by Kevin Hearne
I felt the first twinges of desire myself and reflected that the Diamondbacks really needed base-stealing threats in their leadoff and number-two slots, because until they secured the ability to make pitchers nervous and manufacture runs, they’d be easy prey. They couldn’t rely on their streaky big hitters to win enough games to matter. They had to grind it out every day … Speaking of grinding—no. The bullpen needed a couple of solid guys who could pitch two or three full innings of lights-out ball. They couldn’t keep giving away games if the starter had a bad day.
“The lack of seating is inconvenient,” Laksha complained. “I need someplace to keep this body secure.”
“What? Why?”
“Do you even understand what I am going to do?”
“Not precisely. Push their souls out of their bodies somehow?”
“No, I do that only when I am taking possession. You want me to merely kill them. I will visit one’s brain and shut down the hypothalamus, which regulates the heartbeat, then move to the next as she collapses, and so on. Their souls will leave naturally as a result of their deaths. It will take me less than a minute.”
I frowned. “What will happen to your body while you’re out doing this?”
“This body will be in a vulnerable, vegetative state until I return—which is why I need a place to sit down.” A douche bag drenched in Drakkar Noir approached Laksha from behind, slipped his hands underneath her arms, and cupped her breasts. She immediately stomped down hard on his foot, lunged a step forward, and twisted to the right with her arm cocked, smashing her elbow into his temple. He went down like a sack of cornmeal. She grimaced in disgust and said, “We need to hurry. It’s already getting ridiculous in here.”
“Where are the Bacchants?” I asked.
“There’s one over there on the edge of the dance floor.” She pointed to a woman in what looked like a sheer white negligee, gyrating her backside sinuously against the hips of a young man behind her. She had a drunken smile on her face, and it appeared to me in the dim light that her teeth were unusually sharp. Everyone’s auras were aboil with red carnal lust.
I lost sight of her abruptly as a wanton olive-skinned girl slid up to me and kissed me full on the mouth, her right leg twining behind my left calf and her tongue darting between my teeth. There was a team sport I was supposed to be thinking of at that point, but she tasted like cherries and something else—
She was torn from my arms with a startled yelp, and my head rocked to the right as Laksha slapped my face, hard. Oh, yes, baseball. A home run would be good. Where did that girl go?
“Let’s get you out of here; you’re already useless,” Laksha said, forcefully turning me toward the exit and pushing me firmly in front of her. We hit fresh air before too long, having never penetrated far into the club, but when I tried to stop, Laksha said, “No, keep going. If you stay here you might be tempted to come back in.”
“What about my bats?”
“Get them, quickly.”
I scooped them up, and Laksha escorted me all the way to the edge of the parking lot, proclaiming that I should be safe there until she finished. And then she left me standing there uncertainly, holding two baseball bats with a sword strapped to my back and staring at the entrance to the club. I didn’t think of how unbalanced that made me look to people driving by on the street until the patrol car pulled up behind me, its lights flashing so that traffic would drive around it.
“Good evening, sir,” an officer called out. I nodded back to him and returned my gaze to the club, cursing my stupidity. I should have learned my lesson back at Target, but I’d been too focused on accomplishing the night’s objective to worry about doing it surreptitiously. Wearing a sword was second nature to a man from the Iron Age, but to modern eyes it indicated a need for therapy.
“What are you doing there?” the officer said. I heard the patrol-car door whump closed. I didn’t have the time or patience for this. If these guys hung around, they might wind up in trouble or seriously complicate my ability to deal with trouble if it came boiling out of the club.
“Just waiting for a friend,” I said.
“With a sword and a couple of bats? You sure it’s a friend you’re waiting for?”
Regretting the necessity to use some of my stored power, I quietly cast camouflage on Fragarach and then responded more loudly, “What sword?”
“The sword that’s—hey, what’d you do with it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer. I don’t have a sword.” I heard the driver’s-side door whump as his partner got out to join him, no doubt moving to flank me to my left.
