Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows)

by C. V. Larkin

  Liam pulled to the side of the road. The Corvair didn't park or shut off so much as sputter its way through an agonizingly slow death. Sio muscled the door open. He unfolded himself with a curse as he slammed his head into the doorframe, and watched as Liam removed a pair of pristine brass knuckles from under the driver's seat along with several other lethal and highly illegal looking odds and ends.

  Liam got out of the car, stashing everything in the polyester track pants he was wearing. He slipped on the brass knuckles and smoothed the checkered flannel shirt down against his chest. The Scot's hands lingered a moment as if he were taking inventory. Sio rolled his shoulders to coax the feeling back into his limbs.

  "S' through there," Liam grunted, nodding his head toward a squat structure down the block. Since he'd already changed at Liam's apartment Sio left his gym bag in the car. He locked the passenger door and slammed it shut while Liam snorted in amusement. "Ain't no one able to open that side but you big boy. Ain't nobody lookin' to bust into this piece neither."

  "So you're saying it's not just about the smooth ride."

  "Dick."

  Sio grinned and followed the Scot down the street. Anticipation frothed under the surface of his skin, butting up against the discomfort of being a tourist. This wasn't his lifestyle or his element, it was the temporary balm that filled the void left by the missing pieces in his psyche. Liam fit here. He didn't. He didn't fit into the placid cocoon of well-adjusted normalcy he'd built around the rest of his life either, but fuck it. There was only so much he could do.

  They got to the building and shoved their way through the boards barring entrance and the shattered glass of the front doors. It must have been a factory at some point. The remnants of an indecipherable logo showed through under the thick layers of paint curling like cracked earth off the far wall. A chorus of screaming coupled with the grunting meaty sounds of a fight in progress battered the disintegrating walls. The noise echoed, multiplying, guys screamed themselves raw while fists connected to flesh. The air was rich with the acrid decaying smell of too many bodies in an enclosed space, and the only light came by way of construction floods set up on tripods around the room.

  Liam nodded to a couple of shady figures lurking in the crowd. He raised his left hand, the one with the brass knuckles, and made a gesture that brought both of them over. Sio noticed that he was grinding his teeth and stopped. A thin man in an expensive coat with a contradictory set of jowls wandered over to him. The guy's eyes narrowed in assessment.

  "You're not up for this, pretty. There's no glory to be had here."

  Glory. Sio blinked and started laughing like a lunatic. He couldn't think of a single thing glorious about his life.

  "Sio," Liam bellowed over the roar of the crowd, "get the fuck in there."

  Sio pulled himself together as he was manhandled through the rancid mosh pit toward the center of the room. The thin man stuck doggedly to his side and was glaring at him when he stepped into the ring.

  "Any last words?" the guy asked.

  Sio removed his t-shirt and passed it off. "To glory."

  The air was thicker at the bloodstained edge of the concrete clearing, humid to the point of suffocating. His nerves hummed with awareness as he stood alone in the vacant space. Sio couldn't hear anything over the crowd. He caught a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision and threw himself backward. A sharp burst of pain spilled through his jaw and up into his cheekbone as his attacker darted forward. Sio pivoted and planted a fist into the bastard's sternum.

  They both suffered. The other guy in the ring stumbled back, mouth yawning open and closed like a dying fish. The rotting blackened nubs in the guy's gaping pie-hole revealed that he wasn't on anyone's dental plan and hadn't been for a while. Sio's arm throbbed. He hadn't heard anything pop, but hitting his opponent had been like plugging his fist into a redwood - almost no give at all, and his knuckles were bleeding as if he'd taken them to a cheese grater.

  The human jack-o-lantern hunched in a fighting stance in front of Sio. He had a pale average build differentiated by a covering of faded tattoos. Everything about the guy lent to the deceptive illusion that he was more mass than muscle. The skin of his chest slid around in unexpected ways with the motion of his experimental bouncing jabs. Sio dropped his chin and stared into that lurching torso, waiting for the telltale signs of movement that came before a lightning fast upper cut. The flurry of offensive strikes didn't stop and they didn't let up. The SOB moved like a snake and hit hard. It was like getting knocked around by a sledgehammer.

