“They hid it deep, didn’t they?” Lily said. “Those pesky wizards and their mind magic. They wanted to forge a sword in secret, and this,” she nodded back towards the base, “was your crucible. They wanted to make sure your edges were as sharp as they were supposed to be.”
I finally pulled a name from the bits of data in my head: Spiritwalker. A being that had an affinity with the spirit world, much like necromancers, but where they forced the dead to serve them, spiritwalkers simply moved among them, communicated with them. That would explain why I could see the ghosts of the dead while so many other psychics and magic users couldn’t. In metaphysical terms walkers and necromancers were like siblings, their energies working on the same wavelength. That explained how I had destroyed the ghouls and Darius; I had short-circuited the spell that animated them. And what I had thought was a dream or vision of my following Christian out to the freighter? Walkers could leave their bodies at will, projecting their spirits wherever they wished. I thought back to the sensation of being bodiless, a floating ball of energy, and shivered. Another fun-fact was that when a spiritwalker channeled death magic their eyes glowed green, the same color that the magic had in my Second Sight, the same color I had seen in my eyes when I had looked in the mirror while under the influence of dreamscape. I didn’t want to admit it, but it sounded like this was the truth. Was I truly a spiritwalker?
Sirens wailed off in the distance, moving towards us.
“Damn,” Lily muttered. “Someone has come through my glamour spell.” She looked around until her eyes fixed on a spot by the gate that stood open off to our right. She growled something in a demonic tongue. I followed her gaze and watched as the silhouette of a person appeared out of thin air. After a moment it resolved itself into the form of a woman.
“Terri?” I whispered. She stood frozen against the chain link fence, a hood pulled up over her head and a small talisman clutched in her hand. My eyes snapped back to Lily. “What did you do to her?”
“Clever witch,” Lily mused. “It must run in her family. I simply froze her like the rest of them. But I’m afraid we don’t have much time left. They’ll be here in a minute.” Her eyes came alive then, smoldering like coals. “You need to fulfill the last part of the deal, Inquisitor.” My gun appeared in my hand. I hadn’t even held my hand out in anticipation, it simply materialized and I had grasped it like it was the last life jacket on a sinking ship. Christian rose up as if pulled by invisible strings. He fought weakly in silence to no avail. “Kill him and our business is concluded.”
I looked from the gun to the shell of a man who writhed in his invisible prison. “Why should I? He’s not a threat anymore. He’ll spend the rest of his life in Alcatraz.”
“Not acceptable,” she said, shaking her head. “He knows my summoning name. He’s the last link between our worlds, and he has heard everything I just told you. Now do what you were made for and kill him.”
I raised the gun and pointed it at Lily. “Why shouldn’t I kill you instead?”
She smiled innocently. “Go ahead. I won’t even defend myself.” I felt the air crack as she dropped the energy barrier between us. “Shoot me. You can stop me from getting what I want and be the big hero. Isn’t that what you want? You can keep a book that you want nothing to do with and save a murderer’s life. All you have to do is shoot one innocent little girl.” She waited a moment. “Well? Pull the trigger already.”
I wasn’t fooling anybody so I lowered the gun. “We both know I can’t do that, but I’m not going to kill a defenseless man either.”
“Either you kill him or I will,” she said and shrugged.
I frowned. “You can’t. You’re bound by your agreement not to hurt him.”
“I won’t hurt him. They will.” She pointed up at the hundreds of ravens circling overhead. They were as silent as the night itself. “They were his familiars but they were bound with my powers, so now they’re my familiars. And they are very hungry. Think on it Inquisitor; what would be worse, a single gunshot or a hundred hungry beaks ripping into his flesh? Decide quickly before I lose my patience.”
I heard squealing tires off in the distance, but my attention was focused on the pleading eyes of Christian. He didn’t deserve pity, not after what he had done, but still…
Voices were calling out behind me as I raised my pistol. Lily came to stand beside me. The training tried to take over, to push back the doubt, but I shoved it away. I needed the doubt, needed to feel the indecision rake at my insides. Even as I pulled the trigger I wondered if I was damning myself. The bullet made a neat hole in his forehead that leaked dark fluid. His body flopped limply on to its side and he moved no more.
