Only the sound of unsheathing metal drew his attention back to the girl who ignored him. She smacked him with the broadside of the blade, and with it came that rotting smell of Demon venom and rusty metal.
“You will not disrespect the King,” she said.
Harold had hit the floor almost as hard as she had hit him and couldn’t react before her foot stepped on his chest, pinning him onto the ground. A rage burnt low inside of him and he had to close his eyes, bite his tongue until the warm blood spilled from a fresh wound. The Shadows told him to kill her, told him she was the enemy and that he was in the wrong place — oh so wrong, Harold. Come home.
The King’s laughter rocked the very foundation of the ground above them. Until the man stopped laughing and looked to Sahara wide-eyed as if he’d just pissed himself and he didn’t realize it until the warmth had finally trickled down his legs.
Because the tree above shook after the laughter had died. Roots creaked. They were nestled away in a guarded room, sealed off from the corridor and the steps to the ground above by a heavy iron door, but still they all three turned to it once they heard the screams, the guttural noises.
The green, earthy carpet turned a sickening shade of red as a pool of sticky liquid flowed from beneath the door. Something struck the iron with enough force to send the crumpled outline of a body closer to them as if they were watching a 3-D movie.
Harold needed the Wolves, searched for them. If they couldn’t summon a Deathblade, maybe they could help him find that super strength he used on John. So far there was nothing inside his empty head. And somehow, it felt emptier than usual.
Metal groaned from the hinges of the great iron door. Sahara took a step forward, then dropped into a battle-ready stance, preparing for whatever was outside. The blood kept flowing from the dead guard, soon it ran like a small creek, and the redness nearly stretched the twenty or so feet of space to where Harold stood. But the gap grew larger as he stepped away. He felt so naked without a weapon, with the conflicting thoughts inside of his mind. But he knew the room had to end somewhere, knew the banner of the large bat would tickle the back of his neck if he kept shimmying away.
But what he ran into, the feeling of leathery skin and bumps and so many jagged pieces of cartilage, froze the breath inside of his lungs. And he turned, face to face with the bat-freak.
CHAPTER 6
The sharp fangs of the bat-freak glinted in the torchlight. Harold looked up to the thing as if he were a child seeing a skyscraper for the first time. The top of its deformed head brushed the vast darkness above. How far that darkness went, Harold didn’t know.
The creature roared — bloodcurdling.
Sahara never moved or even seemed to notice the thing, too invested on whatever was pounding on the door. But Harold knew whatever was out there would be laughable compared to what they were trapped in the room with.
Then the flames blew from beneath the crack, lighting the grassy carpet ablaze. It zipped towards Harold in a flash, causing him to dive between the bat’s legs, and roll until he crashed into the wooden throne.
“Get ready!” Sahara shouted. She held her blade up and Harold couldn’t help but notice how uninspired she looked, how fatigued and close to death. Even though, he knew from experience, that death wouldn’t come easy to a Realm Protector like her. Demon venom or not. He’d been shot several times in the battle of the terminal, and each bullet had ripped through his flesh, exploding in black fits of pain, but still he shook it off as if they were regular bullets — which he also had a tendency to defy, just like he had at that shitty diner where he tried to blow his brains out as a useless attempt of running from responsibility.
The creature let out another bloodcurdling screech as the door buckled with a whine that raked Harold’s eardrums almost as badly as the noises that came from the creature.
Through the door came a darkness so black, that it made Harold draw his knees up into his chest, his back against the wooden legs of the throne. The flames licked at his boots, but they were almost fizzled out, nothing besides glowing embers and wisps of smoke. Quite pretty compared to the backdrop of mayhem. Once the door came down with a metallic thunk, and the darkness and the odd calm embraced each other like two long lost friends, Harold’s ears perked up. More screaming could be heard above them, faint but ever-present and hopefully, Harold thought, not in his head.
The bat-freak heaved, muscles danced on it’s bare, fuzzy back. Sahara still stood with a forced enthusiasm, but her blade wavered, legs shook. She began to topple over.
