Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  Do you really want to live forever? Forever young...

  And then the Primal within rose to the surface of his being like fire beneath ice. There was no mistaking the vampire’s tall eared silhouette, the webbing that ran between the inside of his upper arms and armpits nor the rubescent stars for eyes that narrowed in the darkness, nearly swallowed up by the overpowering and unnatural gradients of light that flared in the club.

  The Seeker fought through his more animal self for just a moment, enough to vocalize a spell in his unnatural tongue, sounded out through hybridized sapien and lupus vocal chords. Had the nearby clubbers been able to hear his incantation over the blaring tune, some would have lost their hearing soon after, having beheld one of the most ancient and discordant sounds known and unknown to mankind.

  The tattoos along the Seeker’s skin flared out underneath his fur, glowing in arcane patterns of diffused white. A blast of screaming ivory light erupted from his palm and passed through multiple club goers like a lightning strike, leaving their chests sunken and smoking as the blast finally hit the vampire.

  Frank buckled. In between his slaughter of random clubbers, somehow he had lost track of the wolf and now felt lances of searing pain gouge into his nerves. Skin burned and bones cooled and he felt a lapse in strength, as if his blood had spoiled within his veins. He grunted and grabbed a flustered woman, a rather young and succulent morsel and snapped his fangs around her jugular for a fresh infusion.

  Youth’s like diamonds in the sun, and diamonds are forever...

  It was not the slow and drawn out death he had shown so many of his one night loves, but a quick and brutal draining and as he slurped her down, growling more into her neck, desperate to drain even more. Her weak moans were drowned out by the chaos and her jerking limbs went unnoticed in the anarchy. None were brave enough to interrupt the towering shadow from his drink. A drink that was not quick enough, for no sooner had he partaken of her mortal blood he was knocked down and her spent body hurtled to the floor.

  Above him loomed the werewolf, his eyes like pale moons and his claws white and tipped with smoking fire, as if dipped into the center of a silvery star. “Chyme tal dii, unwhulii shilde di ta nohct...” The wolf leaned down on his impressive haunches and drew his claw back in the air.

  Frank, even in his insane delirium, lost in his love for havoc, knew what was to happen next with sobering realization. “No you won’t motherfucker!” he shouted in a voice born of shadow and blood, several octaves below his normal tone.

  So many songs we forgot to play...

  He caught the werewolf’s knife hand blow for this heart and the beast’s long claws burst out the back of his giant hand in a shower of bright red blood. Frank screamed and tackled the creature deeper into the club, knocking over empty tables and shattering half-finished drinks. The Seeker slashed ribbons of flesh off the vampire and ruined the sinews underneath with his enchanted claws.

  Frank met the beast blow for blow but even he was feeling the strain on his muscles and wondered how the werewolf could still be going with so many wounds. The vampire’s clawed hand ripped into the werewolf’s chiseled midsection, tearing through hardened muscle and eviscerating the fragile organs beneath it all.

  Forever young, I want to be forever young, do you really want to live forever...

  The Seeker howled in agony as he watched his intestines spill out like torn spools of crimson rope. He was going to fail. Agatha... Baba Yaga... was going to escape, her treachery unaccounted for. That he feared more than death.

  Such fear emboldened him to overpower the Primal that had brought him so much victory in the past and so much ruin tonight. If he was to die, it would be as himself, not some unknowing animal and not before taking the midnight fiend with him.

  He gripped the bastard’s forearm, his hand still soaked in blood and bent it until bones punched through flesh. The vampire bellowed in rage and was cut off when the Seeker slashed him across the face, creating three deep gashes across his cheek, flecked with white fire.

  Blood streamed down the creature’s face as the Seeker’s magic penetrated his tissues, weakening bone and flesh alike. He grabbed the vampire around the neck and prepared to shatter his skull until the night beast fixed both his hands around the Seeker’s head... and yanked back.

  All sensation left the werewolf as he dropped down to his knees, and with it, all his dreams of justice. As his vision swam with black, the red glare of the vampire was the last he saw before his long hunt came to its end...

