Jeremy, weary and grief-ridden, gestured with the bloodsword. It seemed an immense weight at the end of his arm. “Tell me, Angel. You’re supposed to know everything about right and wrong. Do I hack down the demon in front of her lover or do I kill him first so I can get to her?”
But it was Debbie who answered. “George won’t live forever, Sabella will. And without him she’ll lose herself to what she is, undead and taker of life. Let her go now and all she kills after will be on your head.”
“You stopped,” Jeremy said.
“You said it yourself, I’m the only one who ever has. I control it, for now, night by night. One night maybe I won’t stop. Then it will be you or me, Templar.”
“It’s hopeless,” George said to Sabella. “Isn’t it?”
She nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“Then take us both,” George said. “Just make it quick.”
Debbie looked at Jeremy, something like pity on her face. “You don’t need to be the one, Jeremy. Wait for me by the van.”
“No,” Jeremy stated. “I’m a Templar. If it means anything, then it means I protect humans from the supernatural. I won’t let you kill George and he’ll die before he’ll let you at Sabella. If this has to be done…”
Jeremy stalked toward the pair on feet that felt like they belonged to someone else. He tried to lift the sword. Then tried again.
“The sword,” he muttered. “The sword forbids it.”
“The sword, Jeremy, or your arm?” Shadowheart asked softly, only barely audible above the rain.
He raised his eyes to the angel, now certain. “Whichever it is, I have no power to do this. Not even if it is right. Not even if it is necessary. These aren’t the monsters I trained to destroy. And I won’t have Debbie do this. I won’t cheat that way.”
Shadowheart gave him an enigmatic look, but he refused to turn away. Did some uncertainty enter her regard, he wondered. Some hint of doubt or of sympathy?
“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps this once, a third way exists.”
Sabella and George shifted, trading glances.
“Anything,” George said.
“I cannot give Sabella back her human life, nor let her continue as a vampire. But I can give you another existence as creatures of the Earth, not children of Adam or Eve but of the dominion. Will you take this life?”
George looked at Sabella. “It’s this or death,” he said with a lop-sided smile.
“As long as I stay with you,” she said, clutching his hand.
He turned back to Shadowheart who nodded.
“You will,” George whispered.
Shadowheart raised her arm and her wings spread far. A song came from her lips, so gentle and heartbreaking in beauty that it fled the memory.
Sabella and George shimmered with a silver light and before Jeremy’s eyes their images blurred and shifted.
Standing between Jeremy and Shadowheart were two beautiful, black swans. The swans regarded them both with eyes that held more than an animal awareness. Then gently they entwined their necks for a second. Without a backward glance the two vaulted into the air, disappearing into the night in a thunder of wings.
Shadowheart, Jeremy and Debbie remained silent for many minutes. Finally Debbie asked, “Do they know? Are they still themselves in those shells?”
Shadowheart’s wings folded down and around her. “They know that they love and that they belong together. They will have many years of peace to come.”
“Then they are the lucky ones,” Jeremy said. He turned his back on vampire and angel, walking off into the night, rain stinging his face and covering his own tears.
The End
The Tithe of Hell
Jeremy Leclerc sighed as National Public Radio began yet another article on American politics. He down-shifted his red Mini-Cooper, then changed the station. Even a Charlotte traffic report would be useful.
“Hey Billy,” a Southern voice said on the radio. “What’s with these reports of little green men being seen in South Charlotte?”
“Well John-boy,” Billy drawled, “we can’t even make up a whopper like this. There’s been a second report of little green men chasing women near Ballantyne Village.”
“I tol ya, Martians is after our women-”
Jeremy shut the radio off.
“You don’t believe in Martians,” a cool, feminine voice sounded in his mind.
“What woke you up?” he said, a hand unconsciously touching the gold and crystal pendant he wore under his shirt. It held the essence of his guardian angel, Shadowheart.
“A man awaits us at your studio,” Shadowheart mindspoke. “He needs the services of a Knight Templar.”
