Slay

by Kim Curran

  A withered hand wrapped itself around Zek’s neck. Niv stabbed the mummy once, then twice, but his attack had zero effect. The corpse grabbed Niv with its other hand and lifted both boys off their feet.

  JD was cornered by the beast. He jabbed out with his knife, but the thing dodged his blow and then sideswiped him, knocking his blade out of his hand and him to the floor. His head cracked against the concrete floor and he saw stars. Reacting on instinct, he rolled as the beast pounced, dodging deadly claws just in time. Confused, the beast turned on the caveman statue instead, tearing at its head with powerful jaws. When it realized it was chewing on nothing but plaster and sawdust, it turned back to JD, growling.

  JD backed up until he was against the wall. There was nowhere for him to go. Connor lay on the floor, moaning; the twins were still in the grip of the mummy. Only Tom was okay and he was standing in front of Diaz, throwing knives at the ready. Diaz continued to work with her lipstick on the wall, drawing some kind of pattern.

  The demon beast came closer and closer. It roared hot stinking breath into his face and foul saliva splattered onto his skin. JD frantically looked for something, anything, to defend himself with and he saw it by his feet. The caveman’s club.

  It was heavier than he had expected, carved from stone rather than wood. Just as the beast pounced again, he shoved the club hard into its mouth. Powerful teeth slammed down, cracking the stone but not breaking it. The beast snarled, the sound muffled by the club, and shook its head, trying to break free.

  JD spun away, readying himself for another attack. His knife lay on the floor. He leaped for it, but was dragged back by four razor-sharp claws digging into the flesh of his leg. He twisted to see the beast bearing down on him, its now empty mouth open in what JD was almost certain was a smile. It came closer and closer, hissing and snarling.

  JD stared into the blackness of its maw and wondered if this would be the last thing he ever saw.

  Milly crawled in darkness, the sound of her thumping heart almost drowning out the shouts and snarls below. Slay had arrived but followed by…what? The noises coming through the duct didn’t sound human. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she had to keep the blade safe, because if the demons got their hands on it, they’d summon Tezcatlipoca and everything would be lost. She clutched the bundle to her chest, feeling the sharp angles of the blade wrapped inside, and crawled on.

  The duct came to a junction. Should she go left or right? Before she could decide, she heard the sound of laughter echoing up the vent from the room behind her. Familiar and yet wrong. Zyanya. The demon priestess was close. Milly froze. Maybe this was her chance for revenge? Zyanya was here, walking around in her dead mother’s body, and Milly was holding a weapon.

  In the dark, she peeled away the cloth and wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the blade. It fitted perfectly into her grasp, like it had been made for her. A sense of strength seemed to flow through her hand and into her chest. Yes, she could do this. She wasn’t going to run away. She was going to take the fight to Zyanya and damn Mourdant or any other demon who tried to stand in her way. Slay had saved her before. Well, now it was time she saved them.

  She twisted around in the duct, her skin scraping against metal rivets, and started to crawl back towards the opening, back towards the room. The blade glinted in the dim light spilling into the air vent, almost as if it was sucking in the light. She was close now. The noises coming from beneath her were terrible, snarling, renting, screaming, and yet she wasn’t afraid. Maybe for the first time in her life, she wasn’t afraid. She was filled with a burning rage and purpose. Kill Zyanya. Get revenge for her mother. Save the boys.

  She pushed herself through the opening and crashed to the floor. The room was a whirl of chaos. Connor, crumpled in a heap, not moving; the twins being held aloft by a thing with rotting, peeling flesh, and there, in the doorway, was Mourdant, smiling gleefully, still wearing his sunglasses, his hands curled as if choking the air. Behind him stood Zyanya.

  The demon priestess saw Milly and smiled a twisted smile. She wore an expression of glowing pride, which Milly had never, in her whole life, seen on her mother’s face. Never, despite every exam passed, award won or lesson learned, had her mother looked so happy with her. She wanted to believe so much that her mother was still in there.

  “Maman?” Milly said.

  “My child.” The woman reached out her arms.

