by Blaze Ward
Gareth had a better view of the crowd than Marc did. He watched the implications of those words ripple out, a pebble dropped into a still pond. Useful information, long term, but Gareth didn’t know how long he had. That Sarzynski hadn’t killed him already meant that there was something the man needed to know, and needed Gareth to supply it.
Knowing Maximus, the man would resort to torture at some point. Gareth steeled his soul to resist as long as he could.
Another deep breath and the fires seemed to bank, turning down to a small hearth of coals, just keeping him warm on a chill night rather than threatening him with a foretaste of hell.
“So what do you want, Marc?” Gareth even managed to sound calm, he thought.
“I want to watch you change, Gareth,” the man replied with a smile. “See what she did to you, so I can figure out what I might want to add to the current repertoire.”
Gareth followed Marc’s eyes and saw Talyarkinash strapped down to a chair off to one side, head lolling as she was still out cold. Beyond her, a pair of Vanir in steel-blue uniforms. Gareth looked close and recognized Constable Baker and her partner, also captured.
Only the brothers seemed to have escaped. Hopefully, they had enough money and connections to remain at large while they assembled another wormhole generator and sought more help. Nobody else in the Accord of Souls was left who could stop this madman.
“She made me a match for you, Marc,” Gareth said gruffly, turning his eyes back to his foe. “That’s what the Accord of Souls needed, after all. Someone who could stand in your path and say No.”
“Well, then you both failed,” Marc said. “Not even the strength of Samson will save you now. I will cut your hair and blind you, so you can listen to the others spill their secrets first, and then their blood.”
“Marc, you can just walk away, you know,” Gareth retorted quietly. “Take your little mob of pitiful losers and vanish back into the shadows. I’ll even give you a head start.”
“You think I should fear you, little human?” Marc voice suddenly turned to rage.
“Because if you hurt her, or the Constables, I promise that there will be no place in the galaxy or in hell that will save you from my wrath.”
“You don’t seem to understand, Dankworth,” Marc’s anger towered as high as the great ceiling overhead. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for years. I was always second best when you were around. Anything I did was almost, but not quite as good, as the great Gareth St. John Dankworth of the Earth Force Sky Patrol. Have you any idea what that’s like?”
“I wasn’t competing with you, Marc,” Gareth said simply. “I was simply trying to do the best I could. Trying to make the Solar System a better place. I will do the same with the Accord of Souls, since I can never go home now.”
“Fool,” Sarzynski thundered. “You’ll be dead.”
Gareth watched him rise from the cheap, imported throne, just an over-sized metal chair, and stomp down to ground level. The criminal gang around him had already fallen silent. Now they parted like the waters at his approach.
Maximus came close, but not close enough for Gareth to grab him. Still, Gareth got his first major shock. Marc Sarzynski was only half a head taller now, so Gareth had reached something like six-foot-nine as his body expanded under the force of all the chemicals and transformational virii.
A hunger took root at the bottom of Gareth’s soul, but it wasn’t just for nourishment.
This one was for justice.
“Now, you will watch what your foolhardy gambles have brought,” Marc snarled.
It felt like they were the only two people in the entire vast auditorium of the warehouse, the rest of the people hanging silent on pins and needles.
Gareth watched his foe stomp over to where Talyarkinash was strapped to the chair. A nearby table had been covered with a cloth, one that Marc pulled back now and cast from him.
Underneath, what looked to Gareth like the contents of surgical theater had been laid out in careful order. Gareth felt his stomach clench.
“Do I have your attention, Dankworth?” Sarzynski yelled angrily.
Without pausing for a response, Marc reached down and picked something up. Gareth struggled against the chains binding him as Marc stepped around behind the Nari woman, but the criminal did not touch her.
Instead, he snapped something and held it under her nose. Even from here, Gareth picked up the rank assault of the smelling salts.
Talyarkinash moaned and stirred, struggling weakly and vainly against the ties binding her to the chair.
