by Deck Davis
I saw now that while Wren held his herb twigs, which I assumed were some kind of ward, Molly gripped a dagger in her hand. It was small, about the size of a letter opener, and about as sharp. It didn’t look like it would pierce demon hide. Then again, there was something about the metal. It glowed dully, almost imperceptibly, but the glow was there. She’d told me that Wren could enchant things, so maybe the dagger had some kind of magical effect.
Focusing on the door, I walked down the hallway. I heard the soft patter of steps behind me, and I wondered if the sound of me and my fellow hunters travelled through the closed door, to whatever waited inside.
I stopped. “What now?” I whispered.
“We have to see what’s inside.”
“But you need to know its name, or I can’t banish it.”
“I can’t do that without seeing it.”
“And if you can’t find out its name?”
“Trust me. I’ll find out.”
I grabbed the door handle and turned it, and I pushed the door open. Not wasting a second, I walked inside.
There was nothing. It was a bedroom; there was a double bed facing one wall, and an old fireplace on the other. The window looked out onto the driveway, at the tangled mess of nettles and the piles of mulch, and our car parked in front. To my right there was a wardrobe, but it was open and nothing was hiding inside it save four blue nurse uniforms hanging from hooks.
I looked at Molly and shrugged my shoulders.
“Use your eye,” she said.
I held out my hand. The coin flesh on my palm tingled, and I slowly waved it over the room. It seemed that now that I was inside the room, it wasn’t picking up the exact source of the auras unless I aimed it precisely. I pointed it at the bed, and nothing happened. The same with the wardrobe. I didn’t know what was going on.
Wren nudged me and pointed at the fireplace.
I turned. I held my hand up toward it.
Aura detected. Strength: 11%
Power accumulated: 24% [76% to level 2]
“It’s there,” I said. “And it’s gone up again.”
“Shit!” shouted Molly.
I heard the scramble of feet and the scratching of claws on stone. A mass of shadows built up inside the fireplace, and at first, I wondered if the chimney had given birth to a demon. I tensed my left fist, wondering if this demon wouldn’t have a vessel after all, and if I could just banish it there and then.
The shapes began to separate, and when they left the darkness of the fireplace, I saw what they were.
Rats. First two, then three, then eight, then a dozen. More and more of them scurried out of the fireplace, and the sound of claws scratching on stone grew deafening, and it was joined by hundreds of horrible squeaks and shrieks.
The black masses of fur climbed over each other in a hurry to get out. They bared sharpened teeth and scrambled with their little rat hands and feet.
One climbed up Wren’s leg, reaching his face before he could do anything. It bit into his cheek, tearing away strip of flesh. Wren cried out, and he smacked at it madly, but the creature hung on. When Molly grabbed it and pulled it away Wren’s skin came with it, a strip peeling away like wallpaper, blood spurting, and Wren’s cries of pain drowning out the scratches of the rats’ feet.
I felt one on my shoulder. I grabbed it with my left fist. I only meant to throw it off me but when I grabbed it I didn’t realize the strength of my new fist, and the creature’s bones cracked in my grip, and blood welled onto my glove.
They leapt onto us then, attacking as an army, black-furred, flea-infested creatures jumping onto our legs and scurrying up our bodies.
They were going for our faces. For our eyes. They wanted to sink their teeth into our eyes.
I smashed one off my chest. I kicked out, sending four flying off my leg. Wren held his herb twigs out and uttered words in a language I didn’t understand. The twigs lit on fire. No flame, no source of ignition to light them, just Wren’s words spoken in a tone of confidence that he must have had to muster from the depths of his soul.
He dropped the twigs on the floor. The rats darted away, and they formed a circle around us then, scared of the twigs. I didn’t know if it was the faint flames and the smoke, or some kind of ward Wren had used, but the rats didn’t dare come closer.
“Go,” I said.
Molly went to leave, when Wren grabbed her. “Wait. Take one of the nurse uniforms.”
“What?”
“Just grab one!”
