Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  Hanif was still firing his gun when his bodyguard fell to his knees. He hoped he had at least wounded Peter on the other side. A brief tug of regret hung over his mind over killing one of his own, but that’s why he hired him. To serve. He peered into the smoke and spark filled darkness. He did not see the flash of white that dashed in from the corner of his vision.

  His face depressed inwards like a wet sponge as the angel smote him with his fist. Saliva and ropes of blood spewed out in whipping ribbons as the false Interpol agent pummeled him with the wrath of god. The businessman was only capable of incoherent gurgles as his head lolled to the side.

  Peter grabbed him by his tie and forced him to look directly in his eyes. “The name! Give me his name!” Hanif coughed and groaned and by the way his eyes rolled within his sockets, Peter could tell he was hovering between the line of consciousness and unconsciousness.

  Hanif was dazed and his head throbbed, as if somehow his heart had migrated to his brain pan. He didn’t think he was being unreasonable, underestimating the man when he had so many guns trained on him. He was wrong. His toughness had taken leave of his spirit as soon as pain had taken root in his bones. “Aphon!” he gasped, through slurred lips.

  His answer only incensed the angel all the more. “The whole name!” He punctuated his point with another blow to the man’s ribs, careful not to addle his mind any more.

  Hanif grimaced and coughed in pain before speaking in a raggedy voice. “That’s all I know, I swear! Only one man in the city knows the other half.”

  Peter slammed his fist into the ground and growled. “You’re coming with me and taking me to him.” Peter glanced down the hallway that lead into the dining area, past the booths and saw police were already bunched up around the sun dappled entrance, their guns drawn.

  He looked around the dark room and his heart jumped when he saw an exit sign, illuminated in neon Arabic lettering in the very back. He hefted Hanif’s limp body up and stomped over to the exit, and kicked the door open. The harsh rays of the afternoon sun poured into the dark dining room, but the angel’s eyes adjusted immediately.

  Only Hanif let out a cry of protest.

  Peter slammed the door shut, hearing the shouts of the police and stumbled out into the city street. Immediately he found his ride. He saw a red car stalling in the middle of the street and pushed Hanif to the passenger door while he bounded across the hood and ripped open the driver door. The driver babbled and shouted in fright and anger. The driven angel only grabbed her by the scarf and pitched her onto the street.

  His intense eyes met her bewildered face. “Your charity to a servant of the Lord will be noted. Peace be with you.” He slumped into the driver’s seat and closed the door, hoping his minimal experience with vehicles since arriving back on Earth would see him through. He looked across the seat to Hanif, whose facial expression was difficult to ascertain, due to the swelling spreading across his face. “Where to?”

  “Downtown.”

  ***

  “Francis... wake up...” called a woman’s voice in the dark. Frank shook his head and his eyes cracked open. The barest blur of swirling green silk fluttered in the shadows. “I’m here now...”

  That can’t be her. “You’re dead.” sighed Frank, fighting to refocus his vision.

  In a breath the sound of her silks stopped flapping and a hushed, guttural whisper blew by his ear. “Not forever.”

  Strange chills ran down his spine as the fog cleared from his eyes. The apparition was gone and he realized the room wasn’t darker because the sun had waned, the shadows were too deep. He moved his wrists and felt cold metal. Chains. His inhuman eyes cut a swath through the darkness and he saw charred and rusted cells in each corner of the room. A dungeon.

  He sighed. “Fuck.”

  Chapter 14: Lupus Iberorum

  Málaga, Spain

  The Seeker had left his container early in the morning before scavenging some fresh fish from the local markets. The taste of raw halibut was still in his mouth. It was suitable, but he preferred meat of a redder and more sentient sort. Having not bathed in days and smelling of fish, with a bearded face that looked like it had not been washed in a decade, many thought him to be desperate migrant.

  Most of the port city’s denizens ignored him or regarded him with disgust. Few thought to translate their repugnance into action. Those that did found that words did indeed break bones, splinter nerves and shatter souls.

