Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  The silvery light of the full moon poured down from the ruptured ceiling and bathed the Seeker’s hulking form with pale luminescence. His body jerked and shuddered from the sudden exposure, giving the witch an opening to cast another incantation. Throwing her palm out she screamed a burst of words, and the room darkened while the remaining lights dimmed as if becoming distant stars.

  The werewolf got hold of his senses just in time to counter the oncoming spell. Flecks of ethereal light, bending like a luminescent stream mingled with the void, shot forth in a gout of power that was near indistinguishable from the shadows in the room, but for its stygian blackness and strange pinpoints of witch light.

  He ripped through the spell, claws extended, its friction singing facial hair and the tips of his rags, his momentum hurling him through the sorcery and to the witch herself.

  Agatha was grabbed by the throat and slammed through the lounge’s exit and into the outer hallway. Gunfire erupted before her, the wall cracked behind. Such things did not register.

  She was snared.

  Agatha’s heart sank as she beheld his wild face, one eye blue and human, the other golden like a wolf, his bone structure caught in some monstrous in between of man and canine. He maintained his grip on her throat, and thus her incantations.

  “At last...” he said, his bestial voice filled with triumph and relief. He pitched her to the ground, enough to break the witch’s legs but for her enchantments. “For the crimes of murder, thievery, conspiracy against the High Council, treason against Calanar, evading lawful judgment, treating with an entity of the Nine Circles... the sentence—”

  “Just shut up!” Agatha coughed, rubbing her throat. “I’ve heard the same lapdog lecture all before. You are not the first Seeker to sentence me, but you will be the last.” She raised her head to him. “They’ve fed you lies to better serve their purpose... which is to serve the High Council. Do you think sorcerers and sorceresses care for justice?” She smiled. “No... if they could be said to care, it is only for power... I am a threat to that power.”

  “You are a threat to order and balance-”

  “A forest fire is not chaos, it is a check against imbalance. When I am done, there will be flames, there will be smoke... and there will be life.” She rose to her feet and eyed the man beast. “You can’t say the same. I’ve seen where your road leads. The wise and mighty Seeker, high and right in his judgment... surrounded by the dead. Tell me, who will you protect when our people are gone? What law is there to enforce with no one to violate it?” Her smile darkened. “What is the Order of Orion without its prey?”

  The Seeker clenched his fists, stepping under the shadows, his voice deep and resonant. “What the Order commands is a means to an end. You would only drag out what must die. I know the rot that seizes our home... that eventually the fires of its decadence will consume it... and that is justice.” Light twinkled at the end of his elongated nails. “Your corpse on Calanar’s burning steps is the same. I don’t care which comes first.”

  Then you are lost.

  He raised a finger and light lanced into Agatha’s eye. At once a train of images raced through her mind. Crippled and broken witches. Warlocks dancing in blood drenched streets, flames in red reflections. Black eyed children in their beds, souls plundered from their flesh like gold from a chest.

  These are lies... figments.

  “I did not do that!” she screamed.

  “You’ve forgotten much.” He stepped into the light. “We forget nothing.”

  The Seeker lunged forward, claws burning with silvery light. The witch was blindsided as searing pain spiked in her side, her life blood spraying in a dark arc over the hallway’s wall. She gasped and stumbled back, feeling the numbed sensation of enchantment leaving her flesh.

  He means to take me back the same way I left. She went to one knee, her breathing intensified, the Black Star around her neck throbbing as it stymied her loss of blood and magic. I come back to Calanar a liberator, or not at all. “You... idiot.” she hacked up blood on a pale hand. “You think you serve some higher purpose? That you were anything more than a rabid dog for cowards in towers?” She staggered to her feet and all the lights in the hall flickered, the shadows running like blood. “See now your true master.”

  “Toula trahansar...” she whispered.

  Her skin took on the cobbled texture of the wall, while the wall itself grew more clear, like a giant sheet of glass. The Seeker lunged for her but only found air, fire and blood. He was back in the lounge. Muzzle flashes scarred the dark.

  The angel took cover.

