Bloody Banquet

by Leod D. Fitz

  Unfortunate. If he had managed to overhear us, it might've been enough to point them away from me.

  Well, maybe I could pull that off anyhow. “I don't have your precious key,” I called out. “But I know who does.”

  “What are you doing!” Sherry hissed as she pulled her clothes back on.

  “I'm trying to survive the night,” I replied.

  “By selling out your lord?”

  I blinked at her. “My lord? I don't have a lord. I have a business relationship, that's all.”

  “You can't betray him like this!”

  “Betray him?” I raised an eyebrow. “I'm not betraying anybody. As it happens, he's better capable of defending himself than I am, plus, you know, he actually has their precious key, so he can make some kind of deal with them.”

  Sherry shook her head. “I can't let you betray him, Walter. I'll kill you first.”

  Kill me? If she had a machine gun on her, I might have actually worried that she was capable of it, but as it stood... as it stood, what worried me more than being murdered was the possibility of ending our... whatever-it-was. Then again, if I didn't share what I knew, I had the giant and whoever else he'd brought with him to deal with.

  I closed my eyes and forced myself to take a centering breath.

  “Don't keep us in suspense, little shiteater,” the giant called from outside the door. “Who has the key?”

  The real question is, if I did tell them, would it change anything? Would they calmly let me go, or would they decide to check my claims by burning my flesh an inch at a time to see if my story changed?

  And there was that other little detail as well: did I want to help them in their quest? Apparently, they were trying to free some kind of horrific beast. Did I want to be a part of that?

  I sighed. “Yeah, the key is apparently hidden up your ass, big guy.” I called out. “I suggest you get one of your friends to crawl in there and dig around until they find it.”

  The rumbling from the other side of the door reminded me of a motorcycle engine, though I was fairly certain it was coming from somebody’s throat.

  Sherry put a hand on my shoulder and lowered her voice to a whisper. “What are we going to do?”

  “You're going to run,” I whispered back. “Get to your car and get the fuck out of here. Tell Aldred what's going on. Maybe he can make some kind of deal with them.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I grimaced. “Don't worry about me. I'll get through this, one way or another.”

  Sherry opened her mouth to reply, but was cut off by the sound of shattering glass.

  The form that flew through the window wasn't as tall as the giant, but it was broader. It took me a moment to realize that it's massive surface area was due to all of the extra limbs. It had an extra pair of arms and an extra pair of legs, all heavily muscled.

  I got between the intruder and Sherry, catching one pair of hands, and accepting the blows raining down on me from the other pair.

  Tucking my body, I managed to put my legs between myself and my assailant, and kicked out hard enough to send him stumbling across the room, slamming into one of the walls.

  I was planning on following him and getting in a few shots while he was on the ground, but before I could, the door behind me ripped off its hinges and the giant from my trailer grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me out of the room so fast that if I’d been wearing shoes, I probably would have left them behind.

  I slammed into a wall and sank to the ground, stunned. A high-pitched screech followed, and a moment later the giant stumbled across the lot, trying to pull Sherry off of his back with one hand, while he defended his eyes from her nails with the other.

  I was just starting to move towards them to give her a hand when the man who’d come through our window appeared, grabbing each of Sherry’s limbs with one of his hands and pulling her off of his companion.

  “Fucking blood licking cunt!” the giant howled, turning around and punching her once in the gut.

  He’d made the mistake of turning his back to me for that cheap shot. I made sure he regretted it, attaching myself to pretty much the same spot Sherry had been in. But where she only had razor sharp nails to work with, I could dig in with my feet and teeth as well.

  I was just starting to tear my way into the man when suddenly we were both airborne. The giant had jumped as high as he could, and came down on the hard cement with only me as a cushion.

  For a moment, I felt like a tick being crushed between a thumb and fingernail. It occurred to me, for one terrifying second, that perhaps the pressure had been too much and my insides had just shot out of me, and the only thing keeping me from unimaginable pain was shock.

  Then the giant rolled off of me and lifted me into the air with one giant paw.

  “Shit-eating worm!” He slugged me in the face hard enough to knock a couple of teeth loose.

  I shook off my befuddlement and reached up, catching the hand that held me with both of my own.

  I don’t claim to be any kind of expert in violence. Never have been. But for a few years when I was growing up, my brother did study martial arts. And in the grand tradition of all teenage boys with younger brothers, he faithfully practiced absolutely everything he learned on me.

  Being a ghoul, I was more than capable of taking what he dished out, and most of the time I did exactly that. I stood still and took the hits, because I knew that if I took things personally, the damage I could do to him would be more permanent than what he was doing to me. But after a while I did pick up a couple of tricks from him, including several wrist locks.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing that was usually useful, since I can break most people’s bones without much effort, but even after all of those years, I still remembered how it went.

  The giant grunted as I squeezed and twisted. I slid out of his grasp, continuing to twist his arm as my feet hit the ground.

  A moment later the giant was on his knees with his entire arm pinned behind his back.

  I raised a foot to slam into the back of his head, but before I could do it a weight struck me from the side, knocking me away from the giant.