  The Seeker was just as merciless with the foolish as he was with the fugitive.

  Now, he stood in the shadow of the Cathedral of Malaga’s north tower, watching the orange sun set over the dark waters across the city. The warm light of the dying day played against his wild eyes, throwing vibrant purples, reds and golds across his irises. The blustery wind sent his beard and rags flapping, and contrasted against the still and imperious stonework behind him.

  Baroque columns curled around corners of the tower in sections, terminating in a spired dome at the top. Its arched clerestories were black and empty, harboring writhing shadows the wolf was keen not to focus on, just as much as the bells housed in its center. His ancient witch blood cursed him with the perception of bell tolls from the past, distorted across the echoes of time into sick, deathly moans.

  The church’s beige stones were lent a golden cast in the dusky light, as were many spots in the city, little globes of luminescence that took over where the sun left off. As the midnight blues of the evening stretched across the sky, so too did the filmy layers of his lupine eyes swim with low burning light.

  Perched so high above the city, his eyes were but the first of many stars that would later dominate the night sky. He felt the subtle stirrings within his body and ever present prickles along his skin. The moon and the Primal called to him, urging him to take on the mantle of the wolf and spill blood in its honor. He defied it and pushed the sensations to the back of his mind. The moon’s influence was steady and insistent, but not full enough to own him for the night. A lesser wolf might have given into the call, even embraced it, but he was not lesser.

  He was disciplined. He was alpha.

  He looked down into the bustling night life below, admiring the ambling lights of sluggish cars and the warm twinkle of high street lamps. Nothing but teeming swarms of flesh to him. They never knew what he knew, the horrors he had seen, the planes of existence he had tread and the truths he had realized. I was once like you creatures. Now they resembled nothing more than scores of upright sheep.

  He fished into his squalid rags and pulled out a wooden compass. The actual components of a compass, the magnet and the dial, were missing, the thing useless to the casual eye. He on the other hand, stared into the empty space within the wooden circle and marshaled a small amount of his power into the humble object.

  He held his hand out and watched blue starlight formulate and crisscross around the inside of the compass, organizing itself into straight lines as it pointed where he needed to go. East. With a bestial snarl he leaped off the roof and into the night, invisible to all mortal eyes.

  Down the narrow graffiti stricken road of Calle Ollerias he passed under frail balconies and along bricked up addresses stamped with signs for renters. As his compass jerked to the right, so did he, into an alley. With its scattered trash and encrusted black grime, the werewolf felt at ease. He smelled the migrant on the ground before he saw him. Whether he was dead or sleeping, he did not know enough to care and cared so little to know.

  Beyond the reeks of unwashed flesh and odors of piss soaked concrete there was a sweeter smell that set a wolfish grin upon the Seeker’s face. The smell of magic. He was close. The manna enriched fragrance had the scent of manufactured freshness, something that yearned to be gulped and savored but was just as alien to his lungs as the vacuum of the void.

  He stopped in front of a brick wall and noted how the moonlight flitted in between the cracked mortar like threads of mercury. He braced himself and held his hand out, whispering an incanta
tion under his breath and saw arcane wards materialize on the wall. Thoughts of using a spell to cross the barrier occurred to him, but keeping a low profile was key. Grizzled and calloused hands knocked on the glowing symbols instead, but there was no dramatic re-arranging of bricks.

  His mind focused on his intent to cross over. Eyes closed, he passed forward and felt the sensation of cold crystal lick across his nerves.

  When his eyes opened, they adjusted to another alley, one that looked identical to the one he left. In this version, the migrant was dead, if his bleached skeleton was anything to go by. Browned newspapers clung to the sticky ground. ‘Hernando Ramos RIP 1964-1946’ ‘Outrage Following Boston Massacre, Mercedonius 15th, 980 B.C.’ and other such things were the pages left out to be soiled and forgotten in a world with place but no time.

  He kept his guard up and his mind keen. He had not truly entered another world, only another man’s perception of it. Said man had as much cause to kill him as he did to praise him. Such was the way with warlocks of differing covens, one never knew if it was a knife or a smile to spring forth come the next meeting.

