David flew over to the jukebox and tapped it a few times before the Clash’s “I Fought the Law” started to play.
“Nice music choice,” I said, cheerfully, as I started firing at the Nightwalker.
“Thanks,” David said, saluting me with one wing. “Try not to die!”
“I’ll try not to!” I shouted, jumping on my desk, and then leaping over the Nightwalker with a minor boost of levitation. You keep trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, but I didn’t think that applied to bullets.
The Nightwalker’s cloak swirled and twirled, extending its length before becoming a shield that absorbed all the magical bullets I was firing out of my enchanted pistols. Even worse, the entirety of my office was on fire and I could feel the heat against my skin. Hellfire wasn’t something I could guard against by turning insubstantial. I could hear the wailing of the damned around me and it sucked at the power that my magic provided me.
“The Primal Orbs aren’t going anywhere,” I said, coughing in the sulfuric smoke that was being created from my place of business. “I stole them fair and square!”
That was when the Nightwalker lifted his fingers. “By the Crimson Bands of Zul-Barbas, I paralyze you!”
“That’s a stupid spell,” I said, right before I was suddenly wrapped with magical bindings and collapsed on the ground.
Paralyzed.
Ah hell.
Chapter Three
Where I Lose My First Wizard Duel
Well this sucked.
I was wrapped in the Crimson Bands of Zul-Barbas, which was one of the strongest spells for binding someone. It prevented you from being able to move, do magic, or speak. The spell was designed to allow the caster to torture the subject for the hours it lasted, usually as part of a ritual to appease the titular Zul-Barbas. I’d killed Zul-Barbas permanently, erasing the god from reality, but the magic named after him still worked. I wondered if one of his Great Beast brothers had sent the Nightwalker after me.
Mind you, I was choking to death on the horrible smoke coming from my burning building and the flames were getting more intense around me. Unless the Nightwalker intended to transport me out, he wouldn’t have time to torture me long. As if my juke box was haunted by a particularly malevolent spirit, the next song that started to play was “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps.
The Nightwalker advanced on me, opening its mouth impossibly wide as a long demonic tongue slithered out. “Your soul will be sucked into my own personal hell dimension. Then I will deliver it to Lord Dracula. We will extract the Primal Orbs from you, and we will rewrite this reality to fix it.”
I wanted to say, “Would they do something about your underbite? You’ve got a serious case of python jaw there, friend.” Unfortunately, the Crimson Bands of Zul-Barbas were still holding me and I couldn’t say anything. On the plus side, I knew who was responsible for my problem: Dracula.
“You stay away from Gary, you rotting imitation!” David shouted, flying down, and clawing at the Nightwalker’s face. It snarled and hissed, distracted for a few precious seconds as I tried to figure out what could possibly get me out of this situation. It occurred to me that I was probably overthinking it and there was one way I might be able to save myself: brute force.
Closing my eyes and concentrating, I was able to picture the Primal Orbs inside my heart. I was crazy enough to store the two objects in the space in-between my atoms. If that made no sense to you, then congratulations, you have a working knowledge of physics. The thing about the Primal Orbs was they were designed to beat up physics and take its lunch money. It helped that the Primals were the Elder Gods who created physics in the first place.
“Get off me you stupid bird!” The Nightwalker smacked David and sent him crashing into the juke box, ending the disco accompaniment to my imminent death.
That was when I managed to absorb the energy of the spell and found myself once more able to move. I was sweating like a hog and felt my flesh licked by the hellfire around me. So, of course, the first thing I did was make a quip. “Man, I hope the real Nightwalker had better lines than that. You are vicious but have no finesse. Just attack, attack, attack.”
“Die!” the Nightwalker shouted, charging at me with a running leap. It was a classic comic book attack, but it didn’t work out for him here.
I turned insubstantial and lowered down six feet before he crashed into the desk above me. I grabbed him by the leg and pulled him halfway into the ground. “You can’t kill what’s already dead, but I can certainly try.”