“All right, tell you what—why don’t you drop the bats and show me some ID.”
I cast camouflage on the bats and said, “What bats?” Of course my hands were still curled around them, but now it looked as if I was just standing there with my fists at my sides. I should have done this in the first place, and then these lads would never have gotten a call about me. But I knew they wouldn’t just leave me alone now. The man with the disappearing weapons was far too curious a creature for them to ignore, and, besides, I’d made them look stupid. They’d want some payback, sure.
“Show me some ID,” the cop demanded again. He was far too peremptory for my taste. Honestly, I was trying to be one of the good guys here. There were times in my past when I probably deserved to be harassed, but this wasn’t one of them.
I cast camouflage on myself and asked, “Who are you talking to?” before silently stepping forward a couple of paces. That freaked their shit right out. They both put their hands to their guns and asked each other where I went. My camouflage isn’t perfect invisibility, but at night it might as well be. I stepped off to the right about ten yards or so as they looked all around them and called out for me to come back. The driver suggested that they call for backup.
“Backup for what, Frank?” the first officer said. “We’ve got nothing here.”
“Maybe he ran into the club,” Frank suggested.
“You want to check it out?” I didn’t like where this was going. Put a couple of guns into a bacchanalian setting and eventually those guns are going to be used.
“Yeah,” Frank said, “let’s go. That guy looked pretty dangerous.”
I looked pretty dangerous? There was something dangerous in the club, all right, but it wasn’t me. I had to do something quickly, so I decided to go the Three Stooges route, since the two cops had moved next to each other before tackling a club full of horny twenty-somethings. A Druid’s ability to see the connections between all natural things and bind them together encourages mischief at times, and while I usually did this sort of thing for an immature laugh, now I would be saving their lives. I muttered a binding between two sets of skin cells so that they couldn’t bear to be parted a second longer—specifically, the skin cells on the first officer’s right palm and the cells on Frank’s left cheek. I broke the binding as soon as it was consummated, and the effect was that the first officer gave Frank a beauty of a bitch slap.
Frank reacted as any American might to being slapped unexpectedly in the face by his partner. “Ow! You dick, Eric! What the fuck?” Now I knew both their names. Frank lashed out and laid one on Eric before Eric could explain it had been an involuntary muscle spasm, and then it was on. Watching two cops have a slap fight was a pretty amusing way to pass an idle moment or two. I’ve rarely been so entertained while waiting for someone.
Eric had the advantage in terms of reach, but Frank was much faster. Frank was landing two or three slaps to every one of Eric’s, and after a half minute of that, Eric had damn well had enough. He turned his openhanded slap into a fist, crunching it into Frank’s nose. Frank yelped and staggered backward, raising his hand to his face. It came away drenched in his own blood.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Frank,” Eric said, holding his hands up.
“Sorry isn’t going to make it better,” Frank growled, and he bull-rushed his partner and wrapped him up in a te
xtbook tackle. Eric managed to twist as he fell so that he landed on his shoulder, keeping his head from hitting the pavement. They rolled around a little bit, back and forth, neither getting the advantage over the other, but eventually Frank came up on top, rage driving him to dominate his larger opponent. He landed a couple of solid punches on Eric’s face, and then they were both bleeding. Eric boxed Frank’s ears and threw him off to the side but didn’t pursue him. They were both dealing with more pain than they were used to, so they were content to lie there bleeding, sling various anatomical epithets at each other, and accuse their mothers of sexual adventures with farm animals. Good times.
Laksha still hadn’t returned, and no one had exited the club in all this time. The music continued to thump through the walls into the night, and I wondered if I should start worrying.
The police officers hauled themselves slowly to their feet and plotted to blame their injuries on me. Their story would be that I had hit them with my baseball bats, broken both their noses, and escaped. They’d get worker’s comp for fighting, and I’d get an APB for assaulting an officer. Great.