She faded from his mind, Shadowheart at her most annoying. Jeremy looked at the traffic ahead of him and sighed again.
A half-hour later, he pulled into the garage adjacent to his studio. His cover as a graphic designer irritated the Templar Master. Templars were supposed to be poor Knights. But Jeremy did no better with celibacy.
The door to his studio stood open, which meant Samantha was inside. She worked for him when things were slow at her glass store. Small and attractive, she wore gold-rimmed glasses and an expression that said that she was up to something.
Sam sat on desk speaking to gray-bearded man dressed in khakis and a sport-jacket. “Here’s Jeremy now.”
“Hi, Sam.”
She gestured at the man. “This is Mr. Sean Lin, Father Bixby sent him to us.”
“This boy is a Knight Templar?” Lin said.
“Shadowheart,” Samantha called.
His guardian angel manifested in her most impressive form: seven feet tall, flowing black hair, a pale face of heartless beauty and black and red wings that once spread would fill the room.
Lin looked up at her, his mouth hanging open.
Then the archangel was gone and in her place stood a small petit blond, snub-nosed dressed in a jeans and T-shirt not much different from Sam’s.
“Yep,” Sam said, “I didn’t believe it till I saw her too.”
Lin moved to speak.
“Yes, I’m an angel,” Shadowheart said.
He opened his mouth again.
“Yes there’s a God,” she added. “No, I am not going to tell you more.”
Lin looked at Jeremy.
“Let’s stick to what brought you here,” Jeremy said.
Lin wiped a shaky hand over his face. “You’ve heard about the abduction and molestation of women near Ballantyne. The little green men story?”
Jeremy frowned. “I thought that was a joke.”
“I wish,” Lin said his face grim. “My daughter Fionna was with a girlfriend when she was ambushed by a group of these little green men, six weeks ago. The friend got away, she didn’t.
“The police didn’t believe it of course. Before they’d even call her missing, she showed up again, forty-eight hours later. Only she was pregnant and near delivery. She delivered a baby boy the next day.”
“What did she have to say?” Samantha asked.
“My daughter has been very vague and distracted since her return. She claims she met an incredibly handsome young man. She went off with him to a foreign land where she was treated like a queen. She can’t remember much beyond she was in love and happy.”
“The child?” Shadowheart asked.
Lin looked unnerved at being addressed by the angel. “At first the child was normal, an attractive healthy boy. But something happened one night; I believe it was substituted for a changeling.”
“Are you sure the baby is a changeling?” Jeremy asked
Lin handed him a photo of a dreamy-eyed young woman holding a …well something in a diaper.
Samantha whistled. “Wow. Put a pipe in his mouth and he’d be the spitting image of Popeye the sailor.”
“She’s named this thing, Tam,” Lin said. “Until we get the real child back there’ll be no way to substitute it for this changeling.”
“Okay,” Jere
my said. “I’ll see what I can do. Sam, would you see Mr. Lin out.”
“Sure, I have to get going and feed the dogs.” Samantha towed a somewhat dazed Mr. Lin to the door.
*****
“Shall we go check out the area where she disappeared?” Jeremy said. “Maybe you can sense something?”
“We must start somewhere,” Shadowheart answered.
Near sunset, Jeremy parked his car at Ballantyne Commons. The last news report had put the little green men at the nearby intersection
Shadowheart popped into existence as the blond teen as he got out of the car. Jeremy could tell that this manifestation was merely an image; she’d have to be careful that no one walked through her. He looked at her in shorts and a T-shirt. “Can you possibly update the look?”
“What?”
“I mean you look sixteen, could you possibly add a few years so I don’t get arrested for transporting you across state lines.”
She gave him a raspberry. “Hey, buy me an ice cream at Kilwins.”
“Won’t you have to manifest more to enjoy food?”
“For Rocky Road, I’ll do it.”
“Work first, play later. We’re hunting Martians.”
For lack of anything better they walked over to one of the four arches that marked each corner of the intersection. The post and lintel style arches stood on grassy mounds on each corner of the intersection. Each arch towered over ten meters and was decorated with bas-reliefs.
