Fallen Stars (The Demon Accords)

by John Conroe

  So Awasos and I picked up a pre-packed picnic from the hotel kitchen, triple-sized—or, enough to feed about ten people—and hailed a cab.

  The cab ride was boring, traffic was bad, and I was a bit irritable from fighting off 'Sos’s attempts to get a head start on our lunch by the time we got to the park. I paid the cabbie, and we started into the park from the Colonial Road side. My days of the week were mixed up—a result of flying all around the country—so it took a second to realize it was Saturday. The park was hopping. Frisbee throwers, picnickers, kids in the skate park, kids in the playground, and some kind of Renaissance festival full of knights, jesters, and maidens out in the open meadow, all enjoying the warm, early fall day.

  The sheer manic energy of it made me rock back on my heels for a second. Awasos was less impressed, his head swiveling to missile lock on a certain picnic blanket occupied by a family of three dark-haired individuals. The Velasquez family had set up shop about two hundred yards from the medieval festival, keeping well out of the mayhem but giving a curious seven-year-old a great view. They were also close to the playground.

  I automatically scanned the people around them till I found what I was looking for. Four casually dressed but extremely alert men were spaced around the family. They were spread out in a loosely defined box around the family, each attempting to look like they were normal parkgoers. The matching dark glasses, wrist and ear wires, and constantly swiveling heads sorta ruined that perception, at least in my eyes. Stewart’s guards, just as promised.

  Awasos woofed a short, sharp bark which immediately caught Toni’s attention. Her little head snapped around and her face lit up like it was Christmas at the sight of the giant canine next to me. She started to run toward us, 'Sos began to trot toward her, and everything went straight to hell.

  The first action I became aware of was a flurry of motion in my peripheral vision. I turned slightly to see a young couple that had been making out on a picnic blanket break off their kiss and jump in tandem on the Oracle guard sitting alone on the grass near them. The woman grabbed his right arm and locked it as her partner broke the sentry’s neck. It was so professionally smooth that no one noticed; at least for several seconds.

  Everything slowed down as I became aware of multiple events. Even as the lovers killed together, a woman with a baby stroller pulled a suppressed pistol from under her bundle of joy and double-tapped another Oracle watcher in the head. A frisbee catcher chose that moment to drop his orange plastic disc directly behind guard number three and instead wrap his arms around the soldier’s throat in a rear choke. The fourth bodyguard made it to his feet before getting stabbed by a passing medieval knight’s bastard sword. The knight had been escorting a young woman dressed as a serving wench, who had been selling turkey legs to hungry park goers. The wench dropped her basket of drumsticks, ripped free the velcro-fastened bottom of her costume, and bolted after my goddaughter. Her newly revealed athletic legs were much faster than a seven-year-old’s; faster than maybe an Olympic sprinter’s, and she caught Toni in seven strides. Awasos lengthened his bounds, and the dark thing inside me burst free.

  The wench woman had time to catch the little girl under the arms and toss her to the knight before her body was swept away by three hundred pounds of enraged wolf. The sound of her spine snapping from impact was clearly audible to me even as I flashed across the green grass.

  The knight handed Toni off to the lovers and turned to face me, his bloody sword in hand. But the thing inside me, the one that craved violence, was fully free and in command. I observed as a glitter of shiny purple ran from elbow to the little finger tip of my left arm, then watched as my arm intercepted the hardened steel sword, clipping the blade from the handle like a weed eater clips grass. My right fist impacted the knight’s helmeted head, the authentic steel face guard folding into his suddenly concave and broken skull.

  The female lover held Toni while the guy produced a harness of some type which he immediately began to fit around my little goddaughter’s tiny frame. The mother with the pistol lifted her aim to me, smoothly firing off five rounds, all of which missed my jinking and shifting body. She was very good, excellent in fact, but the dead knight absorbed three of the shots and two flat-out missed. Five shots was all she got before both arms were sheared off at the elbow by the giant teeth of my wolf.

