Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  At the end of the entryway, past the mirrors, was once perhaps a living room. On a draped over divan sat two desiccated and skeletal corpses, one upright, the other on its side, as if tired. Only the gray light from the opened front door filtered onto them, the rest of the room pulsated with a thick and living darkness.

  The seasoned arcanist felt a primal chill slither down her back. “Agatha?” she said again, this time at a whisper. An unsettling gurgling sound issued from the inky darkness, followed by a litany of cracks and snaps. Her eyes darted to a set of long and stiletto thin fingers, pallid like a corpse, raking along the floor with chipped and rotten nails as sharp as talons. As soon as she saw them they had retreated back into the darkness and a gentle sigh floated from the pool of black.

  “Jo...” said a voice, old and Slavic, yet full of phlegm and life, “Josette.” The latter was spoken with the sparkling silver resonance becoming of her kind. Josette felt her tensions leave her. Agatha emerged from the darkness, raven haired and beryl eyed, her skin ivory like winter’s first snow. “Welcome.”

  Josette expected more trappings of power. “So... you’re the one they’re hunting for?” Agatha was dressed surprisingly simple for one of her acclaim. Her satin black dress draped down to the floor, twinkling like the night sky at certain times and other than the pitch black pendant around her neck and emerald studded rings on her fingers, the rest of her appearance was carried by her magnificent face.

  Agatha looked to the two corpses. “The one they’re trying to kill. I’d regret taking their lives but a message had to be sent... and they were low bloods anyway.” Her face was narrow yet graced with fine features, like that of some Circassian beauty, her lips voluptuous like the petals of a dewy rose. When her gentle hands swept over the closest corpse’s papery, fetid head, her greenish blue eyes flickered with eddies of silvery light. “The High Sorceress of Calanar would say at this level, they were more human than like us. Perhaps a little more sensitive than the average Adamite, but nothing more.”

  Josette looked at the corpse and shivered. She sensed no imprint of a soul or even magic. The witch had taken everything from them. “They say the same things about us, you know. Well, they used to.”

  Agatha moved her gaze to Josette and the witch thought she had made a fatal mistake. The way her eyes lanced into hers with such compulsion and insistence, she wanted to off load every harsh thought she had for the woman and beg forgiveness. Agatha smiled as if she took Josette’s stillness for something else. “The spiteful words of peasants, destined to never know our beauty in their arms, our power in their hands. They hate what they are not. Just look at these fools.” She pushed the upright and rigid corpse back with a swipe of disgust. “You know some backwater covens interbreed with one another? Entire generations of deformed wretches...”

  Josette frowned. “Isn’t... isn’t that what the sorcerers and sorceresses of Calanar do?”

  “Yes but they are not... afflicted, by Adam’s Curse. Their unions are not prone to ill effects. These on the other hand...” She fixed a glare on the corpse on its side, its dried yellowed hair stretched down its side like dead grass. The woman of the couple, no doubt. “Weak bones, weak magic. The price of when fallen blood mixes with our own. They cannot help but fail. It’s in their nature.”

  “Can we fail?”

  Agatha’s eyes sparkled and she met Josette’s gaze once more. “Yes. But never from within.” She stepped away from the corpse. “Come. There is a test for you.”

  The two walked such a distance that Josette was sure that they were no longer in the apartment, only the pallid gray day light shining through the long hall told her any different. But that could have been an illusion too. Even with Agatha present, Josette felt more uncomfortable than ever. The walls breathed with her, and every time she held her breath to listen, there was nothing but predatory silence.

  Only the sound of Agatha’s delicate feet along the brittle wooden floor kept pace with her thoughts. In her presence, she felt like a novitiate all over again. Young even, and outclassed. When the midnight haired witch passed one step ahead of her, she felt a tangible vibration of power pass over her body and pull ahead just in front of her, trailing the witch. To be away from it for even a second made her feel like something intrinsic was missing.

  Agatha stopped in front of a door... a door that Josette didn’t see until she stopped in front of it. Skin prickling smoke coiled out from underneath its weathered frame and Josette felt a thrill of apprehension race down her spine. “Is... this the test?”

