Hard Spell ocu-1

by Justin Gustainis

  The building seemed at least twice as big as you'd think from looking at the outside, which I assumed was more of Sligo's magic. At the far end of the room, three long tables were set up, forming an open rectangle with the open end facing the back wall. They were covered with cloths of black and red with arcane symbols woven into them, and on top of those were all the tools and toys the modern occultist can't seem to do without: bowls, flagons, more candles, knives, and so forth. But you could tell the middle table was special. That was where he'd placed, in an ornate brass holder, a thick, oldlooking book with a cracked leather cover.

  Looked like I'd found the Opus Mago at last.

  Taking in all that took only a few seconds, and then my attention was riveted to what was dangling from the ceiling. Or rather, who.

  A length of chain was suspended over the middle of the open rectangle, tied around a rafter. From the chain hung, head down, the nude, bleeding form of a woman. Her legs were tied at ankles and knees with rope that sparkled in the light, as if shot through with some kind of metal filings. The same stuff had been used to bind her wrists, and a length of it ran from there to attach tightly to a ring affixed into the stone floor.

  The woman had fallen silent when Karl and I burst in, but it wasn't hard to figure why she'd been screaming. She looked to be bleeding from three points, in a line between her groin and breasts. The wounds were three symbols carved into her body, probably by the silver-bladed knife in the hand of the man who stood nearby. He was giving Karl and me the kind of look that most men reserve for Jehovah's Witnesses who show up during the Super Bowl.

  I assumed the man was the one I'd started calling the Evil Wizard Sligo. But the woman I knew for certain: it was Christine.

  I brought the shotgun up to aim, but Sligo took two fast steps sideways that put Christine's body between him and my gun barrel, using her as a shield. Well, nobody said that Evil Wizards have to be brave. Off to my left, I saw Karl moving forward slowly and at an angle, probably maneuvering for a clear shot. I shuffled to the right, with the same idea in mind.

  Then Sligo shouted a couple of words in a language I didn't recognize and brought enough of himself out from behind Christine to make a quick throwing motion in my direction, before ducking back.

  Motherfucker throws like a girl.

  But I guess form doesn't count for much in magic, because an orb of fire about the size of a beach ball appeared in midair, moving fast and coming right at me. I had just enough time to realize that I was about to die when the fireball dissolved into nothing, about twenty feet from me.

  It seemed that Vollman was on the job.

  I took another couple of slow steps, waiting for Sligo to expose enough of himself for a shot that wouldn't endanger Christine.

  Don't look at her. Focus. Focus on sending this bastard to Hell, then you can help her. Focus.

  Sligo stuck his head out from the other side of Christine's dangling form and repeated the throwing motion, with the identical result. The ball of fire flew at Karl, but dissipated before it reached him.

  Sligo wasn't done yet. He made a cryptic gesture at me while muttering something I couldn't hear, and then a dozen knives were in the air, as if they'd been thrown by twelve expert hands, all right at me.

  But then that wave of edged steel suddenly parted, and I heard the knives bounce and clatter harmlessly off the stone wall behind me.

  I was closer to the altar now.

  He sent Karl a swarm of what looked like hundreds of bees, buzzing like a madman's dream – I assumed they were the African killer variety. By the time they reached Karl, the vicious insects had been transformed into drops of water. The only harm he suffered, far as I could tell, was getting a little of it in his eyes.

  Then Sligo dispatched a blast of hurricane-force wind at both of us, which, just for an instant, was strong enough to drive me back a step, before it turned into a gentle breeze.

  Go, Vollman.

  I'd made a couple more steps forward when Sligo's arm snaked out from behind Christine. His hand held the silver-coated dagger, and he placed the point right over her heart.

  "Hold! Both of you!" he yelled. I stopped at once, and saw Karl do the same.

  After a few seconds, Sligo slid out from behind Christine, but the dagger point never lost contact with her flesh. I noticed she was still bleeding from the three wounds he'd inflicted on her earlier.

