Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  “Can’t tell. Hides his radiance well.”

  The witch loosed a melodious sigh. “Ah... perhaps it is because there is no radiance to hide? Heaven sent a little dove... to... do... what? Bring peace? Or amuse me?”

  “You’ll be peaceful enough in the ground.”

  Agatha laughed, musical and cruel. “Oh then show me.” She leaned down to him, looking eye to eye. “Give me peace.” her voice trembled at the end, enough for the angel to notice her eyes soften for a moment.

  “Give me my gun.”

  She smiled and pulled away. “I’m ready for the end... but I’ll not bow before it.”

  “Give me the demon, then. And I won’t kill you.” You’ll wish I had by the end. “You have my word.”

  Agatha smiled and Aphon chuckled. “I have already given my word to help, not harm him. Surely you can appreciate honor and oaths.”

  “Whatever is honored between witches and demons is not honorable. I would have you redeem yourself... while you still can.”

  Agatha twitched and her lip curled into an impious snarl. “Redeem.” she said it as if the very syllables themselves were ashes in her mouth. “I redeemed myself when I reclaimed my power after the folly of Calanar. I redeemed myself again after shedding myself of the icy prison Man designed for me. I’ve had enough ‘redemptions’ to last me for the rest of my life.” It will last no more than another hour, if His grace be good.

  “I have only to suffer redemption one last time,” she continued, “Only this redemption is for all my people. We shall rise like phoenixes from the mud, on wings of Promethean fire, our feathers dappled in the resplendence of gods.”

  This time Peter laughed. The angel’s laughter unsettled Aphon, and the demon stood back before the invisible and harmonious notes of Heaven that ran across his lips. “A witch is the last person I’d suspect to grow fond of fire in her dotage.”

  She spun around and faced the angel, her eyes cold, glinting like polished stones. “Oh there will be much burning in the end. Blood will burn, seas will boil, skies will be wrought in flame. Shadow will turn to light. It will be a reckoning.” She grabbed him roughly by the chin, her levity evaporated. “You burned my brothers and sisters at the stake. The sheep of your false god pitched me into a fate worse than Hell. And the long centuries since have seen my people fade into pale shadows.” Her eyes bore into his and the angel heard a thousand mad voices at once, clamoring for his audience. “We are back to repay your kindness!”

  She launched him across the floor and Peter felt unnatural winds lash around his arms and legs. A strange glow suffused the witch’s complexion and her raven hair fluttered like midnight serpents.

  Peter shook his head and blinked away the blackness in his vision. Gripping his gun, the dazed angel spun around and fired at Agatha.

  Aphon dashed in front of the volley, a blur of infernal shadow.

  The demon host staggered back as the spray of rounds rent his chest asunder while the rest ripped through his shoulder and arm. Blood sprayed forth in great pockets, lashes of oily red fluid staining nearby curtains. “You son of a bitch!” said the demon through punctured, wheezing lungs. Wrong.

  The demon’s irises clouded black as night with thin lines of luminous, warped yellow. Peter’s gaze widened as the creature’s wounds began to sizzle and seal back together. He won’t be able to do it again. Peter leaped forward, marshaling the force of all that was holy into his body.

  Words in the angelic tongue flew from Peter’s mouth, the very air brightening to his holy utterances. “In their names, I rebuke you!” He finished in a language the demon could understand, compounding the power of his litany.

  Aphon screamed and steamed, wrapping his hand around the angel’s throat. Now burn in Hell. Blinding light passed from the angel’s palm to the demon’s face. Bones cracked and his charred stench filled the angel’s nostrils. But rather than annihilating Aphon, the light seemed to diffuse across his skin.

  Peter choked in Aphon’s grip and saw the beast look into him for the first time. A writhing and hunched shadowy mass flashed below the host’s pallid skin, darkening his eye sockets into a skeletal countenance while his shadow elongated, perched on a sickeningly familiar digitigrade feet, flapping a set of wings that existed more for status than function. Peter knew the build well from his wars against such horrors.

