Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  With a swift kick from the soldier, he was sent slumping into the bloody dirt, still fumbling with his flaming head. The mass of gunshots and screams attracted other patrols across the battlefield, and even now, he heard their hoots and hollers. Move. He had to move. He felt pools of his sticky life blood ooze out onto the dirt, wetting it like fresh rain, and smelled the coppery tang in the air from so much feverish bloodletting.

  He scrambled back up, running in the same direction as the soldier: towards Chickamauga Creek. He imagined the soldiers behind him thought him to be some sort of night demon, with his bestial form and fiery head. The Seeker snarled through the pain and passed over the grass like the wind. He came to the edge of the open battlefield before ducking into the forest and sinking his head into the creek.

  At once steam simmered into the night and he let out a relieved sigh that sounded like wheezing furnace. A flock of birds scattered to the stars, the trees seemed to ‘bend’ to a loud breath... and then silence fell, a silence so complete even the commotion of war outside the wood was muted, the running stream as quiet as a pond.

  The wolf snapped his head up, sniffing the air.

  He dunked his head back under the cooling stream.

  I have not forgotten about you. What he hunted was once a warlock of Calanar, that much was certain. He wasn’t guilty of taking the patronage of a demon, such practices had been long outlawed, but rather, taking a patron of a different sort. A patron that did not trade in souls or promises, but the end of worlds... one that intended to bring Calanar to heel.

  Now the warlock and his lord were one. They had haunted the steps of the Cherokee on their Trail of Tears, and now at last, it had come to reap the suffering of the white man. There would be no other night but tonight to rip him from this mortal plane. The offering of the dead was too plentiful to pass up. The Seeker brought his head out of the water and snorted into the night air, relishing the icy water as it streamed off his charred fur.

  There had been another scream. But no gunshot. He rested on his hind legs and perked up his ears. Possibly a clash between the runner and Union stragglers. But not likely. His heightened hearing let him pick up on his pursuers entering the forest. Their loud voices and stomping, crunching boots upon dry leaves invaded his ears like a nagging pest.

  Lesser flesh to draw out stronger prey.

  He grinned and dug his claws into a nearby tree, hacking up the bark as he made his way to a sturdy branch. Once he became settled, he had a good view of his pursuers, fumbling in the dark below. He also felt his breathing become shallow. His bloodied paw moved to his chest and he grit his canines when he felt stinging sensations. Fur competed with torn up muscle for coverage along his pectorals and continued to drip onto the branch and the ground below.

  High in the tree he scanned the ground for more than just soldiers. He sensed the presence once more, as tangible to his senses as the wind but just as invisible to the eye. Through smoke and waving branches he discerned a splotch of darkness crawl out of the ground and then float up, as if drawn by a spider web.

  By the time the soldiers came by, the creature was already watching them from above. The Seeker watched both parties as the men came upon the stony corpse of the lone soldier who had doused his head in flame. All in all, he counted eleven men. And two horrible green eyes, peering through the darkness.

  They were emerald slits, crests of light like the sun before falling down the horizon. The werewolf sensed no human warmth from the creature, nor no sense of their common witchbreed heritage. Whatever the warlock was, had been swallowed up completely.

  As the soldiers prodded and checked the runner’s corpse, he saw his mark slither down the tree like a liquid mist. The men remained unaware of the terror that made its inexorable drive to their waiting souls.

  The Seeker readied a spell and muttered its words in his strange wolf tongue, more adapted to his abnormalities. He leapt from branch to branch as quiet as could be and hugged the tree each time in silence, listening if any sound had been made of his approach.

  He looked down on the gathering. They were in a circle formation, leaning on their rifles as the medic gave his shaken commentary on their comrade’s wounds. The Seeker’s eyes narrowed on the man’s corpse and his stomach turned when he saw two parallel holes in the runner’s chest. They rose upward like giant craters and were shiny with black pus in the moonlight.

  Goosebumps cropped along the wolf’s arms. The soul’s gone... devoured.

  Near the outer circle one soldier had lost interest in the macabre scene and lit his pipe.

