Bound

by Alan Baxter

  ‘They are your death,’ the bald man called out. ‘You’ve eluded me for long enough.’

  Alex looked past the three women. ‘And who the fuck are you?’ he called back. ‘You’re the one been sending things after me? You’re Hood?’

  Mr Hood smiled broadly. ‘You know my name? Marvellous. Yes, I’m Hood.’ He indicated the woman beside him. ‘And this is Sparks. And I will take what you have now.’

  Alex could feel realms bending and shifting around him, through him. He sensed other worlds, space and time itself, a malleable, interchangeable thing. Through it all Uthentia pounded against the nothing that held him trapped, clawing at the last shred of himself trapped in the cursed book in Alex’s pocket, desperate to pull himself back through to reality by the re-formed stone that had exiled him. Uthentia remembered the magic that had trapped him and strove to use it again. And the magic remembered him.

  Alex existed across time, saw through time, felt the near panic of the Eld as they battled to control the Darak they had created. He saw them struggling to direct its power against Uthentia. Kin fought tooth and nail with Fey while the Eld fought a creature more god than animal. And he understood their compromise.

  The sliver of Uthentia trapped in the book was a memory of the godling that nearly destroyed the world. It couldn’t be cast out any more than a person could forget to breathe. However much people might like to forget the horrors that befall them, the memories are always there. It was the memory of Uthentia that was trapped and that was his power, what he clung onto from beyond. The part which could never be exiled. It was necessary.

  Alex pulled the grimoire from his pocket, held it up. ‘You want this?’ he asked. Magesign swirled around it, thick as smoke from burning rubber. The three women straightened as one, took a few paces back.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Hood yelled at them.

  Alex pulled off the ragged remains of his jacket and shirt, his bare torso still slick with the sweat of his struggle to control the Darak. The stone gleamed darkly, dead centre of his chest. ‘You want this?’ he shouted, pointing at it.

  Hood’s voice sounded strained, panicky. ‘Sisters, you are bound to me! Do as I say. Kill him and take those things!’

  Blonde turned to Hood. ‘You have no idea what he has. That magic is a blight beyond anything you could imagine.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Hood screamed. ‘Do as I say!’

  Blonde shook her head. ‘We can’t give you that power.’

  ‘It would bind with us the moment we killed him,’ Red said, backing away further.

  Hood’s eyes were wide, his face flushed red in fury. ‘You are bound to do as I command!’ Tendons stood out in his neck like shipping ropes.

  Blonde laughed. ‘No, Hood.’

  ‘We asked for nine,’ Red said, still backing up.

  ‘You gave us ten,’ said Brunette. She and Blonde stepped back as well, the three of them moving aside.

  Alex faced Hood across an open expanse of cold, hard stone and shale. Volcanic smoke drifted across the ground, curling about their legs like curious snakes. Sparks stood beside Hood, looking stricken, torn between staying beside him and running for her life.

  Hood shook in anger, his hands clenching before his chest. ‘You cheated me!’ he screamed.

  Blonde bubbled with laughter. ‘You cheated yourself, little man. You can’t play with us. Who do you think you are, really?’

  Alex began vibrating with the power coursing through him. Uthentia strained at his bonds, desperate to break through, and Alex planned to let him. He gestured towards Hood with the book. ‘You want what I have?’ he said, his voice quiet yet travelling preternaturally across the distance. ‘Catch!’ He spun the grimoire like a Frisbee through the air.

  Hood gasped, shoving Sparks aside. He stepped forward to catch it, confusion twisting his features. As it landed in his hands, Alex let Uthentia out.

  The air ripped with the sound of realms tearing and the earth shook. A massive inconceivable entity pounded into the world, laughter booming through the sky. Everything darkened in his shadow, everything froze in his passing. Frost instantly rimed every rock, crackled crystalline on every bit of skin. The book burst into confetti in Hood’s hands, the memory rejoining the actual. The Dark Sisters and Sparks scrambled away as Hood dropped to his knees in the face of absolute chaos. Alex thrummed with power. Silhouette cried out behind him. ‘Alex, what have you done?’

  ‘I’m fixing a mistake,’ he said, gritting his teeth as he held on to the force that threatened to tear him apart.

