Copyright 2011 Jesse James Freeman
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Edited by Katie Flanagan
Cover Design by Thomas Boatwright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
ISBN 978-1-935961-25-3
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011944569
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the loving memory of my pop, “Big” Jim Freeman
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
More Great Reads from Booktrope Editions
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank:
Moses Jaen, Tess Hardwick, Sean McAllen, Shane McAllen, Brian Dougherty, Emily Scopas, Bill Schenk, Robert Stringer, Shauna Davis, Micheal Olivares, Lisa Smearman, Minh Phan, Justin Matthews, Laurel Matthews, Miranda Russo, Debbie Freeman, Stacey Freeman, Patrick Noblitt, Tim Krause, Forrest Jones, Thomas Boatwright& everyone in #PubWrite
Thanks to Booktrope Publishing: Kenneth Shear, Katherine Fye Sears, and to Lizzie Smithson, Katie Flanagan
Many an age ago, the time of gods and the fantastical creatures of the old country fell out of favor and began leaving this world, blessed and damned alike.
Man was left to fend for himself and THE SATANIC FIVE began their own ordering of reality as they saw fit.
All the prophets agreed that there would come a great warrior savior into the world to put things right.
This is not his story.
Prologue
Artemis
It is difficult to hold the attention of the gods for very long. It's not a practice that those of us who looked down on humans from high began. Men and women refused from the earliest days of their early tribal gathering to simply go about their own simple lives and leave those of us on high alone. They began with feats of savagery and strength they labeled heroism and continued with their babbling divination and worship of carved stone said to be representative of our image.
Achieved, of course, by looking themselves over and imagining what a more perfect visage of their simplistic, lumpy, animal flesh might look like. In these artistic and fanciful labors, they convinced themselves that this was surely what we looked like on our mountaintops overlooking their fields and forage lands. I suppose we gods and goddesses should be flattered at how we should be portrayed. Few of them ever got anywhere close to getting it right.
They never made Aphrodite's ass quite fat enough.
We were more than content to live out our own soap operas in our cities of clouds. It was humans who drew our attention to them – not the other way around.
So the godhead turned our eyes to what was going on upon terra firma. Their wars were thrilling, their deceptions and betrayals often impressive – humans had a knack for revolting us at the depths of depravity they would sink to under the guise of advancing their civilizations. Blind patriotic zeal, religious subjugation, gold and jewels, and getting the girl would invariably be revealed as the true reasons behind senseless slaughter and unconscionable bloodshed.
We became fascinated and all eyes turned from our own games to the games of mankind far below Olympus, and the other godly cities looming above different parts of their world. The drama became addicting, and we were all caught up in the fervor. Every last one of us.
We began to mingle with them, revealing ourselves to them and picking our favorite players. Prodding mankind in this direction or that – turning brothers against brothers and talking pretty princesses into sending vast armies to their own doom. The betting on outcomes of our meddling became the currency of gods. Fortunes were won and lost just as quickly and tragically in the halls above as they were in the tiny kingdoms below.
As mankind learned and perfected their skills of deceit, world-building and treachery gods and goddesses fell out of favor with them and would become forgotten. My family scattered, leaving the gates of Olympus to rust and turning the palaces into tombs. The current whereabouts of my extended family has become a mystery to me. We've all flown the nest, never to look back. In the end, most had become junkies, ever-after that last fix of relevance from a species that no longer needed us. The gods were replaced in the minds of men and women by the images of their own greatness. No longer carving totems, humans had begun long ago to craft themselves into creations greater than we. Their experiments with this created many mistakes along the way, which at times threatened to overtake humans – but they're a hard animal to subjugate.
Or they were, until they began to unknowingly sell their souls wholesale to new masters.
I cannot say that I have always had the best interests of humans at heart. Even among my own people, I always tried to do my own thing – man was mostly a big bore and a complete bother to me. I only shined when I was alone, running through their forests and hunting with wild abandon.
The only time I ever really got involved in their affairs began as spiteful act directed at my sister Athena and my uncle Poseidon. One of Athena's priestesses was wronged by my family and I decided to stir up some trouble when Poseidon tried to sweep it under the rug. I only got involved, at first, to get revenge.
