Death Bound_An Urban Fantasy Series

by Justin Sloan

  “If we were alive back then, we could’ve been gods,” Rohan said, considering that.

  “Rohan, if we showed people our powers today they might think we’re gods. Or witches and burn us alive. I’d say our chances would be fifty-fifty.”

  Rohan laughed. “Not the best odds, really. Not when fire is part of the equation, anyway. But why him?”

  She shrugged. “My books don’t say much about it, only that he suffered nightmares, and many think it had to do with his time here. Some say it was the guilt for his actions in Peru, but others, those more in the know, think it had something to do with dark forces and evil spirits. If that’s all correct, he might have hidden this city for a reason.”

  Rohan nodded, turning to look at the area. “Regardless, we have no choice but to try and find out.”

  They were atop a large temple. More stone steps led down to a grassy area that looked like a gathering ground.

  The silver glow from above was replaced by a new one—wisps of red, glowing fog. And as the two descended deeper into the city, dark shapes began to form in the red mist, shapes of people—spirits.

  The spirits reminded Rohan of the ones he’d seen in Nora’s house. They were not friendly, and outsiders were clearly not welcome. As Rohan and Nora passed, the spirits glowered, their light pulsating.

  “There should be another temple here,” Nora said. “In the center of the city.” She pointed to a shadowed shape in the distance. “That’s our best bet to find the orb.”

  As they started off, Rohan’s stomach rumbled. “God, I’m hungry.”

  “At a time like this?” Nora asked, with an annoyed look. “I don’t even know how you could be thinking about food.”

  “Eating happens to be a requirement, especially when solving ancient puzzles and wearing yourself out.”

  “We just found the fabled lost city, and you want to stop and eat a sandwich?”

  Rohan shrugged. “If I happen to die down here, I’d rather do it on a full stomach.”

  Nora tossed him a sandwich from her pack. “Walk and eat. It’s called multi-tasking.”

  Rohan laughed. “I can multi-task very well, thank you.” He took a bite of his sandwich and tried to keep up with Nora.

  Then, as he was chewing, something bright caught the corner of his eye. He stopped in mid-chew as more spirits hovered wordlessly nearby.

  He stuffed the sandwich in his pack and shifted his mind to necromancer mode.

  He tried to focus on the spirits, to control them—but doing so felt like reaching for rain. He felt them in his mind like little spots of pressure, but as soon as he touched one, it was gone.

  “I can’t get a feel on them,” he said.

  “Me neither,” Nora said, a discouraged look on her face. “But hey, you’re the true necromancer.”

  “Don’t play down your powers.”

  “Yeah,” she said, clearly uncomfortable with the topic.

  A pressure began to grow around them as they trudged along, pushing like a strong, solid wind. Suddenly, the pressure became a wall, the wind blowing stronger than anything Rohan had ever felt. A roaring came from deep within the city, and Rohan was yelling, trying to tell Nora to fight it, to push on, but no sound was coming from his mouth.

  And then it was gone—the noise, the pressure, all of it.

  “What happened?” he asked, holding his hands out for balance. His body still rattled from the wind, and he felt like the room was swaying.

  “On the floor,” Nora said, pointing.

  Rohan cleared his mind and stood next to her. At his feet was a pattern carved into the floor. There were sharp edges to it, and places that looked like no pattern at all, but more like scratch marks.

  Nora knelt and traced the marks with her fingers. “What could have done this?”

  On cue, a vibration went through the floor.

  “I think we’re about to find out,” Rohan said, watching as red mist shot out of newly formed cracks in the ground. It began to come together in the air above them, swirling until it formed a demonic shape. The shroud of mist wrapped around its curved horns like a sinister shadow.

  The demon slowly lifted its head, then looked at them with eyes of pitch black. It was one of the demons from the afterlife, when Altemus had activated the tablet at Nora’s house. Not the main one, but one of the six. For a moment, Rohan thought it would speak, but instead it just stared. Then it lifted its arms until claws shown in the dim light.

