Wraith ; Semblance

by Riley Mason

  Even she’ll have more than me I think.

  “Gabriel is moving the pieces, I know you know about the True Night,” Bash say’s to me.

  “I’ve heard of it,” I tell him thinking about what the professor had said to me. “Do you really think that’s the endgame?”

  “Seems legitimate. The seals were forged the last time by humans, humans couldn't lock them the same way they were locked before. But the wraith is getting stronger.”

  “So is Gabriel,” I remind him.

  Chapter 60

  “Wait,” Bash says to me holding his hand out by his side but his eyes were on the cop that was on the table.

  I spin the blade in my hand, my body, my hand, it's all eager to put some damage into the demon that moved out of me. I already know why it did it. It was my fault. I believed it when I knew that I shouldn’t have. This is the danger of not having my own memories. I was too willing to believe that a demon would be honest with me especially knowing that its brother had the same ambition.

  I see the girl rise up, almost slow motion, her eyes are rounded and white until they settle into a cold grey that seems to glow in the shadows that's cast over her. I see parts of her body twitch and I can hear bones inside of her skin cracking as the thing inside of her adjusts and moves the proportions to which its confined.

  “It’s not going nowhere look,” Bash says to me and he points, I can see the decoration on the floor. He was smart and he earned his title of Chaser. “With the symbols there it’s not moving, not unless we break it.”

  I close the blade but the staff stays in my hands. “What’s Gabriel after?” I ask it.

  What lights are in the room, the ones that are being run by bulbs all explode at the same time sprinkling glass everywhere. It casts harder shadows, shadows only now being fought by the candles that are lit throughout the room and what moonlight is still clawing at the inside of Terence's house. The eyes against the body the demon is holding grown brighter.

  “He wants us back,” it says, its voice is distant but close, like it's rushing at us but only to a whisper by the time it gets there.

  “What’s who back?” Bash asks.

  “All of us,” the demon says, a smile breaks the coldness in her face.

  “The war banished you, it's the Angel that keeps the seals.”

  “Not once the True Night spawns enough for an army.”

  “Then that’s the endgame?” I ask. “Build an army to take back the surface.”

  “Enslave humanity, we want our chance to live inside the bodies of men and women that have no idea what true power is.”

  “Your all not strong enough to do that,” I say to it. “Only the strong can possess.”

  “For now, the power of the Angel can add to our strength. Break the seals and we’ll rush the surface and bring back war against mankind.”

  “You lost that war once before,” I add. “What makes you think that this one will be different.”

  The smile grows now. “We fought in defiance of our King. Now, he has an interest in joining those that worship him.”

  Bash looks at me, we make the connection quickly. “Lucifer,” Bash says.

  The door at the far end of the house begins to shake and rattle and then the thud explodes into the room. It sounds like someone took a car to the wood and tried ramming it into the house. It drags both our attentions away from the demon.

  I spring the blades out, Bash grabs a handgun that was hidden in his waist and aims it. “What is that?” I ask, the blade spinning in my hands.

  “The followers,” it says before it goes quiet.

  My eyes move to the salt streaks that I dragged over the wood of the house. All of them are strong, the lines are pulled clean, if they get through they’ll be contained but at the same time I know that we need to get out.

  “Get the book,” Bash says to me. “It’s Babylonian, third shelf, fifth book in from the right. There’s a page marked, open to that page and hand it to me.”

  I do it, finding the slim book I get it into his hand. “Now cover me,” he says and I do it. Over the next hour, we worked to banish the demon from her body, both of us felt that she needed to be kept alive.

  Chapter 61

  I left the girl with Bash for however good an idea that was to do. I had to get back to the city but now I had one more ally than I had before and this one seemed to have information and not only that, it was information that he was willing to share. Even though I knew there was more, it gave me a small sense of hope. I knew that at some point wherever this war went, that I was going to figure everything out.

  Bash also did me another favor. He put in a phone call with another Chaser. He said that I had met this one a few times in the past but that I had never liked him. He hoped that with my lack of memory that I would at least forget why I didn't’ or have the space to try and judge him twice. With everything going on I decided that it didn't’ matter.

  I’m back in the city and I park the Dodge at a parking garage about three blocks away. It’s been more than enough time, I’m sure the doctor long ago reported the car stolen but with the plates changing as often as I change them, this Challenger is no different than the hundred that are probably moving through NYC. This time I’m not going back to the hotel and I certainly can’t go back to Hell’s Kitchen, there’s a hunch that I need to investigate for myself. I want to know if the link between brother and sister or the twins, Courtney or the cop. For some reason I can’t shake the thought that I think that there’s more somewhere.

  I reach into my pocket and pull out the girls license that I grabbed right after the exorcism had run its course. I wanted to keep it because that moment was when the hunch grew into something.

  I find her building and break the lock at the bottom floor which lets me into the elevator which I ride up to the floor that the woman lived on.

  As I step out I look both ways before I feel confident enough to pull my gun from my pocket. Once I’m in the apartment and the door is locked and closed behind me I get a strange feeling.

