Clipped Wings

by J. P. Rice

  As I marched toward the Warden of the West, he squinted and an awkward smiled began to form. I got up on my toes and shifted my vision to a higher dimension to detect any invisible objects like the one I’d used on him. That street could go both ways.

  I took one step closer, still undecided on which attack to use, and a fiery feeling hit me in the back. It was like a hundred knives plunging into me at the same time. I dropped to my knees, helpless from the cruel form of magical acupuncture.

  As I gagged on the musty air, searching for fresh breath to provide some relief, I heard the king’s laugh. Even his laugh sounded cruel. A snickering cackle that would make a stereotypical witch blush. My head hit the ground and the stubble on my cheek mingled with the stale booze.

  Closer to the ground, through my husky breathing, the foul odor shifted to a stale yeasty smell. The hallmark of a hundred parties. The pain in my back relented and I went to get up but my body wouldn’t acquiesce. My arms and legs weren’t working. A rush of panic started in my chest and ran down to my belly, causing it to swirl.

  The king squealed, “Get him. Kill him before he gets up again.”

  “But it won’t be honorable,” the warden objected.

  “Honorable is what your king says is honorable. Do it or you’ll be shoveling pigshit if I decide to let you live, that is.”

  The reticent warden’s boots gave off a suction cup sound as he lifted them from the sticky floor and moved toward me. The sounds of a sword being removed from a sheath rang in my ears. It was the worst song I’d ever heard. I didn’t like requiems, especially those designated for me.

  The king urged, “Do it. What are you waiting for?”

  “Do you want to do it?” the warden asked.

  The king answered, “I don’t care. If you want to be sent to the pig farms, step aside.”

  Lying on the side of my head, I peered up out of my peripheral and saw a blurry silver object rising in the air. My heart stopped. It joined my arms and legs. I flailed around mentally, but physically, I lay motionless on the floor, the fruit flies flying up my nostrils.

  If anything could get me to move it would be this uncomfortable feeling, but I awaited my fate. My eyes watered, and I focused back on the ground level. Straight ahead, I noticed a pair of knee high black boots with red laces.

  The fluttering sound of wings grabbed my attention and led me to believe that a thousand bats had escaped from cracks in the castle walls. Then my scrambled brain put it together. The Morrigan’s boots.

  I regained movement and jumped up as a rush of relief bounced around my chest like a pinball of hope. A murder of crows flooded into the room and attacked the Warden of the West. The birds of death knocked his sword from his hand. One group went after the warden, quickly overwhelming him with their vast numbers.

  I also noticed that another division had surrounded the sword lying on the floor. Utilizing their feet, the crows lifted the weapon off the ground and raised it to about chest level. The sword hovered in front of the warden. The crows surrounding him positioned his arms behind his back and flew away from his chest and midsection.

  With the sword located about seven feet in front of the warden, the crows’ wings began to beat ferociously. The Morrigan whistled, and her crows took off like a shot. The silver gleam had a whole new look in my eyes now. As they neared the warden, one by one, the crows let go of the blade. It started at the point and flowed back toward the hilt in a wave of avian darkness.

  The final crow let go its hold on the blade, only leaving behind the ones carrying the hilt as the point entered the warden’s chest. His eyes widened in horror as the demons of death danced in his soul. He could fight it, but resistance against the Morrigan was futile.

  The man fell and spasmed for almost a minute before succumbing to the stillness of death. The entire murder of crows attacked the body, plucking away at it and seemingly bringing it back to life. The warden jumped up to his feet and fought against the crows.

  I peered down and noticed the faint adumbration of the warden’s body on the ground. His soul was fighting against being taken by the Morrigan. I turned to the corner of the room and there she stood, tapping one of her Death Cards. Interesting. I knew she had them for humans, but I had no idea she could use them on the immortal supernatural beings.

  She mouthed the words, “We’re even.”

