The seven members of the coven were waiting in a semicircle to greet the newborn lich when he finally stood up straight, as naked as the day of his first birth, with only a tiny skull to cover his modesty.
He didn’t bother.
Malachai Falconer shook his head, like a dog shaking itself in order to get dry. Mud and soil flew everywhere. He reached down and brushed more away from his body.
“Welcome, brother,” the seven chanted in unison. “Welcome to our family.”
The new-born lich grinned.
Family.
His father was the first to go.
It didn’t happen immediately, of course; first it was necessary for young Malachai to get a schooling in the dark arts. Becoming some sort of creature that was neither truly living or dead had in no way dimmed his passion for learning, and that voracious desire for more knowledge would serve him well over the years.
He was a quick and an able student. In less than two weeks (or what Lamiyah for some weird reason insisted on referring to as “a fortnight,”) Malachai was able to create thought-forms out of nothing but his soul’s energy, which lived safe and sound inside the child’s skull.
Malachai kept the phylactery buried safely in the earth, changing its location every night, and never hiding it in the same place twice. He was paranoid about the tiny little skull coming to any harm, and to be honest, I guess I would have been too – if, that is, I happened to be a raving psycho like he was. I tried to imagine what it would feel like, knowing that my soul – my actual, honest-to-goodness soul—now lived permanently in the really gross Olde English equivalent of a Tupperware container.
Yeah, I’d have been a little freaked out too.
As the days went by, his power grew. The days bled into weeks, passing by so fast that he hardly noticed. He was engrossed in learning as much as he could, as fast as he could.
Finally, on a cold and lonely dawn in December, it was time for a little payback.
The first rays of sunlight were just visible on the horizon when the prodigal son returned to the village of St.Osyth for the first time in months. Following behind him at a respectable distance (but still close enough to observe events) was the rest of the coven, lurking out of sight in whatever shadows were left.
Just as Malachai had expected, his father was dead drunk. Well, that was easily remedied: soon he would be simply dead.
“Wake up.”
The groggy mumble didn’t make for much of a reply. Malachai had been planning this moment for years, obsessively fantasizing about his revenge down to even the tiniest detail. Last night, while running through it in his head one last time and then giving voice to his thoughts in front of the coven, he had briefly considered using a tulpa to take care of his father. After all, he had reasoned, that way he could look anybody in the eye who dared ask about the events that were to come, and tell them that his hands were totally clean, that he had never even touched the man in months.
Yet the more he thought about it and talked it over with his new-found family, the less he found he liked the idea. What was the point of revenge, the tall woman – whose name he still did not know – had asked, if one did not get to savor it like the finest of wines? Malachai didn’t know the answer to that, because the finest wines he had ever been exposed to were the cheap swill that his father drank by the bucketload, but he certainly took her point.
Sometimes, you really wanted to get your hands dirty.
So when the time was finally at hand to tie up this particular loose end once and for all, it was Malachai himself who pushed open the rickety wooden door that led into his father’s home. Just as he had suspected, it wasn’t even bolted: his father usually passed out before remembering to do it.
The snoring was every bit as loud – and as irritating – as he remembered. It stopped just as soon as the young man, who now felt like an intruder in what was once supposed to have been his own home, stepped into his father’s bedroom and began to cast. His fingers danced through intricate patterns, slowly at first, but growing faster and faster until they were little more than a blur. Hundreds of tiny blue lights surrounding them, rising into the air like steam from the surface of a pond on a hot day.
Malachai’s father reached for his throat, suddenly turning purple. His eyes fluttered open and began to bulge in their sockets. Tears were already streaming down his face as his throat began to close up.
The boy just stood there, and smiled.
It didn’t take long. When the big man gave a last gasp, Malachai lifted both arms in the air with a snap, as though raising an invisible box over his head. His father’s body flew up above the bed and slammed into the wooden ceiling with a sickening thump, breaking his nose in a shower of blood. The boy let him dangle there for a good sixty seconds, watching him silently with his head cocked to one side like a dog waiting patiently for a treat. Then he let his arms drop to his sides. The body dropped with them, breaking the bed frame when it hit. Wood splinters flew everywhere, but somehow not a single one managed to hit the gangly young man standing not ten feet away.
If the strangulation hadn’t killed his father, Malachai reflected, then the broken neck would have. He lay on his back in a heap of jumbled blankets and wood fragments, head lolling at an angle that nobody could possibly survived. His dead eyes stared up at the ceiling, where a star-shaped splatter of blood dripped slowly back down on top of him.
It took only a few hours for the dead man’s spirit to rise up out of its broken physical shell. Like so many of the newly-deceased, it was initially bewildered at finding itself awake in a new body made entirely of energy.
“Son...?”
The boy ignored his father’s increasingly desperate pleas, tuning out the cries for help that the dead man wailed with trembling hands. Malachai had come prepared for this. The members of his coven had taught him much about the nature of the afterlife. For many of the deceased, a spirit vortex would open up within the first few hours of death – sometimes within the first few minutes – and convey them on to the Summerland, the next stage of existence in the astral realm.
