by James Hunter
“Well, you’re certainly not gonna beat it with that bad attitude,” I said before pausing to think. I rubbed at my chin. “Okay. You’ve got my gun here right?”
Ferraro looked to Harvey.
“Yeah, we got it secured in an evidence bag down in booking.”
“And my El Camino?” And before you ask, yes, I drive an El Camino. An El Camino with a camper shell attached to the truck bed. The Camino is badass squared—part car, part home, part mobile armory, and all kinds of sexy. Plus, it’s the only real home I have, so tread lightly ye of the sassy commentary.
Harvey nodded. “Out back in the parking lot with the cruisers.”
“Good, good,” I rubbed my hands together. “Ferraro, we need to assemble the rest of the super friends—round up the crew—and get my pistol and some supplies out of the Camino.”
She hesitated for a good long while, chewing on her lip as she thought. “Fine, okay,” she said at last, sounding tired for the first time that night. She grabbed the radio off her belt, “team one, team two, this is Ferraro, report, over.”
The radio hissed: “This is Adams, team one, all accounted for, over.”
“Gorski, team two, all accounted for, over.”
“Good, everyone rendezvous on three in the interrogation room. The perp is still out there and is extremely dangerous—shoot on sight. Copy that?”
“Copy that,” came Adam’s voice, followed shortly by Gorski repeating the phrase.
“Good. Get to three and stay frosty. Ferraro, out.”
FIFTEEN:
Cassius Aquinas
Half an hour later found Ferraro, Harvey, and me in the snow-filled parking lot of the police station, sitting in the back of the El Camino under the camper shell while the engine ran and the heater blasted warm air into the little space. We’d briefed the other six officers and left them clumped together up on three in the interrogation room, behind the locked door with plenty of flashlights and weapons. Hopefully, since I was the metus’s primary target, it would leave the cops in the building alone.
I was sitting on the truck bed and my pistol lay on the floor before me, a small Tupperware container with about two inches of water sat near my left hand. In my right I held a silver penknife.
“You’d better do whatever you’re going to do fast,” Ferraro said. “I’m starting to lose my patience, and my trust is wearing thin.”
“Shit, just hold your damn horses for a second,” I said, bringing the penknife up to my left hand, tracing the blade along my palm—a fat line of red welled up as the blade moved across the surface of my skin and dribbled into the water. Damn that hurt. In TV shows and stuff, people always do this kinda thing all stoically, never flinching, never complaining. Load of crap. It hurts to have your hand cut open, even if the wound isn’t terribly deep.
The blood mixed with the water, curling, rippling, and dancing in swirls, turning everything a soft shade of pink. “Alright,” I said, looking at Ferraro, “get ready for some magic. Cassius Aquinas, Undine of Glimmer-Tir,” I intoned. “I call you forth by the power of blood and water, sealed by pact, and bound by Vis.” At first nothing happened, but then after a moment, the water shifted and stirred, twirling and spinning upward, a miniature vortex of water and blood. The vortex slowly resolved into a figure, maybe seven inches tall, made of pink water, who perfectly resembled me. He was my instinct, my subconscious, a living being of sorts, permanently bound by the Vis with a water-elemental from the Endless Wood.
I breathed a sigh of relief—I hadn’t been sure this was going to work. Usually when I needed to chat with my subconscious passenger, I used a tub of water and a Vis construct. But without the ability to access the Vis, the only way to talk was to bring him out. Even though I couldn’t touch the Vis, the power was still in my blood, still a part of my being. So by shedding that blood—all chock-full of power—into the water, and using the undine’s true name to call it forth, it had allowed the little guy to take form. Thank God for small miracles.
Harvey gasped as the little figure looked around the Camino’s camper, Ferraro shifted nervously beside me.
“You look like a bag of ass,” I said to the little figure, and it was true—he could barely hold himself together, almost looked like a melting wax figurine.
“Ditto, dipshit,” he replied. “It’s the poison, it’s affecting me, too. Draining the substance right outta me. You need to fix this train wreck quick or it’ll be both our asses.” He looked down at the bowl of water, than surveyed my slashed hand. “Smart move, using the water and the blood.”