  The wolf saw for a brief instant, the shadows of the green eyed beast shift and coil when the soldier lit his match. The soldier paused for a moment, looking at the ground and a feral grin reached across the Seeker’s face. Brave idiot. Trust your instincts. That wasn’t a trick of the light.

  The moment the pipe was lit was when the ebon and jade abomination struck. Hands so pale and cold they burned like fire wrapped around the soldier’s throat while grotesque tendrils plunged into his chest, jutting out the other side. The Seeker leapt down and crushed the medic beneath his paws into a crumpled and bloody ruin.

  Half the soldiers had already turned around to the sickly sound of their night stalker’s first kill and screamed their lungs out when they saw its penetrating green glare. The other half had seen the wolf and charged forward with their bayonets. The Primal within awoke to the imminent threat of death and the Seeker allowed it to move through him.

  He slid around the gleaming moonlit bayonets like a wind lost piece of silk. Effortless and smooth. A violent and ancient thirst came over him and he lunged for one soldier’s neck and tore at his warm flesh. The man choked and spat on a fount of red while the Primal howled in exultation at the sweet taste of a fresh kill.

  The Seeker’s fully savage mind didn’t register the cold steel of the bayonets stabbing into his back, or the errant bullet whizzing through the flesh of his hind leg. There was only the hunt. He grabbed another soldier’s rifle just as he pulled the trigger and the misfire went straight through one of his comrade’s eyes.

  He leapt on the man’s shoulders which gave way and bled beneath his crushing weight. Powerful jaws clamped down on the top of the soldier’s head and the wolf heard little fissures form and crack on the man’s skull through his mouth. Through the chaos he caught glimpses of his shadowy mark moving through his foes like a black knife. Men’s hands turned gray and cracked like stone. Inky bile erupted out another’s mouth as he was impaled with an ethereal tendril. All dropped as gray and dry as granite.

  Their souls had been taken in the same manner as their lives.

  Not well.

  The soldier he was on fell to his knees, his skull crumpled inward near the crown like a mushed egg. Blood and brain matter intruded upon his palate but the wolf spat them out. He didn’t like brain. The final two men shot their rifles and ran screaming into the night. The Seeker and his foe paid them no heed.

  The wolf’s black muzzle had turned mahogany with the red spatter dripping from his furry jaw. Wild and pale eyes regarded his foe carefully. But for the creature’s green stare and white hands however, there was nothing to regard. Whatever the warlock had sworn himself to had left very little in its subsumption.

  The eldritch beast left no time for thoughts. Only the Seeker’s inhuman reflexes and blinding speed saved him from the soldier’s fates. He twisted to the side as spiraling void black tendrils shot past him. Distorted light hung around the werewolf’s hybrid paws and discharged in a flash of ivory static when he whirled and snatched his foe by the ‘neck’.

  He kept his grip tight, the sensation of oil flowing between his fingers quickened. When one of the tendrils doubled back he turned his head just in time to catch it with his free hand and caved it in like anything else in the material world. The beast’s green eyes flared and it hissed, the first sound it had made.

  Nothing had been able to touch it before.

  The wind
howled and the Seeker was thrown off his prey, smacking into a tree. Yellowed leaves tumbled down on his head. The green eyes of the creature bloomed in tones of livid viridian and it surged forward. It did not walk or sprint, seemingly ‘appearing’ ever closer and closer before the Seeker’s eyes, its unnatural passage over space making the trees crack, the ground chill and the moonlight bend like a heat wave.

  The wolf dashed away from the tree just as the beast came upon him. His mark collided with the trunk, and from highest bough to the lowest root, the tree instantly disappeared. The ground cracked and the Seeker stumbled, bewildered by such enchantment.

  Before he could even consider the impossibility before him, the creature was on him again. Thin tendrils snapped at his arms, drawing blood and aching bones. For every whip of shadow his lupine form eluded, another ten would score his muscular flesh.

  The Seeker uttered the beginnings of a spell but was then checked with a savage blow across the face. One of his canines was sent spiraling out of his mouth, trailed by a ribbon of blood. He flew into the dirt and rolled with the momentum, his bloodied body absorbing the heavy impacts.

