Night People

by J L Aarne

  The answer to how Wyatt could become the lock still eluded him, so he called the smartest person he knew to ask her about it, but Tallie didn’t answer her phone. He tried several times a day for two days before he had to admit that she had gone into hiding. He couldn’t blame her for it. She hadn’t pretended to be brave, and she had the same blood as Aaron and Wyatt, so she had been hearing the serpent’s whispers for a while. She hadn’t said anything when Wyatt talked to her about it, but she had probably been having dreams as well. He had gone to the library looking for lore about keys and serpents and sea monsters and he had read so many books on mythology that his head was full of Viking lore and bible verses. Hours spent searching the internet led him down a lot of useless roads. There were scholars who might have known the information he needed, but he didn’t have connections like Tallie’s, and without her he didn’t have her access to such people. Which all assumed there was information out there somewhere to be had, something he was beginning to doubt. People had short memories and a new lock was only needed every few centuries. If there was no one to write the tale down, or if it was lost, or if no one bothered to tell it, there wouldn’t be anything for him to find, no matter who he asked.

  On the news every day, there was more disaster; earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, fires. The deaths were in the high hundreds, every day drawing closer to a thousand. Indonesia alone had lost more than two hundred people in the previous week, and those were just the ones that had been accounted for. They were still looking for and identifying bodies. Whales were washing up on beaches all along the Pacific coast. No one knew why.

  Wyatt didn’t see night creatures in the diner anymore. Even the regulars had gone missing. Like Tallie, like the gnomes, they were in hiding. That, or they were getting ready for battle, perhaps picking off night people or hunting someone other than Wyatt with serpent’s blood, meaning to fashion themselves a key.

  The shadow snake had said that it didn’t need him alive, it only needed his blood. He thought back to that night many times and replayed its words over. Wyatt had killed it, but he didn’t delude himself that he had succeeded in doing so out of anything but luck. Luck and… it had hesitated. No matter what it said, it needed something more from him than his blood; it needed his permission. If permission wasn’t needed, the black-eyed children or some other hellish monster would have set the serpent free long ago.

  How much blood would it take to make a key like that? He wondered. Wyatt might have the blood of the serpent running through his veins thanks to some prehistoric ancestors, but blood that diluted by generations of mortal humans, he bet it would take a lot. It would take all of it.

  Which didn’t bring him any closer to figuring out how the lock could be made.

  The method had to be similar, he reasoned. A lock was the opposite of a key. So, what was the opposite of bleeding out? Not bleeding out, but that didn’t seem like the answer because he did that every day by not dying.

  More is asked of a lock than of a key.

  Mrs. Tanith had said that, and he wished he had asked her what she meant by it because he was no closer to knowing than he had been then. What more could be asked than a person’s life? That was everything.

  Wyatt bought a handgun and started going to an indoor shooting range. Silas had told him not to depend on guns because bullets didn’t always kill the things that lived in the dark, but Wyatt killed a lot of paper people the first week. He got good at it quickly and he enjoyed it. There was a calmness that came over him. He tuned out everything, the world narrowed to a black spot on a white piece of paper, and when he blew a hole through it, god it was satisfying. Satisfying in a way that getting his ass kicked by Silas at the dojo never had been.

  He was at the indoor shooting range one day, the gun in his hands, taking aim, breath drawing in just as he meant to pull the trigger, when the building began to shake. The lights jittered and swayed, the floor vibrated, Wyatt dropped his gun and it skittered across the floor. He looked around to see others ducking beneath the counters to hide from falling debris. He went down on one knee, stumbling as the shaking became so intense that he was practically hopping on the floor on his knees. A florescent light crashed against the wall to his right and sparks and glass rained down. Wyatt flinched away from it and tried to hurry beneath the counter in front of him, but with the floor shaking, he stumbled and fell. He hit his head on the counter as he finally managed to crawl under it.

  Somewhere a little girl screamed. He remembered seeing a little girl with her father teaching her how to shoot a pink .22 rifle. She began to sob loudly, and her father hushed her and told her everything was going to be all right.

  “Wyatt?!”

  Wyatt recognized Silas’s voice and opened his mouth to call back to him before he stopped and reminded himself that Silas was one of them. He wasn’t human. He couldn’t be trusted.

  “Wyatt?! Where are you?!”

  The floor wasn’t only vibrating and jittering anymore, it was rolling. The concrete floor fractured and crumbled as the ground underneath it moved like waves of crashing water. It was one of the strangest things Wyatt had ever seen and he stared at it until the floor beneath him rose up and knocked his head against the bottom of the counter where he was hiding. He grabbed onto the edge of the counter for something to hold onto and it cracked as he was trying to pull himself up and use it to steady himself.

