Taste of Wrath

by Matt Wallace

  “Don’t look away,” White Horse urges him.

  “That’s all he does!” the other Darren shouts.

  Tears begin filling the true Darren’s eyes, his features contorting in an expression of absolute misery and deep emotional pain.

  “Please, mon ami, do as Mr. White Horse says and do not look away,” James pleads with him. “Be strong.”

  “I can’t,” Darren manages through the wracking sobs that follow.

  “You can!” James insists.

  “Please!” Darren tearfully begs.

  “Do you see?” the other version of him addresses them all in disgust. “Do you see how he is?”

  “Look at him, mon ami!” James finally shouts at the true Darren. “Do it now! He is nothing! There is only you!”

  It looks as if Darren is trying to swallow broken glass. He moans painfully as he forces a measure of control over his tormented face. He blinks hard, steeling himself.

  “That’s it, man,” Lena quietly urges him. “Come on . . .”

  Darren shuts his eyes tight, but when he opens them again, it’s to stare up at the darkest part of him given form.

  “I know you,” Darren says to him, voice raspy and shaking.

  “You don’t know shit, cabrón. It’s all that white blood in you. It’s like pouring piss into motor oil.”

  “I know you,” Darren repeats, louder, his voice firmer.

  “That’s right, son,” White Horse says. “It’s time.”

  “Time for what?” the other Darren shouts down at them. “What’s he going to do?”

  “I know you,” Darren repeats, adding, “and I know who I am. And I’m not going back to sleep. I’ve slept enough.”

  The other Darren hesitates for the first time. Then, a darkness filling the projection’s eyes until they’re almost black, he whispers, “What are you without me?”

  Darren swallows, hard, staring at his worst self coldly.

  “Free,” he says.

  There is no visual spectacle to accompany the conclusion, no rising score or special effects, as there would be in a movie. The other Darren doesn’t scream a deathly, otherworldly scream as he’s sucked back into the real Darren’s body and absorbed by his renewed spirit.

  The projection simply blinks out of existence. One moment, there are two Darrens, and in the next, there is only the one lying atop the mattress.

  No one speaks at first, not until Darren asks White Horse, “Is that it? Did I . . . Is it done?”

  “You did good, boy,” White Horse assures him. “You did something most people never do, not in their whole lives. You’re gonna be fine.”

  Darren tries to smile, but the smile quickly turns to tears. He tries to close his eyes, but nothing can stem the torrent that overtakes him in the next moment.

  Fortunately, James is there. He covers Darren like a medic’s blanket after a disaster, cupping his face in his hands and kissing Darren’s forehead and lips.

  “It is okay,” he whispers. “Now is the time for tears. Do not be ashamed.”

  “I’m sorry,” Darren manages in one wet, ragged breath. “I hurt you—”

  “You did nothing,” James insists. “You killed the man who hurt me and you. Now there is only us. We will speak of it no more.”

  Darren relents, clinging to him as if James is the lone piece of driftwood in storm-wracked waters, and James holds him close. As they embrace, Lena and the others stand over them, Darren’s best friend of so many years holding back her own tears as she watches him find a much-needed measure of grace in the arms of what may be his first true love.

  “Welcome back, champ,” Ritter says.

  Sitting back from the commiserating, White Horse realizes his granddaughter is staring up at him with an odd expression on her face.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “I still have a lot to learn from you, don’t I?”

  White Horse makes a tired sound hoping to approximate laughter. “Some things only time can teach. And most of those times, you only learn by falling on your ass and failing everyone. I’ve done more’n my share of that. Believe it. You’ve taught me more these past few months than I’ll ever teach you, trust me.”

  “I do,” his granddaughter tells him.

  White Horse doesn’t know what to say to that, or how to explain to her the long-abandoned feelings within him those words stir. He falls silent, and for a time the only sound echoing throughout the cement room is Darren crying. It lasts until he has no more tears left, but no one seems to mind waiting. Everyone in this subbasement chamber has learned that’s what life is largely, waiting for the tears to pass so you can move on to the next.

