by Weston Ochse
“What were you thinking?” he said to the man.
Van Dyke replied with gritted teeth, “That I wouldn’t be shot in my own home.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you in the head,” YaYa said. He could feel the thing inside the man. “It’s back in him, Boss. Whatever the fuck it is feels like greasy nightmare shit.”
“Be easy, SEAL, and plug him if he moves.” Holmes finished tying the field bandage. “What the fuck was that out there?” Then he saw the tattoo over the man’s left breast. Holmes pointed to it. “Triple goddess. Tuatha Dé Dannan.”
YaYa noticed the surprise in the man’s eyes. He leaned in and saw the tattoo. It was three crescent moons, interlocked. And whatever it was lived inside of it. As he watched, the tattoo seemed to pulse and grow larger. He felt its pull and took one uncontrolled step toward it.
“Fu-fuck.” He fought the urge to move forward with every part of his being. “Lives in the tattoo. Don’t—don’t touch.”
Van Dyke leaned his head up and met YaYa’s gaze. The man spoke in a strange language and YaYa felt himself fall. The last thing he saw was the superimposed image of a man made of sticks and leaves and an unholy glow where his eyes should have been.
Then he heard gunfire.
Then nothing.
CHAPTER 19
VAN DYKE HOUSE. UPSTAIRS. NIGHT.
She came at them from a darkened room. Laws opened fire as he backed away, stitching her in the chest with eleven 5.56mm rounds that should have blown out her back and knocked her off her feet. But she kept coming. He brought the butt of his rifle up and slammed it into her chin. Her head swung back, but it did no damage.
WTF?
The doorway was off the landing to the left. He backed farther left down the hallway, separating himself from Yank and Hoover.
She followed Laws, exposing her back to Yank, who opened fire.
But to no effect.
Hoover growled but waited for a command.
Why wasn’t she going down? It didn’t make sense. She was a sixty-something June Cleaver hausfrau. She should have died five times by now with the amount of rounds they’d poured into her.
He adjusted aim and fired two more into the center of her forehead. Her skin pulsed with red light and with each pulse revealed an interlocked three crescent moon. Laws recognized the symbol from the mission logs. The glyph of the three goddesses—Maiden, Mother, and Crone. It was the holy trinity of ancient Pict mythology and had been adopted by neo-pagans. A precursor to Triple Six had gone after a group who worshiped them during the Dust Bowl of 1931. The log had recorded nature spirits but nothing like this creature. If he wasn’t mistaken, it had all the characteristics of a—
“Golem!”
He dropped the rifle and let it hang from its strap and began to draw his knife. But she was too quick. She fell on him, driving him to the ground, pinning his hand where it was on his left thigh. She was incredibly heavy. Their impact as they hit the floor slammed the air from him and he couldn’t move his chest to get a deep enough breath.
Her hands went to his throat. He fought her grip with his left hand, but it was as if he were a child. He didn’t have the strength to stop her.
Fuck! Was this how it was going to end?
The glyph began to pulse with regularity now.
His vision began to dim.
Then the pressure reduced.
His vision cleared enough for him to see her right arm moving back. Was she letting him go? But then he saw the arm was being held by Yank, who tossed it down the hall. The other SEAL, with his feet pressed against the baseboard, levered the golem off Laws, who gasped as he breathed, finally able to pull his knife free.
He got to his knees and saw Yank sawing at the woman’s other arm. It came bloodlessly free halfway down her triceps. Flesh-colored clay encompassed what looked like a branch, now severed. Yank tossed the arm after the first, glanced up, then paled.
“Oh hell no.” He stood and ran down the hall, where he began to kick something.
Laws turned his attention to the golem, whose fierce eyes detailed her desire to kill him. He was about to stand when her legs shot out and caught him in the stomach and chest. He slammed into the wall, all air once again gone. He felt broken as he struggled to stand.