  She ran across the room and through an exit as her crows followed her with the warden, who was kicking and screaming in protest. A sin was normally shunned by the Gods, not celebrated. But my lie for the Morrigan that I’d told back at Clara Spiritus showed the complex situation of the pantheons.

  It was almost like that Billy Madison, “Man, I’m glad I called that guy” moment.

  I’d almost forgotten the king and my eyes shifted to the purple smear in my peripheral. Frozen by fear, the old man stood in place, panting with his mouth agape, showing his white tongue. The other warden, off to my left, started to stir.

  I took two steps back to avoid a quick attack and kept an eye on both the warden and the king. The Warden of the North rubbed his temple and opened his eyes wide. Without saying a word, he walked casually past the king and toward the exit door.

  The king screeched, “Where are you going? We have to finish this. I am your king, damn it.”

  Any king or leader who had to remind people of his stature was no ruler at all.

  “Finish it yourself. I saw what happened to our friend from the West. He’s friends with the Morrigan. He’s like the fucking chosen one.”

  Chapter 31

  The king’s chickens had come home to roost. Treating people like shit kept people in check, but it made it much easier for them to walk away from you when the opportunity presented itself. Even a king who controlled all the riches in the land could fall prey to this tactic.

  That was why I had tried to be nice to the beings I’d encountered in hell. I’d kind of strained those relationships during my rotunda run with Darkwing, but it had paid off handsomely in Sleepy Willow with the Sphinx, the Rosendales and the Red Cap.

  I told him, “Give it up, King Ballistar. You submit yourself and I’ll make sure you are taken to an other world where you can live out the rest of your days. Your help is gone. You don’t stand a chance.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He added casually, “More than twelve hundred years.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I took over as king twelve hundred years ago. Nobody thought I could win the crown. But I did. And all that is over now. Do what you must.” He held his arms up in the air.

  That was easier than I’d anticipated. I approached him carefully. A burst of wind hit my face, blowing the stink around and making me wonder where it had come from. I caught a glimpse of a blurry brown object on my left.

  I turned at the last second as one of the tables from the corner of the room flew in my direction. I ducked and threw my left arm up in defense. The table slammed into my arm and the rest of the weight of the table followed, hitting my head and hip simultaneously. It knocked me down, but I felt little pain and jumped back up.

  The Sphinx needed to bottle and sell those kisses because my left arm should have been throbbing, yet I felt almost no pain. As I got back to my feet, the king had tables and chairs flying at me through telekinesis of his own.

  I bounced left and right avoiding the wooden assault. The relentless attack picked up in intensity and soon I couldn’t avoid a chair. I held up my arms and the chair rammed into my arm, busting into small pieces and falling harmlessly to the floor.

  I could do this all day, I thought, as I leaned to the left. A solid object crashed into the back of my skull. That one got me as I stumbled around the spinning room. I felt the lump on the back of my head and cleared my vision just in time to see a circular table heading for me like a spinning frisbee. It was headed for my knees so I crouched quickly and launched myself off the ground.

  I appeared I would clear the table, but the rotating wooden obj
ect clipped my toe, sending me head over heels and toppling back down to the ground. More furniture smashed down on me. Now the pain was starting to build up.

  The onslaught of tables and chairs finally ceased. From under a pile of splintered furniture, I shoved the pieces of wood off me and sat up. The king’s attack had kicked up about a hundred years’ worth of dust in the form of a hazy cloud.

  As the contemporaneous sawdust mingled with several years of uncleaned party mites hanging heavy in the stale air, I had an epiphany. I had been looking at my experience in hell the wrong way.

  Sure, I had been deemed worthy of most of the levels due to bad behavior. But almost all of those deeds were smaller parts of a bigger act. I’d never killed anyone just for the fun of it. The farthest I’d ever gone in that regard had been when I’d shot the lawyer, Mathias, in the foot.

  For me to defeat the king, I needed to do some things that would be considered despicable by most people. But the end result would benefit an entire society of the supernatural. It seemed like I needed to embrace my dark side and use it when necessary to benefit the whole. The cameo visit from the Morrigan had reinforced that point.