  CABIN IN THE WOODS

  “Can I just say that watching her work is like watching Rembrandt paint, only I want to have sex with this Rembrandt?” Marcus asks his older brother, lowering the night vision binoculars through which he had been viewing the world.

  “Even if she weren’t my best friend, that would still be ridiculously offensive,” Ritter dryly replies.

  “Fine, whatever, so I won’t tweet it. Jesus.”

  Marcus mutters unintelligibly, returning to his night vision specs.

  Moon snickers. “Dude, it’s awesome hearing Ritter give someone besides me shit for a change.”

  The three of them are crouching in the underbrush of a forest about fifteen miles outside Tuxedo, New York. The cabin they’re surveying is more of a lodge, large and opulent and filling the center of a broad clearing. A paved drive has been laid through the woods and winds up to the front door. A more modern structure set several dozen yards off to the right of the cabin serves as what appears to be a guardhouse and barracks for a battalion-sized security force. They look human, albeit heavily armed. The only other occupants of the property are the ruins of an ancient-looking well behind the cabin.

  Marcus digs at his ear. “This wax itches like a bastard.”

  “Yeah,” Moon seconds. “Why are we wearing these earplugs, again?”

  “The same reason you’re wearing contacts spun from Franciscan church glass. I have no idea what kind of magic is protecting that cabin, but knowing Allensworth, it’s powerful and nasty. Eyes and ears are the easiest things to fool and assault. If you’re up for possibly having blood shoot out of your fucking ears until your head explodes, by all means, take out the sacred wax plugs I made myself.”

  “You could’ve just said ‘protection’ and I would’ve been cool,” Moon mutters.

  The bushes ahead of them rattle just a hair, and Marcus drops his specs to take up his heavy-gauge shotgun.

  Cindy crawls from the bushes deftly, parting from the shadows into which she’s perfectly blended, decked out from head to toe in pitch-black.

  Marcus lowers the shotgun, grinning cattishly as she peels back the hood covering her face.

  “I wired the well to blow remotely,” she informs them, wiping grass and dirt from her sleek tactical gear, “and then I set a break all the way back to the tree line.”

  “What’s a break?” Moon asks.

  “It’s a series of charges that’ll funnel whatever force trips the first charge into the next and then the next and so on. Only, I set the break to push those goons away from the cabin. Once they all hustle over to the well and trip the first charge, it should give us plenty of time while they’re dealing with all those fireworks.”

  “Why didn’t you just wire the guardhouse and get ’em all at once?” Moon persists.

  Cindy gives him a look of disdain. “Because I ain’t a damn mass murderer, for one. And even if I didn’t mind flat-out killin’ several dozen people, there’s no way I could’ve gotten close enough with all of them in there. It was hard enough crawling through the grass like some damn ninja.”

  “Sorry,” Moon says.

  Cindy looks to Ritter. “Let’s work around to the front and get in position, and I’ll light this candle.”

  He nods, motioning to Marcus and Moon.

  The foursome
stealthily moves between the trees, slowly rounding the interior edge of the clearing to circumvent the huge edifice of the cabin.

  “Probably ain’t the time,” Cindy says lowly to Ritter as they go, “but it occurs to me, things being things and all, this might be our last mission. Even if we don’t get ourselves fragged. It feels like . . . I don’t know, the end is coming one way or the other.”

  Ritter smiles sorrowfully in the dark. “They were never missions, Cin. We deliver food for a catering company.”

  “You know what I mean, man,” she snaps in her typically impatient way.

  “Yeah,” he says, and there’s a lot held in that simple word if one knows Ritter well, “I do.”

  “We damn sure did the things,” she says.

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “You two need a moment, or a room?” Marcus asks.

  “Why?” Cindy shoots back at him wryly. “You wanna watch? Got you pegged as a freak, anyway.”

  Again, he grins. “You don’t even know. But you’ll find out.”

  “I think they call this ‘creating a hostile work environment,’” Moon comments.

  Ritter halts, holding up a hand.

