The Tome of Bill Series: Books 5-8 (Goddamned Freaky Monsters, Half A Prayer, The Wicked Dead, The Last Coven)

by Rick Gualtieri

  “A hive mind.”

  “Exactly. And that mind is ever geared toward destruction. They cannot help themselves. A part of the void beyond lives within their shells, the entropy which exists between the many planes of existence.”

  She waved a hand and the image changed to show the surface world again. The Jahabich were defending a walled city from an army of Sasquatches pouring out of the nearby woods. The scene shifted to after the battle where the Jahabich, without provocation, turned upon the humans they’d been protecting and proceeded to trash the city themselves.

  The image before us pulled back and we saw it wasn't a lone incident. Cities, forests; all of them burned from the onslaught of the Jahabich.

  “My beloved children.” A tear slipped down the side of Calibra’s cheek as she watched history play out. “Nothing more than rabid dogs in need of putting down.” She turned back toward us and her eyes hardened. “So I did. The only way to contain them was to draw them back to the source of their creation, the very womb of life.”

  We watched mages fighting off the Jahabich, slowly pushing them back toward the hole in the earth. Then, down below, Calibra was casting magic, calling out to her creations, beckoning them back. Finally, she sealed them in using the very source of magic that had created them.

  “The prison wasn’t perfect. There were occasional escapes, but it held the bulk of them for thousands of years.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill them?”

  Calibra rounded on Sally. “Could you slaughter your own children?!”

  Sally glanced at me and I remembered what she said about her sister. If I were Calibra, I wouldn’t be so certain of that.

  “Though The Source was sealed off, it had left its mark upon me, touched me with its power. Years passed and though my brethren withered, the vitality of youth stayed with me. In time, they were gone and what had come before passed into myth.”

  “But still the threats remained. I refused to let history repeat itself, so I set about teaching young mages, imparting to them what I had learned of magic from my long life. The memory of my failure haunted me. Thus, I strived to educate my pupils with a set of principles so they would not make the same mistakes I did.”

  And so the myth of the White Mother began. She showed us scene after scene of her teaching covens of mages. This was the Snow White part of the story, before we got back to the wicked stepmother shit again. In reality, we had no idea if this magical slideshow had been heavily edited or not; however, what we saw seemed to indicate that perhaps once upon a time she was legit in her reasoning. But, as Sally and I were both aware, this movie had a dark sequel.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “Time,” Calibra replied. “For centuries, I passed on my knowledge, my wisdom.”

  Oh yeah, this chick wasn’t at all full of herself.

  “But eventually, I felt my body changing. I was slowly beginning to age again. The Source, its touch, began to ebb from my body.” She turned to face us, and her eyes blazed with power. “But I never stopped hearing its call, always there, always reminding me of what I had once grasped in my hands.”

  “So ... what?” I asked. “You found a vampire bat and...”

  “I am imparting upon you a great gift, showing you this. Do not play the fool.”

  I held up my hands. “Sorry. No offense intended.” Yeah, that was a fucking lie, but thankfully, she decided to skip her sense-motive roll this one time.

  “Busted,” Sally whispered under her breath. Bitch.

  “I could not return, not without unleashing my children back upon the world, a world I had spent ages rebuilding, defending. But still, flawed as they were, for a time the Jahabich helped defend humanity against its myriad enemies ... enemies that once again tested their strength against us. My time upon this world had left me powerful, learned. I decided to try again.”

  “Try again?” Sally asked.

  “But this time, I vowed to not repeat my mistakes,” Calibra said, ignoring us. I couldn’t help but notice a manic edge worming its way into her voice. Oh yeah, we were getting to the cray-cray part of the story. “The Source is infinitely powerful, touches innumerable worlds. To attempt to tame it is madness itself. So instead, I sought to recreate it, rebuild it in my own image.”

  I glanced sidelong at Sally and she shrugged as if to let me know she was thinking the same thing.

  This tale was about to take a dive off the deep end.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Indeed, it did. Calibra showed us her efforts to sequester herself away from the world while she worked her magic to try to force open a new door in reality. But, time and again, she met with failure. There would be a massive flash of energy, only for it to fizzle out.

  “I eventually realized a catalyst was needed, beings who had weathered the passage between worlds, whose energy could stabilize it.”

  And that’s when we saw it. As much as the Feet would have probably disliked Calibra for evicting their ancestors from their lakefront property, what we saw before us cemented why they kinda sorta hated us. She was experimenting on them – and not just a few. Scores of them, chained up and used as guinea pigs as she tried to suck the very essence from them – the spirits that were their native forms when not being giant sacks of shit-flavored fur. Robe-wearing apprentices assisted her in the torture, although whether mages or human servants, I couldn’t tell.

  “It was working,” she said, a look of avarice upon her face as she lost herself in the history playing out before us. It would have been the perfect opportunity. Oh, if only we were armed ... and not surrounded by thousands of creatures who would die at her command before they’d so much as let us sneeze.

  So, we watched with her. Maybe there’d be something, anything, we could use. If not, well, at least this wasn’t one of those boring historical documentaries.