As they returned to their patrol car to radio their lies to the station, I heard what sounded like faint screams coming from the club, a high-pitched top note to the techno pulse. Laksha emerged with a wicked grin on her face, and then more people came spilling out behind her, some of them in nothing but underwear, clearly panicked and fleeing for their lives.
Laksha’s grin faded as she saw the lights of the police car but didn’t see me. She kept coming straight ahead to clear the press of the stampeding mob, and I hissed at her to get her attention.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Use your other senses. I’m in camouflage.”
Laksha’s eyes rolled up and then she spied me standing off to her left. “Ah, excellent.”
“What happened?” I gestured at the club.
“I killed twelve Bacchants, as we agreed,” she said pleasantly.
“Is that why these people are panicking?”
“Partially. But mostly it’s because there are three more in there and they’re tearing people in half.”
Since I’m an Irish lad, I’m already fairly pale, but that intelligence turned me from eggshell white to bone. Either Malina’s divination had been incorrect or a few bonus Bacchants had arrived late in the game. “Well, why didn’t you kill them too?” I asked.
“Because we agreed on twelve.”
“I’ll be sure not to fetch you any extra apples, then. Where are they?”
“I’m sure they’ll be coming out after me soon enough. They’ll be the ones dressed in white sheaths stained with wine and carrying staves. Bloodthirsty look in their eyes, chunks of meat in their teeth—you can’t miss them.”
She wasn’t kidding. A particularly piercing scream drew my gaze to the entrance, where a diminutive brunette in a white nightie had seized a much taller woman by the hair and a fistful of fabric at the small of her back. As I watched, this tiny woman—who could not have weighed more than 110 pounds—heaved the larger one off her feet, spun her around like a discus thrower, and slung her in a high, shrieking arc across the parking lot, over our heads, to land ruinously on top of Frank and Eric’s patrol car.
I almost wished Granuaile could have seen it; she wouldn’t have thought the Bacchants were victims anymore. Laksha laughed, somehow thinking the poor woman’s death was funny. We had different senses of humor, I guess.
I couldn’t stay back any longer. Not only was it clear that Laksha had done all she was going to do, but now the police would be getting involved. I had to eliminate the threat before bullets started flying and ricocheting off the Bacchants’ magic hides. There was no danger of being lured into their orgy now; the happy time was over and the madness had begun.
Still in camouflage, I charged the wee Bacchant as she tore after another panicked clubber. A second Bacchant emerged from the club, bloodstained and wrathful, eyes bulging as she grabbed a full-grown man and broke his back over her knee in one of those wrestling maneuvers that simply wasn’t for show. Too late to save him, but not too late for the fellow the tiny Bacchant was after. As she seized him by the collar of his Dolce & Gabbana shirt, I came in low with the bat in my left hand and swept her legs out from under her so that she fell ungracefully on her backside. She made the sound a cat makes when you step on its tail, and now that I was closer I was surprised at how young she was. She had probably been pretty once, with a name like Brooke or Brittney or maybe Stacy. She might have been captain of the cheer squad and a homecoming queen, driving to school in a pink Cabriolet her daddy had bought for her. Now, however, her nails were more like claws, and her teeth were filed to points, and she had blood dribbling from her mouth—and it wasn’t hers. I brought the bat in my right hand down hard on her face before she had time to leap back up. I even hit her again to make sure she was through, regretting the necessity and thinking that one never quite gets used to crushing skulls. Then I looked up to track where the other Bacchant went.