This is when I stopped playing the game - when I felt sorry for that abandoned priestess who was changed into a gorgon and tossed into the sea. It didn't turn out to be as simple as righting a wrong and justice for all, however. No one foresaw the coming of that reckless and foolish boy.
Were this legend carved on a stone tablet you might expect the upcoming hook of the story to point you now at some messiah not spoken of in prophesy. In my mind the tale doesn't lead to such a place – but you are human and your freeness of will and interpretation can have you believe whatever you wish.
It's as much a mystery to me as I'm sure it will be to you why I have watched the boy, Billy Purgatory, and his family for so long. Perhaps I watc
hed so many clearly defined heroes and villains for so many thousands of years that I can't tell the difference between one or the other any longer. Perhaps I'm insanely and effectively bored.
Perhaps I still have hope.
All I know is that I am Artemis, and the nature of my hunt has changed.
Chapter 1
I'm Billy Purgatory, I'm Here To Rescue You
When he had grown older, Billy Purgatory went through long periods when he couldn't remember clearly many of the milestones from when he was a boy. One thing Billy never forgot was the day that he met that girl and saved her from the vampires masked as men. Billy, and the object of this memory were both ten years old then and their initial meeting was so very brief that he wouldn't even know the girl's name for days to come.
Catching her was far more important than catching her name.
Billy would eventually figure out that those vampires were not dudes but really vampires, but it would be well after he had made the decision to act as he acted that night. Billy had thought they were hobos – which was way cool in its own way, it had been a good guess at the time, considering that vampires were supposed to be make-believe.
The first sound he ever heard from her lips was a scream. She stood between two buildings, abandoned by everything but graffiti. This was in the heart of the old cement factory on a forgotten stretch of turn of the century industrial seaside. The girl of Billy's age was in a state of terror and was the only beautiful thing that Billy had ever seen in that gods-forsaken stretch of crumbling stone.
She was on one knee and the two creatures in their dark moth-licked suits and snarled-face merriment stood over her on either side and had firmly latched their hands to her arms. They were all starved eyes and drooling mouths, meaning to split her apart at the wishbone and flee to some dark corner with whatever stolen part of her was won in the tug. She flayed about and fought for her life as best she could, but it was a battle already lost on her own.
So in that last desperate moment, she cried to the empty stone tombs of the factory buildings for help. Surely the rational part of her mind, muddled then by her screaming, knew that there would be no one in such a desperate place who would hear and come to her aid.
Billy Purgatory had been skateboarding down the coast in the remains of the equally deserted King Neptune's Fun Land, the once regal water park whose rivers had long ago run dry and ticket booth turnstiles rusted in place never to spin again. The boy had spent all day skateboarding - this happened much more often than going to school, and it was not uncommon when the sun finally sat to find him pushing himself on his wheels down the long paved expanse of the concrete plant on his way home.
That night was like many others that had come before, except there was suddenly a beautiful girl who needed a hero.
Young Billy Purgatory was the premiere skateboard star of his generation. His uniform consisted of the typical badass trappings of that chosen profession. Long camo shorts he'd cut off himself with frayed ends left intact for the homemade feel. The left one had a slash across the knee where Billy had exchanged blood and skin for some gravel. His shirt was black, like the hair – either spiked or in a widow's peak, depending on what time of the day it was and how many dangerous tumbles he'd taken. Billy's face was still a little round, like a ten year old kid's should be, but he didn't in anyway look soft. His body was already a collection of cuts and scratches and across his face was the prize of his hardcore lifestyle.
From Billy's left temple crossing the eye and sloping over the nose to end at the base of the right cheek was the scar that he told people he got fighting a lion.
Or sometimes it was a wildebeest.
Billy picked up speed on his skateboard when he heard the girl screaming up ahead and began to make out the figures wrestling with her. He had been coming up from behind them and the skateboard was quiet rolling over the slick concrete - and fast.
A plank of hard ironwood that someone had somehow beaten and bent into nearly the right shape, the board was way old school. There was no glue or sheets of ply veneer anywhere in the mix. It hadn't been assembled by some hippy high on his own uniqueness and the fumes of the sticky stuff. Billy's board was one of a kind, from the orange wheels to the titanium trucks. The center was a mess of overlapping grip tape. It was nicked, cracked on the edges over time but no matter what Billy did with it, there was no Snake River Canyon that could do it - or him - in.