  The weary werewolf clutched his raggedy coat closer and walked forward, passing the skeletal corpse and rusted out garbage bin. The alley walls began to narrow the further he walked, and the ground itself seemed to lower, almost if he was walking down an incline. His night vision helped him penetrate through the enveloping darkness and his ears quivered to the new sounds that hissed through the air.

  Whispers and the echoes of children and screams floated out of pools of shadow. The Seeker looked up into the sky and frowned. It was a lighter shade of night than when he left. Ashen flakes floated down around him like the chaff of a nuclear winter that never was. It’s a trick, none of it real, he reminded himself.

  Sibilant voices taunted and hissed in both his ears as if they were right beside him.

  “Come little one... have a taste.”

  “Leave now!”

  “They took my baby...”

  “Shhh... he’s here...”

  His hardened mind shrugged them off but his body shivered in revulsion, unable to ignore the sheer wrongness of the voices and how they struck the parts of him that were still human, seeping into those mortal cracks like slivering seams of oil. He kept walking and clenched his fist when the sensation of dead fingers grazed the nape of his neck.

  A door bathed in red light took up the center of vision. He hoped his contact’s guardian wraiths wouldn’t be any more testy with him. He would hate to break cover for a mere ghost. When he came to the stained, splintered and nearly rotted away door, he lifted the gargoyle knocker and thumped on the door like a commoner. This far in the contact’s domain, entrenched wards were useless.

  The door creaked as it opened slightly. The Seeker snarled and pushed his way in. He was not readily made tense, and he sensed a surprise at the end of it all. I hate surprises.

  More ruby red light reached across the peeling walls of the hovel inside. The place had the appearance of a study, with a richly appointed desk in the most well-lit corner, wrought with engravings that undulated within the play of light. Carved from ebony, the legs of thing terminated into the forms of gargoyle paws while black roses of sculpted elm wood framed the border of each of its four sides.

  In the center of the desk gleamed a golden stopwatch, a tribal owl head engraved over its cover. Its rounded eyes gleamed in shades of melted amber and red under the room’s light and he noted the texture of the thing with a frown. Nicks, dents and dried blood marred the soft metal. Surrounding the stopwatch was a curved picture frame triptych, filled with black and white pictures of a beautiful woman from a bygone era. The twenties, if the Seeker had to guess.

  He recalled his contact as having nightly attachments, but never romantic. Wouldn’t be beyond him to fall in love with a dead woman’s pictures.

  Violet incense smoke curled in the air, its lush color clashed against the crimson lighting in a battle to see which was more striking. The Seeker sniffed in loathing as ethereal fingers of the stuff caressed his nostrils and wrapped down his muscled torso. Multiple coffins slumped against the walls, some empty, some closed, and some still filled with the dead.

  The Seeker stepped forward to one of them, but then stopped mid-way. Something caught his eye. A pale pentagram gleamed over the lid, etched into the wood. Silver.

  He spun around and scrutinized the room more closely. The opposite wall from the ornate desk was where the contact’s bed was stowed. Replete with puffy, supple ocelot fur pillows and draped in dark blue silk, it was the very image of luxury. The werewolf felt the temperature in his blood rise when he noticed two winged, black boned skeletons on either side of the bed.

  Succubi.

  First generation vampire breed. Antediluvian. Unlike modern breeds who refined their need for sustenance to mere blood drinking, these fiends took the very spark of life itself: the soul. To dance with them was to dance with death, and the Seeker vowed right then that once his hunt was done, he would come back and kill his contact out of principle for being such a fool.

  At least he wasn’t so foolish to keep them alive. He sniffed the air once more. There was something there. It smelled like static and ozone after a thunderstorm. Like magic again. He scanned the room once more and his eyes roved over wrinkled scrolls inscribed in the black and red tones of the blood of man and the blood of earth. Masterwork oil paintings with gaudy colors called to him as much as the portrait subjects themselves. Their eyes and lips subtly moved before his keen gaze, imploring him to burn the pictures and end their eternal torment.

