by JM Guillen
“We.” The word gurgled from the throat of the hound behind me. “We, we ,we.”
“God, fucking—!” Baxter pushed me aside, raised the shotgun, and fired. That blast was close to my head—so close that my ears rang again.
“How many of you do I have to kill?” Baxter sounded wild, crazed. As he shot into the darkness, I glimpsed a bloody gash down one side of his face.
Perhaps I’ll need to order more crab rangoon. I laughed at the thought, and then realized an awful truth.
I might be just a little bit delirious.
“I wish we’d grabbed more guns,” Alicia confided as she pulled me back from the fray.
“I wish I had another one myself.” Rehl fired at one of the wolf-like things. “Or maybe a sword. Do you think pistol/katana would make a good combination?”
“No.” I stared at him as if he were a crazy person. “Why would you want to melee if you had the option of a gun?”
“I mean, it would look cool.” Rehl gave me a grin as he reloaded.
I rolled my eyes.
Wordlessly, we resumed course for the trap door.
Alicia kept her arm around me, which gave me enough support that it wasn’t impossible for me to move. We limped around one of the sagging bookshelves, and peered cautiously into the darkness.
“Shit!” Rehl leapt back just as one of the miscreations leapt at him from the shadows. He drew and fired, but three more slipped toward us in an insectine prowl.
“Got it.” Baxter stepped up and readied his shotgun. “Watch our back, will you, Alicia?”
“There’s more.” I glanced to our left, as we came out from behind the gargantuan bookshelf.
Several more of the monstrosities boiled forward.
Four? I squinted. Five? I just couldn’t say.
I hated feeling so useless, absolutely exhausted while my friends fought for their lives. Now I wished I had considered further before I’d told Rehl I didn’t want a gun.
I need to do a better job of gearing up. Too late now. I touched the bracelet on my wrist, played with the silver bead, and felt the Aegis scrawled upon it. My mind scrambled.
“More.” One of the hounds leapt up to the top of the bookshelf, and the weight of it caused the creaky shelf to rock. Its inhuman voice gurgled a pale mimicry of my word. “More, more.”
“Liz?” Panic burned in Baxter’s voice as he realized how many more came down at us from that side. He started to turn the same moment the creature perched on the bookshelf prepared to launch itself down upon us.
Yet the wolf-spider weighed too much. As it leaned forward, the entire bookshelf fell toward us.
“SHIT!” I dove sideways and scarcely dodged the heavy shelf as hundreds of pounds of books and wood scattered across the floor.
And buried one of us under a mountain’s weight of shelf and tomes.
“Alicia!” Rehl screamed over his shoulder even as he shot one of the hounds.
“No.” I stood in mute shock, unable to process what had happened.
Alicia hadn’t even cried out. That beatific light, Abriel’s radiant truth, flickered and died.
With darkness came despair.
Horror fell upon us, like sharpened sheets of November rain.
11
“No.” I stared at the huge pile of books, unable to process what had happened. Alicia.
I might have believed she was okay, maybe unconscious, were it not for her new… friendship with Abriel.
That light didn’t fail because Alicia was okay. That light failed because she was as far from okay as I could imagine.
“Liz! Look out!” Rehl’s voice sounded rough, strangled. He stepped toward me and aimed at the hound that had been on top of the bookshelf moments ago.
“Here.” It turned toward him, a leer on that horrific wolf’s head. A long, black tongue snaked from its mouth, and it prepared to leap just as Rehl brought the gun up.
Rehl fired.
It dodged.
“Shit!” Rehl threw himself to one side as it lunged at him, but not fast enough. One of those horrific, arachnid appendages reached for him and sliced along his back as he rolled to one side.
Sensing its victory, the creature scrambled after him and sliced him twice more before it latched onto Rehl’s shoulder with its wickedly wide maw.
Rehl screamed in pain.
But the cowboy hat… I whirled.
“Hey there, asshole.” Baxter’s voice came from behind me. “Lay the fuck off.” He fired the shotgun three times.