She was coming for me. She couldn’t see me, but she knew something had just taken down her sister and it was still nearby. This one had never been pretty. Her hair was the frizzy, curly kind that looks like a halo of shag carpeting, and it was matted with blood and pieces of recent victims. She had a beaklike nose, a single eyebrow above it like a malevolent, hairy caterpillar, and the same pointed teeth that the smaller Bacchant had. Her arms looked like flabby shanks of lamb, but there was a preternatural strength inside them. I know because, when I took a swing at her with the bat in my right hand, thinking I’d clock her upside the head, she felt it coming somehow and broke it in two just by doing one of those wax-off moves from The Karate Kid. Now holding half a bat with some sharp splinters at the end as I followed through, I had to think quickly as she kept rushing forward, reaching for me with a clawed right hand, and bringing her left one back around. If those got hold of me, I wouldn’t stay in one piece for very long. I shifted my grip on the bat handle so that my thumb was on the bottom instead of the top, and as her nails dug painfully into my left shoulder, I stabbed down with the sharpened splinters of the bat into the side of her neck where it met her collarbone. That set her back some, and she yowled as she released me to deal with it. I dissolved the camouflage on it so that she could appreciate what was causing the pain. She jerked it out as I backpedaled and shifted the bat in my left hand to my right, and though a fountain of blood spurted forth, she didn’t appear to feel faint: She actually accessed a whole new level of pissed when I already thought I’d never seen anyone madder.
I stepped to my right as quietly as I could and watched her scream away what little mind she had left. Regardless of her incredible strength, that was a mortal wound, and she couldn’t last much longer while losing that much blood. Bacchants aren’t great healers, and she couldn’t see through my camouflage, so I thought all I’d need to do now was wait a couple of minutes and make sure she didn’t hurt anyone else. But the damn thing took a deep breath to scream some more and smelled me.
The bloody broken bat suddenly became a wooden stave thrown at my heart, as she turned and chucked it uncannily in my direction. I had to drop to the ground to avoid it, and before I could roll away, she was on me. Quickly, I thrust the second bat up crosswise toward her throat, dismissing its camouflage too, hoping she’d take hold of it rather than groping for my neck. If she got hold of my head, she could tear it clean off. She took the bait, grasping the bat at either end and trying to wrench it free from my grasp. I held on for the first spastic attempt, but just barely. Her blood was dripping steadily down on me, ruining my camouflage and supposedly sapping her strength, but I could tell she was still a couple of oxen ahead of me in the muscle department. She gathered herself for a truly mighty yank, and as she did I knew I had to end this before she could use it against me. So when she yanked a second time, I didn’t even try to hold on but rather let go, which caused her to throw her hands up over her head as she unexpec
tedly met no resistance. That left her completely unguarded, as I intended, so I drained the last of the power stored in my bear charm and channeled it all into my left shoulder and arm. I rose in a stomach crunch and plowed my fist hard into her chin. The impact broke the first joints of my index and middle fingers, but it also snapped her neck.
That solved my immediate crisis but left me with several others. Completely drained of magical energy, I couldn’t begin to heal or shut down the pain. And all the weariness of my earlier casting of Cold Fire came back to settle heavily on my frame, even as the shag-haired Bacchant settled heavily astride my hips. There were still panicked clubgoers streaming out of Satyrn, and Frank and Eric, the broken-nosed cops, were heading my way with guns drawn. To top it off, I was so drained that I couldn’t maintain the camouflage spell any longer, and I became clearly visible to them. This just wasn’t the right time or place to have this fight, and that’s why I lost it.
Oh, were they happy to see me again. Not only was I visible, but so was my sword that had disappeared earlier, and a woman with a giant bloody wound was lying on top of me. Never mind that the sword was still in its scabbard and I was lying on top of it; never mind that a cursory forensics inspection would reveal that the wound wasn’t a sword wound; in their minds I had just about decapitated the poor woman with a bad hairdo.
So it was hands up, roll over facedown away from that woman, spread your legs, take off that weapon, and then a pair of cuffs around my wrists as half-naked people continued to run away, not from me, but from whatever horror awaited inside. Once I was subdued, it gradually dawned on them that I wasn’t much of a threat to the public: The public was freaking out about something else. Frank thought he should maybe take a peek inside.
“Don’t do it, Frank. One of them is still in there.”
“You shut up,” Eric said, poking me in the ribs with his gun. Authority established, he asked, “One of what?”
