I looked down at the squirming baby in my arms. She was smaller than a doll. Tiny, red, barely formed. She couldn’t even open her eyes. Killing her would be so easy. I didn’t even need the knife. All I had to do was drop her, put my foot on her head. One twitch of my arm and she would be gone. Just like Evette.
I closed my eyes. Magic brushed against me, as thick in the air as the blood smell. Power was shed at death. The more painful the death, the more raw power became available. It was one of the first things Christian had taught me. I touched the magic Evette had shed and nearly recoiled. So much… She must’ve been in such terrible pain. There was easily enough power to fuel a summoning. I couldn’t save Evette, but I could use the pain of her death to avenge her.
I grabbed the magic, gathering the power to me, letting it rise like a pillar of flame around me, bending it to my will.
“What are you doing?” Christian snarled.
I didn’t answer. There were no more words for him, for a madman so drunk on power and secrets that he would murder one of his own. I wouldn’t be that. I couldn’t become that. No, just being part of that made me unclean. I needed to be clean.
The magic surged when I spoke the words of my native tongue. Enochian bounced off the walls, the sharp edges of words shattering the glass window panes. I squeezed my eyes shut tight. All around me, desperate screams erupted along with the wet sound of exploding meat and crunch of breaking bone.
Christian screamed my name, but the whirlwind of flame I had called up destroyed him too. It burned him to ash along with the rest of them.
I pulled my daughter to my chest, shielding her from it while she cried. Don’t worry, child. I’ll protect you. I will always protect you.
For the next twenty minutes, I prepared the circle on the hotel room floor and fed it my blood. Ten more minutes of focused chanting, and a dark spirit surrounded by flame coalesced in the center, answering my call. “Josiah Quinn,” spoke the demon. “We meet again.”
“Valefor,” I said in the form of a greeting. “I’d offer you a ciggie, but I’m fresh out.”
The lord of the Hellhounds’ red eyes lit up brighter. “This had better be good, conjurer.”
I rubbed my chin, wishing I hadn’t smoked everything all in one go. “D’ya fancy another hunt?”
The fire died. I kicked out the groupies and stole everything worth selling out of Christian’s apartment. With the money, I bought a few supplies for the baby and a bus ticket to the cheapest place on the list. Turned out, that was Omaha, Nebraska.
Once I got there, I spent three days doing research, talking to the local clergy, and narrowing down my options. There was a couple just outside of town that everyone seemed to know. Good people. No connection to the occult, to magic, to any of it. God fearing, they said, but not too much. Just enough. Boring, normal people.
Their little farm also happened to be situated on the same plot of land as an old church. With a large enough cash donation, I was able to get a priest to consecrate the four corners of the property. After he left, I laid my own protection spells, as many as I could without drawing too much attention. All the effort created the equivalent of magical dead space. Even if she was my flesh and blood, she’d grow up with no access to magic. I made sure of that.
Then, with the help of a social worker and a judge, both of which were paid handsomely and sworn to secrecy under the threat of a death curse, Harold and Barbra Dale became parents.
I stood on their porch, ready to hand my daughter over to the Dales, but hesitated. There it was again, that awful empty feeling in my gut. This is where she’s safest, I told myself. I don’t know anything about raising children. I didn’t even graduate high school.
Barbra held out her hands and pushed her thick cheeks up into a welcoming smile.
I placed my daughter in her arms. The hollow feeling in gut turned into a familiar black hole. “What’ll you call her?”
As soon as Barbra took her, I knew I’d made the right choice. She looked down at the sleeping baby, her face full of love. I could never look at her like that, not after all the ugly things I’d seen.
Barbra smiled. “Maggie.”
Harold nodded and repeated. “Maggie.”
“It’s a good name,” I agreed. “Well, take care.”
I walked to the property line, lit a cigarette, and gave Maggie the last gift I could. With a drop of my blood, I sealed the final spell over the property and everyone still in the house, erasing me from their memory.
