by K. A. M'Lady
The caves were a sheared wall of rock, muted beige in the afternoon sunlight. There was a large shelf that opened into the wall’s face and the gaping entrance of the cave. It didn’t go back very far, maybe fifty feet, but it was enough for the local teens to party in or for a bum to live in for a while; his own personal mansion with a lake front view. Nice, if you didn’t mind sleeping on the ground and pissing in the trees.
Today the ledge was painted with a circle of blood. A pentagram with candles was marked for each of the four corners of the earth. Each element of the universe was given homage to. There were markings in blood on the rock wall by the corner for the earth, but I had no idea what they meant. Ancient languages weren’t my gig. In the center of the pentagram were the remnants of the body.
From where I stood outside the circle, I could still feel the power trickle along its edges as it ran up my skin like a million ants on the march. Earth magic is hard to miss when you’re kin to it. I could cross the circle if I wanted to, but to do so I would take a little of the Darkness that was called here into myself.
Call me crazy, but I so did not want to be feeling that shadow creeping through my aura. Or have it remember me on some dark night.
I looked at the body. No point in calling it him or her. There wasn’t enough left of it to even tell. Its torso was a mangle of meaty clumps. Each limb was severed from its body and sliced wide open; the bones glistening in the warmth of the sun.
It wouldn’t be long before the flies that buzzed back and forth around it set up homes for their larvae, let alone the gnats that were swarming the congealing blood that pooled the entire circle. They too seemed to be looking for a place of their own.
“So what do the markings mean?” Cage asked as he looked at me intently.
I was so engrossed in the mish-mash of remains that he had to snap his fingers in front of me to get my attention. “Hello. Rihker.”
“What? Oh, sorry,” I said turning to catch the annoyance in his pale hazel eyes. Seeing that glare of aggravation cross Adam’s features reminded me why I was glad we’d broken up. He was so self-serving.
“I have no idea what the markings mean,” I said completely blank-faced.
“What the hell do you mean, you’ve no idea? Why did I call you here if you can’t tell what any of this shit means? Why the hell is the Silent Court sending you as their liaison if you can’t help me?”
I just loved watching his skin turn three shades of red. Seeing him come completely unglued as his perfect little world of peace and order fell apart at the seams. It just made something in me smile.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I should really be over all of this getting even with him at every turn. I should be well beyond the twisting of the blade at any opportunity I could find. But let’s get real. He dumped me for some pretty pathetic and immature reasons. He dated me, fully aware that I was part Pixie, and when it came down to it, I was too much of a monster for him to handle. So, call me vindictive, but his shallowness just pissed me off. And obviously still does.
“Relax, Cage,” I said, rolling my eyes as his histrionics were beginning to cause another scene. “I said I couldn’t read the hou-ha. That doesn’t mean that I can’t tell you what it was that did this. And it doesn’t mean that I can’t track it.”
His semi-tanned brow creased in disbelief. Adam obviously had been working late quite a bit, because his sturdy square jaw needed a shave. By the way he was rubbing it in uncertainty, it was obviously bothering him.
“Don’t fuck with me, Rihker. I’ve got too much Other World bullshit going on lately, and the Mayor is breathing down my back for some answers. Are you sure you can tell what did this?” he asked as he stepped into me, the glare of his eyes shooting poisonous darts--if it were possible.
I sighed in annoyance at his stupidity. How quickly he forgets what I am. Unless it suits his purpose, that is. “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said as I walked to the edge of the circle.
I knew I was going to regret doing this, but I’d be damned if I left here with Cage, of all people, thinking that I wasn’t monster enough to track a fucking whack-job cultist.
“Clear the circle,” I said as my toes reached its thick, bloody edge. The scene had gone quiet, like when you just get a baby to sleep and you’re afraid to make a sound, afraid that a pin-drop of noise will start the screaming again.