  Agatha put her hands behind her back. “What’s inside, will test you. It’s the future of the Black Rose coven, the rebirth of this world.” The door slowly creaked open and a dark shadow fell on the side of Agatha’s face as if the room’s lack of light had projected itself. Josette took three steps forward and looked inside, seeing... nothing.

  To merely look in the doorway was to enter it, to cross across a bridge of frozen shadow, where the stars in the sky did not blaze, but hung like orbs culled of their brilliance, shining ancient and chilled cosmic light down upon Josette’s platinum locks. She heard hisses and whispers flit by her ear, each step darker and warmer than the last. The sound of fluttering leaves surrounded her, the ghostly outline of a rock before her, diffused like pearl and blacker than obsidian.

  “This was my salvation, Josette.” whispered Agatha, her voice like a discordant note of ice in the warm breeze. “Four centuries passed in the world. A scattering before the four millenia in my prison. My thoughts as frozen as my body, stuck as fell things toyed with me and whispered the most profane in my ears.” She pointed to dark rock and ruby red light pulsed through the stone, throwing the black crags and sweeps into sharp silhouette. “Then he came.”

  Josette felt a very mortal coil of terror wrap around her heart when she heard a woman’s scream in the dark, the wail of a horse’s agony, distorted through shadow and echoes. Her fear was mortal, her reflexes were not.

  Manna surged through her brain and air crackled along her fingers. Her indigo irises flashed and swirled with sterling light and she spun around, ready to tear her way out of the abyss.

  Agatha reacted with only a tilt of her heart shaped face and grazed Josette’s swan like neck with the lightest of touches. A weak moan seeped from the Josette’s lips as she fell to her knees, sensing a numb relaxation creep down her back. Agatha sighed. “Now I told you there was a test...”

  “Wha-what?” stuttered Josette, her numbness spreading to her hands and legs.

  “I imagine all the other Orders have spread some nasty things about me. Rumor mongers that they are.” She lifted up Josette’s delicate chin with a lone finger. “Rumors that I practice forbidden magic. Insinuations that I’ve enlisted warlocks sworn to Hell and the Outer Darkness. Slanders... that I walk in step with a demon.” She looked into Josette’s crystalline eyes, wet with despair and wide with confusion. “For once… they’re right.”

  The darkness bloomed with blood red light. Stony walls etched with runes of power and reversed pentagrams came forth, crumbled and wrought with throbbing vines. All around tropical trees waved to the humid air. Above hung the cold stars and below lied the watery stars, shimmering and reflective of their fiery twins.

  Fat and muscular eels writhed through the shallow water beneath Josette’s feet while long snakes extended from the trees above, backlit in the crimson light like diamond eyed, hissing branches.

  “No...” Josette gasped and she felt her breathing become labored.

  A tall, strapping shadow loomed behind Josette, its eyes limned in the faintest jaundiced yellow. Agatha noted its presence with a nod and looked down to Josette. “These are the cries of rabbits and children, unused to hardship. They concern themselves with the means while not one has the courage to contemplate the end.” She ran her fingers through Josette’s silken hair, flowing across her nails like rivers of pale gold. “I do.”

  She grabbed Josette’s head and brought it b
ack as far as her neck would allow, making the witch’s eyes fall into the shadow of the one behind her. “This is the demon. He helped me and he’ll help you.” Josette whimpered as she stared into the demon’s eyes. “For a price. All he asks is that you make a pact with his soul.” In this environment he was near immaterial, his body flickering like the shadow of a flame.

  For the faintest of moments she discerned patches of reptilian skin beneath his wavering cover of darkness. “No...” she gasped, Agatha’s touch making her breath mist past her lips. Thick ropes of muscle bulged underneath the demon’s black veil, overlaid with dark scales that gleamed with colors Josette could not rightly place in the sanguine light.

  Agatha’s breath rasped with fresh agitation as she yanked the arcanist’s head back down. “He needs your consent, Josette. Underneath all those layers, that flesh, lies a smattering of Adam’s blight. The soul. Surrender your piece, and we grow one step closer to reclamation.”