  The chatter dies and their expressions all turn serious.

  Ritter points beyond the brush. From their vantage, they can see the ornate front doors of the cabin. There are two sentries stationed there, both armed with automatic rifles.

  “Do we know if Allensworth is at home?” Cindy asks.

  Ritter shakes his head. “We don’t even know for sure if he’s still alive.”

  She looks at him intently. “What if he is? And what if he is?”

  “We’ll deal with it,” he says vaguely.

  Cindy frowns, knowing he has deeper thoughts on the matter but not pressing him.

  “What do we do if they don’t buck when she lights the well?” Marcus asks Ritter. “I didn’t bring a sniper.”

  “Improvise” is all he says, nodding to Cindy.

  She nods back, removing a small cylindrical remote control concealed inside her tac vest and flipping the safety guard from the trigger.

  “We did the things,” she repeats, smiling as bittersweetly as Ritter did a moment before.

  He nods, returning the gesture.

  Cindy presses the trigger. They can’t see the crumbling old well blow, but they hear it like rippling thunder in the clearing. A moment later, stone shrapnel of varying sizes and shapes begins raining over the cabin, the sentries guarding the front entrance shrinking back as the debris clears the roof and pelts the paved drive in front of them.

  “Fucking hell, Cin,” Moon says.

  She shrugs. “I wanted to get their attention.”

  They watch the sentries. They’re both pressing gloved fingers to the communications devices in their ears, speaking frantically to whoever is listening at the other end.

  “They’re not abandoning their post,” Marcus observes.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ritter says. “The guardhouse should be emptying right now. And they’ll set off Cindy’s break any—”

  As if in answer to him, they hear a series of violent pops followed by chaotic screams issuing from the other side of the cabin.

  Cindy can’t help grinning.

  “All right,” Ritter says. “Let’s do this. Stay behind me until I neutralize the sentries.”

  “How?” Marcus demands.

  Ritter doesn’t answer him. Instead, he pushes up the sleeve of his dark jacket, revealing a gold bracelet around his wrist forged in the shape of a serpent the trained eye would recognize as the god Ananke. He breaks from the bushes and charges across the clearing, rotating sections of the bracelet’s serpentine body as he moves.

  As the others watch in alarm, the sentries spot Ritter and both of them immediately raise their rifles, sighting on the sprinting figure easily and opening fire.

  Before any of them can yell a warning to Ritter, however, the flashes of the sentries’ muzzles seem to freeze and the report of their shots is silenced. The sentries themselves also appear to be frozen in place, and even the smoke still issuing from the fiery debris at their feet ceases to waft, as if time has somehow stopped.

  Ritter finishes closing the gap between the edge of the clearing and the front entrance. He leaps into the air without slowing down, spinning his body and driving the flat of his right foot into the chest of one of the sentries. The petrified guard flies backward, colliding with the double doors behind him and smashing them both open. Ritter lands gracefully and drops down low, sweeping the ankles of the other sentry, planking the man on the cabin porch. Ritter stands and raises his right leg until it’s almost parallel with his torso and drives down the heel of his boot hard enough to shatter the sentry’s chin.

  “Fuckin’ show-off,” Marcus says as he, Cindy, and Moon break cover and run to join Ritter.

  Ritter quickly rearranges the serpentine sections of his bracelet and covers it with his sleeve. He reaches inside his jacket pockets and removes two smooth, plain, light-colored stones. Stepping just past the threshold exposed by the wrecked doors, Ritter slams the bottoms of both stones together, the clap echoing throughout the darkened, cavernous space inside and causing the air to imperceptibly ripple.

  “Damn, you gutted your home security system, didn’t you?” Marcus says to him as the three of them finish their job to the porch.

  Ritter nods, stashing the stones in his pockets. “That should neutralize any magical devices inside, unless he’s got something nuclear-powered.”

  “Then let’s do this.”

  Marcus racks the heavy slide of his shotgun, like an affirmation.

  They can still hear Cindy’s break charges exploding in the distance as they enter, the sounds moving farther and farther back toward the clearing.