  Still, those five shots did two things. First, it made me jump back and away from Toni, and two, it gave just enough time for the next combatants to enter the fray. A flash of black and a stunning impact on the side of my head was my first clue. But the persona my friends call Grim flipped me over, landing my body on both feet, and then engaged the metallic figure that had hit me from the right. The man was encased in black armor and had moments ago been hidden in one of the Renaissance tents. But it was much more like Heinlein’s powered mobile infantry armor than the plated knights of old. My dark half considered this new development for several micro seconds, even as other flashes of black approached from all points around us.

  It was a fascinating piece of engineering. Overlapping plates and segments of blackened metal that slid smoothly across each other as the man inside simply wore it. It hummed with a deadly power, but not the heavy servomotor sounds of old Arnie in the Terminator or Robert Downey’s portrayal of Iron Man. It was much more graceful than that; quicker, slicker.

  Some of the blackened metal was scratched, and a dull gray showed through. The words depleted uranium popped unbidden into my mind, maybe from Grim, who was guiding every action. The faceplate was some kind of Lexan-carbon fiber mesh sandwich that let me see my opponent's eyes. He was confident in the power of his technology. I had to admit… I was pretty impressed as well. But Grim... not so much.

  I had a sudden flashback of a short, ninja-like vampire in a ripped and torn black uniform with dull gray chainmail showing through, fighting me across a concrete dojo. Then it was gone, and we were in full motion.

  My left hand shot out, calling the shorn steel sword blade to it, even as my right hand blocked a jarring, powerful swing by my black knight opponent. The hardened steel jumped into my hand from fifteen feet away and I pressed both palms together to hold it in front of me, my fingers and hand pads pressing hard enough to leave embedded prints in the metal.

  Armor boy laughed, a braying electronic sound that issued from the speaker in his throat guard. My arms shot forward, the sword tip moving bullet fast into the translucent facemask. Lexan is great stuff, strong as hell. But there’s a big difference between deflecting a quarter-ounce bullet and a two-pound sword blade. The sectional density of the eighteen inches of formed steel was much greater than any rifle round, and the speed of impact was approaching the muzzle velocity of a black powder pistol. Armor boy fell back, suit shuddering with the death twitches of a brain-pithed body, the broken blade sticking straight up out of his face.

  Another black suit had flashed onto the field, heading for the giant wolf that had just torn one of the two remaining unsuited males' head off. The suits moved fast, forty to forty-five miles per hour, and the one headed for Awasos veritably streaked across the green grass. 'Sos turned, sensing it coming, and then shimmered into a twelve-hundred-pound wall of muscle. The new suit twitched, as if its wearer had just micro paused, but then came on.

  Big bears are deceptively fast. Supernatural big bears are something else altogether. 'Sos’s spin aside was fast enough to cause the suit to miss. His big, blurring right paw smashing into the suit’s back added another ten miles per hour to the man’s speed, which took him right through two small trees and a concrete trash barrel.

  The suit protected him, as it was designed to do, but he was dazed for a moment as he stood up from the wreckage. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a moment. 'Sos showed up at his back and both giant paws came together in a sonic boom of a clap. The suit buckled—compressed at points its designers had not intended it to. The facemask splashed bright red from the inside, and the metal-clad body fell back into the ruins of the garb
age bin. I had a flash of memory. A small, extremely nasty vampire exploding as two gargantuan bear paws squashed him like a caterpillar. Then I was back, even as Grim was moving us across the field of combat.

  Gina and Roy had begun to move toward their daughter, but were stopped by the male lover’s 9mm Glock. He held the pistol in one hand as he unfolded a long rope connected to a package. He pulled a cord on the package and it began to inflate.

  Two more suits approached me from different angles, coming fast. Grim choose to move right, cutting the angle so that now they both approached from roughly the same vector. The twenty yard hop-skip sideways had also put us near the front entrance to the park. Grim stopped ten feet in front of the low brick wall that surrounded the park for a split second, then accelerated forward toward the nearest attacker. That one just lowered his shoulder and came on even faster like a cannon shell.

  Part of me tried to calculate the energy of a two-hundred-pound man inside a two-hundred-pound suit moving at almost fifty miles per hour. The Grim part of me just went low, below the soldier’s level, and stood up under him, flipping him over me like a linebacker launching a rushing tackle toward outer space.