Unless, of course, somebody interfered.
Malachai had the knowledge to interrupt this natural process, and he used it without mercy. Collecting some of the dead man’s still-warm blood in a container that he had prepared the night before, the younger Falconer spent the next two hours carrying out the ritual of binding which he had spent the past few days so laboriously preparing. All he needed now was…a focus.
Looking around the house, his eyes settled upon the perfect object: a carved and lacquered oak bench seat, which the now-rare visitors to the Falconer household were invited to sit in whenever they stayed for longer than a few minutes. Dragging it through into the bedroom, Malachai was sitting upon it, drinking from an expensive silver cup when his father’s spirit finally separated. The boy had developed a taste for wine during his time with the coven, and a raid on his father’s liquor supply had paid off.
Setting the cup down carefully to avoid spilling even a single drop of the expensive red, Malachai waved his hands in the precise pattern that would complete the ritual and bind his father’s soul to his side for all eternity…or at least, for as long as the physical object that held it remained unbroken.
“No—what…?” The dead man screamed again, drunk now on terror instead of wine. The ability to feel the effects of alcohol were just one of the many things that you gave up when you passed on, and so the brain-fog that Falconer Senior had been in during his death throes wasn’t there to insulate him from the pain any more.
And for a spirit, being forcibly bound to an object was a painful process. Think of how you would feel if a jailer shackled your arms and legs with heavy iron chains, and you still wouldn’t even begin to understand how much the ritual of binding hurt.
Once it was all over and done with, the boy called for help. The sun was fully up now, and yet nobody in the village was out and about. The tall woman had put a low-level glamor on t
he place, and the villagers would all surface from their beds sometime in the early afternoon, scratching their heads and trying to figure out why they had all overslept.
Jonas, the biggest man in the coven, stepped inside and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Malachai nodded toward the bench. Jonas nodded silently, tucked the piece of furniture under one arm seemingly without any effort at all, and followed the newest member of the lich family out into the sunlight.
As the house burst spontaneously into flames, Malachai Falconer didn’t so much as look back even once. He figured that he was trading one family for another, and had cut his old family tree off at the root this day, managing to enslave his father, binding him to his side, for as long as his presence continued to amuse him.
All in all, the boy mused, not a bad morning’s work.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Malachai’s adoptive family lasted longer than his biologic one, but in the end he managed to destroy that one every bit as effectively.
Liches were not the most emotionally stable creatures on a good day, and the coven definitely had its bad days. A lot of bad days.
Jonas was the first. The big man had a temper to match, despite the fact that he had had over three hundred years in which to develop a sense of restraint. He had gotten on Malachai’s bad side. It hadn’t even been a big deal, really; just a misunderstanding over a casual remark made in jest. Now a teenager, and still growing – though at a vastly reduced rate compared to normal human beings – Malachai was becoming more petulant and vindictive by the day.
But he was also cunning, and more importantly, he was patient. For days he simply waited, and he watched. Finally, after trailing Jonas into the woods one night at a discreet distance, he found what it was that he had been looking for: Jonas’ phylactery.
I was guessing from what Lamiyah told me that most phylacteries were bones, or part of the human body. Malachai’s was the skull of a child. Jonas used a big human thigh bone – a femur – to contain his own spirit essence. He had buried it in a hole at the base of a tall tree. This was the first night in the space of a week that he had gone back to check on, it as Malachai had surely known that he would in the end.
“Liches are paranoid creatures at the best of times, Daniel,” she explained to me, continuing the story, “most especially where the hiding place of their soul repository is concerned.”
Jonas hadn’t done a good enough job of watching his own back; in the gathering darkness, he had completely missed the fact that Malachai was lurking in the bushes, watching him pull the gleaming white bone from the earth with his bare hands. After examining at it to reassure himself that it was still safe and sound, Jonas took a sneaky look around to make sure that nobody was watching him. The wood was quiet and almost entirely dark. Satisfied, the big man reburied the femur once more, covering it with a mound of soil that he patted down until it was nearly indistinguishable from its surroundings. Then he slunk off into the night.
Half an hour passed. Then a full hour. Finally satisfied that Jonas really had left, and wasn’t simply laying in wait to ambush him, Malachai crept carefully out of hiding. He picked his way slowly from tree to tree, always half-expecting the big man to leap out and attack him…but nothing moved except for the breeze stirring up the leaves and branches. Relieved to have reached the tree in safety, the young lich squatted down and began to dig with his hands, scooping dirt and soil aside like a dog.
There it was: the femur. Jonas’ phylactery.
Wrapping his fingers tightly around the shaft, Malachai rose slowly to his full height. He didn’t care if there was anybody around that could see him now. If the phylactery’s owner had even the slightest idea of what was happening, he would never have let Falconer within a hundred feet of its hiding place.
With a triumphant roar, Malachai swung the femur around as hard as he could, slamming it against the trunk of the tree. Bark and bone exploded, showering him in splinters and chips.
From far away in the distance, an anguished, agonized cry split the night. It was the sound of Jonas. Suffering.
