I get it. As soon as someone gets drawn into the world of magic, awakened to its existence through whatever means, they’re taught to keep it secret. Some of their powers kick in when during puberty (that’s what happened to Lisa), so they spend pretty much their whole lives keeping that part of themselves secret. Some of them can do this easily – adepts, magicians and sorcerers look just like everyone else, for instance – and some, like minotaurs or elves, can’t go out in public at all without using a glamour. In the middle are the partially human, like werewolves. I have no idea when Gault was bitten (for that matter, I don’t even know for sure that he was bitten – he might have been cursed or simply born into the wrong bloodline), but he’s spent years hiding that part of himself from the public eye. Years of work, years of effort, years of repression, and now the problem’s out in the open right in front of his eyes and he doesn’t know what to do.
He turns to look at me. I can’t believe it. His eyes are asking me for help. He’s powerful and callous enough to have risen to the top of his pack. Not only to take control, but to have expanded it to a number most packs could never support. He has as much power in his control as any warlock and he’s looking to me for advice. I’ve raised my hand against demons and angels and everything in between, but this has to be the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.
Now I feel the pressure. I have no magical talents, of course, but I’ve been living with and among supernatural folks for most of my adult life and I know how the rules go. Most of them would rather walk away from a million-dollar windfall than let their hidden natures show. It’s never occurred to me to do anything but support their lifestyle choices. Help them blend. Keep their secrets. But the danger has never been so public before.
I give him the nod. I’ve pulled a trigger in doing so, and I’m not sure where this bullet is going to land, but the nod is given regardless.
Once the flag is waved, Gault leaps forward as if he’s spring-loaded. He plows in between bystanders like a runaway bus, sending two of them sprawling, and hits Nariko in the back with his right shoulder dipped at what I’m guessing is about thirty miles per hour. The chitinous carapace of this kiovore is apparently just as resistant as the original, meaning her body doesn’t split like an overripe peach under the impact, but apparently they’re as susceptible to the laws of physics as everyone else.
The hit knocks her off the man on the ground but she twists in midair like a gymnast, nimbly landing in a three-point crouch with her empty black eyes locked on the werewolf. Gault, who landed on his belly in almost a push-up position, snarls at her. I can hear the animal in his voice, and I’m certain that his claws are gouging furrows in the street.
Hollett and I try to move in behind Gault, but nowhere near enough civilians have cleared out to allow easy movement. Even worse, I can see at least two people aiming their phones at the melee. The video will probably be worldwide by morning. Wolf cop fights monster lady. That’ll bring civilian attention to Gault, the town, everything, and if the wrong person says the wrong thing about magic or monsters…
Damn it, damn it, DAMN IT!
“DeLong,” Hollett cries, grabbing my arm. I follow his point back in the direction we came from and see another figure, mottled red skin almost invisible in the darkness but long pale hair standing out like a struck match. She’d been hidden by stampeding townsfolk, causing us to run right past her while she fed on a man with a brown leather coat and blue jeans. Doesn’t look like the leather protected him from her bite; her fangs went through it like cheesecloth. Each of the women has claimed a victim. They may have hated one another an hour ago, but they’re a damn good team now.
The kiovore that used to be Celeste Reese leaps into the air, landing on a heavyset man with greying brown hair. The man jams his fists together, knuckle to knuckle so that the square silver rings on each hand lock together like puzzle pieces. Celeste bears him to the ground by main strength and strikes like a viper at his throat, but when she tries to fasten that lamprey mouth she comes up short by half an inch. The man is projecting some kind of energy that’s keeping the kiovore at bay, but for how long?
I’m not interested in waiting to find out. I shoulder Hollett out of the way and slam my shoulder into Celeste’s back, but propelled by human muscles that have already done a lot of work tonight and aren’t what they had been only a few short years ago I can’t duplicate Gault’s massive body check. The kiovore (I have to stop thinking of it as Celeste) rocks back under the impact, giving me the chance to get my arms around its body from behind and haul.