  “Wyatt?!”

  “Silas! I’m over here! Give me a hand!”

  Silas hurried over, following the sound of his voice and miraculously managing to stay on his feet. He reached into the cubbyhole beneath the counter, seized Wyatt’s arm and pulled him out. Wyatt fell against the wall and looked around to see the plaster walls on every side cracking and breaking. The countertops where people set their guns, ammo and other supplies were all broken, falling apart, and of little protection to the people huddled beneath them. The chicken wire window looking in from the office was shattered, shards of glass everywhere. Most of the hanging florescent lights had broken against the walls and ceiling. The floor was covered in so much glass that it crunched under his feet when Wyatt took a step.

  There was a small cut on Silas’s left cheek, but otherwise he looked fine. He didn’t even seem to be caught off-balance and rode the waves of violent movement like he was standing on the deck of a ship at sea.

  As suddenly as it started, the shaking stopped.

  Wyatt braced a hand against the wall, felt the drywall give beneath it and moved his grip to the broken window frame.

  “How many times have you been through all of this?” he asked Silas.

  Silas looked around himself at the mess, at the people still cringing as they waited for the aftershocks, and shrugged. “A few.”

  “How do I stop it?”

  “How do we stop it?” Silas corrected.

  “Whatever,” Wyatt said. He stood away from the wall, went over to where he had been hiding and picked up his dropped gun. The broken lights and crumbling walls made him feel claustrophobic. He needed to be outside. “How did you find me?”

  “Amarok found you,” Silas said, falling in behind him. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “It’s a shooting range,” Wyatt said, holding up the pistol for Silas to see. “I was practicing.”

  “I prefer knives,” Silas said. When Wyatt glanced at him over his shoulder, he smiled and said, “You don’t have to reload them.”

  Amarok was in the back of Silas’s truck. He was so large that he was laying down and could still put his head over the side to sniff Wyatt and lick his face. Thankfully, he kept the licking to a single swipe, which still covered the side of Wyatt’s face in drool.

  “He likes you,” Silas said.

  Wyatt didn’t say anything, just wiped the slobber off his face and went to his car, which was parked a few spaces down from the truck. He opened the back and took a long bundle from the seat. Silas watched him and smiled when he saw it.

  “What? I started
carrying it in my car, so what?” Wyatt asked.

  “Nothing. I gave it to you for a reason,” Silas said. “A sword isn’t any good to you if it’s hidden in your closet back home when you need it, is it?”

  “And I need it,” Wyatt guessed.

  He put the sword in its cloth wrapping in the back of the truck and got in. Silas got in, started the truck and lit a cigarette, but he didn’t back out of the parking lot.

  “There has to be a new lock,” he said. “He is rising and I can’t let him. You understand?”

  “I think so,” Wyatt said. Strangely, he was calm about it.

  “He’s going to try to stop us.”

  “He’s kind of like a god, so his chances are pretty good, wouldn’t you say?”

  Silas flicked ash out his window. “Yeah.”

  It began to rain as they sat there, and Silas smoked the rest of his cigarette. He flicked the butt out into the parking lot to be extinguished in a puddle and the slate grey sky split open with lightening so bright it lit up everything. The flash of light exposed shadow creatures huddled beside the other parked cars and hiding beside the building and the shadows beneath the dumpster. Some of their eyes caught the light and gleamed before the lightening was gone and the thunder rumbled in its wake.

  “I feel bad for them,” Wyatt said.

  He spoke softly, but Silas heard him anyway.

  “I know you do.”

  “Let’s go. Let’s just go if we’re going.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Not yet.”

  Silas put the truck in reverse and backed out.

  They didn’t talk for most of the drive out to the ocean, for that was where they were going. Wyatt had known it was where he needed to go for a long time, probably since the first dream where he woke up drowning. He had figured a few things out since Silas’s confession on the beach, but he still didn’t know how any of it was supposed to work. Magic? It sounded preposterous, but so did everything else. He didn’t know magic though, so if magic was required, that was going to be a problem.

  “I figured it out, you know,” he said, breaking the silence.

  “What’s that?” Silas asked.

  “The lock. It took me a while. I just figured it out a couple days ago,” Wyatt said. “’More is asked of a lock than of a key,’ that’s what she said.”

  “Who did?” Silas glanced at him. “Who have you been talking to?”

  “A gorgon named Mrs. Tanith,” Wyatt said. “Like the writer, you know? Except it’s her last name.”

  “A gorgon,” Silas repeated. “What did she want?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Wyatt said. “But she said that, and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Since the shadow snake familiar demon thing killed my cats and tried to kill me. It said that it needed my blood, but I don’t have to be alive. So, I figured it out.”

