Taste of Wrath

by Matt Wallace

  “What do you want from me?” Little Dove says miserably, feeling the strength leaving her knees, wanting to crumple there on the cobblestones.

  “I only want you to leave. That’s all. Simply leave this place. Walk out of this building right now. You will not be harmed in any way. And in return, my employer will grant any wish you have, fulfill every desire you’ve ever harbored. It is more than a fair exchange.”

  Little Dove swallows hard, staring at the ground, unable even to meet the spirit’s eyes for the shame of even asking, “And then what?”

  Luciana shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. What happens after you leave this building will no longer be of any consequence to you. You’ll never have to think about it again. I promise.”

  The other presence Little Dove felt before, a legion of spirits lingering at the periphery of her perception, begins to close in around her. She feels them all in that moment, hungry, raging, lost, and vicious. They sense her spirit weakening in that moment like sharks tasting blood in the water. They’re suddenly so close, it’s almost like feeling hot breath on her neck. Little Dove sees faces and shapes forming in the shadows draping her shoulders, ugly, mangled visages and monstrous aspects emerging from the dark around her and nipping toothless at her flesh, raising a hundred thousand microscopic bumps.

  “Walk away, dear,” Luciana says gently. “It’s time to let all of this go and start living for yourself. You can do it.”

  Little Dove begins shaking her head, closing her eyes to stem the tears, but she feels something cracking in her head. She hears a voice, her voice, and it’s the angriest part of herself demanding retribution for all the pain and loss and degradation Little Dove has endured since she was a small child. The voice is loud and powerful and salient enough to be convincing. So much of what Luciana says is the truth; she can’t deny that. She’s only ever wanted out. It’s only been in the past few months, finally learning from her grandfather rather than nursing and protecting him from himself, that Little Dove has found release.

  But what about the other nineteen years? What does she get for that? What is she owed for all of that time?

  That angry voice answers her: Everything, it says. Everything this spirit offers. We deserve that.

  All of a sudden, entertaining the thought of walking away doesn’t even feel like betrayal to Little Dove. It feels natural, even inevitable. The more she envisions actually doing it, the more righteous she feels, and the more those malicious entities around her press in and whisper their assent.

  Fuck Sin du Jour, she thinks.

  She opens her mouth to speak, but a sharp pain jabbing up her arm cuts off the words. Little Dove realizes she’s been gripping her deerskin pouch this whole time, and the edges of the little toy car inside have bitten into her palm. The pain and its source make her think of her grandfather’s face, hard like stone and lined with the crags of what always seemed like eons, framed by those shocks of pure white hair that lost their color as a result of the things he was able to see that most mortals cannot.

  Thinking about him does more than break through the turmoil within her; it seems to summon his voice, reaching through the spectral walls of the four worlds and funneling his words into her spirit. There he speaks the wisdom she needs in that moment, a final lesson from a true Hatałii and the man who raised her and taught her to be what she is now.

  “No, fuck this bitch,” White Horse says to her.

  And he’s right, of course. The hot moment of selfish release felt good, but as all indulgences are, it is utterly fleeting. It burns away, her angry fourteen-year-old self fading with it, and what’s left is the Hatałii she’s become and her conscience. Perhaps the girl would’ve fled, would’ve accepted Luciana’s cheap bribery, but the woman will not be seduced. She sees the truth.

  This is her home, and these are her people.

  Little Dove cries out in the dark, letting loose a feral scream, and much more than that. Something gargantuan feels as though it is uncapped within her, like a rocky scab atop the mouth of a great geyser breaking apart. What pours forth from the “wellspring” Luciana spoke of is power Little Dove has yet to discover, a reservoir of it with no bottom. It is the power to command all that exists between worlds, the spirits clinging to a plane their flesh has abandoned.

  The tidal wave sends the malevolent things surrounding her scattering in every direction, abandoning the battle for Sin du Jour in primordial fear.

  Luciana adds an agonized shriek to Little Dove’s cry as the succubus’s spirit is dispersed in a sickly kaleidoscope of terrible light.

