by Greg Dragon
“What do you mean, Dad?”
“I mean everything, sweetheart. Me, you, Tracy, Jaime, this piece of metal. We’re the real thing. I know you don’t like to hear that, but we are, baby girl. When they portray killers—the people who are forced to commit the ultimate sin—they hardly look like us. Their swords are always flawless, beautiful renditions of historical relics; not crude, wicked-looking blades like this one.”
He stopped talking and kept his hand running on the flat side of the sword. It was fashioned into the style of a Japanese katana—one edge curved and long—but forced into that form from something else. Not from a blacksmith—who could probably make it into a convincing sword—but from force. It was bent, chipped up, and ugly. James brought it up and smelled it, brought it close to his face and flicked the blade with his finger, and then put it up to his ear as if to listen to it.
“Good God almighty, she’s singing,” he whispered, then stood up suddenly and sheathed the sword gracefully as if he was at the end of a Japanese Iaido kata.
“I didn’t think you still cared for that sort of thing, Dad,” Alysia said when she saw him, and she smiled with pride as it brought her back to the days when they would spend hours together inside of his dojo.
“A warrior never forgets his discipline, CeeCee. I know you know this, but don’t write your old man off yet. I may prefer the weapons of my age, but under all of this bone and flesh you see here lies a focused spirit.”
“A focused spirit with a thing for police women?” she said to him, slitting her eyes to show her disapproval.
James turned in such a slow, graceful way that it caught her off guard and he looked at her intently. He shifted his hips so that the sword clicked as it rested perfectly into its sheath. “We’ve been through this, CeeCee. I’m not going to defend her every time you decide Tracy isn’t good enough for me. The world is ending, let’s stay focused on that.”
Alysia rolled her eyes and took back her sword, tying the ribbons around her waist and positioning it where she could feel it against her hip. James moved in to take her down in a sudden attack, and she fell with his motion, rolling away smoothly and coming back to her feet with her hand on the hilt of the sword, ready to defend herself. Her father smiled when he saw this and she nodded at him. Always be ready, he used to say, and it was a lesson that had made itself into her very being.
“There’s silver in that weapon,” he said to her. “Old Donald must have taken it from something other than what he told me, but that blade definitely has silver in it. When you cut into one of them, it will sing for you, CeeCee, but beyond that – I think it tells us that silver hurts them.”
“Just like werewolves,” Alysia said as she walked over to sit on the bed next to him.
“So, we will need to make some modified silver ammunition for our guns,” he said.
“That sounds like a pain in the butt, Dad. You should just get a sword; actually, three swords. One for Tracy and one for Jaime, too.”
“That won’t work; they don’t know how to use them,” he said. “No, we need to make some silver bullets. We’ll restrict them to being used on the big ones, major ones like that thing in the bunker. The rest of them die easily enough from our regular shots. So I think we have a good plan with that.”
“Okay, Dad, I will keep that in mind the next time we’re near a silver mine and a place that will allow us to make bullets,” she said as he shoved her gently away from him. She looked at him, laughed, and then hugged him closely.
“You know, your mother always thought we had the strangest relationship,” he said to her as she leaned in on him.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, we Knights aren’t the most affectionate people, you know, and while people can see the love we have for one another, we don’t always show it.”
“Well, Dad, we shouldn’t have to. That’s why we’re family.”
“Yeah, you said it, baby girl, you said it.”
~ * ~ * ~
The sound of something tinkling woke her up, and she opened her eyes to find that she was alone. The front door and the back door were open, and a light breeze blew the evening air into the house, causing the curtains to dance like apparitions.
Alysia hopped up and crept to the front door. She checked to see if she still had her sword at her waist, and touched the hilt reassuringly. The tinkling of the bell sounded again, and she looked outside to find her father working on the fence. She breathed a sigh of relief and then walked back through the house towards the back door.
She walked around to the side of the house that was closest to the street and looked out at the trees in the distance. The air was still and the temperature was cool. In the past, it would have led her to taking a stroll or a light jog on the sidewalks around the university. There was no need for jogging now, she thought. The monsters keep us in good shape with all the running and fighting for our lives.
The tops of the distant trees were starting to darken and become mere silhouettes against the brilliant blue of the sky, which darkened as the sun said its goodbye and dipped below the horizon. She watched the tree line as she walked, trying to see if she could spot any red eyes, or the head and shoulders of a giant, roaming towards their new home.
The bells tinkled once again, and she spun to see if her father was securing the fence. There was no one at the fence, but inside the house she could see lights on in most of the rooms.
She crept forward and pulled her sword. She rounded the corner to the far side of the house and saw what appeared to be a cloaked figure slip to the back. How did he manage to hop the fence so quickly? she wondered, and then ran towards the back to investigate.
“DAD? JAIME!” she screamed as she got to the back. But when she looked around, she saw nothing. Jaime was nowhere and her father had not come out when she screamed his name. She felt her heart drop to her ankles, and a wave of fear took over her as she entered the house, both hands resting on the hilt of her sword.
