Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  Peter smirked. “Both. At any rate, I can’t handle the object, only the demon. The material would only destroy me.”

  Frank rubbed his chin, concealing a smile. Thanks for the tip, choirboy.

  “Well, be that as it may the order still stands and the boys across the pond get what they want.”

  The angel straightened his tie and leaned back into his chair. “Suit yourself. I tried to warn you. And with the Star in your hands I may not even have to cleanse your order.”

  Frank stood up and massaged his forehead. “I’m lost. What the fuck is black steel?”

  “It’s the... the metals, from a very old star, congealed with bits of melted rock-”

  “One of the components derived from Black Stars, Frank.” finished Peter. “Astral phenomenon that are not of my Father’s work nor any entity other, they’re outside any known dimension, a single shard of which could level an entire city.”

  “And somehow, some way, a bunch of up and coming narcoguerrillas got their hands on this cosmic nuke? Is that what’s happening?” Frank looked to Bill.

  Bill finally got up from his seat and stretched himself against a filing cabinet. “We don’t know yet. But we hear it mentioned with the Puppet Master too much for there not be a grain of truth to it. It won’t be conspicuous and it’s probably been shaped into some kind of idol or dagger. Which is why you’ll be accompanying Peter and keeping an eye out.” The angel groaned. Bill felt a lump form in his throat when he saw the vampire ball his fists, with a near imperceptible growl emanating from his quivering lips.

  Frank lunged up, almost knocking over Bill’s bookcase. “You have got to be shitting me... the man is dressed like the fuckin’ Colonel and would smoke me if given half the chance.”

  “Then you’ll be on your best behavior.” Bill turned to Peter. “You know where to go?”

  The question was seemingly an interruption to the angel’s internal musings, his chin perched on his hand like some gentleman smoker from the nineteenth century. “Oh... yes. Yes. I do. Before our Nicaraguan heathen came to his timely end, he made repeated contact with our demon. Dream communication leaves a psychic imprint of sorts, and the hottest spot was in Rabat.”

  “Motherfuckin’ Morocco.” said Frank, before moving to the office door and leaving with a loud slam.

  Bill walked over from his cabinet and gave Peter a handshake. “Well, that settles that. Good luck, and keep him on a tight leash. You have my permission to kill him if necessary, no one wants another bloodbath.”

  Peter mustered the most sincere shake and smile he could, off-put that someone so beneath him was giving him the permission to do anything. “It would be my pleasure.”

  Chapter 5: The Seeker

  He had been called. At long last he was called upon to do the only thing he could do. Hunt. The command had been simple.

  Find her. Bring her dead or alive.

  Her. Who was she? He wracked his amnesia ridden brain as to who she was, but they had taken that too, along with all other semblances of his past identity. They may have taken his past, but the marks that forged his character remained, no matter how hard they tried to remake him.

  All that was left of his memory for her was that she was important. And most importantly, her scent carried the taint that made all nature beasts and witchbreed alike tremble with rage. Demon. She had consorted with demons. As the trees and ferns passed underneath his bounding feet, the idea that she had sworn herself to the beasts of Hell filled him with a burning and violent fury.

  His rage moved more strength to his rippling muscles while his wild blood fumed and simmered like liquid fire. This was not the hunt for a heretic, determined by the whims of some bruised and decadent no name sorcerer in Calanar. This was a traitor, one who had abused her exile and gone against her people.

  He knew she had been free from her icy prison for decades, perhaps a century. And yet his masters did not consider her a threat, a spent sapling doomed to wither in the mortal world. But she did not wither. The womb of time had brought her power into bloom, and at the cusp of a new century, the high folk in their high towers began to feel a very mortal chill stalk their hearts... only now did they turn to their Seeker for righteous fire.

  The hour is late. But not too late.

  For once, the law and justice were in harmony and he was all the more glad for it.