He said this with such conviction that I did it. I unhooked a nurse uniform from a hanger in the wardrobe.
“No, grab the one on the floor! I need one that’s been worn.”
“What the hell?”
“Just listen to him,” said Molly. “We’ll explain later.”
The herbs had almost burned down to the end now, and I knew the rats would be back on us after that. So, I grabbed the dirty nurse uniform from the floor and I bundled it up and put it in the pocket of my coat.
I pushed passed Wren and Molly. “Come on,” I said.
I left the room and went back into the hallway.
And then I stopped.
A feeling eerier than anything I have ever experienced came over me. I felt my skin itch, and a cold sweat built on my forehead.
Ahead of me, at the end of the hallway, were more rats. Fifty of them. Maybe more. Maybe a hundred. But they weren’t scampering toward me. Instead, the rats were climbing on top of each other, one after another, until they formed a tower of rats, a solid figure of writhing fur, of screeches, of beady eyes and disease-ridden teeth.
This horrible rat figure began to move at me as one, almost as if it had become one giant rat, except I could still see dozens of rat limbs moving and scraping and scratching.
It dredged a sense of horror from deep inside me, twisting my stomach, sending a shiver through me. I had never seen anything as horrible as this squirming mass, this thing made from darkness and fur with its tails intertwined, with some of the rats biting each other, and blood dripping down their hairy bodies.
“A rat king,” said Wren. “This is what they do, sometimes. They bundle together like this with their tails hooked to each other, only nobody knows why. But if a rat king is here, then…”
“That means it could be…” said Molly.
“Yeah,” said Wren, cutting her off.
Behind us, there was movement from the bedroom. Even more rats poured from the fireplace now, trapping us between this rat king, this disgusting nest of rats that moved as one, and between hundreds of vermin in the bedroom.
We needed the safety of the car, and I had to get us there. I stared at the rat king as it scuttled across the hallway, and I remembered what Molly had told me about my Blast power in my demon fist.
Energy will store inside you, and it’ll explode out of your fist when you punch. The longer you wait between using Blast, the stronger it’ll be.
Feeling energy tremble where the demon flesh met my own, I charged at the rat monstrosity. The hallway shook with my footsteps, and I felt adrenaline and fear explode into a deadly cocktail in my chest, but I didn’t stop. When I reached the rats, I swung my fist and I felt energy shock through me.
I swung a hook into the side of the rat king. A white light burst from my fist, a burning white spark like a firework exploding. The white flare lit the rats’ fur and spread from vermin to vermin, and the rat king dissembled in an instant, some rats dropping to the floor, others slamming into the walls. Their cries rose to an insane volume, a dizzying sound that bore deep into my eardrums and shook my skull.
They died one by one, some with smashed spines, others consumed by fire from the light, clearing a path for us to leave.
“Got the uniform?” said Wren, his voice shaky.
“Got it.”
Molly slapped my back. “Good job. Get to the car.”
Chapter Seven
“You did well back there,” said Molly.
We to
re away from the cottage and back onto the country road, which Molly threaded through at a speed well above the limit. The rats and the cottage must have gotten to her if she wasn’t worried about getting pulled over for speeding.
“Nothing Capgrove wouldn’t have done,” said Wren, holding his hand against his face.
I glared at him. “Found your balls again, have you?”
“Boys,” said Molly.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her.
“One of the bastards nipped my thigh. Apart from that, nothing. You?”
“A few scratches on my arms. Might have drawn blood.”
“We need to disinfect wherever they might have broken skin. Especially you, Wren. It got you good. Are you okay?”
“I suspect when I see my wound in the mirror I’ll pass out, but other than that, I’m alive.”
“Spoken like a true warrior,” said Molly. “Glove box.”
Wren opened the glovebox. A few chocolate bars tumbled out, as though so many were stuffed in there they were waiting to break for freedom. After rummaging around, Wren pulled out a first aid kit in a green box.