  Now I got my first good look at Sligo, aka Richard Vollman. He didn't look anything special, but I knew from experience that Evil Wizards are rarely nine feet tall, and they hardly ever have horns and a tail. Sligo looked to be about twenty, which I guess was his age when Dad lost control of his appetite and turned him. Apart from the hair, which was the same slicked-back widow's peak as his old man, I didn't see much family resemblance. He was slim, maybe six feet, dressed in tight jeans and a white dress shirt with the sleeves folded back a couple of times. Guess he hadn't figured that becoming the world's first super-vampire was a fancy dress occasion.

  Sligo was breathing like someone who's just sprinted a hundred yards. He pointed a finger at me, and I noticed his hand was shaking a little as he said, "You! How is it that a couple of miserable fucking blood bags like you two can suddenly work magic? If you had the Talent, either of you, I'd have smelled it on you earlier. How?"

  Then a voice I recognized spoke from behind me.

  "They do not perform magic. But I do."

  Sligo's eyes widened for an instant, before narrowing into slits.

  "I should have known." He nodded slowly. "I should have known you'd interfere, even find some pathetic warmbloods to do your bidding."

  Sligo gestured with his free hand toward the central altar, the book resting atop it like a big, poisonous toad. "But not this time, old man. You can't stop me! And when the transformation is complete, the first thing I'm going to do is come for you – at high noon. I'll find you, cowering from the sun in your pathetic box of earth, and then I'll drag you outside and watch you burn!"

  "No, Richard," Vollman said. His voice sounded as full of sorrow as his son's was full of hate. "It must stop here. It must stop tonight."

  Vollman walked briskly forward, spreading his arms like wings. Sligo withdrew the knife from Christine's breast and began to walk toward his father.

  I realized he'd just given me a clean shot, and I wanted to end this fucker's life more than I wanted my next breath, and I brought the gun up to kill him, but Sligo, even while moving toward his father, made a complex gesture in the air – and this tme Vollman was too preoccupied to block the spell.

  What I can only describe as a blast of pure magical energy blasted me off my feet and sent me careening backward, like somebody in a wind tunnel – until I was stopped by my impact with the pump house wall.

  Karl was hit by the same force, but his luck was even worse. Instead of slamming flat into the rear wall as I was, his body slammed into one of the broad stone pillars that held up the roof, and I thought I saw his spine bend backward with the impact just before the wall of the pump house hit me like a train.

  I'd had enough sense to try to break my impact the same way you break a fall in judo: arms spread, palms flat and a little behind me. Maybe it helped a little, I don't know. But that stone wall hit me harder than I've ever been hit in my life and the shock and sorrow I felt for Karl was lost in the wave of unconsciousness that grabbed me and squeezed me and bore me down into the blackness.

  I don't know how long I was down there in the dark. I opened my eyes and tried to get them to focus. I was sitting on the stone floor, my back against the wall that had so abruptly stopped my little journey through the air. I hurt in places I hadn't even known I had.

  My vision came back into focus slowly. The first thing I saw were my hands. One was in my lap, and the other was limp on the floor next to me. Both palms were scraped and oozing blood. I remembered something about trying to break my fall, except I hadn't been falling, exactly. Something about judo. Whatever my bright idea h
ad been, it didn't seem to have worked real well.

  I tried to raise my head, and my vision blurred again. A word floated out of the part of my brain that was still functioning: concussion.

  Every street cop gets knocked around some while on the job, and I'd been concussed before, according to a couple of ER doctors. But this concussion, if that's what it was, compared to the earlier ones the way a car crash is like falling off your tricycle.

  I tried to keep my head from flopping back down, and succeeded, more or less. When I could see again, I found that I was looking at Karl. He was lying on his side, maybe fifty feet to my left, one arm outstretched, fingers hooked into a claw. The middle of his body was blocked from my vision by the pillar that he'd slammed into. Karl didn't move at all, and I was too far away to tell if he was breathing.

  I turned my head, which not only caused another loss of focus but brought on a wave of vertigo that was more like a tsunami. I'd have puked, if there'd been any food in my stomach. When had I last eaten – breakfast? Was that today, or yesterday?