Hoover shot in and put her jaws around an ankle, but the creature kicked the dog free with her other foot. Hoover squealed as she flew to the landing, coming to rest in a painful splay of legs.
Fucking golem, Laws decided then and there. He absolutely hated golems. Hated them even more than those ridiculous homunculi.
Glancing down the hall, he saw where Yank was fighting with the golem’s hands, which were still alive and grabbing at him.
Laws fell to the floor beside her and removed her head in five hard strokes of his knife.
It should have killed her, but her legs continued to move. He tossed the head over the rail and heard it strike the stairs several times before it landed on the first floor below. Then he began to saw at one leg, then the other, until they were separated.
He got to his feet, grabbed a leg, opened a bedroom door, then tossed it inside and closed it. He did the same to the other leg but tossed it into a different room.
Then he ran down the hall.
Yank had chopped off the fingers of one hand, but they had moved back to it and were reattaching themselves. He glanced up at Laws and shrugged. “Fucking arm won’t die.”
Laws brought his knife down and impaled the hand into the floor, like a specimen.
Yank did the same thing.
Then they both stood, staring at the impaled hands, gasping for air, sweat pouring from inside their masks. As one, they removed the masks and wiped their faces.
Yank shook his head. “What the fuck?”
Laws answered in gasps, “Golem. Your first time. Can’t be killed.”
“Remind me to scratch them off my bucket list.”
Growling caused Laws and Yank to turn around. Hoover had returned and was pulling the torso toward the stairs. But the torso was undulating, as if unwilling to leave without its other body parts.
“Dog has the right idea.” Laws ran up and cleared Hoover away. Then he kicked the torso down the stairs.
Yank came after.
When Laws got to the first floor, he saw her head lying against the front door. He grabbed it by its hair and carried it into the drawing room. He held the head up by the hair. “Found her.”
He saw that YaYa was unconscious on the floor. Holmes knelt next to Van Dyke. The SEAL team leader had his P229 9mm pressed against the man’s head.
“What took you so long?” Holmes asked without moving.
“Turns out she was a golem.”
“You have to cut her,” Van Dyke said. “You can’t kill her.”
“We found that out.”
Then Van Dyke said the unexpected. “Thank you. Thank you, very much. She was holding me prisoner.”
CHAPTER 20
CHICKSANDS RAF. NIGHT.
The loot from the warlock’s bowling alley HQ was extraordinary. Sassy Moore had spent the night going through the tomes and trinkets, impressed with his ability to collect such a diverse library of the arcane. What the warlock had had before his delightfully untimely but uniquely appropriate demise easily rivaled her collection in its magnitude and scope, but then again she’d concentrated on her own path and hadn’t diverged as much as her dear dead enemy. He’d concentrated most of his efforts on fabrication; at least it had appeared so from the immensity of that gargantuan creature. Had Van McKee spent half his time concentrating on astral battle tactics, she wouldn’t have been able to disembody him so easily.
But at least now he was dead. He’d been a thorn in her side for years. He was a controller and wanted her tidily working for him, whether it was under the auspices of one of the covens or druid circles he belonged to or as his own personal servant. Now that Section 9, with the help of the remarkable Jack Walker, had helped her to
remove him from this plane of existence, her path toward her own supremacy was clear.
Normally, she’d take her new things and slip away. She had to rebuild her life and establish a new magical focal point. But with the Wild Hunt running amok and the mysterious Red Grove controlling its actions, she’d have to pretend to be a team player. Oh, how droll it was to smile and grin at mortal humor. She’d much rather poke her eyes out and so much as promised herself that she would if she ever found herself in a similar position—one in which she’d have to go hat in hand to the nice military men for support.
Walker came into the room, wearing boxers and a T-shirt, wiping his face with his hand and yawning. He’d only been sleeping for a few hours. He reached into the refrigerator, grabbed a water bottle, twisted it open, and drank it half down before he noticed the witch regarding him.
