by N. P. Martin
“I know,” I said. “The wonders of magick.”
“So what age are you then?”
“A gentleman never reveals his age.”
She shook her head at me. “So what, you’re immortal, is that it?”
"Not exactly, but I can stay in this body a long time if I want. I'm kinda under the gun for the next few days, though, so living a long and happy life is looking less and less likely at this point."
“You’ll find a way.”
I wished I had the same faith in myself as she seemed to have. “This is strange, you know.”
We had arrived at the park entrance. Leona steered the car through the main gates, taking note of the ambulance parked up near Cedar Lake. “What is?” she asked, as we passed the tennis courts.
“You being so…friendly towards me. I remember you being a lot more hostile when we first met. It took you a while to warm to me.”
“Who says I’ve warmed to you now?” She flashed me a wicked smile.
“I guess you were going through a lot when we first met, what with your brother and everything.”
“Probably,” she said, stopping the SUV behind a Park Police car. “Can we just focus on the job now, if that’s okay? Or do you need a hug first?”
“A hug would be real nice actually.”
She shook her head. “Let’s go.”
Smiling to myself, I jumped out of the SUV and followed Leona to the Park Police squad car where two uniforms were standing looking out of their depth. One of the uniforms, a middle-aged guy with a gut like an orangutan and the same color hair to match, came saddling towards us. "Sorry, but—"
Leona flashed her ID at him, shutting him up mid sentence. “Homeland Security,” she said. “You can go now.”
“What?” the park cop said. “We didn’t call you.”
“You didn’t have to,” Leona said.
The cop looked at me as if for an explanation. “Hey,” I said with a shrug. “Count yourself lucky the professionals are here.”
“Screw you,” the cop said. “We got it under control.”
“Oh really,” Leona said, pushing past him, throwing the other cop—a young guy with curly dark hair who looked like it was his first day on the job—a look that made him avert his gaze immediately. “I don’t see the suspect in the back of your squad car, so that must mean he’s still out there hurting people.”
“Actually,” said the younger cop, almost apologetic for interrupting. “He’s down by the lake there, feeding on…someone’s dog.”
“A dog?” I said. “He hasn’t hurt anyone then?”
"Yeah, he has," the fat older cop said. "He's attacked three people so far. Luckily they all managed to get away. He took a chunk outta one, though. A jogger. She's in the back of that ambulance over there."
“So why haven’t you stopped him?” Leona asked.
“Because the kid’s a fucking animal, that’s why,” the older cop said. “I ain’t risking going near him. We don’t get paid enough, right?” He looked to his partner for confirmation, who just nodded weakly.
“You called anyone else?” Leona asked.
“Yeah, of course. Local precinct said they’d send someone out. That was a while ago.”
“Okay. Call back and tell them everything is fine. Also, get the fuck out of here and let us handle this.”
“You gotta a real attitude, lady, you know that?” the cop said, looking Leona up and down.
Leona stepped towards the cop, towering over him. “Are we going to have a problem here?”
The cop dropped his head slightly. “No problem.” He headed back to his squad car. “Come on, Jimmy. Let’s leave this to the professionals." He threw Leona another look before plopping his weight into the car and driving off.
"You learn your diplomacy skills in the Army too?" I asked her. "They could use some work."
“I don’t have time for diplomacy,” she said, striding across the grass towards the newly minted vampire currently sucking on a dog by the lake.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, catching up with her. “Who needs diplomacy when you’ve got guns and a badge, right?”
“Exactly.”
“So how you going to handle this kid?”
“That depends on him.” She already had one of her Berettas in hand.
“He probably has no control over himself. They usually have other vamps around to help them through the initial turning process.”
“I know that. So where are they?”
I couldn't see anybody else around, either people or other vampires. That didn't mean the vamps wouldn't turn up at some point, though. Vampires in general thought of themselves as being apart from the human race, superior to it even, which meant they liked to handle their business themselves. They didn't like people like Leona or myself getting involved.