The heavyset man is screaming like a sheep, but at least his panic is serving him well in keeping those two rings, undoubtedly the source of the shield spell, from coming apart and breaking the charm. I heave again, nearly throwing my back out, then the kiovore swings wildly with its left arm and I’m forced to either jump clear or take a hit with the same impact as a juiced-up major leaguer’s home run swing. Free of me, the monster wraps its claw like fingers around the man’s wrists, encircling the tight shields around his forearms entirely, then brutally yanks the arms apart. Then it strikes, clamping down onto the now defenseless man’s forehead in between his eyes with a sticky crunch. He manages a single horrified scream before he falls silent.
I try once again to knock the monster off him but this time the kiovore releases its prey, spins my way, and grabs my forearms with both hands. It’s like hydraulic machinery clamped down on the bones until they groan under the pressure. It happens too quickly for me to even cry out, the pain swallowing me so quickly it’s all I can do to take a gasp of air. Instead of pulping my arms, though, it snaps its arms forward, swinging me over its head as effortlessly as if I was a child and launching me into the air.
For the briefest of moments, the world becomes a vertiginous Catherine wheel of emergency lights and night sky as I’m thrown in a flat spin, everything moving so fast my brain can’t keep up with it. The end of my flight is as abrupt as the beginning as I hit the pavement in an uncontrolled tumble, rolling wildly down the street for a dozen yards. My body is a song of pain in multiple harmonies, countless scrapes and contusions on skin that’s already been tenderized by Kenta’s stone shower. I fight my way to my knees despite the cyclone swirling in my head where my brain used to be. Too bad the crowd has almost completely disappeared. Some bodies would have been useful in breaking my fall. I try to stand but the earth won’t back me up. I don’t even make it to my knees before I sprawl back out on the dirty street.
Hollett had come in right on my six, and even though I can’t make a steady movement I can see him drawing little objects no bigger than cereal marshmallows from his leather belt pouch and flinging them at the kiovore one at a time. It reacts to them as if they were explosive, recoiling in apparent pain as they ping off its face and chest though they leave no marks on its hide. He moves in as he presses his attack and suddenly the kiovore isn’t reacting to the Lucky Charms any more. They rebound off the mottled carapace with no apparent effect. Hollett realizes this half a second before he realizes that he’s moved himself almost within arm’s reach of the creature.
I stagger to my feet. My body feels like an envelope full of broken things and the world is spinning the wrong direction around me, but I slog my way gracelessly towards the fight, already too late but unable to do anything else. Even at my best I wouldn’t have made it in time.
The kiovore snatches Hollett by the shirtfront and drags him forward as if for a kiss. She (it) is fast, blindingly so, but Hollett’s thought ahead. He has his thorn wand wedged in between their bodies, and the mottled carapace starts to smoke as the thorn cuts into it like a welding torch. I expect it to hurl him away, a natural animal response for a predator that misjudges its prey, but instead it pulls him closer despite the injury. I can see the spiraling rows of black fangs quiver as they close in on Hollett’s throat and I’m too far away to do anything about it.
Gunfire, close by, makes me jump, but not before I can see sparks of imp
act inside the kiovore’s mouth. It flinches away from the shots and releases Hollett, who sprawls away from it. Adam Farelli is standing in a two-handed shooter’s stance twenty feet away, the barrel of his matte black duty Glock smoking in his pudgy hands. Damn, he’s a good shot. Those bullets must have shaved Hollett’s ear, but what sticks in my brain is that the thing felt those shots, and Adam doesn’t carry any enchanted ammo.
The mouth, I realize. Their mouths are vulnerable. Not completely, otherwise those shots would have killed it on the spot, but compared to the resistance of their hides the mouths are a soft underbelly. The kiovore looks at Adam as though marking him, then the quivering maw makes a final strike at Hollett’s face. He doesn’t even have time to close his eyes.