The rotting corpse of the Nightwalker stared up in shock before I concentrated on burning the Reaper’s Cloak around him. The original Reaper’s Cloak, the one I’d worn, had been reclaimed by Death long ago but I’d created my own. The one on the Nightwalker poseur felt similar, but I had the power to destroy it the same way I’d destroyed all the other ones.
“Argghhhhh!” The Nightwalker hissed as the zombie suddenly found itself without the source of its powers. I didn’t stop burning the monster and countered the heat around us by creating my own flames. Seriously, that’s a thing in science. Even magical science.
“How do you know about the Primal Orbs?” I shouted, pouring on the heat. “Tell me who else knows!”
The Nightwalker tried to raise his desiccated skeletal hands at me and cast another spell instead of answering. I ended up throwing him into the flames behind me and watched the figure disintegrate into the pyre now surrounding me. The hellfire flames were consuming the walls, most of the floor, and separated me from the outside. The Nightwalker didn’t scream but disappeared into the fire and presumably returned to whatever hell he’d been conjured from.
“You probably should have focused on getting out of here over beating the undead Nightwalker,” David said, flying over and landing on my head. “You know, I do think the Good Lord can get me out of this but I’m pretty sure you’re borked.”
“Borked?” I asked, looking up to the raven.
“I think swearing is a sign of an unintelligent mind,” David replied. “That and all the soccer moms won’t buy my horror novels if I say anything badder than butt.”
“That’s borking stupid,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” David said. “Well, talk to you later. I hope you don’t mind if I have someone dig out the gold near your burned-out dead body. I mean, waste not, want not.”
I was really starting to dislike that bird. “Yeah, well I’m not dead—oh, bork! That stings!—Yeah, well I’m not dead yet.”
“Got any ideas how to get out of here?” David asked, watching part of my ceiling collapse, exposing the levels above.
“In fact, I do,” I said, concentrating and levitating above the flames. The second floor of my building was full of giant props from when this was a factory for them in the Sixties (don’t ask me who bought them) and the third was just empty apartment space. I didn’t stop levitating until I reached the rooftop above both. David flew behind me, keeping up with my serendipitous escape.
The fresh-ish air of Falconcrest City was something that filled my lungs and I was surprised that I wasn’t entirely sarcastic. Falconcrest City used to be such a toxic hellhole that you might have done a better job getting fresh air by smoking a pack of cigarettes. Most of the smog was gone now, at least by comparison, and it was only about as awful as Downtown New Angeles these days.
It was early in the morning and there was a fog laying out over the city streets below with the sun barely visible. I had a fairly good view of my hometown. It was a shame that said view was coming from on top of my burning office building, but that was a small price to pay for surviving an undead version of my old friend Lancel.
Falconcrest City used to look like one Gothic Art Deco skyscraper after another. When I was growing up, the Thirties buildings were covered in gargoyles and you couldn’t cross the street without running into a decaying slum. Things had changed in the past few years, time compression or not, and half the city was n
ow modern glass buildings that looked like they were built in the twenty-second century rather than the twentieth or twenty-first.
The City of Nightmares—yes, that was its actual nickname—had changed because of the efforts of heroes combined with the dozen disasters that had hit the city one after the other. It no longer looked like Cthulhu was going to team up with the mafia to kill everyone. Now it looked like Cthulhu, the mafia, and cyberpunk gangs were going to kill everyone. I’d done my best to rescue my city from being called the Worst in America fifty years running. Now it was just in the bottom twenty. Progress, am I right?
David plopped himself on the top of my hood as I looked out to the metropolis below. “Well, our goose was almost cooked or raven in my case. I can’t believe that Dracula sent a zombie version of Lancel after us.”
“It wasn’t a zombie,” I said. “I know zombies. It was something much worse. Like a lich and a wight combined. A Lich-Wight.”
“That’s not a real thing,” David said.
“It is if I say it is,” I replied. “In any case, Dracula has made the mistake of coming after me so I’m going to have to take him down now.”
