Demon Squad 7: Exit Wounds

by Tim Marquitz

  Ilfaar, however, was too slow to escape no matter how long I could hold on. He’d pretty much turned my distraction into something I hadn’t quite wanted to contemplate. It had become a fight. Teeth slashing and wings flapping in a furious attempt to be rid of me, I did the first thing I could think of. Well, technically the second as my withered rectum wasn’t capable of shitting my loincloth.

  The smarter of my options out the window, I snapped the spear in half and committed to something even a mentally challenged fish would scoff at. I drove a sharpened piece of the weapon into both sides of the guardian’s neck, right at the base of skull, using all my vampirey strength. Its shriek rattled my bones as oily, gray blood bubble from the wounds. About halfway through that, I realized I was humming the theme to the Beverly Hillbillies.

  If the guardian was pissed before, it was doubly so now.

  Its Volkswagen-sized head snapped back in an effort to smoosh me, but the makeshift handlebars held, allowing me to ride it like a bucking stallion. It reared up, wings extended while it spun about, but I wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t hold much hope that I could really hurt the thing, but the longer I kept it occupied, the less likely it was to hurt anyone else I cared about. That was all I could wish for at the point. I’d taken on the role of Kamikaze the moment I jumped on its back, so it was pretty clear I was going down in a blaze of glory. Unfortunately, Karra had other ideas.

  I spied her running toward me and realized all she was gonna do was get herself hurt and, like the rest of the trip so far, it would be all my fault. I couldn’t have that on my conscience on top of everything else so I did what any other sane person would do in that situation—

  Okay, so that might be stretching the definition of sane a bit.

  –and drove the spear bits in deeper, aiming them upward as I did, aiming for the brain like I was in a zombie flick. I didn’t know shit about dragons but I knew a whole hell of a lot about reacting to pain. My experience held true as the guardian did exactly what I’d hoped it would. Desperate to escape the agony and the thing causing it, the creature dropped into a coiled hunch and launched itself into the sky.

  The only part of all that I hadn’t quite factored in was just how fast the creature could move. Before I could think to let go, we hit the canopy, a car wash hammering of leaves and branches whipping at me as if I were bird shit on the hood of a sedan. Fortunately, just like that bird shit you can never get rid of without losing a chunk of paint with it, I was still there when we broke through the other side of the trees.

  The downside to that was that I was still there, on the back of a dragon, hundreds of feet in the air and climbing, with no way down except for taking a chance on a mad passionate affair with gravity that would surely end in disaster. I so desperately wanted to shit myself right then. I just held on instead.

  Gray-white fluid spattered my face and neck with frothy warmth as the guardian winged its way higher, but its momentum was a blessing in disguise. Despite all the blood leaking from its wounds, the speed of our flight kept it from wetting all but the embedded tips of the spears. My hands gripped the dry shafts tight, allowing me a measure of control I hadn’t expected. That didn’t make the guardian happy any.

  With the trees having been unsuccessful in scraping me off, it must have decided aerial maneuvers were its next best bet. It rolled and dove and climbed and juked and did pretty much everything else in its power to shake me, but if there was a benefit to being a vampire it was that the cold, unfeeling lump of meat I was wearing was immune to all the normal human responses those moves would have elicited had I been plain old me. No nausea, vertigo, or even the slightest perkiness of my nipples from the cold wind plagued me. I was an immovable object. A stuck one, mind you, but that was far better than the alternative. I had no interest in going splat.

  My perseverance eventually paid off as the guardian appeared to wear itself down. I didn’t imagine the constant leak of its blood spilling from its twin wounds helped any. That had formed a willowy gray cloud around us as we flew on. Its breathing felt labored beneath my legs, and its screeches had gone silent. We’d been in the air for what was probably fifteen minutes before the beast settled enough that I could stop fearing for my life and sit up a little to take a look around.

  It was one hell of a view.