  He flipped completely over the wall and slammed into a red Honda Accord parked on Colonial Road, crushing the windshield and roof, setting off a whooping car alarm. We leaped the distance to the car, and Grim yanked a metal parking sign out of the sidewalk, swinging it like Jackie Robinson, the concrete clump on its end smashing the suit out into the street.

  Grim turned back to the second soldier, who chose to launch a flying sidekick, his metal-edged foot turned sideways. His speed was much lower and Grim simply slide sideways a foot, grabbed the metal ankle, and spun the four-hundred-pound package around, up, and down onto a stubby fire hydrant. The metal breastplate buckled, folded inward but holding tight. Not so the tender flesh and brittle bone filling inside, which compressed and crunched with a nasty, rather definitive sound. Another memory flash—this one of me swinging a motorcycle one-handed into a bar of werewolves.

  Grim did it again, this time smashing the suit’s back. It still held together, but the hydrant broke, a jet of high-pressure water shooting straight up twenty feet in the air. The soldier inside the suit was critically injured, his torso compressed too far to leave many of his organs intact. But he was alive. Spoke too soon. The suit’s faceplate flashed a red glow three times, then an explosive crack sounded from the back of the helmet and the Lexan mask spider webbed from inside as some projectile slammed into it. The red on the face mask was now the wet, drippy kind instead of electronically generated light.

  The guy from the Honda had pulled himself upright in the street, but Grim was already in front of him. A whumping sound penetrated part of my awareness, approaching from the southwest. But even as we (Grim and I) were aware of it, Grim was grabbing a metal arm in one blistered hand while the other DU-burned hand slid under the suit’s armpit. Grim spun around, bending at the waist, planting his feet, and tossed the suit over his hip in a fairly textbook judo throw. One that ended with the suit on the ground, Grim holding the arm, ignoring the burning pain of the depleted uranium, and bending the arm back. Fastened to the ground in that weird vampire way, exerting all of his/our strength against the hyperextended arm, it was only a matter of a foot or so before things tore. But the suit held. So Grim put my foot on the shoulder blade and worked the arm like a kid breaking off a green stick. Some kind of connective mesh, possibly titanium, had put up a fight, but it tore loose, freeing the armored arm and leaving a blood-jetting hole in the shoulder. The blood stopped after a couple of seconds as something in the hole constricted, but a lot had sprayed by then. Too much, as this suit also began to flash a red fail-safe signal before the same explosive shot sounded. Apparently the suit’s designers didn’t want their people to get interrogated.

  I had been aware of roaring from inside the park, just as I was aware the whumping sound was closer. I/we moved back into the park, noting that no other fail safe units would be needed. Two more armor soldiers had engaged Awasos. They were understaffed for the job. Did you know that a half-ton were-bear can launch a four-hundred-pound, suited man almost two hundred feet? I didn’t either. That was result of attempting to just charge directly into my bear. One massive paw strike, claws catching under the helmet, and a black projectile was flying across the meadow and into a cluster of trees.

  The other guy hesitated, clearly rethinking the head-on line of attack. He raised his arm and pointed it like a weapon. A red muzzle flash and the burring sound of a full auto weapon firing confirmed that it was, in fact, a nasty little piece of ordinance.

  'Sos took some rounds but then shimmered into a smaller, more agile canine package that ran into the woods where the first soldier had landed. A roar accompanied by the sounds of metal tearing told the remaining single soldier that he was now all alone.

  Grim picked up the bent and battered street sign, using another glittery edge on my right hand to clip off the messy clump of shattered concrete. He did it at an angle, leaving a bit of a spear point on the round metal pipe. The sign that warned against parking between the hours of 11pm and 5am in place became fletching of a sort, making the sign spin when he threw it, javelin fashion, at the armored soldier. It flew like a Hellfire missile from an Apache helicopter. Hit him in the hand—or, more accurately, the gun part of his suit’s hand. The soldier spun to look at us, shaking his arm and pointing it futilely. Behind him, the inflating package had become a round balloon that rose steadily into the sky, trailing a long line of rope.