The strike never lands. The kiovore freezes, the attack arrested scant inches away from Hollett’s skin. I look around to see Kenta Gamagori, leaning drunkenly against the wrecked door of the jewelry store. His right hand, sheathed in his heavy leather glove, is extended towards the kiovore and clenched in a tight fist. Sota Gamagori’s gauntlet, finally put to good use. He jerks his arm, tearing her away from Hollett and tossing her away. It snaps to its feet, catlike in its motions, and fixes its former lover with black insect eyes. Struck immobile by the thing’s stare, Kenta doesn’t do a thing as the monster that used to be his girlfriend swings around and vaults to the top of the white cement building in a mighty leap and it’s gone, swallowed by the night.
Before I can say anything to Adam he wheels around and starts running as fast as his bulk will allow. Past him I see Gault and a fully shifted werewolf wrapped in the tatters of an SBPD uniform tearing into the kiovore that used to be Nariko Gamagori with monstrous savagery. For the quickest of seconds, the fight looks even. Then the blood-hued thing drops a fist like a piledriver into the wolf’s back, buckling it to the pavement with a pained yelp. Its taloned hands lunge at Gault, but reason trumps instinct and he’s half a step ahead of it, dancing out of range with lupine grace.
The kiovore looks up to see Adam leveling his weapon at it, Hollett rising from the pavement with his wand ready for use and battered-but-still-moving me bringing up the rear and in a second it abandons the fight. It grabs the pelt of the shifted wolf and uses the beast as a club, hurling it into Gault and sending them both reeling. Then it lunges for an alley and disappears into its mouth, running in the exact opposite direction that Celeste ran.
“What the hell are these things?” Adam shouts. His face narrows. “Ian, behind you!”
I turn around and find that Celeste’s first victim, the man in the leather jacket and blue jeans, is standing on shaky legs. His transformation is slower than hers and Nariko’s had been, but his skin’s already well on its way towards becoming the blood-hued carapace and his face, painted with blood from the wound on his forehead, has already lost most of its human features. Looking incredibly alien in his human clothes, the new kiovore takes stock of its surroundings before bolting down the street with the speed of a cheetah.
“Shit. Gault!” I yell out. When he looks at me I point to Nariko’s victim, the one she’d been feeding on when we came up. It’s a portly man in a dark blue suit, spattered and soaked in blood. At least he was a man. Now, even with little more than streetlights to show us, we can see his skin has hardened and turned red. It’s standing unsteadily, it’s movements jerky, like it’s not used to its own body.
We close in a rough, 20-foot circle around it. Myself, Adam, Hollett, Gault and two of his wolves. I don’t know if that’s all that were here or if there were more who ran off. Or were caught. “Take it down,” I say.
Nobody moves.
“We can’t let it get away,” I shout. The former man in the suit stops twitching and looks around at its surroundings. We only have seconds. “We need to do something with it, take it away, lock it up somewhere.”
Nobody moves.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I scream. “We can’t let it get to anyone else! We have to kill it, stop it, something…” I feel my breath falter, “…anything…”
“They’re too strong,” Hollett says. His voice isn’t comforting. It’s not meant to be. “We can’t fight them. Not like this.”
“He’s right, DeLong,” Gault says. He’s glaring at the emerging monster. “It’s over.”
The transformation finishes right before our eyes and all we can do is watch as the kiovore takes its first step. Everyone jumps back two feet except me. Gault’s wolves actually move even farther back, cowering behind a parked car. It leaps in my direction with a grace I’m sure it didn’t have in life and lands right in front of me. For a second, I can see myself reflected in its ebony eyes. Then it rushes past me and disappears into the night. The alien grace it moves with already looks familiar.
I have a feeling it’ll be a whole lot more familiar before this is all over.
Seventeen
For a few minutes chaos reigns outside of Parkman Gems, but for the moment it’s a chaos I can deal with. The chaos that I’m sure will come later I’m not as certain of.
Adam immediately gets busy tending to the wounded, of whom there is no shortage. Dozens of people are hurt, with injuries as minor as a twisted ankle on up to a fractured collarbone from being bashed aside by a hungry kiovore. All of the injured are humans. The Grey spotted the pattern in the kiovore attacks instantly and promptly beat feet. Wise on their part. We saw what happened to the ones who couldn’t get away fast enough.
