Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Realising the dire severity of his position, Pedro transformed into his jaguar form, obliterating what remained of his suit. Scrambling to his feet, he let out a threatening growl and kept his body low to the ground, backing quickly away to put some distance between himself and the tiger. In his jaguar form Pedro weighed in at almost one hundred and forty kilograms, but his opponent was easily double that size. Nonetheless, this jaguar was a savage fighter with centuries of combat experience, and he had dispatched plenty of larger opponents than himself.

  As the tiger advanced with unwavering intent, he locked eyes with the beast, watching keenly as he came into stark focus out of the red haze of mist. The huge cat let out a bone-chilling roar, and then broke into a furious charge.

  Pedro waited until the last moment to move. The beast bore down on him with the velocity of an air-to-ground missile, but instead of springing headlong to meet his enemy’s challenge, Pedro twisted his body and jumped out to the side, with the tiger landing on the now-empty spot he had just occupied. In a gloriously fluid manoeuvre he rebounded off a wall and pounced onto the tiger’s back before it could turn, slamming his razor claws into his adversary’s flanks. Hanging on tightly to the thrashing creature, Pedro rejoiced with violent glee as bright blood stained his enemy’s black and orange coat.

  Without relishing in the upper hand he now held, he lunged with his bear-trap jaws for the top of the tiger’s neck, aiming to sever the spinal cord and end the fight as quickly as it had started. However, before his teeth could even graze the tiger’s fur the beast launched himself backwards, springboarding off the ground with elephantine strength. Because of this, Pedro’s lunging bite missed its mark, and his teeth sank instead into his opponent’s shoulder. They did not stay embedded there for long though, for the two great cats, entwined in a deadly embrace, sailed backwards and slammed into the ground. As four hundred kilograms of combined muscle, sinew, blood and bone smashed into the concrete, a shock wave seemed to ripple through the alley.

  Pedro’s jaguar body was thickly muscled, fight-conditioned, and his reflexes were honed for combat, but even so the force of the impact almost ended the battle there and then. Unable to retain his grip on his opponent, he tumbled into a stack of garbage cans, scattering them like bowling pins and plunging into a time-lapse flower-bloom of billowing trash and plumes of dust.

  The tiger rose to his feet, panting and bleeding from the wounds on his flanks and shoulders. Acutely aware of the fighting prowess of his opponent, he advanced cautiously on the pile of trash, his obsidian pupils wide and his senses on full alert. He crept closer, ever closer, but still nothing stirred. The tiger paused for a moment and sniffed at the night air, and at that moment something moved beneath the garbage, so he roared and pounced, his sabre claws and scimitar fangs bared for the kill. When he savaged the pile of detritus, however, he realized that there was nobody in it but a shrieking rat, which scampered away in panic.

  As he watched from a ledge above the garbage cans, onto which he had been able to surreptitiously clamber via the cover of a stack of steam-belching pipes, Pedro grinned to himself, tasting victory within his grasp. Before the tiger even had the time to realise that he had been tricked, Pedro dropped soundlessly off the ledge; an angel of death descending from the night sky, ready to deal a killing blow with one swift clamp of his jaws.

  But in the split-second in which he was airborne, hovering in a frozen moment of time above the tiger’s back, Pedro realized that he was the one who had been fooled. The tiger, in a lightning-fast gymnastic twist, rolled onto his back to catch him, a living bear-trap of razor claws and dagger fangs of doom.

  As the two of them wrestled and rolled and grappled and slashed and bit in a tumbling, careening tornado of bestial rage, Pedro fought and struggled with all his might, inflicting some horrific wounds as he did, but his strength could not match that of the tiger, who finally overwhelmed him. In a brutal finishing flourish the tiger clamped his jaws tight around Pedro’s jaguar throat, slammed his claws deep into his flanks, and with the blades on his feet he tore open the smaller cat’s midsection.

  The scimitar canines slashed through Pedro’s flesh and buried themselves deep into his throat, simultaneously crushing his windpipe and ripping his throat wide open with a spray of arterial blood. After the tiger dropped the jaguar’s battered body onto the blood-slippery concrete, he staggered back, exhausted and wounded. Pedro, meanwhile, changed himself from his jaguar form into his human one and tried to get up, but found that all strength seemed to have deserted him, leaving his muscles jelly-like and ineffectual. Raising his head from the ground, he caught sight of his adversary, who had also changed back to his human form. The man’s head was crowned by a yellowy moon leering through the haze of the tight-stretched sky, and there the ancient orb hovered, both twisted halo and mute witness.