  An adjacent shelf stocked with jars of ancient oddities grabbed his attention. Living trilobites quivered and shook in their prisons of brackish, yellowy green water. Their exoskeletons, mutated by the uncompromising touch of magic, had grown pale, sprouted with harsh chitinous barbs and riddled with unsightly tendrils.

  I would kill you for the succubi to serve justice alone... but looting the past... both the law and justice would demand your head.

  He calmed down and reminded himself where he was and who he was looking for. If he was his contact, he would have sprung the trap by now. But he wasn’t his contact and the trap wasn’t sprung. A bolt of intuition hit him, and the wolf knocked over chairs and tore up scrolls.

  Some went up in smoke, others caught fire and a rare few froze over before falling to the ground and shattering into chunks of ice. His dirtied hands lunged for the bookcase and he felt his fingers not wrap around the spine of a book, but the neck of a man. He pulled the man back and marveled how the light reflected around him, catching the red glow of the room and a portion of the books behind him.

  When he threw him to the ground, it was to uproarious laughter as the light bending charm melted away to reveal corporeal flesh. “Well then...” the man chuckled, “I see your investigative technique hasn’t changed much.” His voice was heavily accented and he looked inhumanly young for his age and unnaturally debonair for his mental state. Perfectly coiffed black hair complemented a well trimmed beard. He had the look of a man at the height of his powers, perhaps in his mid-forties, but no more.

  “You hid from me.” said the Seeker, trying to keep calm and in no mood for games.

  He smiled and straightened out his velvet bed robe. “Yes, well finally, you didn’t come bearing gifts so the natural conclusion was that you came to kill me.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  The man threw up his hands and smirked. “My intuition serves me well.”

  The Seeker looked to the corpses of the succubi. “Not well enough, Rodrigo. You play the roles of Death and the Fool like a child. Roles that haunt their players to the very end.”

  Rodrigo walked over to his desk and fixed the things that the werewolf had knocked over. “So I’ve heard!” Surreptitiously he quieted away a long, gleaming dagger of silver up into his sleeve. “I trust that my coven hasn’t done anything to break the temper of the pretty little childre
n on the council?”

  The Seeker looked at him, his voice level and cold. “You’re the only one in your coven.”

  “Oh yes, that’s right.” Rodrigo looked over his shoulder once more and took in the Seeker’s ghastly rags. “What a shame the kings and queens of the floating brick don’t give their loyal dogs nicer coats. I remember as a child, two of them burnt down an entire city block just to flush out a sorceress’s escaped pet. Seekers seemed so terrible then, with their blue-black cloaks, their flowing and silvered Artemisian armor underneath...” he droned on but the Seeker ignored his provocation.

  He cared little for the pretensions and intrigues of his order’s home, much less how his fellows garbed themselves. All he needed was his order’s pendant around his neck and the law to wrap around those of his enemies “...but then they didn’t do much of anything when I needed them. Maybe if I was... was higher born or if she was one of us, then I could’ve gotten justice. But the judges were out to play and the clock had its way...” Rodrigo’s voice dropped its whimsy tone and curdled with seething, poisonous derangement.

  The Seeker moved over to the bookshelf, ignoring his contact and palmed a black, crystalline orb. He set it back when a pale green light shimmered through its center. When he looked to Rodrigo, the man had ceased his rant and watched him handle the object intently. He sported a face splitting grin that was either born of nervousness or mania. “There is a coven member here. An acolyte of the Black Rose.”

  The Spaniard visibly deflated and looked to the ground. “Ohhhhh... yes. Regrettably she is far and away and—”

  “You lie. She is here. Play me false again and I’ll kill you now.”

  Whether I find her now or later, you will not live past tonight.

  A darker cast came over Rodrigo’s face while he slowly inched his silver blade up his forearm. “My... little, mangy... friend. Were that promises to kill were as potent as power to kill. You are but words.”