  The demon took lives. Frenzied and covered in blood, his skin burnt and clothes singed, he stove in the face of the djinn prince with wild abandon, the man long dead.

  His eyes fell upon the shafts of moonlight that pierced through the ceiling. His gaze wandered up.

  He could not look away.

  Howling winds and icy rain blew through the hole in the roof. The air was lit up by gun fire, the stink of melted bronze accompanying the barrage. Veins bulged on the Seeker’s neck and his muscles rippled. The pull of direct moonlight felt like it was going to pry his brain in half.

  The Primal rattled its cage within his soul, knowing its time had come. Such was the price of serving two masters. The Order... and the wolf within. Some warlocks swore themselves to lords of Hell, others to the Outer Dark and The Night Mother. But he followed the wolf. And the Wolf follows the Moon.

  Veins of light traced up along his physique. Thighs and arms exploded with new musculature while fur burst out along his spine. He roared, no longer able to deny the full moon its due.

  His eyes, once sharp and wild with a hunter’s purpose, diffused into an animal’s primal rage. Foam gurgled forth from his mouth and his eye socket’s smoked with dead light, his pupils and irises washed out like a set of burning pearls.

  The room was a whirl of shouts, colors and flames, blurred before his moon drunk eyes.

  Stay focused. She can’t run from the Wolf.

  More bullets from the fire touched cretins tore through his arms and buried themselves in the thick slabs of scarred muscle that composed his back. In the span of seconds he felt his jaw elongate into lupine proportions and his ribs split wider apart to accommodate his hulking sinews.

  He reared his snout and howled into the air. It was the song of the Primal, reveling in its long awaited moment to breath, bound and butcher. He spun around to the panicked djinn and leaped to the nearest one, whose submachine gun fire dug into the Seeker’s thick chest like nothing more than a haze of bloody bee stings.

  The wolf wrapped a clawed paw around the hapless mercenary, digging into his head and drawing burning blood even as he was lifted off his feet. The Seeker punched his other arm through the struggling djinn’s chest, bursting his heart and ending his spasms instantly. He gritted his canines through the pain of the bastard’s life blood scalding his paw, smoking into the darkness like a whole carton of lit cigarettes.

  With a shrug of disgust the wolf pitched him to the ground as the djinn’s blood ignited another fire atop the lounge’s plush carpet. The scattered and screaming djinn sung to the Primal within as more heads to crush, arms to snap and throats to rip, their frightened faces illuminated in the copper orange glow of their fallen comrade.

  There will be more to kill, he said to the beast, but the witch is first. The werewolf staggered as the Seeker impressed his will upon the Primal. It was only a shred of its power on a night like this, but still seemed to be enough.

  And then the werewolf’s wild eyes fell upon a two dark red orbs, burning like bloody suns in the abyssal darkness. The Primal let out a growl so deep the Seeker heard it in the depths of his mind. It was a growl drenched in hate, hate so powerful it had been imprinted on an instinctual level.

  No...

  As the Seeker took in the man’s face, so too did his shred of control flutter away, like a dead leaf in winter. The man’s eyes were twin stars perched within a r
ugged marble face. He knew that kind of countenance. A vampire. The pale, sweeping contours of such a visage could not be hidden or mistaken.

  The blood and spirit of the Primal flared with new life at this old foe, for it was not only the Primal’s own spirit that thrummed with passion and vengeance, but of its ancestors and the ancestors before them, that burned incandescent rage for its ancient enemy. The witch! The witch damn you!

  No matter how much he railed and screamed, the Primal would not be denied. The beast’s thirst for vengeance was great. Too great. The millennial grudge that haunted the souls of all werewolves pushed him into a hate filled bloodlust.

  With a harsh roar his muscular back hunched and he barreled forward into the vampire. The wolf’s heart thundered and his skull thrummed with the high of wild anger. His gigantic jaws snapped around the pale creature’s head but was blocked with a thick forearm. His canines sunk into the old flesh and his tongue recoiled at the taste of sour, necrotic blood, running over his gums and chin.