  It’s as if I’ve been in the apartment before. I can’t recognize the placement of the furniture, the smell of fresh Febreze that finds me when I walk in in but there’s some feeling of familiarity in there that I see. Something tells me that I’ve seen this once before even though I can’t place the where or the when that I have.

  I start to walk, my gun still in my hand my eyes washing over all the surfaces of the house. I’m looking for something but I’m not exactly sure what it is. I find a liquor cabinet and decide to use it. When I open it, there are at least five different kinds of whiskey. I take the one at the front of the line and open it and drink it right from the bottle before placing it back down and tying it back off.

  There’s a sound that comes the bedroom. I turn, planting both hands back on the gun and move into stalk towards the sound that I heard.

  A hand comes out of the bedrooms darkness, a hand with incredible strength and moves the gun up to the ceiling where it rips it out of my grip breaking one of my fingers in the process. The eyes attached to the body are like looking into an experienced furnace. I recognize it as the girl's brother.

  “You,” he says to me.

  I have no time to cradle my hand or try and set the bone that he just knocked out of place in my finger. I lunge at him with a knee to the sternum hard enough that bones in there should rattle if not crack. I need that gun back, I need to create some distance between him and it so I have time to fire a shot.

  It grabs me by the face squeezing my jaw and my cheeks in its hands. The violent eyes stare at me and a twist in flesh comes with it. I slam down my elbows as hard as I can to try and break the bone of the arm that’s holding me. After the third one it's enough, the arm is bending even though the demon inside of the body doesn’t fully realize it yet.

  When I broke it I drop another knee into the same spot as before, this time I could hear the crunch of bone splitting, I pull the staff out, slide
the blades into the open air and stab.

  Chapter 62

  Gabriel sat there in a chair, smoke rising from the cigar that was just between his teeth. Five computer monitors display coding in front of him, the phone has some of his attention, the computers have all the rest of it.

  The wraith is there too, standing in the corner he knows that he’s going to have to let it out to hunt and not continue to bring it flesh for it to feast on. It has purpose and he gave it that purpose, but the second seal hasn’t lined up yet. He needs her in whatever condition they can bring her back with.

  This call has been on his mind, it's wound its way up in his head and he hasn’t been able to move on from it. Part of him isn’t’ really sure if he wants her dead, the other part is sure that he doesn't really care the condition that they put her into. The assets that he’s releasing for this are the most well trained that he has. If he can survive this, the wraith is the last resort. He can’t risk her knowing, the power in her head would be too much to let go into this timeline.

  “Execute,” he says into the phone and then slides it closed and places it down putting the cigar back into his teeth.

  Chapter 63

  The demon vanished, that wave of smoke didn’t vent from its mouth, nostril, or eyes. Instead it consumed the entire body that he was possessing. It left me alone in the room, blood falling out of the lower corner of my lip.

  I didn’t even have the gun in my hand when the window in the cop’s living room exploded and five men swarmed into the room. From head to toe they were in attack gear, black, vests, automatic weapons. They were Gabriel’s I knew it at once.

  I took off, running at one of them sliding the blade against the cord that held them, it cut two and the momentum that I put into the knee that I delivered was enough to knock two of them out of the building.

  I fought the other three, I didn’t want to use the blade, it makes marks, it brings investigations but these men are going to kill me if they have the chance to do it.

  The staff moves and I cut through their armor with ease one of them gets a punch to my jaw, it's enough to stifle me but not to knock me over.

  They keep shouting commands at me. I’m beyond that.

  I slam the blade into one of their feet, yank it out and put it into another of their shoulders and the third took the bade across his left shoulder.

  In the end the three of them are on the floor. I look down at their weapons but I can hear the sirens wailing in the distance. The explosion of the windows, the sounds of the fighting definitely caught unwanted attention. I have to get out of here.

  I look around, it's what’s left of the search that I had come here to do. Another thing is certain to me now, there is a tracer on me, there has to be. There is no way that Gabriel had time to launch this entire ordeal on short notice because a scouter saw me roaming back into the city. The one thing that I couldn't figure out is why it hadn’t come through at Bash’s house.

  I decide the answer has to wait and I leave the apartment, only satisfied that half of it is searched.

  Even in the hallway I can see the blue and the red bathing the walls and hear the whisper of sirens and the yelling of tires scraping against the street trying to stop a car that was moving too fast.

  At the far end of the hall is a stairwell, I can’t go down, I have to go up.

  I drag myself up nineteen flights of stairs and get myself out to the rooftop. I see the demon there, it's standing on the ledge, I’m reminded of the demon that lunged at me from another building top down in the Kitchen. He’s standing there looking down at the chaos down there of cops.

  “Gorgeous isn’t it.”

  “How many hands do you have in the war?” I ask over the high wind that’s trying to stop my voice.

  “More than enough,” he says to me.

  “The Chasers aren’t done.”

  “There close enough,” he says, he still hasn’t turned around. “Come to me,” he says.

