by K. A. M'Lady
“Perhaps, Ogre. But leaving I shall be.”
For a beat of a heart, we all stood waiting for Gimlit to strike a killing blow or for the Vamp to make some ridiculous move. Nothing happened. Well, nothing except the thick, vaporous blackness that seemed to slough off of Lucien’s flesh right before all of our eyes.
One second he was clutching me in a death grip, my life in his hands, my heart pounding at the uncertainties of everything and the next, his hands, his body, his entire being melted into a noxious black haze thick enough to gag on as he evaporated into the shadows of the night.
“Holy shit!” Dragon whispered, worry lacing each word as his normally tan complexion paled a horrid shade of grey.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked, my voice frantic as I began swiping down my arms to get the slimy feeling of sloughing flesh off of me. Once again I was majorly confused and totally freaked out by all of the Vampire hou-ha bullshit. There are days I really hate playing Blind Pixie’s Bluff. “Does somebody want to tell me what hell is going on?”
“The last time I saw a Death Stalker fade into a Shadow was almost two thousand years ago, Rihker. At the beginning of the Goblin Wars,” Gimlit said, his turquoise eyes distant. Lost in the memories of war and death.
“You’re not that old. Are you, Gim?” I asked, suddenly very unsure of everything. Forgetting once again who and what Gimlit truly was. Long before he was my Guardian, he was a great warrior. His people still revered him.
“Rihker, you need to tell me everything that has happened here tonight. Starting from the time that the Silent Court called you.”
“What? Why now?”
“Because things are about to get very, very bad,” he said, sheathing his sword and turning to close the door on the dark world beyond.
Some days it just doesn’t pay to even get out of bed.
Chapter Six
Because he speaks humbly and serenely, without effort, he seems to
Know me like a father,
Or like the old mariners, who, leaning on their nets, at the hour of
Winter and the winds anger,
Would sing to me in my childhood the song of Erotókritos, with their
Eyes full of tears
From Upon a Line of Foreign Verse
Translated from the Modern Greek by A.E. Stallings
Dawn had come and gone and with it any reasonable hope of a decent day’s rest. I had spent the last of the darkness and my entire morning in my kitchen with my Weres and Kieran telling Gimlit everything that had occurred since I’d left the house that evening. Gimlit was still trying to work his way around the pieces of Fred the Flesheater hacked up and warbling around in the trunk of my rental car.
He couldn’t quite seem to grasp good ole Fred slithering around like a grub worm, seeking out morsels of my flesh to munch upon. Oh, he bought the part about the pissed-off Pixie hacking his limbs off and then stuffing them into my trunk, all right. No big surprise there, with my past history of minor fits of anger. But even he was perplexed about the ‘life’ that seemed to be wandering around in Fred’s melon like a couple of errant seeds seeking purchase in the ooze the Zombie had for brains.
When the first hints of daylight approached, Kieran said his good-days before kissing me as he went off to Vampire sand-land. At least someone in the house will be rested for tonight; I thought dryly, envying him the ability to sleep the sleep of the dead. Apparently death did have its upsides.
As I was slugging down my third cup of coffee, I was trying to think of what they were besides sleeping when everyone else was awake. Beauty sleep has its merits, mind you, but I guarantee that Kieran doesn’t need any help in the luscious department.
“I want to see this Zombie,” Gimlit was saying as I was staring at Kieran’s retreating backside.
“Fine, Gim. But I’m telling you, if he hobbles his way from the trunk, you’re stuffing him back in there.”
“Tell me again, mistress, of this bubble that surrounded you while the flesheater was attacking you.”
“I don’t know,” I said, still perplexed by the whole damn thing as I shoved my chair out from the table and the rest of us made our way to the front door. “I didn’t even know I was in a freakin bubble. I just kept yelling for Cage to fucking help me as ole dusty-lips was mackin on me, and Cage was nowhere to be seen. When I finally got Fred off of me and stood up, that was when I noticed it.” I made my way down the front steps and into the cool pale light of morning. It was October twenty-seventh, and the leaves surrounding my house were in mid-change of their autumn foliage. The world began to glow a crisp copper hue as the sun began to rise, glinting on the remaining trace amounts of snow from the night before.