  Josette felt some of her lucidity return and feeling drive away the numbness in her chest and throat. “I can’t... I’ll fight for you, I... I’ll do anything, but this...”

  Agatha leaned down and her mesmerizing sea green eyes bore into Josette. The witch felt her breath seep away as she lost herself in them. “There is no turning back, Josette. You can join me in the red halls, among the golden clouds and diamond towers... or you can join the ones back on the couch. You’ll contract with the demon, because this is a war. Because deep down, you wish to see the shadow mares gallop across plains of light...”

  Josette not only saw everything the witch described within her eyes, flickering through bands of silver tipped emerald flames, but felt the joy of it all. “Yes...” The joy of wonders only glimpsed at and the joy... of belonging.

  “Peer through the strands of fate and cut your own, like the Norns of yore. You want to see what you’ve never known. Flower petals that melt into the night sky. Trees of fog, dappled with blood, reflecting the faces of all who lived and ever will live...”

  Josette had lost her breath and no longer saw through the fire of Agatha’s eyes but as if she had personally beheld the strange vistas herself. “Yes!” This was sorcery, but she didn’t care. Nothing worldly could have given her such a sense of fulfillment.

  “Our cities are but a prelude to our new order. Whether the foundations of this are built with fire and murder or the cold withering touch of time, mankind will fade.” Visions of a new, lusher world blazed across Josette’s sight. Old cities were remade, the Eiffel Tower doubled in size and crowned with a crystal beacon, the Statue of Liberty reforged into an earth shaking golem, the vast Black Forest turned into a burning sea of swaying gold leaves and obsidian trunks. “For all this, all we ask—he asks—is for a portion of your soul. It won’t even be taken whole. Such a little, little trifle... for so great a prize, wouldn’t you say?”

  At once the fantastic sights retreated and she was back in the ruby tinged swamp, looking into Agatha’s cruel and beatific visage. “I want it...” Josette said, without breath. “If you can give me half of what I’ve felt, any price... would be worth it.”

  Agatha’s face widened into a smile that was both cold and alien, a formality picked up from those with more humanity to spare. She was pleased she didn’t have to kill another. “All that and more, child. Swear yourself to the demon, and I’ll swear in a new world with this new millennium.”

  Josette sighed as she felt the demon’s heavy hands sink into her shoulders. Here he did not need his mortal husk. Here... his power was free to expand, and her hairs rose on her neck to the thrumming of such power. So close to being able to call it her own.

  “How about it, little one? There’ll be no pain. Not all contracts are signed in blood after all... I trade in words now and I only need but a few.” The demon’s voice prickled the edges of her soul, like a predator nosing its prey.

  Josette took a deep breath and exhaled a frosty mist into the humid air. She closed her eyes and said the words. “I swear.” Her eyes did not reopen. A realm of rain and wind came over her, but she did not dampen nor flutter. Shadows and red heat intruded within her flesh and took shape to her soul, but there was no pain.

  There were only hopes... and dreams.

  Chapter 8: The Wolf Goes East

  New York Harbor

  The Seeker walked around the ship launches. The smell of the sea and diesel called to him and the squawks of gulls resounded in his ears. He could feel the eyes of the incautious and unwary upon him, hear their chittering whispers and smell their dank fear. Even without benefit of becoming a beast, he still looked like an animal, a man who struck all common folk as being inherently incapable of belonging to society.

  His mud brown hair was dirtied and matted and clung to his skull like a disease. What were once handsome features lay buried underneath a tangle of facial hair that would not look out of place in more barbarous times. But for him, every time was a barbarous time, his very presence made it so. Even his garments were suited to his nature. Clad in ratty, frayed and oversized shirts and jackets, so faded that reds were brown and blues were gray, he wouldn’t have to find a new set of clothes if the Change came upon him.

  The early morning chill was defrayed by his rags and for a time he contented himself with the gentle swaying of the harbor’s brackish green water, how it shined under the awakening pale blue sky and how the little bubbles and soggy cigarette butts floated on its surface. It had been long since he took the time to walk among Man.