“Thanks. And yeah, I’m working on getting this whole thing straightened out, so just hang in there.”
“Sweet God, what is that?” Ferraro finally said, her voice holding equal parts skepticism, fear, and awe.
“I’m an Undine—water spirit. Look lady, don’t worry about it. Just sit tight for the time being, then do what my boy says”—he nodded at me—“and maybe, maybe, everyone left gets outta this alive.”
She looked shocked, and honestly it kinda brightened my mood a little. I liked Ferraro, sort of, she was a strong, smart woman who knew her business and kept a level head in a tight spot. Plus she looked good—hey, I can be a little superficial, looks aren’t everything, but they are something. With that said, she’d also been busting my balls all night, so it felt nice giving her a little payback. Petty, sure, but I’m not totally above a little bit of pettiness.
“Now, this guy,” the Undie waved at Harvey with his little G.I. Joe arm made of blood, “he’s alright. Kind of a by-the-book fella, a little uptight maybe, but I’ve got a good feeling about him.”
“Uhh, thanks … I guess,” Harvey muttered before falling silent.
“Business,” I said.
“Business,” he repeated.
“So what’s the deal with the metus?” I asked. “How do I take this B-rated horror flick to the cleaners?”
“First, I think you might be mixing metaphors a little. As to the metus … hold on—we read something about them once.” He froze, motionless, limbs perfectly still and unmoving. “Right,” he said after a handful of seconds. “Okay so the metus are fae, but special sauce-like. Cold iron will only work while they’re hanging around in their true form, but while on Earth they’re almost never in their true form.”
“Okay, so cold iron’s out. What else you got?”
“I’ve got a theory, but that’s all,” he said. “I think—and I could be wrong here—but I think that when a metus transforms it literally becomes whatever it transforms into. If they take on the form of a vampire, they temporally become a vampire. At least until they take on a new form. That kind of thing. So maybe, while transformed, they’ll have whatever weakness that particular thing has. That’s all I got.”
“Hum.” I pressed my lips together. “Not as helpful as I was hoping for.”
He shrugged. “Take it or leave it. I’ve got to go—I can barely hold myself together …” His limbs were drooping, fat drops of pink falling away. “Friggin’ poison. Get this shit ironed out,” he admonished again before falling into a puddle.
“Well … that was something, all right.” Ferraro said.
“Yeah,” I said noncommittally, still focused on my task—I wasn’t quite done, not yet. I carefully set the knife down and picked up the medical vial, holding it below my slashed palm before squeezing blood from the wound, drawing the red liquid down into the tube.
“What are you doing now?” Ferraro asked, weariness coating the words. Obviously I still hadn’t earned her trust completely.
“Don’t worry about it. Just magic stuff, not any of your concern.” The way I figured it, if I made it through this mess, managed to get the Holy Grail, and put Shelton down, it’d be good to see if I couldn’t whip up some kind of antidote against the toxin. Probably I’d never be dosed with that kind of poison again, but with my luck, I wouldn’t completely count it out either. After a few minutes, the vial was near
ly full, so I carefully stoppered it with the plastic cap and stowed it away in a small built-in fridge for later.
“Hey, help me patch this up,” I said, holding out my bleeding palm to Ferraro. “The first aid kit is on that shelf over there.” She grabbed the kit and set about pulling out gauze, scissors, and paper tape.
Harvey shook his head. “I don’t even know what to think,” he said. “I just … I can’t get my head ‘round this.”
“Listen Harvey,” I replied, “this shit’s tough for the mortal mind to process—you’ve got a crash course here, but there’s still a good chance that your mind will reject this whole experience. In a week or a month or a year, you might just be able to convince yourself that it was a bad dream. Everything will blur around the edges, fade with time. The human brain isn’t really equipped to handle the truth, not this truth anyway.”
“I just don’t know.” He looked down at the camper floor.
