by Chris Lowry
Did you know own about this? I asked Elvis over my shoulder.
I am the one telling you, am I not? Kiko said.
A dragon in America, the ghost answered. No. But the watchers know about the Knights.
Knights? Plural?
Yes, Kiko sighed. There are on every continent where dragons live. Who do you think keeps the humans safe?
I didn't know what to think so I couldn't answer her.
Until thirty minutes ago, I didn't know dragons were real.
Vegas Vamps
Rock and roll vampires.
One gets the drop on me and almost takes my head.
This gets me introduced to the head of the Nest who has a ripper problem.
Thank a God your here. Now it's your problem.
He sounded bored as if giving it to me to solve was gauche already.
How is this my problem?
You are the Marshal. It's your job.
The Scorpio is a sex monster. A local witch is working with it to build up sex frenzy with the last spell. Last.
Gloria us using local witches to do the heavy lifting and sweeps in to steal the essence e.
I watched the fields pass by on one side, the mighty Mississippi on the other, though once it flowed past Memphis it really earned the nickname, Big Muddy. The water was pitch black in the faint light of a crescent moon, but I'd seen enough of it to know that hundreds of thousands of pounds of silt poured into the River from tributarys that leeched topsoil into the water.
As the River descended, it got wider and muddier, until it roared past New Orleans and down into the Gulf. Give a hundred years without manmade intervention and all that silt would form islands. In the past hundred years, manmade intervention had prevented that, hence the changing landscape of the Lousianna coastline.
I turned away from the River and it's muddied history but got just as morose looking out over Cotton fields. Highway 61 stretched over there somewhere, known as "The Blues Highway." Not many people knew that the blues originated in Mississippi, created by newly freed slaves still searching for their place in the South.
Jazz in New Orleans, Blues on the way down. I loved music, and in my almost one hundred years got to hear a lot of it.
"Did you see that?"
Elvis floated on the seat beside me.
"What?"
"Out there."
He nodded toward the cotton fields.
I couldn't see anything, just puffs of cotton flashing by in the field. Cotton that was impossible for me to see in the moonlight. That wasn't cotton.
"Ghosts," said Elvis.
"Where are they going?"
"I don't know. It's not like theres a newsletter."
The man came on the announcer and said we were stopping in Greenville.
"Greenville, maybe?" Elvis took a guess.
The brakes on the train squealed as it rolled to a stop. The Greenville station seemed like it was lifted out of the fifties. It was a long box building set up on a rectangular platform on the edge of a field. The lights in the building were on, but the platform was practically empty.
After midnight in rural Mississippi, I'd expect nothing less.
Elvis floated up out of his seat and toward the door.
"We don't have time for this," I said.
"Do you hear that?"
He floated outside.
I almost didn't follow him. Seriously, I had a job to do, and twelve monsters to stop. The longer I delayed, the worse things would get. I didn't have time to go chasing my ghost all over the emptiness of Mississippi cotton fields.
Huh. My ghost. Like he was my pet or something.
I hopped off the train and chased after him.
He was standing in front of another ghost. This one was an old black man, shoulders hunched, hair white around the edge of his bald head. It kept going into a beard that was snow colored, against a brown suit that looked second hand.
"Marshal," said Elvis. "This is Blind Dog."
I nodded a hello and he pulled a porkpie hat out of thin air and tipped it before covering up his bald spot.
"Blind Dog, this is the Marshal. Tell him what you told me about the Devil."
"Ain't no devil, son, not like you done gone and think about him. Scratch is real, Legba is real but he's one of them there demons. Makes his trade along the crossroads."
"You trade your soul to a demon to play the guitar?"
Blind Dog waved his hand and a smokey guitar materialized beside him. He slung it across one knee as he squatted off the ground. His fingers picked along the strings and played a gorgeous throaty blues riff.
"You get more than just playin when you do something like that," said Blind Dog.
He picked a riff and slid through a progression. Elvis found his foot tapping along. He turned to me.
"You feel that?"
I nodded my head in time with the music. I couldn't help it.
"Yeah, I feel it."
"We have to help them."
"We don't have time," said the Marshal.
"Then make time. They're trapped here. No souls means they can't move on. Look out there."
He pointed a ghostly finger as shades and appiritions appeared out of the darkness of the fields, drawn to the edge of the station by the strains of a blue's guitar.
Thousands of them.
A soul demon haunting the hinterland of Missisippi.
You still love her, she said. It was in a low voice that carried across the room, muted by the large woolen tapestries that hung on each wall.
And the thing was she was right and also wrong because I did love her, or at least I loved the memory of her for after all it had been more than a decade since I had seen her, more than that even.
