by Peter Nealen
I fumbled for my 1911. No time to search for the rifle. Brother Ezekiel was straightening back up, now bellowing out the litany hoarsely at the top of his lungs, fighting against the shrieking, scratching cacophony of The Walker. One of the three remaining Sisters suddenly arched her back, her eyes rolling back in her head as she convulsed, her mouth opening in a silent scream, trailing spittle. But even as she fell backwards, her back still bent like she was having a seizure, it still seemed like The Walker was barely paying any attention to the rest of us; it's focus was still on Brother Ezekiel.
It reached out again, only to snatch the dark hand back again with a mind-searing roar of pain and anger as it neared Father Ignacio's crucifix. The priest was still praying, though I couldn't make out the words over the rest of the noise.
I got the pistol out and fired, though my gun hand was shaking so bad as I squeezed the trigger that I was worried I'd miss. Not that it was going to be that easy to miss; the Walker was nearly filling half of the building by then. The bark of the .45's report sounded muted, insignificant compared to the supernatural fury of the being I was trying to hurt. Eryn blasted it with her shotgun a second later, and Tall Bear opened up from the other side.
More tentacles of solid darkness lashed out at us. I was slammed against the floor and the wind was knocked out of me, but that pain was nothing compared to the sudden pressure on my mind. Flickering images of blood, carnage, and horror began to pulse through my brain. I felt a trickle down my lip as my nose started to bleed.
It was too powerful. We were going to die, all of us, in screaming, horror-stricken agony, our minds shredded before the last gasp of life was ripped out of our bodies.
Suddenly, there was a piercing cry, and a figure dashed past the Friar and the priest to throw itself at The Walker. A gray skirt and gray veil swirled behind Sister Margritte as she charged it. She'd abandoned her rifle, and was reaching for the tendrils holding Charlie, ripping at them with a strength born of fury. She held her own crucifix in her hand and pressed it against a tentacle.
“Let them go!” she shouted. “Take me, if you have to take a life!”
She didn't get anything else out. She'd barely finished her sentence when the tendrils that were reaching for Brother Ezekiel seized her like pythons, crushing her arms to her sides and lifting her up to a level with The Walker's non-face. She began to shake violently, blood streaming from her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
“I will take all your lives anyway,” that flat, emotionless voice said, reverberating throughout the structure as if it came from everywhere. “So your sacrifice is meaningless, your guilt unexpunged. Take all your sins to the grave with you and suffer.”
She went limp, blood pouring in a cataract onto the floor. It didn't let her go, but held her corpse above us as if in triumph.
But her sacrifice had not been in vain. While it had turned its fury on her, Brother Ezekiel had neared the end of his litany. Now he stood, holding the crucifix up, and shouted the final verse hoarsely. “Now I bind thee, by The Lord God, One in Three, by the Principalities and Powers of Heaven, to this place! Here thou shalt await the Final Judgment, thy wickedness unable to withstand the weight of the Power of the Cross I hold over thee!”
The tendrils vanished like smoke. Charlie and Sister Margritte fell to the floor. The weight and pressure on my mind lifted. The clouds above began to break up, and a single ray of sunlight came through the shattered roof to illuminate a crumpled, dark, smoky form that crouched on the floor, huddled beneath its hat. It still wasn't human, but The Walker had been bound, its power taken away by a far, far greater Power.
It was over.
Chapter 20
Brother Ezekiel stayed on his knees, his head bowed, soaked in sweat. Father Ignacio stood slowly, looking nearly as exhausted as the Friar. I struggled to my hands and knees, then painfully rose, going to join Eryn where she stood over Charlie and Sister Margritte.
Sister Margritte was clearly dead. She was soaked in her own blood, her eyes glazed and staring, her chest still as she lay there. Eryn reached over and gently closed her eyes. Father bent down over her and began the prayer for the dead. I bowed my head and joined him. As pompous and arrogant as she had been, she had given her life to stop The Walker. I prayed that she rest in peace.
