Surrender the Dark

by Tibby Armstrong

  “Nyx!” Benjamin cried. She’d miscast her spell, and it had accidentally blocked his hunter’s vision in addition to obscuring the scene. Sure, he could literally fight blind, but he hadn’t been expecting to, and it took a moment for him to reorient his attention.

  The scent of wet clay and musk broadsided him, and he managed a deft roll that had him out of the vampire’s grasp and back onto his feet. In the struggle he dropped his weapon. With a fluid motion, he unsheathed a knife from his boot, and crouched in wait for the vampire’s next attack.

  There was a scuffle nearby, and Akito panted. “It shredded my right hand. Sonofabitch.”

  If Akito couldn’t hold a weapon, the fight was down to Benjamin.

  “Too bad that bite isn’t enough to transfer its magic to you,” Benjamin joked darkly, biting his tongue on the irritable urge to add, then you might be able to actually kill it. “Protect Nyx. She needs someone to watch her back.”

  Akito complied without complaint for once. Several moments stretched, during which nothing happened. Sounds of Benjamin’s own breath became too loud to bear, each inhale filling his lungs with cold fire. Had he asked for this when he’d left his house tonight? No. Why did death always seem to be looking for him? He pushed fear aside, annoyed that it chose to rear its head now. Whether he sought this particular fight or not wasn’t the point. It was his duty to finish it.

  “C’mon,” Benjamin muttered, hands beginning to shake with unspent adrenaline.

  The creature hissed again, feral in its anger, and Benjamin heard it spring forward. The candles’ magic glow remained steady in the darkness. On reflex, Benjamin rolled back, legs rising to slam against the vamp’s chest. He met empty air. Using the momentum his motion created, he returned to his feet.

  Slashing with his knife, he again met only air where the vampire had been, and tripped over a rut. A hand raked his coat. He countered with an uppercut of his knife hand that did little but slice the air.

  “You’re too slow, hunter.” The vampire brushed past him. “The coven has made me powerful beyond your wildest nightmares.”

  As if. If the coven had that kind of power Nyx would have known about it.

  A twig snapped nearby. Benjamin whirled, his sidekick missing its mark. Knife clenched in his fist, he made a slashing sweep, aiming for where the vampire’s chest should have been. Nothing. He felt the thing move. Weapon high, he flailed inelegantly, expecting failure. Hot blood sprayed his face. The vampire howled and reared. Benjamin scrambled to his feet, leaving the circle of Nyx’s magic despite the risk they might be seen. His hunter sight slowly faded back in, making an etheric chalk outline of the vampire. On its knees, the creature clutched at its throat in an attempt to stanch the blood until it healed.

  Benjamin stumbled forward. His boot hit his ninjato, and he swept it up. Coming behind the vampire, he swung. Energy spurted outward, indicating the flow of blood. It was a nice deep cut, which he completed with another swing. The vampire’s hands dropped to its sides, its body swaying before its head tumbled clumsily from its shoulders.

  Shoving his hands over the now-inert vampire’s chest, Benjamin drew its soul into his palms. With a flick of his wrists, he cast the energy out into the Common where it scattered in a brilliant fireworks display, spiraling outward until it disappeared into nothingness on the ground. The body dissolved. Even the blood on Benjamin’s skin evaporated, leaving a tight feeling where the liquid had been moments before. Shaking, he slid his weapon away, knowing the blood that coated it would disappear now that the vampire was dead.

  Footfalls behind Benjamin made him spin, forearm in a defensive position, but he saw no one…no aura. “Akito?”

  “Cops,” Akito managed, breathless.

  Benjamin imagined Akito pointing toward a car crunching quietly over the pavement some distance off.

  “Hell’s bells.” The curse came from Nyx who hastily threw her extinguished candles and herbs into her bag. “Rendezvous tomorrow at Benji’s.”

  “Shift at the shelter. I’ll be late,” Akito said, referring to his job as a social worker with the downtown homeless shelter.

  Nyx shoved Benjamin’s sunglasses into Benjamin’s hands. They fled in opposite directions. It was more difficult to capture them if they separated, and nobody ever thought of Benjamin as a threat. Limping his way across the Common, Benjamin repeatedly slapped away the crawling, adrenaline-fed fear that threatened to take over his ability to reason.

