Zane laughed, “Nah, man. Television’ll rot your brain; shit kills ya!”
Raith rolled his eyes, “Yup. And all this”—he nodded towards the weaponry—“is much safer lounge material, I take it?”
“I’ve been living for years as a living A-bomb, Raith, I’m not really—”
“We,” Raith corrected him. “We’ve been living for years as a living A-bomb. I was there, too; don’t forget that. I had to watch everything without even having the benefit of a say in any matters. But I saw something else while I was in there—and I hope beyond hope that you don’t punch my teeth in for reminding you of this—you and Serena.”
Zane looked up at him.
Raith sighed, “Look, at risk of sounding like a Peeping Tom or something, I was able to see everything you saw, but I feel like you missed something crucial in that girl, Zane.”
Zane leaned forward, seeming more intrigued than angry; something Raith was thankful for. “What?”
“You.”
Zane frowned, “Is that supposed to be some kinda dirty joke, ‘cause I am seriously not in the mood, man!”
Raith chuckled and shook his head, “No, though I should’ve picked my words more carefully.” He sighed, “What I meant to say is that you have done something to that girl, something powerful. She was a fighter her entire life—you said so yourself—and fighting for that long all on your own takes a toll. Just look at us; we’ve been shackled with that fucking psycho for years and now we can’t keep our bodies from shivering like a damn bobble-head toy every time we hear his name!”
“What do you mean… about Serena?” Zane leaned forward, returning the length of Serena’s hair to his pocket.
“The point is that you have given Serena the ability to take the weight of the world off her shoulders; you’ve offered her a companion in you. Sure, she’s a fighter through-and-through—always was and always will be—but she’s stronger with you. Now I’m sure that she’d be tickled pink—and, no, that’s not a dirty joke, either—to know that you’re out there beating the shit out of club-goers and whatnot trying to track her down, but your little stunt earlier was… well, fuck, Zane, it was damn-near suicide! If Zoey and I hadn’t gotten there when we did, Maledictus”—Zane shifted uncomfortably and Raith, though he didn’t falter, felt himself squirm as well—“would have killed you. That would’ve been you: dead; gone; bye-bye, brave-but-stupid Zane!” Raith took a deep breath, “And then where would Serena be? No closer to being saved and condemned to a world without the man who’s made this major impact in her life.”
Zane frowned and looked over at him, “You sound like Zoey right now.”
Raith shrugged a shoulder, avoiding eye contact with his friend. “So we might’ve talked a bit in the car while you were unconscious.”
“Thought so,” Zane rolled his eyes. “I bet Celine loved being a part of that conversation.”
“I wouldn’t say she was a part of the conversation, mate; more like, an awkward, pouty lump in the corner.”
The two laughed.
“So you’re here on Zoey’s behalf to chastise me for almost getting myself killed, is that it?” Zane finally asked when the laughter had subsided.
Raith gave him a look, “Like I’m too stupid to chastise you on my own, dipshit?” He gave a playful-yet-solid punch to Zane’s hip, “I’m here ‘cause, both before we got you into the car and after we got back, you cursed us out pretty bad, and I—this is me, with my own brain and everything—think you needed a reality check.”
Zane sneered at him, “And what reality are you going to check me into that I’m not already aware of.”
Raith glared at him, his voice turning serious. “The one that you proved to me just a little bit ago, mate: that you are not the only one who wants to see that psychopath dead and gone; that you’re not the only person who’s suffered because of him!”
Zane shook his head, “I never said that—”
“You don’t need to say shit to send a message, Zane,” Raith’s tone was low-but-powerful, rumbling through the room like an earthquake. “You throw yourself into an impossible fight and then think you have a right to bark orders at the friends who show up to drag your ass out of the grinder—friends who are every bit as eager to see this chapter of their lives added to the ‘executed’ pile—just because they have sense enough to not get themselves killed? And what if we had killed him back there, Zane? Were you planning on punching the hideous corpse until it—what?—belched out Serena’s location? Or did it not even occur to you that you could’ve left us with no way of finding her?”