  I turned my momentum into a roll and came up into a crouch, with both feet and one hand pressed against the ground, prepared to dart off in any direction.

  Everything froze for a moment.

  Sherry was laying on the ground, limbs at odd angles, presumably yanked out of their sockets. She had a look of self-righteous rage on her face that I usually only saw after I’d done something unforgivable like suggest that she come over to my place instead of arranging our meetings as though we were committing treason.

  The eight-limbed man and the giant had apparently decided that Sherry was out of the fight, and both of them were oriented on me.

  Now that he was standing in the streetlight, I recognized the scarred face of the eight-limbed man from the photos I’d stolen from Orrin. The trench coat he’d been wearing in that shot made a lot more sense now that I knew what he was hiding under it.

  Like the giant, his scent was off. He carried with him the body odor of a dozen different people… not a dozen people in volume or intensity, but the sweat that escaped from an arm was subtly distinct from that which dripped down his scalp, which was different from the pooling sweat of his genitals.

  As I watched him he adjusted his stance, lowering himself deeper into a bizarre, eight limbed variation of a martial arts stand. He brought his open hands up in preparation for attack or defense and, much to my consternation, I saw mouths open in the middle of each of his palms, revealing sharp, angry teeth.

  The giant smirked at my expression as he slowly circled me, forcing me to divide my attention.

  I sniffed the air, trying to see if there were any other odors I should know about. I found nothing definitive, but that only meant that nobody was lurking upwind of us.

  “Little shiteater. You should know, it took me nearly an hour to extract myself from your home.”


  I nodded. “Yeah, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I should’ve just burned the place down with you inside.”

  The large man chuckled. “Yes, you should have. Then you’d only have to worry about what Andres has planned for you. Now, I can promise you, even once you’ve told us everything you know, your pain will only have just begun.”

  “Uh-huh.” I sniffed again. This time there was something funny in the air. Something unusual. But I couldn’t quite separate it out from everything else around me. Not yet.

  “Come Jayr, you can flay the mortal alive later, right now Andres wants him.”

  Jayr. Jayr the giant. That was a stupid name for a giant.

  The giant grimaced but nodded, lowering himself into a fighting stance.

  I glanced between the two men. Either of them alone had to outweigh me by a hundred pounds. And from what I’d seen, both of them knew how to fight. This was not going to go well for me.

  Unless I could delay it a bit. They’d dismissed Sherry, probably on account of how quickly they’d been able to remove her from the fight, but I happened to know that she could take damage a lot better than most neckbiters. She’d be back on her feet shortly, and if she could surprise them, I might be able to take advantage of the situation enough to get both of us to our cars.

  “You sure you have enough time for this?” I asked. “We haven’t exactly been quiet. Somebody must’ve called the cops by now.”

  Jayr grinned. “Who? Look around you. We cleared the area while you were busy fucking your whore.”

  I glanced around and grimaced. The place was pretty well deserted. No lights in any hotel rooms, a handful of cars, and at least two of them looked like they’d broken down in the lot and simply been left to rust.

  How the hell had they managed to pull that—oh, who fucking cared? Maybe they’d bought the motel, or gone door to door dressed as cops, however they did it, the effect was the same.

  “Make this easy on yourself,” the many-armed man suggested. “If you come peacefully and tell us all you know. You might even live through the night.”

  Jayr growled something in a language I didn’t recognize.

  “I thought Jayr was going to get to flay me alive, later?” I retorted.

  “He might, if you give us much more trouble. Or if Andres decides he doesn’t believe the answers you give him.”

  “Really? You want me to just give up and come with you with the full knowledge that I might still be tortured to death?”

  The eight-limbed man shrugged. “You are coming with us either way. A mortal who throws himself on the mercy of the gods does so because he might find mercy, not because it is guaranteed.”

  “So you’re gods now?”

  The giant grimaced and looked uncomfortable, but the eight-limbed man just smiled wider. “Why not? We live forever, we have powers far beyond human reckoning. The word seems to fit.”

  I rolled my eyes. “The word crazy seems to fit. And if you think I’d even consider turning myself over to the dick who broke into my home, then threatened to skin me— “

  “Jayr is not in charge. Much as he might like to be.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Andres is in charge. And Andres is known to brutally torture people for information.”

  The many-limbed man smiled. “Yes, he is. But only those who do not give him what he wants. He isn’t unreasonable, after all.”

  Coming from a man wearing other peoples’ bodies and who considered himself a god, that meant next to nothing. I stared at the octo-asshole for a few seconds. There was something about him that struck me as… off. Perhaps it was his grinning confidence, or maybe it was the way his eyes didn’t seem to need to move in concert. Whatever it was, I had a feeling that his attachment to reality was something less than certain.

  I grimaced. “I don’t know, he sounds pretty unreasonable to me.” At the periphery of my vision I saw Sherry beginning to move. I just needed to drag this out a little longer. “Besides, I’m not sure I want to help you. Somebody went to the trouble of building an entire mountain to contain that thing, and I’m not sure I want to help you set it free.”

  Jayr and the man-armed creature stopped stock still, their eyes widening in surprise. “How do you know about that!”