  William Gisborne’s piercing eyes reflected the flashing night-reel of neon from nearby signs, and his lips were curled in a grim smile. Blood tattooed his skin in chaotic henna designs from the wounds that Pedro had inflicted upon him, but he nonetheless retained the strength to stand and walk.

  As Pedro’s chest rose and fell in a hollow, weakening rhythm, William hurriedly dressed himself in the clothes he had stashed behind a trash can before his ambush. Attired in his jeans, tee shirt, sneakers and motorcycle jacket, he had an air of an outlaw of sorts, or a simple outcast. His most striking feature was the barely visible inferno that crackled ceaselessly behind his eyes, and at this moment, with the adrenalin of combat coursing through his veins, those flames glowed ever so brightly. He knelt down next to Pedro, who was shivering with shock and gasping for breath, sucking in each mouthful of the cold New York air with futile greed.

  ‘Hernández,’ Gisborne said in his soft, gravelly voice, his odd accent barely placeable, but coloured with a vaguely Scottish tint. ‘So, we meet again.’

  ‘Gisborne,’ Pedro rasped through his rattling gasps. ‘Just finish me now. Do it cabrón, do it!’

  ‘I’ll give you a quick death if you tell me where your friends are, and how many of them are hunting me. And you will, I repeat, you will tell me exactly where the Ice Bear is hiding. You keep your mouth shut though, and I’ll watch you suffer. Give it up now, old boy. You’ve got nothing to gain from lying to me or clamming up.’

  Pedro snarled through his shivers of shock and spat a mouthful of blood-thick saliva into William’s face.

  ‘Fuck you!’ he hissed. ‘You may have won this battle, but you and the rest of the Rebels lost the war a long time ago. There is no hope left for you. The Huntsmen are closing their net ever tighter around the few of you who remain … and they are on the brink of finding the greatest prize, the secrets you fools thought you could protect. And the Ice Bear? Hahaha, you idiot, you fucking idiot…’

  William wiped the bloody saliva off his cheek with the back of his hand as Pedro leered up at him with a mocking grin.

  ‘Then you’d best tell me what you know,’ he gnarled. ‘This is the last time I’ll ask you nicely.’

  ‘Chinga tu madre,’ Pedro hissed through clenched, blood-browned teeth, his jaw quivering.

  William shook his head, sighing with disappointment, and retrieved a flick-knife from his motorcycle jacket. He flipped the switch and the blade darted out with the immediate menace of a spark igniting a gas stream.

  ‘Despite your airs of bravado, Hernández, I know that you’re a coward at heart, and I know, I know that this hurts,’ Gisborne whispered, his gaze hard and cold as flint as he stabbed the blade between Pedro’s ribs. Hernández howled in agony and frothed at the mouth, his eyes bulging with pain. ‘Just tell me what I want to know Hernández, and I’ll make it all go away, nice and fast.’

  Pedro gasped and writhed, but a look of desperate, wrathful defiance entered his eyes.

  ‘Fuck you and all of your Rebels!’ Pedro snarled. ‘I fought with Hernán Cortés, I conquered the New World, destroyed an entire nation of mortals, and brought an empire to
its knees! I carved out my own empire and became wealthy beyond any man’s wildest dreams! I’ve been alive for five hundred years, you piece of shit! Killing me will not erase my glory, nor will it change the present or the future, you fool! You’ve lost already, all of you Rebels have lost, and you have no idea of the pain that awaits you. You want to find the Ice Bear? He’s closing his claws around you as we speak, asshole! He will find you … and he will crush you, and the last few of you idiots that remain loyal to your cause, and he will end this war in a way that neither you nor the Huntsmen could have foreseen.’ Pedro paused here, his breathing becoming increasingly ragged and shallow, but his eyes still glowing with feverish keenness. ‘An ancient power, asleep for centuries, is rising again in the Dark Land. The lost Mothers have been found, and we will unleash their fury on the earth. And what’s more, we have awakened another power, a power that I first caught wind of in the dying days of the Aztec empire. And his coming, his return, I should say, will usher in what could only be described as … Armageddon itself. The world of mortals will be finished, hombre, finished! The Huntsmen will be overthrown, your Rebel forces will be crushed, and you will die screaming with all the rest of them. So fuck you, Gisborne. Fuck you and damn you to hell!’

