Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  With one final, agonizing scream it was finished and he was no more. Peter bounded over the edge of the balcony just as the others rushed in, battering the beast with shards turned into rains of searing glass, whispers turned into razor winds, holding him down with tiles turned to tar, mauling his titanic hide with blades of light and darkness and no small measure of armor piercing bullets.

  The angel landed on the building below, rolling to absorb the shock of falling on ceramic shingles. The things cracked and poked into him but he pushed the pain away. No sooner had he landed he was up again. Horrific sounds of slaughter emanated from the balcony above, screams punctuated the cacophony of tearing and burning.

  Peter heard shingles crumple and snap behind him, followed by curses. He leapt across to another roof and spared just a half-second to spot his pursuers. Two witches. Their beauty was alluring as it was unnatural. The eyes of the blonde one carried an uncanny luminescence while the skin along her arms rippled like water, her flesh brimming with the power that distanced her kind from Man as Man’s intelligence did from common beasts.

  The other witch’s face was refined and pale, her features elongated, eyes narrow and black, cheekbones as high as gravestones. Her sable tresses whirled in the rooftop winds like triumphant pennants, streaked with strands of silken silver.

  The marks of their wickedness have not withered with time.

  The two pursuers stopped for a moment to regard the angel. Peter too, paused and caught his breath and then recognized the two. They were the very same girls he had seen earlier hovering over the coffee pot when he entered Karim’s apartment. With their glamour dropped, they no longer looked like they fit in modern society, or at least sane company.

  Blue jeans had been replaced by some unidentifiable dark material, smooth like leather but infinitely more suited for running. Peter strained his eyes to see the color of their dark jackets against the waning sun. Both were black with silvered floral trim around the cuffs and gleaming designs in the style of rose petals around the collar.

  His own blood and scorch marked white jacket had turned brownish purple under the flushed coral tones of the falling sun. “Leave me and repent... I offer you this one chance to walk with your lives.” he said breathlessly. The one with the seams of silver in her locks contrived a giggle while the blonde one stepped to the edge of her footing and smirked.

  “An angel come to grace us with his presence? Is it true?” the witch smiled.

  Peter didn’t. “It would be better for you if it weren’t.”

  The other witch stepped forward. “Look at him! Not even a shadow of a wing or a glint of gold.” She laughed. “I wonder… is an angel still an angel without his wings?”

  Ask your blinded friends.

  “Just a man.” said the other. “But a talented man. Which patron are you sworn to? I’d bet our Lady would like to meet it.” Her hand massaged a wand, carved in a lustrous red grain wood with a clear gem at the handle, swirling with tiny currents of milky light.

  The black haired witch looked to her companion, smiling. “I don’t think she would need him alive for that, either...”

  The blonde scrutinized Peter’s eyes, oblivious to her friend. “How did a man like you end up in a place like this?”

  Peter’s face remained stony, his words leaving his lips like water drips from dry rock. “Because my god is just… and yours are cruel.”

  The witches’ good humor evaporated. “Guess she sees him dead.”

  Peter scanned them both. A stroke of insight hit. Their Lady. Karim didn’t know. But they would. “Tell me from where your Lady commands, and your judgment shall be held for another day.”

  The two witches glanced at each other and smiled. The blonde one spoke. “We’ll take our chances.” she said without mirth, though even that could not hide the innate melody in her voice.

  Then I’ll take what I need.

  He leaped across the span of the two roofs, kicking up shingles down to the streets below. He wrapped one hand around the neck of the blonde whose hair was like a shivering mass of foamy gold. His other hand wrapped around her wand and pitched it into the streets.

  The woman howled with rage. She muttered a quick incantation under her breath and slashed her nails across Peter’s chest. Charred, red streaks bled across his pectorals. Her long nails vibrated so fast smoke rose from their tips. She struck again with a fluidity becoming of her witchbreed heritage, this time holding her hand over his shoulder as she whispered another enchantment.