  Forever young...

  Frank slumped down to his knees, utterly exhausted. “Fuck...” he sighed as his bestial form left him. He felt the werewolf’s magic still eating at him from the inside. Think you’re gonna have the last laugh you fuzzy fuck? I don’t. He checked the club and saw it was mostly deserted, with a few cowering under tables, the rest having run outside or lying dead on the floor.

  He looked back to the wolf and his dead blank eyes. Who was he? And what kind of magic was that? He didn’t know and didn’t care. All that mattered was that he was still warm. The old vampire became reacquainted with the taste of wolf the second time that night.

  ***

  Peter dropped his gun and held his bleeding side. He took a deep breath, numbing the edges of his pain. He looked at his weapon, how his own blood ran along the chrome barrel and drenched into the cobbled texture of the grip. He sighed. It’s empty anyway.

  “Oh... such... such beautiful quiet.” hacked Aphon before firing off a few shots into the prone body of a bystander.

  After Frank and the werewolf were pitched out into the club below, Aphon had chased the wounded angel into the building’s administrative offices. Bouncers and club management fled from the vicious gun battle, those that didn’t ended up like Navras.

  The angel remembered the fallen prince. His head was like a ruined flower, stomped upon, leaking red nectar all over his chest. When last he saw him, the fire in his blood had so cooled that only little sizzles came from droplets.

  “We were not meant for this world, angel.” Aphon ripped down a cubicle wall with a fury at odds with the calm in his voice. “After a hundred years, I’m sick of it. Sick of these people, these lights and smells... but... I’ll not go quietly. Not until I have what’s mine.” He let out a laugh and rapped his long nails alongside another cubicle wall, tearing out yellowed fliers and promotionals. “Club Paradis’s New Millennium Celebration, December 31st at 8!” He read out loud and kicked another cubicle wall down. “They celebrate as if it actually means something. These short sighted animals are what you toil for, angel. Dust born mongrels. They’re barely worth killing, much less dying for. No wonder your brethren rebelled.”

  No brothers of mine.

  “You’re a quiet one. Did all the angels with fire fall after The War? Do the choirs of Heaven ring silent!?” Another loud crash exploded in the office as the demon pitched a computer monitor through crumpled blinds and out the window. “I am but one of many. Put ten worlds like this to the flame and you would not have emptied Hell.” Your end comes later. We are here to save Man. “You kill me... you change nothing.”

  Peter shuddered at the dissonant tones of his voice. He heard the demon stumble over something and curse, his breath light and sporadic. “I will change enough.”

  The demon snarled and fired gunshots where he heard Peter’s voice. “Show me!”

  Peter blew his words and they floated right by the demon’s ear, a whisper in the dark. “Look and you shall see.” Just out of his cover, the angel saw a certain glint by a djinn’s corpse. He made his move.

  The demon spun around when he heard a thud on the floor and saw nothing but a djinn’s body, reminding him of their dead royal. A nasty grin spread across the demon’s sunken and black eyed face. How he loved extinguishing that one’s flame. Imperious to the end. He reminded him of the royal traitors in his own palace back home. Beings as old as he, brandishing daggers and swords as old as the universe in the cold a
nd dark corridors of his wraith haunted halls.

  His hands reflexively twitched at the imagining of coming back triumphant, upon a chariot roaring with the thunder of spectral stallions, the wheels alight with the flames of an infernal star. He imagined wringing their necks into a pulp, like a spent fruit rind and basking in the black spray of their life blood across his face. Then he felt something more real, more tangible than dreamings of vengeful fantasy.

  The air cracked. When he looked down he saw his chest was a smoking ruin. Molten bronze ran in rivulets along exposed bone. Flesh was black and charred. Putrid blood leaked onto his pallid hands. The human part of him let out an involuntary laugh. “No...” He slumped down to his knees.

  Peter limped in front of Aphon, Navras’ shotgun at his side. “From cavorting with witches and wallowing in heathen opulence... to bleeding out in a mortal den of sin and vice. You deserve less.”