“The bargain is concluded,” Lily said. The Book of Names and the box that held Nathilog faded out of existence, going who knew where. “Before I go I want to give you one more present.” Too numb to respond I simply looked down on her. “I lied when I told you that there was no hidden meaning behind me labeling you my Guardian. Of course you already suspected as much. I can sense potential in you, even if it is hindered by your humanity, and I think some of our goals are the same. So I will leave you with a way to summon me. Perhaps you will never use it, or maybe you will look back on this day and not remember why when you had a little girl named Lily in your sights you didn’t take the shot. When that hesitation is gone you will be ready for me.” Her eyes flooded with darkness, and the smell of sulfur filled the night. “My Name is Rashonteif.”
Power coursed out of her and into me, the force of her giving her summoning name to me carrying the weight of worlds. The name burned itself into my brain, making sure I knew exactly the right way to pronounce it and empower it so it was more than just a name. In my mind’s eye I saw a red sky and a dead landscape. Jagged mountains rose up in the distance like claws scraping the sky, and figures marched towards them. They spread from horizon to horizon, millions upon millions of them. They chanted in a grotesque chorus, tens of millions of inhuman throats voicing demonic cries. Something moved across the mountain, a giant shape that wrapped around the rock. What I had at first taken to be tracks of forest I could see now was something…alive. A serpentine body moved across the cliffs, grinding stone to dust as it moved and causing avalanches in its wake. My eyes focused and zoomed in on it without consciously trying. What I had thought were trees were actually immense hair follicles as wide as a man and twice as tall, and on each of them were impaled a handful of creatures that writhed in unending agony. The hairs spread across the length of the creature’s body. There were thousands of them that I could see, all of them covered with their grotesque and horrifying prisoners, and I assumed it was the same on the other side of the mountain. A gigantic insect-like head rose to loom in the sky. It lifted a gaping maw filled with grasping tentacles to the sky and released a ground-trembling roar, and the creatures rejoiced. A hundred eyes like burning stars looked out over the masses and reveled in their worship.
Rashonteif had won.
My mind rebelled, thrusting the images back and out of my head as I struggled to hold onto the last threads of my sanity.
I snapped back to reality and watched as Lily turned her face to the sky and screamed. Light boiled from her eyes and mouth and ascended to the sky, just like the creature in my vision. After a moment the light faded and died, the Demon having departed her body. Weak from exhaustion, Lily fainted and I barely had time to scoop her up before she hit the ground.
Her eyes fluttered open. “Daddy?”
“No honey,” I said quietly as I picked her up and cradled her in my arms. “But I’m going to bring you to your daddy. You just get some rest okay? You look tired.”
She barely had time to nod before rough hands were dragging her from me and twisting my arms behind my back. She screamed and tried to cling to my jacket as they pulled her away. Adrenaline surged through me. The girl had been through enough for a lifetime and I would be damned if I was going to let her get hurt now. I twisted and struck the man close
st to me in the throat. He went down gagging. A kick to the knee sent another one sprawling to the side. One grabbed me from behind, trying to get his arm up under mine for a joint lock. I struck out with an elbow and sent him stumbling away. I threw a couple of punches before they swarmed me and sent me under through sheer weight of numbers. They pummeled me with fists and feet and clubs. I curled up in the fetal position and took it, all the fight draining out of me.
“Stop!” somebody cried from nearby. “Get him up and secure him.” Zip ties went around my wrists and tightened until it was almost painful. I was pulled to a sitting position and slapped lightly across the face to get me to open my eyes. Officer Lewis’s dark face peered back at me, a fresh looking lump on his forehead. I was surrounded by angry looking STS troops. “Have you lost your mind, Goldman?” he growled. “If I weren’t an officer of the law I think I would put you down like a rabid dog. Lucky for you the STS don’t work like the Inquisition, huh?”