  Little Dove drops to her knees, scraping them against the rough stones of the courtyard without feeling it, sobbing into her hands.

  LATE PREMIERE

  The swaying access door is kicked out of the way, and Marcus and his shotgun storm the rooftop with military attitude, quickly clearing the space through the sights of his weapon. Ritter and Cindy follow, Ritter the first one to fully take in the sight of Lena and Darren kneeling over Bronko’s blood-soaked body. Cindy and Marcus fall in behind him, the latter lowering his shotgun as the line cooks look up at them in anguish.

  “What happened?” Ritter asks. “Who—”

  Lena points behind them, at Allensworth’s body with its nearly neckless head lolled unnaturally to the side.

  “Is that Allensworth?” Cindy asks.

  “Half of him, looks like,” Marcus comments. “He must have gotten a transfusion of demon blood, or an organ or something. There was a brisk trade for that kind of shit in Thailand years back before they shut it down. This one time when we were in Bangkok—”

  Ritter shakes his head severely at Marcus, the reprimand in his eyes deep and fierce.

  Marcus quickly shuts up, nodding his contrition to his brother.

  Lena and Darren stand as Ritter approaches them, staring down at Bronko’s serene final expression. He crouches down slowly and rests a hand over the executive chef’s forehead.

  “He gave me a second chance,” Ritter says. “I didn’t even know it at the time, but . . .”

  He just shakes his head.

  “What’s happening downstairs?” Lena asks, her voice hollow but her mind working at full speed.

  “Looks like it’s over,” Ritter says, standing. “Everybody came through for us. Ryland’s down. Moon’s okay.”

  Ritter looks to Darren. “What about your line?”

  “Everyone except Dorsky,” he says, the absence of emotion in his voice somehow more powerful than if he’d delivered the news sobbing.

  Lena blinks rapidly but finds there’s little left for Dorsky inside of her at that moment. She knows it’ll come later, in droves.

  “Does anybody else hear that?” Marcus asks, providing her with a welcome distraction from her thoughts.

  Lena looks away from the soul-gnawing scene at their feet, staring across the old and battered rooftops of Long Island City. The sleek, lighted bodies of newly built condos loom high among them like something ancient that had long lain in wait beneath the surface of the streets and finally burst through.

  They all fall silent, listening to the night.

  It may have been faint a moment ago, but now it’s rising, the oppressive sound of heavy boots pounding the pavement far below in unison, a chorus that has scored millions of nightmares about armies coming for you and your loved ones in the dead of the evening. It’s the sound of hundreds marching through the streets, and in the next moment they all feel the building beneath them quake, just a little, but the vibrations are strong enough to unsteady their feet and rattle their teeth.

  Ritter is the first to break for the edge of the roof, Lena quick to follow behind him. The rest beat feet across the blacktop, joining them along the brick-lined ledge. They peer down together at the street in front of Sin du Jour’s demolished main entrance. What they see flash-freezes their blood in an instant, stealing every last sliver of hope from their collective eyes.

  Lena and Ritter find each
other’s gaze and they lock on tight, all the desperation and fear and pain and loss of the moment passing between them without a word.

  “So, this is what it feels like,” Marcus says quietly.

  “What?” Cindy asks him.

  He swallows what feels like a steel ball bearing before answering.

  “Being well and truly fucked.”

  They fill the formerly deserted street, arranged in skirmish lines three rows deep that seem to totally surround the front and back alley of the building. Their sickly green-scaled faces shine hungrily and horrifically in the flame light of torchbearers flanking each column. They are all warriors of the Vig’nerash, the younger upstart demon clan Lena helped serve during her first event with Sin du Jour. Unlike the Oexial demons she fought at the disastrous movie premiere after-party that almost saw half of the kitchen staff burned at the stake, the Vig’nerash aren’t clad in jagged pieces of brutal medieval-looking armor like something from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. These are next-generation demons, integrated demons of the modern world. Every warrior is clad in dozens of stylish modular composite plates lain protectively over skintight bodysuits. Their weapons, pole axes and curved swords, look more like gargantuan Apple accessories than deadly blades. They possess the angular modern design aesthetic of a tech billionaire’s foyer.