  “Fuck you!” gurgled the decimated creature, clawing feebly at the angel’s leg.

  “Thank you. If it weren’t for your wanton gallivanting, we might have missed the witch for longer.” Ever is the dark the servant to the light. “She promised you a crown. Fool. There is only one king, one master...”

  “I piss on your king! My lord made his clouds run red with fire and blood! How mighty was he when that happened!?” Anger rose up in Peter and with a wave of his hand he made the side of Aphon’s face smoke and turn red. He would not suffer such a disgrace of his Lord. The demon screamed.

  Mighty enough to give the Fallen One a fate worse than death. The angel walked around his body and loomed over Aphon’s head. “A demon only finds glory in the past.” Soft light coursed along Peter’s palm, a cloud of dawn at midnight. “Here, now... I’m standing. You’re dying.”

  The demon’s bloodied hand tugged at Peter’s pant leg like a snipping crab. “I will... return... rip off your goddamned wings...”

  Fouler beasts have failed. “Your host has my sympathies but he chose his path.” The angel’s lighted hand hung above the demon’s wretched head. “Goodbye.”

  Chapter 25: A Tale of Two Cities

  “Hey! You get the witch or what?” called a voice from down the dark hallway. Peter leaned against the wall and sighed with relief. For the first time he was glad to find a vampire.

  “No.” he answered and took another step. “But I got the demon. And his host.”

  Frank’s silhouette shrugged. “Good. We never talked but he seemed like a sack of shit.” The club music was now muffled behind so many walls, but the familiar alarum of police sirens blared outside. The long arm of the law had at last come to answer the call of nightmare.

  “Baba Yaga is roofside. She’ll need the open sky and there’s still plenty of people assembled outside.” gasped the angel, looking at a fire exit stairwell.

  Frank stepped in front of him and opened the door. “Damn that name is even worse than Agatha.”

  Peter smiled and got into the stairwell, brandishing a handgun from a fallen djinn and handing another to the vampire. “It would go a long way to explain her Slavic lilt.”

  “Oh yeah, what explains the model looks?”

  “Magic.”

  Frank laughed. “A long time ago, back in the old country I used to butcher these hags all the time. Sometimes they poisoned husbands, other times they drowned children, but they never looked that good.”

  Peter scrambled up the steps at a faster rate, his angelic gifts at last soothing his wounds and invigorating his tired flesh. “I never took you for justice dealer. The ones you slew were low born witchbreed.” Or imitators. “When the blood is weak, so too is the power.”

  Frank kept up with the angel, keeping his eye at the top of the staircase. “Ain’t about justice. Kill lots of people you’re bound to nab a few who had it coming.”

  “That is His hand at work.”

  The two stopped before the top door. “Just wet work to me. The Night Courts wanted someone dead, I was their man.”

  Peter checked the safety as best he could with the strange djinn customizations on his pistol. “Fascinating. You’ll have to tell me more.”

  Frank inspected his weapon and arched his eyebrows. “Yeah we’ll see. The old days are all fuzzy, lost in a whore and blood soaked haze with a few beautiful stand out gems in between.”

  The angel looked over to his comrade and put his hand on his shoulder, taking a deep breath. “Steel yourself, Frank. The witch is quick and cunning. Interrupt her speech as much as you can.”

  “How ‘bout I just take her throat?”

  The angel turned back to the door. “If you can, Frank. If you can.”

  The two burst out onto the club’s roof, braving the hard rain that lashed like liquid whips and ignoring the artillery like booms of thunder that would have trembled lesser men. The full moon was entwined in a surreal play of clouds and mist while flashes of far away and diffused lightning appeared over the city.

  Agatha stood at the edge of the roof and oblivion, wide legged with her arms up to the heavens in exultation. Like fragile white stalks they waved in the howling wind, her fingers like tiny clawed branches as unnatural rain streaked down their length. Her luxuriant raven tresses glistened in the water and glowed in the distant light of the moon, disturbed neither by magic or inclement weather.