I checked the scratches on my shoulders and my right bicep. One might have broken skin, but nothing serious. Nothing like Wren, poor guy, with the chunk of his face torn away in a strip. I actually felt sorry for him.
The worst thing for me wasn’t the physical damage; it was the thought of it all. It was one thing listening to Wren talking about it back in the bunker, about demons and the creatures they could corrupt, about the smells they left behind and the way their mere existence defiled the air enough that it made you sick. It was easy to store it away as harmless information while Wren paced up and down the control room, sometimes with a mug of coffee in his hand. When he’d get really sucked into a lecture he’d swing his arm and coffee would go everywhere.
It had seemed too removed from reality back then. Like I was just suspending my disbelief, and deep down I knew things like that didn’t exist. But then, the bunker had wards to protect it, and it had thick concrete walls. Wren’s words were just words down there. In the cottage, it had been real. The smell in the air, the ripeness of rot, the way it twisted into my gut and my intestines and wrung them tight.
Then the rats. I’d never known that rats bothered me until now, but I guess the closest I’d ever been to one was through Jonesy, a friend I’d had in school who kept two of them in a cage in his room. While Jonesy’s pet rats were clean and docile, these ones in the cottage were the opposite. Dirty, feral, and hungering for flesh. They hadn’t wasted any time in attacking us, there was no hesitation while they decided what to do. When they’d piled out of the chimney it was for one reason.
Even thinking about them made me feel like someone had pressed ice against my nerves. It made a twinge creep up my back and into my shoulders.
Molly turned us onto the motorway now, taking a lane marked out for Manchester. Wren pressed a bottle of surgical spirit against a ball of cotton and tipped it over. With the cotton stained brown, he took a deep breath and pressed it against his cheek. He yelled. He kicked his leg out, thumping against the interior of the car. Molly gave him a sideways look and smiled.
“This isn’t funny,” said Wren.
“It could have been worse. Much, much worse.”
Wren had been scared back at the cottage. It had been written in his eyes, and I knew fear when I saw it. When you were in the ring, it showed in your opponent’s eyes the second they knew you’d completely broken their defenses. The early rounds of any fight are a game of chess. You might have watched tons of videos of each other in the buildup, but everything is different in the flesh. You sound each other out, you move around the ring carefully. Maybe you throw a testing jab here, a feint there.
There comes a point, and for me it was usually in the later rounds, that you start to see the patterns. You see the little flinches, the tiny changes in expression, and you start knowing when your guy is going to throw a punch that will leave his defenses wide open. When you figure that out, you’ve got him. That’s when you start throwing devastating punches of your own. Hooks that rock their skull, a cross that makes their skin wobble when you watch it back on television in slow motion.
When you start rocking them with shots like that, and when the crowd gets out of their seats and the roar builds and the atmosphere of the whole place picks up like it’s been electrified, that’s when you see the fear. I knew how it looked the minute it hit, and I saw it in Wren just before the rat tore a chunk from his face.
Here was where it was different, though. When you saw a fear in a guy, it usually went two ways. It locked him down, or it made him fight. I’d seen fighting men, and I mean really tough guys, walk back to their corner after a tough round, looking like sheep trundling toward a slaughterhouse. They’d stare ahead while their trainer bombarded them with advice, but none of it sank in. Their eyes were vacant, the ring was a haze of blue, the cheers of the crowd was just a background buzz. Then they’ come out after the bell and I’d see in the way they moved and threw punches, without energy and full conviction, that the fear had got to them.
Wren hadn’t done that. To give the guy all his credit, he’d acted. Molly had, too. Maybe as hunters they weren’t infallible. The way they were forced to hunt put them in constant danger, like having to go into a strange cottage, like having to learn a demon’s name before destroying it, but they were capable of meeting it, both mentally and physically. Now, I just had to make sure I was ready too.
The glove on my left hand was covered in rat blood and guts, so I pulled it off. I looked at the cracked flesh that lined my fist. The power in this thing! I hardly believed it. The way I’d smashed into the rat king, crushing bone, cracking spines. And the way the energy flushed through me when I did it – it was a rush.