She slowly walked into the kitchen. It was silent and she stopped to listen for any movement, heavy breathing, or evidence of her friends. There was no sound inside the house and all she could hear was the sound of her own heart beating in her ears as she stood there, waiting.
She was about to move forward when a jolt of what felt like electricity ripped through her body. She dropped the sword and fell to her knees. It was so harsh and sudden that she didn’t even realize she had fallen until she was on the ground and looking up at the ceiling, confused.
She tried to look around and managed to look past her feet where a man in a red cloak was standing with a strange-looking gun in his hand. He pulled the hood back and revealed a hard face with long blonde hair that was thinning in the middle. Where his scalp was sparse in hair follicles, his face and chin were full of them and it all descended into a greyish-blonde beard that ended in a knot.
He looked at Alysia and walked over to her, kicking an ottoman out of the way as he retrieved her sword in a smooth, effortless motion. He scanned its length and then flicked it like her dad had done before. He stared at her intently, his grey eyes kind despite his gruff demeanor.
“So, you’re the one,” he said to her, his face stoic and hard to read. She saw that he was muscular, and she wondered if her father had managed to get any hits in before this predator subdued him. “You killed one of them. You got them to utter your name. Alysia, right?”
Alysia nodded her head and then looked around to see if she could see where he had stored the bodies of her friends and family.
“They are safe; we removed them from the house and took them to a place where they can’t be hunted,” he said.
“Who are you? How did you—how did you manage to attack me and get rid of everyone so quickly? And, where is my dad?” Alysia asked. She could sense feeling in her arms and legs again, but she lay still, hoping to catch him off guard when he least expected it.
“Get up,” he ordered her, pulling back his cloak t
o reveal a belt full of guns and weapons. Some were so exotic that she didn’t know what they were or what they were capable of. She complied and scrambled to her feet, glad she was still alive but curious and concerned about what it was he had used to shoot her.
“What did you hit me with?” she asked.
“Nothing you could fathom or even understand, Alysia Knight. At least not yet.”
“How do you know my name, and how did you know to find me here?”
“You are all loud, sloppy, and pathetically lucky,” he said to her as he leaned against the bar, playing with her sword. He was not concerned about her retaliation and she could tell that even if she tried something he would be ready for her.
“Your father hasn’t been a Navy Seal for ages and the policewoman is such a brute that her stomping gave you all away even at a mile’s distance. Then there’s the loud-mouthed boy-man you call ‘friend.’ Instead of asking me how we found you, you should ask me how it is that you aren’t dead by now.”
“We? Who else is here with you?” Alysia asked, daring to walk around the disheveled living room to see if anyone else was hiding inside of the house.
“My darling locusts, sisters of the Bloody Garot; they joined me to remove the distraction from your life, and they have taken them away to a safe place. Like I said before.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She had only been walking and thinking for ten minutes when she left Jaime, and that was all it had taken the cloaked man to remove them quietly from the house. Her father had often told her stories of how Special Forces operators could perform frightening miracles like that, but this man was not a soldier. He looked like the leader of a heavy metal band, and he spoke with an accent she could not place.
“So you came for … my sword?” Alysia asked, trying to push back her growing fear.
“This silver piece of junk? No, Alysia Knight, I didn’t come for your ‘sword,’” he said, and then gave it back to her as if it disgusted him. “We came for the one that the lost ones named. The one who managed to kill one of their matriarchs.”
Alysia was puzzled. It had been a team effort to take down the demon. Besides, she didn’t have any sort of super powers that would be cause for a group of creepy, cloaked people to seek her out. “A—are you a demon?” she asked him, and he stared at her without moving an inch.
“Demon? Is that the name you gave them? You are asking me if I am one of them, the creatures that are corrupted with the taint. My dear, I am not, but I am not like you or your father’s kind. The only thing that you need to know is that you are safe, we have found you, and luckily it was before the V’Kosha.”
“What do you want from me?” Alysia asked, cursing her luck again for being the one singled out for the special horror of another’s entertainment. “You weren’t there at the fight, so how do you know it called my name? Are you one of the soldiers playing a trick on us? Were you there? Did you follow us out and track us to this house, got your buddies to jump my dad, and then threw on some red sheets to make yourself look like some sort of grand wizard or something?”
“I knew it wouldn’t be easy with you,” he said under his breath, then walked up to her and punched her in the stomach. “Enough talk. We have a long journey ahead, Alysia Knight.”
The stomach, always the stomach. She winced and doubled over from the impact. The man scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder as he stepped out into the night air and began to move. He ran very quickly, too quickly for it to make any sense to her, and before long, he was amidst the trees.
The pain from Alysia’s abdomen made it hard for her to concentrate, but from what she was seeing, the ground was giving out from beneath them and then there was the crunch of branches as the big man ascended. It appeared as if he was whisking them from treetop to treetop using the limbs as his platforms.
This makes no sense, she said to herself, but she couldn’t argue that what she was seeing was actually happening: the man was running across trees and there were several other people with him.