  So my demon is a royal. But no prince and certainly no king. Though his form showed the earliest signs that he had the making of one. Peter felt the strength leave his legs as he threw one last heaping of his willpower at the demon. Hope dimmed in his heart when his exorcising light seeped into the demon and fell underneath his shadows like bone white fingers sinking underneath pools of oil.

  Aphon’s laugh rumbled with a deepness that belied the sunken chest of his host. “Should have brought more than a rebuke, little angel.” Aphon picked him up by the neck and walked him back over to Agatha.

  “We all have our places.” said Agatha from behind. Her voice echoed, as if it sprung from the very stones themselves. “I have the city of cities in this world, the demon the crown in his and you... wings in Heaven. Not all will be so lucky.”

  “You do that and you’ll start a war.” he coughed and Aphon tightened his grip.

  Agatha stepped closer to him and he felt a brush of chill air. Her hands slid down his sides like slick ice, tasting of his warmth and radiance. “Man is but flesh and blood, his warhorses slow and clogged with oil.”

  Peter laughed bitterly. “It is not Man you will answer to.”

  Agatha smiled. “All is and will be accounted for.” More than you know, witch. She leaned down and caressed his cheek. “I do not seek fallen ones or old ones.” She reached for her neck and pulled off a necklace with a long, dagger shaped piece of onyx. It sucked in light like the earth does blood when she twirled in front of him. “A treasure coveted by Heaven and Hell alike, by the Outer Dark and even my own kin. The Black Stars are from realities as subtle as a breath in a storm, and as far away from our own as light is from Tartarus.” The air thrummed with power, grown heavy with purpose, the old lamps in the room smoldered more intensely, their yellows deepening to the growing wave of whispers that reached up the angel like old growth.

  “I need no gods, from above or below. I need only this...” She brought the umbral relic up to her face and twirled it, admiring the way it thinned and widened with each change of angle. “The envy of all, the one thing the great cannot make.” A sickly sweet smile dawned on her visage, and the Black Star fragment in her hand flickered out of existence while her face twisted more than her flesh should have allowed. “As for you...” She looked back to him while the shadow of the demon loomed in the corners of his vision.

  Peter prepared for death as Aphon unsheathed a ritualistic knife over his paralyzed body.

  “Go back running to your masters, in that little cloistered hall of pearl. And you tell them of what has happened tonight.” She circled around him, smiling. “Impress upon them... that I am a problem that can never be solved.” The back of her head exploded in a halo of red spray.

  “Problem solved.” said Frank across the room, holding a smoking gun. Her body slumped over and her whited out eyes rolled back into the steaming crater of her head. He showed the weapon off to Peter. “Beretta. Old Italian Navy style. Didn’t think they would have one here of all places.”

  Peter still stared at Agatha’s corpse and shuddered in disbelief when her facial features streamed down her neck like watercolor paints, leaving behind a woman who was a witch, but not the one he was seeking.

  Aphon snickered behind him.

  “Did you really think it would be that easy, angel?” Peter turned back to the demon just in time to see him disappear from the space he was occupying, making Frank’s belated gunfire tear apart the marbled walls behind him.

  “Oh. Damn.” said Frank as he prodded the corpse that was not Agatha. “Well one out of two ain’t bad...” That’s not her you fool. The chantin
g came back again, like some rising storm, vibrating through the walls and floor.

  The angel wanted to scold Frank for wandering off, but a more pressing matter called to him. Dark whispers rushed past his ears. The nearby table and crystalware shook while the lights dimmed and flickered.

  He turned back to Frank. “It’s not over. Not yet.”

  Chandeliers shook and unfinished plates exploded like ceramic grenades, sending bits of steak and plaster into the air. The dining hall floors collapsed as if sucked into a funnel, moving the two to leap back to the entry arches of the room. Wooden flooring flew and was stripped off in rectangular chunks, swooping into the dark vortex below the floor like some perverse sun.

  The chanting Frank and Peter had heard from time to time was now let out, unmuffled and at full resonance. Ranks upon ranks of forsaken heathens ululated cries of glory to their patron below. A select few were unmoored from their grip and were sucked up into the vortex with a cut off scream.