  Sio's temper cooled into something dangerous with each sharp burst of torment. He dogged an unpleasant combination and landed a couple of hits to the guy's torso before neatly dislocating the prick's arm at the elbow. The thing popped with a wet crack that was loud enough to be heard over the music of the screaming sadists around them.

  His opponent howled and lunged forward, going for a leg sweep and shoving with all of his body weight behind his dislocated arm. Sio traded getting tossed on his ass for a couple of solid blows to the face in rapid succession. His nose broke for the hundredth time and he had a second to wonder why every time hurt like the first before his lip was split to match. He got popped in the eye. It bled a river into his line of sight. The blatant assault catalyzed some dark impulse in his psyche. He could feel it unwinding in sick threads of malice from the core of his dysfunction. It didn't happen often, but he was a mean bastard when he got like this, destructive and not just to himself.

  The guy moved in again and Sio let him get close enough to deliver a couple of body shots so he could crack the bastard's cheekbone on his elbow. He took another love tap to the kidney that was bound to leave him pissing blood for days, had a flash of the night before, and snapped. For an indeterminate amount of time, existence narrowed to an all-out Rock Em Sock Em Robots blur where he couldn't sort out the pain he was inflicting from the pain he was feeling under the blood washed haze of physical exertion.

  He heard his ribs crack before he felt them. The agony exploded in his side and the other guy went down, writhing on the ground in a pain-drunk incoherent mass of sweat, and blood-slicked flesh. Sio's ears were ringing and he was struggling for breath so it took him a minute to realize that the circle around him was silent. He was numb aside from the excruciating pain plaguing every inch of his body. He felt...spent. There was blood everywhere and he had no idea how much of it was his. A trickle of fear came on the heels of the visual.

  Liam shoved his way through the throng and tossed Sio's shirt back. Sio put it on mechanically. He didn't bother to avoid getting blood on it. He was going to throw it out anyway.

  "It's time to leave, mate," Liam said, shoving him toward the exit.

  Sio shrugged him off and aimed for the car. The crowd moved out of his way, giving him a wide berth. They were starting to talk again and the low-level buzz of voices felt nearly as loud as the screaming had. Liam caught up to him by the time he'd made it to the street.

  "How much did you take in?" Sio asked. He wasn't overly interested in the answer. Wasn't interested in anything, but getting back to his place and passing out on the floor.

  "Hundred grand."

  Sio stopped and stared at the other man. Liam shrugged. "Odds weren't in your favor."

  The answer took a minute to digest.

  "Good...maybe now you'll go out and buy a car with seats, cheap bastard."

  Liam only grinned, but he did it the whole way back to SF.

  ****

  Tian was sitting in the living room cleaning an assortment of weaponry. Unfortunately, it didn't distract from the fact she was still squabbling with Ceyla over what they were going to do with George's kid brother. They'd been at it off and on for an hour.

  Their roommate Avery was sprawled out on the smaller of the couches with an economy sized bag of potato chips. He was consuming the damn things with wild abandon and it was difficult to pinpoint whether the open mouth crunching
or the incessant bag rustling was more irritating. Ceyla was glaring at him from her perch on the bar.

  "Why can't you eat popcorn with your entertainment like everyone else?" Ceyla asked.

  Tian released the slide on the 1911 she'd finished and it snapped shut. Avery's eyebrows migrated north toward the thick chestnut mop at his hair line. He grinned unperturbed, revealing wide, even, pearly whites.

  "Kernels get in my teeth."

  He grabbed another six or seven chips out of the bag, shoved them all in his mouth, and crunch louder with bullshit innocence plastered all over his puss. Ceyla looked like she was about to have a conniption.

  "I need a tracking spell," Tian said. "I'll go, and I'll outsource the kid while I'm there."

  Ceyla's head whipped around so she could refocus that bad mood. "We've been over this. The kid's issue could be anything."

  Tian shrugged. "Could be, but if you didn't think he was possessed you'd be a helluva lot calmer than you are right now."