  He heard the green eyed beast behind him, displacing air and forest in a series of claps and cracks. Then he felt oil slip around his throat, solidify as hard as crystal. It pulled him back like a choke chord, raising him off the ground.

  The Seeker coughed, struggling for breath, the immense grip very near to breaking his wind pipe.

  His relief came quick.

  The servant of the Outer Dark flung the Seeker into the ground with tremendous force. Air fled his lungs in one painful blast. Plumes of leaves scattered, the hard earth breaking before the werewolf’s mass. The Seeker rolled on his back to grab, but this time his claws found nothing, swishing through black phantoms while his sturdy sinews rattled, his heavy bones cracking to a force unseen.

  It was a feeling like drowning.

  The numbed wolf felt his very marrow chill while sharp things pierced his throat. The muted sound of gulping echoed in his ears, the feel of his hot blood erupting from his powerful neck, staining his fur. Locked in the horror’s embrace, the pressure against his ribs grew unbearable.

  He was taken over the edge of agony, his muscles screaming as much as his mouth. Only his twin heritage of witch and wolf saved him from descending into death itself.

  A famished, ever devouring void hovered over his soul, but there was nothing to take, no memories, no love... no happiness. Only hate and pain remained, a sour meal and a bitter gift for he who would take all.

  He felt his lungs constrict, as if they were about to be flattened. His sharp senses were rendered blind and deaf, his world reduced to sick wails and the discordant feel of crystalline muscle, of oily shadows oozing across his arms and the acrid taste of cosmic ashes along his tongue.

  Death loomed and his spirit rose, the words of his order echoing through his mind.

  A Seeker never misses.

  He would not be the first.

  The merciless god of the hunt and wild in him rallied, the beauty of the moon his beacon in the stormy dark. Instinct pulled him from out underneath the gurgling abomination, and instinct made him ready the spell, ready to touch the untouchable once more.

  His claws blazed like ivory flames, cold and silver.

  The Seeker choke slammed the writhing shadow into the ground and had the killing spell upon his tongue before his teeth sank into clammy, corrupted flesh. He gagged and swiped his new assailant with a backhand blow. When he glanced over his shoulder, steely determination burned anew in his heart.

  Necromancy.

  A milky eyed Confederate stumbled from his blow, his flesh pale and translucent. His head lolled to the side from the missing ligaments in his torn out neck, leaking putrid black down his uniform. The wolf looked back to abomination responsible. Your time here was not short enough.

  All the others the green eyed beast had killed had risen to their feet and shambled to their master’s call. The Seeker glared into the beast’s burning emerald eyes and heard a chorus of chants, baritone laughs and sobs from countless mouths, in agony or bliss, he could not tell. The shadow’s cold servants drew ever closer but only one thought was present in the wolf’s mind as he fought back the Primal for a moment of clarity.

  The spell.

  The start of light, he ripped a fallen bayonet from the ground and kept the words in his head, heralds the end of death and night. His lips curled in a snarl and brought the blade down. “Vade dar mi visum!” he finished in the witchtongue. Mutilated though the words were, they were spoken.

  The bayonet in his shadow beast’s chest bloomed with blinding white light and channeled the burning heat of a thousand stars like a long blood stained lightning rod. Darkness withered in a cacophony of alien screams.

  One of the shamblers was reduced to glowing ash and died the second time that night. The Seeker’s own hands burned raw and he felt the searing warmth seep into his bony knuckles. Through the blindness, he still saw those seething green eyes, fuming with untold rage at its killer.

  Once the light retreated, his mark was no more, the bayonet a gleaming pool of molten slag. It’s done. He looked to his sides and saw four of the dead still standing, charred beyond recognition but still moaning a chilling death song. Almost. Half blind and still bleeding he lunged up and sheared the soft and smoking skull of the one he had tasted earlier.

  The others lurched forward with surprising suddenness, their blackened maws and flame cracked teeth gaping grotesquely. The after image of green eyes still lingered on the wolf’s retina and stars swam at the corners of his vision as seared hands clawed for him.