  In defiance I do nothing but before I realized it I’m at his side, I walked almost half the building in length and I’m standing there next to him just before the ledge looking down at the cops down there.

  “It's amazing how you can’t remember this power,” he says to me. I look up at him but his face is indifferent now. It’s not happy or sad, it just seems to be there, in thought somewhere.

  “It’s amazing what you know and what you can’t remember,” it says to me.

  I look at it and I see the whites of its eyes as it stares back at me, the glow of shadow does nothing to hide them. “You can have them all back if you really wanted.”

  I stand there at his side, standing with a demon over a ledge. “That’s not possible,” I tell it.

  “You can have them if you want them, everything. All the gaps of your past filled all at once and every piece of information that you ever wanted to remember you could.”

  “And what would that take?” I ask it, I’m more curious then I should be but I need to know.

  “One life, that’s it. Take one life for me and I’ll give you everything, all of it.”

  “Where,” I ask.

  “Damian Spray,” it says to me.

  “How do you justify that?” I ask.

  “That’s not for my justification, it’s for yours. You’ve killed Identicals

  before, you’ve killed my kind before, what’s one more when I can give you something that you’ve wanted for a lifetime.”

  “Blood carries a strong curse,” I tell it.

  “Not on a soul like yours.”

  For a second, that’s all it was, it couldn't have been longer. I decide to take that option. I decided in that moment that that was the only option to take, there was nothing real left to consider. It was enough. The agreement never had to be in words. It was enough for the demon to do what needed to be done to bring them back.

  I look down and see nothing but empty streets. There are no cops, no

  sirens, no blue and red lights splashing temporary paint on the walls surrounding them. They’re all gone. Every one of them.

  Chapter 64

  Damien was someone that I knew, someone that had some place in my head even with all the canyons of forgotten that were up there. I was going to kill him too and there was nothing that was going to stop me from doing it. I was going to kill it because for some reason that was all that I wanted. I can’t think of anything else besides ending his life. Of course, there is some part of me that holds some regret for what I’m going to do but I let it go, killing always has attachments to it.

  I stand there with limited recollection about how I got to his house. I’m outside the city, I can recognize it as some part of upper Westchester but I’m not entirely sure how I got here. Most of this has played out in my head. I know Damien lives alone but I know that he’s very, very paranoid. Most of his paranoia centers around the occult, I can’t say that I blame him, most all Chasers are skeptical of how much the occult will remember when the hunting days come to an end.

  I walk around and slide myself through a window, I’m in a kitchen. It’s still and it's quiet. Watching my footing, I walk around out to the living area that’s still in darkness. It’s late, I have no idea what time it is but it’s time for even a former Chaser to be sleeping.

  I take the stairwell up to the second floor, the carpeting over the staircase muffles the steps.

  At the top of the stairs, there’s five doors, I already know which one to take. I know because he told me which one to take. I go to it, I’m shocked to see that it's not locked at all.

  When I open the door and step into the darkness, I see a set of eyes glowing looking back at me. “I suppose it was only a matter of time,” the voice says.

  The staff is in my hand and I twirl it. “It ends for all of us Damien.”

  “But you though. The strongest of us being sent to quiet us.”

  “Some decisions are out of our hands,” I say to him. “Some we can’t control, some we don’t w
ant to control.”

  “I thought you would've broken Gabriel’s control by now. We lost a lot of good Chasers’ trying to make that happen for you.”

  “Assuming the control really wants to be broken, the mind needs to want that release.”

  I watch as he holds up his wrists. Both of them are cut and I can see his eyes move to a bloodied barber razor on the bed. “I tried doing it before you could. Something told me I wouldn't survive the night.”

  “Our evolution was always harder than most,” I say. “It's a shame it didn't finish in time.”

  The blades slide out, free from that burden of the staff that holds them. I lunge the blade forward and cut into his waiting skin. The first thing I do is slit his neck wide and twist the blade carving out a few more layers of skin before I tug the blade free. This has to be public, I can't finish this unless it’s public. I have no choice, it has to be public.

  I take the body ignoring the blood that's now running down my hands and my weapon and bring it to the bed. I quiet one blade and leave one out. From the cut that I implanted in his neck, I cut down the middle until I get to his pelvis and dig my hands in just above his ribcage and start the clear away his skin.

  I grab the body and bring it down the stairs, dragging it the entire way, my eyes are loose, it's almost as if I’m sleepwalking the whole time that I do this.

  I strung him up so that he’s hovering over the banister of the stairs, muscle that's buried below the skin is showing, his intestines are hanging from his body on the carpeting below him. His skin is being torched in the bedspread that I pulled off the bed. The skull stays with me. Azrael wanted it back, I want to make sure that I bring it back to him.

  The last thing I do is go to the cell phone that's still hooked up to the charger. I dial the emergency number with it. “Help, there’s been a murder at ninety-two-ninety-two Cypress,” I say and I hang up, sliding the phone into my pocket and disposing of the SIM card.