  What a sick joke that as the blind guy in the group, he got to be the seer and fighter he’d never wanted to be. Fuck the universe for taking away his natural sight and for giving him this fucked up ability. As far as he was concerned, it could shove its gift up its proverbial ass. The voice in his head—that long-forgotten taunt he’d heard over and over while in the hospital as a child—had returned fully, and he squashed it down as it joined his uncle’s recriminating voice and his parents’ imagined last breaths.

  I’ve time for you now.

  Breath expelled from Benjamin’s lungs as if he’d been punched. He’d let the vampire get away all those years ago. He’d fucked up, nobody else. He couldn’t stop hunting because, if he did, there’d only be more blood on his hands. It was his fault, all of it, and he was so tired of waiting to be next.

  Nearing the Granary Burying Ground adjacent to Park Street Church, he stopped to slide his shades onto his face. Snow hit his cheeks in icy pinpricks, and he gazed skyward, hailing the universe with his middle finger. Twitching his cane at lightning speed over the pavement, he tried, and failed, to outrun a sense of smell that worked all too well. Neither the ozone on the air nor the cloying stink of urine from the pavement could expunge the scent of the vampire from his nose. There was only one thing he’d ever found that could erase that stench. Alcohol, and lots of it.

  He crossed Tremont Street against the light and was rewarded with the sounds of screeching tires, blaring horns, and a crunching fender as one car slid into another. Another ten steps and he shoved hard at the door to the bar. One flight of sixteen stairs, then eight steps to the right. He crossed the room and found himself in his favorite drinking spot at Whiskey Tango—an alcove with two leather and velvet wingback chairs. Dropping into one, he rested his cane against the other. Music thumped over the sound system. The rhythm pounded through his chest and superimposed itself over the ache, drowning out the pain and the voices.

  “You’re here late,” Marc, his usual server, said.

  “Scotch. Neat.” In no mood for pleasantries, Benjamin pulled his credit card out of his wallet and put it on the table. “And keep pouring until you have to call me a cab.”

  As he tossed back the first drink a few minutes later, the burn transported his anger from his chest to his belly, where it coiled like a serpent. He fixated his attention on the stairwell—the club’s only entrance outside of a rarely used elevator. Midnight blue eyes peered back in imagination—his reference point—and he raised his glass in salute.

  “Go ahead, you fucker,” he said to his own personal Ghost of Nightmares Past. “Come and get me.”

  I’ve time for you now.

  Benjamin was ready to die and to bring the bastard vampire who had killed his family down to hell with him.

  Chapter 2

  On the edge of the Granary Burying Ground, the War King, Tzadkiel, crouched above his quarry for the second time that evening. Lamplight shone from the businesses across the way, casting Benjamin Fuller’s features in a half-shadowed mask that revealed a ruined visage crisscrossed with glossy scars. Acid burns.

  The telltale sweetness of elderflower and spring rain had heralded the hunter’s approach, fomenting vivid memories as only scent could. As a child, Benjamin Fuller’s blood had spoken of sweet sage and bright elderflower. As a man, he smelled no different. Tzadkiel’s thirst reared, threatening to cut him off from sanity, safety, and every careful plan he’d made over the past decades. He’d had to stop following the man earlier lest he give in to that temptation
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  All those years, even through the haze of pain and rage, and loss of memory of who he was and what his wounds had meant, Tzadkiel had catalogued the aroma of Benjamin’s blood. In his dark hole, wasting from the injuries the boy’s uncle had inflicted, he had fantasized about the taste of that magic-laden elixir—the healing properties secondary to the hollow ache it would soothe. An ache so intense no human food could sate it. Famine consumed his universe, eating at the walls around him until he floated in a void where nothing existed except the hunger itself. Eventually, he had become that hunger; memories of any sentient self abandoned and forgotten in the desperate bid to survive at the edge of insanity while his body struggled to find enough magic in his acid- and iron-tainted blood to heal his wounds. Now that he was fully awake and at least strong enough to move freely about the city, his hunger pulsed with beacon-like brightness. Fixated on its glow, Tzadkiel struggled to think of anything else as he watched the hunter.

