by Levi Black
And then he does.
And his eyes change from softly unfocused to razor-sharp and honed into the meat of me and I feel his gaze on the pulse in my throat.
I do not step back from him.
It takes everything I have not to.
The coat draws tight around me, hardening against my skin, becoming like armor as its voice burbles in the bottom layer of my brain.
He turns his face toward Mylendor, but his eyes stay on mine. “What sweetmeats have you brought to my table this time, faithful hound?”
His voice is so normal it’s a shock. He sounds like any man with a mid-timbre voice that would speak to you about the weather.
“I came here under my own power and authority. No one brought me.” I know how these things work, so I answer before Mylendor can and I put an edge on my voice like a machete. “And I am no fucking sweetmeat.”
“You travel with bits and bites, my darling; I made an assumption.” His eyes slide to Ashtoreth and even through the coat I feel her go tense, every part of her vibrating as her head drops and her eyes fall to the floor.
Winnie the hound click-clacks to her, a long growl shaking his frame. Long, thin ropes of the ichor that coats him hang and sway from his vivisected chest.
The Yellow Man’s upper lip curls back. “I will staple your skin back on, Conmortavich.” He spits the last word. Is it a name, an insult? “You are no protection for her. Not here.”
Mylendor slides sideways, to the Yellow Man’s left side, covering his flank. Her skull has gone flatter, the bones shifting, giving a leonine cast to her features. Her body sinks, center of gravity lowering.
The air vibrates with her own low growl.
The coat sings frantically up into my brain.
The choir of patients around us take up a round-robin moaning that slithers between us, moving in and out, a long python of undulation.
Ashtoreth shakes, fine trembles running under her skin like many-legged things chasing one another. The panic screams off her and she might collapse in on herself.
Javier stands close to her, face nearly blank, and I don’t know if he’s scared or in shock or oblivious to what’s about to explode around him.
When you’re outnumbered act quickly and decisively.
I decide what I’m doing and the coat agrees, so I shake magick into the Mark on my palm and make my move.
40
THE COAT GOES soft and supple around me, flaring out like a dragon wing as I push off on my left foot. It stretches out and up, forming a wall of solid darkness between my people and the bad guys. Mylendor rolls away, her feline body twisting and curling in on itself as she does. The King in Yellow jolts back, poncho flapping, snapping at the chill air as he tries to get away.
I’m on him before he moves a full step.
My left hand curls in the fabric of his poncho, fingers digging for purchase. The cloth is thick, like sailcloth, but brittle, dry-rotted, and my fingers tear through it. They sink in and hit something hard and smooth.
His wings, flits across my mind as I scrabble around for something to grip, to grab, to hold on to, so my strike has as much power behind it as I can muster.
My right hand is a magenta comet, surrounded by a nimbus of etheric energy that crackles and sparks. Master Ken’s gruff voice jabs in my mind, the words from his lessons long ago just as harsh and unforgiving as he was a teacher.
All your strength every strike! Hit to destroy your opponent.
I punch through my body, using my hips for torque, driving with my whole torso and not just my shoulder. My fist is a stone from a catapult, a runaway train, a nuclear warhead of magick and physical potential.
I drive it into the King in Yellow’s chest.
And everything explodes.
The backlash of magick slams into me and it feels like a cannonball trying to take my head off my shoulders. My feet leave me and I drop, slapping onto the cobblestones. My skin goes raw from magickburn, scoured by the very energy I unleashed, and my eyes turn all black deep and pure as if they’ve been plucked from their sockets. I lie, pinned to the ground by the weight of my own body, the coat limp around me and moaning in my head.
As my vision clears I see the King in Yellow.
Standing over me.
And smiling.
41
“MAYHAPS THAT WAS a mistake,” he says.
I push myself up to sitting and slide back from the looming King in Yellow as the coat coils itself back toward me. Once I get a few feet between me and him I glance around.
He and I are the only two conscious.
Javier and Ashtoreth lie next to each other, his arm across her, neither of them within five feet of where they stood when my spellpunch went off. Winnie the skinhound has his back against Ashtoreth’s side and I have to look hard to see his splay-ribbed sides moving. Mylendor is sprawled against a mound of unconscious mental patients, arms and legs tangled in their straps and jackets. The coat is silent and still, full of drag like I went swimming in the damn thing and it’s waterlogged.
My feet almost stick to the coat as I climb to them. As I fight to not trip and face-plant into the cobblestones I become acutely aware of how much it normally helps me move. It hums along my skin ever so slightly and I am sure it’s not dead, but I don’t know just how badly hurt it may be. The silence in my head is cavernous, pressing against the inside of my cranium, and it’s hard to think my own thoughts without the constant gurgle of noise from the coat for them to skim over. Since I woke wearing it my brain has had a stream of alien song running in the background and without it I am left feeling that my synapses are misfiring and the chemical connections that form my thoughts are loosely fitted and could slip their sockets at any second.
Wake up soon. I push out to the coat.
The King in Yellow moves and my attention is brought back to him.
The thoughts in my brain tighten, squeezing together as I realize that with the coat non-responsive (unconscious?) I can’t get to the weapons inside it.