How can you possibly explain that to someone, except that of all the people in the world, she would understand for she had lost someone too. Several someone's through several lifetimes and it never got easier.
I knew this just as well as she for the losses in my life stacked up like boxes and I had a time trying to sort and store and try to forget them.
That part of her sung to me, called to me because she too had lost her parents, and lovers and her sister, so many people for do many years that she built up walls around the place where her heart had been.
Maybe the walls in me recognized the walls in her or somehow something inside of me was peeking through a Sally port and saw something peeking back. Maybe it was our souls.
"Let's just recap okay Elvis? I'm chasing a Voo Doo woman named Phyllis through the Big Easy, we have to find and stop her Zodiac Demon, and the head of her Coven has put a bounty on my head for any supernatural spell slinger that wants to come along and take out a piece of the Marshall. Does that sound about right?"
"And you have to find the Watcher."
"Find the Watcher too. Right. Think we'll have time for Cafe DuMond?"
"I don't know boss, think ghosts can smell?"
I watched him take a really dramatic sniff.
"No. Ghosts can't smell. So I don't give a damn about Cafe DuMond."
As far as magic goes, there are things you can do to enhance the power. Wards come to mind or objects, especially if those objects have signifigance.
Mine was a pistol. A Colt .45 military issue from 1941. Carried by a soldier, SGT Rankin, who stumbled across a hidden treasure trove in Italy where he was killed. The Pistol was taken by Hermann Gerring and gifted to the Furherer.
The same pistol old Adlof ate on that fateful day in 1944.
Hitler used the gun to kill seventeen powerful Jewish Kabbalists. All that mystical energy surrounding a hunk of metal created a very powerful channel.
I stole the gun from a German Mage in Romania, spoils of battle and all.
He was working with the damn Sidhe, picked the wrong side. And I was lucky.
FLASHBACK in WITCHMAS DAY (III)
The Marshal recovers in Las Vegas where he runs into a real paranormal expert, a ghost hunter who has taken a shi
ne to capturing Elvis.
Elvis haunts the Flying Elvi, and the four major Elvis impersonators.
The Marshal has to get permission from the Vegas Vampire Coven to do something- or work with them to get something.
A wee person reaches out after the Gnome sends a psychic signal her way, it's the KITSUNE who comes to rescue the Marshal from a witch attack.
She tells the story of how the Vampire got to Vegas.
Nevada Territory - 1876
There are reasons most folks don't know about magic. Sure they believe it, like children on the edge of ten still sort of believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but also know that only babies still believe that stuff.
We grow out of belief.
Most of us.
I didn't have that luxury. I was born to magic parents into a magic time just before world war two. My parents were attacked by the Catholic Church and disappeared, which happens a lot more than you think to folks with the ability. I was put in the care of a priest who led the attack on my parents who raised me in an orphanage under his tutelage.
Seriously I didn't have any hang ups about my parents. My childhood was mostly idyllic or at least as sane as a kid raised in a private boarding school monastary could be.
I had new roommates each year, and one or two close friends and was always under the watchful eye of the Father. I was instructed in the rosary and confession, was denied communion until my confirmation and that wasn't allowed until after I hit puberty. That's when they expected any latent magic to appear.
The first signs came when I was ten.
By the time I was twelve I knew I was different and hid it, like most boys who hide their secret longings in their heart or behind bathroom doors.
My body was changing, and whenever the Father tried to question me about it, I just assumed he was referring to the hair in new places.
For my twelth birthday, Father tried to kill me.
It didn't take.
I spent the next four years on the run, living on the streets of city to city, traveling the rails like a hobo. I met a bunch of people, some kind, others not. The kind ones got a little luck on their behalf in the form of magic, just whatever favor I could send their way. A farmer fed me more eggs than I could eat, then boiled two dozen for me to carry with me. I put a blessing on his cows and chickens so they produced more milk and eggs that never spoiled and never went bad.
A grandmother made me cookies once and I put a ward on her home so that bad weather and bad things just avoided it.
Two boys were travelling on horseback to New York and shared their meager meal with me one night and I gave them eternal safety, a personal ward that stayed with them for almost eight decades.
I won't share the details of the bad men.
They were mostly men and they are mostly dead. Men who prey on children deserve horrible deaths, and I gave it to them, and watched while it happened.
The first time I felt guilty.
Good old fashioned catholic guilt for taking the life of another. I didn't like it, I didn't like how it made me feel. Except that I knew that with these types of people gone the world would be a better place.
I sometimes think about that in the dark of the night. When I can't sleep and I wonder about the dark side and the light side. The two wolves that fight inside us and the stronger one is the wolf we feed, if you believe in Cherokee legend.
I could have been a really great Dark Wizard. Maybe not a great wizard, but just great at being bad.