  Uthentia, whole again and fifty feet tall, arched up into the clouds, screaming his joy at the firmament. His memory had been removed from its attachment to Alex’s soul, the book destroyed. Alex called out to the reminiscence of the Eld, begging their help wherever they might be.

  Uthentia sensed the Darak. He spun around to face Alex, enormous, black and twisted. Alex’s mind struggled to understand what he saw, tried to conceive more dimensions than he knew existed. Uthentia stood tall, a monstrous, heavily muscled creature, wrapping and warping through multiple forms. His skin shone dark and thick, rippled with scales and scars, then smooth as ice. His limbs seemed human, then animal, first four, then six, then eight, taloned and reaching. His features swam through one hideous form after another. He roared from a lionesque mouth before his lips writhed into reaching tentacles. His eyes burned with fire, gleamed blackly in the daylight, shifted from two to four to eight to two.

  Alex gathered every bit of power he had and channelled it through the stone embedded in him. Uthentia remembered the Darak and the Darak remembered him.

  The incomprehensible godling bellowed, striding across the distance in two mighty steps, raising arms that twisted and turned through dimensional impossibilities to crush Alex into the rock. And the Darak worked its magic again. Energy poured out of Alex in luminescent waves and pulses, engulfing Uthentia. Alex dug in as the magic he wielded drove him back. His feet gouged furrows through rock as he stood against a god. The Darak had the power, the Eld had created it, he had to channel it. Only he had bonded with it in a way the Eld never had. He controlled it with himself, the same way he controlled himself every time he fought. Uthentia screamed in rage as realms bucked and folded, wrapping the Fey godling up again. His deafening voice cracked across the sky, like a thousand demons shouting at once. ‘Memory is eternal!’

  Alex understood that. He had learned from the Eld. They had to let a shred of Uthentia stay and so did he. But they had been surprised. He was prepared. As Uthentia split and churned between the walls of realities, he cast forth that shred of his consciousness again, looking for a hook in reality. Alex directed the power of the Darak and caught that memory, wrapped it in the magic the Eld had imbued in the stone, and guided it. This is what had cracked the Darak before and would do so again, but not before he made sure it was contained this time.

  He fixed his eyes on Hood, still on his knees across the broken ground, shaking and piss-stained. Using every bit of power the Darak could muster, he sent that piece of Uthentia’s consciousness directly at the bald man. ‘You want what I had?’ he yelled. ‘You can have it!’

  Hood arched backwards, lifted from his knees and flew back across the loose ground. As the Darak forced Uthentia once again into the exile of nothing between realms, screaming, Alex released the full potential of the stone and the part of Uthentia that had been the book became Hood. Alex shrieked in agony, his chest exploding as the Darak cracked again.

  Hood shrieked, slamming his palms either side of his head. He thrashed on the ground, pulling at his face. Sparks wailed, running to his side. She dropped to her knees, sobbing, trying to hold him as he writhed. She looked at Alex with pure, uncomprehending hatred.

  ‘Oh, that’s beautiful!’ Blonde shouted at Alex. ‘You trap Uthentia in a man! But it won’t last long. It will destroy his mind in minutes and move on.’

  Alex grimaced with concentration, eyes watering with the pain of his ru
ined chest, desperate to stay conscious. ‘It needs another person if it plans to move on,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘That’s how it works, moving from one thing to the next, living on in one item or another, making that thing indestructible. And this time I’ve sealed it in him!’ He drew against his own magic, his own authority. He remembered the pages of Welby’s grimoire of elemental magic, water, air, fire and earth. He sent his mind down into the earth beneath them, drove his will between the rocks and into the liquid red magma below. The shattered Darak burned like shards of red-hot iron, embedded in his flesh. It still held power and he used it. He forced his mind through fissures in the rock directly below Hood, cracked the earth itself wide open. Hood cried out, scrabbling at the shattering rock as it opened up around him. Heat shimmer and smoke belched up from the glowing red pit beneath. Sparks scrambled back on hands and heels as Hood slipped down into the furnace lake, his fingers clawing desperately at the edges.