  Oblivious to danger, Benjamin paused below the maple tree’s gnarled bough to slip a pair of sunglasses onto his face. Broad shouldered, slight in stature, with the elegant gait of a dancer, he had grown into a glorious specimen. Given his lack of heavy muscle and his missing eyes, no one would consider him a threat, unless they knew his lineage. Tzadkiel, cloaked in shadows and magic, watched in wary fascination as the man gesticulated rudely at the sky and walked across the street to a drinking establishment. A subtle black and white sign proclaimed it the WHISKEY TANGO LOUNGE.

  When his nemesis had disappeared inside the bright and rowdy bar, Tzadkiel leaped down from the tree. If he had been restored to full strength, he might shield himself and the hunter from view and drain the man down to his very marrow. Instead, he headed in the direction of Boston Common and let Benjamin Fuller go. For now. From a distance, lamplight appeared to halo the park’s ironwork fixtures, their globes suspended like motionless fireflies branching from path to path. When he reached the boundary to the green space, hesitation gripped him. His foot moved back from the pavement, seemingly of its own accord. He frowned and tried again. Pushing into the open space of pavement in front of Park Street Station, he stared, bewildered, at the park beyond.

  Fatigue washed over him, making his knees turn to water. Jaw clenched, he leaned forward and shoved against the exhaustion. With a stumbling, shoulder-first gait, he managed the few steps past the T station vestibule onto the lane that led toward the Common’s center. As soon as he’d crossed some seemingly invisible boundary, his strength rushed back. Looking over his shoulder, he scanned for any threats. He had thought himself over these bouts of weakness, but this one had been different from the rest and much worse.

  A gaggle of college-age students hooted to each other in the distance, boisterously marking their journey from bar to bar. Tzadkiel forced himself onward, solitude cushioning him in its familiar embrace, insulating him from the group even as he catalogued its progress. He had been alone for so long, it was almost as if he’d forgotten how to be a part of even himself. Slowly, his labored breaths evened out until he felt more himself.

  Near the snow-dusted expanse to the left of Parkman Bandstand, he slowed. Home was so close. He automatically scanned for the hidden door in the base of the structure. Though he knew where it was, it was undetectable. Apparently, the magic at his disposal remained too weak to see and activate the opening. No matter. He would locate members of his mora tonight, in the open, and allow them to escort him inside.

  In the distance a police radio squawked. Scuttling leaves formed mini dervishes in swirls of falling snow. The hunter’s lingering essence teased Tzadkiel’s nose, overpowering the traces of diesel fuel and baked goods drifting from Tremont Street. Among these other scents were those that smacked of home—musk and earth and the metallic note of fresh blood. Also he detected something like ozone, but with a sweet bite that spoke of decaying lavender. It was a scent he recognized, but not one he’d expected to find here tonight. Tzadkiel sniffed the wind, scanning the ground until he found the source. Ten yards off, sparkling shards of light danced and mingled in a tiny maelstrom.

  Slowly, he crossed the expanse of snowy earth and knelt to run his hand over the ground. On the second pass, heat poured into his palm. Gaze scanning the Common, he mentally traced the hunter’s scent along the path he had followed—a path that led to the juncture of several walkways by which Tzadkiel now knelt. Knowledge and understanding collided. That he could still see the soul’s aura meant that the vampire to whom it belonged was newly dead. The hunter had slain one of Tzadkiel’s subjects here. Tonight. Choking on anger and grief, Tzadkiel drew forth his kinsman’s life force, pulling it from the ground until light pulsed and danced in a thousand tiny pinpricks against his skin.

  “You will be avenged.” Tzadkiel rose, the energy cupped in his palms. “As your War King, this I vow.”

  Trees groaned throughout Boston Common, their gnarled limbs seeming to catch streamers of fog from the night air. Ancient ceremonies, unused for decades, returned on a rush of dormant memories. Faces from other battles, and even greater casualties than this one, filled his mind’s eye. Hands held skyward, Tzadkiel opened his palms and set the light free. A streak, not unlike a shooting star, skated from his fingertips and illuminated the low cloud ceiling before winking out of sight. Then he waited.

