A second cult member appeared and firing again, Talon stitched a bloody track across his chest. The man heaved and lurched, soon joining his buddy on the ground in a puddle of blood.
The voice of a third band member rang out, calling his comrades, a note of panic coloring his words. The corpse-paint, black clothing and skull-masks all served to make Rezok’s crew seem larger than life and more than human. The illusion was being shattered by the power of steel.
The third cultist grew visible in the dark forest. After a few steps he sensed movement from a snowy embankment. He stopped and narrowed his eyes, detecting something off about the snowdrift. An instant later, the snow shifted, coming alive. Talon rose from the mountain of ice, an angel of death. One gloved hand cupped the band member’s mouth while the other drove a knife into the base of his neck. After a quick twist of the handle, the target’s entire body went from rigid to limp in one convulsion as his brain stem was severed.
Three down, one to go.
In other news, Ice God broke up tonight.
Talon stood still and listened like the predator he was, senses fully engaged with his environment. The lead singer had vanished. Talon combed the forest but failed to detect any movement among the trees. Where had Rezok gone?
Once more, Kristin’s cry for help carried through the night. Every fiber of Talon’s being was on high alert. He wanted to come to the terrified woman’s rescue, but he didn’t want to give away his position, either…
Screw that. Kristin’s condition was worsening by the minute. He had to act now.
Casting caution aside, Talon burst into the clearing. Despite the many brutalities of war he’d experienced over the last decade, he was affected by the sight before him. The clearing had become a horrific mass burial ground, with the heads of the dead acting as icy grave-markers. Talon saw no signs of decay, the cold perfectly preserving the women’s lifeless flesh.
Talon crossed the icy cemetery to Kristin. She stared up at him with big, terror-stricken eyes now framed in frost.
Frozen tears, Talon realized.
On some instinctive level she seemed to comprehend that Talon wasn’t one of her kidnappers.
“Help me,” she pleaded.
He scanned his surroundings and spotted a shovel leaning against a tree. Ice God must’ve used it to dig Kristin’s vertical grave. Moving fast, he snatched the tool.
Eyes still fixed on the trees, he holstered his gun. He didn’t like it, but there was no other way. He would need both hands if he hoped to free the woman from her icy prison.
The metal shovel sliced into the ground. Talon put his back into it, but the snow seemed unwilling to release its human bounty. Even worse, he would dig and seemingly make progress only to turn around and find the snow back in its original place. Was the ice actually fighting him in some way?
Don’t give up now!
Talon redoubled his efforts.
As he launched his renewed attack against the frozen soil, he sensed eyes on him. Was it Rezok?
Following a crazy hunch, Talon shifted his attention to one of the buried women. For a second, he could’ve sworn her head had moved.
Impossible!
Correction, kiddo — impossible in the old world, but this is your new reality! Hasn’t the last year taught you anything?
Talon analyzed the eerie heads more closely. Their purplish, frostbitten skin made them look barely human. He was about to advance when he sensed movement behind. Body in full combat mode, heart pounding, he pivoted toward another of the buried victims. For a terrifying split second, the lifeless face glaring back at him with an accusing, unforgiving expression belonged to his dead fiancée.
The blood drained from Talon’s features.
Why didn’t you try this hard to save me? Is this worthless bitch more important to you than your own fiancée?
Talon clenched his jaw and blocked out the haunting voice in his head. Those words weren’t coming from Michelle, because he’d never gotten a chance to propose to her. What he was hearing and seeing couldn’t be real. The magic only gave life to his own dark thoughts and guilt.
Galvanized by rage, Talon spun toward Kristin and continued his furious shoveling. He had become a man possessed. This time no matter how hard the ice fought back, he made progress. He kept digging and digging, metal carving away until he could reach for Kristin’s halfway exposed arm. His fingers closed around her frozen limb and he pulled with all his might. Her body moved toward him, one strenuous inch at a time.
Suddenly, something yanked Kristin from below, almost as if icy hands had snagged her legs and refused to surrender their prize. Kristin felt the tug, her features contorting with terror.