“Look, most of the monsters try to keep things under wraps—at least marginally—but even if they were walking around in broad daylight, most people wouldn’t really see ‘em. They’d think it was a joke. A guy in a costume, maybe. Most people only see what they want to see, and they’ll go to extreme lengths to explain away the obvious. So don’t feel bad, what you’re going through is normal—don’t sweat the details.”
He glanced up and placed his hands on either side of his head, like maybe he was trying to keep the crazy in. “And if I don’t forget? What do I do then?”
“If you don’t forget?” I shrugged. “Start drinking. Whatever you do though, don’t tell anyone, ever. If you do, your family and friends will disown you, think you’re on drugs, or maybe decide you’ve slipped a cog in the old mental machine. So just bottle it up and keep it inside. If you really need someone to talk to, I can put you in touch with some people who can sympathize.” I’d give him Greg’s number—an old bud from my Vietnam days, who actively hunted all the freaky-deaky hoodoo that preyed on folks.
“So this creature,” Ferraro said, while taping the last bit of gauze into place. “It can shape shift into anything?”
“Yeah, sort of. It can take any shape, but it can only take a single form at a time. Usually, it’ll assume the most horrific fear of the first person to spot it. That’s what everyone else will see, until it locks on to a new target.”
“So because I saw it first, it turned into my Nonna … but how did it know what to say, about L’uomo Nero? About all of that?”
“They can peer into your mind,” I said, “peer into the part of your brain where terror lurks, and see the memories tied to the particular fear. It can make itself into exactly what your mind finds most disturbing, and create it. But we can use that. We can use this thing’s power against it … Ferraro, tell me again what Adams thought he saw.”
“I’ll do you one better.” She pulled the radio from her belt and thumbed the button on the side. “Adams, this is Ferraro, over.”
“Go for Adams, over,” a male voice squawked from the radio.
“Tell me what you saw again, over.”
Silence for a moment, as though the guy were trying to decide how to phrase it in the least bat-shit crazy way possible. “It looked like a werewolf. Brown fur, long muzzle, sharp teeth, big yella eyes. Except it wore a clown suit—baggy yella-and-red outfit with multicolored puffballs runnin’ right up the middle. Big oversized shoes, though he had a mean set of claws.”
I reached out for the radio, and Ferraro reluctantly gave it over. “A werewolf, you sure, over?” I asked.
“Yep, I’m sure. I’ve been scared of werewolves since I was a kid—I know what a werewolf looks like. It was a werewolf—err, except for the clown suit, of course. Over.”
“Out,” I said, ending the radio communication.
“Yeah, finally a good hand to work with,” I said, smiling for the first time in a while. Since checking up on Kozlov, I’d been having a pretty shitty go of things: no power, arrested, pressed into the service of Lady Luck, and stuck battling a shape-shifting fear-monster. But now I had a plan. Sometimes, even without power, you can still outthink even the most dangerous opponents. I opened up one of the small drawers underneath my bed and took out a few necessary items, a couple of Vis imbued doodads that might just give us a fighting chance against this Friday Night Creature Feature.
“Alright,” I said, looking first at Ferraro, then at Harvey. “So listen up and pay attention. This might get a little hairy, but I think we can shut this shit-licking, pig-face-wearing, clown-wolf down for keeps.”
SIXTEEN:
Time to Tango
I was standing in the chilly, snow-filled room where I’d tangoed with the Butcher earlier in the evening. The door to the hallway—where Ferraro’s Nonna had appeared—was behind me, firmly shut though not locked. That was my exit route, the way back to the interrogation room where I’d finish off this shape-shifting bastard. Assuming, of course, I actually managed to make it back to the interrogation room.
Right now I was putting fifty-fifty odds on that. I wasn’t handcuffed, awesome, and I had some of my gear back: my coat, pistol, and a Vis embedded K-bar—old-school Marine Corps-issued knife, with a black blade and a round wooden handle. I even had a twelve-gauge, eight-shot Mossberg, courtesy of the police department.
I didn’t have my powers though, and I couldn’t actually use my pistol, not yet—I needed to save that for the final act of this drama. I also didn’t have any help.