“What did the bubble look like, Rihker?” Gimlit asked as we huddled around the trunk of the car. I put the key in the trunk, ready to turn and open it, but his large hand stayed my motion. “The bubble, Rihker?”
His behavior was beginning to freak me out. This wasn’t like my Gimlit. His normal calm, soothing state of Zen-ness was slipping at the seams, giving away to a more practical, calculating warrior-like attitude that I wasn’t used to seeing.
Granted, I’d heard the stories of the Goblin Wars. The Goblins had massacred millions of Others in their coupe attempts to take over the Other World. If not for the merging of Ogres, Fey and even Death Stalkers, who knows where our kind would be today. But I had not been born then, and I still knew so little.
It is still whispered throughout the lower rungs of the Silent Court Halls and beyond that, Gimlit had killed hundreds, maybe even thousands of the Goblin Horde. He was a fierce warrior and a great healer among his people. To this very day, they still sing his praises.
Time had been so different for our people then; chaotic, changing. It was because so many of the Others wished to live as free-men among the humans that the Silent Court was created. Leaders were chosen among our kind to rule over us; mete out our own brands of justice and keep the humans safe when Others went beyond human laws.
Because of these decisions, life in the Other World would never be the same. Had never been the same. Once we crossed into the world of humans our existence and our history, as we knew it, was forever changed.
The Goblins and many other fractions of those who wander the Realm of Other didn’t want anything to do with the humans. Well, except to maybe eat them. Or enslave them. It was their Darkness that started the Goblin Wars.
Even now, the Goblins walk with Darkness and their stain is spreading as it bleeds to unrest in the Death Stalkers. The Vampires are fighting internally over a return to hunting humans. Seeking willing offerings of blood donors, it seems, has grown too blasé for some. They yearn for the hunt, the kill.
The Goblin Horde sits in the Darkness, relishing the destruction of peace, the flowing of blood and the prospect of battle, waiting for their moment of uprising.
I saw all of this in the subtle blink of Gimlit’s pale turquoise eyes, his large hand heavy on mine, his pulse steady as it matched the beat of my own. There was so much I didn’t understand about my Guardian and my link to him. So many unanswered questions.
They say he carries my powers in a spell in his heart and that is what binds us to each other; and if I unlocked the powers in my Ogre’s spell, then he will be free of me. Yet they also say to find the Book of The Way is to obtain all of my Tells. So which one is it? I silently questioned.
“It is both. And it is neither,” he said as he stared deeply into my eyes, his voice so soft I barely heard him speak.
Something had passed between Gimlit and me over the summer while I was fighting for my life against my father and the stain of his Darkness. Something we had not discussed, nor tried to re-obtain. I wondered why that was.
“So what exactly was this bubble thing that sucked you into it, Rihker?” Ien asked, breaking the silence of the moment.
The moment stretched a second longer as I gazed at the pale gray tone of Gimlit’s face. For an Ogre he truly was lo
vely to look upon; overly large and burly, yet with soft, pale skin. He had the loveliest eyes I’d ever seen an Ogre possess—turquoise, like the Mediterranean at night.
For the millionth time, I wondered how I came to be both blessed and cursed with all of these sins and responsibilities—my Ogre, my Vampires and my Weres.
Turning to Ien, I tried to shake off the spell that Gimlit seemed to be casting over me. Finally I said, “The bubble was like a syrupy gray haze of shadowed Darkness. There, but not there. It blocked out all sights of humans and others, and yet the earth remained. Even sound remained. When I touched it, that was when it fell away.”
“A Shadow Spell.”
“What? What the hell is that?” I turned back to face Gimlit.