He glanced down at his boxers, then back to Sassy Moore. “I didn’t see you sitting there.”
“That’s okay. I was invisible.”
His eyes widened. “Really?”
Dolt. “No. I was just teasing. I can’t really make myself invisible.”
Still, he looked at her warily. It seemed to wake him and he regarded a box of books on the coffee table in front of her. He came over and lifted the top one free. “Are these helping? Funny-feeling book cover. What’s it made from?”
“Anthropodermic bibliopegy.”
“What kind of animal is that?”
“Not an animal. It’s a term used to define books bound in human skin.”
He dropped it like a sheet of acid and wiped his hand on the side of his boxers.
“You could tell a guy.”
“You might not just walk up and grab stuff.”
He shook his head and gave the entire box a distasteful look. “What’s it about?”
“The Red Barn Murder. William Corder murdered the mother of his child near Suffolk in 1827. He was later killed for his crime, and a surgeon stripped and tanned his skin to use it as a binding for the book about his deed, the subsequent trial, and execution.”
“Morbidly dreary. What’s it used for?”
“Not sure. My guess is it’s a focal point for someone to contact the soul of William Corder.”
“Why would anyone want to do that?” Walker thought better of it and waved his hand. “Never mind. It would probably be disturbing.”
She smiled primly. “People sure love to eat sausage, but they can’t stand seeing it made.”
He nodded. “I’ve used that saying before myself. It’s absolutely true.” He drank the rest of the water, then broke down the plastic bottle, the crinkling sounds filling the silence. “I’ve been tossing in bed going over the day’s events. I’ve been especially thinking about Sir MacDonald and why he’d be so keen on shutting down a unit almost no one knows exists. It’s not like he can take public credit for it.”
“That’s true. What’s his motive?” She eyed Walker speculatively. Perhaps he was more than the sum of his handsomeness and muscle. “I did find it interesting that he was so quickly able to deflect my power. He’s either shielded or a warlock. I don’t recognize any of the warlock tells I’m familiar with, so my bet is that he’s shielded. How and why is what I’d like to know.”
“How does one go about being shielded by a warlock? Is there a section in the yellow pages? Craigslist?”
“I don’t know what either of those is, but I think your attempt at humor referred to something available to the common man. To answer your question, no. A warlock, or a witch, for that matter, wouldn’t advertise. We prefer our privacy. No, whoever is involved with Sir MacDonald was involved from well before this day.”
“Could it be someone from the Red Grove?” Walker rubbed an itch in the center of his chest. “Perhaps we should see where he goes. I wonder if Preeti couldn’t develop an algorithm which would allow the CCTV cameras to trace his comings and goings.”
She raised an eyebrow. U.S. Navy SEALs weren’t the knuckle draggers she’d believed them to be. It seemed the selectors valued intelligence. And to think that there were more coming. Yum.
“I’m going to go see if she’s still awake.” He took a few steps, then paused. “Do you need anything?”
“I’m fine, Mr. SEAL.”
He stared at her a moment, then shook his head. Soon he was out of the room and headed down the hall.
She leaned over the box and stared at the book he’d picked up. Beneath it was another book bound in human skin titled L’Esprits des San Ignacio Mini. Although she’d never seen the book, she’d heard of it. Who hadn’t heard of it? Written in 1613 by a Jesuit priest who was also known to be a practicing warlock, it was the record of life and death and daily events at a small mission run by Spanish conquistadors in the northeastern corner of present-day Argentina. Father Jose Cataldina finished writing the book in 1721, then had the skin from his back removed and used it to bind his work. For years it passed from hand to hand. It wasn’t until 1852 that it was found once more when Vicar John Baptist Miège, Vicar Apostate to the American Indian Territories east of the Rocky Mountains, came into contact with the book. As he wrote in his own private ledger, he discovered a simple Elizabethan substitution cipher hidden within the text of the book, which revealed a series of resurrection spells of such complexity that they could never be replicated. Many a coven had rumored that a spell of forgetfulness had been placed over the tome to discourage copying. To Sassy’s recollection, no one had ever decoded any of the spells believed to be in the book, much less been able to incant them.