No matter how hard the force jerked, Talon held on.
You’re not going to get her!
Talon clasped her arms tighter, face twisting with effort, muscles and joints pulled to the breaking point.
LET GO OF HER!
A final excruciating effort and… Kristin was out of the hole. She collapsed on top of him, clinging to him like a newborn hoping to reclaim the heat of the womb. Hands touching, faces close, eyes meeting. Survival stripped down to its most basic impulse — the need for warmth.
They lay there for a moment before Kristin bolted upright, her whole body wracked by powerful convulsions. What was happening?
Talon stared as Kristin gagged and spat up a stream of snow and ice particles. Her face reddened with effort as she expelled the contents of her stomach. With each passing heave, color returned to her bluish features. After a final, powerful retching sound, her lips ejected a small dark object.
It was one of the rune stones.
Kristin’s legs caved beneath her and she collapsed. Talon caught her in mid-fall and gently lowered her to the ground. Her breathing seemed to have normalized. Weak, but steady.
Talon shifted his focus to the other women. Ice God must’ve forced each of these victims to swallow a stone. Rage rose inside him, a murderous force that yearned to be directed against the mastermind who had perpetrated these savage atrocities.
His chance at revenge came a second later.
Rezok peeled from the circle of pines.
Talon heard the fiend before he saw him. Glock leveled, he spun around. A red laser-light tattooed alabaster muscle. The albino warlock had cast off his jacket and shirt, standing bare-chested in the frozen clearing. His body was as pale as his face and for a moment he seemed to have been carved from ice. Snowflakes danced around his head, his long mane of white hair framing granite features. Runes adorned his sickly looking flesh and a serrated knife angled from his bony hand. He spoke in Norwegian, or perhaps it was the old tongue, as he pointed the blade at Talon.
Talon somehow understood the words without knowing the language.
“The Ice God demands his sacrifice.”
Screw your Ice God! Talon thought, and fired the Glock. Or at least, he tried.
No bullet erupted from the muzzle. Talon’s finger was glued to the trigger, arm stiff from the unbearable cold.
Rezok advanced another step.
His blade glittered and shimmered in the hazy, dull light.
Talon tried to drop the gun and go for his combat knife, but his body wouldn’t respond. Transformed into a statue, he was the latest victim of the winter warlock’s magic.
Rezok kept whispering away in that creepy, archaic language. Each muttered word became an icy hook that dug deep into Talon’s muscles with paralyzing force. The cold had become unbearable. He instinctively understood that he was in the presence of something ancient and timeless, an unfathomable darkness that predated mankind and had been biding its time to consume the world once more.
Waiting for the sun to burn out and the Earth to turn into a barren, frozen ball.
Waiting for the day when ice would reclaim the planet.
Rezok approached his prey.
Instead of driving his knife deep into Talon’s prone form, he brushed past him, dismissing him like a pesk
y insect not worthy of his wrath. Rezok didn’t seem to care that Talon had taken out his cohorts. His full attention was devoted to Kristin. Only one objective seemed to matter to the albino mage: completing the ritual.
The cold kept wearing Talon down. Some of his Delta buddies used to say he had ice in his veins. It didn’t feel like a joke any longer. His insides had turned solid and were tearing him apart. He almost expected snow slick with gore to erupt through the pores of his frozen skin.
Memories began to drift away. Thoughts ceased.
There was only the cold.
Only the ice.
As the blizzard engulfed his mind and the darkness closed in, one memory somehow fought its way to the surface. He was twenty-two again. He’d served in the Army since turning eighteen and he’d just begun the first week of the Delta selection course at Camp Dawson in West Virginia. During this phase of the process, his commanders did everything in their power to make him and his fellow recruits quit the program. The punishing obstacle courses, the nights without sleeping, the mental harassment – it was beginning to take a toll on everyone.