Apparently no one wanted to enter that circle unless they had to. Call me crazy, here I was about to do it just to prove a point. One of these days being such a hardass is really going to come back to bite me. Let’s just hope it wasn’t today.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, letting all of the tension and Darkness leave me. I was hoping that only the Light would course beneath my skin. I said a silent prayer to the earth to keep the Darkness at bay, to forgive me for treading where I did not belong, and for the Light to lead me. Then I stepped into the circle.
The instant my foot passed that bloody outline the screaming started, and I wasn’t sure if it was me, the dead girl at my feet or the world around me. Suddenly the world went black, and it felt like a door had been slammed on my reality.
I could feel the cool, reaching hands of Darkness as the night extended its dexterous grasp to caress my skin and pull me into its madness. The sky above was an ink-black bed of flashing stars and a three-quarter moon riding high in its dark plateau.
Cage and the team of techs were gone. The warmth of a sunny afternoon was now swallowed by the darkness, and I was completely alone with the memory of a murder.
I could hear the soothing song of crickets chirping in the tall grasses along the banks of the river. In the distance the low hum of traffic. But the girl just kept screaming, her voice raw with terror as she pleaded for mercy.
It pissed me off a little to know it was a woman who’d been murdered. Did it always have to be a woman? I mean, why were we the chosen few?
She was stretched out in the circle, her body naked in the soft light of the moon; open and innocent to the dark hands that would come to collect her soul. She wasn’t tied down in any way that was visible, and yet she was a prisoner to the circle itself.
I could feel the evil permeating through the darkness around me, thrumming through the night with every small breath of the wind, every lilt of river song. It felt as though the magic grew stronger the longer I was held in this warp of time as I tried to see what had happened. I felt like a weight was pressing on me, making it hard to breathe as I searched for the creature that had called the magic.
As soon as I thought of the creature, I felt him there on the ledge, drawing the diagram in blood with bony, tenuous fingers. His blood, and his victim’s. And then I noticed some of her gaping wounds.
Slices through her chakra--her body’s points of power--arms and legs; throat and belly.
I turned and studied the creature. He was a silhouette to the darkness, dressed in a black gown with a hooded cover, his body a shadow hidden among shadows. Had I not known where he stood, the images on the cave wall would have appeared as though by an unseen hand. Yet I felt each line, each circle, like a fist to my gut.
I could feel myself being drawn by his power. Lifted from my feet by his magic. And I was suddenly hovering above the circle, weightless in the night, like just another breeze. I could hear voices shouting through the darkness. But no one was there, no one but me, a dying girl and a creature of Darkness.
The shouting was bleeding into the nightmare, and the creature visibly tensed with annoyance. He paused in his drawing as if sensing the voices.
I watched in horror as he took up more blood upon his own palm and began to draw more swiftly, hurrying now to complete his magic. The girl’s skin split open to the bone at her arms. Then her legs did the same; the muscles exploding like ground meat, blood splattering everywhere. Her screaming suddenly stopped, her terror a distant memory of the wind.
I hovered above her--an unsuspecting bee, waiting to be swatted away.
The creature drew mor
e symbols, and the girl’s torso ripped open as if claws were gashing her open from the inside out. Bile rose in my throat as her entrails pooled out of her in an exploding fissure of stench and gore, the smell of death, blood and bowels heavy in the air.
I could feel myself beginning to gag as the horror swept over me. I wanted out of this circle. I needed my feet returned to the earth, and the light of day to fill me. I called the Light with every ounce of my being and the creature turned towards me, a scream like a hollow, condemned soul flying at me through the darkness. The noise pierced my ears until I thought my eardrums would explode from the pain.
The girl’s limbs tore away from her body, blood splashing in an arc all over the front of my clothes and face, and I screamed. I screamed until light exploded from my body and I was thrust out of the dark circle. Out of the Darkness. The last thing I saw before I hit the ground was a flash of a skeletal face, and long silver hair behind the hood of a cloak.
Cage and three other cops rushed towards me as I lay on the ground, spots of yellow and black dancing across my eyes. I hit the ground in a heap, landing on my tailbone, elbows scraping the gravel and cracking my head back on the rocks. As I tried to figure out what it was that I saw, Cage began screaming at me. “Don’t you ever fucking do that again! Do you hear me?”