Zane’s face turned red as the truth sank in and he looked away. “We could’ve found her some other way.”
“Says the dipshit who didn’t have sense enough to consider it before getting his ass kicked,” Raith sighed. “Did you even get a single hit in on him?”
Zane shrugged, “Not really; ugly bastard kinda caught me off guard with everything.” He smiled then, “Though I did piss him off. Like, big time!”
Raith smirked, “Oh?”
“Mmhm,” Zane beamed, “Just like Serena.”
Saying her name brought the sadness back to his face, and Raith saw his hand start to drift back towards his pocket.
“So let’s go find her,” Raith said.
Zane looked up. “Huh?” His eyes narrowed, “Like it’s that easy? Like I haven’t been combing the whole fucking city for a week? Besides, with Zoey out of commission we’ve lost our best source for finding her.”
Raith groaned and let his head fall back against the wall, “You must really think I’m an idiot. Come on, asshole, let’s track this fucker down.”
“An atlas?” Zane laughed, “Really? We have millions of dollars of top-of-the-line computer equipment literally right behind you and you’re using an atlas?”
Raith sighed, “Let me start by remarking that it’s because of things like this atlas that the information on those computers exist. I’d also like to add that, with Zoey unconscious, nobody seems to know how to work the millions of dollars of top-of-the-line computer equipment short of logging onto Facebook or watching porn.”
Zane frowned, “I thought I cleared the history…”
Raith chuckled, “Busted.”
Zane rolled his eyes, “Moving right along to Raith’s ancient map of wonders.”
Raith laughed at that, “Fair enough.” He pulled out the file that Zane had gotten from the club and flipped it open; Zane seeing that a bunch of the pages had been highlighted and scribbled on. “These are all of the various events that your informant felt had something to do with Maledictus, and, in that, he wasn’t wrong. Mind you, yes, some of these are unrelated—either having some connection to other clan cases that have been wrapped up since then or random on-goings and a few pranks—but, for the most part, these all outright stink of that asshole.” Raith pushed five of the pages—all of them with a red X scribed in the upper-right of each page—off the table.
Zane stared at him. “Really?” he nodded to the pages that now littered the floor, “Was that necessary? You could’ve just—”
“It was for effect, asshole,” Raith sighed, “an effect, I’d like to point out, that you just deflated.” He shook his head and spread out the remaining pages before taking out a Sharpie. “I was looking through these before I came to get you, because I genuinely think I’ve narrowed in on his hideout,” he shook his head, looking over at Zane, “but I don’t know the area well enough to determine where exactly.” He opened the atlas to their city—Zane already seeing a few marks from Raith’s Sharpie—and pointed the tip of the marker to Ben’s club on the map. “This is where you first spotted him before he led you to the lumber yard”—he dragged the capped tip across the map in the direction they’d taken—“which actually tells us something.”
Zane frowned, “What? That the asshole likes wood?”
Raith cupped his face in his free palm. “Sometimes I just cannot believe that I actually went on missions
with you. No, you dunce! It has nothing to do with the lumber yard, it’s the direction!”
Zane looked back at the map and frowned, shaking his head, “What about it?”
Raith retraced the path from the club to the lumber yard several more times as he spoke. “A lot of animals—birds especially—will, when the threat of a nearby predator is felt, travel away from their nest or burrow. It’s an instinct—a baser one—to lead the threat away from their home; to protect their families.”
Zane’s eyes widened, looking at the map. “Then that son of a bitch high-tailed it to the lumber yard because…”
Raith was already nodding.
Zane studied the map harder, taking in the various marks that Raith had already applied. “So wherever he’s stowing Serena must be around…”—he circled his finger roughly around a site on the map as he looked at the pages from Ben’s file—“But where? Where?” he chanted to himself as he looked at the documents with a renewed hope.
Raith nodded, “That’s where I got snagged, too. So I figured I’d come find you; see if you couldn’t figure out something I was missing.”