  "Because the bollucks you're suggesting'll get us indebted to the Progeny for not one, but two favors, and to hell with that," Ceyla said. The female was so agitated that she'd had the same bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label in her hand for the last twenty minutes and hadn't consumed any of it.

  "Royal will take blood as payment for the spell as long as he gets to kill me in public. Technically that leaves us on the hook for one."

  "Thrilled to know you can count, mate."

  "Fine," Tian said, tossing the empty weapon on the coffee table for emphasis. "You check the kid. And when it is a demon issue, and you walk out of there with the thing grafted to your ass because you're a draw, you deal with Royal when he comes looking for his minion."

  At the second mention of the demon Progeny's name Ceyla paled to puce. She looked like she was about to blow chunks all over the carpet until she closed her eyes and clenched her jaw in stubborn fury. "He's not going to help the kid if he authorized the possession."

  Avery snorted over on the love seat. "Please, when was the last time you heard of Royal authorizing the possession of a teenager?"

  "I thought you were 'Switzerland'," Ceyla snapped.

  Avery shrugged. "I like to think I'm more like Australia, smoking hot and full of seriously mean shit."

  "Just because we haven't heard of it doesn't mean it hasn't happened," Ceyla persisted. She wasn't going to let this go.

  "Say he did then." Tian selected a silver dagger and its accompanying whet stone off the spread laid out on the coffee table. "If we're involved he's going to assume that you're the one who took it out of the kid, and since we profited from the extraction, and derailed whatever plans he had, we'd owe him for the damage. In fact, we'd owe him bigger."

  Ceyla slid a small baggy from the inside pocket of her jeans and tossed back its oblong blue contents, washing them down with a swig from the bottle she'd been white knuckling.

  "What if we outsourced to a Guardian?" she asked in a small voice.

  Avery's crunching stopped. "You're kidding, right?"

  "They'd take him."

  "The Guardian are goddamned zealots. Those wizards hate our barely human asses, straight up, and I don't want that target on my dick. The only reason they leave us alone now is because they're scared of the Pureblood Sidhe." Avery sighed. "You need to call this what it is, Cey."

  Ceyla shook her head, bit her lip, and stared fixedly at the ground. Stubborn bitch, wasn't going to budge.

  "I'm asking. I'll take the debt on my own."

  "Tian..." Avery trailed off as she shook her head and sheathed the dagger.

  "I still have to play repo. I don't have time for this."

  "Thank you," Ceyla said softly.

  Tian gave the other female a hard look. "Don't forget you said that."

  ****

  Sio was still having trouble breathing as Liam pulled his heap against a curb near the civic center.

  "Tuck an' roll, mate."

  "Go fuck yourself, Liam."

  "Aye, on a nice big pile of the money you just made me."

  Sio shoved open the door and poured himself onto the curb, leaving a sea of tacky red hand prints in his wake. He was halfway through wiping them up with what had once been a clean work shirt before he realized what he was doing...before he realized that Liam was scrutinizing his bizarre behavior. He took one last compulsive swipe at the door and dropped the shirt back into his gym bag in time to catch the stacks of hundreds that Liam lobbed at his head. Those went in the bag too, and ironically he wondered if he had enough loose change on his Bart pass to get him back into the mission. As luck would have it, he did.

  Sio took up two seats on the Bay Area's answer to the subway system as it shuttled him back to the shoe box apartment he managed to afford on his own. On any normal occasion he went out of his way to avoid mass transit. It was too claustrophobic, contained too many strangers who were blatant with their assessments, and their needs, and their agendas. Tonight, he was too beat to shit to care. He must have looked bad though, because almost everyone in eyeshot was pointedly directing their attention elsewhere.

  A few seats in front of him a girl was sketching. Her electric blue bob stuck up at precarious and endearing angles like she'd forgotten to comb it. It framed a pale heart shaped face with delicate bone structure. She was biting her lower lip with the utmost concentration as she appraised him with gigantic cobalt Bambi eyes before burying her head back toward her pad. The way she was mooning between bouts of artistic assessment made him uncomfortable. She was pretty, no question, but too young, and way, way too damn innocent. He had no business anywhere near someone like that.