Harold weaseled his way around the bat’s tree-trunk legs and dove for the falling Protector before she crashed into a red-hot rug, landing on the wrong end of a Deathblade.
He held her in his arms, bent on one knee. Her skin blazed. Beads of sweat dotted her forehead and somehow despite the heat radiating from her body, she looked as pale as a corpse. Still, he was glad to be holding her. Her breath plumed out in a wheeze, and a strand of hair, wet and plastered to her face, found its way on to her lip. He brushed it with a slight touch.
She smiled before her eyes closed.
The Demon venom had taken its hold on her, and he imagined she felt a lot like he had when he had stared down the barrel of that crazy Disciple woman in the clown makeup. But why wasn’t her body shedding it like his? He had felt all but normal within a couple of hours, almost forgetting that he’d been subjected to the horror — though slicing his own hand off and dousing the Hell flames with most of the venom had probably helped. Still, before then, he was okay. He could’ve fought, but not without a Deathblade. But her’s hung from the exit point in her left forearm. The blood-stained bone white hilt stretched down into a darker shade of steel with a squared and razor sharp cross-guard, culminating to a deadly tip that had seen the insides, no doubt, of many supernatural creatures.
It wasn’t Harold’s blade — there were no Wolves attached — and now he needed her to fight. Because out of the darkness emerged the ugliest motherfucker he’d ever seen.
He raised both of his eyebrows, let his eyes go as wide as they could as if to adjust to the shape and texture of the beast shrouded in Shadow. It was one of the Demons which had looked down upon Harold and Sahara as Charlie and Beth had attempted to mutilate them in their coliseum-style arena no longer than half a day ago.
From the Demon’s head, two ram-like horns made of rotten skeleton curled downward. Its body was made up of skin that reminded Harold of the fabric of a very old and land fill-worthy sofa — gray and black, except where parts of the Demon’s flesh were missing, showing bone instead. There were no lips over the blackened teeth, teeth that looked like rows of miniature steak knives, and without the lips, the thing wore a very misplaced smile.
Harold hadn’t remembered them being so…grotesque in the coliseum as they had cheered and roared at nearly everything the Shadow Eaters had said. Probably because he had been a bit preoccupied at the moment, and a man can only handle so much fear at once, Realm Protector or not.
The thing took one look at Harold, black pools of malicious eyes, and brought its arms up, revealing three claws on each hand like the tips of a scorpion’s stinger. The black venom dripped from each point.
Then another one came inside the King’s chambers, stepping over the gate. Fresh, red blood coated its teeth, shining like turtle wax on its mouth. From one of its claws hung the bunched flesh and leather outfit of a Vampire guard.
Harold couldn’t move. His feet felt like they had sprouted roots and dug into the earthy floor, forever grounding him in the spot in the King’s chambers to die a gruesome, Mortal death. He was a deer caught in the black headlights of Hell.
The King screeched its high pitched, horrendous screech and that helped Harold snap out of his momentary lapse.
You’re not the old Harold anymore. C’mon, you pussy, he thought.
And when the Hellion Demon craned its neck down to where the ram-like horns were aimed in Harold’s direction, he showed exactly
how he wasn’t the old Harold anymore. His hand wrapped around Sahara’s hilt and despite it looking like it had been dipped in a very powerful acid and then hacked at with an axe for hours, it still had a weight that told Harold it was better than nothing. The Black Panthers roared in his mind when his fingers brushed against the hilt. Suddenly he was in a moist jungle, stalking around trees, moving as quiet as possible, the smell of blood buried deep in his nostrils. For the prey was already wounded — an easy meal. But these were not his Panthers. They wouldn’t obey him. Their shining eyes turned in his direction, and a blur of blackness zipped toward him as he screamed a noiseless scream.
Then he was back in the King’s chambers, facing the Demon’s advancing figure, and the brick shaped head. It was a couple feet away as the air rippled with the creature’s speed. Harold’s hand acted quicker than his mind, thank god, and the Deathblade raised right when the Demon roared.
