. One of his eyes was so clouded it looked like a crust was keeping him from seeing. “Your next vessel,” he said to the man.
The creature that crawled out of the skin, shredding it like paper was at least fifteen feet in height, wide red eyes and rows of jagged teeth. It jumped and turned itself into a cloud and suffocated the prisoner that he was holding there until all the mist had buried itself in the man. Slowly the chains around his arms and feet and neck were released. Now he had to focus his attention on Arinna. Now that he had found his Master’s servants new vessels.
Chapter 18
I give the handgun one final twist to chamber another of the rock salt shells, but I doubt there is any need. The sounds have all faded and I watched as four of the creatures move from flesh to ash and then vanish.
I don't know where they came from and even now with the flashlight in my hand shining light on the darkness that the paws were moving across the ground with, I can’t see anything but a bare wooden wall, this time there are no elusive trap doors.
The handgun stays in my hand as I go back up the ladder into the apartment but as I start applying weight all over my body I can feel something sting on my left hand and as I look at it I can see that blood has been moving out of it for some time, it's down to my forearm and its stained my clothes.
Like it or not, I'm going to have to find something in her house. I can’t remember if I caught my hand on something or if one of their fangs touched my skin. My mind isn’t racing but I now I need it clotted and I know that I need to make sure that either of the two options don’t infect my blood.
I get back to the top and immediately go through the house as fast as I can until I can find a liquor cabinet or some hold where Courtney kept her liquor. I find one under the TV set, it's mostly whiskey. I grab the Knob Creek, spin off the top, and pour the amber liquid on the cut and feel the burn sizzle inside my skin and the sharp pain that I allow to dig into my nerve endings as the fermented yellow fluid kills almost everything it touches while I pour a healthy portion down my mouth to the point where two small streams creep out and start to slide down my face. When I stop I wipe it away with the back of my hand and start to look around again for the medical supplies.
Holding the bottle, I get myself up and walk to her medicine cabinet in her bathroom, the mirror is cracked, I hadn’t noticed that before. It’s cracked in at least three places and as I look closer at it I can see that there's small flecks of blood caught in some of the splintering.
Down on the floor I can see drops of blood that have turned black from their time left out to dry.
I open the medicine cabinet and see at least two dozen different bottles from varying pharmacies. I start to go through them, I need to thin my blood out and try and drain this if it was one of the fangs that cut me. I’m looking for iodine if she has it, any sort of pain killer will do the same job though but there’s a chance that I’ll have to cauterize the wound. I don’t want to do that but without knowing what caused the injury I might have too.
I find a bottle of Percocet, it's not ideal but it will work. I open the top and take three and crush them between my teeth, I need it in my bloodstream as fast as possible. I take two more out of the bottle, place them down on the basin of the toilet until a chunky powder and dip my hand into it. The small pieces that I cracked get lodged into my skin and I look to make sure my blood is soaking around them. It is.
While I’m looking for the iodine, salt, anything I can use to scrub this cut, I’m running my hand under scalding hot water. It’s hot enough that my entire hand is red lik
e the water is burning off a layer of my skin. I clench my teeth to cope with the pain but my eyes are still searching. There’s nothing.
I know now that I’m going to have to cauterize it, like it or not.
I turn the water off and move into the kitchen where I light the stove on fire. The biggest burner on the highest heat. I turn to her dish drain, pulled out a steak knife that was there drying and placed the tip of it just right so that the point caught all the fire.
I pulse my fist open and closed, trying to squirt out as much blood as I can, I hate these things even worse now. I need to make sure that the blood in my hand doesn’t work through the rest of my body. I need it cleaned. That’s a big risk I’m taking by sealing it and not being able to properly drain it. I have the tools back at my apartment, but I don’t have the time to get there before any possible infection contaminates my body.
The smoke sizzling catches my attention, the blade is cooked and I grab its wooden handle and look at the blade to see the orange, red, and white tip. I don’t like what I’m about to do but I’m not thinking about it either. I stretch open my hand and see the source of the cut is just below my palm on my left hand but on the right side. It could be anything that made that mark.
Gritting my teeth, I touch the blade’s tip to the open wound and embrace the pain as my own skin cooks under the heat and begins the process to close the wound, sends an explosion of pain through the rest of my body as the nerves in my skin are literally set on fire.
Chapter 19
I look at my computer, I want the five screens to tell me something. I want information that I don’t have as one of them analyzes the Wicca mantle that I uploaded the picture of. While the other ones monitor government surveillance, DOT, NYPD, and most of the other acronyms in the city, I’m enjoying the bottle of Knob Creek that I took with me, it’s done well to the dull the burns on my arm. I’m more than lucky the cops didn’t see anything, but I know there were calls, a lot of people heard the massacre in the sub-floor and I’m not sure I want that mantle made public before I’ve had some time to investigate it.
I bandaged my arm with gauze that was smothered is an ointment that I had made, something called mazpar, it has a faint wasabi smell, but it’ll lighten the blackening and periodically pull blood and sterilize it. I can see that the wound is already leaking moisture from a cut that should be bone dry by now.
I hate when I drink, I do it more than I should but I have to say that I hate it. It does well to remind me that there are a lot of things in my life both out of my control and it exposes the dark spots in my memory that shouldn’t be there. There was no head injury that I’ve ever suffered, no close calls, no hospital visits, but at the same time, there are spots where I can’t recall information.