  A small insistent vibration rocked the left pocket of his gym bag distracting from her scrutiny. Sio cursed the difficulty it took to extract his cell from the abyss and wondered how women ever found anything in the zeppelin sized purses they carried. According to the display screen it wasn't even midnight. He felt like he hadn't slept for a week.

  "Hey Jay. What's going on?"

  "I'm screwed, man, that's what."

  "Good to hear from you too," Sio said. He smiled which made his split lip start to bleed again. He was thrilled to discover that his voice sounded sturdy considering the collapsed lung. Bambi snapped the lead tip off her pencil and, red faced, started digging for another one in the Betty page Caboodle where she kept all of her supplies.

  Sio let out a self-deprecating chuckle. "Unbelievable."

  "Scuse, what?" came the response from the other end of the line.

  "Nothing, never mind. How are you screwed, Jay? And if it's in that fun life-affirming kind of way, hang up the phone and quit crying."

  "Asshole, I wouldn't have called you in the first place."

  "Good man. Why did you?"

  "Bren's coworker Rachel, you remember her, blondish, too much makeup? Anyhoo, Rachel got tickets to a show at The Gates tomorrow night."

  "Christ, it's eleven forty-two and you're calling me about dinner theater?"

  "Uhh, yeah, and Bren really wants to go, says it's supposed to be life altering or some nonsense. You're sort of the catch."

  "Here I thought you enjoyed the pleasure of my company."

  "We do asshole. So if you won't do it for me, take one for team Bren, she really wants to go man."

  Sio cringed at the thought of Bren's co-worker. The woman was pushy, self-important, and too damn handsy. He'd still go. Bren was good people. Hell, she was practically family.

  "You know me," he replied in a falsely bright tone. "I'm all about a cultured evening of frivolity with you and your girl."

  "And Rachel," Jay added.

  "Her too. Meet you there?"

  "The show is at ten. We can swing by yours and collect you."

  "You collecting my date?"

  "She insisted."

  Of course she did.

  "I'll meet you there," he said.

  Jay sounded relieved. "Thanks, Sio. I owe
you."

  "Yeah, yeah, you do."

  Sio looked at the blue-haired pixie and her drawing as he got up to debark. She was a good artist and her sketch was impressive, mostly devoid of idealism. Kid had some serious talent. Then again, if he actually looked the way she'd drawn him he wasn't showing half as bad as he felt, which wasn't damn likely. Ahh, vanity. Maybe that's what prompted him to say what he did. Maybe he wanted one image out there to be more than an illusion of normal. A shooting pain tore through his neck as he leaned down. He ignored it.

  "The eyes should be pale."

  Sio selected a bleached yellow/brown from her bin as she gave him a startled look out of those impossibly wide eyes. She took the proffered pencil with a shaking hand.

  "Use charcoal for the outside edges," he said. He booked it without looking back because the exchange and the beating had left him feeling exposed.

  Chapter 5

  The Lion Tamers

  The Progeny's club was a small brick cottage nestled between two massive warehouses on Fisherman's Wharf. As Tian watched, the wooden slats on the shingled roof rippled with power, flexing and seething like the scales of a snake. The roof undulated, wrapping itself around the brick structure. She stood across the street in the shadow of a tree and observed the protective wards around the place rearranging themselves for the upcoming show. Blood magic from both human and other had made The Gates a fortress. Fear, rapture, lust, and excitement were palpable and screaming out of the sigils surrounding the heavy oak door. She took a deep breath, exhaled, and waded through the crushing energy currents.

  She was smothered in a dense layer of power by the time she made it to the door. No sooner had she set foot to the carved stone mat, a compartment opened up at eye level. Through the one inch by half inch gap, a blood red eye roamed over her, starting at her feet, working its way up until it hit a speed bump at her flat stare. The eyeball widened and recoiled. The door slammed shut and a larger compartment opened, revealing the red eye and a right nostril. The small dark hole flared as the creature on the other side took a pull. The red eye widened again, moved back, and the cutout slammed shut.