  The demon charged, and Rohan barely had enough time to leap out of the way. He stumbled, and was almost back to his feet when he saw the demon swooping around for him, legs forming from the mist as it approached. Claws tore at Rohan’s shoulder, and he cursed at the sting of pain.

  “Get to the temple!” Nora called as she pushed her arms out, straining to pull on the spirits around them. With a grunt, she collapsed, and Rohan was too busy dodging the demon’s sharp claws to catch her.

  He scrambled over, lifting her head. A quick glance told him the demon had become fully solid now. It was breathing in the red mist, growing in size and strength as it did.

  Nora coughed as Rohan wiped a small trickle of blood from her nose.

  “The orb, if we can get it….”

  “You have to get up,” Rohan said. He wrapped an arm under her shoulder and another around her waist as he helped her to stand.

  The demon moved in for the kill, but Rohan closed his eyes, held out his hand, and pushed. A bright flash engulfed the area. When he opened his eyes, he saw a wall of spirits between him and the demon. He had been able to use them to protect himself.

  He tried to imagine the spirits turning into a blade, but they drifted away and he could no longer control them.

  “Come on!” he yelled, pulling Nora along with him.

  She was too weak to run, having used her energy to try and control the red spirits. From behind them came the thud of pursuing footsteps. A shock went through Rohan as the demon connected with him. The impact flung him into the air so that the whole lost city spun beneath him. He struck a wall with a thud.

  His head spun, and he felt hands gripping his throat. The pain squeezed deeper inside his head, throbbing.

  Then he snapped out of the daze.

  Nora was gone. The demon’s face was inches from his, and now resembled a man. His eyes were still pure black, though, and his skin red and flowing like the center of a fire.

  In those horrible eyes, Rohan saw his own reflection. Then he felt a sharp tug, and he was in the man’s eyes, no longer separate, tumbling through darkness. The air tossed him like a mighty wind, throwing him about until he landed in a mucky swamp of silver mist that hovered in the darkness.

  “What is this?” Rohan shouted.

  “Call it a duel of the minds,” a voice said, and then a man appeared. He resembled the demon, but was simply a man. He wore nothing but a loincloth and walked with a walking stick ornamented in feathers and glimmering stones.

  “I don’t understand.” Rohan took a step back, hands up as if ready for a fight.

  “We knew you’d come for it, after seeing you in our world. I was once worshiped in these very lands, and the spell you activated by entering the city allowed my return. So now, I trap you inside of your own mind, and leave your body to slowly die.”

  Rohan had never faced a true demon before. Spirits, yes. Altemus and the Lich King even. But demons?

  He thought of Nora, left all alone in the hidden city, out in the jungles of Peru. That couldn’t happen.

  “Do your worst,” Rohan said. “Stop wasting time. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  The man snarled, teeth exposed, then lifted his hands. Fire surged from the ground and encircled him, lifting him into the air so that he hovered a few feet above Rohan.

  “When we’re done with you, we’ll ensure the man who activated the tablet accesses the Eye of Gilgamesh, and the world will be ours.”

  “Shut up and fight me!” Rohan said, stepping forward and pr
eparing all of his remaining energy.

  The man’s eyes bore into Rohan’s soul until, with a flick of his wrist, a wave of flames surrounded them and Rohan was screaming in agony. He saw people in the flames—first his mother, then his father, both long dead. Others he’d known over the years as well, many that he didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. They were all shouting for him, reaching, but he was jerking about as the flames tore into his soul.

  Each movement ripped at his charred flesh. It was too much. He couldn’t go on, he couldn’t handle the pain.

  But then he saw her—the love of his life, long dead, gone from this world, and he knew this couldn’t be real.

  He closed his eyes, focusing on Nora nearby, and let the waves wash over him like water.

  When he opened his eyes again, it was all gone. He was unharmed, but the ground around him was scorched.

  “How…?” the demon said, staring at him in confusion.

  They were back. Nora gasped at the sight of them and ran to Rohan’s side, supporting him as he staggered from exhaustion.