The newly minted vampire was by the lakeside, hunched over the body of a large Golden Retriever, his head buried in the dog's neck while he sucked the blood from its body. The vampire looked about thirteen years old, and he was dressed all in black, his dirty fur hair long and hanging down over the dog's bloodstained coat. Tendrils of smoke also rose off the kid's body. At that early stage, the fledgling vampire still maintained a tolerance to sunlight. Soon enough, though, he would lose that tolerance and the UV rays of the sun would fry him up. If he weren't careful, his whole body would explode into flames like a Tibetan monk at a war rally.
“Disgusting,” Leona said as she eyed the kid vampire.
“We could just do nothing, you know,” I told her. “If he keeps absorbing the sunlight he’ll explode soon enough.”
"I have stake rounds loaded." She pointed her gun at the kid just as he looked up at us and snarled, fresh blood dripping copiously from his open mouth, which was full of small, pointed teeth, along with two longer incisors that were a good inch in length. "I can just take care of him now." The stake rounds were, as the name suggested, bullets made from weighted wood. A precisely aimed shot to the heart could instantly induce the Final Death in a vampire, but the rounds mostly only worked on younger vamps. Older, and therefore more powerful, vamps were usually able to withstand a stake round to the heart as they had fortified themselves against such weapons over time. You didn't want to fuck with older vampires. Not much could stop them, and you had to get close enough first, which wasn't always easy. Not that I was any kind of vampire hunter. I'd had cause on occasion to take a few out, but mostly I did business with them, sometimes mediating between different groups in the city to prevent a street war from happening that would inevitably cause much collateral damage. Other times I did favors in return for information or magickal knowledge. For the most part, though, I avoided vampires because they tended to be too sneaky and hard to trust.
"Or we could take the kid to his own kind," I said, knowing it wasn't the kid's fault he was behaving like an animal. He obviously hadn't been turned on purpose. If he had been, his Maker would be with him, looking after him. He was probably jumped somewhere and left for dead, waking up with an unquenchable thirst for blood, as often happened.
Leona looked at me like I was as bad in her eyes as the dog drinker before us. “Their vermin, Creed. Why would you want to save it just so it can kill people in the future?”
“They don’t all kill, you know. Some of them have other means of quenching their thirst.”
She shook her head. "I don't care. I'm following protocol and protocol says I put this thing down now."
Sorry kid, I thought. Nothing I can do for you.
Leona aimed her gun at the kid again, but as she did, something happened. The kid's reddish eyes turned completely black, which is something I'd never seen before. Then his head snapped towards me like some force had pulled it that way. "Creed," he snarled in a voice that was too deep—too evil—to be his own. "The darkness is coming, Creed, and you can't stop it. Soon all of you will be consumed by it." The vampire—or whoever or whatever had taken him over—grinned lasciviously at me wi
th sharp, bloody teeth. Then it began to laugh like it knew what it was saying was true and that everyone in the world was fucked, and there was nothing I, or anyone else, could do about it.
“Who are you?” I demanded in a voice that probably sounded less disturbed than I actually was.
The entity in the vampire didn't answer me, just kept laughing, grinning and staring at me with those eightball eyes. Then I heard a shot and the kid vampire in front of me exploded in a burst of blood and guts, bits of it showering down into the water, staining the green grass around it. I looked at Leona, who was staring at the mess she had just made, the gun still in her hand. She turned her head to look at me. “He talked too much.”
Saying nothing, I looked over at the rippling lake. The fish were coming to the surface, nipping at the bits of gore floating on the cloudy, crimson water.
A chill went through me, and I shivered.