Everyone was locked up nice and tight in the observation room, which looked into the interrogation room via the one-way mirror, Ferraro included—though damn if that hadn’t been one helluva fight. I’d grabbed a bunch of barrier sticky notes from the El-Camino, yes, sticky notes. These were little blue ones with a variety of seals covering the front and back; they were rudimentary wards that made it more difficult for supernatural beings to pass by.
If the metus really wanted to get into the room housing the officers, it probably could with some time and effort. I was sure, however, that it wouldn’t be too interested in them. After all, I was its primary target and I was standing out in a big, poorly lit room all by my lonesome. Powerless. If the metus was smarter than a brain-dead amoeba—and I had no reason to believe otherwise—it’d know this was the best chance to rip my limbs off, drink my blood, and wear my skin like a Batman cape.
Though I had a plan going into this little throw down, there was a damn good chance that Fear-Factor was gonna punch my ticket. But sometimes them’s the breaks. Just gotta roll the dice and see whether you come up elevens or snake eyes.
“Alright, ass-pirate,” I called out to the empty room. “I know you’re lurking around here somewhere, biding your time … but here I am, so if you want a piece of me … well, this is your shot. I’m tired of you taking pokes at a bunch of innocent Rubes, so let’s just do this dance, dickweed.” No better way to piss off a bully who wants you to be afraid than by choosing to be brave. And yes, sometimes calling bullies silly names is brave.
I shuffled around the room a little, shotgun tucked into my shoulder pocket, the moonlight playing off its black barrel. “Ba-cock,” I shouted, flapping my arms up and down, the best chicken impersonation I could manage while holding a shottie. “Someone a wittle scared? Maybe you’re just some kind of spineless, chicken-shit huckster, only taking a chance when you think you’ve got a sure thing. Ba-cock, Ba-cock.”
Click-click-click, the sound came from the far wall—near the window and the stairwell entrance—from the deep shadows in the far corner, maybe thirty or forty feet away.
I love it when a plan comes together.
A rustle of movement, and then something seemed to materialize out of the dark. Inky blackness giving birth to life and horror. Except the thing that stepped out wasn’t some freaky-deaky monster-movie baddie, nor was it some repressed childhood fear. It was just … me. A mirror image, at least from the waist up—everything below was wrapped up nice and tight in a cloak of black.<
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“I think you’re the one who’s a wittle scared,” it said with my voice. “Scared of yourself. Of all the terrible things you’ve done. The people you’ve hurt—everyone who gets close to you pays the price. Lauren. Your kids. Ailia. Your friends. You’re a menace. A danger. A plague. You hide behind tough words and snarky comments … but underneath? A damaged, broken little boy, too scared to look in the mirror.” He smiled, a flash of its teeth—my teeth—and scuttled further into the wane light of the room.
The shadows around his waist receded, melted away as he drew closer. Oh God, his bottom half was the chitinous form of a centipede—a long segmented body of rusty-red snaked out into the darkness. Legs, hundreds of white, vaguely luminescent, prong-like appendages clicked against the tiled floor, and rubbed against one another. Slick, bobbing antenna burst through my doppelganger’s forehead, the skin cracking and rupturing with gouts of blood. His lips peeled back and giant mandibles worked their way free, snapping back and forth in angry chewing motions.
So yeah, I was afraid of myself, sure, but centipedes won that race hands down, with no runner up even close to the finish line. But if my two greatest fears had a baby? This would be that thing … the attack of Centi-Me. And yes, it scared the great good bejesus outta me. I backed up a step, not wanting to be within touching distance of that thing. My knees wobbled just a little, my hands quivered, refusing to hold the gun barrel steady. Shit, shit, shit, it’s all fun and games until you’re alone in a dark room with a manipede.
I didn’t have time for fear, though, this wasn’t the place to let myself be scared. No, this was the time for action, brainless heroics, and adrenaline. Lots of adrenaline. I could have nightmares later—I was sure I would—but for now, it was time to put this bad dream to rest. So I focused. It was harder without the Vis pumping through my veins, lending me power and, in turn, courage. But I focused nonetheless.