  In the face of these prophecies of doom and destruction, William simply smiled. His expression was an eerie travesty of a grin, though, and it sent a dark chill racing down Pedro’s spine.

  ‘I don’t fear your friends, and nor do I fear the Huntsmen, Hernández,’ he said calmly. ‘I’ve survived this far, and I’ll keep outwitting all of them at every turn. Despite what you think, there are some of us left who are loyal to the old ways, who still believe in what was, and what still could be. And your claims about finding the lost Mothers? Bollocks. We’d know if anyone had found them, so nice try with that bullshit bluff, but I’ve called it, and you know it. And as for the Ice Bear, I will have my vengeance, one way or another. I don’t fear him, and I certainly won’t pay any heed to whatever fairy tales he’s been feeding you about some mythical power rising up from the ashes of the past, whether in the “Dark Land” you speak of, or some dead relic from the ghosts of the Aztecs. Alas for you though, my old foe; your days of plunder and pillaging have finally come to an end.’

  William pulled the knife from Pedro’s ribs and watched as blood from the unplugged wound washed in an obscene torrent down the man’s ribs. Hernández, however, managed to force a smile through his grimace of agony.

  ‘You’re a shitty liar, Gisborne,’ he gasped. ‘I can see the fear in your eyes. You know it’s over. You know the end is nigh. Your world is dead, and nothing can change this. It’s too late for you … and too late for almost eight billion mortals. We’ve won, you son of a bitch. We’ve … won.’

  ‘One last chance, old boy.’

  ‘Te veré en el infierno, hijo de perra.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll sleep in hell tonight Hernández, but you won’t see me there. Adios, amigo.’

  William cocked his right arm, with the knife gripped tightly in his hand, but at the very instant that he was about to unleash the blade in a death-thrust, Pedro grabbed William’s wrist, the dying man’s hand quaking violently as he expended his final reserve of strength. William saw in his enemy’s eyes a new and raw terror; this being, alive for over five hundred years, now sensed the finality of death settling about his shoulders, draped with the crushing weight of a cloak that would shut out all light and sensation forever. Already its shadowy canvas was clouding over the brightness of his eyes.

  ‘Wait!’ Hernández panted. ‘Wait! Before the end, tell me, William, tell me … The Tree of Life, the Fountain of Youth … have you really seen them, like they say you have? Do you really know their secrets? Please, tell me this, tell me before the—’

  Performing a swift Krav Maga move, William whipped his hand out of Pedro’s grip and slammed the knife into his adversary’s heart, twisting the blade to ensure a killing blow. The ancient being convulsed one final time, and then his every muscle slackened as his soul left his body.

  ‘What memories from those five hundred years of life flashed before your darkening eyes, my friend?’ William whispered, half to himself, his eyes locked on Pedro’s face as the dying man exhaled his last breath of this corporeal air. ‘What fleeting recollections of twenty mortal lifespans did your dying mind cling to in its final moments?’

  After his adversary’s body had twitched out its final deathly rattle William crouched down and began to search the pockets of the torn-up remains of Hernández’s trousers. Aside from a phone, which he took in case it contained any important information, there was nothing that he thought would be of value to him. His body ached from the savagery of the fight and his raw wounds burned, but something else crept through him as well though, something dark: fear. There was so much of it that it felt as if his body were tissue paper trying to absorb an excess of spilled ink. Hernández had been right; William was afraid. He was terrified, in fact. Despite the fact that he had lived many lifetimes of mortal men, inside he still felt, more than anything, that he was nothing but the scared, lonely child he had been in a long-past century. That part of him had never died, but with the passage of the years it had somehow become surrounded by a strange and almost parasitic husk of manhood, like the gnarled roots of a tree slowly swallowing up an unyielding rock.

  ‘It’s just an illusion,’ he mumbled to himself. ‘We fool ourselves into thinking that these years that pass mean something, but all we’re doing is repainting the same tired, worn-out masks, the same bloody masks.’