  After a while I thought I could see again, but maybe I was just hallucinating. At the far side of the room, in front of that three-sided altar, two figures were struggling. They should have been Vollman and Sligo – I mean, who else could they be?

  But what I was seeing, or imagining, didn't look like the two vampire/wizards – not as I remembered them. My brain must have been scrambled but good, because it seemed like I was looking a couple of Roman-style gladiators, shuffling around on the blood-soaked dirt of some arena, hacking at each other with big, heavy swords and defending with manhole-size shields. Roman fucking gladiators – but their faces were those of Vollman and Sligo.

  I closed my eyes, not wanting to take in any more evidence that I'd gone totally fucking insane. But then I opened them again, and found that I was still seeing things that weren't there – that couldn't be there.

  How else to explain that dusty Western street, with Sligo and Vollman dressed in outfits that belonged in some particularly gritty Spaghetti Western? They stood maybe thirty feet apart, eyes narrowed, tense hands hovering over the handles of their holstered guns, while the wind blew a single, forlorn tumbleweed between them.

  I went away again for a while, and when I returned, it looked like the Western theme was still clinging to my subconscious. That would explain why I could see Sligo, in breechcloth and war paint, razor-edged tomahawk in one hand, locked in combat with a saber-wielding U.S. Cavalry trooper who looked an awful lot like his old man.

  I closed my eyes once more, and started to wonder if maybe I'd died from hitting the wall, and Hell was a series of bad TV reruns. When I looked again, at least the channel had changed, because a U.S. Marine resembling Sligo was desperately trying to drive the bayonet on his M-1 through the body of Vollman, who was dressed as a soldier of the Rising Sun, a samurai sword held high in both hands.

  This series of fantasy visions seemed to go on forever, lending further support to my I'm-deadand-in-Hell theory. I remember Vollman and Sligo, in gray and blue, respectively, going at each other on a Civil War battlefield, then it was on to a bloody no man's land of World War I, followed by a vicious gang fight in some urban jungle, and I'm pretty sure we all ended up at the Alamo, with Mexican soldier Vollman contending viciously with Sligo, who was wearing a coonskin cap and swinging a Kentucky rifle like a club. Then, mercifully, I passed out again.

  I was brought back to reality, if that's what it was, by the scream. I forced my eyes open and saw Sligo, dressed as he'd been when we first broke in, standing over the still form of Vollman. There wasn't a mark on either one of them that I could see.

  The scream was coming from Sligo. Fists clenched, head thrown back, face gleaming with sweat, he stood over the body of the father he'd hated for so long. It went on for what seemed like long time, the scream did; it combined elation with rage and, if I'm not mistaken, a pretty fair dose of grief, too. All in one great bellow.

  Then he was done. Panting, he wiped his face with his sleeve, then looked at his watch. At once, he turned back to the altar.

  I tried to concentrate on what he was doing. At the moment, I didn't give a shit if he became a super-vampire or the world tiddlywinks champ, as long as he didn't do anything more to hurt Christine. But I kept remembering that the other four vampires who'd been material for this ritual all had to die. First he'd carved his magical symbols on them, as specified by the Opus Mago, then he'd killed them. I assume the book said to do that, too.

  Sligo stood behind the altar and went through the ritual. He read aloud from the Opus Mago sometimes, he rang bells, mixed powders and liquid in bowls, burned incense, and generally looked like he was having a great old time. Big fucking deal.

  Then he picked up the silver-bladed knife.

  That finally galvanized me into action. Or as much action as I was capable of, which turned out to be not much. I looked for the shotgun, but couldn't see where I'd dropped it, even in the glaringly bright light Sligo had brought to the pump house. I remembered the Beretta on my belt and fumbled for it, only to find the holster empty. Must have been knocked loose when I'd smashed into the wall. The pistol had to be on the floor close by, but every time I moved my head in search of it, the vertigo returned and my vision started acting funky again.