  He turned his head to the sound of laughter and caught two dock workers chatting near a light post. The sky was still dark enough for it to be on and it threw a warm coppery cast over the duo. Their orange and lime yellow vests popped out against the darkness and the steam from their coffee cups coiled out into the cold. When he turned his head away from them, he felt their eyes on his back and their voices in his keen ears.

  ‘You see that guy? Jesus...’

  ‘Yeah, poor bastard. A lot of ‘em just come off the street, thinkin’ it’s so easy, but Joe want’s ‘em clean and drug free and not talking to walls. Which ain’t much but it is when you’re one of them.’

  ‘Talking to walls?’

  ‘Yeah after Tom’s wife left he lost his shit, Joe had to let him go. Too fried in the head, couldn’t hold it together...’

  The Seeker smiled as he took in another draft of fresh air and saw a gull flutter up into the cloud buried sky. How mundane they thought he was. Any inkling of his true nature was the furthest thing from their minds. Some part of him, the young man long entombed within his soul, wanted to show them what he really was, to sup on their terror. Through a half-remembered silver haze he recalled when he was first turned and showed off his new strength to blushing ladies, uncaring of what such brazen boasting would bring him...

  “Sir... Sir...” A voice called to him from behind. He turned around slowly and his deep set eyes settled on the officer before him. “Sir, this area is for ship and port personnel only. I’m going to have to escort you off-site.”

  He couldn’t help but notice the agitation in the man’s stance, how his eyes struggled to meet his and how his hand was already resting on his gun. He smiled. “I am... ‘ship personnel’.” He over enunciated the technical term, like one of the elderly picking up a new phrase from the younger generation.

  The port officer was taken aback. He was expecting the grizzly, harsh tones of a babbling hobo, but this one spoke with a purpose and clarity that eluded modern man. Hearing his voice also made him reconsider the man. He stood straight and proud, accentuating his towering height and his eyes sparked with keen awareness, unlike the glassy, mental haze that addled so many other vagrants.

  “I see. Sir, I’m going to have to see some ID.”

  “What?”

  “Identification.”

  The Seeker extended his arms wide, leaving himself in an open position. “You have it. You’ve seen me and I’ve told you what I do. My name is Malcolm.”

 
The officer sighed and unclasped his gun but still left it in the holster. “Alright, party time’s over big guy. No card, no boat.” He gestured with his hand for ‘Malcolm’ to come over, but the scraggly man did not move and was no longer so open.

  “No.” The Seeker had hoped playing a fool with the man would work. I am beyond all of this. What irrelevant lives they lead. Permission for this, permission for that...

  The officer appraised the man more carefully, not being so stupid to think he could wrestle him down and cuff him. He clutched the radio attached to his shoulder. “Hey Matt, I’ve gotta uncooperative transient and uh, yeah, need bac-” He was cut off when the Seeker’s hand shot for his throat, pinning him against an off-loaded shipping container.

  “I’ve humored you enough, little man.” The officer made choking sounds and fumbled for his gun. The Seeker grabbed his hand and crushed it within his heavy palm, to a litany of cracks and snaps, breaking every bone within. Sounds of muted agony sprung forth from the guard’s lips. “Don’t come after me. Your life is meaningless enough without being killed by a stranger.”

  With a swift movement he ripped the man’s pistol from his holster and dropped him to the ground, wheezing for breath. He looked to his name tag, pinned right below his radio. “And your donation of a Smith and Wesson nine millimeter to my sacred hunt is much appreciated, T. Kempski.” He stuffed the weapon into his robes and looked down the pier, his eyes narrowing as they pierced the morning fog, catching sight of the commercial freighter he was waiting for.

  He turned back to the guard and got down on his knees, laying his hand across Kempski’s face. “Stick to your grounds. I’ll stick to mine. Anything else will lead to more weeping bones.” The much maligned officer could only gurgle in pain while his eyes turned bloodshot and misty. “Now... rest.” A pleasant warmth extended from the Seeker’s hand and poured into the guard’s head, lulling him into a dreamless sleep.