Charlie, while blood-soaked and unconscious, was alive. His breathing was shallow and he was cold to the touch, but he was alive. Kolya was treating him for shock; anything else was going to have to wait until we could get him out of Storr's Hole.
As I turned to Brother Ezekiel, he raised his head to meet my gaze. “I can hold it here for now,” he said, “but I'll need you to go and get more of the Friars to come and join me. We'll have to build a new monastery here.”
“So you'll stay here with that thing for, what? The rest of your life?” I asked.
He nodded. “These creatures don't exactly die of old age. The sentence was until the Final Judgment, remember?” He hauled himself shakily to his feet.
“That did sound pretty permanent,” I said. “So, given that it is enforced by On High, why do you need to stay here, exactly?”
“Mostly as a safeguard,” he admitted. “Though we are in fact as much of an instrument of the Divine Will in this as anything else. Not only to keep it from trying to escape—and it will, regardless of the strictness of the sentence. It won't succeed, but like all the rest of these things, it can do a lot of damage in the process. But we'll also be here to keep people away. Someone stumbling upon this thing might present a crack it can get out through. It's complicated.”
Ian stepped up, his rifle still in his hands. “I'll stay here,” he said quietly. “That way there will be two of us.”
Brother Ezekiel peered at him. “You want to take the tabard?” he asked.
Ian shrugged. “Fortunately, being a Hunter's not like being a priest. I'm not bound until I'm dead. At least, I wasn't. I guess now I will be.”
Brother Ezekiel turned back to me. “Well, it will help to have two of us, but we'll still need more.”
“We'll get them for you,” I told him. I looked back at the shrunken form of The Walker. Somehow, while still bizarre and unnatural, it didn't seem as sanity-threatening anymore. It looked...pathetic. I still didn't trust it in the least. “Are you sure you're going to be all right with just the two of you?”
“The Lord will look out for us,” Brother Ezekiel replied. “We might not even be entirely necessary, at least after a while. Like I said, the Friars are a precaution. There is a story about one of our monasteries on a remote tor in Wales. Bandits attacked the monastery, looking for gold and silver, and slaughtered all the Friars. They didn't get much for their trouble; as you may have noticed, we live very simply. But the Elder Fae that was imprisoned there never left. It was still there a year later when the Friars were finally able to get enough men together to return.” He looked over at The Walker. “Some think that creatures of the Otherworld, even those as wicked as this, have some chance of redemption. The angels had one chance. We get many. Perhaps they have something in between. We don't know. It isn't something that we've been given to know. Perhaps that Fae had turned its heart away from its madness and wickedness, and that's why it stayed.” He gave me a tired half-grin. “But I'm not all that willing to test the theory to find out.”
“I can't say I blame you,” I answered. “Especially not after having seen what this thing is capable of.” Kolya and Tall Bear were lifting Charlie's still form. The two remaining Sisters were trying to pick up Sister Margritte's body, but she hadn't been a small woman. Seeing them struggling, Eryn and I stepped over to help, while still never quite turning our backs on the shrunken, dark form only a few feet away.
It took a lot of work to get the bodies up the slope to the vehicles. Sister Margritte and Sister Emilia went into the back of the Sisters' van, their veils over their faces as expedient shrouds. Tyrese went in the back of Kolya's truck, wrapped in a tarp. Charlie was still unconscious, and we lo
aded him in my truck and took off with little more than a perfunctory farewell to the Sisters. There wasn't time. We had no idea just how bad Charlie's injuries were, but the longer he was out there without medical attention, the more likely we all thought it was that he wouldn't wake up.
It took an hour and a half to get to the nearest hospital. Father Ignacio, Kolya, and Tall Bear followed us. Tall Bear was driving Charlie's Scout; he'd need it when he got out of the hospital. We'd left Tyrese's car at Storr's Hole. We'd have to find out if he had had any family left so that we could get his car to them. That wasn't something I wanted to think too much about at that point. I just concentrated on keeping Charlie alive.