At seven thirty, I got out of the cab in front of a squat, run-down hovel with a broken-down car out front. A rottweiler barked at me from the other side of a chain-length fence when I shouldered my bag. I looked at it, focusing my will and forcing it to meet my eyes.
The dog quit barking and sat, panting.
The front door swung open and my prey stepped out into the open. “Butch, I fucking told you—” He broke off when he saw me.
Brett was a typical asshole pimp. The fact that he rented a room to shoot his films didn’t make him any less of a pimp. White singlet, gold chains around his neck, tattoos, ball cap, pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Fuck me, he had a soul patch. What a fuckwit.
He squinted at me and came to the gate. “Can I help you?”
“Brett Trace?” I mispronounced it on purpose.
“No, it’s Brett Trace. Like race. You don’t pronounce the e.”
What a fuckin’ idiot. Never give a wizard your name.
I shifted my bag. “Thanks for giving me your name. Now, let me tell you who I am. I’m the fella about to give you a very bad day if you don’t break off all contact with Maggie Dale immediately and permanently.”
“’Scuse me?” He crossed his arms. Typical alpha male move. Trying to make himself look bigger. If ever we fought, I’d melt the flesh from his bones just as fast as I had Christian Lenore. “You want to run that by me again, pal?”
“How about a demonstration?” I extended a hand.
The gate he stood in front of swung open, hitting him in the groin. Brett doubled over, cursing, but I was just getting started. A quick chant, a small infusion of will, touch the charm in my pocket, tap into the connection I forged earlier with the rottweiler and…
The rottweiler’s eyes flashed red as Valefor possessed it. He surged forward, barking and snarling, but stopping short of doing any actual mauling. Brett’s terrified cries must’ve woken the whole block. His bladder and bowels let go as he sank into a quivering, shrieking mess. I didn’t blame him. I screamed the first time I saw a real Hellhound too.
“Maggie Dale,” I repeated, shouting over the hellhound’s howls. “You’re going to leave her alone, Brett. Forever. Or I’ll be back, and next time I won’t keep my demon on a leash.”
“Okay, okay! Anything! Just make it stop!”
I recalled Valefor with a word and stepped forward to lift the cigarettes from Brett’s shirt. “Thanks for the smokes,” I said and walked back to my waiting cab.
The neighbors had just started to come out to investigate when we pulled away.
I hopped a plane to Omaha and a cab dropped me off at the Dale farm at dusk. It was abandoned now. Barb had passed on, and Dale had Alzheimer’s. He was in a home over near Lincoln, fading fast. Mags visited whenever she could, but not as often as she liked. The judge I’d bribed died of a massive coronary, and the social worker was in a train accident that left her in a coma.
Only the house and I knew the truth now, just the way it ought to be.
I walked up to the rotting porch and sat on the sagging stairs to light a cigarette. All around, wild corn grew, tended by ghosts, serenaded by crickets singing for their mates. Poor buggers didn’t know they’d be dead come winter. Yet the human race soldiered on, driven by instinct, sustained by a false hope that the next time, they’d do better. The lie that we would give our children a better world persisted, stretching back into the dark ages. Unless something changed, the lie would never be enough.
; The sun set and I stood, shouldering my bag once more. Okinawa was calling. I flicked the smoked cigarette off into the tall weeds and started down the dusty, dirt road. “Until next time, Maggie Dale.”
BIO
E.A. Copen lives in Southwest Kentucky. While working a boring retail job, she entertained herself with stories of the fantastic, some of which became books like Guilty by Association, Death Rites, and Broken Empire. She speaks three languages fluently: English, Latin, and sarcasm. E.A. is currently studying to become proficient in memes.