“You going somewhere with this, Lewis, or are you just breaking my stones? I’ve had a long day and I have to get Lily to her father. They deserve a nice family reunion.”
“That may be,” he drawled. “But you ain’t gonna deliver it.” His face looked like it could have been carved from stone. Normally if he had me on the ropes like this he would smirk just to rub my nose in it, but there was nothing but pure cop in that expression. “This shit you do may fly in the Second City, but this base is property of the American government. You’re under arrest for the murder of Ethan Linklatter. Get him up.”
Two sets of hands gripped me by the elbows and hauled me to my feet. “What?” I stammered. “But—”
“You have the right to remain silent…”
36
Jail sucked. A windowless isolation cell in the basement level of STS headquarters was even worse. On the plus side, I had two full days to rest and reflect on what had happened. Polly, the same nurse that had tended to Ben and Terri, came to check on me when I first arrived. She came in to my cell with two guards flanking her, and she didn’t seem too excited about that. She had clucked her tongue in admonishment when I had disrobed and she got a look at all of the bruises that covered my body. Both of my tattoos were gone, faded away as if they had never been because they had expended their power. That, coupled with my near nakedness and the guards watching over me made me feel useless and old, like an outdated piece of machinery. I was grateful for Polly’s matronly demeanor and professionalism. For a while I didn’t have to do anything other than be a patient. She told me to get some rest, and I did. Most of my first day of incarceration was spent on the thin mattress. It didn’t even matter that a spring was sticking painfully into my back.
They didn’t give me dinner that night. They also “forgot” to give me breakfast the next morning. When I had reached through the small rectangular opening in the barbed bars to knock on the heavy steel door that lay beyond, the eye-level partition had slid aside to reveal a guard that did not look pleased to be there. He told me he would “look into” what happened to my food, then promptly closed the slit and forgot about me.
The guards on duty were probably friends with Polanski. Ha ha, good joke.
When noon rolled around on the second day two guards opened my cell and gave me a big lunch. I recognized the one guard as Officer Snow, one of the men who had been at the ill-fated church raid against Christian. That explained the change in mood. It was highly uncommon to open a prisoner’s cell for any reason other than to move him or to search for contraband. Normally the meals were slid in through the slit in the door and onto the small rectangular opening in the bars. It would straddle the two ledges until the prisoner, being monitored by a guard, took it, whereupon the slit in the door would be shut once again. Snow and the other officer, though, opened my cell and—after respectfully asking that I sit on the floor at the back of the room—came in to join me for lunch. The other guard—I learned his name was Thompson—insisted that I be handcuffed to the bed frame while they were in there. Snow started to argue, but I quickly consented. I was just glad to have food and someone to talk to.
Snow had been sent by Lou to fill me in on what had happened after I was arrested. It made me feel guilty that I hadn’t really wondered about it. Instead I had just moped around my cell and slept. Snow’s military background showed through in the somber way he recounted that fourteen soldiers had been killed and twice that many wounded; some so badly that they still didn’t know if they would pull through. Looking at Snow’s stricken features and downcast eyes made me feel that much worse about my self-indulgent brooding. All of Christian’s playthings, including his acolytes, had collapsed as soon as he had died. Ben had woken shortly after the STS had arrived, but he had been too weak to leave under his own power. Clara had resumed her rampage for fresh blood as soon as Lily’s…no, Rashonteif’s time freezing spell had worn off. Simon had grappled with her and ended up pinning her none too gently between two jeeps to keep her from killing anyone. He had actually pushed one of the jeeps with his bare hands according to Snow. After that he just waited until the paramedics arrived with the stocks of bagged blood they kept for wounded vamps. Clara polished off eight pints while Simon, also wounded, held himself to a meager three. When I asked him about Terri he told me that nobody had seen her there. She had glided in, called the STS, and glided out like a ghost.