“You were already going to,” David said.
“Yes, but it’s more ironic if I pretend that I wasn’t going to accept until he attacked me,” I replied.
David cawed in a way that I assumed was him laughing. “You’re alright, Merciless. You’re the second-best Jewish mobster I’ve ever met.”
I frowned, both irritated at the misidentification as well as wondering who the best was. “I’m not a Jewish mobster.”
“Sorry, Jewish supervillain,” David said.
“Superhero,” I said, unhappy.
David made a snort-like sound that was slightly different due to the fact he was a bird and had a beak instead of a nose. “Sorry, chum, but you ain’t no Hebrew Hammer. He was the baddest Heeb since Tel Aviv. You’re mid-tier Arnold Rothstein at best. Now there was a guy who knew how to run the rackets of Falconcrest City.”
I was getting the distinct impression my talking bird was racist. “Listen, David, if you’re going to be my familiar then you’re going to have to cut it with the language. I’m not a mobster and even if I was, I’d be the best mobster in the city period versus the best Jewish mobster.”
“Actually, I think Cindy and her dad are the best Jewish mobsters in the city,” David said. “In my day, the Kosher Nostra were professionals. You’re a fairly good heist man and I applaud you taking a hit out on all the baddies you’ve eighty-sixed. But as a boss? I don’t think so. Fuhgeddaboudit.”
“How are you an Italian raven again?” I asked.
“Sicilian!” David said.
I felt we were about to start a Monty Python sketch and debated going with the dead parrot or swallow with a coconut one. I didn’t get a chance to, though, because my right leg was grabbed by a bony hand that reached up from underneath the roof. Levitating up and carrying me up into the air was the Nightwalker, his Reaper’s Cloak having regenerated, and his mummified form burned but otherwise unharmed. He turned me upside down as the edges of his cloak became unnaturally long tendrils that lifted me upside down in front of his face.
“Motherborker!” I shouted.
“You cannot kill what is already dead,” he said, his eye sockets now empty except for a pair of flames like eerie Saint Elmo’s fire. “I am immune to the power of Death. I am beyond her, I am beyond life, I am—”
“Web!” I said, making the heavy metal horns with my fingers and covering his face in a bunch of steel hard goop.
“Gah!” the Nightwalker said, his prehensile cloak dropping me on the ground.
“Where did you get that power?” David said, flapping about.
“Long story,” I said, aiming at the Nightwalker with both hands. “Prismatic Spray!”
A glowing rainbow blast of a half-dozen spells released at once and struck the Nightwalker, sending him flying over the side of the roof. He was taking everything I was throwing at him and proving damn near unkillable. I was going to have to think of something better than my usual bag of tricks if I was going to defeat him. Leaping off the roof, I levitated down to follow him just as the building behind me collapsed. The hellfire had eaten away its interior and I would have been buried alive if I’d remained inside. Well, I would have been burned alive, killed by smoke inhalation, and then buried alive.
I landed in the middle of the alleyway behind my now-destroyed place of business. It was next to two abandoned warehouses and a mob-owned recycling center. There were no workers or homeless people around so I could cut loose. Still, it said something about Falconcrest City that a building could go up in literal hellfire and there was no sign of either the police or fire fighters. As Wang Chi said in the immortal Big Trouble in Little China, “Cops got better things to do than get killed.”
The Nightwalker was already ripping away the webbing on his face, tearing pieces of his skull away and regenerating them almost instantaneously. The Prismatic Spray spell, which was seventh level in Dungeons and Dragons, had only managed to injure it for a short while. I needed to inflict damage so great that it would prevent the Lich-Wight from repairing itself or figure out something it couldn’t regenerate.
“I do not recognize that breed of magic,” the Nightwalker said. “Tell me the secret of it and I will make your end a short one.”
“Uh, no,” I said, debating returning to the Primal Orbs to unmake this scumbag. Even if I could do it, I wondered if it was designed to rip them from me. If they fell into this monster’s hands then it would probably teleport away, and I would have just handed Dracula two of the most powerful objects in the multiverse.