  It was a putrid yet familiar piquant, one that only emboldened the werewolf as his spirit blazed with vengeful remembrances. The two collided with such speed as to crash through one of the lounge’s overlooking windows, tearing out chunks of the wall and shattering the glass as the duo fell into an orange and azure spotted neon darkness.

  Frank let loose a guttural bellow as his slavering assailant slammed his body on a booth table. From behind the animal he saw the torn out hole of the balcony lounge, still flashing with splashes of violent light as the remaining occupants dealt with one another. As for the werewolf, he knew he was outclassed.

  With another terrifying howl the beast plunged its claws into his chest and pitched him end over end into another table. The commotion renewed the chorus of screams that had first begun when he entered the lounge guns blazing. The VIP crowd was the only one that surged and scrambled through the greater club goers, the rest of them too inured by the exotic drinks, the flashing lights and blaring music.

  The wolf picked him up again, this time bashing the vampire upon the wooden edge of the booth. Frank clawed at the creature with futile effort, his sharp claws skirted across the creature’s thick skin and near impenetrable muscle tissue. Only thin trails of blood were left upon the wolf’s arms and chest. Frank’s muscular neck strained underneath the wolf’s repeated bashing and was thankful that the booth’s edge was gave way rather than his skull, in a burst of polished wood splinters.

  But it would not always be this way. The vampire was sturdy, but the wolf was driven by an ancient flame of hatred that had been ignited before either of them were born. Frank pushed his left hand against the paw that was locked around his throat, slowly peeling his gouging claws away with colossal strength, calling on reserves he never knew he had.

  “Come on you son of a bitch...” he said through gritted teeth, feeling as if the monumental strain was going to make all the muscles in his left arm burst in a bloody chain reaction. His feelings were not far off the mark. He had only lifted the werewolf’s paw a few inches from his face until the beast threw his weight behind his arm, snapping Frank’s wrist and cracking the ligature in his arm.

  The vampire bellowed, the extraordinary pain flashing through his deadened nerves.

  Frank felt what it was like to be powerless as he watched his left arm crumple underneath the werewolf’s sheer power, while his right arm remained pinned. He imagined that even if he had bothered with a fresh drink beforehand, it would not be enough to resist such power. Then it hit him.

  He turned his head like a desperate shark and clamped down on the werewolf’s wrist with his elongated fangs. The taste of tough skin and wretched fur filled his mouth before like a burst dam, the torrent of red he so craved flooded past the great white spires of his fangs. It was not enough to be bursting with vitality.

  He had to shed himself of the human guise bequeathed to all vampires, the inheritance of Lilith, the veil of normality that only allowed the barest glimpses of what unreality lay underneath the skin, an aspect of the vampire’s true soul. A beast for a beast. Not the silver faced night walking heralds that populated the fears of Man and the fantasies of his women, but the monstrous engines of carnage and despair that haunted his nightmares and stalked his old battlefields.

  Frank felt his muscles expand and his jaw widen like an anaconda. It was working, until the wolf tore him away. Frank looked at his foe with deranged red eyes, still lost in the blood thirst as his entire chin dripped crimson. And then he launched himself at the wolf, mouth wide for the jugular.

  The Seeker was strong and held the night demon’s gasping, fanged mouth at bay. But his strength was crumbling, which enraged him all the more. How could he have grown so powerful while drinking so little? And then, even his rage crazed mind, it occurred to him. Werewolf blood.

  The vampire had partaken from a living chalice imbued with far more vitality and primal vigor than that of the average mortal. The Primal within the exploded with animalistic fury that something so unholy had drank of something so sacred.

  Just as the strength in his arm failed, he launched forward and tore at the vampire’s throat and shoulder. He was in the jaws of a thief, but that didn’t mean he was going to let his treasure go without incident.

  Frank sank his fangs into the thrashing animal’s throat and a tore a large swath along his jugular to drain even more of his life essence. It was messy and his nostrils stung with the bite of wolf blood, but this was a matter of unlife and true death. He wasn’t going to Hell, not tonight.