  A marble foyer lights up automatically as its sensors detect their presence, followed by a great room beyond. Far from being rustic, the cabin’s interior is more like a Napoleonic palace than a lodge in the middle of the rural countryside.

  “Even with your magic-killing rock whatever thing,” Moon ponders, “I expected this dude’s shit to be locked down heavier than this, didn’t you?”

  “The little stoner has a point,” Marcus says. “Dozens of heavily armed Blackwater rejects aside, this seems pretty easy.”

  “Bite me, new guy,” Moon fires back.

  “Don’t speak too soon,” Cindy warns them.

  As if on cue, the sound of large paws skittering across the great room floor draws their attention.

  A large Rottweiler trots up to the edge of the marble foyer, its tongue hanging out as it regards them passively.

  “Shit,” Ritter whispers. “Bruno.”

  “What?” Marcus asks, confused. “It’s just a fucking dog.”

  “No, it’s not,” his brother assures him.

  “You’re getting old, man.” Marcus snaps his fingers at the Rottweiler. “Fuck off, pooch, we’re busy.”

  Bruno blinks at him then leaps up to stand on his hind legs.

  The growl that issues from his maw in the next moment does not belong to a household canine. It’s the ferocious bellow of something colossal and ancient and hungry. The dog’s body begins morphing to match his voice, its mass doubling, then tripling in size. Its jaws extend and widen until they’re large enough to encompass a grown man’s head whole. In moments, a canine-like creature that is a head taller than any of them and rippling with muscle is gnashing knife-like teeth at them, his eyes glowing as red as brimstone.

  “Oh, fuck me!” Marcus curses, raising his shotgun and firing.

  The first blast hits the creature in his side, and he shrugs it off with little effort. Marcus racks the slide and pumps two more rounds into the monstrous canine, only serving to momentarily falter his step and further piss him off.

  “Seriously?” Cindy shouts, rearing back and throwing her tomahawk at the beast.

  Her aim is true, and the blade of the axe’s curved head buries itself deep
in the monster’s chest, but once again, it only causes the creature to howl in rage and continue to advance on them all.

  Ritter calmly reaches into the right pants pocket and removes an orange shotgun shell. With equal calmness, he offers it to his brother.

  “Here,” he says.

  Marcus blinks at the shell, hesitating for a moment before finally reaching out and taking it. With far less serenity than his brother, he begins hastily loading it into the shotgun’s feeding tube.

  “Faster is better,” Ritter says, watching the towering beast close the gap between them, six-inch claws and dripping fangs flashing in the light of the foyer.

  Marcus shoves the shell into the tube with the tip of his thumb and quickly racks the slide.

  Bruno rears back on his haunches and lunges directly at Ritter, its roar deafening and its maw spreading as wide and black as the mouth of a volcano.

  Marcus puts the butt of the weapon to his shoulder and pulls the trigger, filling the foyer and great room with thunder.

  A near-seven-foot Rottweiler crashes to the marble floor at Ritter’s feet, motionless, its coat smoking where Marcus’s blast tore through it.

  Ritter seems to finally exhale, although none of them could tell he was holding his breath. He gently prods the beast with the toe of his boot.

  “Dead?” his brother asks.

  Ritter nods. “Or very, very sleepy.”

  Marcus discharges the shell that killed the creature, reloading the shotgun.

  “What was in that shell?” he asks Ritter.

  “A dollar-eighty in Mercury dimes. Ninety percent silver.”

  “Does that thing count as a werewolf?” Moon asks.

  Ritter shrugs. “Close enough.”

  Cindy rips her tomahawk blade from Bruno’s chest. “Well, that was all kinds of fucked.”

  “None of you should be here.”

  Marcus spins around and levels his shotgun, his right index finger slipping past the guard to tickle the trigger.

  It’s Luciana Monrovio, Allensworth’s former (and supposedly deceased) succubus assistant. She’s wearing a creaseless canary-yellow skirt suit. Her pumps and the oversized frames of her eyeglasses match the color perfectly.