by Joey Ruff
“You need to step away from these people.”
He laughed, but it was humorless, and the hollow sound sent chills through my body and stood every hair on end.
“Or what? You come not with the authority of the Creator. You come not even with the authority of the Lawkeeper. What are you, man of dust, to command me?”
I fired. The three shots sounded like blasts of dynamite in the cave and left my ears ringing and momentarily deaf.
Loki dropped like a lead ball. But as the ringing subsided in my ears, it was replaced by the sound of his laughter.
The white at his core and in his face blinked out, and then the violet of his body melted into the violet shades of the rest of the cave.
I scanned the area, trying to locate the burning white core of Loki’s center. While he appeared to be gone, something inside me refused to believe it. I gripped the gun tighter, even though part of me wanted to holster the weapon and breathe easier.
“I know you’re here,” I said, not needing to be loud in the echoing space. “Show yourself.”
I felt something cold snake around the back of my neck, and realized it was his hand, fingers as cold as a winter frost.
Surprise and panic threatened to creep up on me, but I took a deep breath. “The power of Christ compels you,” I said.
“Excuse me?” came the gravely voice in my ear.
“The power of Christ,” I said, each word louder than the last until I was nearly shouting, “compels you!”
Laughter, thick and mirthless, ushered from his lips and echoed against the stones all around us like machine gun fire. I felt him draw nearer, felt his breath blowing hot against my neck. “The power of Christ?” he said, his laughter filtering through in exagerrated gasps. “What power of Christ can be wielded by a faithless priest?”
“I...”
As if reading my thoughts, he said, “Yes, Austin Finnegan. I know you. I can read your entire history as if it were tattooed across your soul. You have no weapon against me.”
“I have love.”
“Do you now?” He made a quiet noise that sounded like he was clearing his throat. “Let me tell you a story.”
“Piss off.”
“Your kind was formed from the dust, little man. I watched it happen. I watched the breath of the Creator fill the first man and distinguish him from the rest of the clay. And yet, like his pet king so many years ago, I often wondered what made you so special in his insolent eyes.” The hand squeezed tighter. “And the answer that I’ve discovered is this: Nothing. Yet while you are the least thing in Creation, he chose to love you.”
Loki laughed, low and quiet, his breath like a hot vapor against my neck. “The reason I became a trickster was simply out of delight in fooling your kind. I’ve yet to make a fool out of El, himself, but I can make fools out of the clay given his image. It is no more effective than drawing a mustache on a photograph, but it makes me smile. For just as my works are a ruse against your kind, so too is your love a ruse compared to the love that is shown to you. Your weak and watered-down love is not a weapon to be wielded against me.”
He was squeezing so hard, that it became hard to breathe. It was harder still to talk, but I found the will and said in strained words, “I don’t give two shits about you. I just want those people over there.”
“You mean to tell me that you love these complete and random strangers that I have collected. You pretend to be so noble, yet all you ever care about is yourselves.”
From the way his breath hit my neck, I could imagine the way he held me, where his body was positioned in relation to mine. I squeezed the handle of the Colt, and brought the tip of the barrel up to eye level. My foot lifted from the ground, my knee going forward, and I thrust my boot back as hard as I could to where I judged his knee to be.
Whether it was his knee or not, I struck something, and the grip loosened just enough for me to break free. I took a step forward and turned with the gun, but just as I leveled it between the two white spots where his eye lights burned in my thermal vision, he struck my hand, swatting the gun to the side.
The report was deafening as it echoed in the cavern, and the flash from the muzzle, in the glasses, about blinded me. While I couldn’t see anything for a minute, I felt the blow hard against my chest, lost my feet, and then collided with such force against the ground that the wind was knocked from me.
Blinded, deaf and breathless, I panicked. I scrambled backward, away from Loki, to where I judged his captives to be. I’d lost the gun, and the only thing to think of was to run. Just as I regained my breath, I realized so suddenly and painfully that I was out of my league here. Every hunter knew that knowledge was the number one weapon, and I had drawn a complete blank. I had no idea how to beat Loki. Which meant only one thing, I wasn’t leaving the cave alive.