Then Zane spotted the police report on the body at the cemetery.
“Bringing the dead back to…”
Raith leaned forward, “What? You’re mumbling, mate.”
Zane motioned to the page. “That report; they found that body dug up and lying a few feet from its grave.”
Raith nodded, “Yea. Pretty sick shit. It definitely stinks of our boy’s MO, but I couldn’t figure out how exactly? I mean, I have a few guesses, but nothing I want to think about too long, y’know?”
Zane shook his head, “No, he wasn’t digging up corpses to fuck them, Raith, he wasn’t digging them up at all! He told me earlier that he could bring the dead back to life; that he’d been able to do this way back before he was him. This body did dig itself up—just like those kids in the report said!—but it was because that son-of-a-bitch brought it back to life!”
“What? Like a Leiche or something?” Raith looked up at him.
“A what?” Zane looked back.
Raith’s palm met his face again, “Don’t you Council-appointed warriors have, like, homework or something that you have to do before they give you a bunch of weapons and turn you loose on the world? A Leiche is a… well, it’s like a zombie.”
It was Zane’s turn to cup his face in his palm, “You can’t be asking me to believe in zombies right now, Raith. You really can’t.”
“Just bear with me here,” Raith sighed. “A Leiche is like a zombie—the whole walking dead thing—except that they’re not all brain-dead and dull-witted and such. They’re like auric vampires—all that energy and aura-manipulation and whatnot—except that they gain their energy from killing; they are human magic users who, through magic, have locked their own essence into their bodies and purposefully died so that they could come back to life as one of these things. They’re like… like anti-aurics, in a way. They absorb the auras of the dead and use that power to manipulate death and decay.” He pointed to the picture of the corpse in the police report, “Like that! You told me he said he could raise the dead! When is the only other time shit like that happens?”
Zane sighed, still not believing what he was hearing; his entire life—his existence!—was set in the foundation that nothing that was dead could also be alive. It was why the growing zombie craze had become such a joke within the mythos community. “Raith, do you really believe that—”
“C’mon, Zane! I know you know this much! When can a dead body—gone, not a vampire in the midst of the change, not an enchantment; a true, blue dead body—come back to life?”
Zane sighed, “Only situation I can think of is if an aura winds up possessing it somehow.”
Raith nodded. “Exactly! An aura! Auric energy! We’ve seen it before; aurics are always taking control of minds to control them. The truly sinister ones outright control the people themselves!”
Zane nodded, “Right, but whenever they do the brain can’t take it. Humans under the control of an auric end up—”
“—dying,” both Zane and Raith finished the sentence; Raith nodding his point.
“See? A living body isn’t equipped to handle that much strain. An auric can’t keep those they control alive because, without the human’s aura in control of body—in control of the brain—it loses hold and passes. And a body without an aura is a dead body! If Maledictus was…” he shook his head, “If he is a Leiche—a death wizard—then he could have control over something like that; he could raise the dead. And it would sure-as-hell explain why he’s such a murder-happy bastard!”
Zane frowned and nodded, looking down at the file. “A sang needs blood, an auric needs life-energy…”
Raith nodded, “And a Leiche needs death-energy.”
“Fuck me sideways…” Zane shook his head, looking back at the map. “He said he’s got something big planned, Raith; something that could change the world. He said that it wouldn’t be long until he was strong enough to do it.”
“There’s nothing more certain in this world than death, man,” he looked over, biting his lip. “That’s a lot of fuel for something like that if it wants to start some shit.”
Zane groaned, wiping his brow. It was so much easier to want Maledictus dead when he was just a dangerous psychopath who’d made him and his loved ones suffer, but this was turning out to be something far greater than he ever could’ve imagined. “Okay, this is serious. He’s gotta die. Like, really gotta die; like, him… or all of us—that kinda serious.”
Raith nodded, “You’re not exactly a poet, mate, but you don’t hear me arguing. So where the hell is he?”