  The serene blues of her jacket fluttered in the wind and revealed glimpses of calves and legs as well formed as the rest of her unearthly form. Peter and Frank stomped across harsh gravel, their greater strength nearly undone by the blistering gusts whereas the witch stood like a heathen ivory statue, ululating loyalty and desire to all that was divine and profane.

  Before the trio, a minute tear of foggy emerald appeared in the air. It danced and disturbed the air like some light seen only in the northern and southern most reaches of the world. The witch’s hands moved further apart as if she were pulling on an invisible ball of yarn and the tear expanded, but not with light. Howling, impenetrable darkness bloated into being, not a hole, but an ever expanding sphere upon which no light entered or escaped.

  Neither Frank or Peter had to know magic to know what that was. Both steadied themselves and opened fire on the woman, desperate to prevent the rebirth of a dead city and the death of this one. Many of their rounds deflected around her, sparking against an invisible bubble, but the effort of pulling something so colossal from the void had taxed the mighty witch.

  A few errant bullets punched through her legs and grazed her arms and the portal faltered. She screamed and bared her teeth. She ached to hold her side, slashed and soaked in her own blood, the dim and pale tears left by the Seeker draining of her life as much as magic itself.

  She could take any number of wounds, but the wolf’s touch had left her more feeble and feeble by the moment. Bitter mirth rose in her heart. ‘A Seeker never misses’. The emerald tinged sky clapped with thunder, the portal regained its lost size. But it’s too late. Too late for Calanar. Too late for this world.

  The witch heard shouts over the rain. She knew Aphon had passed on, sensing the passage of his screaming spirit in the last ten minutes.

  It troubled her little. He was a useful tool and now she had one less obligation. And one less foot to stand on as she fell to the ground. She screamed and felt power ebb from her body as the pale faced terror straddled her and choked her neck.

  “Settle down! It’s over!” he screamed. The vampire grabbed her by the wrists, trying to keep her hands from reaching towards the portal. He had endured so many grotesque sensations over the centuries that her clammy skin, frosty sweat and iron bones did little to dissuade him from letting go.

  Her strength was tremendous and her arms did not budge, as if they had been filled with concrete. No matter, the vampire resolved to break her bones. Merely being in contact with her aura gave him the same feeling he had felt earlier when she hexed him. A darkness beyond the one he harbored stirred once more within him and he coughed shadow into the rain.

  “Only for you! A ne
w dawn rises, shadow child...” coughed the witch, her eyes burning beryl blue in the blinding sleet. Her force of will pressed against the vampire and found his as intractable as ever, searing pain blossomed between her eyes. “The old order will fade and the mistake of Man will leave this world!”

  Frank felt like collapsing. Icy fire gnawed upon his bones while a duel of shadows warred within his soul. He looked to her neck and spared a hand to snatch the Black Star pendant. Once the chord snapped, the tempestuous portal boomed with strange life.

  The last the vampire heard across waves of distorted sound was the enraged shriek of the witch and the noble voice of the angel. “Frank, you fool! Not now!” The rain struck pebbles below him blurred into one wet shining mass, the night sky retreated as if he were looking at it through a rear view mirror and the beauty of the witch below him was torn away in the irresistible vacuum.

  He saw bleary, veiny eyes, pitted with points of sea green and an inhumanly grotesque nose, perched upon a face that was the insult to all that was beautiful and good. A scaly scalp with frayed black and gray hair writhed in the sucking wind. Burst blood clots sprouted under her skin like awakened tumors, purple and blue varicose veins stretched across her pulsating throat and arms like seething, angry roots.

  For the first time in a century, darkness fell over the vampire.

  ***

  Peter stretched up to his feet and thanked his Father that his soul was intact after all he had seen during his winding and horrific journey. Though he wondered if his prayer would even make it in a place so far from his light like this. The pull of the interdimensional tear was enough to yank everything off the roof, gravel, railings, emergency doors and gutters.

  Even him. He gave another prayer of thanks that the tear was closed. And then prayed again for a way out. He saw Frank knocked out down the road, with the Black Star still in hand. As the angel walked towards the fallen vampire, he took in his surroundings.