  Some kind of grand experiment of mad sorcery was afoot. Beneath the light of a full moon, Calibra commanded her servants to slit the throats of dozens of captives at once. Their spirits were pulled from them through the wounds, leaving their bodies dried, withered husks. Those spirits, glowing yellow under the light of the moon, began to swirl in a circle, their energies melding together as Calibra worked her magic.

  Faster and faster they flew in ever tighter formation until they lost their sense of individuality, becoming one massive floating circle of power. The yellowish color began to pulse, growing darker, until it turned an angry red. The surface began to bubble and appeared to become less energy and more physical matter – not entirely unlike the massive pool in this cavern, save smaller in size and floating on its side in mid-air like some sort of half-assed Stargate.

  Hah! I realized that’s exactly what it was. She’d ripped open a doorway. To where? I didn’t know. Perhaps I didn’t want to know.

  “The breach began to stabilize,” she said. “Began to draw power from beyond to be self-sustaining, but then betrayal struck.”

  Betrayal wasn’t quite the word I would have used. One of Calibra’s human servants, an older fellow with a long white beard that almost reached the ground, was too busy staring in awe as his master orchestrated her shit storm. A large male Sasquatch managed to break his bonds while this guy’s attention was diverted.

  It bellowed a challenge and raced forward. The servant saw it but reacted too slowly. He stabbed at the creature with a double-bladed dagger, but it was only a glancing blow.

  Calibra turned and saw it coming. She raised a hand and red fire flew forth from her fingertips, but she was also too late. The flame consumed the squatch, but he still managed to drive the bulk of his dying body into her, sending her flying.

  She hit the swirling, glowing portal and everything went to shit.

  The power within it began to pulse different colors, quickly becoming chaotic as whatever spell she’d been weaving began to unravel. Calibra herself screamed out, stuck to the portal as if it were made of flypaper and she a gian
t bug. Arcs of energy, resembling clawed hands, reached out and began to grab at her. Though I couldn’t know for certain – and I had a feeling it was probably not a good idea to outright ask – it seemed to me as if the spirits she’d corrupted were attempting to get their revenge.

  Calibra fought back, though, using her magic to try to free herself until the entire thing fucking exploded.

  I tried to stifle a laugh, but it was tough. I didn’t consider myself a cruel person, but I wasn’t a saint either. If enjoying watching an evil asshole get creamed was a crime, then send me to jail.

  The show wasn’t over, though. No, that was just the warmup act.

  An explosive shockwave tore through the prison camp, flattening minions and prisoners alike. Of that latter group, many were freed from their bonds to retreat to the woods around them, although a few were curious enough to stop and watch from cover what happened next.

  And what happened next was apparently key.

  When the dust cleared, gone was the nascent portal to whatever Hell it led to, but it had left something behind. Calibra lay on the ground unmoving, her white dress mostly burned away, but the scraps that were left were now black as soot.

  Fitting, because when she finally opened her eyes, so were they.

  Monologuing for Fun and Profit

  And thus it came to pass that we witnessed the birth of the first vampire. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions and, holy shit, they’re right. Calibra had started out trying to do good, but had slowly been corrupted from her path. She was kind of a less whiny, but no less douchey, version of Anakin Skywalker.

  What happened next was nothing I couldn’t have predicted. The first person to her side was the bearded fellow who’d caused all this shit with his worshipful neglect. Within moments, his white beard was stained red as she turned upon him and tore his throat out.

  His buddies all followed in quick succession as Calibra arose, angry and apparently quite hungry.

  The image before us dispersed and we were once again in the here and now.

  “I became what I am today,” Calibra said. “Though I didn’t know it at the time, my servants would soon rise as the first of this new race, driven by the hungering spirits inside of them to eternally seek mortal blood for survival.”

  “Hold on ... what do you mean spirits inside them? You said that earlier, too.”

  Calibra turned away from me and began to walk toward the castle of rock. She didn’t tell us to take a fucking hike, so we again followed her.

  After a few moments of uncomfortable silence behind her high and mightiness, she finally spoke again. “The Jahabich are weak, captured souls imprisoned within stone and empowered by the magical energies of The Source. Though I failed to recreate its power, I succeeded in creating a superior race, but not a perfect one. The sun burns our bodies. Faith, a magic I once wielded with impunity, now turns us to ash. However, despite our failings, we are far above the Jahabich – not one soul, but two, and not in a false body, but in the original, strengthening it beyond belief.”

  “Two souls?” Sally and I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied, “in each of us, even myself – the creature who disrupted my spell, as a matter of fact. The multiverse has a sense of irony, after all. I’d thought the magic of my conjuring dispersed, but I was wrong. It persists, a little bit in all of you, the way opened at the time of your becoming.” She stopped and turned toward us, causing me to back up a step. Sorry, but crazy and powerful was a combo I didn’t care to get all too close to. “When the undead pass along their gift, what they leave behind draws in a primal spirit from beyond.”

  “Pass along their gift?”

  “The venom, boy,” she said as if explaining to a particularly stupid child.

  “Wait, you mean from our fangs? Holy crap, Dave was right.”

  “Right about what?” Sally asked.