  Armor guy kept shaking his hand, trying to get his gun working. He failed to see the streak of black and tan that left the woods in a blur. It raced up to him, leaped into the air, shimmered, and came down as a much bigger animal. All four pile-driver feet landed on the soldier at the same time. The energy involved must have exceeded the engineers’ specs. The suit collapsed and I had another flashback. The same wolf leap and bear landing, but this time on a nightmare seven-foot stretch of gray-muscled monster, deep in a night-dark forest.

  I blinked, back in the here and now. Just in time to see the woman holding Toni clip the rope to the harness wrapped around my goddaughter. Just in time to see, feel, and hear the helicopter shoot past overhead. To see the balloon get snagged by the bracket on the helicopter’s side, yanking the stretchy rope and snatching my goddaughter into the air, dangling thirty feet below the chopper.

  Chapter 37

  Grim ran through the options. Clip the rope with aura—too dangerous to the dangling little girl, who had gone from zero to one hundred miles per hour in seconds flat. Crash the copter with aura—again, too dangerous for the same reason. Jump and grab Toni—we tried, but fell short by twenty-two feet.

  Call for Kirby to appear in front of the copter and stop its forward movement. That one almost worked, but the pilot was a pro and jinked the Bell Ranger around the giant shadow hawk that appeared from thin air. Poor Toni swung like a lead sinker on a fishing line as the helicopter banked around Kirby.

  We began to run, flat out, flashing by Gina and Roy, close enough to see the mother’s look of horror on Gina’s face mixed with the regular look of horror from watching us fight. She’s seen the aftermath many times, but Gina had never been present during a Grim fight. The fake lovers took off across the park in the opposite direction, but Awasos and I ignored them, concentrating on Toni.

  The helicopter was straight-lining it northeast, moving at well over a hundred miles an hour, rapidly leaving us behind. Toni’s figure started to winch closer to the cabin of the helicopter even as she grew smaller to our eyes.

  We hopped the fence and ran alongside the beltway that wraps around the top of the park. Grim was still in charge, focused on the tiny receding image of the chopper. Most of my emotions had stripped away. Fear, doubt, compassion for others—all gone. I was left with worry… tremendous worry for the little girl who had been taken so easily from me. The worry fed the rage, an all-encompassing tsunam
i of raw hatred and fury. The rage fueled our pursuit.

  The many drivers on the beltway immediately noticed my furry companion. Hard to miss a giant wolf running at fifty miles an hour alongside your Mini Cooper or Toyota minivan. None of them seemed to notice me, though. An angry man who could keep up with a speeding wolf ought to get at least some attention, but no one so much as looked my way.

  We caught up to a flatbed full of construction equipment and jumped aboard, worming our way in between a front-end loader and a small bulldozer. Grim touched my wolf and the curious drivers around us promptly forgot about him. Interesting, that.

  The Bell Ranger was long gone, even the thumping sound of its blades having faded, but I knew exactly where it was. I could even see the terrified little girl huddled in the padded seat, her hand clutching her bear-shaped necklace.

  We couldn’t keep up. But I had a dead lock on her location, one that wasn’t going to fade or disappear—at least as long as she kept her necklace. So we would follow as fast as we could, taking as direct a route as possible.

  The flatbed took us across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, but when it started to exit into midtown, we jumped off and ran down another loaded truck. This one was staying on the FDR, heading north, so we let it haul us until it turned toward I-87. The next truck was loaded with crated Polaris ATVs, and it was headed for I-95 north, which stayed closer to the path the copter had taken and the direction I knew Toni to be. My phone rang and Grim answered it, giving Tanya the bare-bones details of what had happened. She understood, completely, knowing we had to follow the helicopter as best and as fast as we could. She would follow us, catching up as quickly as possible once she had marshaled her resources. My vampire didn’t chastise me or attempt to have us wait for her; none of that. Just instant comprehension of the problem and what was needed. Her questions were geared to Grim: short and sharp. His/my answers were just as brief and bullet quick. Then I hung up and we settled back, letting the truck haul us along.