That was how I’d improve, too. It was how I’d live up to my title of Banisher. I touched my hand, and a voice spoke in my head.
Demon Fist
Level: 1
Power accumulated: 53% [47% to level 2]
Abilities
Blast: Level 1
Banishments: 0
Kills:
Rats – 18
Effects: 15% damage increase to rats
Seeing my progress in numbers brought me back into familiar territory. In training camps in the run up to fights, everything was about numbers. I had to watch my micro and macro nutrients, measure my weight, my run times, my punch power, my speed. Everything was geared to tweaking my body and my style for hours and hours, sometimes just to gain a fraction of a percent of improvement. Sometimes my numbers didn’t change at all. When they did, when a day of sweat and toil led to a number swinging upwards, it was a drug. A rush of feeling, a hit of dopamine making me high.
I devoured the small scrap of information from my fist, smiling at my progress in accumulating power which I knew I could use to upgrade my fist, either back in the bunker, or in the field if Wren was with me. But something new, that Molly hadn’t told me about, was the kill count.
“Molly?” I said.
She looked at me in the rear-view mirror. “What’s up, champ? We’re nearly in Manchester.”
“It’s saying I killed 18 rats, and now I can hurt rats a little easier.”
“Didn’t Wren explain about your fist?”
“What about it?”
“About which demon we took the flesh from?”
“I did,” said Wren, sticking a plaster over his sanitized cut.
I wasn’t sure that he had mentioned anything about it, but things between me and the book mite were a little sour, and I knew now how important it was that we were a team when we were in the field. Things could turn dangerous in a snap, and we needed to be together. I wouldn’t point out the fact he hadn’t told me.
“He probably mentioned it,” I said. “I don’t have the best memory. My skull’s been smashed one too many times.”
“Your flesh is cut from Torgyuren,” said Molly. “His fles
h adapted to whatever he fought. It made him stronger the more he fought a certain enemy.”
“Who the hell is Torgyuren?”
“A demon.”
“Did Capgrove have demon flesh too?”
“On his shoulder,” said Molly.
Torgyuren. It was strange at first, hearing the name of the demon whose flesh was grafted onto mine. The more I thought about it, the more it changed from strangeness to a chill. A stirring in my stomach, making my insides feel like they were squirming.
I thought about people who received organ transplants. After their operations, after their lives were saved or at the least, improved, did they all want to learn more about the people whose organs they’d taken? And if they did, what if they learned something bad? What if a guy had a heart transplant, but he learned the man whose heart now rested in his chest, connected to his arteries, came from a child molester?
It left me aching to know more about Torgyuren, the demon whose skin was melded with my own, but at the same time I didn’t want to ask.
“Torgyuren,” I said. “Is he dead?”
“Nope.”
“But his flesh…he can’t, sort of, control my hand or anything, right?”
“It’s cured. Nothing about Torgyuren himself stays in the flesh, but the essence of the flesh itself, the things it can do, is untouched.”
“Why use demon flesh at all?” I asked.
“Sometimes, when you fight an enemy,” said Wren, “you have to use his own weapons against him.”
Huh. Wren had managed to put it in a way that I understood all too well, because that was a time-worn strategy in the ring. A guy has a thundering right hook? Let him use it. Let him swing it time and time again and let him miss, and then slip under the swing with a savage counter. Use his weapon against him.
“We’re five miles away from the city,” said Molly. “Wren, we better get a track on this thing.”
“Right. This place looks pretty quiet, you want to pull over?”
Molly took a left and then pulled over the car and we all got out. We were away from the countryside but out of the city centre, in a kind of twilight zone where nature and industrialization met at a crossroads. Far in the distance I saw the swell of the city, the multi-floored office blocks rising in concrete towers. Somewhere behind us was the countryside with its narrow roads and its farmers with their jeeps, but it was hidden behind a line of flourishing oak trees. There was nobody around, because there was no reason for them to come to a place like this.