  What was more, Hernández had been right about the War as well; the Rebels were losing, and there was not even a sliver of hope of a turn in the tide.

  ‘Not a snowball’s chance in the fires of hell itself,’ William muttered.

  The notion was a bitter truth to swallow, but what could he do but continue fighting? He would never give in to them, never. Not only for the sake of his own integrity, but for her – the one he had lost so long ago.

  No.

  The one they had taken from him so long ago. He had made a promise, and all the devils in hell could not keep him from fulfilling it.

  Hearing police sirens howling through the nearby streets, William snapped back to the present. He took off at a jog, which became a sprint as they grew rapidly closer. As he was dashing down a side alley, an armed police officer jumped out from behind a dumpster.

  ‘You!’ he bellowed. ‘Hands in the air! Hit the fuckin’ ground pal, stop running, now! Stop asshole, I said! Hands where I can see ‘em!’

  The cop, who was about ten feet away, had his gun trained on William’s chest, and from the icy glare in the man’s eyes he could tell that the officer would not hesitate to use deadly force. He skidded to a halt and began to raise his hands above his head.

  ‘That’s it,’ the cop rasped. ‘Nice an’ easy ya piece a’ shit, don’t make no sudden moves, y’hear? Now get your goddamn ass on the ground like I told ya, move it!’

  William began to lower himself to the ground, drawing in a deep breath as he did so. He focused all of his mental and physical energy and concentration into a singularity: a ball of crackling blue electricity that he visualised materialising before his eyes as he prepared to use an ability that he only unleashed under the direst of circumstances.

  ‘C’mon jerkoff! I said get your goddamn ass on the pavement, right—’

  William cried out in a wordless shout that was half aggression and half agony as he directed his intent at the police officer. In his mind’s eye, he watched the sizzling orb of blue lightning rocketing towards the cop with the speed and force of a loosed crossbow bolt, and it smashed into the man and hurled him back, as if hit by the full power of a heavyweight boxer’s knockout uppercut.

  William staggered back as a wave of nausea stampeded through him and black spots blurred out his vision. A flush of bright red blood gushed from his nose, trickling over his lips and dribbling down his chin, and his legs became w
eak, feeling as if they would give way beneath the now-leaden weight of his swaying body. Consciousness threatened to fly from his mind with the chaos of a flock of spooked birds, but blue and red flashing lights, wailing sirens and a police car screeching to a halt at the other end of the alley forced desperate strength back into William’s veins.

  ‘Officer down, officer down!’ one of the cops roared as he scrambled out of his vehicle. ‘You! Get the fuck down now! Hit the pavement or I swear to God I’ll put you down!’

  William ignored the policeman and the crippling nausea and took off at a sprint. A booming blast from a shotgun echoed through the narrow alley as the police officer fired on him and missed, and William vaulted over a car before darting between two dumpsters and hurdling over a surprised group of homeless men huddled around a burning tyre fire.

  The threatening flickers of red and blue pursued him relentlessly, urban lightning in this grey concrete tempest, and the wail of sirens barrelled through the narrow streets parallel to him. He veered off through a narrow passageway to his left, breathing hard as his legs pumped with the voraciousness of fire-driven pistons. A chain-link fence blocked his way, but he scurried over it, skidded around a corner and then stumbled into an alley behind a crowded nightclub.

  In front of the red-painted door, a loud-talking, inebriated crowd of patrons spilled out onto the street, jerking and wobbling like malfunctioning droids to the bass-heavy thumping that reverberated from within the club. Amidst curses, angry threats and insults, William shoved through the mass of drunkards who were pissing against the walls, vomiting behind trash cans and making out in dark corners. He fought his way through the throng to get to the main street, where, gasping for breath, he heaved out a sigh of relief when he perceived the aggressively seductive curves of his BMW S1000RR superbike.

  With the swarm of sirens drawing nearer, he sprang onto the motorcycle and pulled on his helmet. He revved the engine, taking a moment to savour the harsh power of its cannonade bark, which ripped with metallic ferocity through the cold air. He clicked the motorcycle into gear, spun the back wheel in a banshee-howl of acrid smoke, and sped off into the night at hyperspeed, pursued by ghosts and haunting memories that would neither relent nor surrender … as well as by human and not-so-human enemies who were closing their net ever tighter with each passing day.