  “What happened?” Nora asked. “Did you beat him?”

  The demon laughed. “Hardly.”

  All around Rohan, the dark spirits from above began to appear. Before Rohan could react, they converged on him, claws tearing at his clothes and flesh.

  Rohan and Nora both pushed out with their energy, doing their best to keep the spirits at bay, but it was no good.

  “We have to stop the demon!” Nora shouted above the shrieks of the spirits.

  “Distract them,” Rohan said, bowing his head and focusing. “Give me thirty seconds.”

  She spun, pushing out both hands and absorbing the brunt of the spirits’ attack. Rohan didn’t waste any time. He sprang forward, throwing himself at the demon, and was on him before the beast could react. With both hands, he gripped the demon’s head, thumbs pressing firmly into its temples, and focused all of his necromantic energy into it.

  The ground beneath them cracked like an earthquake. The demon screamed in agony, and the dark spirits left Nora to swarm around Rohan. But with another loud crack, it was over. The man, now once again a demon, sank to Rohan’s feet, defeated.

  Nora stared at Rohan with shock and relief. “We did it.”

  “For now,” he said, looking at the way the spirits still swarmed above them. They’d backed off, but for how long? “Let’s just get to that temple.”

  He grabbed her by the hand and they ran as the dark spirits began an echoing wail.

  They reached a corner where the red glowing light reflected off of gold walls.

  The temple. It was an imposing stone structure against the darkness, with several hundred steps leading up to the sacred chamber. Bones lay strewn across the steps. At the top, carvings of faces stuck out from the wall, staring down at them. One particular face had its mouth open in a scream, which unsettled Rohan.

  “If the Eye of Gilgamesh isn’t there, we’re screwed,” Rohan said.

  “And if it is?” Nora shifted uneasily, glancing back the way they had come.

  Rohan sighed. “Probably just as screwed, but at least then we’ll be in control.”

  “Well, at least there’s that.” Nora tried to smile.

  They started the long ascent up the stairs, trying not to look at the bones. Every now and then, spirits drifted toward them, but Rohan did not speak to them for fear of distraction.

  Climbing the steps was like scaling a mountain, and several times they had to stop, resting on the steps and looking out over the shadowed lost city. Spirits flew in and out of the stone structures that spread for miles in all directions. Each glance at the city renewed Rohan’s vigor, and made him want to get out of there as soon as possible.

  They reached the top step, where the temple stood on a small plateau surrounded by more ruins.

  Rohan had expected an entrance, but they found no doors, and no windows aside from small slits in the stone that were too high for them to reach.

  “Look, there’re patterns,” Nora said, her fingers caressing small shapes. Some were like crescents, others like waves.

  Rohan moved to the next block over, and he saw them too. They could almost be mistaken for ripples in the wall, but looking closely, it was clear they weren’t.

  “What does it mean?” he asked. He glanced behind him. Mist was gathering around the rooftops. “And can we hurry?”

  “I’m not sure, but—wait!”

  She spun, eyes searching the small square and surrounding ruins, and then darted over to a small hut. “Rohan, look at the stone right under your hands. From left to right, tell me the shapes you see, in order.”

  He looked down at the stone. “A hut, a jaguar, and a sun.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t miss any?” she asked.

  “Positive.” He walked over to where she had her hands pressed against the wall, and stared in amazement. She’d uncovered three holes in the wall. Each one was positioned along what looked like a series of gears in the ground.

  Rohan studied the gears. “So the lost city had lost technology, too.”

  “Tell me the order again.”

  “Hut, jaguar, sun.”

  “The rhythm of life.”

  “What?”

  Nora looked up at him and smiled. “Think about it. A man is born in the safety of a hut. He ventures out into the jungle to become a man—a representation of the jaguar. And at the end of his life, he dies—the sun.”

  “And if you believe in reincarnation, he’s born back inside a hut, right?”

  Nora nodded. She stuck her hand into the indentation of the hut and felt around until she pulled a lever. Somewhere, something rumbled to life. Two large doors hidden in the rock slid open, leading into blackness.