“Good,” Marc said in a cruel voice. “You’re awake, Dr. Liamssen.”
It dawned on Gareth that he had never heard the woman’s last name, having been apparently on a first-name basis with her from the first moment. He would apologize to her later for his social failures.
“Whaa…” Talyarkinash fumbled to find a context.
“Welcome to my lab, traitor,” Marc continued. “I’m going to ask you questions, and you are going to answer them. If you don’t, I am going to use pain as a tool and an art form to slowly rip away your sanity, until I get what I want. If you please me, I might kill you quickly.”
“MAXIMUS!” Gareth roared across the space. “This is your last warning.”
“YOU DO NOT GIVE ME ORDERS, HUMAN!” Marc screamed back in a voice of cruelty that transcended human or Vanir.
Gareth watched the man pick up something from the table and step around behind the woman again, so Gareth that had an unobstructed view.
“My friend needs to understand his situation, doctor,” Marc hissed. “And I need you to understand that your only choice now is how much pain you will suffer before you tell me what I want to know.”
Gareth growled, low in his chest, as Marc held out the thing to Talyarkinash’s left arm. It was a fine-pointed, surgical knife, but Gareth wasn’t sure how he knew that from this far away. It should have appeared as a steel pencil, considering the distance.
“We begin,” Marc said in a voice dripping with venom.
He took the knife and turned it sideways.
Talyarkinash struggled, but she was bound too effectively to move anything but her ears.
Slowly, Marc ran it down the outside of her arm in a move that made no sense, until Gareth saw her fur fall away in a strip an inch wide and several inches long.
He and Marc locked eyes across the space for a moment, rage swirling back and forth like a storm’s tide. Lightning bolts of fury seemed to pass between them, at least in Gareth’s imagination
Marc turned the blade again and plunged it directly into Talyarkinash’s arm, right in the center of the bald spot, dragging it far enough to make a deep cut. Bright red blood welled up and began to drip.
Talyarkinash whimpered in pain.
Gareth saw more red, but this time it was in his soul. Anger, previously banked, waited no more. Those coals, calm and waiting at the center of his being, they were no longer quiet. Hot wind blasted them and they exploded into the sort of white heat necessary to forge steel.
The pain Gareth felt was worse than anything he had previously endured, but this was driven by wrath, not confusion.
Gareth squinted his eyes and howled. Felt the sound echo off the far walls of the warehouse as Marc smiled at him, pulling the blade free and wiping it clean on Talyarkinash’s tunic.
Gareth looked at his left hand now, the manacled arm closer to the heart, where six injections had forever altered his life.
Nothing would alter his soul, but the flesh of his hand seemed to melt under his gaze, showing the faintest tint of bronze as his fingers extended a little in the fury of a molten forge.
He looked back up at Marc and smiled.
Something had changed in the man’s face. Fear, perhaps, had taken root and begun to spread its tendrils.
”What are you doing?” Marc called in a voice twinged now with doubt, supplanting the towering anger that had been there a moment ago.
“Being bo
rn,” Gareth said simply.
He closed his eyes and reached down into the depths of his soul, plunging both hands into that pile of white-hot coals, seeking something. What he wasn’t sure.
Perhaps Excalibur.
Gareth had been raised on all the great martial tales of history: Arthur who was known as Pendragon. Saint George of Lydda, reputed to have slain a dragon, and Theodore of Amasea, another warrior for his faith. But others as well, including Bilbo who fought a dragon in his own way and lived to tell the tale.
All throughout the Western Literary canon were sprinkled great beasts who tormented men. Creatures known as dragons that had become receptacles of dreams of flight and fancy, powerful immortals who challenged men spiritually as often as they did martially. Symbols as well as monsters.
Gareth had no desire to face Samson’s fate, even as he considered the manacles binding his arms and legs to an iron frame. Nor would he accept the imagery of another man so bound, with the Spear of Longinus plunged into his side.