  None of it is enough to distract from their bloated, diamond-scaled, horrifically snaggletoothed faces, however, or the lustful, hungry-for-blood look in their reptilian eyes.

  Marcus looks down at the inhumanly compressed neck of Allensworth’s distorted corpse.

  “I guess we’re past negotiating, huh?” he observes.

  “Sorry,” Darren says, but it’s a hollow sound without conviction.

  “What’s the play?” Cindy puts forth, trying to fill her voice with brass and authority that can’t hope to weigh down the fear and futility she feels.

  “We have to get back downstairs,” Ritter insists. “We have to reinforce the others. They’ll be overrun before they know what hit them.”

  Marcus looks at his brother incredulously. “And we won’t?”

  “What else can we do?” Ritter shoots back at him.

  “You can’t fuckin’ magic us out of here or something, Mr. Wizard?”

  Ritter’s usually dour expression darkens several shades. “If you’re ever going to grow up, this looks to be your last chance to do it.”

  “Fuck you!” Marcus thunders.

  “Fuck you harder,” Ritter says calmly.

  Cindy turns from the ledge to face them both, exploding. “Will you cool it with this sibling Dr. Phil shit? Damn!”

  A horn sounds in the distance, filling the streets below with a deep, primordial thrumming like something ancient calling to them through a tunnel made of bone.

  “Shit!” Marcus swears, like the rest of them assuming it’s the demons being called to charge. “Let’s go!”

  He turns to dash for the roof access door, but Ritter reaches out and grabs a handful of his shirt collar, stopping him.

  When Marcus turns to curse at him, his brother points back down at the street, and what Marcus sees when he looks gives him the same pause.

  The street is still congested with over-stylized reptilian warriors. The demons haven’t budged. The winding of the horn hasn’t called them to battle. Rather than charge, storming the building with teeth gnashing and artisan axes chopping, the attention of the demon horde seems to have been drawn away from Sin du Jour by the horn’s bellow.

  A different chorus begins to sing to them from the corners of the block. This symphony, however, isn’t played by jackboots stomping in unison with genocidal intent. This is the music of bone dancing lightly on marble, the clacking of majestic hooves. They begin to hear stray whinnies and the smoky flare from equine nostrils wrinkling the air. Those noises are joined by the unmistakable sound of horses, a lot of them, clip-clopping over the city streets.

  Lena and the others have to fight to rip their collective gaze away from the snake-toothed, designer armor–clad visage of destruction below.

  “What the fuck is this?” Cindy says breathlessly, turning to Ritter. “Did you do that?”

  He stares back at her, utterly speechless, and shrugs.

  Dozens of white stallions, pure alabaster coats and flawless silver battle armor flashing bright and brilliant in the moonlight, have filled the intersections at either end of the street, bottle-capping the demon horde at both ends. The warriors astride each horse appear to be human, only way, way hotter, all of them, to a rider. Each head of perfectly coiffed hair gleams as brilliantly as the magnificent mounts beneath them. They wear the same sleek, angular silver armor protecting their steeds.

  A light fills Lena’s eyes, one she would’ve thought just a moment before could no longer be sparked within her.

  “Holy shit,” Marcus marvels. “The cavalry.”

  Ritter nods dumbly. “Literally.”

  “More like the goddamn red carpet at the Oscars,” Cindy says, even more aghast.

  Even at a distance, the famous faces of the mounted warriors are undeniable. Practically the entire starring cast of every big-budget superhero/heroine movie of the past decade composes the front line of the two battalions lined up across each intersection. Hollywood studio sets must look like ghost towns at this moment, or at least only scenes involving the main characters’ best friends are being filmed.

  Even the horses look prettier than regular horses.

  Foot soldiers wait in the periphery, wearing lighter, more ceremonial armor and carrying halberds. Lena recognizes the garb from the goblin royal wedding catered by Sin du Jour. She also recognizes several of the foot soldiers from her favorite YouTube channels and realizes they all appear to be YouTube stars. She finds herself wondering if YouTube is the new boot camp for burgeoning goblin nobles, and immediately realizes what and on how many levels a bananas thought that is to have right now.