  The more he drank, the deeper his fangs sank and the thicker his bones grew. Pallid skin darkened into a slate cast and he felt his facial features begin to crumple and melt into that accursed countenance that made a mockery of all that was human. In between his vision sharpening and his hearing changing directions, it occurred to Frank how powerful werewolf blood was.

  Muscles exploded in size, restitching themselves like self-carved chunks of stone. It accelerated his transformation. He ignored the futile ripping and tearing of the creature, its efforts useless so long as he gorged upon its blood. But he could not ignore the shadows of old memories playing out before his eyes.

  Ah shit... not now... Half transparent specters of a bygone era walked across his vision, blindly intermingling with the florid blasts of color in the club and its gyrating inhabitants in the present. It was strange to have such double vision and live two lives at once. To be in place with his eyes and watch the werewolf creep up on these early twentieth century denizens through its eyes, stalking in the shadows as the vampire stood in them.

  Other memories flashed by, disorientating the vampire further. Most mortal memories were pleasant and would completely occupy his vision, like a dream. These half-finished dreams tapped into the werewolf’s very being and the vampire became subject to his storming emotions and explosive rages as his massive claws tore apart screaming men and his maw closed around the waists of wailing women. The sting of leaden musket balls reverberated along the vampire’s skin as the wolf was riddled by their fire. The satisfaction of ripping through the wild and devouring the air through heaving lungs teased his nerves. The soul emptying sensation of betrayal as his mate was killed by another shifter...

  Not a wolf, one of the colossal beasts the Amerindians venerated. And then the soul uplifting experience of glorious revenge.

  Frank savored the taste of that well. It was a taste he never grew tired of, having drank of it from others as much as he had experienced it in his own life. Only things such as hate, love, greed and lust compared to the high of revenge.

  His drinking came to an end when he suddenly found himself choking on the wolf’s blood, and realized his throat had been torn open. He leapt off the creature and held his flowing neck. The werewolf had scrambled back on his feet and did the same to his wound.

  The two monstrosities eyed each other with a burning hatred as their lungs heaved, Frank out of reflex and the Seeker out of desperation. Frank’s face was
a cross between a bat and something far more exotic, not seen since the ancient world. His bloodline was an old and for all he knew extinct sort, not blessed with the prodigal wings of later bloodlines. Rather he was graced with a near mythical physique, striated muscles overlaid with a blue black hide.

  Every dark desire he felt when under the guise of a man, was a temptation in comparison to the need for havoc he felt now with no bonds of humanity to hold him back. And with the wolf right in front of him, he could not have picked a better creature to vent his innate cruelty upon.

  With a scream as sonorous as it was terrible Frank lunged for the werewolf and for once, the club crowd at last saw what stalked among them. Their mortal eyes beheld their mammoth and terrifying forms batter into each other like warring gods, every bite, swipe and slam backlit against the high voltage glare of strobing reds and bright strands of pearlescent blues.

  Frank tackled the Seeker into the crowd while his fangs tore into the beast’s muscled shoulder. The werewolf too fought back with thunderous ferocity, bashing the vampire’s hard head and tearing chunks out of his chest and flanks with razor sharp claws.

  The Seeker felt bones gouge into his back and blood spray soak into his fur as he landed on a bystander. The room was awash in horrendous screams and had grown as loud as the music itself. The werewolf was happy for the ensuing stampede as the vampire was knocked off by the sheer press of people.

  He jumped up to his feet and scanned the scrambling shadows for the beast’s unnatural silhouette. The din of the chaos ebbed for a moment and his lupine ears caught the music.

  Let us die young or let us live forever...

  His eyes pierced through the darkness and he saw fleeting glimpses of screaming women in torn skirts and faltering tube tops, men bleeding out their broken noses as they hustled past, hurrying their way forward with scraped elbows.

  Life is a short trip, the music’s for the sad men...

  More oblivious clubbers collided into him, so blinded were they in their fear. The Seeker smacked them down like worthless peasants, uncaring if his idle blows sent them careening into sudden death or sleep.