“The Shadows called it Cloak and Darkness. During the time of the Great Darkness—the Goblin Wars, the Goblins would use Shadows to abduct their enemies in raiding parties. They would use it to slip into enemy camps unnoticed using the Darkness as their shield, the silence as their sword until the night would fill with the sounds of slaughter. By the rising of the sun, thousands of the Resistance would be dead.”
“By the Prophets…” I whispered. This was a history lesson I knew nothing about.
“I thought the spell was destroyed at the end of the Goblin Wars.” Dragon leaned against the side of the car.
“As did I,” Gimlit replied pensively.
“So who could have gotten their hands on it?” Jade asked.
“Let’s see what Rihker’s Zombie has to say,” Gimlit said, giving me the nod to open the trunk.
I was certain good ole Fred would pop out of the trunk like a Jack-in-the-box, all stupid smiles and wicked laughter, but he lay there withering and decaying; the smell of rot permeating the air like a garbage heap in high sunlight in the midst of a warm summer day.
“What the bloody hell!” I exclaimed, waving the air away from my face in a sad attempt to keep the scent of rotting flesh from clinging to my sinuses. There was something about decaying corpses that seemed to linger and stick to the roof of your mouth like bad peanut butter that you never could quite swallow.
“It would seem that whatever or whoever hath called your Zombie from its slumber has itself been returned to the Shadow Lands,” Gimlit was saying as he peered down at the rotting remains, completely unaffected.
“What do you mean, returned?”
“If the animator of the flesh is no longer of this plane, then the Zombie rots away.”
“So how the hell does something not of this plane animate a Zombie?” I asked, even more confused than I was when all of this shit started.
“Well,” said Gimlit, “the animator would first need to be here to call the Zombie. Then, they would either have to be returned to Shadow Lands...”
“Or were already from the Shadow Lands, and someone would have had to have slain them,” I said finally seeing where he was going with this.
“So how does Lucien get Shadow Slaves and Necromancers to do his bidding?” I wondered. “And why?”
That was the fifty-million-dollar question. Yet another one that would have to wait to be answered, as Cage and his black Yukon were barreling down my driveway like a stampeding boar.
Gazing into the white-streaked gleam of dawn blazing across the high gloss of his spiffy paint job, I seriously considered running for cover into the thicket of the forest surrounding my house. I knew in no uncertain terms there was no way in hell I was going to get any sleep now.
“Whatever it is, Cage, go roust up some other lackey on the Court’s payroll,” I growled as the whir of his window came to a shush along with his cloud of dust as he ground to a halt.
“Well, good morning to you too, Miss Happy Sunshine. Nice to see that you woke up on the right side of the bed.”
“I haven’t been to bed yet, Cage, so stow it.”
“You always were bitchy in the morning, Rihker. One would think with all that sex, it would do something to your disposition,” he mocked, trying to goad me into yet another argument.
“What the hell do you want, Adam?” He’d been here exactly one minute and I was already sick of him.
“Relax, Rihker,” Cage laughed as annoyed shock spread across my features unbidden. “Surprisingly, I don’t actually need your help this morning. I need your wolves.”
Of course I didn’t find anything amusing in the request at all. What the hell did the police want with my wolves? My wolves? When did that happen?
“We’ve got some ‘turner cornered downtown; supposedly slaughtered his family. We need some help getting him to either turn completely or coaxed back down. He keeps tearing up my men.”
A ‘turner, just what my morning fucking needed. If Cage thought I was letting my wolves go downtown without me, he was out of his damn mind. I glanced at the wolves in question and got the same look of acceptance in their lovely eyes. “All right, Cage. Give us twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes? What the hell for? You gotta go get a bone from one of your dogs now too? Or maybe it’s all of them.”
“Fuck you, Cage,” I took a step towards him as total aggravation rushed through me. He just couldn’t let it go.
“I already told you, I don’t need your help,” he spat.
The deadpan glare I sent him must have been all the convincing he needed.
“Fine. Just hurry the hell up,” he conceded, returning my gaze hateful glare for hateful glare.