It all came to a head that day in the swampy marshlands. Each trainee had to paddle down the river and survive the freezing cold mud. Talon tried to ignore the howling winds and physical agony. The swamp consumed their bodies until nothing remained visible but their heads. All throughout, the instructors tantalized them with promises. If a few men quit, the rest would be off the hook.
Talon didn’t know what was worse - his chattering teeth, or the incessant prodding of his tormentors.
He’d been so close to giving up that night, his suffering pushing him to a place from which he feared there might be no return. Soon it would all be over. Just one more week of this hell before the real training at Ft. Bragg got underway. It was a weeding-out process, a test of mind over matter. Talon tried to will the pain away, but his mental discipline failed him. He had reached his limit.
And that’s when another recruit in the mud raised his voice and started to sing the Delta version of the Airborne Ranger cadence.
The singer was out of tune but there was a force behind the lyrics. An undeniable will to persevere and defy the miserable darkness.
The voices multiplied as the other trainees joined the chorus, including Talon. The instructors warned them to stop, but the voices of the recruits could not be silenced.
Talon heard that same song now.
As the cold threatened to whisk him away into frozen oblivion, it grew louder in his mind. The voices of his old buddies joined in, their singing building in volume.
The song had become Talon’s world.
He concentrated on the words, blocking out everything else, and soon his lips could form sounds again. At first a ragged whisper, his voice increased in volume and strength. The warmth returned to his limbs, his will conquering the grim magic.
Rezok paused, realizing something was amiss. With the blade hovering inches above Kristin’s neck, he turned toward Talon. His ivory skin seemed transparent, the capillaries outlined underneath. A man of ice.
The words flowing from Talon’s lips built into an explosive roar. A scream burst from his lungs, and suddenly Talon could move again. Life returning to his hand, he squeezed the trigger.
The bullet ripped through the albino’s shoulder in a volley of gore. Blood sprayed the snow but the ice rippled and flexed, quickly absorbing the scarlet life-force, its appetite whetted.
Before he could fire again, Rezok flung his knife at Talon. The blade buried itself into his shoulder in a spray of blood, sending a wave of agony down his arm. Talon stifled a scream and dropped the gun. Mercifully, the numbness brought on by the cold kept the worst of the pain at bay. Before he could scramble after the Glock, the icy ground swirled and sucked up the weapon.
Shit!
There was no time to ponder the phenomenon as Rezok closed in. He had scooped up a blade that one of of the other band members had dropped earlier. They started circling each other. The heads of the seven dead women looked on in silent indifference, forming a morbid arena around the two combatants.
Rezok lunged at Talon with rapid-fire strokes, the blade an extension of his long arm. Talon staggered backward, pulled out the reddened blade from his shoulder with a hiss of pain and brought it up just in time to block two diagonal slashes at his face and avoid a stab at his throat. The blades clung together and sprang apart.
Rezok’s height and longer reach was giving him an edge in this fight. Talon had to turn Rezok’s advantage into a disadvantage. He weaved through the snow, feinted an attack with his knife while striking out with his boot. The plan was to break Rezok’s wrist. Easy in theory, but a little more challenging in practice.
The albino’s reflexes were near superhuman. Spiderlike fingers caught Talon’s foot, yanked hard and flipped him around.
Under normal circumstances Talon would have maintained his balance, but the snowy environment turned against him. His boots sunk deep into the shifting, animated white mass. The terrain was Rezok’s ally. Chunks of ice snagged Talon’s ankles and hurled him to the ground.
Talon rolled over the snow and feathered back to his feet. But the maneuver had cost him precious seconds. Rezok was now right on top of him and rammed his elbow into Talon’s face, snapping his head around while simultaneously hacking at his arm. Steel bit into Talon’s white ski-suit and turned it red.
Rezok’s next kick targeted Talon’s right hand. The boot connected, sending his blade flying.
The albino loomed, his ghostly face hovering mere inches from Talon. Rezok was about to come in for the death blow when he grew still, mouth distorting in a mixture of pain and surprise. He let go of the blade and stumbled…
Standing behind him was Kristin.