  Each desperate mouthful of chilled air and the snapping of fallen branches, the cold night wind racing past his ears, was enough to fill him with a joy he had not felt in years. He felt like he was the wind of justice, closing in ever closer to his mark. Such feeling had even brought the Primal out from the depths of his being, the spirit with whom he shared his body with, as did all his wolf brothers.

  For many of his kind, the Primal acted as much as a bulwark against enemies as it did a blade against themselves. The consequences of when the spirit of Man was at cross purposes with the spirit of the Wolf were often bloody and dire. To avoid this fate, some sought to honor their Primal by learning its name and allowing it to run free and wild whenever it pleased.

  For the Seeker, such things were foolish. The gift of the moon was a tool, something to control, nothing more. Through sheer force of will he had beaten his beastly side into submission, but the moon’s silvery light reminded him of what he had not beaten. The Change. The Primal’s call to the Change was always strongest on a full moon and still had a hold on him like a common dog... but not forever.

  The Primal’s awakening from his high of emotion lent an explosive expansion to his bulging sinews and muscles. The heavy landings of his sharp claws threw up clods of dirt and his sharp ears twitched to the sound of squirrels rustling through the trees. Even his vision, always keen, seemed to sharpen a little more. He saw the full and rich shades of green in the leaves as surely as a man might see them in the day. He smelled roadkill three miles away, the strongest of which was a bird, a pond species by the odor of it.

  He leaped over stones and roots with a little more vigor in his jump and caught a view of the stars, high, bright and white against the acres of midnight blue sky. He passed over pine ridden slopes like a thunderbird riding out of a gale. Nothing of this world could stop him, so great was his fervor.

  His was exhilarated by his clarity of purpose and conscience. And then in the dark of night, his keen eyes picked out a lone man. His inner hunger impelled him on, lending more power to each stomp into the soft ground. He was alone. He was mortal.

  He was food.

  ***

  Ranger Stevens let his flashlight cut a swathe of light through the inky darkness. There had been reports of teenagers loitering and hollering in the woods after the park’s official hours. The middle aged man had always loved the forest, even as a boy and always tried to impart to his children the same love for nature that had been absent in so many of the youths he had tried to apprehend. He had failed on both accounts.

  He stopped and sniffed some of the green thicket, trembling in the light breeze of the alpine wind. A strange scent wafted in the air, foul but not rotten. He moved on and walked over the wet ground with a little less sureness to his step and kept his flashlight a little lower to the ground. Ideal to catch a deer. Or a corpse.

  The park was a peaceful place, a happy place. Even these days. His breath had grown heavier and he felt his heart shudder and thump as a hooting owl fluttered from the branches.

  He vowed to himself that he would take ten more steps and then head back, telling his superiors that the teens must have left. The wind howled and left over rain drops on the trees speckled his cheek. It was just night time. And the park was a peaceful place.

  By the time he reached his tenth step, the dull yellow beam of his flashlight was shaking all over, throwing its warm cast over splintered logs, the sour green of moss ridden trunks and scattering some white cottontail back into the woods. He took a deep breath and turned around. There was nothing to fear.

  Treat nature right and it’ll treat you ri
ght, he always thought. Such was the view of a civilized man, a creature of comfort. But not nature. He stopped suddenly when he heard loud cracks in the distance, as if a series of trees had fallen over. He dug his heels into the sodden nettle strewn ground and took another deep breath.

  “What in the hell...?” his trembling flashlight focused on the shifting and waving dark green brush. He expected drunk, naked teenagers or a bunch of stumbling potheads. He did not expect four hundred and fifty pounds of fur and muscle to come crashing down on his chest, pouncing him down into the wet mud before a pair of canines clamped around his throat, cutting off his scream before it even began.

  Like a gardener ripping a shallow weed from the ground and pitching it behind, so too did the ranger’s throat and wind pipe fly into the night, a red and meaty ribbon of chaff for the carrion, but not for the wolf. The ranger’s paling hands pushed and brushed against the fur pillars of the beast’s tremendous arms, his survival instinct’s last, futile effort.