Years later, when fighting with a girlfriend, Billy's skateboard would come up, “Why don't you just marry it?” Billy would at that point strongly consider the suggestion, but on the night in question, when the event of first meeting that girl took place, his board would prove crucial.
The dark men were giving the girl one final pull as they hissed when Billy jumped a stack of wooden pallets and disengaged from the ground to find the air. He had fifteen feet of flying before he would be on them, and both began to turn and loosen their death grip on the pretty girl far below Billy. Jumping, bouncing and then launching off the wood had made plenty of noise and had not escaped the attackers pointed ears. As Billy looked down he watched the girl try and pull loose, completely unaware of what the night sky was about to set upon them all. Billy was focused then on grabbing his board in his hands as the angle of his approach began the arch down complying with the needs of gravity.
Billy was just a kid and no expert planning or regard to the laws of physics factored into his thinking then. “This is awesome,” was the only thought rattling around in his head.
When the vampire men who had the girl turned to face his kamikaze move he finally was close enough to get a good look at them. They were ugly, wearing their dark coats and vests with grey undertaker ties. Black and white movie characters against the slim backdrop of purple dusk, as if they were a part of the dark and it was moving all on its own. The men who held the girl made a noise. Billy had thought it was crickets at first, that insect song he usually never paid any attention to. It was clear the men were quite obviously the source of it, sharp teeth chattering in hungry mouths. A warning like a rattlesnake just before it strikes.
The one in the forward position hissed Billy's way and bared fangs right before the boy clocked it good right in the face while in mid-air. He hit the man so hard that Billy swore he heard bone break. Whatever fight the broken thing had in it was expended, because it shrieked and went down.
That was when Billy Purgatory landed beside it, coming down like a cat ready to pounce on the other one, who held tightly to quite an enchanting sight.
That girl was the most beautiful girl ever. She had long black hair and green eyes in a panic while she tried to dig her delicate fingernails into the evil thing that gripped her. She kicked it in the shins and those long dark strands of black hair flew around her head and she locked eyes with the boy who had taken time out of his evening to rescue her.
Yes, Billy Purgatory was in love.
The boy moved so fast that night that the remaining vampire man never saw it coming, the edge of the skateboard deck swinging down on its arm like a sword. Billy was sure this time that he'd caused a break. He watched as the arm went limp and bent in a way that was impossible to occur had the bone held. The girl pulled away when it cried out in pain and its greedy fingers could no longer hold her.
She seemed shocked at the force that the boy standing before her had been able to exert on creatures three times his size. Billy would be shocked too later in life when he called up the memory, but on that night of meeting the girl he only had one thing on his mind: valiant rescue.
Billy Purgatory held her close to him, both of them balanced atop his trusty skateboard as he kicked them ever faster away from the scene of the attempted crime. She was facing him, pointing backward from the direction they then travelled and he had an arm around her like some caped hero who rescues pretty girls every day of the week and has his looking cool while flying away form down to second nature.
The girl had her chin pressed into his neck and he
ld on tight. It was a most amazing feeling that heroic night when Billy figured out how wonderful girls were and how safe and on top of the world they can make a guy feel just by being close. It almost felt like it was she who had saved him.
Almost.
Billy didn't stop when they left the gates of the abandoned factory and hit the street headed towards the jump over the railroad tracks and his ultimate destination, back to his neighborhood and obscurity. Billy had to get this girl to his Pop. His father would know what to do. Pop always did.
“Who were those guys?” Billy tried to play it nonchalant, which is a word that he had no idea what it meant other than people who were cool were sometimes said to be that. Billy's mission then was to, no matter what, keep riding that badassary vibe.
“Vampires,” she whispered it into his ear. “Do you believe in them?”
“I only believe in Billy Purgatory, sweetheart.” Billy had played that line out in his head and the execution seemed dead on so he left it at that. “I'm taking you to my Pop. He was in the war and he probably killed lots of vampires. You'll be safe.”
Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird Page 1