14
Playing With Fire
I DIDN’T SAY much on the journey back to Freetown. Neither did Leona. It was like we were both trying to process what had just happened at the park. It wasn’t every day that a dark entity took over the body of a fledgling vampire and spoke to you direct, underscoring your impending doom. Needless to say, the experience had disturbed me. It seemed to disturb Leona as well, but she probably compartmentalized it like she did everything, just as her army training had taught her to do, so she could continue to focus on whatever task was at hand. In this case, driving me home to the Sanctum in East Oakdale. After that, she would be onto another case. There was always another case for Leona and the organization she worked for, just as there used to be always another case for me before I was cursed. Now I had just one case: The Case Of Saving August Creed’s Ass…And His Soul.
After telling Leona I would call her, and after her telling me she'd be around if she needed me (with a hint of rare sympathy in her eyes as she did so), I went inside the Sanctum to find Blaez sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace. The wolf got up to greet me, and I crouched down, so his big head was level with my face as he nuzzled his snout into me. Putting my arms around his thick neck, I gave Blaez a hug for a moment. "Someone's messing with me, Blaez," I said. "And I intend to find out who.” The wolf pulled away and fixed me with his yellow eyes, letting me know he was there for me, as he always had been since I rescued him from Babylon all those years ago. “Thanks, Blaez. I know I can always count on you.”
And Leona, of course, who had been surprisingly supportive so far, given that she didn't even remember who I was. On some level, she seemed to trust me, and for that I was grateful. It was difficult sometimes, not showing her how I really felt about her. And while a woman like Leona wasn't exactly into relationships, the relationship I had with her previously was the closest I'd ever had to one. Living your life pursuing magick and sorting out other people's problems didn't leave much room for romantic entanglements. There had been a few women over the years (one of them a vampire) who I had shared a closeness with, but none as deep as with Leona. She seemed to get me, and I got her. That in itself was a rare thing, and it enabled us to be close, but not too close. Enough to give each other what we needed while still giving each other the space to do what we each needed to do. It worked out pretty well before my life went sideways.
I flopped down into the well-worn armchair by the fireplace. Logs were stacked on top of the grate, but the fire wasn't lit. Staring at the logs for a moment, I mumbled a few words and directed a small dose of magick at them. Flames appeared instantly in the grate, licking at the logs until they caught and started crackling in the heat.
Every time I lit the fire and stared into it, I was reminded of the huge fire that was always burning in the family Sanctum back in Ireland. My father would often sit in one of the two chairs by that fire with some ancient book in his lap, sipping at brandy and smoking cannabis as he read. Sometimes I would join him, sitting in the other chair with my own book, and he would look over at me occasionally as if I was distracting him. My father always took magick very seriously indeed. Too seriously, if truth be told, to the detriment of all else.
Magickal energy was such a potent force, and so unpredictable at times, that you had to know what you were doing if you were going try and wield it. That's why my father was so hard on me and my brother and sister growing up, forcing us to spend hours every day studying and practicing. Even when he wasn't there and was off on some business trip or expedition in some far-flung corner of the world, my mother would be there, overseeing our studies, though in a much more relaxed manner. Our mother would let us have fun occasionally, like when we would run around the grounds of the house, blasting each other with magick that came from fingers shaped like a gun, sort of like magickal paintballing, only not as messy (though often painful, especially when you took a blast to the balls thanks to an older brother who delighted in aiming for that particularly sensitive area). Or like when my brother and sister and I would race to see who could take over the spirit of an animal from the woods at the back of the house, and then we would all meet up in the woods and go running if we had taken over a mammal, or flying if we had taken over a bird. I loved those times spent with my brother and sister. We loved and protected each other, until my father—with his ego that could never get enough—overestimated the limits of his power and fucked it all up for everyone. Something I still haven't forgiven him for over three decades later.
But now I was about to do the same thing, wasn’t I? I was planning on summoning forces that were very likely beyond the limits of my control. But I wasn’t about to do so out of ego or some selfish grab for more power. I was about to do so out of necessity, for survival.
That didn't make it any easier, though.
I was getting ready to play with fire, and how burnt I got depended only on the whim of whatever demon happened to respond to my call.
And going from experience, I feared I might just end up incinerated, soul and all.