Cage could sit there and smolder to ashes as far as I was concerned. There was no way in hell I was letting my wolves go downtown to HQ with a bunch of trigger happy, neo-fascist, Other-World-hate-mongers with badges. Especially when there was a ‘turner locked up for the slaughter of his family. Yeah, they’d have a real high opinion of us.
This day was seriously dawning into a world of furry shit. Just how furry was going to depend on the rampaging Were on the other side of the irons.
Chapter Seven
Maybe my soul’s all right.
But my body’s all wrong.
All bent and twisted,
All this that hurts me so.
From Song of the Little Cripple at the Street Corner by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated from the German by David Ferry
The station house where they keep the Other World patrons while they wait for the Silent Court is more reminiscent of a psycho ward’s isolation unit than your neighborhood jail cell. Its lovely stark white walls, steel-enclosed doors with the slot opening for meal trays and cube on cube panoramic view is a nice touch of home for many.
Inside each cell is a steel bunk attached to the wall with its two-inch-thick mattress, a steel toilet and lovely matching sink. All the comforts of home for the downtrodden and deranged. All that it’s missing is Mom.
It was definitely not a Fey-friendly housing unit, though. Too many cold, hard, man-made metals. But it seemed to work just fine for the humans that way. What they failed to realize was that a Were anything could rip that bunk right off the wall and wrap it around them like a cloak, if they really wanted to. Damn good thing for everyone involved no one had done it so far.
Shows you where my mind was at, since I was already considering these options. If you asked me, the humans might as well have tossed the Others in the dungeon and given them a turn on the rack for all the kindness and civility they usually showed us.
But I guess I shouldn’t bitch. If they knew what really went on in the lower rungs of the Silent Court’s prisons, let’s just say they’d be screaming intolerable cruelty to whatever Activists Organization they could run screaming to. Even though it would do them absolutely no good. By the time some wide-eyed activist found his way inside the Court’s halls, the Sweepers would probably have the place wiped clean and the cells would be sparkling.
I don’t even want to think about what they’d do with all that blood and carnage after that show. The thought gave me the chills. Just thinking of the Sweepers gave me the chills, come to think of it. They were one of the very
few things that scared most of the monsters.
Monsters, hell—they scared me too. You definitely did not want to roll up on a scene with one of them. The Court used them to clean up all of the Other World dirty work, and what was even scarier, the wicked little beasts loved their jobs. The bloodier, the better.
Cage had to get clearance for us with the four sets of security before even entering the section of the jail where they housed the prisoners. All weapons had to be left at the main checkpoint, so I didn’t even bother bringing my blades with me, which was really weird. I mean, I went everywhere with my axes. They were like a growth attached to my spine. I even slept with them—a girl in my line of work just couldn’t be too careful. Especially of late. I never knew what the hell was going to climb its way from the grave and try to eat my face off.
There was no way in hell I was leaving my cherished blades in the hands of some dumb-assed human rookie cop to slather over. So I left them at home. Besides, if three Werewolves and a department full of cops couldn’t watch my back in broad daylight, I was in some serious shit.
After walking what seemed like an eternity, at the end of the long L-shaped corridor, we finally turned the corner. At first the growling and moaning started faintly, but as our steps progressed, it began to echo down the length of the hall, bouncing off the stark walls before finally reaching our ears. I knew that somewhere at its end the ‘turner was down there slamming repeatedly into the steel of his door. It was fighting the change, fighting the steel that kept him trapped. Fighting for his very existence.
“Jesus, how long has that been going on?” Garric asked. He was two steps in front of me, casually keeping pace with Cage, his long hair flowing softly down his back.
Garric was the middle born of the three wolves, his smile infectious, his sunny blond hair lush and full of waves, and he had the loveliest sky-blue eyes I’d ever seen. I knew that when he turned all furry he was a lovely shade of silver gray, and I wondered if I’d be seeing him and his brothers turn furry again today. The last time I’d seen it, they were ripping the shit out of a bear in my honor in the middle of Rembley Forest.