  Through the whirlwind of swirling debris, and the spine chilling chants of the cultists spoken in reverse, Frank saw something peculiar in the roaring vortex. It wasn’t as dark as he thought, and as it widened, as if pulled from the sides by invisible hands, he saw the roof of another building, the skies of another city.

  Below the torn mess of the dining hall, he watched a lone man stalk the edge of the cultists, his strangles brutal and smooth, like shadowy lightning snapping around the necks of his prey. Hobo’s got some moves. The ragged stranger plucked the chanting cultists like a thief in the night, his victims too enraptured in their task for alarm.

  He ripped through the assembly like a virulent disease. His loping stride gave off a primal grace, despite looking like he rolled out of a rusty truck bed.

  “That’s him!” screamed Frank over the howling maelstrom, pointing to Peter their mysterious benefactor.

  “That’s her and him!” Peter shouted back, pointing out Agatha and Aphon as they scrambled over the sea of their followers towards the vortex.

  The two leapt down into the chaos, pushing and bounding over flailing, stumbling bodies. Most of the followers were lost in a terrified scramble. A few more deranged types hurled themselves at the angel and vampire, their mouths wide and screaming.

  Peter dodged his attackers while Frank slugged what he took to be a strung out coke addict in the jaw; his unnatural, unholy strength snapping the man’s neck. Frank noticed how Peter took on an unreal quality, twisting and flexing around assailants with inhuman dexterity as he grew closer to his prey.

  Peter glowed with holy purpose, and heard a shriek of despair over the chaotic din as he gained on the real Agatha. He spared a look over his shoulder and saw the renegade, wild maned witchbreed tearing and leaping over bodies with crazed desperation as he bounded ever closer to their leader. Peter clutched a jagged piece of debris and leaped forward, his improvised weapon aimed for the back of her neck- –

  Aphon tackled him from the side.

  Wind flew from his lungs and his sternum cracked.

  The two stumbled and careened down small steps before rolling into a stone sarcophagus. The angel bashed Aphon’s head into pointed stone, screaming holy words of banishment over his rain of blows. Foul blood streamed down the side’s of Aphon’s head, too stunned by the angel’s fury to react.

  Peter prayed to his father, imagining each blow against the demon’s host as a hammer pushing his spirit ever closer to Hell.

  The demon rallied his senses and struck Peter in the ribs with a savage blow. Peter grimaced as he felt his bones fracture, recoiling backwards. Still strong. Too strong. The demon launched back up to his feet and brought his knee to Peter’s nose, sending spurts of red dripping onto his leg.

  The host had become unhinged, his mouth wild, showing teeth that looked like they had been cooked in acid while putrid light radiated out his eyes. Peter thought his time had come, that the demon was going to finish it once and for all. He looked over to his side and still saw Frank cleaving his way through flailing bodies, his eyes bright, his fangs long and a depraved smile across his face.

  As Aphon picked him over the sarcophagus, he realized there would be no bullet tearing through the demon, no final punch to buy more time. The creature exerted too much over his body, pinning his bones down with an unseen force. Aphon drew his fist back, high in the air above Peter’s throat.

  He paused, his face turning to the hums and snaps of the closing portal. “Lucky dog...”

  Aphon dropped the angel, bounding off to the ethereal terminus.

  Peter fell to his knees. His eye’s welled up, grateful for another breath. He swayed on his feet, all the way to the glimmering passage that shrunk with each moment. Almost there. Frank lifted his arm over his shoulder from behind.

  The angel looked to his blood drunk ally and saw how his jacket was torn, smoked and scorched. Ruby droplets of blood speckled his alabaster face and ran like red rain down his jaw. He had the bearing of a lion given too much meat on which to gorge.

  “Go!” shouted Frank as he pushed a stumbling Peter through the closing spectral tear. The vampire watched as silvery light assailed the outer edges of the angel’s body before falling over him whole... and then the holy servant was no more.

  Frank spared one last glance over his shoulder at the charnel house the crypt had become. Throngs of the dregs of society clambered over each other; backs, limbs, faces all, not one part was sacred among the herd in their frantic scramble. Witches too, hurled spells at each other, which Frank could only discern as such by the various, near invisible distortions of air and surreal flickers of eldritch light.