  “What is this? Lena asks, half-convinced she’s hallucinating the miraculous saving grace they all appear to be witnessing.

  “It’s the Royal Goblin Army,” Ritter says without a trace of irony.

  Lena shakes her head, more bewildered than she’s ever been in her life. “That’s seriously a thing?”

  “For real?” Cindy echoes.

  “I guess the goblins chose a side,” Marcus says.

  The demons begin closing ranks, re-forming away from the front of Sin du Jour’s building and massing to face the army encroaching on both ends of the street.

  “Hold the damn phone!” Cindy shouts with an entirely different energy than the shock and awe they’re all experiencing.

  A slight rider gallops up and down the goblin battalion line formed in the intersection closest to the building, raising high a short sword with a hilt forged in the shape of an iconic character millions know as the Love Symbol. He almost looks like a child on such a large mount, especially seen from the rooftop. Unlike the rest of the goblin soldiers, his armor is painted a royal purple, and its lines and edges have been forged with an eye toward dramatic flair. A high collar of steel curved at the top like the folds of a cape rises from the pauldrons bouncing on his virtually nonexistent shoulders and surrounds his head, yet somehow the man’s downright majestic afro draws the eye far more.

  Cindy grips Ritter’s shoulder, digging her nails into him painfully without realizing. “Is that . . . that can’t be!”

  “It is,” Ritter and Marcus confirm in almost perfect unison.

  “He died!”

  “Nah, he’s just taking a break, like the King,” Marcus says.

  “Elvis or the Goblin King?” Cindy asks.

  “Both,” the brothers repeat.

  “Goblin celebs do that after forty or so years,” Marcus explains. “Before people start asking why a dude or chick in their sixties still looks thirty.”

  “So he’s . . . what . . . like, their general?”

  “And a legend,” Ritter says. “The gre
atest goblin warrior in ten thousand years, they say.”

  Cindy is livid. “How do you not tell me the baddest musical virtuoso of my lifetime is, one, alive, and two, some kind of unmatched goblin general ten-thousand-year warrior legend–type motherfucker?”

  “We’ve been busy,” Ritter reminds her.

  Marcus, on the other hand, is practically giddy. “All I know is if what they whisper about him is true, every green asshole down there is about to find out what it sounds like when doves cry.”

  The primeval sounding horn winds once more, and both battalions of the Royal Goblin Army charge in perfect collaboration, converging on the footed Vig’nerash from both sides. The demons gnash their teeth and raise their artisan blades, meeting the attack with the violent glee one would expect from minions of Hell, but it belies how immediately overmatched their forces are by the stampede of heavy horses and the trained blades being wielded from their backs. Though the Vig’nerash warriors at the forefront do manage to take the leg of the odd mount, most of them are brutally trampled under hoof before a goblin sword has the chance to reach them. The demons who feel the wrath of those blades are the warriors three rows into the Vig’nerash formation. Their pole axes are batted aside with finesse before their plastic armor and Armani bodysuit–covered shoulders are split from their scaly chests.

  “Look at their swords!” Cindy cries with a manic amazement. “Look at ’em!”

  Lena has to squint to zero in on what Cindy is talking about, but she sees it. The hilts of almost every goblin sword seem to be fashioned from entertainment-award statues or statuettes. The Emmys are the easiest to spot because of their bulbous skeletal “atom” sculptures and the wings of the golden woman holding them, but Lena is certain she spies Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, People’s Choices, and even the odd Cable Ace Award, which she’s pretty sure is a thing that doesn’t even exist anymore.

  The Goblin General in Purple steers his mount through the sea of bodies so effortlessly, it’s as if his horse is sailing, or as if the animal has the grace and fluidity of the man astride it. He swings his sword arm in broad arcs, swiping on one side of his mount then the other. Demon heads are lopped off with the ease and rhythm of a dance, and each time he strikes, the general lets loose a melodic battle cry that rises to the rooftop, lyrical and with perfect pitch but also something guttural and vaguely sexual in tone and delivery.