With a sickening pop — from the blade or the Demon’s head, Harold wasn’t sure — the Demon collapsed like a sack of bones, wild roar growing fainter as its head slid further down the metal. Eventually part of its horns snagged on a chipped piece of sword, stopping its teeth just inches away from the cross-guard, and admittedly, too close for comfort from touching Harold’s hand. The weight of the thing was excruciating for the moment as it hung skewered like a shish-kebab. But thankfully the Deathblade, as beaten as it was, didn’t take long in working its magic.
And the Demon exploded in a fit of dark orange and misty green. First the head vanished into glittering pieces of dust, then the neck, and finally the body. Harold wrapped his arms around Sahara, digging his heels into the floor, pushing himself as far away as possible from the pile of ash that was now the Demon.
But it wasn’t over. Another Demon, currently preoccupied by the Bat, fought with a rage and grace Harold had never seen before, the closest thing he could liken it to was the way Charlie swung his sword.
And the Bat looked to be losing. Each strike raised another bloodcurdling howl from the former Vampire King, yet no howl prickled inside of Harold. And the once Realm Protector whimpered like a frightened child.
The Demon bellowed something in its Hellacious language. A spray of blood exploded from the King’s stomach, and from Harold’s view point, two of those scorpion-like talons sliced through the King’s middle, poking their way out of his back.
He collapsed in a violent screech. Knees thudding the floor, rocking Harold’s vision. And in a blink of an eye, he began to shrink into the plumper version of his normal self. Except now his black leather robe had a large gash in the middle, and the blood flowed like a river from the wound. His body shook, and he sniveled.
The Demon raised its other claw, letting out another roar. Before the talons came down on the King like three axes swung simultaneously, Harold thought the Demon’s black eyes caught his own, letting him know he was next. Yet Harold shook his head in disbelief. It couldn’t be happening to him; he should’ve died a long, long time ago. And now that he was no longer immortal, susceptible to all forms of dying both natural and supernatural, he wished he’d had a gun. Because going out the way of a vicious goat-looking Demon was not at the top of his list.
The claws came down with a squish and another mist of red. All Harold heard after that was a deep grumble in the Demon’s open chest, where a glistening black heart pumped the venom through its veins. And then the King let out a throaty death rattle, signifying that his reign had come to an end.
As had Harold’s.
Until a flaming arrow whizzed past his eye. For a split-second it seemed to move in slow motion. And Harold studied the harsh looking arrowhead — about as jagged and broken as Sahara’s blade with curved spikes jutting from the middle of the shaft and what looked like crow feathers tacked on the end, dancing through the smoky air.
It stuck with a twang into the wooden throne, and he hadn’t noticed, from too much shock apparently, that it had taken his hat with it. A sound like a muted gunshot went off and another arrow speared the air. Harold had the good grace to duck that time.
Great. Demonic Katniss has arrived on the scene, he thought.
But that arrow wasn’t intended for him.
The Demon turned its head too slowly, and the arrow had pierced it through the side of the neck, giving him something like Frankenstein bolts. Black blood gushed out from the exit wound. It gurgled and fell to its knees, looking at Harold with wide-eyed terror, though Harold couldn’t imagine something like that ever being terrified even in its death, seeing how it was probably already dead to begin with.
And to Harold’s surprise, Demonic Katniss hadn’t passed the threshold of the broken door to the former King’s chambers. Instead a very old-looking man had. And he marched over to the Demon hunched on its knees with the grace of a young man, gripped just below the black crow feathers of the end of the shaft, kicked his foot into its back and yanked the arrow out the opposite way towards himself. Those curved spikes had a stranglehold on the Demon’s flesh and when the old man won the tug of war, the Demon screamed bloody murder. He stood over the corpse like he was King Arthur removing the sword from the stone.
All Harold could do was watch with glazed over eyes — a mix of utter terror and firm admiration brewing in his gut.