No Oathbreaker.
No Aqedah.
No soul gem.
I am weaponless.
HELPLESS?
No.
I full-stop refuse that thought. Push it away with violence.
My bone marrow turns to ice water as the King in Yellow stares at me. His left eye drifts to the outside, disturbing for its laziness, as if it is unconcerned with the thing before it and has wandered away to see something else to hold its attention.
Thoughts are straying.
Moving around untethered in my skull.
I shake my head to clear it.
He takes my movement another way and the eyebrow over his lazy eye slides up. “Oh, you think otherwise?”
“What?” I ask. So clever.
“You shake your head at my claim that your assault was a mistake.” He takes a long step in my direction. “You say that you committed no error?”
Act as if. Hold your ground. Be a wolverine.
“Of course I do.” I don’t know what else to say.
“You threw your magick at me to no effect.” He chuckles and in it I hear an echo of the stridulation of his wings. “Seems a mistake to me.”
I catch a loose thread in my unraveled thoughts and grab on to it. “No effect?” I raise my own eyebrow and sweep my hand over the people lying around us and the words come to me. “You attempted to harm those under my protection. Now they slumber peacefully as I guard them and your intentions toward them have disappeared.”
He straightens at this. For a long moment he seems to contemplate what I said. “My intentions toward them have changed, moppet.” His smile creeps back into place. “But you should worry that my intentions toward you have changed also.”
“Do I look worried?” I push my eyebrow up higher, going for cocky, and try to make my face take on a sardonic, reckless casualness that doesn’t truly feel successful.
That lazy eye of his rolls in its socket, near-black iris moving m
y way until it lands in my direction and rocks to and fro like a roulette ball before settling in its socket and staring at me.
Always bet on red.
The stare has weight to it and lies heavy against my skin, saturates my flesh to the bone, as if I’ve been underwater for weeks and then dug out all swollen and full and sloshy. It soaks me and my lungs tighten as if the bottoms of them are sodden cardboard, unable to pull molecules of oxygen from the breath I drag into them.
I break the look and begin studying my nails.
They are ragged, chewed to the quick; the cuticles one and all have tissue-thin strips of skin waving in the air over narrow furrows of painful pink flesh.
He isn’t used to humans, not sane ones, (yeah, like I’m sane); I can feel it. He seems to hold court with the gibbering lunatics.
Like the song goes: I’ve always been crazy, but it’s kept me from going insane.
“Mayhaps you are a fool. Mayhaps you are ignorant of who I am.”
I don’t tear the little bit of skin off my index finger cuticle even though I desperately want to. The habit rides me hard. One therapist suggested that biting my nails was a very passive form of self-harm for me.
I told her there was nothing passive about it.
But I’m not removing a bit of my skin in this place with this monster here before me.
I put my hands in the pockets of the coat. They feel just like regular pockets on a regular leather coat, but as my fingertips caress the smooth lining of them a small murmur begins at the base of my brain. A glance tells me that Winnie the skinhound is beginning to move a bit.
I just need a little more time.
I fake a yawn. “Let’s see, Hayster the rumbly, King of Yaller, master of a toothless hound, and a sign of some kind.”
Mylendor lifts her head but doesn’t stand. “I can show how toothless I am, meatstick.”
The King in Yellow moves his hand in her direction, silencing her. “You missed the most important title I have. The reason I may allow you to live another day.”
I don’t respond. I just wait for it.
He leans in, looming over me again.
“I am the Concubine of Shupnikkurat, Paramour of the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, mated to Baphomet Midnightress.”
I don’t know what that means but the words strike chords deep inside, engendering a bad feeling about them, so I say: “I don’t know what that means.”
He blinks at me and the action makes his lazy eye drift. “Have you never been in love?”
Daniel comes to the forefront of my mind. I put the thought of him away, protecting it. I don’t know if the King in Yellow can read minds, but too many things can. “I don’t know what that means to me.” I shrug and the coat shifts on me. It’s lighter than a second ago; it’s waking up, coming to. “Right now it doesn’t concern me at all.”
“Oh, but it does. It is the basis for the agreement between us.”
“I have agreed to nothing.”
“Did you darken my court with no purpose?” He sniffs and his voice rises to a higher pitch; it gives his words more of a buzz, like he has a throat full of honeybees. “I scoff at this notion.”
Before I can speak something changes. Like a shift in the ozone when a storm is approaching or the flash of clarity that you get right before the drunk driver smashes into your car, and my spine is suddenly painted in ice water. I shiver inside the coat and it tightens around me and its voice begins to babble in my head and the dread inside me builds until I am not surprised when it happens.
It feels inevitable, inexorable, unstoppable.
“She has come for me.”
I turn.
With a sinister chuckle he rises, separating from the not darkness like a splinter pushing through flesh. I’ve never seen him without the coat that hangs around me. He’s an ebon blade: long, slender, and sharp. Made for puncturing lungs through rib cages. He’s sleek and beautiful and oh so, so deadly.
A ghost.
A god.
A guru.
In an impeccable suit with his red right hand.
The godsdamned, motherfucking Man in Black.