  Peter opened his mouth to soundless agony as his right shoulder fractured in three places, catching a mouthful of the smell of his own singed chest.

  Filled with righteous fury, he kneed her in the stomach just as the other witch prepared her spell. Peter manipulated the blonde’s wrist with inhuman deftness and snapped it.

  Her shriek of pain was but a prelude to the banshee gusts of wind that ripped across the roof, all flowing into the tip of the raven witch’s scepter. Peter pushed the woman in front of him and held her by the neck.

  “You take me, you take her!” he shouted over the lashing gales. The woman only grinned as her body began to distort more and more to furious winds and waves of dusky gray light.

  “I know!” she screamed. Peter’s heart sank as she unleashed a wall of wind across the roof with explosive force. Sparks from the grind of shingles bloomed into blazing orbs of hellfire. Silver and cerulean bands of light shot into the physical matter; screaming and cutting like souls risen from underworld graves.

  Peter braced himself with the heathen as his shield while shredded chunks of shingles, wood frame, fire and magic spun forward in a maelstrom of razor sharp eddies and currents.

  As he and the witch were pitched off the roof and bit into by glowing ceramic shards, he moved his hand over her forehead and plumbed her soul for secrets. She did not have the spiritual fortitude granted by Karim’s ring and yielded what he sought under sacred pain.

  Even in the rushing winds, her screams were elucidating.

  The angel had three important facts. A name. A location.

  And that it was a long drop.

  Chapter 19: Reunions

  The shadows spat Frank back out into the chamber, darkness slopping off like the membranes of a delivered newborn from his shoulders. What seemed as uncountable years of delirium and agony on the ancient shadow roads was but a breath of time for the djinn’s perception of reality.

  The remaining mercenaries shouted in disbelief and utter horror that the vampire was back, his appearance nightmarish. Veins of darkness coiled along his gray skin, the red glare of his eye the brightest it had ever been. Hair clung wetly to his scalp, giving him the appearance of a vengeful drowned wraith.

  Spent but not broken, the vampire’s thirst for revenge greater than his thirst for blood, he butchered the djinn that did not run before his wrath. Basima watched in horror and awe as the bloodthirsty blur bent djinn across bars, savagely slammed heads into the black stone and gunned down stragglers from impossible angles.

  Frank dropped a steaming djinn pistol and clenched his fists, his back heaving.

  The circular chamber was awash in streams of molten bronze, biting through the stone in drooping bands of light, while the very stairs and slopes seemed to bleed, their dark sheens covered in the life blood of Basima’s kin.

  The vampire slumped down the shadowy stairs, a crimson ruin. Streams of red hot bronze leaked over exposed bone, his hands as raw and smoking as his fanged mouth. His lips were black and cracked, his eyes like blood flecked fires. “Basima...” he rasped, his throat charred. “What... was... that?”

  Basima scrambled back and held a small knife out in front of her. “Stay back!”

  He smiled at its gleaming point and chuckled harshly. “You’re gonna need a bigger knife.”

  “Please... Frank, I told you I couldn’t go back to that life!”

  Frank leaned down and caressed her face, his throat making a sickly rattle. “And now yo
u won’t.” She whimpered and stuck the knife in between his ribs. The vampire placed his hand over hers and broke the handle off from the blade, bringing his lips close to her ear. “I know what you are Basima. I truly do.” He traced her supple mouth. “You killed a lot of men with these lips. Cause of death could be knives, poisons... bullets.” He glanced at Vazim’s corpse. “But the weapon is always the same. Trust. You’re not some poor pawn in a cell. And you ain’t no Queen of the Desert. You’re a fuckin’ schemer and you thought with me ‘Here’s another.’”

  Her face reddened and she tried to push away from him. “No, no, it’s not like—”

  “And know what I’m thinking right now... here’s another.” He licked his blood parched lips, his irises fat like black moons.

  Basima breathed hard, her voice trembling. “I’m sorry Frank!” Sorry that I’m not dead. “I had no choice... Navras used me! Both of us!”