  I conjured two fireballs, one for each hand, as I sprang to my feet. A mess of busted tables and chairs fountained into the air, momentarily distracting the king. Perfect. With two quick underhand flicks, both balls were in motion.

  The king quickly detected the ultraviolet green spheroids so I drew two more to each palm. He dodged to the right to avoid the first ball and jumped over the second mass that sped under his sandals and brushed the bottom of his purple robes.

  It was a deft move for an ancient immortal but it gave me the opening I needed. I zinged the other two balls at him before he landed. As the soles of his leather sandals hit the sticky ground, he tried to dive to the right but his feet wouldn’t move. His own sloppiness in not cleaning up after parties had come back to haunt him.

  His foot finally lifted off the floor with the sound of a suction cup being peeled away. The first bright green ball hit him in the right shoulder and jolted his upper body. He twisted to the right, his arms flailed and the momentum pulled his other foot off the ground.

  The second ball made contact and tore through his hip, first breaking the bone, then burrowing into his flesh. He didn’t scream. Not even a little yelp, which was curious. I saw the pile of robes moving gently up and down indicating that he wasn’t dead so I approached cautiously.

  I called on fire. Liquid fire. The only way to kill a sidhe was to shut down every one of their organs. This was my least favorite thing to do.

  The king struggled, his legs flailing from under his tangle of robes. Blood gushed from his wounds, and like the sands of an hourglass, dribbled slowly onto the dirty floor. But for the dear king, his hourglass was running out.

  I neared the king and he still didn’t let out an uncomfortable grunt. His face was hidden under his voluminous robes as he said, “I’ll take your offer now. Thank you.”

  I explained, “That offer went away when you denied it earlier.”

  His voice screeched, “You can’t kill a man who is giving himself up. Why, you’ll be no better than me.”

  King Ballistar had a solid point. A man was only as good as his word. Sure, I’d lied sometimes in the past, but I had promised him the offer of going to an other world. As the two choices seesawed in my head, the purple mass at my feet moved.

  The king sprang to his feet with the quickness of a gazelle, reappearing from under the purple robes with his arms extended at me. Lightning pulsed in his fingertips, begging to be released.

  However, I was prepared for his sneak attack, and a split second before he unleashed an electric hell on me, I blasted him with a strong mist of fire.

  He closed his eyes as I waved my hands up and down, attempting to cover his entire body. The liquid tore through his skin and went on to destroy all his organs. His body turned white, like a pillar of salt, and slumped down under its own weight. A sudden breeze kicked the ashes of the King of Sleepy Willow into the air.

  The King’s remains took on a sudden enchantment. They sparkled with all the colors of the rainbow and streaked around the room, zipping out the exit door.

  I didn’t have any time to celebrate the victory because if the King’s army could pull off a victory outside, they would just appoint a new king. I hustled out of the banquet hall and headed down the zig zag path of the hallway. I drew two orange fireballs to my palms and injected them with extra electrical currents.

  I concentrated on the correct path to get out of there.

  I rounded a bend and saw that the door to the kidnapping room was ajar. Without hesitating, I booted it open and rushed inside. I saw the door to the balcony open and peered through it at the battlefield. The first thing I spotted was a purple dragon surround by two black dragons.

  I sprinted for the balcony with reckless abandon to save my noble friend. When I hit the middle of the balcony, I achieved top speed and didn’t slow down. I approached the railing, crouched my knees and launched myself into the air, capturing the attention of the two black dragons.

  I launched the orange fireballs as the two dragons turned to me. The two balls blazed through the air, one headed for each dragon. Neither dragon moved an inch, each ones’ wings moving slowly, allowing them to hover in the air.

  The dragons waited casually for the fireballs. At the last moment, they both opened their mouths. My fireballs quickly disappeared into the gaping jaw of each dragon. The black dragons thought they had solved the problem and turned back to attack the lavender dragon.