Gault focuses his attention on his private band of officers. There hadn’t been many of them there, which is a blessing. Most of the ones who were there escaped serious injury, except for the one who transformed to battle Nariko. He’s being carried off on a stretcher. The sheets are pulled up over his canine head. I don’t know if that means he’s dead or just being hidden from any electronic eyes that might still be looking for him.
I’m sitting on a curb, numbly watching the bedlam with half an eye. I can’t believe what happened. Not so much the mythological monsters that turned out to be real. That’s as close to commonplace as the Aegis gets. No, I mean the battle spilling out into the public eye.
And the eye will be public, that much I’m sure of. Adam is gathering whatever cell phones he can as he circulates through the crowds. So is Gault, when he can. But they won’t get them all. By tonight the whole world will be watching monsters fight in the middle of a suburban street, and there’s nothing that I or anyone else can do about it.
It’s happened before, on smaller scales. Videographers get footage of sasquatches more often than you’d think. Lake monsters, too, along with mothmen and skunk apes and every other magical creature in the zoo. The Aegis has a whole division to deal with these videos, altering the ones they can get to and discrediting the ones they can’t. A lot of times nobody has to lift a finger to make the videographer look foolish. Go to any internet video site and scroll down through the comments of every UFO-sighting video and see for yourself.
This one will be different, though. It happened right out in the middle of the street. Dozens, if not scores, of people got it on their phones, and every single one of them saw the same exact thing. There’s no way this can be laughed out of sight. This is going to be a fire even the Aegis can’t put out. I feel a presence come up next to me and shake myself free of my musings to look up and see Hollett standing there.
“You okay?” he asks. I nod, none too energetically.
“Gault’s taking Kenta home,” he says. “I think he’s going to grill Sota. I’d love to see that.”
“Yeah,” I agree with a scoff. I marshal my energy and stand up, feeling all my body’s pain wake up again but bite back the groan.
“We have to get going,” I say. “Those things move fast.”
“Ian, what we need to do is take cover, then get the word out for everyone else in this town to do the same.”
“That’s already started, but while we’re doing that we’re going to do what we planned. Those things are still going
to go for the two families. You say Gault’s going to the Gamagori house. Fine, I’m going to go to yours.” I start heading for the truck we picked up at the farm. Hollett falls into step next to me.
“It’s a bad idea,” he says.
“Why? You can pick up your paycheck while you’re there.”
“Dead men can’t spend.” I open my stride. He keeps pace. “We can’t beat them,” he tells me.
“Yeah, you already said that. You and Gault. Stay if you want to. I can’t force him. I can’t pay you. Maybe there’s nothing I can do there, but I’m going anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what I do. You do what you want.” I reach the cranberry Raptor and climb into the cab with a little less effort than scaling a mountain. I start the gargantuan engine and I’m about to put it in gear when Hollett walks, calmly and slowly, in front of the truck. He continues to the passenger door and joins me.
“I think I hate you, DeLong,” he says.
“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” I answer, putting us on the road.
As soon as we’re moving I’m on the phone. As I listen to the ringing I check the time on the dashboard clock. It’s not even nine thirty. Only about two and a half hours since I first stepped foot on the Reese lawn. It feels like months, and it doesn’t help that Lisa isn’t picking up her goddamn phone.
Voice mail. I hang up and try again. It’s not uncommon for this to happen. She got off work at six thirty, but she usually forgets to turn her phone’s ringer up after she goes home. Normally, it’s an annoyance. Tonight, after what I’ve just seen, it’s enough to turn my hair gray. After a second eternity I hear her voice.
“About time,” she says.
“Are you at my place yet?” I ask. She must pick up on the strain in my voice because her own turns hard.
“I got here a while ago and gave Jamie your message. You should have seen the fit he threw. He’s writing like crazy on his chalkboard now. I can’t even read it. Hold on, he’s erasing and rewriting it.”
No More Devils: A Visit to Superstition Bay Page 15