There was only one God, according to Pastor Jacob, and Gareth lacked the arrogance to challenge that notion, even as the desperate, criminal scientists of the Accord of Souls sought to make him over into one.
But he would accept a dragon as a powerful totem.
Gareth howled again as the fire crept out of his soul and immolated his physical form, Talyarkinash’s greatest success coming to flesh and fruition around him.
Dragonsong.
But this roar was not pain.
No, this was retribution.
Gareth turned his face on the rest of Marc’s gang and snarled his rage at them, watching them shrink beneath him as he did.
Except that they were staying the same size.
Gareth was growing. Elongating.
Transforming.
The four manacles shattered as he flexed mighty limbs, covered over now with bronze scales inspired by two scared Yuudixtl scientists, willing to risk everything to undo the evil they had unleashed on the galaxy.
Reptilian Pandoras trying to find Hope at the last.
Marc Sarzynski stood frozen in shock as he watched.
Gareth leapt into the air, trusting the instincts Talyarkinash had programmed as mighty wings unfolded from his back and began to beat. A tail swished behind him like a great rudder as he was suddenly airborne, racing towards the suddenly low-hanging ceiling overhead.
A sound below drew his attention. A stunner pistol firing. At him.
The range was too great for such a small weapon to be effective, but both of the Warreth women would not let that dissuade them. They continued to fire. A gray-furred Nari male joined in after a second.
Gareth had no interest in finding out if the weapons would stun his new form, but he also didn’t want to simply annihilate them all, as much as the beast in his breast called for it.
He banked at the far end of the warehouse and set his eyes on the array of species representing Sarzynski’s gang. Wings beat a tattoo on the sky and he dove, weaving back and forth to avoid the fire.
He would not kill them unnecessarily. Fear of dragons was a thing all humans seemed to be born with. Gareth hoped that these other species, who had already learned to fear a human, might acquire an even greater fear of a dragon.
He took a breath and opened his mouth, screaming pure fury at them like a physical assault.
Dragonfear.
They broke, scattering in mindless panic as they tried to find a door out of the building.
Anything to escape their worst nightmare made flesh before their very eyes.
“GARETH!” Marc screamed as Gareth pivoted on a wing and began a second pass.
Gareth found the man. He had not moved at all, except to grab Talyarkinash by the fur on the back of her head and pull it back to expose her throat.
“I’ll kill her,” he warned, almost touching her with the tip of that scalpel.
Gareth swung around in a tight arc, watching the rest of the gang flee, including the three with enough anger to shoot before. Just to make a point, he picked out a spot, high on a nearby wall, and trusted Talyarkinash again.
Fire erupted from his open snout, a great gout of flames that licked the wall and scorched it down to the metal in an instant, raising the temperature in the room several degrees as metal oxidized under that assault.
The rabbits ran even harder.
Gareth turned his attention back to Marc, holding a hostage he would kill, even knowing that Gareth could immolate him a moment later.
It was time to talk, finally.
Gareth circled one last time and swooped in to land, nowhere close to the one known as Maximus and his hostage, but instead crushing Marc’s throne under the immense weight of a twenty-meter-long dragon. One of mankind’s greatest terrors, soon to be something the criminals of the Accord of Souls learned to fear as well.
He felt his tail flicker angrily behind him, knocking things over with a variety of sounds. Rear paws had grown talons, which he dug into the wood of the small stage, splintering it loudly. Front paws came down and flexed as well. His wings folded to half-mast, not retracted, but not spread to full extension.
“What have you done?” Marc screamed, almost mindlessly.
“She made me into something that could stop you, Marc,” Gareth said in a voice that sounded like his own, down an entire octave of resonance and anger.
“You’re no longer human,” the man raged, amazed.
“Nor are you, Maximus,” Gareth replied coldly. “Remember that. You have chosen to become a Vanir, among your other enhancements. You are no longer human either.”
