The Last Coven (The Tome of Bill Book 8)

by Rick Gualtieri

  “Uh uh, Harry,” I said. “Not going to be that easy.”

  “Fool!” he bellowed as he held out his hands toward me. His fingers were contorted in what I assumed to be some sort of arcane hand sign, but since nothing happened, it just came across as a bad secret handshake.

  I was happy to oblige.

  “Oops, looks like wizard needs food badly!” I grabbed his wrist and fell back, dragging him with me. Once I landed on my behind, I kicked out with my legs. Harry might’ve looked human, but he had the weight of a Jahabich. Fortunately, I was expecting that. He went flying over me, skidding to a stop just short of goo lagoon. From the wide-eyed look upon his face, and the fact that the Jahabich I’d sent into it hadn’t emerged yet, I got the feeling that being double-dipped in shit wasn’t a good thing.

  Decker rushed me clumsily, proving he was about as adept at hand to hand combat as I’d been during my first months as a vamp. I waited for the right moment, then wound up and swung, wanting to see how far I could send his teeth flying.

  Sadly, I’d gotten cocky. He transformed as I threw the punch, completing the change far quicker than I’d ever seen happen before, and caught my fist in his rocky teeth.

  He clamped down and I expected to find myself short one hand, but instead, his teeth dug in to my wrist, pinning me in place. I could have sworn I saw a flicker of mirth in his soulless orange eyes, but then his club arms began to pummel me, distracting me ever so slightly from those thoughts.

  I defended myself with my free hand as well as I could, but it was two against one. He caught me a good one with his right, and I spat up blood as my ribs cracked. Fuck me!

  Much more and I’d be pounded into a bloody smear. Worse, if I lost, there would be nothing to stop this corporate fuck from sending Sally skinny dipping into the primordial ooze behind him.

  No fucking way!

  Two could play at this game.

  I leapt into Decker’s grip, wrapping my legs around his wide torso. He still had my arm pinned fast, but I’d robbed him of the momentum needed to beat the shit out of me. Mind you, that didn’t mean he couldn’t bear hug me to death.

  Sadly for him, I still had one free hand, which I shoved into the nearest eye-socket. Using my claws, I began to dig for whatever passed for a brain in his head.

  Harry wasn’t overly appreciative of that. He opened his mouth to let loose a roar of anger, freeing my trapped arm. It was mangled pretty badly, but still attached.

  If only he had another eye to keep it nice and warm while it healed.

  Oh wait, he did!

  “AWAKEN!!”

  What the fuck?!

  The compulsion washed over me, subtle, yet with an underlying power that caused my teeth to rattle. I was in no real position to spare it any thought, though. Decker and I were pinned together, him seeing how much pressure it would take to make me pop, and me trying to reach the candy center of his face.

  It was a race to see who got to the finish line first and, judging by how much blood I felt running down my ruined back, it was gonna be a close one.

  Still, I simply couldn’t live with myself – even in the afterlife – knowing I’d let Decker beat me. Fuck that noise. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth, digging for all I had.

  All of a sudden, I felt Decker’s grip loosen.

  I opened my eyes and saw Sally staring at me over his shoulder, somehow back in the game. Her claws were embedded in his arms and she was prying him off me. “Need a hand?”

  “Could use two,” I replied with a smile. I had no idea why Calibra had released her, but I wasn’t about to argue with it.

  She dragged Decker backward, pulling him off balance. He lost his footing and she stepped out of the way just as he tumbled over onto his back with me on top. My hands pulled free, but before I could dive back into my work, he transformed back to his old self, a look of panic upon his face. He knew he’d been beaten.

  “Stop! Have mercy!”

  “No, it’s supposed to be in the name of love. Pity for you, you're not my type.” I hauled off and clocked him in the jaw. It was like punching a concrete wall, but whatever. I’d heal. He wouldn’t, at least not when I was finished with him.

  “This is unfair!” he screamed as I continued to pummel his stupid face. “Mother!”