~ * ~ * ~
The voices were muffled and barely audible, and Alysia could tell they were trying to be quiet. It wasn’t so much that they were concerned she was awake and hearing them, but they seemed to be trying to keep it from someone else.
“She is the one. You heard what Lord Chaos said,” a hushed female voice said.
“The hell she is. I think it’s a mistake. She’s old, and she looks too normal to be the one,” a male voice barked back.
“There’s nothing remotely normal about me,” Alysia replied as she sat up on the stone slab and looked at them, then glanced down at herself. They had dressed her in black tattered robes, and on her feet were tiny black slippers with embroidered red dragons on the tops of them. The girl was an Asian teen of at least sixteen, and the boy was older, dark-skinned, and had dreads in his hair. They both wore beige kimonos with the same dragon on their chests, and on their feet were black sandals.
The teens stared at her in disbelief and then rushed out of the room. Alysia could see there were tracks below the slab and it looked as if she was in an old subway tunnel of some sort. The walls had been constructed recently, since they looked relatively new compared to the rest of the place, and when she looked above her head at the ceiling she knew her assumptions were right. They were below ground in one of the old subways that the city had sealed off so many years ago.
“She’s arisen.” A voice spoke from somewhere behind her. She turned around and saw nothing but darkness until a pair of glowing eyes revealed themselves to her. Alysia started and scrambled around to the back of the stone slab, to make sure that it was between her body and whatever it was that stared at her.
“Demon!” she exclaimed, and held its gaze, waiting to see if it would make the next move. The eyes rose to float about six feet off the ground, and as they moved towards the light, Alysia could see that it was the man who had taken her from the house.
“Not all eyes that glow mean you harm, girl. In fact, you will find the ones you must fear the most have eyes that don’t glow. You have experienced the cruelty of men, have you not? Plus, we are not all the same. We the children of Yalem.”
“So you admit that you are one of them?” Alysia spat at him. “You came from the sea with the giants and the kreples. You came to our land to terrorize us, didn’t you?”
He kept moving forward, and she could see that he was no longer in the red robe he’d worn when she encountered him inside of the house. He now wore the same beige kimono as the children from before, but his had a cape that hung loosely from his shoulders, and flowed down to the floor where it dragged along the dirt from the filthy, subway tracks.
When he was in front of the slab, he moved so fast that Alysia couldn’t even blink before he had her. She felt her heart stop as his vice-like hands gripped her shoulders, and she felt her body go limp from his touch. Fight or flight, CeeCee, she told herself, but unlike before, her body wouldn’t react. The demon had rendered her helpless and she couldn’t even make a sound.
“We are Turevila. In your tongue it translates to ‘hunters of the lost’, but we go by the name of Bloody Garot, and we came here to rein in the prisoners of our realm.” He released her and motioned for her to follow him as he walked towards the darkness of the only door, gliding as if he defied gravity.
Alysia wanted to lash out at him, to demand that he answer her questions and tell him never to touch her again. However, his touch had chilled her to her bones. She felt frightened by him, and she didn’t want to repeat the helplessness that had come over her when he had touched her. She followed behind him silently, his willing slave for now, and he didn’t need to look back to know that she was there.
“You are trained, and I can see this,” he said. “Many of you here on this plane of existence… you are trained warriors. The savage nature of humanity demands it, doesn’t it? Combat sports, the need to dominate one another to prove who stands superior. You forge crude, ugl
y weapons—like the one I took from you earlier—and you learn to make fists and lash out with your legs.”
“Do you all not fight?” Alysia asked. The man got quiet, as if he was thinking, and then he stopped to open a set of large, double doors.
There were several kimono-wearing children inside a deep hall, lined with lanterns on the wall and long tables with an assortment of food on them. At the far end of the hall was a throne-like chair, and next to it on two sides were smaller thrones. A beautiful, white-skinned girl occupied one. Her hair was a light, silky shade of greenish blue, and her armor was black and red with spikes.
“Oh, we fight, Alysia Knight, but we do not do it for sport, for establishing dominance, or to show superiority. We fight to keep realms like this one free of the ones that would consume you all. We failed to do our job recently and now your world is facing the crisis that you are well aware of.”
“Where exactly are you all from? Hell? Or is there somewhere subterranean where you needed to come through the deep sea to get here?” Alysia asked.
“You have quite the imagination,” the man said, and then showed her to a place on a bench in front of the food that sat untouched on the table. “Sit, eat, and relax, Alysia Knight. We have much to discuss, and I don’t want you to lose focus.”
“The only thing that I can focus on right now is that my dad has disappeared and I am being led to my doom by Satan and his children,” Alysia said.
“Satan? The horned menace from stories meant to keep cruel humans suppressed,” he replied, rhetorically. “No, Alysia, I am not Satan. I am more like your angel, Gabriel, here to remove the Satans from your world. Now, I am not going to ask you again. Eat, and get comfortable. You will be spending a lot of time here.”
The tables had an assortment of fruit and pickled cold cuts that were delicious to Alysia’s taste buds. She ate until she wanted to pop and when she could not eat any more, she turned around and sat, watching the man talk to the white woman on the throne.