We got him hustled into the Emergency Room, with a story about an accident in an old mine. It was true, as far as it went. Most hospital staff aren't prepared to deal with statements like, “Well, you see, we were trying to imprison an ancient eldritch abomination when it grabbed him and started trying to tear his brain to shreds. We're not exactly sure what it did to him, but he's been unconscious for hours and he's cold to the touch.” They accepted that he got hurt poking around an old mine readily enough.
Father broke off as soon as we got Charlie situated. He still had to make contact with the Brotherhood and get more Friars on the way out to Storr's Hole to reinforce Brother Ezekiel and Ian and start building a new monastery. It was probably going to take some time and travel, since the Abbot hadn't had any more than three to spare; he'd have to find other monasteries. He shook our hands, accepted a hug from Eryn, and rode off. Kolya had already departed, taking Tyrese's body to his family.
That left Tall Bear, Eryn, and I sitting in the waiting room. For a while, none of us spoke. Eryn and I were sharing a seat, our arms around each other, just kind of staring into space. Tall Bear had sprawled in a chair right across from us.
I looked over at him. The big man looked exhausted, but there was a thoughtful look on his face as he stared at his boots.
“Something I'm not sure about,” he said after a while. “We saw The Walker turn one of the...other guy's monsters into pink mist in Bartram. So why didn't it do the same thing to us?”
“There's no certain way of knowing without asking it,” I replied, “and even then, it might very well just lie. Creatures of the Otherworld tend to be capricious. I do have a theory, though.
“Like I might have mentioned before, these things are very proud. We didn't hurt it seriously in Bartram; in fact, I don't think we really hurt it at all. But we insulted it by daring to strike at it, and trying to trap it. It knew what that circle was for, and for whatever reason, it decided that we had done worse than the sorcerer who tried to enslave it to his own will. I think that's because, if we'd gotten it in that circle, we might have succeeded, while the sorcerer was being an idiot by even trying. In any case, I'd be willing to bet that it figured just splattering us across the landscape was going to be too quick. It wanted us to suffer. So, it played with its food when it should have gotten down to business, and that's why Brother Ezekiel had time to nail it down.”
He nodded thoughtfully, a faint frown still on his face.
“So, what are you going to do now?” I asked him after a moment of silence.
He looked up at me. “I'm not sure,” he said. “I'd like to just go back to being a Sheriff's deputy, only worrying about relatively mundane crimes that relatively mundane people commit.” He rubbed his chin and sighed. “That said, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to, not after this. I think I'll always be looking over my shoulder for something worse.” His eyes narrowed suddenly. “And somehow I don't think this case is entirely over. Is it?”
I shook my head. “Not for us, it isn't. But you're not coming with us, at least not right away. You've got some soul-searching to do first. Do you go back to the badge, or put on the Cross and turn your back on a normal life? Because while you did good out there, for a newbie, you really need to decide whether or not you're truly committed to this work if you're going to keep doing it.” I held up my hand before he could answer. “Think about it, first. This isn't the time or the place to be making that kind of a major decision. We're all strung out, and you've seen the kind of losses we can take in this line of work.” I took my arm from around Eryn's shoulders to dig out a piece of paper and a pencil, and wrote quickly. I tore off the paper and handed it across to him. “If you decide to hang up the badge and join us, go here. Tell Ray that Jed Horn sent you. He'll get you sorted out.”
“And be nice to Magnus,” Eryn put in. “If Magnus doesn't like you, you're going to have a hard time at this.”
With a bit of a bemused expression on his face, Tall Bear reached across to take the note and tucked it away in his shirt pocket.
Charlie woke up late that night. He was weak, and couldn't talk much, but he was going to be okay. He remembered everything that had happened, though I still wondered if he was ever going to be the same. The man lying in that hospital bed hadn't had quite the spark of the old Charlie. Whatever The Walker had done to him, it was going to leave a mark. Maybe in time the scars would fade, and he'd be his old, exuberant self again, but for now he was a wan, haunted man who answered only the questions he was asked, his gaze on something far, far away. He was cogent enough to insist that we didn't have to stay, though, as long as his Scout was parked at the hospital, and we left him his keys.