Gareth let his weight settle forward, like a cat resting, except he kept all four paws out for quick movement. His eyes had enough peripheral vision to see nearly the entire space of the warehouse behind him. He watched the last three, the dangerous criminals: the two Warreth and Nari, get to an outside door and flee into the night without once looking back.
Let them go. They had the fear of a dragon carved into their souls now. As he had intended from the start. They would take that with them and infect the entire underground with it, fighting half of his future battles for him.
“Stay back,” Marc threatened, jerking Talyarkinash’s head hard enough to elicit another yelp of pain from her. “I’m warning you.”
“I will make you a deal, Marc,” Gareth rumbled. “Put the knife down without hurting her and walk away. If you do not, you will never make it out of this building alive. But I will let you go, right now.”
“Let me go?” Marc’s mind seemed to have snapped. “What kind of a deal is that?”
“I will make you that promise on my honor, Marc Sarzynski,” Gareth said. “For old times’ sake. We were both members of the Earth Force Sky Patrol, once upon a time. You know what my word is worth.”
“Just walk away?” Marc asked, sanity creeping slowly back into his voice. “Just like that?”
“Just like that, Marc,” Gareth promised. “Tomorrow, I will begin to hunt you again, in earnest, but today you and your kind are free to go. The price is the lives of Talyarkinash Liamssen and the two Constables.”
“Your word?”
“Yes, Marc,” Gareth acknowledged.
Talyarkinash hissed in surprise when Marc Sarzynski suddenly let go of her hair. Gareth watched him step to the table and replace the knife he had picked up earlier, grabbing a bandage and strapping it around the oozing wound in the woman’s left arm.
Marc reached down and undid one of the straps holding her in place, freeing her right arm. He placed her hand over the bandage, so she could hold it in place.
Gareth held his breath as Marc Sarzynski, the criminal mastermind known as Maximus, turned to face him one last time.
“Until tomorrow, Gareth,” he nodded.
“Until tomorrow, Marc,” Gareth replied.
The Vanir warrior, who had once been his best friend, when they were both humans, turned and began to walk away.
“That’s it?” a new
voice raged into the empty silence.
Gareth and Marc both turned to Constable Baker, apparently awake now. She must have been silently biding her time, but Gareth could understand.
“That’s it, Eveth Baker,” Marc said.
He turned and quickly made his way to an exit.
“You’re letting him go?” she turned and directed her bile up at Gareth.
“For now,” Gareth reassured her as the door slammed shut on Marx Sarzynski.
Carefully, he made his way down from the platform, kicking the uncomfortable, crushed remains of Sarzynski’s throne to one side as he did.
Gingerly, he reached out a giant paw and tugged as the bindings holding Talyarkinash to the chair, snapping them with the razor edge of his talon.
“It worked,” she said with an awe-tinged voice. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“No, Talyarkinash Liamssen,” Gareth replied. “Thank you for saving mine.”
“Release me,” Eveth Baker demanded as Talyarkinash rose and hugged Gareth’s serpentine neck with her good arm. “That bastard’s getting away.”
Gareth turned to the female officer, noting with interest that both of them were awake, and that the dangerous-looking man was watching with steely eyes even more interested than hers.
“Tell me, Constable Baker,” Gareth asked. “What is your word of honor worth?”
Constable
Gareth the Vanir looked up as the door to the hospital room opened, admitting Eveth Baker and Jackeith Grodray. He saw another pair of armed Constables guarding the room from the outside before the door closed again firmly.
Talyarkinash had been seated next to Gareth’s hospital bed, where she had been eagerly consuming some medical article on her pocketcomm. She put it down now and looked up expectantly.
Gareth considered the several empty dishes on the tray stretched across the bed. He hadn’t felt the need to be in a private clinic, but had been unable to convince anyone else that he felt fine.
At least they had been feeding him better food than he remembered from his previous hospital stay, and enough for three people. And he had been able to transform himself back into a human, well, a Vanir, although that had left him so exhausted that he had been at the mercy of the two cops. But they had only brought him here.