  I don’t know what I expected to see, but the primitive paradise that sprawled out before me wasn’t it. Used to the gray headstones of modern society that always blocked out the horizon in Old Town, nothing but yellow and brown surrounding the place, it was strange to see such abundant foliage having infiltrated every square acre of the land below. While there were broad clearings that stood out here and there, a handful of wooden fortresses like Mia’s set in their midst, there wasn’t much else to set the place apart from the rainforest of the Amazon. The land behind where we’d arrived, barring the random, jutting plateau, was a veritable sea of purple. It was beautiful in an artsy-fartsy kind of way.

  The purple ran all the way to the base of the ominous mountain we’d been traipsing toward. It rose out of the foliage like morning wood under a sheet, a lumpen hill stretching toward the sky. Wisps of gray smoke billowed from an unseen vent along the side of the mountain. It certainly wasn’t Mt. Everest, the upper reaches rounded with the passage of time, softer slopes leading the way upward, but it wasn’t without its own sort of dangerous charm. At the highest peak towered a great flue of smooth stone. It rose up well above the rest of the mountain range, glimmers of green and orange energy illuminating the air above it, coloring the clouds in a reflected gleam.

  The guardian, having leveled off at an uncomfortable cruising altitude, gave me a damn good line of sight over the lip of the odd volcano. I held my breath at what I saw—more for effect, really—as my undead lizard brain sorted the details and threw a party inside my skull.

  There was an active gate of some kind just inside the mouth of the volcano.

  “Who’s a good boy?” I asked with excitement, petting the unintentionally helpful guardian quickly before returning my hand to the steering wheel. “You’re a good boy, that’s who.” It snorked something phlegmy deep in its throat, but that was all I got out of it.

  I leaned over and took a look at its eye to see how bad off it was. A secondary, transparent lid had sealed it off from the wind, but there was no mistaking the strain that glistened behind it. Dots of black had invaded the red, inky stars bursting across its cornea. Its head drooped as it flew, each blink drawing the eye closer and closer to shut. It was dying, no doubt about it.

  Part of me cheered its demise, the guardian going down way easier than I could have hoped for. With little more than a borrowed vamp-body and a couple of sharp sticks, I’d taken out a dragon. I could picture mounting its head above the fireplace and telling my kid nightly stories about how I’d wrestled it into submission before finally killing it with kindling.

  Another part of me, however, remembered I was still trapped in a supernatural prison a gajillion miles from home with no concrete method for escaping, riding a dragon that was about to meet the great lizard in the sky, and I didn’t have Gandalf to call an eagle cab to get me back to where the rest of the group hopefully still waited.

  That second part of me was a real downer.

  He also appeared to have friends who enjoyed pissing on a fellow when he was down.

  My gaze was drawn to a cloud of dust that roiled up between two of the closer fortresses. I inched higher onto the dragon’s back to get a better view of what was causing it, my ride obliging me by flying me closer. It took a few moments for my vision to sort itself, but when it did, I wasn’t pleased with what it reported.

  A small army, of what I assumed were greenies, was on the march.

  My eyes traced the line of their advance, though I didn’t need to. I knew exactly where they were headed, Murphy’s Law in full effect.

  “Shit!”

  If Karra and the others had given up on me and had started off again, they woul
d be headed directly toward the mass of greenies bearing down on them. They wouldn’t stand a chance. Even if they waited, the army would find them eventually. They were on a collision course, but there was nothing I could do to warn them from up here.

  That realization soured inside me, but I wasn’t finished yet. There was no quit in me, well, none right then, so I tightened my grip on the spear bits and twisted, leaning my weight to one side. The guardian hissed, but for all its faux resistance, it banked sharply and swung about…pretty much in a complete circle.

  I sighed. Anne McCaffrey had made it seem so easy.