A grin twisted his lips. He swung again and again, smashing the bone, shattering it into a thousand tiny pieces. With every new impact came a fresh scream to match, high-pitched and piercing.
It was the sound of a lich dying.
A cloud of blue and purple lights, hundreds of thousands of tiny little particles, emerged from the ruins of the femur. Malachai held the few remaining intact fragments close to his chest, as though hugging them to give them comfort or to keep them warm. His hands glowed with a cold, pale light. The multi-colored vapor rose up out of them and drifted toward the center of his chest, snaking its way through the exposed skin and disappearing inside, somewhere in the region of his heart.
The life essence of Jonas, an immensely powerful and fairly old lich, was now gone, displaced when its phylactery had been busted apart by the young upstart. But it was not lost; all of that spirit energy, and the power that it represented, had been absorbed into Malachai’s own body, drained like a battery and transferred.
Malachai had never felt stronger. Yet he knew that he would have to act quickly; the death of Jonas, whose body was now reduced to a dried and dessicated husk of its former self, would warn the others. They would come for him, Malachai instinctively knew, the pack turning upon its one rogue member because he had dared strike out at one of their own, and was therefore a threat to them all.
A threat that could never be tolerated.
He had time, Malachai knew, but precious little. One by one he sought them all out that night, hunting each of them down in turn. The short woman named Elspeth was next. She was the toughest and put up the most fight, he was surprised to learn – but Malachai was also stronger than he had ever been, his power boosted by the energy he had absorbed from Jonas. He conjured up a tulpa to fight his battle for him, one that mimicked his own body type…but twisted and distorted, as if it was being looked at through a warped mirror.
The tulpa stayed by Malachai’s side through that entire night of blood and violence. Lich after lich was taken by surprise and defeated, their energy absorbed and consumed in order to feed Malachai’s constantly-increasing strength. When each adversary had been pummeled to the brink of death, he would force them to lead him to their phylactery – and destroyed it.
The tall woman – Agnes was her name, Malachai had finally been told – he deliberately left for last. True, Malachai had felt something quite close to affection for her – but in the end, it hadn’t been enough to save her from his ambition, which was burning like a forest fire and consuming everything in its path. Her phylactery was, appropriately enough, a cured and preserved human heart, which she kept buried on the shore of a small lake.
Malachai and his dark companion stalked her through the dark woods, which were starting to grow lighter with the oncoming dawn. She waited for him patiently, standing on the edge of the water with the relic held loosely in her hands. Her lips were moving ever so slightly, as if she was talking to herself. He could barely see her face at all in the gloom.
He was going to handle this one himself. He felt that he owed her that much, at least; after all, he wasn’t a complete ingrate.
“I always knew that it would come to this.” Agnes sounded tired, completely resigned to her fate. “Since the night of your birth, when you clawed your way up out of the ground into the starlight…I knew.”
The younger lich sneered, but it lacked any real conviction. “Why not finish me before tonight, then?” he challenged. “You might have been able to stop me. Might have been able to save them all.”
She shook her head mournfully. “I think not. You were always more powerful than you ever suspected, Malachai. You have the black heart of a true lich.” Agnes looked down briefly, seeing the heart still cradled in her hands and allowing herself a little smile at the joke. She saw Malachai’s eyes shift downward, taking in her phylactery. “Oh,this? This isn’t the heart of a lich. It’s the heart of my hus
band. A good man, but also a weak man,” she said dismissively.
“You killed him?” Malachai asked, suspecting that she was stalling for time but intrigued nevertheless.
“My first. I shall never forget.”
“Regret is a weakness best reserved for the living.” Malachai took a step closer toward her. Two. She didn’t flinch or match him with a step backward; the water was at her back, and there was nowhere left for her to run. What’s more, she knew it.
“Perhaps. But then again, so is complacency—”
The attack came in a split-second, almost taking Malachai completely off-guard.
Almost.
Agnes let the heart drop, throwing up her hands palm-first. A torrent of blinding white light flew out of each one, joining together into a single stream about a foot from her outstretched hands and blasting toward Malachai.
It was only then that he realized that she hadn’t been talking to herself at all: she’d been casting, preparing a psychic attack for him in the hopes of catching him unawares. He should have remembered: Agnes didn’t much go in for tulpas and autonomous thought-forms. She was much more of the direct attack type.
Falconer threw himself to one side, hitting the ground with a thud that sent the air rushing from his lungs. The energy burst blasted a tree to smithereens, sending a shower of branches and leaves high into the canopy up above.
Malachai lay on his side, desperately trying to catch his breath. Agnes was on him in a heartbeat, straddling him and slamming her fists into his face, ribs, and any other vulnerable spot that his flailing arms couldn’t cover in time. He yelped, trying to roll away but prevented by the weight of her body pushing down on him.
“How does it feel, Malachai?” She slammed a fist into his face, once, twice, then a third time. He squealed when he felt his nose pop, but it was more of a reflex than anything else. Liches felt very little in the way of physical pain; it was one of the great benefits of being a soulless supernatural creature. “How does it feel to be helpless?”
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 17