CHAPTER 7
A black and red streak of goop lined the old man’s face, just under his eyes. Smeared by a willing finger, like a football player caking on war paint before a big playoff game. The man’s skin looked harsh in the dying flames, but even so, Harold knew that a man like that would look harsh in any lighting. He had seen some things, picked up a few tricks along the way apparently, and Harold knew this was a man not to mess with.
“Draw your blade, you pussy!” the man shouted. He raised his crossbow, took the arrow in his left hand, covered in the black, sticky blood of the dead Demon, and loaded it while pulling the string back with a loud click.
A click that made Harold’s heart drop. The old man was lightning quick with the weapon and before Harold had time to make up his mind about which way to dive, the arrow struck him in his open palm. Pain burst out in a sea of volcanic fire. He turned his head, teeth bared to look at the damage and saw that his hand had been pinned into the wood of the throne.
Below him, Sahara laid on her side, her Deathblade concealed by her body, and she didn’t move — hardly looked as if she were breathing.
He snapped his gaze back at the man, who now stood on the carcass of the Demon, making him look a half a foot taller, a big, square-toothed grin on his face, teeth white and perfect, the only young and redeeming thing about him.
Then the thought of dentures came into Harold’s mind, and despite the pain, he couldn’t help but return the smile.
“This ain’t a time to smile, Demon. Your life’s on the line if you don’t start talking.”
Another arrow whistled past him. The crow feathers brushed his cauliflower ear, but there had been no immediate burst of pain, meaning that the man had missed. And naturally, Harold — this new venom-induced Harold — let the old man have it: “My dead grandmother could shoot better than that. And she was born with no arms!”
“If I wanted to, that arrow could’ve went straight through that Devil pupil ya got in your eyeball, son.”
Harold didn’t doubt it, but a few days of Hell will do strange things to a man. Make him not much of a man at all. The next arrow that headed his way didn’t come close. Because, blade or not, he rushed the man. He was old after all, and Harold had slain a Vampire, beaten a Shadow Eater. What was a senior citizen going to do to him that hadn’t already been done? Harold had survived Spellfire and walked away with only a few burns. Tamed Wolves.
He went straight for the man’s throat, like the Wolves had shown him. Though there were no more Wolves, and part of Harold’s mind told him there never would be again. But goddamn it, if he couldn’t exert his Alpha male dominance at least one more time before he came to terms with the fact that he might never hea
r the sounds of the Wolves again.
But the old man was ready. And he didn’t throw a punch like a man who got to Denny’s at five in the morning for the early bird special every Sunday. The fist hit him square in the jaw. He felt his teeth jolt loose, the spill of blood trickle from his lip. Then the harsh carcass of the Demon when his back slammed into it. Blackness edged his vision.
The old man’s boot came down on Harold’s chest with a thud, and held him there as the man reloaded the crossbow.
“These ain’t normal arrow heads, my friend. These are the type that’ll make you melt from the inside. They don’t give a painless death.” He shook his head. “Nothing merciful about it, no.”
“My kind?” Harold asked. “Cause I’m pretty sure any old regular arrow would kill me, man.” Harold’s breath came out in wheezes. The man’s boot must’ve weighed about a hundred pounds, and then he leaned closer, increasing the pressure.
The Demon smelled of smoldering fire and the decrepit, rotting smell of Sahara’s Deathblade.
Sahara, he thought. And he tried to tilt his head back to see if she was still there, though of course she would be, being on the cusp of death and all. But still, hope is a funny thing. And he hadn’t heard her get up. Sure he would’ve, right? She wasn’t exactly at the pinnacle of health, and all that grace and cat-like agility would be gone.
“Yeah, your kind,” the old man said. “But your kind don’t matter much anymore. I’ve killed all your little minions like the goddamn vermin they were. Cut through them like butter. And now I’ve stumbled upon the leader!” His hand closed around Harold’s left, fingers gouging into the flesh with a horrendously tight grip. “If you’re going to fight then now’s the time, you bastard!”
Shadowbound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Realm Protectors Book 2) Page 4