  Minutes passed as he scanned the heavens in silent threnody. He sought a flare that would indicate the opening of the heavenly gates to the constellation Gemini. Without his subject’s name and the formal ceremony that should have accompanied Tzadkiel’s pleas, however, there was little hope of convincing the gods to open their doors. Still, it was Tzadkiel’s duty to try.

  When the bells of Park Street Church chimed the half hour, and the clouds hadn’t parted, Tzadkiel tore his gaze away from the sky and added another failure to his growing list. At eleven on a cold winter’s night, there was little activity around Parkman Bandstand. The skating rink was closed for the night, and the outbuildings that dotted the rest of the park were boarded up or locked. Even the lights that dotted the Common seemed to glow few and far between, lonely beacons in the vastness of the sparsely populated space.

  He closed his eyes, and stretched his senses. The exercise tightened the muscle at the bridge of his nose, etching craggy tendrils of pain across his forehead and into his temples. Ignoring the discomfort, he unlocked dormant abilities that had until recently been inaccessible to him. At first he detected only the stale air of the subway tunnels and a tang of salt on the wind. He breathed more deeply, relaxing into a part of his mind that had been quiet for so long he didn’t know if it still existed. Rust and metal flaked in chunks of brown and black, figurative hinges creaking, as Tzadkiel pushed at the mental door that connected him with the oldest of his mora. A tendril of ancient, earth-tinged silence touched Tzadkiel. The concentration of power he recognized as his strategoi—his military commander—Dryas.

  Opening his eyes, Tzadkiel saw he faced toward the Financial District. Guided by instinct, he wandered, pausing to test for the man’s energy every so often. Several times, he lost the trail and was forced to retry the exercise. Something that once had been as natural to him as breathing was now akin to a toddler’s first steps—wobbly, unsure, and fraught with error. The dearth of magic in his blood made him weak where once he had been strong—where he would be strong again. When he finally ended his search at a small park above an underground garage in Post Office Square, he suspected he’d erred. His people would have no reason to gather in this place.

  Finding no one in the snow-blanketed strip of open space, he gazed upward. Granite and glass office buildings towered overhead, cutting a jagged circle in the night sky. Snow swirled above. The scene was reminiscent of an Art Deco snow globe, projected in shades of black and white. Shadows threw themselves across sheltered pavement, flat and unmoving. Vacant stone benches squatted in the small park’s artificial light. No one was here, and yet…Yes, there it was. The bright knot of energy he’d recognized.
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  “I am your War King,” Tzadkiel announced, rotating slowly to view the area. “Show yourself.”

  Six men stepped from behind the arbor’s classical columns, seeming to materialize out of the darkness. Tzadkiel recognized their faces, and the memories that went with them filled his mind with bitter regret. A seventh man emerged from behind the underground garage’s elevator vestibule, drawing Tzadkiel’s attention.

  Dryas.

  Tzadkiel shoved down the urge to go to the man in welcome. Friendship had no place in this moment. Calling on ceremony and ancient right, he claimed his due.

  “I am Tzadkiel, son of Demarchos, and I am your War King.” From his back, Tzadkiel unsheathed his sword, an ancient xiphos that had belonged to his great-grandfather, the demigod Pollux, son of Zeus. “Kneel or be judged a traitor.”

  The six looked to each other, their whispered conversation snatched away by the wind. Tzadkiel caught the words archon, witches, forbidden until Dryas stepped forward to meet Tzadkiel.

  “If you are the War King”—Dryas swept Tzadkiel with his gaze—“then first you must answer for your absence before we kneel to your rule.”

  Tzadkiel blinked away his surprise. Violence had always been a possible outcome of this first encounter—likely even, as the mora should have chosen a new ruler in his stead—but he’d never imagined outright denial of his identity. Was he so unrecognizable after his injuries that his own people failed to know him? Surely his unshorn hair and thinner frame wouldn’t render him a stranger.

  “I am your king.” Tzadkiel pulled back his hair, fisting it in one hand while holding his sword in the other. Twisting his head this way and that, he allowed the lamplight to touch his features. “And I must needs answer for my absence only to the Justice Giver.”