The hound screamed and flailed as it fell off of our friend.
Our friend screamed too.
“You shot me!” Rehl sat up and clutched his leg.
“What?” Baxter ran up to him. “Oh, shit. I am so sorry—!”
“Elizabeth.” The horrific voice sounded like two ancient stones as they grated together. “Shall we parlay again? Are you ready to make a different decision?”
Oh no.
I turned toward the source of that voice, even as three of the hounds backed away from us and took to the shadows. There, I saw the silhouette of the Houndsman again, a greater darkness amidst the twilight of the room.
“S—so it’s definitely not dead.” Baxter stepped up behind me. I heard the tremble in his voice, but also the steel hidden there.
“I guess not.” My mind frantically whirled, like a hamster on its wheel.
This had gone on too long. Everyone had been hurt, Alicia might be dead.
Because of me.
The Houndsman had been right. I should have just given up earlier.
“There doesn’t need to be any more death here.” The monster sounded almost reasonable.
“Maybe not.” Baxter took a step forward and stared into the darkness at the Houndsman. His gaze held a certainty I hadn’t seen before.
He dropped the shotgun.
“Baxter?”
“I have no business with you, little manling.” I heard the patronizing smile in the fiend’s voice. “I will take the bitch and go my own way.”
“I—I thought introductions were in order.” Baxter’s voice sounded small, yet held a determination I wasn’t familiar with.
Except when we play. A ghost of a smile teased at the edge of my lips. When we gamed, Baxter was fearless.
“I have no name you could understand, not you nor your kith, kin, or kine.” The Houndsman sounded impatient, as if he dealt with a child.
“My name is Baxter Ward.” He took a breath, and I noticed his right hand fiddled with the gauntlet covering his left wrist.
He glanced back at me. I saw the fear in his eyes, the tremble to his hand.
But he turned back to the shadowed horror.
He smiled.
“You should say hello to my little friend.”
He completed some motion I couldn’t see, and orange fire unfurled in the darkness. There, resting upon Baxter’s gauntlet—his falconer’s gauntlet—perched something like a giant hawk. The apparition looked more like some prehistoric raptor, like the archtypical idea of what a hunting bird should be. A dire falcon, maybe.
Yet in addition to being sleek, winged death, living elemental fire outlined each and every feather. It flapped upward, three or four lazy motions. Its ember-like eyes glared at the Houndsman.
“What is this foolishness?” the Houndsman snarled.
The hawk suddenly incandesced, erupting into flame only vaguely in the shape of an avian, and swirled down.
It was not a hawk.
It was a thousand hawks. A thousand hawks constructed of flame and volcanic fury. They screeched, crying their wrath as they swooped down upon the Houndsman and his unholy horde.
The world exploded in fire and screaming wrath.
“Take them!” Now the Houndsman screeched, rage and terror and pain wound all through his words. “Slaughter them like sheep!”
At his word, the otherworldly spider-hounds leapt forward to rush us from the shadows.
I couldn�
�t say how many there were. Without the light of Abriel they did not hesitate to lunge toward us, melting out of the shadows into a wall of horrific, fanged death.
“Oh fuck!” I scrambled backward and bumped into Rehl who had pushed himself to his feet.
“My gun!” he cried frantically. “I can’t find it! I don’t know where—?”
Frantically, I spun in place and tried to take in all sides at once. I clutched at the bracelet as if I could drag the Wind out of it.
When I realized the truth, a slight smile curled my lips.
“I don’t know if it matters.”
For every hound, there were at least a dozen of the flaming hawks, which dove and burst against the creatures with no concern for themselves. Every time one of the hawks struck true, it exploded into a burst of white hot flame.
The battle cries of the hawks commingled with the grunts and growls of the hounds as the battle raged around us. A kaleidoscope of light and shadow whirled in the attic, yet everywhere we looked, the hounds fell.
They didn’t even try for us anymore.