  “Perfect timing,” Rohan said, looking back. Several spirits were flying up the stairs toward them. And they didn’t look happy.

  They darted into the temple and slammed the old door shut behind them as a whoosh of wind washed over them—spirit chills.

  Rohan and Nora shared a horrified, but relieved, look and waited to see if the spirits would follow. But they didn’t. The spirits stopped at the door and wailed, making Rohan and Nora cover their ears. The wailing continued, filling the city with their cries, until eventually they faded away.

  Rohan flicked open his lighter. They were in a small room no bigger than a bedroom. The air was stale, and each breath was harder than the last.

  He approached a wall with images drawn on the rock in fading paint. The temple. Atop the stairs, two people stood. A man with an object that resembled the tablet, and a woman with the orb. She held the orb above the tablet. Above them both, light rays shone from a second round object.

  “The sun?” Nora asked, looking at the image.

  “It must be. But I’m confused as to what it means.”

  Rohan looked around, then spotted what he was looking for. At the top of the room was a dais. The slits in the rock let the light in, and it hit the dais at a precise angle.

  “I read a story about a monument in Latin America that was built with geographical precision,” Nora said. “There’s a massive temple, and in the temple there’s a place where the sun shines through a hole at a certain time of day at the right angle, and it lights up the whole room.”

  “Okay,” Rohan said. “Keep going, but maybe you want to speed this up.”

  “That’s a common architectural design across the Americas,” Nora said. “These days we take the sun for granted, but for ancient peoples, it was one of the most important elements of daily life.” She wrung her hands together as she thought. “But we don’t have the sun, or sunset. All we have are angry spirits outside.”

  “And they’re getting angrier,” Rohan said, his nerves on their highest alert.

  Nora paused and gathered herself, her mind racing.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, and for a minute she seemed to be figuring out something on her hand. She looked up at the slits in the st
one and squinted. “Yes!”

  She went to the wall and walked out ten paces, then stopped. She stooped and nudged one of the stones in the floor, and it moved.

  “Whoa, you gotta teach me that trick,” Rohan said, genuinely impressed.

  “Sure, I’ll go ahead and enroll you in high school science class.” She laughed as she pulled out a long, shiny stone. “In the meantime, let’s figure this out.”

  After removing the stone, Nora carefully looked inside the hollow, where the box had been, and saw an elaborate carving.

  “This defies all logic,” Nora said. “I’ve never seen any kind of studies that talked about this kind of masonry. Not from this time period….”

  “Francisco Pizarro,” Rohan said. “This must have something to do with his legend.”

  Rohan held his lighter into the hollowed stone, and a spider crawled out and skittered across the floor. He jumped, and then held the lighter in the hollow again. He saw mountains carved into the rock and an aerial view of a terraced city. On the edges of the town stood a group of men holding up a round object.

  The way the mountains were shaped made him wonder. “That looks like Machu Picchu.”

  “Yes and no,” Nora said. She brushed at the carving and uncovered a dusty square in the center of the city. She pulled at something shiny—a green orb approximately the size of a marble. It was a dull emerald color, too cloudy to see through. She looked at it a moment, and then handed it to Rohan.

  “This is it? The Eye of Gilgamesh?” he asked, holding the orb close and furrowing his brow. “I guess… I expected it to be bigger. Grander.”

  “It fits right into the tablet, I imagine,” Nora said. “It’s the right size. We found it.”

  “But what does this have to do with Machu Picchu?”

  “For the longest time, historians thought that Machu Picchu was the lost city. But excavations and archaeologists didn’t agree. The digs didn’t seem right. So legend just disappeared to history.

  She pulled out a map. With a marker, she marked two points, one near Cusco and one near Machu Picchu. “Today, there is a trail that goes directly from Cusco to Machu Picchu. It’s called the Vilcabamba Trail. It’s not promoted by tourist companies. But it is a very clear, straight path between the two points, with many monuments and archaeological sites along the way. Just as they are connected in modern times, they must have also had some sort of connection in ancient times.”