Metal Angel: An Urban Fantasy Adventure (Rings of the Inconquo Book 3)

by A. L. Knorr

A shot skipped off the top of the wall above my head, and I cringed low enough for my breath to kick up the dust at my feet. I didn’t want to stay here another second, vulnerable in a very poor position. And given the sour tang I’d sensed at detonation, I knew just who had done it.

  My metallic senses strained. Like raking leaves I gathered every bit and bob of metal I could find, mostly shards and fragments from the explosion. I couldn’t see them from where I crouched, but I heard them scrape and tinkle as they bounced off the road and each other. Shots from both sides slackened a little as the combatants gaped at the glittering dervish.

  “Can someone give me a direction?” I asked into my headset through gritted teeth.

  A brief pause, then “Two o’clock.”

  The dervish became a cyclone of metal shards. A terrified spasm of gunfire sliced harmlessly through the gathering storm, pattering across the stone.

  “My turn,” I whispered.

  Men roared and wailed as the twisting, stinging fragments lashed over and through their position in the ruins. Curls of metal sheeting and slivers of fractured nails and bolts scourged the area like a swarm of locusts. I dared a look over the wall to see men springing up, covering their heads with both arms, and casting weapons aside as they ran. Glinting under the Mediterranean sun, the flecks of metal looked like enraged fireflies from hell.

  Separated from their impromptu gun nests, the men appeared to be locals: leathery blokes who would have looked natural on a fishing boat or driving a flock over the rough hills. Some raced about in circles, not noticing they’d escaped the worst of my now dissipating storm. Others crept along on knees and elbows like strange penitents, not daring to look up from beneath their clasped hands. A few staggered forward clapping hands to thin gashes on their face and arms. Altogether there were more than a half dozen of them in the shattered stockyard.

  “Sitting ducks,” Bordeaux growled. Point and central had used my distraction to creep along the front of the building. There had been no clear shot into the cannery before, but now they had the enemy dead to rights.

  “What’s the plan, Sarge?” the corporal asked as I let the remaining scraps tumble to the ground.

  Tension crackled in the air, and the world seemed to hold its breath. All the security team’s weapons were trained on the stunned and defenceless men standing out in the open. Had our places been reversed, I doubted those men would have hesitated to kill us. The whole squad appeared to lean forward eagerly.

  “I can secure them.” I climbed over the wall intending to jog across the road to where Stewart squatted with the central squad.

  “Bashir!” Stewart snarled, his voice low but forceful through my headset. “Get back to cover!”

  “Give me a second.” There’d be hell to pay for this later, but I cared more about avoiding further carnage than I did about Stewart’s wrath.

  I skirted around them, reaching out to a broad section of tin roof. It warbled as I lifted it off the ground, then gave a tortured screech as I tore its corrugations into strips. The men in the yard cringed and recoiled, their eyes bulging in fear. A few genuflected as their gazes wandered back to the rifle barrels levelled at them.

  Stepping over the remnants of the stockyard’s fence, one hand held out to shaping bonds, I met the eyes of the men I was trying to save.

  “That’s an order, lassie!” Stewart hissed.

  I was sweating, but a chill clawed its way up my spine. I was defying direct orders, but I couldn’t risk these men’s lives. I moved to work faster, making as many strips as there were men.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Stewart rise. I had seconds before he either dragged me out of the way or told the team to open fire. With a less than gentle shove, I sent the strips of metal to loop around the chests and knees of the men in the yard. A few screamed as their legs were pinned together. A few flopped over, almost comically, their expressions dramatic enough for a Three Stooges film. But they were alive.

  “See?” I turned to Stewart, who advanced on me like a purple-faced avalanche. I forced my face into a hopeful grin.

  The rattling slither of chains sounded from inside the cannery, and I turned as a nauseous rush assaulted my senses.

  I cried out in horror along with the bound men in the stockyard as oily, black chains burst through the windows in the central building. Like living things with hooked hands they plunged toward the men, snaring bonds, clothes, or flesh. It happened so quickly I hadn’t even taken a breath before they were dragged, screaming, into the building.