Dark magic is usually used against innocent normal people and done so the magician gains advantage.
When those bad men tried to do worse things to me, I tapped into dark magic to cause them grevious harm. I did unto their person horrors that dwarfed the acts they planned for me.
And when they died I moved on.
Maybe it was the Father's influence that kept me from becoming an evil man.
At sixteen, I joined the War.
It was in the war I learned that the world was a whole hell of a lot bigger than anyone knew, and that we were under constant attack from creatures of legend.
They wanted our world, and they wanted us in it, subjigated to their will and moving to their amusement. The Sidhe.
Creature of fairie and fae, legend lost to modern man and slowly being forgotten much like the magic everyone once believed in. How they hated us, hated that they relied on us to belive in them and that their paths to our world were being severed as we destroyed the wilderness in the name of progress.
The Sidhe kept coming at us and though forbidden by an edict older than even their memory against direct interference they still used their influence to try to usurp control of man.
They wanted us to remember them, and fear them. Fear their magic which we no longer believed in.
They were bad.
It was one of the reasons I said yes when the Judge told me I was a Marshal.
Justice against the bad things.
And I never once considered that I might be one of them.
CHAPTER
It was literally the coolest thing to ever see.
I didn't see it, but it had to be. I sprinted across the ground and dropped to my knees on the slick surface, leaning back Matrix style as bolts whizzed over my head and body. Fingers held out unleashing hell on the witch, on her demon. Coat whipping in the wind and appropriate bad ass scowl on my brow.
Probably a good thing I didn't see it.
That's how I'm telling it though. For anyone who wasn't there.
"I was there," said Elvis.
"Shut up ghost."
"That's not how it happened."
"Did you hear the shut up part, or did I just say it in my mind?"
He was right. I hated it.
My slip and slide into battle started off well enough. I got the sprint part right.
But instead of dropping to my knees, one foot clipped the other and I sprawled on my face.
Instead of sliding in a very cool, awesome manner, magic blazing, it was more of a desperate crawl on the floor hoping like hell I didn't get my ass shot off.
Literally.
I fetched up in the corner where the wall met the floor and rolled over in time to shoot off a couple of blocking spells.
See, there's no way the first version isn't more entertaining. More elegant.
"I know you," said the ghost of my watcher. "I know how you operate. You're going to play this up and try to come out a hero."
"In the middle of a fight Elvis."
"Left."
I banged off a shot from the tip of my finger. It wasn't a lightning bolt, more like a shimmer in the air as energy transformed from my willpower into a manifestation of magic.
The result was an expanding circle of nothing that collided with another circle of shimmering air from the witch I could still hear cackling until a miniature sonic boom popped her quiet for a second. A literal second.
Then she cackled again.
"You snort when you laugh," I called out. "You're snorting."
That shut her up.
But now she was quiet and doubling down on the whole try to kill me thing.
I wiggled my fingers and tried to think of a way out of this predicament. Because the witch had back up. In the form of a demon, and they both had me dead on the agenda.
CHAPTER
During the second book, the Marshall learns about the third witch summoning a Dragon in Montana. Awakens an ancient Dragon.
“There are rumors afoot.”
“Afoot?”
“It’s an expression.”
“I think you’ve been hanging around Tera too much.”
“I’m tethered to you my corporeal friend, if I’m too close to someone it’s my proximity to you that’s the cause.”
“About that-”
“You haven’t found a spell to untether us.”
“I haven’t found a cure to this ailment.”
“I ail you. You prefer I ale you?”
<
br /> “A ghost who spouts beer instead of rumors. That’s a tether I wouldn’t mind.”
“The rumor is one of the witches has awoke a dragon.”
“A dragon.”
“In the West.”
“How far West? All the way to Japan West? Because I’ve always wanted to visit Japan. I’d like to meet a Kitsune.”
“I can summon a Kitsune, if you like.”
“Kitsune can’t be summoned. They aren’t demonic.”
“I meant summon as in to call, not the supernatural sense.
“You have a kitsune on speed dial?”
“Had. One of the Watchers is Kitsune.”
“Their experience with dragaon’s may come in handy.”
“This particular dragon is not in Japan. It’s in the West, as in the old Western part of Montana. Big Sheep country.”
“I think it’s Big Sky Country.”
“Nope, Big Sheep. Dragons can’t carry off the sky to eat.”
“Dragon’s in Montana.”
“With a witch.”
“Damn it.”
“I told you, it’s gonna be that kind of day.”
LATER
“A dragon is as large as a whale.”
“One of those cute little white whale’s right?”
“Blue Humpback.”
“A flying whale.”
“That breathes fire,” she added. “And is magic resistant.”