“Baxter!” Rehl squeezed my shoulder and took three quick steps to our friend. The small man lay on the ground and twitched as if in some kind of fit. “Baxter!” Rehl cried again, and shook him.
“Cleverly played, stupid little quim.” The Houndsman strode toward me, even as another of the flaming, fury filled hawks swooped upon him and crashed against his chest with a burst of wrath.
“Looking a bit rough there, aren’t you?” I couldn’t keep the snark off my tongue. No longer an intimidating bastion of shadow, the Houndsman couldn’t hide his state. Between the explosion from Simon’s clever little throwing star and the flying Flame Elemental dive bombs, the Houndsman was practically transparent in several spots.
“It matters little.” I heard the smirk in his voice as the fiend swiped its stave to one side and batted one of the hawks to the ground. “Even if I am unable to take you to Mister Lorne, I can make certain no others shall hunt you.” Its smile grew wicked. “That is a blessing, is it not?”
“Maybe you can.” I cocked my head as I realized what lay on the floor to my left. “And maybe you can’t.”
With the last vestige of will that scrappily clung to some forgotten corner of my heart, I hurled myself sideways and dove into the clumsiest side roll I’d ever done.
The Houndsman swung with his stave, and if I’ve been a touch slower, the strike that splintered the floor might have flattened me.
But it didn’t. Instead, I came out of that roll with Baxter’s shotgun in hand.
“Surprise!” I stepped forward and pulled the trigger.
The blast carved away part of the Houndsman’s head, and he stumbled backward.
I grinned.
“Idiot child,” he slurred. He held his stave forward, as if ready to pronounce doom from on high. Darkness gathered around him, like a coming storm.
Which was the moment Rehl shot him in the face.
“Nat twenty!” he crowed drunkenly. He’d apparently found his pistol, and limped forward to shoot the Houndsman from the left. He double tapped again, and stepped even closer.
The fiend screamed with fury and rage.
I stumbled forward, so exhausted that I wanted to fall where I stood. Yet I pulled the trigger again and again, my wavering hand dealing certain death. The shotgun hurled blast after blast into the Houndsman’s chest and head.
Until it clicked empty.
“Have not won.” The Houndsman’s gravelly voice cracked, even as another of Baxter’s loyal firebirds swooped upon him and exploded against his face. “The Gaunt Man has a long memory.”
“I think we’ve won today.” Rehl reloaded as he walked closer to the downed horror. Without another word, he took aim, and fired round after round into the side of the manifestation’s head.
A scream filled the room, an eldritch cry that sounded as if it echoed from the edge of reality. For a moment, every shadow in the room quivered and trembled.
In an instant, they froze and a soft sigh issued from nowhere and everywhere.
And the shadows drifted away. In one final, savage rush, the remaining fiery raptors descended against the fiend, and its remnants lit into a furious death pyre. The corpse of the Houndsman burned away beneath the flame of savage elemental birds.
CRACK! The world around us trembled, and not with the otherworldly quakes that prefaced the arrival of more of the hounds. It was a rapid, boiling blur as the gray shadow world of the Houndsman receded.
The very moment the shadowed figure burned to nothingness, that sideways world fell away, as gloaming half-light vanished before the dawn.
We stood in my father’s attic.
As I watched the Houndsman die, I couldn’t help but think of the last of Lorne’s servants that we’d killed. I could hear the thing in my mind, and hear Simon’s response.
“This isn’t over, Shepherd!” The creature wailed, its voice crackling. “My master holds legions of servants! Another will come in my place!”
“We’ll burn that ’un too.” Simon gave me a wink as I hurried past, pulling my stunned comrades. “Just see if we won’t.”
“We did it, old man.” I sank to my knees as I watched the remnants of shadowy horror drift away. At the edge of my mind, wild delirious laughter lurked. I felt as if I might sunder, as if mania stalked in my deepest corners.
As if he were next to me, I heard Simon’s voice again, “I’m forty seven. Not old.” I could hear that scowl.