  Without warning, one of the black dragon’s heads exploded like a piñata full of red Twizzlers. Two seconds later, the other one’s went off like a stick of dynamite. The overconfident dragons hadn’t realized I’d pulsed the fireballs with a charge that would explode eventually.

  Speaking of overconfidence, I mildly regretted my dangerous move as I looked down at the earth racing toward me. Sometimes, I acted before thinking. These were the types of things Burn had warned me about. This would fall squarely into that category. But I was the hammer, never the nail. I made shit happen in a world where people sat around blaming their problems on everyone else.

  This would be the perfect way to die. Possibly, the most heroic thing I’d ever done. And just like that, it hit me. When it was staring me in the face and never more imminent. When I should have been shitting my pants and pissing myself out of fear. When it couldn’t have been scarier, I was calm. I came to peace with my death. Almost like I’d figured out my role in the world.

  It didn’t matter if I was ranked among the best wizards of all time. Or if I was the chosen one of the Celtic Gods. What mattered was the people’s lives I’d saved or made better through my actions. And yes, I was going to die one day. But how many lives could I improve before that day came?

  I realized that even with all the gifts that had been bestowed upon me, I was special. But in the same regard, I was no different than the anonymous dead father lying face down in the grass below me. I’d helped a lot of people in the past few years, but I was going to die, just like the father. The great equalizer of life. Death didn’t care about how many lives I’d saved. Equal opportunity for all.

  And with those simple thoughts during my plunge to death, I’d accepted my own mortality within the grand scope of the world. I wasn’t going to live forever and I probably wouldn’t save the world. And for the first time, I was fine with that.

  I closed my eyes, the wind rippling against my face and body, and thought about what I would miss the most. It wasn’t the magic or hunting down supernaturals or solving mysteries. It was saving families.

  In turn, I was going to miss my family. I was going to miss Burn, Dante and my baby to be. It had taken me a long time to figure it out, probably because I’d come from a broken home, but that’s what life was all about. That was the legacy I would leave, not some campfire stories about how I blew up a demon or killed a dragon. Alt
hough those would be pretty cool too.

  I smirked at the cruel mistress known as life. Every person wanted to figure out the meaning of life before they died. If only I’d figured it out a little sooner than mere seconds before my grand demise. C'est la vie.

  In the split second before contact, a single thought entered my empty head. I hoped I’d made the world a better place through my actions. For the longest time, I’d felt like a burden and that the world would have been better off without me.

  Ironically, my soul never felt freer than right now.

  Then I hit the ground.

  It was softer than I’d imagined. It felt like a big beanbag of wrinkled reptilian skin. The earth moved, carrying me with it. My eyelids shot open and the wind caused them to water and blur. Using the back of one hand, I dabbed my eyes and everything slowly came into focus.

  I looked down at a mound of black dragon flesh underneath me and grabbed on tightly, sinking my fingers into one of the wrinkles. The evil dragon thrashed around, trying to lose me, but I dug into the hot skin on its back and got ready for the rodeo. The dragon dipped and dived before going into a barrel roll.

  When the dragon went upside down, I hung on for dear life as I dangled from the back of the beast, my two trembling hands saving me from instant death. The dragon completed the roll and I sighed in relief. I leaned to the side to see around the dragon’s thick neck and noticed Pembrooke and Alayna headed straight for me.

  A plume of flames shot out of Pembrooke’s mouth and I leaned back behind the dragon’s neck. An instant rush of heat and rippling energy blasted me in the face as the dragon screamed a song of agony. Nothing sounded as desperate as the wailing moans of a dying dragon. It grated against your soul.

  As the dragon turned its head to the side, I could see and smell the burnt flesh on its profile. Some of the melted skin hung down from its chin like thick whiskers from a beard. The dragon’s wings stopped beating and we started to drop like a boulder. Not again.

  I didn’t have any time for further contemplation of my life because Alayna’s voice cut through the sounds of battle. She called, “Move to the right.”