  “Mother.”

  Sadly, aside from the Jahabich answering in stereo, no help came his way. A moment later, Sally joined me in feeding this asshole knuckle sandwiches.

  We only stopped once there was nothing left of his head but a crushed pile of gravel. Good riddance to a bad wizard.

  My hands looked like bloody chop meat and Sally’s weren’t in much better shape. Nevertheless, I threw my arms around her and hugged her hard.

  After several long seconds, she bent her head and whispered in my ear, “Thank you.”

  “Anytime, always.”

  “But you still owe me a new blouse. These bloodstains aren’t going to wash out.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Anytime, always,” she replied happily as she got to her feet and offered me a hand.

  I took it, wincing a bit, and pulled myself up where we both took a few moments to stomp on Harry’s former noggin, just for good measure.

  “There is something so satisfying about killing an asshole who deserves it,” she said at last.

  I lowered my voice to the point where it was barely audible. “Then let’s hope there’s a lot of satisfaction left to come this day.”

  * * *

  “That is one of the few aspects I admire about you, Freewill,” Calibra said, obviously overhearing us. There would be few secrets spoken around her. “You always think big, far bigger than one would presume your talent allows for.”

  “That’s me, a dollar and a dream,” I replied warily. We were definitely not out of the woods yet, not by a fucking mile.

  Decker was small potatoes compared to her, by several orders of magnitude. It was like arm-wrestling Aunt May only to find your next opponent was the Hulk.

  “Thanks,” Sally said. “I guess.”

  “Spare me your false gratitude, child,” Calibra replied with barely concealed annoyance. She turned on her heel and began to walk away, although her voice still carried as if she were facing us. “Decker defied me for a petty squabble. I released you for that reason and that reason alone. I allow my servants a measure of freedom, but he overstepped his bounds and got what he deserved.”

  I glanced at Sally and shrugged. We hadn’t been invited to follow, but we hadn’t been not invited either. That she hadn’t killed us immediately was a good sign.

  We both tagged along, watching as the crowd parted before her while sycophants of varying races pledged their loyalty and love to her. It was good to be the queen.

  Oh well, she was either going to vaporize me for impudence or not. No point beating around the bush. “I thought Harry was one of your more ardent supporters.”

  “What of it?” she replied, not bothering to face me.

  “Well, petty squabble or not, why choose Sally over him?”

  “I would choose any of my favored children over his kind.” This time, she did look over her shoulder at us, just long enough to give Sally the stink eye. “Even ones I do not favor at all.”

  “So why bother?” Sally asked, flipping her off behind her back.

  “Do that again and I will remove your arm,” Calibra replied. “But to answer your question, girl, I do not waste fodder when it can still be put to use.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Do not play the fool, boy. I know that Gansetseg made contact with you after escaping my clutches. The girl considers herself wise, yet thinks two dimensionally.”

  “She still escaped,” I offered.

  “A simple error on my part. I assumed the pure one’s brood would be perfect. It seems there are still imperfections to work out.”

  “Speaking of Gan...”

  “She is mine.”

  “So she’s alive?”<
br />
  “I will humor you, Freewill, but only because you somehow managed to best the most favored of my children.”

  “Decker?”

  “The Destroyer. Your paramour will live until such time as I deem her usefulness at an end. I have decided that perhaps I have been hasty in terminating my experiments so early. Where magic fails, perhaps science can produce results.”

  I waited for her to elaborate, but she stopped to let a group of Magi bow at her feet, conveying a bored blessing upon them that I doubted gave them even a plus one to hit.

  The mages had looks upon their faces that I imagined weren’t much different from that of teens in the sixties upon meeting the Beatles. Calibra, however, acted as if she were forced to deal with them only because she was under contract. I got the impression that if any of them tried to get overly chummy with her, she wouldn’t hesitate to have them skinned alive. So much for being a loving goddess.