Laughter, mad and relentless broke out of my chest. It felt as if I were a clay pot that simply shattered, and I laughed, howled, and sobbed.
Rehl stared at me, shock and dismay on his face.
I think that’s the moment I passed out.
Legend Lore
September 5, 1997
New York, New York
I dreamed then.
I dreamed of dark-clad men that hid in the shadows with secrets I would never know. I dreamed of the voice of my father, as he called to me from just beyond my reach. I couldn’t tell if he’d been driven by exultation or fear, I only knew that he was far, further than I could ever understand.
I dreamt of my friends.
I dreamt of their blood.
2
“Liz,” a soft voice whispered from the shadows, woven of worry and care. “Are you awake?”
“Five more minutes, Mom,” I grumbled. “I’ll get up soon.”
“I know you love to sleep.” Alicia stepped closer to me, and the golden light from the window fell across her face. “I tried to let you rest.”
I blinked. The events of the last several hours poured into me, memory like petrichor shadows. In a single startled move, I sat upright.
“Oh my God.” My wide eyes drank in her face. “You’re okay! Oh, fuck, you’re okay!”
“Language,” she chided softly. Alicia sat on the bed next to me and bounced lightly. Her hazel eyes shone brightly, yet a bit of white nimbus danced at their edges. “As okay as possible. The bookshelf knocked me unconscious. Rehl dug me out.”
“He did?” I sighed in relief, but then remembered something else. “What about Baxter? He was having some kind of fit?”
“Yeah, well. Rehl insisted we go to the emergency room. Which was a problem because an emergency room wouldn’t know what to do with you.”
“With me?” I bit my lip and tried to track what she meant. I had a difficult time paying attention, as part of my mind insisted on trying to determine whether her words were Alicia’s or Abriel’s. She sounded far more like my friend than she had, but…
“Liz, Abriel has quite a bit of experience with users of Grace who exhaust themselves like this.” She put one hand on my shoulder. “Our little encounter in the attic must not have been the first time you used so much power. Have you blown yourself out like this before?”
“Literally hours ago, before the attic fight. I pushed things a little too far and came home to fall asleep for something like
twenty-two hours.” I rubbed my eyes as a thought occurred to me. “How long did I sleep this time?”
“Almost sixty-eight.”
“What?” I felt my eyes grow wide with dismay. “I slept for almost three days?”
The ramifications chilled me.
“Rehl called an ambulance. He told the EMTs Baxter and I had both been beneath that shelf when it fell.”
“He could have driven you to the hospital himself—” I furrowed my brow, “—assuming he’s okay?”
“He had a different plan. Didn’t want to leave you alone.”
“Smart. Lorne might have sent another goon.”
“He twisted an ankle.” Alicia cocked her head, and then continued, “Baxter has stitches down one side of his face, but nothing that won’t heal.”
“Christ.” I shook my head.
Alicia narrowed her eyes a touch at the oath, but said nothing.
“So the three of you are… well enough?”
“No one died. Everyone’s injuries were minor.”
“I saw Baxter having a conniption. He was literally on the ground going into convulsions.”
“When you stepped away to try to Masked Brava that horrific monstrosity by yourself, Abriel gave us a quick primer on some of Simon’s more unique tools.”
“I’m feeling like Simon’s tool, lately.”
“Rehl took the hat and Baxter the gauntlet. Both of them had Empyrean sigils hidden within.”
“But neither of my friends are…” I gesticulated futilely, “clever. Talented. You know what I mean.”
“The Empyrean tongue can be learned by anyone, with time. While neither of the guys know the first syllable, Abriel is fluent. She claimed to be able to assist them, but that was before I got knocked unconscious by a bookshelf.”
“Which was why Rehl only used the hat once.” I nodded slowly. “And then when Baxter fiddled with the flaming falcons of doom it was a bit too much for him.”
“He did as Abriel told him to do; he just expected she would be able to assist him. When she wasn’t, he attempted it on his own.”