  Only a few wet gurgles and squelches resounded in the damp air while his body suffered last minute spasms and tremors from profuse blood loss. Pools of red mixed with mud as the rainfall picked up again that night, the sound of hard hitting drops just another melody among the snaps and cracks as the beast savored the ranger’s marrow.

  The werewolf howled as a crescent moon peered through the umbrageous storm clouds. An auspicious start to a righteous hunt.

  Chapter 6: Fly By Night

  The water roared hot and fast. Frank scowled as he scrubbed his hands of oil and dirt in the airport bathroom. He worked alone. Last thing I needed is some golden cocksucker from Heaven telling me what to do. You fucked up Bill. He was the hammer, brought on because the messes he created sent the right messages to the right people.

  As he dried his hands under the heated blower it occurred to him how silent the rest of the bathroom was. No awkward coughs, footsteps or running faucets. Even for the late hour and in a private terminal, there should have been more people. There should have been people, period. He was alone. His eyes roved over the scummy floor, underneath the stalls and back to the dilapidated urinals, before settling on the source of disturbance. The lights.

  Fluorescent lights. If he stared at them long enough, his heightened eyes could make out the subtle flickering. He watched the color shift from a dull white to an acrid greenish-yellow, bathing the bathroom in a grotesque, downtrodden light. It was then all sound suddenly ceased, the sound of the blower and the dripping of the sinks fading into silence, as if sucked away into vacuum.

  From the bathroom entrance, walked in the tall man in black. Frank gritted his teeth and regretted not bringing his weapon. The man set down his suitcase and swept back his thinning, greasy hair. Even now his body displayed that barely perceptible distortion effect, as if reality itself couldn’t decide whether he was solid or abstract.

  “Haven’t formally met. Inopportune before, opportune now.” he said, his voice halting yet elegant, as if English wasn’t his first language. Frank’s disgust for him intensified even more. Even to a vampire, the sheer wrongness of the man’s nature struck him as especially perverse. He was like a cockroach in human clothing.

  “There was that one time I saw you, and missed the chance to kill you.”

  “Now?” The man’s eyes beamed with a sickly glint and his amused smirk only intensified Frank’s ache to end him now.

  “You know what they say about when a door closes, a window opens...”

  “See no windows here.”

  “Window, door, bullets, bare hands, makes no difference to me.” Frank was hard pressed to remember anything he hadn’t killed someone with.

  The man smirked and stepped forward, while Frank kept his eyes locked on him, his nerves alight and his body ready to pounce. “I am a man. Represent interests. Interests are interested-”

  “In the shit I’m tracking down.”

  The man folded his hands. “Blunt. One way to put it.”

  “That is the way to put it. Now fuck off.”

  The man took a deep sigh, putting his pallid hands within his silken pockets. “Francis. Or Frederic? Many lives. Many names. You disappoint us.”

  Frank watched as the man began to pace around him and held back his surprise that the man knew him so well. With his shoddy memory, it was not the first time men had tried to intimidate him by knowing more about him than he did.

  “Know you want freedom. Not what we offer. Freedom easily taken.” The man paused to look at himself in the bathroom mirror and polished the cloudy emerald wrapped around his ring finger. “We give something else. Not even time takes.”

  Frank chuckled. He knew this riddle well, the unspoken offer for elder secrets. He did not learn what he could not use, and the more the present soared into the future, the more useless the past seemed. He looked the putrescent man in the mirror. “I’ll pass. I’ve got all the time in the world. They don’t.”

  “Wait it out. Not like you.”

  “And what the fuck would you know about me?”

  “Love blood. Love women. Loved Ena. Can get first two... not her.”

  The vampire’s dead heart heated with near forgotten passion and he grew still. “No. I can find her anytime I want.” he said levelly, his back straight and his gaze penetrating.

  “Not alive. Unless passions burn for dust-” he stopped when he saw Frank’s glare. “Abrupt of me. Apologize. What if she is alive again? What would Francis say?”

  “I’d say you’re full of shit.”