  Sparks screamed, clapping her hands to her mouth as Hood slid inexorably, fast running out of anything to slow him as his newly indestructible fingertips shredded the rock. She stood frozen to the spot, her hands stretched out across the gap between them. ‘ROBERT!’ she cried.

  Hood’s eyes were wide, terrified, as his grip finally failed and he slipped from sight into the burning fissure. ‘CATRIONAAAAA!’ his voice howled as he fell into churning depths of molten rock. The name became screams of unimaginable agony as his body burned. But the screams didn’t stop, echoing on and on. Hood burned but couldn’t die, indestructible with the shred of Uthentia’s consciousness trapped inside him.

  With the last of his power, as darkness closed in all around, Alex slammed the broken earth shut, trapping Hood and Uthentia in an eternal prison of fiery liquid torture. He heard the Sisters’ laughter and Sparks’s screams as he gave in to the pain. Silhouette rushed forward, grabbed hold of him, and blackness closed tight as he collapsed.

  30

  Strange noises swam around Alex’s mind. Blackness surrounded him and the weight of a planet pressed down on his chest. He hitched a painful breath. Given the discomfort he decided he probably hadn’t died. The sounds resolved into voices, an odd lilting language he didn’t recognise. Perhaps it was Icelandic. He tried to open his eyes.

  A shadow moved over him and as his eyelids peeled apart he saw Silhouette. Her smile lit up, relief and love in her eyes. She pressed her lips against his, murmuring through the kiss. He sucked in a breath as she moved away. ‘Don’t suffocate me!’ he said, his voice weak. ‘Not after all that.’

  She laughed, moved around, kissed his cheek, his forehead, his chin. ‘You son of a bitch,’ she said. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  His eyes focused on soft, low light hovering around a room of rough-hewn grey stone. Other faces floated by, looking on with interest. ‘Where am I?’ he asked.

  ‘Safe,’ Silhouette said. ‘This is a Den in Selfoss.’ She smiled at his confusion. ‘We’re still in Iceland.’

  ‘Frigeir actually waited for us?’

  ‘No way. He fled. So did the pilot who brought the others in. You remember the Sisters?’

  Alex winced, recalling the hideous evil they exuded. ‘Yeah. They helped us?’ He found that hard to believe.

  ‘Kinda. They were so entertained by what you did to Hood they passed word on to this Den to come and get us. I looked after you in Ovidius’s cave until help arrived.’

  ‘Wonders will never cease. Funny ally to find in all this. What about that Sparks woman?’

  Silhouette grimaced. ‘They took her with them. She was gibbering mad anyway, I think.’

  Alex wasn’t surprised. He felt a twinge of guilt at what he’d done to Hood. For all his efforts at trying to avoid turning into a monster he had condemned that man to an eternal torment, a literal hell. But he’d had little choice and Hood was hardly an innocent. Alex found it hard to believe anyone could really be bad enough to deserve what he’d done, but the man had tried to have Silhouette and him killed. Why should he care? For aeons Uthentia had found pockets of torment in one form or another, trapping and killing people throughout history. While Alex may have damned Hood to something unimaginable, no one would ever suffer like that again. He would carry the guilt of what he’d done forever, but at least he could try to console himself with the thought of all the lives he might have saved. Including his own. Or was he just rationalising his selfishness?

  Silhouette stroked his cheek. ‘You did what you had to,’ she said quietly. ‘I can see you struggling with it, Iron Balls. Don’t. You did what you had to.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No one has ever managed what you did. You’ve stopped the final influence Uthentia has in this realm.’

  Alex frowned. He couldn’t get the image of Hood burning for eternity out of his mind. ‘At what cost?’ he asked, his voice breaking.

  ‘What you did to Hood was no less than he deserved,’ Silhouette said.

  ‘No one deserves that.’

  Silhouette shook her head. ‘Really? You know what those creepy Sisters told me? Hood had tried to secure their services with the lives of children. Only he’d given them ten children when they’d asked for nine, so his binding didn’t take. They thought it was funny.’ Her face twisted in horror. ‘He sacrificed ten kids trying to get to you and they’d been toying with him all along.’

  Alex couldn’t understand. ‘Sacrificed?’

  ‘Hood kidnapped children and fed them to those evil bitches, Alex. He deserves to burn forever.’