  She looked at the woman, a moment of hope swelling in her heart. And then the demon’s eyes flashed black.

  “You’re not my mother!” Milly spat. She tightened her grip on the blade and took a step towards the demon priestess. This would end here and now.

  Zyanya waved her hand, as if welcoming Milly forward. Yes, the demon seemed to say, come to me, come.

  Milly heard a terrible snarl and saw a hairy thing fly past her, landing on one of the boys. She couldn’t see who was being attacked. She looked from Zyanya to the demon beast. It was biting and clawing at whichever boy it had trapped. Milly hesitated for barely a fraction of a second and then turned away from Zyanya and charged at the demon beast. She punched out her hand and stabbed its back with the Blade of Shadows. The blade sliced into the thing’s flesh too easily as she stabbed again and again. After a shuddering howl, the beast went still.

  “No!” Zyanya cried out and tried to run into the room. With a blood-chilling screech, she was thrown backwards, as if she’d collided with an invisible wall. Through the doorway, Milly saw what had been her mother’s body lying on the floor, arms bent at unnatural angles, like a wooden puppet that had had its strings cut.

  “Ha! ¡No entrad!” Diaz cried out.

  Milly turned to see the professor standing in front of a symbol drawn in blood-red lipstick. It glowed bright gold.

  “Clever,” Mourdant said. “But your protection symbol won’t last for ever.”

  “It doesn’t need to last for ever.” Tom flicked his wrist and a silver shard cut in front of Milly’s face, causing a curl of her hair to drift, detached, in the slipstream. She followed the trail as it sliced through the air and punched right through the lens of Mourdant’s sunglasses.

  The man raised a hand and delicately pulled his shattered sunglasses off, leaving the throwing knife still sticking out of one black eyeball. He looked down at the glasses with his remaining good eye, then back at Tom.

  “Oh, no,” the demon said, with a sigh.

  Tom pulled another blade out of his jacket and drew back his hand, ready to take another shot. He didn’t need it. Milly stared, transfixed, as Mourdant started to shiver and shake like he was having a fit. His body started to change, his youthful face creasing into saggy wrinkles, his slicked-back hair turning white and then falling out in chunks, his too-white teeth turning brown and dropping out one by one, clattering to the floor. With a screeching hiss, a black shadow burst out of the withered husk of a body and dissipated, leaving only a swirl of dust.

  Milly looked around, trying to process what she was seeing. There was no sign of Zyanya’s broken body through the doorway now. Had she too turned to dust? Next to Milly, the thing that had been holding the twins collapsed to the floor, just a pile of bones and rags. Zek and Niv fell to their knees, choking and gasping for breath. Connor groaned and rolled into a sitting position as Tom rushed to help him. That only left JD.

  He was still pinned by the body of the beast, his face splattered with blood, and there were deep cuts in his leg. With a kick, Milly rolled the creature over, freeing JD. He stared up at her like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The others were looking at her too, a mixture of surprise and amusement on their faces.

  “Milly?” JD said, like he couldn’t believe that the girl who’d saved him and the one standing here now were the same person. It was kind of insulting.

  “Well,” she said. “Are you going to lie there all day?”

  The light from Diaz’s symbol still glowed.

  “What is that?” JD asked, wiping the bloo
d from his face.

  “Scarlet Heart,” Diaz said, reading off the bottom of her lipstick.

  “I think he meant—” Tom started.

  “I know what he meant,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s the symbol of Quetzalcoatl. Tezcatlipoca’s eternal opposite. God of creation and light.”

  “And it acts as protection against Tezcatlipoca?” Connor said, walking up to it and tracing his finger around the outline. “That is seriously deadly.”

  “Seems so.” Diaz popped her lipstick and the green book back in her bag.

  “Seems? You mean, you didn’t know?” JD asked.

  “It was an educated guess. Exceedingly educated, if I’m telling the truth. It worked, didn’t it? Zyanya couldn’t enter the room, which is why she had to send her pet in.” Diaz kicked at the body on the floor.