  “He had this crazy theory about us secreting venom like a rattlesnake. Milked me for a sample.” Even as the sentence left my mouth, I realized it was a poor choice of words.

  Sally couldn’t help but smirk. “Doesn’t surprise me. So, how often did you two milk each other?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Guess I’m not your type after all.”

  “David?” Calibra asked. “This wouldn’t happen to be the same...”

  “The one you gave to Firebird? Yeah, same guy.”

  I could feel Sally’s eye’s boring a hole into the side of my head at the mention of that name. Safe to say, Firebird was at the bottom of her list of people to show mercy to.

  “He has proven surprisingly ... useful,” Calibra replied before once again resuming her pace.

  Dave? Useful? Oh yeah, things were definitely getting weird now.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Calibra went on to explain that when a vampire bit a human, it wasn’t so much the person dying and being reborn as it was them being possessed. Seems that was part of the reason the Feet hated us as much as they did – y’know, aside from her using them as her personal guinea pigs. The Feet were spirits made flesh through their own abilities. A vampire was a less natural merger, an extra-planar spirit drawn into a body – kinda like with a lure – then fused with the soul still in possession of that body, essentially creating a new being.

  I remembered what Christy had told me when she’d been mucking around in Sally’s mind, how she’d felt like she was being watched. All of a sudden, that made perfect sense. “So, you’re saying that a human soul and some sort of ghost thing merge and form Devastator?”

  “The spirit thrives on the life force of others, but much depends on its strength of will compared to that of the human host it inhabits.”

  “Life force?”

  “Blood,” Sally said. Gone was the snark. Calibra had her full attention now.

  “Indeed, child. If the spirit is stronger, so too is the need to feed. It is why so many are born feral. It is why so many become that way.”

  “And if the human is stronger?” Sally asked.

  “Then they might not even notice the change. They may very well think that it is they and they alone inhabiting the shell of a body, the thirst merely a byproduct of their transformation. If their will is strong enough, the other within them can become little more than a slave.”

  “But the need to hunt, to feed, to kill...”

  “Do not underestimate human nature,” Calibra replied. “We are predators every bit as they are. They simply enhance one’s natural proclivities, bring out the beast inside.”

  “They turn us into monsters.”

  “That is a very narrow way of thinking.”

  “Oh? When I was growing up,” Sally said, “I never hurt anyone outside of calling them names. After ... that’s when I moved on from people’s feelings to hurting the rest of them.”

  “Perhaps you were one of the weaker souls.”

  Whoa. Those were fighting words. Before things could devolve, I stepped in front of Sally and warned her, “You can’t win this.”

  “Indeed she cannot,” Calibra replied. “I am older...”

  “And thus stronger,” I finished for her.

  “Incorrect. I am more whole.”

  “Come again?”

  “We do not get stronger as we age, foolish boy. It is the merger that becomes stronger, allowing us to draw more and more upon the energies of the being to which we are bonded. When we are first born, we are comparatively weak. Two souls fusing is traumatic. It leaves both debilitated. It takes many centuries, longer even, for that damage to fully heal.”

  She was arguing semantics. Fine; maybe a new vampire was essentially a gimp with a lot of rehab ahead of it, but the end result was still that an older vamp was faster, tougher, and a hell of a lot stronger.

  But that still didn’t explain me.

  “All of this is fascinating, but it doesn't jibe with what's going on in my head. That whole soul merger thing. It didn’t
take. I can talk to my ... whatever the fuck it is. And it tends to talk back.”

  “That is because you are a Freewill.”

  We’d reached the gates of her palace, much larger up close than it had seemed when I first entered this cavern. One wouldn’t think such a subterranean world would be possible outside of stories like Journey to the Center of the Earth. It was too large, too open. But then again, it also had the magical energies of the multiverse coursing through it. That was probably enough to keep the place from caving in on itself.

  Calibra turned and approached me, putting a hand upon my shoulder. I had a feeling it wasn’t be convey brotherly love. “You are to be my crowning achievement.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “We are talking about Bill here, right?” Sally asked.

  Calibra looked me in the eye. “Tell me, child, do you think I have told you all of this simply for your own edification? Do you believe you are owed answers for your existence when so many who have come before you have died ignorant of their true nature?”

  “Um, maybe.”

  She actually chuckled, although I had a feeling it wasn’t because I was a funny guy. “Consider yourself a beneficiary of happenstance, nothing more. I am the First, and so can appreciate the amusing symmetry of telling this tale to the very last Freewill.”

  Somehow, I didn’t find her words particularly comforting.

  “Alexander, too, realized what you represent. He sought to destroy your kind because he knew you were a threat to his power.” Her grin widened into a leer. “Yes, I know all about his machinations, as I know he had the heads of all the others destroyed not long after my servant was freed.”

  “So much for reinforcements,” I muttered.

  “He did so out of ignorance and fear. If one could be reborn as Vehron was, so too could they all. But in doing so, he foolishly presented me with a boon.”

  “A boon?”

  “Yes, because your kind are the ultimate obstacle to overcome. Through the freak occurrence of circumstance and your very nature, being dormant catalyst Magi, your kind possess powers others do not, most important of which is the ability to overcome the orders of those stronger than yourself.”