Zane looked at the area on the map that Raith had determined to be the likely region Maledictus was in, but it was still over fifty square miles of city. There had to be more…
He looked at the files again. Risen corpse at the cemetery. Spooked patients at the old folks' home. Creepy shadows scattered about the region. Missing college kids. Murdered rape victims near the hospital.
“Like an animal,” Zane muttered to himself.
“What’s that, mate?” Raith looked up.
“You’d said that he’d been like an animal earlier tonight when he tried to lead me away from his ‘nest,’” he nodded to himself. “What if that’s how he’s acting now?”
“How do you mean?” Raith’s heart rate sped up in Zane’s ears, and he knew his friend could tell he was on to something.
Zane scratched the back of his neck, “I mean, he’s in an ykali body now. We moved that thing inside the corpse and Nikki used replicated the curse’s markings on his scales to transfer the essence into that thing; figured we could just dispose of it later.”
Raith nodded, “Yea. And?”
Zane shook his head, “It’s still an ykali, though. It’s not like we replaced its brain or swapped out all the old parts of what it had been; we just added a crazy psychopath into a dumb animal. Albeit, a seven-foot, ravenous mythos animal, but an animal none the less.”
“So you think that the ykali brain is still calling some of the shots?” Raith asked.
Zane nodded, “Why not? I always thought that he was such a vulgar, perverted fucker because that was how the taroe created him, but he wasn’t created; not like that, anyway. What if the bulk of what made up the personality of the Maledictus we know was how the essence of whatever he’d once been perceived itself through our vulgar, perverted minds. However old that thing is, I’m sure that it wasn’t words like ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’ or the whole mess of porno-words he loves to play with; all that had to have been learned after we were cursed with it. And think of who he targeted when we were the hosts: all those close to us. It fooled me into thinking we’d killed Celine, and every time after that it was always local incidents. It never transformed and then went on some road trip to take revenge on somebody from a past life. It was always acting through our filter; it was those close to us.”
“So wh
o’s close to an ykali?” Raith shook his head.
Zane smirked, “That’s the thing. Nobody! He’s got no modern filter except that of a blood-thirsty lizard. No connections or focuses; it’s probably why he’s even beginning to remember his old self.”
Raith nodded, “He’s got no other distractions from the ykali’s brain.”
“Exactly! All that’s there is basic animal instincts. And that pretentious cocksucker is so certain he’s on top of everyone and everything that he’d never suspect that his actions were being dictated by a ‘stupid animal,’ so he’s casually acting on ‘stupid animal’ logic thinking it’s his own. Which is why he went to such great lengths to lead me away from this area,” Zane motioned to the area on the map.
“So where would Maledictus, driven by an animal brain, think to go?” Raith finally asked.
Zane’s eyes moved around the map once more. “A stupid animal would want to stay close to its shelter”—he pushed a few pages off the table—“A stupid animal wouldn’t stray far from what it knew”—he ‘X’ed out a few areas on the map—“And a stupid animal would always seek out the perfect home to suit its personality…”
Honing in on a spot on the map, Zane smirked and drew a circle around the location of Maledictus and Serena.
“An abandoned loony bin? Are you kidding me?” Celine frowned, looking at the map while everyone suited up around her.
Zane nodded, fastening the last of the buckles on his boots before he hurried to begin arming himself. “Absolutely! That son-of-a-bitch has proven time and time again that he’s nothing more than a psychotic, misery-seeking asshole. He’d seek out someplace private, someplace that nobody would dare go poking around, and someplace teeming with pain and suffering.”
“He’s right,” Nikki offered, zipping up her leathers and securing her bright red hair in a tight ponytail. “If he is a Leiche—and all evidence points to it—then he’d be innately drawn to places where many had died.”
“And, though the records are a bit sketchy, this place has seen more localized death than any other site for the next hundred miles at least,” Raith, wearing minimal layers to allow for a quick transformation when the time called for it, didn’t bother looking up. “All irony set aside, there’s no better place for something like him to hide out, and almost every event we can tie him to took place within twenty-five miles of there.”
Scarlet Dusk Page 14