LINKS
Author Website: https://eacopen.com/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/E.A.-Copen/e/B01BE60MAG%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
Twitter: https://twitter.com/authoreacopen
The Demons of Arae
Christopher Ruocchio
THE MOUTH OF HELL
Fire screamed all around us, and the violent shock of atmospheric entry that shook the ship beneath my feet was like the coming of an avalanche. Faceless men stood about me, gripping their restraints. The red glow of the emergency lighting reflected off their featureless ivory masks.
The thunder stopped. We were falling through clear air beneath yellow skies.
Arae.
“You’re sure they’re on Arae?” I remembered asking before we set sail from Nessus on this expedition.
Captain Otavia Corvo had only shrugged her broad shoulders. “It’s your Empire’s intelligence, Lord Marlowe. They said they tracked this lost legion of theirs to within a dozen light-years of the Arae system. If they’re not on Arae, they’re somewhere in the Dark between, and we’ll never find them.”
An entire legion had vanished. Four ships. Twenty-six thousand men.
Gone.
At first Legion Intelligence had suspected the Cielcin. The xenobites needed to eat, after all, and four troop transport ships with the legionnaires already on ice for the long voyage were indistinguishable from meat lockers where the aliens were concerned. But when we arrived in Arae system, we found something we hadn’t expected.
“Pirates?” Corvo didn’t believe it. I could see it in the way her brows arched above black eyes. “What sort of pirates could capture a Sollan legion?”
We all knew the answer. I could feel the eyes of my officers on me, as if each man and women were daring me to say it first. I glanced from one to the other: from the Amazonian Corvo to her bookish second-in-command, Durand; from green-skinned Ilex to solemn Tor Varro.
“Extrasolarians.” After Vorgossos the word carried a poisonous aftertaste for me and for every member of my Red Company. The Extras had been an Imperial bogeyman for millennia, the sort of monsters mothers scared their children with. But I knew now. Those men who—fleeing Imperial control—fled to the blackness between the stars, to rogue planets and lost moons far from the light of Imperial order, had bought their freedom with a piece of their own humanity. As a boy, I’d believed the Chantry’s proscription against intelligent machines and against the augmentation of the flesh was nothing but reactionary cowardice.
I know better now.
Monsters are real, and I had met them. Met not only with the Cielcin who threaten mankind from without, but met also with the monsters we’d made in our own image and in the image of our inner demons.
Repulsors fired, and our descent slowed, forcing my bile up as we came out of free fall. I shut my eyes, mindful of the quiet chatter of my men through my suit’s comms, of the way the thermal layer clung to me beneath the armorweave and ceramic plates. I still felt half a clown wearing it.
I was no soldier, had never trained to be one. I’d wanted to be a linguist, in Earth’s name!
But I was a knight now, one of His Radiance’s own Royal Victorians. Sir Hadrian Marlowe. And after Vorgossos I knew there was no going back.
I undid my restraints and moved into the middle of the cabin, conscious of the faceless soldiers watching me through suit cameras. My own suit worked the same—though my black visor was fashioned in the image of an impassive human face and not a blank arc of zircon. Almost it seemed I wore no helmet at all. Images from outside were projected directly onto my retinas, and but for the indicators in my periphery that indicated my heart rate and the integrity of my Royse shields, I saw plain as day.
“They’re putting us down close to the door as they can!” I said, voice amplified by the speakers in my breastplate. “Petros’s team should have those gun emplacements on the south ridge down by the time we make landfall. Pallino’s got the north. The Sphinxes have air support! All we have to do is back the Horse!” They knew all of this already, had gone over the assault plan with their centurion before we’d left the ship, but it bore repeating.
“You ready, Had?” that same centurion asked me, clapping me on the shoulder as I took my place front and center by the exit ramp.
Beneath my helmet mask I smiled and returned the gesture. “Just like the coliseum back on Emesh!” I seized hold of one of the ceiling straps to steady myself as the dropship banked into an arc.
“Let’s hope!” Siran replied. The woman had been by my side a long time. Long before Vorgossos, when I had been little more than a slave in the fighting pits of Count Balian Mataro.