  Still, I decided to hold my next question until we were well out of earshot. No point risking a stray lightning bolt from a miffed mage.

  Calibra turned down one of the aisles flanked by Jahabich pens, when I finally opened my mouth. “Earlier you mentioned favored children.”

  “So I did.”

  “Well, then unless my friend here learned some card tricks in the time since her capture, is it safe to assume you mean vampires?”

  “It is never safe to assume anything around me, Freewill. There is only what I have said and what I have not.”

  “Okay, then I’ll change that to a question. Did you mean vampires?”

  “Yes, child. I did.”

  I struggled to find the right words. “So then how do the three races ... um ... how does this work? How did this all happen?”

  “What I think genius here means to ask is, where do vamps, mages, and Jahabich all fit into the food chain?” Sally added.

  Calibra turned back toward me, seemingly ignoring her. “You truly have no idea of our history, our struggles, or the spirit inside of you trying to open your eyes to your potential – any of it, do you?”

  That caught my attention. “Huh? Wait, what do you mean spirit inside of me?”

  She looked away, a wistful expression upon her face. “No, I suppose not. Such knowledge is lost to time, a combination of malaise from my children and the usurpers trying to rewrite history to suit their image.”

  “Hold on. What do you know about Dr. Death?”

  Sally snickered under her breath. “Oh, this ought to be worth the price of admission.”

  “Bite me.”

  If Calibra took offense at our back and forth, she gave no indication. Instead, she merely waved her hand and the legions of Jahabich before her parted as if she were Moses, revealing a view of The Source again. From the look of things, the Jahabich at its shore had resumed turning hapless victims into rock-encrusted slaves.

  “I found this place roughly six thousand of your years ago,” Calibra said, that wistful expression still on her face as if deep in a memory. “It was such a different world back then.”

  “I’m sure it was,” I replied. “All the mastodon burgers one could eat.”

  “You joke, but I have beheld them with my own eyes. They used to roam the plains in herds.” She glanced toward me, her eyes glittering. “But they were the least of the wonders one might have once seen. Dragons flew through the skies in those days. Leviathans and Kraken would battle upon the seas, their struggles sending tidal waves which would wipe out coastal villages in an instant. Gods forced men to build the very first wonders of the world – shrines to their greatness.” She appeared to consider something for several moments. “Gather close, children, and I shall show you.”

  She waved her hand again and the air in front of us shimmered. Images began to form – people. Heck, I was half-expecting one of them to turn our way and tell us Obi-Wan Kenobi was their only hope.

  They weren’t alone, though. We watched as things came from the darkness – monsters, demons, nasty shit like that – all with a hankering for human flesh.

  Sally grunted dismissively. “Not bad, but my surround sound system is better.”

  I chuckled before turning back in time to see an army of what looked like ghosts chasing a group of hunters from a forest.

  “We were at their mercy, the lowest of the low,” Calibra said. “Cattle who existed to be slaughtered. For you see, in those days, the walls were thin indeed. Other realms bled into ours and with them came beings of power, the least of which made us seem as nothing but ants.”

  I turned to a Jahabich who was standing close by, still as a post. “You getting all of this?”

  “But, as it turned out, we were not as helpless as we thought. There were those born among us who could tap into the powers from beyond the veil, use them.”

  “The first Magi?” Sally asked.

  “Indeed. I was proud to call them my brothers and sisters.”

  The scene before us shimmered to show a group of people fighting off winged gargoyles with magic. The image zoomed in to reveal Calibra. She looked a lot different, plainer – this was obviously before Revlon was a thing. Her hair was shorter and shirts apparently hadn’t been invented yet, but it was definitely her.

  I took a moment to admire her Cro-Magnon boobs before turning to Sally. “Holographic pornography will be a thing one day, mark my words.”

  “But powerful as we were, we only slowed the inevitable,” Calibra continued, caught up in her story enough to ignore my stupidity for the moment. “There were too few of us and, even with selective breeding, we could not guarantee that those we birthed would have the gift.”