  “Bashir!?” Stewart asked, his ire gone, the colour draining from his face. “What the devil are you doing?”

  “It wasn’t me,” I gasped. “I wouldn’t…”

  The screams inside the cannery stopped with sickening abruptness, and something else pressed on my awareness.

  We stood beside the rusted framework of a truck bay. My gaze snapped upward to the exposed girders jutting from the blasted end of the cannery. My knees and stomach quailed as a red glimmer winked at me in time with another rush of putrid force. I felt the metal’s despairing cry as the insidious corruption destabilised it, molecule by molecule.

  “Run!” I screamed at the team as the girders reached critical mass.

  The solid branches of steel had become bombs, shaped by the mad will of an ancient evil who would love nothing more than to see the whole world fester and die.

  Hard-won instinct saved my life, as well as Stewart’s.

  I snatched up the last of the metal sheeting with my power and lifted it to block the sergeant and I from the blast. The sheet of tin slapped against us as thunder blasted, the force driving us to the ground hard, but sparing us from the worst of the explosion.

  Our cheeks smashed into the dirt; the sergeant and I shared terrified looks under the shadow of our makeshift shield. As the ringing in my ears subsided, sporadic gunfire and screams filled them instead.

  “G-et the team ou-t,” I wheezed, fighting for each syllable as I struggled to catch my breath. Blood pounded through my head, making even my ears throb.

  Stewart’s face was pale, and every hard line in his craggy face seemed curled in fear. The shooting and the screams stopped abruptly. Something harder than any metal known to man flashed in Stewart’s eyes.

  “Bloody well dinna think so,” he snarled. With a bellowing heave he threw the battered tin off.

  We rose to our knees in an opaque curtain of dust and smoke. Stewart’s eyes and rifle barrel swept around in frustrated defiance.

  “Squad leaders, report,” he growled. Static answered.

  Somewhere in the fog, chains rattled.

  I struggled to my feet, working on getting oxygen into my lungs. My metallic awareness was nearly as useless as the radio, overwhelmed by the feeling of wrongness in the fragments of metal swirling around us.

  The chains clinked and rustled again, taunting.

  “What are our options, Bashir?” Stewart continued his slow scan.

  The dust cleared with unnatural slowness, cocooning us in a murky twilight.

  “Let me clear the air.” I reached my hands out to either side, laying a mental hold on the fluttering metallic dust. I winced at the contact of the befouled bits with my mind. The chains jangled irritably, and my skin prickled as the noxious aura bubbled up in my senses.

  I swept my hands down, and the clouds sank to the ground.

  In the devastated stockyard a monster clutched its prey with many hooked coils. The entire security team was bound. Vast lengths of greasy chains entangled them, hooks and many-toothed gears pressing just hard enough against throats, eyes, and groins, that not one moved.

  “Let’s not make a bad situation worse,” drawled a familiar voice.

  The head of the monster, leaning forward from the mass of metal like the figurehead of some infernal ship, was Dillon Sark, or something that had once been him. His frame was nearly skeletal now. His chest was a molten mass, seething and throbbing as metals wound over and through hole
s seared in flesh and bone. At a tone so low, I felt it as much as heard it, the demonic engine that was Kezsarak ground and thrummed.

  KILL HER

  I raised the battered tin, but Sark’s strained laughter brought me up short.

  “Mad ol’ boy doesn’t come with a mute button, I’m afraid,” he said with a broad smile. His handsome features were ragged and painfully sharp, lips cracked raw, eyes fever bright. Life on the run had been hard on him, but life as a demon’s vessel was eating him alive.

  “Let them go ’fore I put a hole through your skull, lad.” Stewart raised the rifle to his shoulder.

  Sark’s smile widened beyond human proportions, bones twisting like rubber.

  With viperish speed, a length of chain whipped out and twisted around the sergeant, who roared in pain as it squeezed his arms to his sides. His rifle kicked off a single useless shot as it was slammed back against his chest.

  Howling my defiance, I launched the sheet forward, sharpening the leading edge as it flew.

  Sark sank deeper into the mass of chains and trapped soldiers. I couldn’t hit him without slicing one of the security team open. I halted the tin and drew it back, letting it hover, ready to defend or attack.