Turning back to face the fifty men that stood in the cramped hold of the Ibis-class lander, I got a clear look at myself in the mirrored glass at the rear of the compartment. Like all Sollan Imperial combat armor, my suit’s design recalled the style of ancient Rome, the shape of it speaking to cellular memories of ancient power. The muscled breastplate was black as anything I had seen, embossed with the trident-and-pentacle I had taken for my sigil when His Radiance the Emperor restored me to the nobility. Beneath that I wore a wide-sleeved crimson tunic darker than the ones worn by legionnaires. Strapped pteruges decorated my shoulders and waist, marking me for an officer. Black boots and gauntlets contrasted the Imperial ivory and scarlet, and I alone wore a cape: a lacerna black above and crimson beneath.
How had I ended up here? I’d left home to go to school, to join the scholiasts. Not to fight a war. Still, I raised my voice. “Some of you won’t have fought the Extras before! Soldiers of the Empire, whatever comes at you you will hold your ground!”
My tutor always said I had too-developed a taste for melodrama. Maybe he was right. Or maybe whatever gods there are share my love of theater. Whichever is the case, no sooner had a said these words did the landing alarm blare and each of us felt the Ibis buoy on its final approach.
The landing ramp slammed downwards, admitting the orange Araenian sunlight.
I turned and drew my sword, kindling the weapon’s exotic matter blade with a button press. Liquid metal the color of moonlight gleamed in my gauntleted fist, and I was first onto the shattered tarmac and the approach to the pirates’ fortress.
The mountain rose before us, the last lonely peak in a chain that broke upon the salt flats of the Soto Planitia. Arae had never been settled—its air was carbon monoxide and ammonia, and there was little water. But for the remains of a few mining expeditions the pirate fortress was the only settlement on the planet. I could see the fingering shapes of antennae and other comms equipment bristling on the ridge line above, and the smoking ruins of gun emplacements where Petros had taken our Fifth Chiliad and wiped out the artillery.
Battle raged about us, plasma fire splitting the cancered daylight like lightning, black smoke rising from bodies and from the wrecks of ground-effect vehicles and three-legged machines that I think had governed themselves.
And ahead—between the two reaching arms of that final mountain—stood the Horse.
Our colossus.
The titan stood nearly forty meters high, its legs more like the arms of a crawling man than those of a horse in truth. The earth trembled with each mighty step it took, and the men who stood against it could not so much as scratch its armor with their arms. Beyond it, the hardened outer wall of the fortress rose two hundred feet above the landing field, black as the space we’d come from. A
stray shot pinged off my shield, and not ten yards off the tarmac exploded as a plasma cannon struck ground, sending dust and bits of shattered concrete fountaining skyward. Above, three of Sphinx Flight streaked overhead, single long wings tacking like sails against the wind, filling the air with the thunder of their drives.
“Why haven’t they cracked the wall?” I asked, toggling to the officer’s channel.
“It’s shielded, lord,” came a thin, polished voice. “Crim took a few shots at it with the Horse’s artillery, but we’d have done as well to scratch at it with our fingernails.”
I cursed. “How are they powering a shield of this size, Lorian?” I asked, “I thought your people didn’t pick up a fusion reactor on your scans.”
From his position on the ship in orbit, Commander Lorian Aristedes wasted no time in answering. “Could be geothermal. Arae’s core runs hotter than most thanks to all those moons. I’ve ordered sappers. If they can attach a plasma bore directly to the door, the shield won’t matter.”
“We’ll clear the tarmac then,” I said in answer.
I did not hurry, but allowed the bulk of our soldiery to fan past me, soldiers moving in groups of three behind their decurions. One of the colossi’s massive feet descended, cracking the pavement. The earth shook, air filled with a noise like drums.
For a moment, all was silent and still. Far above, a cloud passed before the swollen circle of the sun.
An awful cry resounded off the surrounding rocks, high and shrill.
Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within Page 29