Under any other circumstances, I wouldn't have even thought about leaving him, but as Tall Bear had noted, we weren't done yet. The bald sorcerer was still out there. We had to get Tall Bear back home, but after that, we had a trail to pick up. We loaded up at dawn and drove away.
Kolya met us at Barnes' Creek, after we'd dropped Tall Bear off. The big deputy still had that thoughtful look on his face. I suspected we would meet him again at Ray's place before too long.
“The funeral's in a week,” Kolya said. “He had a good family.”
“How'd they handle it?” I asked.
“Well enough,” he said. “They all know what he did. His dad was a Hunter, did you know that?”
I shook my head. “Never knew much about his family. It never really came up for some reason.”
“They're mourning him, but they know how and why he died,” Kolya said. “They'll be all right. How's Charlie?”
“Distant,” I answered. “Whatever it did to him, it hurt him, somewhere deep down. But he'll live.”
There was a long silence after that. I think we were all hesitant to bring up the next step. We'd been beaten down pretty hard by what had happened. We'd hit Bowesmont with nine Hunters, Father Ignacio, and Tall Bear. Five of those Hunters were dead or deeply wounded. We'd found Blake, only for him to lose his life in Bartram. The Sisters had lost eight out of ten. We had no idea how many people had died in The Walker's rampage, but it was a lot. It had been a rough week. We just wanted it to be over, but that isn't the way the world works.
“Yanquinia?” Kolya finally asked.
I took a deep breath and nodded. “It's the last place we found any trace of him. Best place to start looking.”
Eryn walked back to our trucks from the police line. The house where we'd found the corpses and symbols was cordoned off with what looked like miles of yellow police tape, and there were three local sheriff's department vehicles still gathered around it. It had been a few days, but then, we had no idea how long the imp's spell had lasted, either.
She shook her head as I raised an eyebrow. “I don't think they're telling me everything,” she said. “Pretty sure they think I'm a reporter, and it's an ongoing investigation, but it doesn't look like they've got any forensic evidence for who did it at all. No DNA in the place except for the owner, who's dead, and the bodies from the cemetery. Even the symbols, which were apparently painted in the owner's blood, don't have any traces of anyone else.”
I blew out a frustrated breath. “Well, it stood to reason that he was going to cover his tracks as best he could. There's no way somebody could survive long enough to do what he's done without
being careful. One of us would have gotten wind of him and taken him down a long time ago.”
“That's what worries me,” Kolya said. “He's in deep, and he's got some serious power behind him. And just judging by what he's done here, trying to take control of The Walker, he's got something big in mind.”
“I'm sure he does,” I said, thinking again of that note in Silverton. If this was the same guy as the one Mayhew had called “Master,” he had something very, very big in mind. “Well, we'll check the other towns nearby that fit our profile for his flesh-golem manufacturing, but I doubt we'll find anything. If he's that careful, he will have gone underground as soon as he saw that The Walker wasn't right on his heels anymore.” I sighed. “We're just going to have to keep our ears to the ground, and be ready to nail him when he pops up again.
“Because I'm sure he will, sooner or later. Whoever he is, and whatever he wants, he's not done.”
Author's Note
Well, this series has come a long way already since I first started working through an idea on WeTheArmed. What started as a “Let's see where this goes” experiment is now over 200,000 words, and there's more to come. I hope you enjoyed the latest installment. Special thanks to the individuals on WeTheArmed who helped preview it, and added what feedback they could. You guys rock.
Now I have a favor to ask you, dear reader. As I've said before, getting your work noticed as an independent author is an uphill battle, particularly as one who got started in a different genre. If you enjoyed this little hunt for an ancient evil, I'd ask you to go on Amazon, or Goodreads, or both, and put up a review. Reviews are a large part of how the little guy like me gets noticed, which helps me keep this little train going.