  JD turned his attention to the dead demon beast. As he watched, golden fur receded into dark skin, long claws retracted under human fingernails, till the beast had transformed back into the body of a large man, head shaved, empty eyes staring up at the ceiling.

  “Oh no,” Milly said. “Not him.”

  “Who?”

  “He was my mother’s driver,” Milly said, covering her mouth with her hand. “He was nice. He liked milkshakes.”

  JD noticed a rough symbol carved into the man’s arm. Had he been a willing host? he wondered. Or had he been forced to give up his body to the demon?

  “Didn’t the diary say that when Zyanya escaped the massacre she was guarded by a group of Jaguar Warriors?” Zek said. “It seems like at least one has returned to protect her again.”

  Diaz stood over the body. “I never realized how literal the name Jaguar Warrior was – that they had the power to actually transform into jaguars. Fascinating.”

  “This is a man we’re talking about,” Milly said, pointing the black blade at the body. “A man that I…”

  “You saved me,” JD said, before the girl could finish. He could still feel the hot breath of the beast on his face. He had been absolutely sure that he was going to die…and the really worrying thing was that he’d been okay with it. It was how he expected to go out. Screaming into the face of some evil thing. But thanks to Milly, he was still here. Still fighting.

  “But you shouldn’t have,” he finished.

  Milly shook her head. “What? You’re telling me I should have let you die?”

  “I’m telling you,” JD said, stepping closer, “that keeping the Blade of Shadows safe is more important than me. More important than any of us.” He waved his arm in the direction of the rest of the band.

  “The air duct was smart,” Tom said, stepping between them.

  “Yes, and she should have stayed up there,” JD snapped.

  “I’ll remember that for next time a great big beast is tearing your face off, shall I?”

  “Yes!”

  JD and Milly glared at each other. JD wanted to thank her; he wanted to wrap her in a hug and make sure she was okay; he wanted to say what he really meant, which was that she was the thing that was more important than him or any of them. That it was her, not the blade, that he had to keep safe.

  “Shame about the dress,” Zek said, breaking the tense silence.

  “Huh?” Milly looked down at herself and the black grime that covered the red silk. She then looked at her hand holding the blade. It was coated in the demon beast’s blood.

  She stretched the blade out in front of her, as if trying to get as far away from it as possible. “Take it, take it,” she said to Diaz.

  The professor took the blade gently out of Milly’s hand, which was shaking along with her whole body. It looked like she might be going into shock. Before JD could move, Tom was there. He rested his hand on Milly’s face for a moment, then pulled Milly into a hug. JD felt a sting of envy as the hug went on for an uncomfortably long time.

  To distract himself, JD looked at the blade in Diaz’s hands. They’d risked so much to protect it and might not be so lucky next time. He grabbed it out of Diaz’s hands and threw it to the floor as hard as he could. It thudded, as if landing on a soft pillow.

  “What are you—”

  He stamped on the blade. Still nothing. He looked around for something that he could use to destroy it. His eyes landed back on the club lying on the floor. It was heavy, made from stone, just what he needed.

  “Please, no,” Diaz said, standing between JD and the blade. “It needs to be studied, understood.”

  “It needs to be destroyed,” JD said.

  “He’s right,” Milly said, stepping away from Tom. “They can’t get it. This blade can be used to bring back a god of demons; we can’t let it fall into the wrong hands.”

  Diaz closed her eyes and then stepped away, her hands held up in surrender.

  JD lifted the club above his head and brought it down with all of his strength. A purple light blasted out of the blade and the club shattered as if it had been made of clay.

  The Blade of Shadows lay on the floor, not so much as a scratch on its dark surface.

  “Well, how about that?” Connor said.

  Diaz bent down to retrieve the blade.

  JD covered it with his foot before she could touch it. “Professor,” he said warningly.

  “I know,” Diaz said, “I know. It has to be destroyed. But the question is, how? So if you would let me examine it?” JD lifted his foot so that Diaz could pick it up. She held it to the light. “Interesting.”

  “What is?” JD said, grateful of the distraction.

  “This symbol.” She angled it so that JD could see the engravings on the hilt. “It looks like the symbol for a key.”