  “Shh shh shh... Basima... I might believe you...” he saw her eyes swell with hope and deep down his damned soul rejoiced. The blood of hope is sweeter than the blood of lies. “but maybe... maybe I hear the way your heart beats... the way you look away from me, imagining your next story... the way you shot Vazim when it looked like it wasn’t gonna go your way...” He brushed away a strand of her lustrous, raven locks and revealed the smooth expanse of her swan-like neck “and think you’re still just full of shit.”

  “Oh.”

  Frank grinned wide; his vampiric fangs, stripped of their surrounding flesh, stood out like the great canines of a silverback gorilla, their high ivory towers ready to pierce into soft skin.

  She looked away and tried to pull back.

  Then she felt it. Rough and bloodied hands pulled her further down and she gasped as he punctured her throat. Whether it was in fright or pleasure, she could not tell.

  Frank grunted like a bear nuzzling into the innards of a deer. Gouts of dark blood lapped over his chin like red wine. It was lighter than human blood and burned less than that of full djinn blood. It burned but did not scald.

  And it was satisfying.

  There was a slight undertone of sweetness that washed around his regrowing tongue that made him savor it in his mouth a little more before indulging in the throat stripping burn that followed. He felt his torn muscle tissues reconnect and reinvigorate. The burn in his throat became more intense as more of his flesh reassembled. Blood soaked into the roof of his mouth and was redistributed via specialized membranes up into his brain.

  His senses rushed back to him. He felt smoke and cinders waft through the shadows and over his shoulders. The smell of Basima’s opulent perfumes wafted by his restored nose. Her moans, long and melodious like a songbird, graced his ears.

  Raw power blasted through his sinews. He pulled away from her neck and straightened back up on his feet, exhaling lustily and balling his fists. “Whew! Goddamn!” Spots of untouched alabaster skin peeked through his torn, blood soaked leather jacket. Bones no longer rose from flesh, his chest heaving and in one piece.

  Basima stared into the ceiling with hazy and dilated eyes. Her midnight tresses stuck to her elegant brow in a fine layer of sweat. She twitched, a halo of blood blooming around her head from the twin punctures in her throat. She was lost in ecstasy.

  “Frank...” she said breathlessly.

  “We’re even.” He glanced at her paling face, the weak quivers in her hands. And then walked on, through the Gate, out of the shadows... and into the roaring light.

  ***

  A shower of dust and crushed brick blew over Peter’s shoulder. He stumbled to the ground, choking, runnels of blood running down his arms, his side wracked with pain. Through the red haze stepped a creature of nightmare, at odds with the cozy apartment kitchen behind it.

  In one claw it held a witch’s corpse, the one who was blown off the roof. With a haunting growl the beast pitched the woman’s ragged body at Peter. The angel weakly rolled out of the way, enough for the witch to hit where he was sitting with a wet slap and crunch. Her body sagged down the wall, leaving a snail trail of brownish red blood.

  Peter exhaled, wishing he had one more sip of wine, one more look at the setting sun, the vastness of the sea. This... is not how this life ends. He gathered his breath and looked upon the abomination.

  Sickly emerald eyes pierced through an enveloping veil of lightless black ooze like rotten cosmic bodies. Cheekbones rose to skeletal prominence and hollowed out sockets housed shrunken, clouded orbs within, blazing unnatural viridian light through their irises. Everything else in its bone structure had indicated it had thrown off the manacles of humanity and embraced something far more ancient and strange.

  Where there was once a jaw, sat a radula with crystallized feeder tendrils pouring out its center, covered in blood and the being’s black cosmic essence. Beneath a striated, muscular neck bulged clavicles forged out of the iron of some bio-mechanical nightmare. Its forearms were like thick slabs covered in molten black oil, its fingers ebon spikes evolved for the purpose of the most efficient deathmaking possible.

  Peter was beaten. He didn’t have a gun. He didn’t even have the skin on his fists. But he did have one thing, a thing as inevitable and as strong as a law of nature.

  His will.