  I winced internally. Simon had pieced together the truth about that thing from a diary that only a handful of people in the country could probably translate, and access to one of the most extensive libraries on the planet. And because he was sleeping with someone who knew their way around that library. Hell, even mother hadn’t known what the keys unlocked. They’d probably gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure that nobody knew the truth, and I’d let it slip after about five seconds.

  Nothing to do but play it off. “What? Is it supposed to be some kind of secret? I found out, like, five minutes after I nailed big boy to the wall.”

  The two men looked at each other. “Andres will not be pleased,” Jayr murmured.

  “As long as he has someone else to be displeased with,” octo-dickweed replied.

  I snorted. “Well I’m definitely not coming peacefully, now.”

  The giant smiled. “Good.”

  Though no signal passed between them, the two moved towards me in perfect concert, born, I suspected, of centuries of practice. I raced to intercept Jayr, hoping that if I could reach him first I might be able to take him out of the fight quickly so I could focus my attention on his companion.

  Unfortunately, it seemed, they had seen this tactic before. Jayr immediately slowed his approach, while the eight-limbed man accelerated, and the two reached me at the same time.

  A pair of hands hooked around my arms and locked behind my head, the palms pressing against my neck so that the mouths on them could lock down hard on my flesh.

  His two remaining hands rained down blow after blow into my kidneys.

  The giant, meanwhile, concentrated his attack on my chest and stomach.

  Lacking any other options, I tried to bring my legs up to protect my stomach and slam my head backwards into the head of the man behind me.

  Neither attempt was particularly successful. The arms that held me prevented me from getting a good swing with my skull, and the giant had little trouble batting my legs aside and hitting me in the side.

  I had no idea exactly how long they beat on me, except that it felt like hours, but was probably only a few seconds.

  Suddenly octo-fucker lost his grip on me and stumbled backwards.

  Sherry wrapped her arms and her legs around him, her mouth locked onto the back of his neck, which she tore at like a dog trying to get the last bits of meat off of a bone.

  I fell to the ground, gasping in pain and surprise, but I managed to keep my wits about me well enough to catch the giant’s legs as he tried to move to help his friend.

  “Get off of me!” He shouted, trying to kick me loose.

  I coughed up some blood and yanked harder on his leg, sending him to his knees.

  A few feet away, I saw the many-limbed man trying to knock Sherry off his back by slamming her against a wall.

  I coughed up some more blood and forced myself, unsteadily to my feet.

  The giant was up already as well, and he was inhaling deeply. I was, I realized, about to get hit by a gout of fire, and I didn’t have enough time to get out of the way.

  The part of my brain screaming to move faster was dealing with a body that was quite convinced that it had done its goddamned best already tonight, and wasn’t it time for a good meal and a nice nap?

  I stared, for a thousandth of a second, into the gaping maw of the giant, knowing that once I was rolling on the ground, screaming as I tried to put out the flames, the two chimeras would have no trouble collecting Sherry and myself and taking us anywhere they damned well pleased.

  And that was when the small, fast moving figure slammed into the giant so hard that his shoes left skid marks on the asphalt.

  I blinked in surprise.

  The fence at
the edge of the motel property bent from the impact of the two bodies. The giant, mouth twisted in a snarl, claws flashing, was trying desperately to deal with the absurdly fast figure.

  If I’d had to rely solely on my eyes, I doubt I could have identified him at all, but I had no trouble placing his fishy, magic heavy scent.

  Orrin moved like lightning. He dodged the big man’s blows, slid past his defense and struck with devastating accuracy.

  The scents of the ocean poured off of him, particularly a sharp odor of poison that increased as he swung his hands at Jayr. I realized, suddenly, that the tips of his fingers had small, claw-like spines on them which he jabbed repeatedly into the larger man.

  I wanted to continue watching, to stare in bewilderment at the fight in front of me, but a pained cry from a few feet away drew my attention. Octo-asshole had managed to shrug Sherry off of him, and, realizing that simply pulling her joints out of their sockets would not be enough, appeared to be trying a more vigorous approach to removing her from the conflict.

  My first blow broke his nose. My second knocked the air out of him. I pulled Sherry to safety and shoved her in the direction of her car. “Get out of here!”

  “I can help!”

  “You’ve helped enough, now go!”

  I turned back in time to take a fist to the right cheek. He knew how to hit well. He put all of his mass into his swing, but he wasn’t nearly as strong as the giant, nor did he have quite as much mass. I shrugged off the blow, twisting to the side and grabbing one of his other hands in a wrist lock. My knee connected with his elbow as I yanked backwards, and the monster let out a howl of pain as bone snapped.

  I heard Sherry’s light footsteps racing away from us and, a moment later, her car start. Relief flooded me. Whatever else happened tonight, at least she wouldn’t be hurt. Not because of me, anyway.

  For all the pain, though, my attacker didn’t roll over and give up. An arm slipped inside of his jacket and came out with a long and angry looking dagger which slashed at my chest.

  I managed to get my arm between us just in time.

  Even if I hadn’t gotten a good whiff of the blade, I’d have known the weapon was magic from the pain that radiated through my body when it bit into my skin.