I blinked at him a few times before I sat up. “Jeez, Cage, I didn’t know you cared.”
A corpse, this world. Do not go near it.
It bears a greater love for dogs than men
Tell me, clever one, what good has come
Of squabbling with jackals?
From The Inkishafi, By Sayyid Abdalla Bin Ali Nasir
Translated from the Swahili by D. H. Tracy
Chapter Fifteen
Dusk was settling on the outskirts of town by the time we left the caves and were making our way back through town on our way to my house. I’d left Cage and his crew to clean up the mess, and was quite thankful for it. My splitting headache was finally going away, my elbows thankfully had stopped bleeding almost instantly, and the scratches were hardly even noticeable. It was just too bad I could still feel the Darkness clinging to my aura like an oil slick as it sloshed around my chakra like the dark sludge that it was.
I was beginning to think the hyper-healing had something to do with the two blood exchanges with the Vamp that’d been resting peacefully in my basement all day. Now that I was done with yet another police scene, I’d get to go home and ask him. Come to think of it, I had several questions for my new friend Snidely Sharp Tooth.
Starting with, Why the hell did he give me more of his damned blood?
I’d told Cage what had happened at the circle while I was reliving his murder--Always a lovely bit of my tracking power. Instant rewind with scent is such a bitch. But the strange thing was--this creature had no scent that I could recall, nothing that I could track. In fact, he was a big, fat void of blackness.
Oh, he had the weird, creepy, black cloak and bony, chilling fingers thing going for him. And he had enough power to light up a small city. But he had absolutely no smell, and I couldn’t sense what kind of creature he was. Which was even stranger.
I mean, I knew what flavor the monsters were. Sight and scent were two of my best abilities. The whole thing was just fucking bizarre, and it made me uneasy.
The only creatures I’d ever met that didn’t have a scent were Vamps, but even they had a sense of power to them that I could at least pick up. Their vibe was like radar, telling me they were Other. This whack-job didn’t even have a vibe. Nothing but a big nada. Zero. Nothing but blackness.
Cage had told me that I had been hovering above the circle right before I was thrust out of it. He’d said that I was glowing like a small supernova before I crashed into the ground.
I remember the feeling of floating, but I’d never experienced leftover magic with enough power to move me like that.
Whatever this creature was--he was fucking powerful. Blank and powerful. And I had no idea what he was.
Not a good sign.
In the course of a few days, I had two murders with Other World creatures calling the shots. The first was a wandering, flesh-eating Ogre called from the Shadow Lands with an AWOL master. The second was a sadistic power-glory skeletal void who was butchering innocent women without even touching them.
Could this week get any fucking better?
I knew I should have kept my mouth shut and not asked, as Dragon--who thankfully had been utterly silent on the way back--and I pulled into my driveway just after sunset. Call me lucky...again. Apparently I had company.
Just what I so did not need. I hit the lights with a sigh. Whoever was here, in their black Mercedes, I was not in the mood for. Call me unsociable. As if I care. I liked my life that way.
Fewer people tended to die.
I could hear shouting as I got out of my truck and made my way up the front steps. From the grumbling and bickering that could be heard through the door, it sounded like Kieran was in the midst of a heated debate.
“And I do not see how this is my problem, Drae,” Kieran said from his place of relaxed comfort on my oversized purple chaise lounge. I could see him clearly through the front window as I took the last step. He was kicked back in my living room like he was holding court. The Werewolf brothers were awake and dressed, and a few of the other Vamps had returned, but Mercy was nowhere to be seen.
Apparently they didn’t need me to invite them in. I guess if Kieran had my permission, he could just invite anybody into my home. And no, I wasn’t happy about it.
But Judge Trollness in my living room was an interesting sight, to be sure. And not what I expected to find when I got there.