  “Hasn’t heard prop-”

  Frank scoffed and stepped past him. “And if I’m lucky I still won’t.”

  The man concealed his disdain well, his face as still as an alabaster slate. “Impetuous. Unfortunate. Offer unappreciated.”

  “I’ve appreciated death too much.”

  Frank headed for the bathroom exit before looking over his shoulder, ready to deliver one final word of warning, but found nothing. He shook his head as he headed into the airport boarding gate area. Fuckin’ Spooks. Forget who they’re talking to.

  As he left the normal traffic of people resumed and sound came tumbling back into his ears. Along with something else. The voice of the tall man in black. Frank shuddered when he heard it, the man’s fluid whisper settling down onto his ancient bones.

  We will be watching you.

  ***

  Peter had his newspaper up, reading the headline:

  HOMELESS MAN DIES IN FREAK HORSE ACCIDENT

  It was all a lie of course. The rider would get blamed for losing control, but even in the black and white picture, the angel could see the real culprit. The horse. It was all in his eyes. Such animals were blessed with high intelligence and intuition, but this one possessed a glint of sagacity that eluded his more earthy kin. It was a malicious glint, sparkling with a distant and removed sadism within those big brown, ungentle eyes as only a photo could deliver.

  He figured it unlikely to be a demon. Demons seldom possessed animals, on account of them being animals. Nor a werebeast, those grotesques of nature having the good fortune of being only able to adopt forms more suited for predation. Perhaps a warlock? Cursed to serve his fellow man atop his back for as long as he lived?

  Or perhaps something more unnatural? Alas, it was a mystery for a different time and a different detective. Peter folded the wrinkle ridden, coffee stained paper and set it down just as Frank emerged from the crowd. He was a most peculiar vampire. While Peter never knew much about them, his interest in vampires as low as Frank’s interest in everything but matters of flesh and drink, he was aware of the subtle differences in the varying bloodlines.

  He knew the Slavic types east of the Volga had eyes as blue and white as the western bloodlines were red and brass, among other things. But Frank was different, and he suspected, from an older bloodline. His temperament was about the same as most his kind, the process of damnation pushing the soul to darker and more primal urges, but everything else struck him as odd. If he
was as old as Peter thought he was, then he should have been a veritable blood fiend, the need for blood growing greater as the vampire grew older, until need exceeded supply and they began their downward slide into decrepit depravity.

  Yet he has the appetite of a new blood.

  He stood up as Frank came near and looked at his gleaming watch. “Well, that was quick.”

  “Yeah, time flies.”

  The angel smiled as he lead them down the boarding ramp to their plane. “Or sometimes not at all. Come, our esteemed pilot awaits.” The Templars had connections all across the globe, and for them, no cost was spared hiring the best of the criminal underworld to their cause. At the end of the ramp waved their pilot.

  He was a tall Arabian man, dressed in a traditional captain’s garb but with an extra, ostentatious touch. His rhino horn necklace and frosted diamond rings only hinted at what riches he made in whatever unsavory profession he held before this one. He extended his hand to Peter. “Welcome aboard the White Hawk! I am Captain Hasan and you are Mr. Adams, and...?”

  “Mr. Redd.” grunted Frank, pushing his papers into the captain’s hand before ducking into the plane. Hasan looked back to Peter quizzically.

  “Don’t mind him, Captain. Civility eludes him as surely as right action and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”

  Hasan shrugged. “Ah, it is no matter. I am used to dealing with such men. Not a lotta talk but lots of action, eh? Eh?” He playfully jabbed the angel on the arm and laughed.

  Peter smiled politely before turning his gaze to Frank, noting the agitation in his scowling face and bunched up shoulders. “Oh, you have no idea.”

  Frank slumped into his cozy chair and let out a loud sigh. It had been so long since he had been in such a place. He admired the dim, hazy lights and the far away stars outside his window. He tried to ignore the way the shadows darted and loomed against the curved walls, the way they seemed to move if he only kept them in the corner of his eye. They reminded him of the man in the bathroom.