  Alex closed his eyes. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘Maybe he does, after all.’ His hand crept up to his chest, feeling gingerly across the tender flesh. It was hot and swollen.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ Silhouette said. ‘It needs to heal.’

  He shifted up onto one elbow, pulled the cover aside. His chest was a ragged network of puffy red scars, throbbing with pain. There were three dark shards like glass merged with the flesh around his solar plexus. He touched one gently, felt it pulsing with power in time with his heartbeat. ‘The Darak,’ he whispered.

  Silhouette nodded. ‘Andrea said it’s a part of you now. It’s broken, but it can’t be removed because you and it are one and the same thing. She said you have amazing strength to have survived that. And those pieces are still very powerful, even I can feel that.’

  She was right, the strength of the Darak, even cracked, coursed through him, pulsed with his lifeforce. ‘Andrea?’ he asked.

  ‘She runs this Den, the Clan Lord here.’

  Alex stared at his chest. The pressure, the constant, insistent rage that had been part of him, had vanished. He felt lighter, clearer, stronger than ever. Even though the stone had broken, its magic engorged him, unfettered by Uthentia’s desire. ‘Part of me.’ It already felt like the Darak had always been there.

  ‘Yes.’ Silhouette ran one fingertip gently over a piece of the ancient stone. ‘You’ve bonded with it, become part of it. You always will be. It would kill you to remove it and effectively kill the Darak too. So there’s really no point in anyone hounding you for it any more.’

  ‘Joseph,’ Alex said. ‘I wonder if he’ll ever forgive you.’

  Silhouette made a rueful face, but there was mischief in her eyes. ‘Ever is a long time. Besides, Joseph has a soft spot for me.’

  ‘So do I,’ Alex said. He ran one finger over the shards again, a deep ticklish sensation thrumming in his heart. ‘For a moment there, while it was whole, it was incredible.’

  Silhouette smiled. ‘I remember. But it’s still whole. You and it together. It just bears scars, like you do.’

  The power of the stone travelled through him like his blood and his breath. ‘More than human, eh?’

  Silhouette kissed him. ‘A lot more.’

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would simply not have existed without the tremendous help of my friend Paul Haines. He turned the original manuscript into something special with his expert, brutalising and often hilarious crit
ique. I’m forever grateful, and I miss you, buddy.

  Also invaluable to this book are Angela Slatter and Joanne Anderton, great friends and great critiquers both. Their help is beyond measure.

  Huge thanks to my wonderful wife, Halinka, whose love and support make anything possible.

  My great thanks also to Alex Adsett, superagent, and to Rochelle Fernandez and all the amazing team at HarperVoyager. You guys rock.

  To all my friends in the writing community, thanks for your constant encouragement and support. See you at the bar, guys.

  And lastly, thanks to you, dear reader. Thanks for coming on the journey with me. I hope you enjoyed it enough to read Obsidian and Abduction too, because I’d love to share more of Alex Caine’s story with you. And, you know, my son needs new shoes.

  All the places in this book are real, but I’ve taken a few fictional licences with many of them for the purposes of story. Otherwise, any and all mistakes are entirely my own.

  EXCERPT FROM OBSIDIAN

  Read on for a preview of Obsidian,

  Book 2 in the Alex Caine series.

  Available in August 2014.

  1

  The midday sun beat incandescent against everything, the sky impossibly blue. Eddies of sand shifted through crowded streets, hawkers pushed barrows, well-fed owners stood in the shadowed doorways of shops and cafes, coaxing passers-by to sample their wares. Somewhere a camel moaned its dissatisfaction with life and an ancient jeep roared and rattled along the packed dirt road. Voices shouted and cajoled, striped awnings rippled in a hot breeze. In a dim, quiet bar Claude Darvill chewed a plastic straw in frustration, the glass condensing in the dry heat, ice-cold against his hand. He perched his long, lean frame on a bar stool. A broad leather fedora-style hat shaded his face, shadows in his hollow cheeks, tufts of sandy hair escaping all around. Darvill’s free hand pressed an old phone handset to his ear, the black plastic making him sweat where it touched. He sucked frosty Coke through the gnawed straw, chewed again. Finally a female voice crackled. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m still getting no response.’