“So be it,” the Nightwalker hissed. He then started making elaborate gestures and muttering in languages I didn’t understand. Glowing red runes and circles of symbols I didn’t recognize appeared all around me. I found myself once more unable to move but this time it was accompanied with pain that prevented me from concentrating enough to access the Primal Orbs again.
“Dammit!” I said, struggling to force past the pain.
“This world should not exist,” the Nightwalker said. “You have created one where the struggle between good and evil is determined as much by blind luck as the value of the struggle. Kings and heroes die due to random chance. Great monsters die at each other’s hands as often as due to the chances of fate. Fools like you live when geniuses, saints, and sinners fall. It is an abomination.”
I started summoning flames capable of incinerating atoms. Fire that was hotter than the flames that had destroyed my office. “Tell me… something I don’t know.”
It was strange but the Nightwalker was sounding a lot more coherent now. The Lich-Wight had acted like nothing more than a parody of his previous self when it wasn’t outright acting like a monster from a Bruce Campbell movie. Now he almost sounded like the real thing, brought back to life to judge my sins. I didn’t like it.
“Goodbye, Merc—” The Nightwalker didn’t get to finish his statement because there was a gunshot that caused his head to explode in golden heavenly light. The rest of his body crumbled to dust and the magic he was weaving vanished.
“Huh, that was anticlimactic,” David said, flying down onto the edge of a nearby dumpster.
I collapsed on the ground, my vision blurry and my head pounding. “Not that I’m not grateful for the assist but who, exactly, just saved my ass? Could you come out and identify yourself? Also, why did your weapon work and not mine?”
“Is that important now?” David asked.
“It is if there’s another of those things coming!” I snapped, shaking my head free of the pain.
“Hopefully, there isn’t,” a familiar female voice said. “As for what killed it, my bullets are forged in Heaven. Almost as good as New Detroit for ammunition.”
Stepping out from behind a garbage bin where she’d taken her shot was Jane Doe, aka Weredeer. Jane Doe was, as her name stated, a weredeer. She was a beautifu
l twenty-something girl with a bowl haircut, brown hair, freckles, and a lithe yet toned body hidden under clothing that immediately identified her as a hipster.
She had ripped blue jeans from the Eighties, an out of season Christmas t-shirt with a reindeer hunting Santa on it, and a bedazzled jacket covered in flair that hadn’t so much gone out of style as never been worn by anyone over the age of fifteen. In her hands was a WW2 American pistol that glowed with heavenly power that was the antithesis of the kind I had wielded with the Reaper’s Cloak. I didn’t wield the power of Hell like the now deader-than-dead Nightwalker did but mine was the power of darkness while hers was, well, light.
Jane Doe was from an alternate reality, one where superheroes had never emerged and the supernatural was predominant instead. It had vampires, shifters, mages, and more living openly among mankind instead of Supers. Circumstances had dumped her in my reality for a time, but I’d sent her back to her home universe once I’d mastered how to use the teleportation powers of the Primal Orbs. I hadn’t asked her whether she wanted to go first, and it had cost me one of my few friends. I wasn’t sure how she was back in my universe and in that moment, I didn’t care.
“Jane!” I said, walking up to her. “I am so glad to see you.”
She promptly slapped me in the face, thankfully holding the gun in her other hand. So, at least she wasn’t pistol-whipping me mad.
“Ow,” I said, rubbing my face. “Usually, I’ve slept with a girl before she does that. Also, it’s usually Cindy.”
“We need to talk,” Jane said.
I stared at her. “Also, a line usually coming from women I’ve slept with who are usually Cindy.”
“Nevermore,” David said, taunting me.
I glared at him.
Chapter Four
Where Jane and I Catch Up
“You hit me!” I snapped at Jane Doe, miraculously returned from her home dimension.
The Supervillainy Saga (Book 7): The Horror of Supervillainy Page 3