  “Can’t we just, like, chuck it in Lake Michigan?” Connor said, gesturing over his shoulder.

  Niv held his hand up and signed dropping something. “Yeah, or drop it in a volcano?” Zek said.

  “Do you see any volcanoes around?” Tom said.

  Zek shrugged.

  “I will call my contacts in Mexico,” Diaz said, handing the blade back to JD. “Maybe one of them will have heard of this.”

  “Okay,” JD said. “And until then, we will keep it safe.”

  When they arrived back on the upper floor of the museum, the party was over. Only a few cleaning staff were buzzing around, sweeping up broken glass and crushed canapés, as the boys filed out of the exit with Milly and Diaz.

  They all stood at the top of the stairs, looking down on the plaza below.

  “To think”, Diaz said, running her fingers through her hair and untangling the bun it had been in, “these things I have studied my entire life, these gods and mythic beings, are not so mythic after all.”

  “Quite the rush, hey?” Connor said, hitting Diaz with his full-watt smile.

  “What? Oh, no, I much prefer my books. In fact, I am going to go home now and consult them. See if there’s anything that might be able to explain what I’ve seen tonight. Even for a mind as agile as mine, it’s been a lot to take in.”

  “If you find anything…” JD reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a business card, one of the few he carried for moments just like this. It had their real contact number on it. “And thank you, professor,” JD said. “Without you…”

  “I was lucky,” she said with a shrug. “We all were.”

  They said their goodbyes and headed back to the jeep, which now had a yellow parking ticket stuck to the front.

  “You might think they’d let you off when you’re busy saving the world,” Zek said, peeling it off the window.

  He threw it to Niv, who added it to the collection in the glove compartment. Niv would hack the system later and this ticket would vanish.

  Zek drove, with his brother in the seat next to him. Connor leaped into the boot seat, while JD and Tom sat in the back with Milly between them.

  “So,” Connor said, leaning over the seat and squeezing his head between Milly and Tom’s. “We killed the bad guys, got the evil blade of doom or whatever, and saved the girl!
”

  “Oi!” Milly said. “I think you have that the wrong way around!”

  Connor winked at her. “You know what this calls for?”

  “A party?” Zek said.

  “A party!” Connor grinned.

  JD forced a smile as the other boys whooped. They’d seen Mourdant turn to dust before their eyes, Zyanya had vanished and they had the blade. And yet, JD was pretty sure that Tezcatlipoca wasn’t finished with them quite yet.

  He looked at Milly, who was staring out the window. She wasn’t smiling either. He reached out his hand and took hers. She didn’t resist, interlacing her fingers with his.

  Grit rattled against the bodywork as Zek slammed on the gas and drove them home.

  The shower wasn’t hot enough to scrub away the dirty, dark feeling that coated Milly. No shower in the world would be. Not even bathing in lava would do it. She could still feel the beast’s blood on her hands. The shock of what she’d done was fading and the guilt was pouring in. She tried to tell herself that she’d had no choice. It was the demon or JD. But it wasn’t working. As well as that, she kept thinking about the expression on her mother’s face in that moment. No, she told herself, Zyanya’s face. Her mother was gone. Dead.

  Was it true? Had they really defeated the priestess tonight? The boys were celebrating, but she couldn’t help feeling that it wasn’t over.

  After twenty minutes of standing in the increasingly cold water, Milly finally gave up. Pulling on fresh clothes, she wrapped her old ones up in a bundle, and then hesitated before picking up the blade. She hadn’t realized she’d taken it into the shower with her. She placed it inside the bundle of her clothes and went to join the others.

  Tom was playing his keyboards and singing. Milly recognized the song as the one she’d heard on TV what seemed like a lifetime ago. Tom’s voice wasn’t as strong as JD’s but it was still good – sweet and clear. Connor hung, upside down, off one of the bunks, drumming on the floor, while Gail pounded her stick along in time. Meanwhile, Zek and Niv were in some kind of hip hop dance-off, each pulling off moves that the other would then try and beat. Zek was good, but Niv was the clear winner.