She opened the book with the tenderest hands, letting her finger linger on the pages as she turned them. She felt power here. Substantial and ancient. She’d fiddled with Elizabethan ciphers before. As an apprentice witch she’d passed notes to other witches, their true nature hidden behind replaced letters and numbers. The real genius, of course, of an Elizabethan cipher was that it still had to make sense to better hide what it contained.
With the Wild Hunt once again returned to England and the Holly King successfully resurrected, it was likely that the spell that made that possible was hidden away in this nasty piece of work she now held in her hands.
Knowing the spell would allow her to unmake it.
The question was, did she really want to unmake it? If King Arthur had indeed returned, did she want him there?
She wasn’t sure what she wanted, nor would she be until she determined exactly what the reasoning was for bringing back the Hunt. Until then, she’d work on breaking the code and search the remainder of the warlock’s materials for a link to the Red Grove.
CHAPTER 21
C-17 GLOBEMASTER III. ST. JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND. NIGHT.
SEAL Team 666, Genie, a tied-up Van Dyke, and three crew chiefs stared wearily into the brightening day outside the windows of the giant plane. They’d had to stop for refueling and were ready to get to their destination. When the plane took to the air once more, everyone found a comfortable position to rack out except YaYa. The constant tingling in his body because of the presence of the spirit inside Van Dyke was a constant reminder of the obour.
He’d never considered that a forest could be haunted before. He’d always attributed ghosts to places like houses or graveyards. But it made sense. The world was covered with more open space than not. It was just his bad luck to run into one during his first mission in the forests of Myanmar.
It had started with the feeling of being watched. At first it had been an anomalous idea of something tracking him. But when he’d stop, look, and see nothing, instead of the feeling going away it stayed with him. Then it evolved into a certain curiosity. He felt the strange attention, whatever it was, try to understand him; just as he might watch an insect pick a path from one tree to the other along the forest floor, so did this thing do to him as it watched him make his way through the forest.
At one point the idea of twelve came to him. It began with just the idea of the number. Twelve. Twelve. Twelve. But then it became more, once h
e exhibited a curiosity about the number. Then he had the idea of twelve eyes. Twelve eyes watching him. At the moment of that thought, he remembered vividly halting in the middle of a copse of giant trees of Myanmar. He spun in the silent forest until he spied six birds sitting on a branch of a tree. The birds’ bodies faced the same way, their heads were turned the same way, and they watched him from pairs of inscrutable black eyes. He moved away from the birds and felt the weight of their stare. He moved left, then right, but each time the birds moved their heads in unison, tracking him as if they were mere appendages of one larger will.
As he expressed his curiosity about it, it in turn expressed an uncertainty to him. It wanted to know more about him and in turn he wanted to know more about it. He wanted to understand what it was he felt and how he was able to detect something he didn’t see.
Then he’d lost time. He next remembered his body aching. The light was different. The entire feel of the forest had changed. He hadn’t known it then, but it was because he’d let the creature come into him.
YaYa ran his remaining hand along the mechanism the experts had made for him. Produced by DEKA Research and Development Corporation in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the prosthetic came in two models: one that could pass for a human arm and one that appeared to be half-human and half-cybernetic. He’d chosen the latter, not only because it was stronger but also because its falseness would serve as a reminder of his utter stupidity. Controlled with the help of neurotransmitters implanted into his brain, it was near perfect except for the fact that it wasn’t his own.
His thoughts drifted to Walker. Among anyone he knew, Walker would be the one to best relate since he’d been possessed before as well. YaYa hoped to be able to talk about it but also realized that the SEAL was in mourning. God knew the last thing YaYa wanted to do was to pour on the misery. He’d have to find the right time to bring it up, if at all.