As they neared the shadow of the archway, Shadowheart gasped and staggered, her image wavering. Jeremy whipped out a Walther PPK from under his jacket, wishing he’d brought his Templar Bloodsword from the car.
“Back,” Shadowheart managed.
“What is it?” Jeremy demanded.
“Evil,” she said, recovering and looking at the arch with narrow eyes. “I do not know how I didn’t sense it before. These structures were made by men, but usurped by evil. They lead to netherworld dimensions. Jeremy, the child may be in the netherworld.”
“So I go in and get it,” Jeremy said, quickly, before his commonsense could assert itself.
“The netherworld is a part of the realms of hell. I cannot go with you and you dare not go alone. I can think of only one ally for you,” Shadowheart said, her face grim and drawn.
Jeremy studied her. “Wow, go on, this I simply have to hear out loud.”
Shadowheart grimaced. “Debbie Middleton.”
Unable to resist, he said. “That would be the vampire, Debbie Middleton.”
“Yes, her truce with the forces of light makes her a safe ally. If you can keep your dick to yourself around her.”
Jeremy’s eyebrows went up. “If you recall, she used her hundreds of years of sexual practice to seduce me, when I first went to destroy her.”
“If you recall, you resisted for all of three minutes,”
“They didn’t teach me about that sort of thing in Templar School,” Jeremy replied, “but you’re right. The question is will she help?”
*****
Debbie was a modern vampire, cell phone and all and agreed to meet him right after sunset. He waited in Panera’s bakery watching the four arches.
Jeremy spotted Debbie’s hot-pink VW pulling into the lot and out popped Debbie. The short, busty vampire wore a rhinestone denim jacket and painted-on jeans. She gave Jeremy a casual wave as she strutted up in her high-heeled cowboy boots. A couple of young men were leaving and almost fell over themselves to get the door for her.
“Thank you, boys,” she twanged. “Oh, so many good-lookers, makes me want take a bite out of one of you.” They must have been married as no one took her up on it, though the looks she got spoke volumes.
Jeremy rose and pulled out a chair for her.
“I do so love your old-fashioned manners,” Debbie sat at the table with a sigh. “I swear I’m going to get these things reduced after two hundred years of lugging Double D’s around. Thank God I’m dead already and don’t have to worry about sagging.”
Jeremy shook his head. “Too much information.”
“Nice to hear from you, Sweetie and you ordered me key-lime pie and coffee, lovely. So what’s up? Did you decide to join me in an eternity of blood-orgies?”
“Er, no”
“Good,” she said, “I like you, boy. If you had, I’d be kicking your ass over the archways there.
“Thanks. Those archways are why I called you.”
“Yeah, I read in the paper about the weird goings on around here. Seems some girls been getting their skirts lifted by aliens? So what do you think is going on?”
Jeremy said. “The local radio hosts seem to think it’s Martians.”
“Oh, honey,” Debbie laughed. “Everybody knows there’s no such thing as Martians.”
He looked at the vampire silently.
“Okay,” she said. “The irony was lost on me for a few seconds. But Jeremy, vampires and demons are of the Realm of Earth. Even the other dimensions are merely shadows of this earth. Like the forms that Plato wrote about, those dimensions only exist as alternatives of this one.”
“You read Plato?”
“I got a lot of daylight to avoid, baby.”
“Who’s to say that this is only place imbued with life,” Jeremy replied. “In all this vastness, how could we be the only world?”
“I don’t know,” Debbie said around a mouthful of pie. “Your pipeline to God is better than mine. Why don’t you ask your foxy little guardian angel?”
“Well, there’s an idea.”
Debbie dropped her fork. “Don’t you go calling her here. She scares the crap out of me. One day she’s going to conjure a private sunrise for me. Oh lord, I just know it.”
Jeremy grimaced. “Shadowheart’s never threatened you.”
“She doesn’t like me,” Debbie finished.