  “That’s better,” Sark cooed, sliding to the fore once more, though he kept his human shields close. “Now we can talk like civilised people.”

  In answer, I sheared my section of siding in half with a thought. One leaf moved in front of me, a rough shield, while the other hovered menacingly at my shoulder, a sharp projectile ready to fly.

  “If you want to talk,” I growled, setting my feet into a fighting stance, “then let them go.”

  Kezsarak’s mechanical pulse quickened at the demand, sending a tremble through the chains. I prepared to defend and attack simultaneously, but his assault didn’t come.

  Sark eyed me. I’d spent enough time with him to be able read his face: he was afraid. He wasn’t sure, even sharing a body and abilities with Kezsarak, that he could take me. Good. Let him doubt. I wasn’t sure I could take him either, but I’d be damned before I’d let any uncertainty show.

  “I will let them go.” Sark’s gaze swept over his captives with open contempt. “But first you need to listen.”

  I shuffled left and then right, looking for a way to get to Sark that didn’t go through my team. “I’ll listen if you let them go.”

  “Afraid not, lovely.” He shook his head. “They’re my insurance. Wouldn’t want things to get ugly.”

  “Judging from what that demon’s done to you, that’s impossible.” I gave him a pointed up and down.

  “Not when she’s still useful,” Sark hissed, but not to me. He focused and smiled again. “Sorry about that. He’s … well, if anyone knows what he’s like, it’s you.”

  I kept my eyes fixed on his face, but a corner of my mind swept the area.

  “For a bloke saying he wants to talk, you aren’t saying much.” I needed to keep his attention on me. “You went to all this trouble just to be cheeky? Is this your idea of flirting?”

  “You’re saying it isn’t working?” Sark threw me a leering wink.

  “We are far past that stage. You’ve gone insane, Sark, simple as that. You need to be stopped.”

  Sark’s eyes widened with a burning light that would have made even an edimmu like Daria wince.

  “Insane!” he snarled, spittle flecking his ravaged lips. “I’m following the plan! The plan that you could have helped me with!”

  “You mean the plan to kill your way to Winterthür?” I retorted. “Yeah, wonder why I didn’t sign up for that.”

  I felt a pair of metallic flickers in the wreckage behind him. I shifted, hoping to steal a peripheral glance. If he sensed me manipulating metal, my plan would be doomed.

  “He’s awake now.” The pronouncement was flat and heavy.

  “I know.”

  “If we had worked together, we could have stopped him,” Sark said, his voice thick with sincere emotion. “Now that he is awake, the only way we can possibly survive is by working together.”

  “Not like this,” I rasped. “Not your way.”

  Sark’s eyes flashed, and the muscles in his jaw clenched. “It is necessary. What are a few lives to saving the planet?”

  I met his grimace with a calm, steady voice. “That’s not good enough,” I said, appealing to whatever was left of this tortured creature’s humanity. “A guardian doesn’t sacrifice what they are meant to protect. I’m a guardian.”

  Sark’s laugh was a jagged file across my nerves.

  “You’re a fool,” he sneered. “Your high minded ideals will see the world burn!”

  “Then I’ll spend my last breath putting out fires.”

  The demoniac engine sounds grew more urgent and shrill. Sark shook his head viciously as the chains tightened fractionally. Every man in their grip held his breath, eyes wide.

  I waited, inching over a little more.

  “Let me handle this,” he muttered out the corner of his mouth.

  KILL HER

  “Oh, shut-up!” Sark snapped. “A little patience wouldn’t hurt you, you animal.”

  “Might hurt you, though,” I deadpanned.

  Launching my leaves of sheet metal, they flew through the air half a metre over Sark. As I expected, he shielded himself with my team – the poor wretches colliding with a clamour of metal links and wounded grunts. For a terrible instant, I feared I misjudged, but the metal cleared the men’s heads by scant centimetres and sailed over Sark.

  Sark didn’t have time to consider his good fortune before the twin spines of rebar I’d spied behind him lanced into his back and dragged him into the air. His shock and Kezsarak’s outrage kept him from mounting an effective defence, and with a heave of raw will I pulled him free of the chains.