  Another quick tug, followed this time by a counter yank once we’d veered about and were going more or less the direction I wanted to, made all the difference in the world. It wasn’t perfect by any means, like driving a car with its wheels way out of alignment, but it worked. Scaly seemed content to let me lead him along rather than try to resist and suffer more than he already was. That was cool with me. He was already starting to tire out, his wings losing more and more of their snap, so I didn’t figure I had much in the way of establishing dominance time on my hands, so that worked out fine since all the dragon taming was wearing me out, anyway. I hunkered down to cut wind resistance, because yeah, that was gonna make a difference, and set my cheek against the dragon’s cool hide to rest for a moment.

  Turned out, that unwitting maneuver saved me from losing my head.

  A kaleidoscope of rippling colors cut through the sky just a few feet above the hurtling dragon. All sorts of weird energy pinged my senses in rapid succession like someone hit me with an auto fire Taser. There was a burst of static right after, a radio spitting the white noise between stations. I’m sure I yelped as the sound invaded my skull, but it was drowned in the gurgled roar of the guardian.

  Its docile willingness flared into open defiance as it bucked and tried to spin about. I clamped down on the spears and fought the guardian’s motion, exerting all of my strength to bring the creature back in line before it could veer off and follow the light show. My eyes, on the other hand, did exactly that. I saw the lights dance along in a blurry chain of sparkles, stars twinkling in and out of existence in the span of an instant, a hail of alien sensations washing over me. Except there, amidst it all was a flutter of memory, a wisp of something I recognized, something I knew with all certainty. A voice, perhaps?

  My eyes zeroed in on an emerald flicker mashed between the other colors, and my cold, dead heart thrummed in my chest. While a pale imitation of the Northern Lights, these glimmers of brilliance were far more breathtaking than any natural phenomenon could possibly ever be. These weren’t just tricks of the atmosphere, these lights led somewhere. They were portals. And as I thought that, they flickered and faded, only to jump a distance across the sky where they appeared again, fluttering just as they had a moment earlier, careening toward the Sanctuarium Custodes before disappearing altogether.

  The guardian beneath me rumbled, but with no breath left to vent its rage, its complaint spewed forth in a wet spray of fetid gray mist. Another of the creatures, however, took up its call off in the distance, a shadow peeling away from the great mountain in pursuit of the place where the lights had just been. That only served to confirm what I already believed. These were the gates Shaw had been tracking.

  They were pointing the way home.

  Fifteen

  Much to my regret, landing a dragon turned out to be way more complicated than hijacking one.

  While I could, in essence, steer the great lumbering beast as well as I could any American made car, the further along in its death throes we got, the less responsive it became. Head down, deep, gasping breaths filling my vision with steamy grayness, the guardian dropped lower and lower as we careened back toward the place where I’d launched.

  The massive mountain at our back was a great landmark for keeping me on track. While I’d been freaking the hell out when we took off, my subconscious seemed to get a pretty good look at the angle we’d rocketed up at. Even if it hadn’t, the wreckage of the tree tops where we burst through was pretty definitive with regards to where I needed to get back to. It was impossible to see the damage from any real distance, but with the guardian grazing the canopy close enough to tickle its reptilian balls it stood out once I’d gotten up close. There was no mistaking the wreckage of trees as flew right over it.

  Unsure I could circle and still end up anywhere near my destination, I thanked scaly for his service and twisted hard on the handlebars. He cornered like a brick, but I’d expected that. Counted on it actually. I drove his head sideways and pushed him into the canopy, using his massive girth to buffer what I knew would be a very unpleasant encounter between flora and fauna. Didn’t much care for which side won, just as long as the undead element made it through okay.

  We hit the trees at a breakneck speed of holy shit, and it took all of my effort just to stay on the back of the guardian. There was a moment there where I wondered if jumping free and angling toward a tree branch might be the better option, but big boy was snapping limbs left and right, and I could see an array of jagged points just waiting to impale me should I leave the relative safety of the dragon’s fleshy shield. Images of old Dracula movies and sharp stakes lingered as we crashed through the canopy. By the time I’d decided to stay put, we broke through the last of the branches and were in free fall. That lasted all of a split-second before my ride hit the ground with a meaty thump. The impact knocked me loose and tossed me to the ground about ten feet from where the dragon uurrked his last. Flat on my back, every brittle bone in my body vibrating with the landing, I stared up at the wavering canopy and just lay there letting my eyes stop swimming in my head.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” Karra’s voice was a sledgehammer slamming into my skull. Her face appeared right in front of mine, blocking out my view of the forest.