I had a brief moment to wonder at what she had seen before Snow said around a mouthful of his snack bar, “Did you see your new neighbor?” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder and pointed to the cell across the hall. I told him I hadn’t. “Remember that preacher that was stirring up all sorts of shit with the locals, calling for people to rise up and kill all the paras?” I felt a twinge of cold anger at the memory of the old man at the scene of the two dead gang-bangers. “Well, he finally convinced some of the villagers to get out their pitchforks and torches. He led a group of twenty men and women into the Second City yesterday morning. I guess he thought he’d catch everyone napping. The thing about that, though, is that we patrol at all times, day and night. So we see a group of twenty pissed off people marching in broad daylight in a place where practically no one is out before sundown and we get a little suspicious. Since he was on our turf we got to take him in.”
I listened closely in the gaps in our conversation and I could hear a faint rambling coming from his cell. I smiled despite myself. Snow just shook his head. “He’s been doing that since he got here, yelling some biblical passage about the valley of death or some such. He’s really pissing off our residents with enhanced hearing. Apparently most of them aren’t big on the bible. Go figure.”
After that, Snow and Thompson took the cuffs off me and left. Time rolled by slowly afterward, and I decided to use my hours to go over everything that had happened in the last week. The revelation of Jae Kwon’s role in events had shaken my faith in the Council. Did the rest of the Council know what he had done? Maybe not, but they had to know what he had planned for me. I had never met Jae before the meeting in my mind, and from what Rashonteif had said my mind had been conditioned for something. The blank spots in my memory, the creeping semi-consciousness of the training, my scar-riddled psyche that Terri had pointed out to me; were these the traits of a human weapon? The people I had trained under, or at least some of them, had to know the truth of what was going on. And what exactly had they conditioned me for? I was already an Inquisitor, the diplomats and weapons of the Supernatural Enforcement Committee, so why the subterfuge? What made me different from any of the other Inquisitors out there?
A single word rose to the surface of my mind: Spiritwalker. And with it came a murky vision of that stone statue in the basement of the safe-house. I had felt like I had recognized it when I first laid eyes on it, but I had discarded the notion at the time. Did one thing have something to do with the other? I didn’t know who to ask. The SEC had proven that they would go to any lengths to achieve something, and I wanted nothing more than to get off their radar. I trusted Sim
on implicitly, but he was a lowly grunt like me so he wouldn’t know anything. And Ben? He had been acting strange over the last couple of days but I didn’t think he was involved. The more I thought on it the more I was convinced that my old mentor was in the dark about me and the Council. But there was something else, something he was hiding from me and I had had enough of being lied to by my own.
I had plenty of time to think about it.
And I was doing just that, staring at the concrete ceiling with the anti-magic runes etched into it when one of the guards opened the outer door and told me to stand up. When the door opened, Ben was standing just outside waiting for me. The guard told me I was free to go. I raised an eyebrow at him in question, but he simply glowered at me in return. Two guards escorted me and Ben out to the parking lot where his car and mine sat side-by-side in the mid-day sun. Squinting from the glare of sun on windows, I noticed that the back window had been fixed and there was a new lid on the trunk. It didn’t quite match my paintjob but what could you do?
The guards stayed at the entrance and watched us. Ben waited until we were far enough away that we wouldn’t be overheard before he said, “The District Attorney has decided to drop the charges provided you stay in the Second City. If you want to venture into human territory you’ll need to petition the mayor ahead of time.”
“Sounds like a good deal to me.” I couldn’t help but smile. On the first day of my incarceration I hadn’t really taken it seriously. Mistakes like that happened. It would all be worked out soon enough. By the second day, however, my situation had become clearer. I had been arrested for murder and a slew of other less serious crimes. I was a fighter on foreign soil, at the whims of people that generally didn’t like me or my kind very much. The fact that my job gave me carte blanche to do whatever I felt necessary with criminals rubbed a lot of law enforcement types the wrong way, even if they understood that for many of these paranormal beings normal punishments just couldn’t be applied. None of that mattered. I had broken their laws, and if they saw fit they could have locked me away for life. If the mayor wanted me to stay off his turf unless invited by him, well that was just fine and dandy with me. Hell, if he wanted I’d send him a gift for Chanukah every year for the rest of my life.
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