  The lengths of stained metal collapsed, limply hanging about their would-be victims.

  I focused on pushing Sark up and away as quickly as I could. I felt the combined wills of Sark and Kezsarak pressing on the intersecting rebar, one trying to expel while the other began to violently dissolve them.

  I drove my ringed fist up in a pantomime of an uppercut and sent them hurtling onto the roof of the cannery, landing with a crunch.

  Summoning the twin leaves of sheeting back to me, I held them at my shoulders, ready to sweep down and block or lash out at a thought. I reached out to the lengths of chain not wholly compromised by Kezsarak’s viral will, reinforcing the leaves with hardened folds and ridges. The extra links I spun out to encase my arms and shoulders in a metallic skin.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. I didn’t think for a second the fight was over.

  Some of the team pointed at me, someone muttered the word “angel”. I spared a look at the reshaped metal sprouting from my armoured shoulders. I hadn’t intended it, but they did look like wings.

  “What do we do, Bashir?” Stewart eyed the roof of the cannery as he moved to stand beside me.

  “You need to run.” Something shifted in the auras of metal within the cannery. I squared my shoulders.

  “We’ve been over this,” Stewart snorted. “Like bloody hell I’m leaving you.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. The one time the crusty grunt treated me like one of his own and not baggage was the one time I needed him to drop me.

  “There’s nothing you have that can hurt him,” I explained. “It’s not Sark that will be coming now, but Kezsarak. Your weapons will only give him something else to hurt us with, and a stray shot could put me down. Simple as that, Sarge.”

  The chains in the stockyard shuddered and retracted into the cannery like a tide of clamouring, black snakes.

  “Please.” I took a step toward the looming industrial building, pulse picking up speed. “Help me by getting to safety.”

  Stewart ground his teeth loud enough to make my jaw ache, and then cursed as only a Scotsman could.

  “Alright, lads,” he bellowed, his face twisted like he�
��d swallowed a lemon. “You heard her. Hoof it!”

  The security team had just cleared the yard when the roof of the cannery erupted. Stabbing up through the gaping wound was a nightmare of live metal and twisted hate. A serpentine trunk of jagged metal plates swivelled, a blunt head crowned in fused barbs revolved to face me. The head bloomed and out of its gaping throat came Sark’s head and shoulders, but not his voice.

  NOW YOU DIE TRAITOR

  I didn’t wait for the nightmare to come for me.

  The wings clamped to my armoured shoulders, and with a surprisingly natural impulse I drove power into them. My feet came off the ground, and after a second of faltering, I let out a cry of terrified excitement.

  I was flying! Flying to my death perhaps, but flying.

  A wordless battle cry, something melodious and primal rose up in me as I surged forward to meet the demon’s fury. The industrial worm lurched to meet my charge, bladed tines gnashing together in eagerness.

  It was a game of chicken. With everything I had I thrust the jagged edges of my new wings forward and poured on more speed.

  In the back of my mind, something bemoaned a foolish blaze of glory, but a burning elation drowned it out. Something like joy but brighter, harder, and more terrifying took the place of my heartbeat, and I was a speeding spear, an arrow loosed.

  To my eternal surprise, the demon blinked. With a shriek of metal twisting against metal, the monster tried to turn away.

  It was too late.

  My lyric-less battle hymn crested as I plunged between the grasping barbs, my wings driving into Sark’s shoulders. My momentum blasted out the back of the hellish construct’s fused skull, and the whole thing began to crumble. Together we soared higher and pirouetted in the air.

  Kezsarak’s hateful spirit struck at me like poisoned claws, and I felt my wings succumbing to his rot.

  DIE

  “You first.” I drove my ringed fist deep into his molten chest.

  Pain--like fanged lightning--chewed its way up my arm, lunging toward my heart. Sark’s head snapped back with an inhuman shriek, Kezsarak’s bellow joining in.

  I wrenched back, away from the excruciating pain, but my fist was lodged inside his chest. My screams joined the cacophony of sound as tongues of metal dragged my hand deeper. The metal encasing my limb began to glow. Heat built around my arm, soon to be scorching and unbearable.