  “Uh…” was all that came out, though I have to admit it came across fairly well.

  “You’re taking a huge leap of faith by presuming he thought anything.” I recognized Veronica’s snark even though I couldn’t see her.

  “You’re an idiot, you know?” Karra eased a hand under my head and helped me to a seated position. Once more I was grateful vampires couldn’t spew any sort of bodily fluids. I hurt everywhere, and I do mean everywhere, but other than that I seemed to be in pretty good shape for having just crash landed a dragon. I’d had worse slipping in the shower.

  “Well, however stupid it was, it looks like your ploy worked in our favor,” Katon said, coming over to where I could see him. He gestured to the woods behind us.

  My neck creaked as I glanced over my shoulder, but he was right. Dead greenies were scattered all over the place, more pieces than whole people, but there weren’t any of them up and about. I could only see my immediate vicinity, mind you, thanks to a certain corpse that looked more like a beached whale than a grounded dragon, and smelled about a million times worse. I got to my feet with Karra’s help and took a good long look at my conquest, noting a rash of blackened spots that had spread all across its flanks that hadn’t been there minutes before, let alone the stink.

  “What in the hell is that stuff?” Venai asked, finally breaking her streak of three consecutive words spoken since we’d arrived.

  “Step away from it,” Rahim warned as the growing stench got even worse.

  “I’m not going to question what you two got up to while you were gone, but you should really keep your cooties to yourself, Frank.”

  “Heeeerrrrpppeeeessssssss, eeeeeewwwwwwwwww.”

  I ignored Rala’s and CB’s jibes as the darkness spread across the dragon’s skin, the sharp tang of smoke and what smelled like burning oil clinging to my nose. The moldy blackness split in places, and a flurry of dark mist steamed loose, glimmers of ashen light boiling in the widening crevices.

  “It’s gonna blow,” I shouted, stepping in front of an unimpressed Karra.

  And it did. Well, sort of.

  It was more o
f what you’d call an implosion than anything else. One second the dragon corpse looked all puffed up and cracking at the seams as if it might burst, the next it simply collapsed in on itself with a whimper. It fell apart like a smoked cigarette, leaving behind a thick layer of gray-black dust where it had sat only moments before.

  Fortunately the stink went with it.

  “That’s…interesting.” Rahim stared at what was left of the guardian, wiggling the tip of his boot in the ashes, smearing them across the ground in sooty swaths.

  “It would explain why it was so easily defeated,” Shaw added, giving me an amused grin when I turned to look at her.

  “Easy?” It kind of was, but there was no way I was gonna admit that to her.

  “Reincarnation,” Rahim muttered.

  “Precisely.” Shaw nodded. “Why waste resources creating new ones when the original can be pressed back into service? The creature has likely returned to its domain to await its rebirth.”

  My balls shriveled to raisins at that.

  “So it doesn’t matter if we manage to kill the guardians, they’ll just reform and return?” Katon asked with all sorts of displeasure in his voice. “Fantastic. And here I thought our journey couldn’t get any better.”

  “The only uncertainty is how long it takes for them to regain their composure. If it’s instantaneous, we can only hope our leaving doesn’t depend on getting past them.”

  Ilfaar’s annoying grin seemed to slap everyone in the face at once, the group glancing over at him before he’d even begun to speak. “I’m afraid to say it does, though, if you are determined enough, we might well avoid the worst of such an encounter.”

  My brain fluttered through what I’d seen while taking my leisurely dragon cruise. The top of the mountain, where the strange gate sat, was exactly where the guardians had come from. I hadn’t gotten close enough to pick out any paths or passageways leading to it, so I was still in the dark as to exactly how we’d manage to get up there unseen and uneaten. But did we really need to?