Who knows what reserve of strength she tapped into, but she had snatched one of the skiing poles that the members of Ice God dropped earlier and buried the tip deep into Rezok’s back. He pulled the pole from his flesh with a splash of scarlet and whirled toward Kristin. Howling in rage, he punched her in the face and sent her flying. She landed next to one of the dead women’s heads, empty dead eyes boring into Kristin’s.
Rezok spun back toward Talon. Fortunately, Kristin’s bold move had bought Talon precious seconds to prepare a counter-attack. He whipped out a marker flare from one of his ski-suit’s pouches, snapped the cap off and a fiery explosion of light showered the icy surroundings.
Rezok brought up his hands, shielding his light-sensitive eyes.
Talon’s snatched his own Ka-Bary from his belt and moved in for the kill but Rezok still had some fight left in him. Bony fingers caught Talon’s incoming arm and clamped around the wrist holding the blade. Rezok mouthed words in the old Norse tongue, hoping to draw on the Ice God’s magic once more.
You’re not using that trick again…
Using all his weight and strength, Talon head-butted Rezok.
The albino staggered backwards.
Talon’s blade found Rezok’s neck before he could recuperate. The steel went in with little trouble, slicing from ear to ear in one fluid motion.
Rezok stood dead-still for a shocked beat before hitting the snow like a slain ice giant. Talon approached his defeated enemy, breathing hard, knife dripping crimson.
On the ground, a dying Rezok gasped for air, drowning in his own blood. Sunken eyes shot through with red peered up at his killer.
But Rezok wasn’t quite done yet. With a last burst of strength, he scooped up the rune stone Kristin had regurgitated. One hand held his gushing throat while the other stuffed the artifact into his mouth.
Without hesitation Rezok swallowed the rune stone.
Talon took a step back.
The albino had opted to become the eighth sacrifice, thereby completing the cycle. As soon as his eyes turned up into white crescents, a rumble passed through the snowy ground.
Kristin traded a fearful look with Talon, sensing that something terrible was fighting to be unleashed from the
ice. They had to get out of here. Now.
Talon snatched Kristin’s hand and dragged her back to her feet. They stumbled out of the haunted clearing. From the corner of his eye, he saw the dead women being sucked into the snow. The icy landscape devoured their bodies just as it had fed on Talon’s blood earlier.
Had Talon won the battle but lost the war?
He wouldn’t hang around to find out.
The earth shook and vibrated, branches unloading clumps of snow. It felt like an earthquake, the shifting of ice beneath them triggering intense vibrations. They were standing at ground zero of an avalanche.
Talon’s eyes locked on the snowmobile. A second later he was seated at the handlebars, Kristin behind him with her arms wrapped around his chest. He cranked up the engine and they blasted off, the vehicle’s skids carving up the white carpet.
Trees grew before them.
Talon yanked the controls, navigating the woodsy obstacle course. They cleared the forest and hit a chute. Balls of snow showered down the slope. The ice heaved and cracked and groaned, almost as if some giant Nordic monster was battling its way to the surface.
Bits of ice raining on them, they flew down the mountain at breakneck speed. Geysers of white erupted and for a second Talon thought someone had detonated charges under the snow.
They sliced through the powdery mass, skipping like a stone down the slopes. A tidal wave of ice tore after them, the snow frothing violently. The whine of the snowmobile’s engine was drowned out by the rumbling mountain. Behind them, the avalanche slammed through everything in its path, pulverizing trees and animals under its crushing weight.
Another enormous mass of snow erupted ahead but Talon never slowed down. As the hill buckled and rose before them, he cranked the gas. The snowmobile lifted off and the skids weren’t connected to the ground any longer.
For an eternal beat, they sailed through the air until…
WHAMM! The vehicle landed hard, rattling its two passengers to the core.
They had reached the bottom of the mountain and the road below the ski trail jumped into view. The snowmobile skittered to a halt while the ocean of snow came to a gradual stop at the edge of the street.
Occult Assassin: Ice Shadows (A Novella) Page 5