  “Recessive genes are a bitch,” Sally said.

  “SILENCE!!”

  Sally immediately ceased her commentary. Guess she’d pushed Calibra’s buttons enough for one day.

  “This is not a joke,” Calibra warned. “I lost many – brothers, lovers, children. It was a brutal time to live. Forget what the human histories have taught you – that humanity spread like a plague, conquering everything in its path. Many times, the world as you know it came close to being wiped out before it could even gain a toehold. What humans today foolishly call myth and legend was my reality, save there were few heroes to fight against the oncoming tide.”

  I was busy waving my hand in front of Sally’s face, but she was caught tight in the compulsion. There wasn’t much I could do for her at the moment and I had a feeling that if I ticked off Calibra too, then story time would be over and hurting time would begin. “What about Icons?” I asked. “I thought they were the heroes of ancient history.”

  “We have very different viewpoints on what defines antiquity,” she replied. “This was all before their time. Had they existed in those days, events might have played out ... differently.” She turned and glared at me. “Wishful thinking perhaps, but no more than foolish fantasy. We were pushed to the very edge of extinction, barely holding on. But all tides eventually change and so too did ours. We began to push back, to assert our dominance over this world.”

  “What changed?”

  “Is it not obvious?” She gestured at the cavern around us. “I found this place.”

  ORIGIN OF A SPECIES

  “I was out gathering berries, a simple task, far below the station of one who could wield the power primordial, but one I’d enjoyed as a girl.”

  If she was about to go off on a tangent on the finer points of pie baking, I was gonna get a running start and preemptively throw my ass into the jizz pond.

  “It was then I discovered the cave, quite by accident. It was a one in a million chance – one of the few natural tunnels that lead here.” She smiled, as if enjoying the memory. “It still exists, the entrance hidden in the sub-basement of an ancient mosque in Damascus. I should have gone back, gotten the others, but I was young, certain of my power, and curious. I followed the tunnel for hours, perhaps days, ever downward. It’s hard to explain, but I felt drawn. I should have been terrified. After all, the way was
not unguarded. Soon, I was fighting my way through hordes of fell beasts, many of them seemingly drawn as I was.”

  The image changed again to something right out of a dungeon crawl. The only difference was Calibra was a party of one, and she wasn’t wearing armor. Hell, she wasn’t wearing anything but tatters as I watched her blast a pair of giant glow-in-the-dark scorpions. Hmm, a naked cave woman fighting off monsters ... why the hell hadn’t HBO picked that up as a series yet?

  “Had I faced such odds on the surface, I would have surely fallen, but not down here. The further I walked, the stronger I felt, so I kept going until I came to this place.”

  Now things got trippy with the magic hologram, for we were looking at a view of this place superimposed over the same spot. The difference was that back then, it wasn’t being manned by the Jahabich.

  Several incorporeal forms danced around the pool, seeming to come from it. Many of those forms touched upon the ground where they became solid, took on new forms. They grew in size, until they were over eight feet tall and covered in fur – Sasquatches. “Son of a bitch.”

  “I took this place by force,” Calibra continued. “Claimed it as my own.”

  She did at that. Nasty as some of the things in the cave were, the Feet seemed to be minding their own business. It was a lot like the village I’d seen in the Woods of Mourning, except replace the crude wooden huts with mud ones, and give it an overall less warlike feel.

  It didn’t last. One moment there were happy groups of squatches prostrating before the pool, seemingly worshipping it, and the next Calibra came charging in all set to kick ass and chew bubble gum. Pity for them, bubble gum was still several millennia away from being invented.

  I could only watch as she blasted her way through their ranks regardless of their age or sex. It wasn’t an attack so much as a slaughter.

  “This used to be their home?”

  “Yes. Used to be,” she echoed. “I doubt even they remember. They were unworthy guardians, so I drove them out and lost myself in the wonder of this place.”