“Well you are the evil undead.”
“Hardly, Sweetie, I’m the neutral undead. Remember? Truce under a White Pass you arranged for me so long as I don’t hunt humans.”
“A man came to see me today,” Jeremy changed the subject. He relayed the tale of Sean Lin. “Shadowheart confirmed there was something mystical about those archways though. She thinks they’re gateways to the netherworld. But she could barely function in this area. The longer we were here, the further she had to get from the archways. So we’re thinking something demonic rather than Martians.”
Debbie frowned. “Most of the passages between the netherworld and the Realm of Earth are ancient and ran through Europe. Those archways are only a few years old.”
“I need to find a way to the netherworld,” Jeremy said. “I have to get that baby back.”
“And you want my help? Shadowheart’s halo will catch fire.”
“Never seen her with a halo,” Jeremy said, “and she suggested it.”
Debbie whistled.
“The question is will you help and what do you want for your help?”
“Oh, I’ll help you honey. The charge goes to your angel. She owes me a favor. I’ll name it when I need to.”
Jeremy lowered his head and concentrated. This close to the archways at full dark, Shadowheart’s voice came to him muted but tinged with annoyance. “Yes, dammit.”
He looked up at Debbie. “Deal”
They hiked over to the archways around 11PM, traffic still buzzed and more than the usual number of police cruisers rolled by. The cops might not buy the story, but they knew something was up. Jeremy selected the Southeast arch. There could hide in the nearby bushes and trees on a nearby rise and keep watch.
Hours passed along with the occasional fanatical jogger. Traffic thinned and crickets chirped. Around 2AM Debbie shifted impatiently. “This ain’t working. Or if does, it may be weeks or months.”
“Suggestion?” he asked.
“Bait,” she said. “These sighting are accompanied by girls disappearing or getting groped. Well let’s give them what they want.” Debbie took off her jacket, whipped off her blouse
uncovering a black bra that gave new meaning to “lift and separate.” She slipped the jacket back on. “I’m gonna be a stoned floozy passing out in the hollow there.”
She waited for some cars to pass and then staggered out, her jacket open and her bra visible. She stumbled around until she reached a spot near the archway. The ground dipped there and she pretended to fall then sat up, and rolled on her back.
Debbie lay unmoving, something the undead were very good at, for more than an hour before the archway developed a shimmer. It was so faint that a weary Jeremy almost didn’t notice it. A pack of figures slipped from between the pillars. Short, mostly naked but for what looked like animal-skin pants, they were bald, green-skinned, with red eyes and leering mouths. The crew of gnomes piled out of the gateway and descended on Debbie.
“Look at the tits on this one,” one cackled, slapping his hands together.
“No chasing ass tonight,” another said, “this is practically delivery.”
As the first lecherous gnomes reached her, Debbie came to life, so to speak, swinging. Gnomes flew.
“Hey, she’s awake,” one said.
“You got it, Braniac,” she said and decked him.
Jeremy piled out of the bushes, sword in one hand and pistol in the other. But the gnomes were already running for the gate. Debbie jumped on Braniac as he tried to rise. Jeremy thought of shooting but wasn’t sure if any misses would go through the netherworld or across the street. When he reached the gateway, both the shimmer and gnomes were gone, leaving only cold stone.
Jeremy turned back to Debbie, who hauled the struggling gnome upright. It froze when it saw the steel sword; things of faerie hated iron. “Back to the bushes,” Jeremy said. “I have questions for our lean, green, leching-machine here.”
Debbie dragged the gnome and tossed it to the ground in between bushes they’d hid in before.
Jeremy was searching his memory for the ancient gnomic tongue when it spoke.
“What’s your beef anyway?” the gnome said, its beady eyes looking for an escape.
“I’m a Templar. I hunt supernatural evil.”
“Doesn’t seem to have stopped you from hanging out with Boobzilla here,” the Gnome jerked a crooked finger at Debbie. “She ain’t no human. Not hitting like that.”
Knight in Charlotte Page 15