15
The Library Of Dark Magick
I SPENT THE next several hours inside a room in the Sanctum that didn't exist on the plans of the brownstone (one of many hidden rooms in the place). The hideaway was subbasement, accessed via a magickly sealed and hidden trapdoor in the corner of the main basement, a trapdoor that only became visible when I did a Reveal Spell and waved my hand over the blank piece of floor to reveal it, which would then give me access to the Library of Dark Magick.
As the name suggests, the Library of Dark Magick is where the most dangerous and downright evil books are kept. Books that are full of spells and instructions for accessing the darker regions of the universe like the Myriad Hells and all kinds of other dark and sinister dimensions that most sane people would have no need to access or travel to. These dark pockets of the universe were filled with entities and things that could only be described as monsters, beings that would rip a person apart and devour their very souls on the spot if you made yourself known to them.
The kind of dark magick contained in the books that lined the wonky shelves of the library was just the kind of magick being practiced by the bastard who killed that girl and put the curse on me. To access a dimension like Kiroth and the dark lord Rloth, one would have to be very familiar with the practices outlined in the books I was now about to look through myself. And unfortunately, the only way I was going to counter the black magick spell I was under was to use black magick myself.
A rusty ladder led from the basement down into the library below, which was a maze of narrow corridors that were lined on either side with endless books that seemed to exude their own kind of dark energy, one which immediately put me on edge, causing me to shrink away from them in fear at times. I didn’t exactly make it a habit to go down there. When I took over the brownstone, my uncle warned me not to enter the dark library unless I really had to, telling me that there were books and artifacts down there that would try to seduce me into touching them, into opening them up and using the dark magick inside.
The fir
st time I explored the Library of Dark Magick, I did so after depositing a book down there that I had come into possession of, a book that had no place on any open bookshelf, but which needed hiding away, such was the awfulness of the spells and information it contained. Of course, at the time, I couldn't resist going through some of the books I came across, touching their spines tentatively like they were made from slug flesh or some other foul material. One book, in particular, seemed to beckon me, forcing me to take it off the shelf before I even knew what I was doing, coercing me into opening its pages to recite an ancient Egyptian spell that would open a portal to the Underworld. I had almost finished reciting the spell before I realized with horror what I was doing, slamming shut the book and quickly slamming it back on the shelf before getting the hell out of there. Ever since, I avoided going down there, doing so only a few brief times over the years when I really had to.
Now, as I stood in the stifling atmosphere of the library, the narrowness of the walkways instilling in me a sense of claustrophobia, I resolved to get in and out of the place as quickly as possible. Already I could feel the strange pull of some of the more powerful books, their tendrils of dark influence trying to probe inside my mind, begging me to open their pages as they tried to lure me to them the way a Venus Flytrap lures a fly with the promise of sweet rewards before springing its deadly trap (anyone who tells you books are benign objects with no power except in the minds of those who own or read them says so out of ignorance, and have clearly never been in the presence of a truly powerful book).
The book I was looking for was a centuries-old tome written in an arcane language that very few could read (not without a Translation Spell) and still fewer could even handle without going mad or being dragged down into total darkness forever. The book's title roughly translated into The Book Of Many Hells And Demons. It was kept at the back end of the library, locked up inside a large trunk along with the other more dangerous books in the library. I wrinkled my nose at the musty smell of the place, and occasionally at the other, sharper smell that arose—the smell of pure magickal energy. Yes, magick has a scent. A scent that can vary depending on where the magick comes from and who is wielding it. Black magick has a very sulfurous smell that almost seems to burn the back of your throat. More benign types of magick always smelled to me like almonds, often underpinned by more exotic (and not always Earthly) scents if the magickal energy was intense enough. Right then, as I made my way past the rows and rows of books, it felt like I was in some diabolic maze in the Underworld, almost convinced a demon would spring forth from around a corner at any second. To a darker soul, it would have been heaven down there amongst those books. Not to me. I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there.