  In the chaos, with no mistress to keep them tethered, old hatreds flamed anew. He watched an exotic, platinum haired witch take fire from a burning bookcase and hurl it at a wizened bald warlock. The spell rippled across the room in a spark filled heat wave. The warlock in turn smashed his staff into the ground and Frank saw a mass of sable coils and tendrils snake around scattered corpses in a mad dash to the witch; their sharp, seething tips outlined in hues of empyrean emerald.

  Gunshots flashed in swirls of cloaks and smashed against tattooed flesh. Cool knives shimmered in the darkness, some as plain as silver, other’s as alive as a man’s hand, drinking blood and bone alike. Some men laid in a red, rictus peace, their brains dashed across the stone sarcophagi. Many women were torn down like their silk robes, some dying with dignity, others left in crimson tatters.

  Aphon’s degenerates, demonic and mortal alike, coupled with the common witches, their twisted flopping and screams a mere sideshow to the wailing statues that crumbled into dust and flame. Witch dueled witch, their arcane clashes hidden to the eye but for the coronic arcs of silvered light that exploded above their heads every few heartbeats.

  Warlocks called upon their dark patrons, desperate to get out of the blind, panting knot of the mob. Most died, their prayers unanswered as they fell beneath a hundred different feet. Others disappeared or set their attackers into melting stumps, their joints smoking to the black drip of shadow fire.

  Among the cries of agony and ecstasy, ivory sarcophagus lids careened to the floor, drenching their immaculate stone to the ever widening pools of red. Flickering pale, jade and blue fires lent the room an underworld cast. The new world Agatha promised was out of reach to the witchbreed, but their fellow man was not. All sensed each among them had something worth taking; a life, a knife, it did not matter. Only the satisfaction of the taking.

  Frank slew one howling, half-mad witch who stumbled out of the press with the snap of his pistol. Before she fell on him he caught her. He ripped into her still warm throat, taking one gulp before spewing the rest out in distaste. Tastes like tingly shit. He sent her limp corpse tumbling down the steps before letting loose a deranged laugh at the bloody anarchy.

  He turned and jumped into the portal, now only wide enough to barely admit him. He felt sharp prickles across his face and coldness in his feet as reality melted and bent before him like an
oozing candle. For the smallest piece of a moment in that transportation of soul and body, he knew what it was like to be in two places at once.

  Chapter 24: Showdown

  Frank was thrown from the tear and onto the hard pebbles of the roof. His chest skidded on the bumpy ground, and the sharp granules tore though his shirt and skin underneath as if under a grater. Cold fog rose up from his back and limbs like he had just emerged from a vat of dry ice. However frigid the journey was however, the vampire showed no sign of bother and got up to face Peter.

  The angel had been waiting for him, and pointed to Frank’s singed and torn jacket. “Seems you’ve made a habit of catching fire.”

  Frank touched his jacket and then remembered. “Courtesy of our secret helper. Little shit threw light at me. Burned like hell.”

  Peter put a finger under his chin before turning back around and watching the city lights below. “You mean he commanded fire?”

  “If it was, it was the cleanest fire I’ve ever seen.” More like a beam than a blaze. “The burn felt off too.”

  “Not unusual. The arcane has become a subtler thing since its decline. Some heresies of nature are bound to be distorted past recognition in order to work in this world.”

  Frank came up next to Peter and overlooked the city. Having walked the earth over the long centuries and still not seen all the strangeness the world had to offer, what he saw now was tame in comparison to what he had seen in the last few hours, much less ages past. London spread out before him in all its gleaming night glory as the full pale moon graced its tall buildings and cramped spaces with its silvery caress.

  “That helper, by the way, is a werewolf.” said Frank. “Most the time you can’t tell. Night like this you can. Face is too thick in certain places, fucked up ears.” He looked up to the full moon, its pure ivory glow marred by the passing of dark clouds. “His body is preparing for the Change.” And on a night like this. Fuck.

  Peter watched the streets intently for his mark until Frank’s words fully sunk into his brain. “Come again?”