I tried the typical medical route to try and remedy the amnesia which was really the best and only word that I had for it. That’s not like a Chaser to seek out professional help. Usually there’s just one in the club that understands the typical injuries faced in the field, most of us never get old enough to get passed possessions and upgrade to diseases. Most of us could clean, suture, and manage a bullet wound but beyond that and the standard supernatural, we’re useless.
The doctors did a round of MRI, CT SCANS, and a few other tests. I was aggravated after I was handed off the first time. Then they started forwarding me to specialists, after that they had to start incorporating things like psychotherapy and psychology. It wasn’t meant for me. If something was that hard to figure out especially in my life, I figured that there was no point in really trying to uncover it anymore. Drinking and pills and killing the dead were more than enough of a distraction and management for whatever depression came from the unknowing.
It’s moments of drinking that I think about the brother that’s here in the city with me. The one that’s a permanent resident of St. Luke's hospital it seems. It’s rare that I speak about him and almost no know knows that he exists and that’s the way that I prefer it. The long-term care that he’s in, they’re good people that watch over him and care for him.
Sometimes I remember that I had a relationship with him at one point but remembering why he’s in that condition is something that I just don't know and most of the memories that I even have of him are starting to disappear. It’s just another missing item in a valley of forgotten memories.
For a long time, I was writing them in a journal, keeping track of those things had a value to me at one point. When I burned it, the regret came to me afterwards, it was hard to see him, to read those memories softened something in me that I couldn't afford to have. It brought tears to dry eyes and feelings to a heart that had managed to burn most of them off or block them with medicine designed to hollow out irrational emotions.
I took care of him though. Their pulling his health insurance from a phony company that’s set up out of Switzerland. The funds of the health care are pulled from one of the main banks of Morocco which periodically funds the health care system and then on request is moved to the hospitals bank accounts. I made sure that no expense was spared for him and his health. I just don’t know how well it’s doing anymore or how much hope he has at a normal life.
What’s worse is that I’m not entirely sure how I started this life anymore. There are fragments in my head but nothing of hard evidence. I once ran a search on myself to see what I could find and the information that comes back is so minimal that it's almost worthless. My tracks are covered well, I don't even know my own social security number or where my original place of birth was.
I think about it sometimes too, not always when the drink is stamping over my cognition. As I walk through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. What life would be like without this particular burden on me. How do I know how to kill all these creatures that most men can’t see but I can’t tell someone my middle name or my favorite toy that I played with when I was growing up?
When I crave normalcy, it seems that for me that well goes deeper than most and if I hold my breath to try to swim to its bottom, I might never come up for air.
The headache is back again which means that there’s no more drinking for the night. No headache should exists against the potency of those painkillers. If I was sober, it would feel like a drill bit sliding through my temples and chewing up the skin on the other side of my skull.
I see a breaking news alert show itself on my computer screen. Three men found dead, execution style, Brooklyn.
Not something that's in my area of expertise. I look for the strange and the hard to believe, that news report has human killing written all over it.
I take out my phone though I’m not sure why I do, and I scroll to Liam’s name that’s still there. I hope that I’ll find out in the morning that it wasn’t the alcohol that was doing this but for right now the solitude is touching me in a way that I just don't enjoy right now. I push send on the message that I wrote and I wait for the response.
Chapter 20
I sit there in the coffee house with Liam. It’s good to see him, with a life as locked down and as punished as mine it's easy to forget the bliss of emotions that aren’t grounded in survival adrenaline. I don’t usually let myself feel them but as he sits across from me, it's hard to hold them back. I know they’re there, I’ve felt their existence at least once before.
I shared a lot with him, it's time like these that I can’t remember why I broke it off in the first place though. It through this rush of emotions as I look at him that I know I made the right decision, but that decision has such an air of stinging regret that it waits unsettled in the pit of my stomach.
He’s taller than I am, that’s one of those things that first drew me to him. Cold grey eyes with dark hair, he’s wearing a simple shirt, some slim jeans with rips, and Converse. We’re sharing coffee, him with a double espresso, me with the same.
The day seems more perfect than seems fair. I hurt him, I can see it in his face even now like some invisible set of scars that I left there that only I can see lik
e most of the things that I hunt. If I had to guess, I wouldn't be able to comprehend why he chose to meet me here today or why he even chose to reply to the message that I had sent him in the drunken chaos of last night.
I can still remember all the phone calls that followed our break-up and how hard that had been on the both of us. I didn't want to ignore him, but I knew it was for the best. My life really isn’t for the sharing right now. It’s not because my heart can allow someone in, he found his way in just fine like some part of me left a door ajar for him. It’s because of all the other things that are in there that would be sharing space with him. There was my own identity that I didn’t have a grasp on, it’s too hard to love when you don't really understand yourself or know who or what you really are.
“It’s good to see you,” he says to me, placing his cup down gently. “I was surprised when you texted me.”
“I know,” I say almost shyly, “I’m a little surprised that I did too. You’ve been on my mind a lot lately and I thought that it would be good to see you.”
“I’m glad you did,” he says with a smile, it's forced, I can see it draw itself on his face. He has expectations for this, not sexual though I wouldn't mind that at all but I won’t say it. I know that he wants to see if the text message meant that I had second thoughts about us. I did, and I always will but that wasn’t the reason that I wanted him here. I genuinely just wanted to see him, like there was something missing inside my chest that I was trying to repair or at least clot for the time. “You look really good,” he says.