  He threw a blind blow, his clawed hand burst through the back of one’s head. The thrall dropped instantly. Another set of hands pulled back at his head, yanking on his tall ears for a bite.

  The Seeker elbowed the one behind him, hurling him into a tree, eliciting a staccato of snaps as every bone broke in his body. With his hind leg he smashed its hard head into a rotten pulp.

  The final walker was the one who had escaped him earlier, his chest still leaking that foul black putridity. His remaining eye carried no recognition of the Seeker, but that he was living and must die. The wolf paid him as little mercy in death as he did in life, and launched forward in a ripping fury, disemboweling the creature in blur of tearing claws. It fell down on its chest and crawled forward. The long night calls...

  The Seeker swiped the last time that night.

  Sleep.

  Chapter 11: In the Dark

  Frank’s eyes pierced through the darkness, though it was the first time in a long time that he had been able to feel the darkness. It was not the kind of dark felt at the absence of light. It was the kind of dark felt when the sun was dead and the stars dim, a natural environment for those who would not be natural in any environment.

  The dark was not the only thing he could feel. The ever present sting of light hung on his neck, not of the ultraviolet spectrum but the rays from a dimension far beyond his own. He wished to be as far from the angel as possible and yet had to proceed cautiously. The room reeked of dust and staleness and seemed larger than it should have in the shadows.

  Dim white pools from the moon scattered along the carpet from the swaying curtains. They should be brighter, he thought. But whatever natural light came through the windows was hampered by the aura of unnatural that had entrenched itself in the room. Each step he took the atmosphere grew thicker and more cloying. If the angel felt it, he made no note of it.

  His refined eyes scanned over the furnishings, all bathed in a diffused blackish blue night glow. Strange skulls laid in a variety of positions on a dresser, some goat like, others more human but not quite. All were inked and chiseled with ancient sigils, deformed crosses and distorted ankhs. The bed in the room was slashed with a giant ‘X’. The vampire thought he saw some writhings at the foot of the bed but paid it little heed.

  At the bedside table his eyes narrowed at a jar
of dark red fluid. It bubbled with currents of silver, glowing eerily with strange, self-contained light. The top of it steamed and churned like a stew, though no heat source was readily apparent.

  “Witch blood.” said Peter and pointed at the jar. “An open jar keeps whatever wards in the room active. But don’t knock it over, or they could all go off at once.”

  “Bet that’s hard to get a hold of-” Frank stopped suddenly. He felt the ward... and it was alive. Like the cold fingers of a dead child, the air grew active around his head and grazed his throat with a feather soft touch. He felt the slightest of tugs at the back of his hair and a sticky sensation creep past his lips and down his throat. The closest he could compare it to was when he had to drain a snake once and the creature still had a little more fight in it.

  The snake was warmer than the chill that crept down his throat. The chill grew thick in his chest, as if his ribs had turned to heavy ice while the rest of the darkness clung to his body like a layer of ethereal swamp grime.

  Frank heard a beating in his head, but it was not the sound of his dead heart. Ghostly prickles raced down his chest and his sharp vision diffused into a more impressionistic sense. Deeper and deeper the viscid chill went; he might have gagged were he mortal. It spread through his flesh, in search of something precious.

  However the dark that entered would find no light to dim, only more of a void to drown in. Come take a peek inside, stay for awhile. A vicious and merciless blackness stirred in his chest and rebuffed this intruder. Cacophonous roars resounded in the vampire’s head, so loud and so terrible that he winced.

  Frank felt some of the tenebrous cold begin to leave him.

  He grinned and felt a rush of black ice rush through his nerves as the talons of his soul ripped into its catch. The interloper had intruded into a most savage and damned creature, and would no more be spared than more corporeal prey.

  The jar of witchblood boiled more hotly and the silvery light glowed more brightly. Beads of sweat reached across the vampire’s powerful neck as he staggered, struggling to keep the beast inside. He heard the angel say something to him but heard nothing but dim noise, his hearing thrown off as if someone had fired a gun by his ear. The gentle touches of earlier were no more as the foreign spirit wailed to escape and spread searing pain through his deadened veins.