Xavier Drae--Troll Over-Lord and High Court Judge--stood before Kieran, his stout body rigid with annoyance. His pitted face was red with anger, and he turned his black, slanted eyes towards me as I walked through the door and said, “Rihker, you must make him listen to reason.” His voice was gruff, and all of his previous pomp had apparently gone out the window.
Now he wanted me to do him a favor. This was becoming an even more interesting evening as the moon rose. As I looked at him, I asked myself if I really wanted to know what was going on with the Silent Court and the Vamps. Answer: Probably not. But I had the bad feeling I was going to be stuck in the middle of it, no matter what I did.
“What is it you want from me now, Drae?” I asked as I sauntered through my living room, weary and annoyed, and I had just gotten there. One of the Werewolves had his feet propped up on my glass coffee table, and I scowled at him in passing. He ducked his head and quickly set his feet on the floor.
Jeez, did they have no manners? You just did not put boots on a glass table, for crying out loud. If they were going to be staying here--which I wasn’t thrilled with in the first place--then some ground rules were going to be set.
“What I want, Rihker, is for you to explain to your prisoner the importance of doing as the Court deems.” Xavier had taken a seat across from Kieran, and was now seated in my multi-colored low-backed chair. The chair looked like a rainbow threw up on it, and the aftermath was a burst of splashed colors.
Most people hated it on sight. But there was something about it that every time I saw it, I ended up smiling. Seeing Xavier plopped down onto its plump cushion, his pocked face stern and his hollow eyes squinting in annoyance as he tried to get his point across--well, the sight was almost ridiculous.
“I do not find this situation amusing in the least, Rihker,” he scolded. Apparently I couldn’t keep the smile from spreading across my face.
“Look, Drae. I don’t know what you’re so hell bent on Kieran doing for you,” I said, trying to remember that I shouldn’t be laughing at him. “Hell, I don’t even understand why you guys have gone and made me his fucking keeper.” I scowled as I began to lose my patience. “But if things are going to shit in Vampire-land and you want me to side with you, you better start spilling it. Because quite frankly, I’ve had about eno
ugh of all of you.” I glared at everyone.
Xavier looked from me to Kieran with intent eyes, obviously unsure if he could trust me. Which just pissed me off even more.
Oh, I was good enough to track down all the bullshit monsters in boogeyland that were running amok causing problems with the humans. But apparently, have someone start some political bullshit in the Other World, and he had to consider if I was worthy. Fuck that. And fuck him!
I stood in the middle of my living room for about five seconds more and was about to throw his ass out. Hell, I considered throwing them all out. Opened my mouth to spew the obscenities and everything when he raised his hand to still me.
“All right, Rihker. What I tell you now has been whispered about through the halls of the High Court for some months. And our dear friend Kieran, through his brethren, is on the receiving end of some of this information,” he said as he turned his cold, dark eyes towards Kieran.
Kieran sat in the chair, legs kicked out in front of him, arms on the rests at his sides, fingers steepled. Silent as only death can be, he waited.
God, the drama! Were all Other World creatures so damned dramatic?
Drae sighed as he looked at me. And still he said nothing.
“Drae, so help me, if you don’t get to the point, I’m throwing all of you out of my house and you can clean up your own damned mess. I’m sure the Sweepers would be delighted to have the job.” By now I had crossed my arms and was glaring daggers at everyone.
What the hell was with these people? I had two murders to help solve, and Drae wanted to play keep it close. And I so hated games. I was certain the Sweepers would love the job. They were dark shadows--Ghouls, if you will--of the Other Word. Those among us who cleaned up our messes--literally, sight unseen. And they loved the blood and gore. The messier, the better. They fed on it.
“Fine. Fine…” he said, giving in to my demands rather easily. “The Court has received information that the Death Stalkers are working with a faction of Goblins in an attempt to overthrow the Court. There are rumors of one leader pursuing a return to the time of the old ways, when Others ruled and did not follow the human laws. The Death Stalkers want hunting rights on the humans, and any who are working to go mainstream are being targeted.”