  Sligo was holding the dagger reverently in both hands now, reading an incantation from the book in that incomprehensible language. Even in my fucked-up mental state, I figured it was only a matter of time before he'd stop chanting and start cutting – the cutting was going to be on my little girl.

  I fumbled my hands into my jacket pockets, an operation that seemed to take an hour. I was searching for my phone, with the vague notion of calling 911. I couldn't find the damn thing, and part me knew it didn't matter, really. There was nobody I could call who would possibly get here in The fingers of my right hand brushed metal. Not the phone – something smaller, and much thinner. Round and curved on one side, jagged on the other. It felt like… part of a coin.

  Kulick's amulet.

  The one I was supposed to hold while saying his full name five times, once I'd found Sligo.

  The one that he promised would bring him to me.

  Well, I'd located Sligo, at last. Guess it was time to make the call.

  I wrapped my fingers around that slim little halfcircle, and tried to remember. Four names. Okay, Kulick, I knew. First name was… George. That's two. The true name, his wizard name… it had sounded like something out of a science fiction novel. Trasis? No, Thraxis. George Thraxis Kulick. But there was another one, another name.

  At the altar, Sligo had stopped chanting. Squinting, I could see that he had turned away from the book, and was facing Christine.

  Herman? No, nothing so normal. Something a little weird, kind of like Herman, but…

  Harmon.

  George Harmon Thraxis Kulick

  Say it out loud, dummy!

  "George Harmon Thraxis Kulick."

  Again.

  "George Harmon Thraxis Kulick."

  Three more. Hurry!

  Sligo walked toward Christine, the dagger in his hands.

  "Georgeharmonthraxiskulickgeorgeharmonthraxiskulickgeorgeharmont hraxiskulick!"

  I couldn't see the altar anymore, because something was blocking my vision. A leg, a woman's leg in a skirt. It moved now, the woman stepping forward, away from me. I raised my head higher, fought the vertigo, made my fucking eyes focus.

  It was Rachel. Or rather, it wasn't.

  George Kulick had joined the party at last.

  Rachel's head turned back, looked at me, and after a moment, nodded. Kulick's voice said, "A bargain made is a bargain kept. That's the law."

  At the altar, Christine screamed.

  Rachel Proctor collapsed bonelessly to the floor, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. The spirit of George Kulick had left her body, at long last, to go… where?

  I made my eyes focus on Sligo, and almost wished I hadn't. He'd jab
bed the silver blade into Christine's lower belly, bringing forth another scream, and now he was adjusting his grip, with the clear intention of pulling the knife upward toward Christine's breastbone, opening her up from groin to chest.

  I closed my eyes. I couldn't watch, couldn't bear it. The only hope I had left was that she would die quickly, become truly dead, and go someplace where there was no more pain, and no more fear.

  And for this I'd "saved" her from leukemia.

  Christine, I couldn't protect you, and I'm sorry, baby, so sorry. But as long as I have breath in my body, I will dedicate myself to taking vengeance on this motherfucker, I swear it.

  I guess I was crying, I don't know, but my head came up at the sound of another scream. Because this one was in a man's voice.

  Sligo had withdrawn the knife from Christine's belly without cutting any further. He had dropped it on the altar, and was clutching both hands to the sides of his head, as he screeched "No! Get out! Leave me now – I command you!"

  In my concussed state, it took me a few seconds to figure things out, but then I knew who Sligo was talking to: George Kulick.

  And now I knew where Kulick had gone when he left Rachel – inside Sligo. He was taking possession of Sligo's body exactly as he had Rachel's – except that Kulick didn't hate Rachel when he'd assumed control of her. She'd been merely a tool. A tool for vengeance.

  I don't know why Kulick was able to invade without any resistance, unless Sligo had used up all his psychic energy in destroying his father, and had none left to protect himself. But Kulick was in there now, and Sligo was clearly losing the battle for control over his own body. He dropped to his knees with the strain of trying to expel Kulick from inside him, then fell over on his face. But after, I don't know, a minute or two, Sligo's screaming and writhing stopped. He stood, slowly. I thought I could see something different in his face, but I was too far away and too fucked-up to say for sure.