  Even if it was set against a spectral wall of hardened muscle, harboring a mind born of the sleepless and pitiless worlds that lay invisible against the sepulchral darkness of the cosmos, the angel would stand and smite until he could do no more.

  He staggered up to his feet, his stance unsteady.

  The two intellects regarded each other. Millenniums among the eternal against eons of alien wisdom and still it came down to what it always comes down to... brute strength. Against the walking rift of unreality, Peter was in a contest that no mortal was meant to win, much less compete in.

  But he was no mere mortal.

  “Coruzhra thith amar kralya s’isubar!” roared the being in a tone that was as musical as it was dissonant.

  Peter felt his chest and ribs vibrate, as if the creature was trying to dislodge his soul by voice alone. He noticed how the dark edges of the entity quivered, like black flames blown by some unseen wind. The sable fluid that writhed over its muscles sometimes shot forward, as if trying to grab a more solid bearing on reality, find nothing.

  Peter’s eyes flicked down.

  The ring.

  The angel dodged the beast’s first strikes; its blows without grace, like refracted shadows, each lunge precise, correcting on each previous miss. Still... Peter could only predict its moves so far.

  It swatted him down to the ground. Adrenaline and his thirst for life enlivened his will. He rolled away from the being’s killing swing.

  One of its claws smashed through the floor, the carpet and floor itself around disintegrating into black haze, consumed by the beast’s hunger for existence.

  Just as Peter looked up, a trio of midnight black tentacles erupted from the creature’s chest, waving and lashing in the air obscenely. Meanwhile, hardened chitinous plates began to emerge from underneath its oily muscle. There is only now.

  The angel focused and heat built up within his palm, inadvertently sealing up cuts and clefts. He darted forward with a deftness that surprised himself, sliding beneath the whipping tendrils. In a moment that was beyond thought and instinct, he gripped the horror’s ring finger.

  He pulled.

  Light, smoke and shadow coursed off the mangled finger. The monster screamed a sound unlike any Peter had ever heard in all his travels. It sounded of high pitched mortal agony, and of something deeper, like a sea beast’s rage.

  Peter fell back on the ground, his hand slipping off the animal, leaving behind only Karim’s vestigial bone, the ring having come off in a steaming and bubbling mass of void flesh.

  The darkness, separated from its master, evaporated within the angel’s hand.

  The master too, without its ring to root it in reality, became subject to nature’s laws all at once. It stumbled for
ward and then fell to its knees. Joints and ligature cracked, its chest sunk inwards while its grotesque face subsumed into shadow, the luster of its green eyes faded into darkness.

  Peter backed away while the thing crawled along the floor, its human part screeching for life, desperate for existence; reaching for its ring. Pieces of chitin slopped onto the floor and faded from being just as quickly.

  The angel watched its death throes with cold eyes, how its struggles slowed unto stillness, until only a partially devoured skeleton remained, much of it taken out of this world with the darkness that once rode its flesh. A dark but slowly fading resin glistened on its bones, its one intact hand frozen in a skeletal reach towards Peter.

  Peter sighed and smiled. “Finally.” He reclined his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  The sound of crunching glass shards hit his ears before the voice. “Oh my... what a mess you made.” He opened one eye and saw the witch who had blown him and her companion off the roof. Her fingers grazed the apartment walls and their texture rippled to her touch, like wind across grass. “I’ll be having that ring now.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  Her face widened and her eyes gleamed with joy. “Shouldn’t be too hard.” She raised her wand, its tip swirling with light and distorting the air. Peter tried to move but only fell to his side. What witchery is this...

  He felt a strange prickle and heat build up in front of his face, his skin crawling with tingles. The air grew more heavy and pressed down on his body. Just when he thought the end was to come... it did.

  All strangeness in the room fell away just as the witch fell to the floor. A long crescent of red circled her throat. The thin but deep tear leaked lustrous blood, pooling beneath her pale head and clouding raven tresses into crimson shadows. Peter’s eyes roved up to her killer.