I’d gone in half-cocked and guns blazing because I’d faced down a couple fallen angels in the past and come out on top. Of course, I had been a different person then. I had been a man of the cloth, a man of faith, and there was one rule that I could count on – something universal: Every spirit must bow before the power of love, which is to say, God. When I’d faced the others, I’d had faith in that love. And it was a weapon stronger than the sharpest sword.
Excommunicated and cut-off from that faith and love, such as I was, I had nothing. I was damned, and I picked a fight with someone way outside of my weight-class.
As my vision began to return, I blinked a few times, felt the tears streaming down my cheeks, and I saw the purple figure straightening up in front of me. I saw the white eyes and mouth, the white that signified the core of his being, and something else. Three somethings, to be exact. One in the shoulder and two in the gut. They looked like bullet holes. And they were as white as could be, which meant hot.
Iron burned the fairy kind, and the Sidhe were basically just demoted angels.
I said a silent prayer, and drew the other Colt holstered at the small of my back. Before Loki took another step, I put three bullets between his eyes.
I heard a long, loud shriek – even over the echoing report of the Colt – and then he was gone. The purple and white of his presence turned off like a light.
I sat there, tense and alert, sweat pouring from every struggling pore. Five minutes went by, then five more. I waited for Loki to return, but he didn’t. Eventually, I felt myself breathing normally again. Once my pulse finally leveled off, I pulled myself to my feet and moved for the other forms, the ten victims in the darkness, and – one by one – I unbound them and dragged their unconscious forms out into the sunlight.
When the last was out, I heard a slight chuckle and turned to find Coyote, back in his human form, leaning against a tree, arms folded across his chest, watching me.
“You did okay,” he said.
“Iron against the Fallen?”
Coyote shrugged. “It’s like garlic to dracula in those movies. It’s not going to kill him – unless you use a shit-ton of it, but it’s going to annoy the piss out of him. Right between the eyes, too. He’s going to have a bitch of a headache for a couple days.”
“Well, it was enough for today.”
He nodded. “But you seriously pissed off an immortal. When time means nothing to you, it takes a while to forgive. Just pray you don’t meet him anytime in the next thousand years or so.”
“I don’t plan to.”
He laughed. “Tell ya what, Austin. I’ll take care of these guys.” He motioned to the ten unconscious men and women lying prone in the grass. “You take off.”
I nodded. “I won’t make you say it twice.”
He smiled.
I turned to go and then looked back at him. “Next time, let’s grab a beer without all the extra stuff.”
He looked surprised. “Is this another trick?”
“You’re the trickster, not me.”
He bit his bottom lip and nodded. “I’d like that.”
***
It took me nearly an hou
r to work my way back to the little clearing, and I sat and stared at the falls for hours, mulling things over. I wasn’t sure what to do anymore. The case was over. It was solved, not that I could tell anyone what was really happening.
The real question was what I did now. Now that Danielle and I had discovered each other again. Sure, I’d been distracted for the last twenty-four hours, and yes, it had been amazing. But now, in the quiet rush of nature with nothing further to keep me from my thoughts, I realized that it was time to move on.
Even though I wanted to stay, I couldn’t. Any happiness I felt would be only momentary. There could be no real joy. No peace. In the quiet moments, I would always be reminded by the aching inside myself that happiness was fleeting – that life was fleeting. And that what came after, banned from Heaven as I was, was an eternity of insatiable wrath and punishment.
No matter what had happened in the past two days, I was one of the damned, and that hadn’t changed. It would never change from sitting here and playing house. I knew the only thing that could change it…
***
I stopped by the road house on my way out of town. It was lunch. The place was busy for a Monday. I stood in the doorway in my leather jacket, my backpack strung over one shoulder, and I waited for her to look up.
I wasn’t sure how to say goodbye. But I knew, this time, I owed her that much.
She looked up and saw me. She nodded. I nodded. As I turned to go, I saw the tears in her eyes.
She didn’t get a chance to see the tears in mine.
Finnegan’s adventure begins in the pages of
The Dark Communion
Other stories featuring Finnegan:
The Confessor