42
“HELLO, ACOLYTE.”
The Crawling Chaos stands before me and tilts his head as he addresses me. He smiles and his lips stay closed, but I know that behind them is a mouth full of shark teeth, jagged and serrated, designed to cut meat from bone. His jawline is still clean and jackal long, his nose still bladed and sitting between hooded, heavy-lidded eyes. Hair now hangs over his brow in a careless shag of ebony that falls to blend at the shoulders of his suit. The white of his collar is pure but doesn’t gleam, doesn’t reflect off his dusky skin. He is tall and thin and of an enviable height.
I feel small.
Over the burbling voice of the coat is a rising tide of white noise. It’s panic, unadulterated fear spilling across my thoughts, drowning them.
The Man in Black raises his hand, his red right hand, and lightly strokes his chin with skinless fingers. I stare at it and my eyes go fuzzy, but my mind blazes with the memory of it, at the raw fibers of the muscles, the flat strings of tendons laid over them in a lattice of pull and relax, tension and release. The veins and nerves all pulse over the thin red membrane that covers the whole thing, clinging to the palm and pads of the fingers, lying over the knuckles and dorsum, rolling over the wrist joint and disappearing under the linen cuff of his shirt. I see it all in my mind’s eye and I remember all the times he touched me with that hand, cool, dry, slick, and the crackle of elder god hoodoo.
The coat tightens across my chest and something solid digs into my ribs below my breast.
The white noise gets louder.
The coat squeezes again, harder, the solid thing presses hard enough to bruise, and it slices through the panic and I know what it is.
The hilt of Oathbreaker.
The coat is telling me the cursed blade is available from its fathomless depths, only a split-second’s reach inside.
The coat is all the way back and I am armed.
I take in air with that thought and it clears my head like wind on a foggy morning.
“I’m not your Acolyte.”
This smile parts his lips just slightly and I see a gleam of white. “Then what are you to me, Charlotte Tristan Moore?”
I push aside all the implications of that question. I am not going to get into a war of words with the Lord of Nightmares. “Your executioner.”
The King in Yellow shakes his head, stepping forward. His arms are crossed, hands inside the ragged sleeves of his poncho. He looks even more insectish than before, like a praying mantis or some other form of locust. “He is owned, Little Godslayer; you may not claim him.”
I stare at him. “What?”
“He is mine, caught and tagged.” His arm slides out of the sleeve and he extends it toward me. On a wrist that is all skin and bone hangs a gold bracelet made of fine chain and tiny charms in the form of multi-legged creatures. It shines as if lit from within, giving the metal the illusion of being liquid. The King in Yellow tilts his head toward Nyarlathotep, who raises his red right hand and gives it a shake. A matching bracelet tumbles down and hangs against the raw crimson flesh and nicotine-coloured tendons. I watch the two of them clench their hands in sync, matching bracelets flaring brighter and tinkling like mad fairies.
As I watch the Man in Black I see the ring.
On the third finger of that red right hand sits a silver ring with a stone the colour of spring grass.
The colour of my love’s eyes.
The colour of Daniel’s eyes.
It slips, rattling between the knuckles. It is the essence of Daniel, his soul or something much like it. The Man in Black took it the last time I saw him. It’s the reason Daniel has been in a coma for these last months. I need that ring to fix Daniel, to restore him.
The King in Yellow snaps his fingers, drawing my eyes from the ring. “If you want to kill him you must earn him.”<
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I smile and drop my hand into the pocket of the coat. My fingers find what I am reaching for and the Mark on my palm begins to tingle as they close on it and draw it out.
In my hand is a long knife with a heavy spine and a wedge-shaped iron blade set in a plain wood handle, both of them stained with ancient blood. The Aqedah. The Knife of Abraham. I raise it between me and the King in Yellow.
“What do I have to do to just take a finger?”
“I do not offer him piecemeal, Little Godslayer.”
The Man in Black clears his throat. “You should not offer me at all.”
The King in Yellow turns. “You stumbled into my court seeking asylum, wounded at her hand and leaking yourself upon my flagstones. You knelt before my throne and sought the Yellow Sign to protect you from her. You brought her into my court.”
“I did no such thing. She has made it clear I have no control over her.”
“Your actions before your service to me sparked her desire to find you. Your fortunes have fallen since you attempted to make her yours. I have need of her service and she has designs on your life, or at the least your finger. I own you, Lord of Nightmares. I am Hastur, the Rambling God, and I will strike whatever bargain I wish with you as the collateral.”
He turns back to me.
“He’s slumming it now?” I ask.
The King in Yellow just looks at me and I see he doesn’t understand the question.
I try again. “He’s busted, he’s broke, and he works for you now?”
I get a nod of the head as assent.
I laugh and it feels good. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen! The big, bad Crawling Chaos groveling at the feet of another.”
“I do not grovel,” the Man in Black says.
“You will if you become mine.” I see Mylendor climb to her feet. She’s still shaky from the backlash of my magick.
Or she’s faking it really well.
My people are stirring but still out.
The coat rustles around me.
The King in Yellow glances down at the Aqedah.
“I do not allow weapons in my court.”