  “Okay, so explain it to me,” Silas said.

  “The key needs blood—probably a lot of it. All of it. The key is death,” Wyatt said. “The lock is the opposite. The lock requires life, but the thing I don’t understand is how. If I die, I’m the key, not the lock, right? So, that’s not it. So, I don’t get it. I don’t know how. You know, though, don’t you? You know how. You told John Bledsoe.”

  “I told him,” Silas said, his jaw clenching. “I told him, and he didn’t even hesitate. You humans, you’re so stupid. You throw your lives away like they’re nothing. You have no idea what they’re worth.”

  “But you do,” Wyatt sneered. He wasn’t thinking about Silas or Richard Warwick, he was thinking about his father. The thing inside Aaron Sinclair hadn’t just taken his body, it had assumed his life; it had taken everything. “You know better, right? You’ve been alive for how long? More than four hundred years, I’m sure. How many human lives have you taken? Not just killed, but actually stolen their lives?”

  “Shut up,” Silas snapped.

  Wyatt didn’t shut up. It was too late for him to shut up. Once he started talking, started saying everything he was thinking, it was impossible to stop. “Why are you different, huh? You think you’re special or some shit because you pick up that big magic sword and kill your own kind sometimes to… what, protect people? Is that what you tell yourself? You’re protecting people and that makes it okay that every few centuries, you kick some poor asshole’s soul out of his body and hijack his life. Who can really blame you, right? I mean, you’re a survivor. But the thing is, you don’t hop around from body to body like I’m sure some of them do, huh? No, you keep it and remake it into someone else until you can almost forget what you really are and that makes you think you’re fucking noble. What about Richard Warwick? Sure, Bledsoe thought he was a dick, but he was person and that was his life you took and how do you know what he was going to do with it?”

  “I don’t,” Silas said. Wyatt had hit a nerve, but Silas kept his voice low and he refused to look at him as he spoke. “I have no idea what he was going to do, but I made peace with Richard Warwick a long time ago. He was an asshole who beat and raped his wife, who would beat or kill a man for daring to stand against him. He was strong and entitled and he was a prick. You think he gave a shit about those people? He didn’t.”

  “And I suppose you knew all of that when you killed him?” Wyatt asked.

  “I knew that taking his body would save me from becoming little better than a ghost. I was fading, hiding in the shadows. My body had died, and animal bodies are not compatible hosts for my kind. I knew that I wanted to live.”

  “Why are you different?” Wyatt asked. “All the fleshgaits, skin-walkers, whatever you want to call them, they don’t seem like they really care about any of this, but you do. Why?”

  Silas sighed. “The world ending is an impossibly big thing for people to wrap their minds around, so don’t try. Every living thing in this world will die if that godlike creature is set free. Try to imagine the magnitude of that and you can’t.”

  “Okay, so forget the end of the world. Why?”

  “For John Bledsoe.”

  Wyatt stared at him, not understanding.

  Before he could ask Silas to explain, Silas pulled off the highway onto a little sandy road that led to the beach. It was the same beach they had visited the last time they were together, but about two miles farther out. There were more rocks here and a stony outcropping where muscles had washed up and clung to the black stones, constantly bathed in the waves and spray.

  Wyatt’s mind was still on their conversation and opened his mouth to ask what Silas had meant, but the question died unspoken when he saw what waited for them on the beach.

  The carcass of a gray whale lay on its side just above the tideline. It hadn’t been dead long because there was no visible decay to the body, but gulls and other carrion birds had already been at it. Whales and other marine animals were dying all over the world, their bodies washed up on beaches and made the ten o’clock news if too many people hadn’t died that day. Knowing about it and seeing it were completely different things. The whale was as big as a small house and Wyatt had seen them before from afar as they jumped out of the water. They were huge creatures, beautiful and peaceful and wonderous. The dead one on the beach broke his heart. It was a giant lump of grey meat turning pale with death on the sand. It didn’t belong there. It belonged in the water, leaping over the waves, growing barnacles on its face and singing to other whales.

  Wyatt got out of the truck, Silas forgotten as he walked down the sandy incline toward the whale. People had once thought such animals were monsters, but those people had never met a real monster. A gray whale could reach upwards of 60,000 pounds and grow to forty feet in length and that was nothing but spit in the eye of the Midgard Serpent. That monster would destroy the world and every amazing thing that called it home for the sake of its own freedom. Perhaps it was pitiable, a wretched beast doomed to be imprisoned for eternity, and who knew for what, or if there had ever been a reason for trapping it other than fear, but it had to
be stopped.

  Wyatt placed his hand on the cold, wet back of the whale and watched the gulls that had been pecking at it and fighting fly away into the stormy, blackening sky. He turned to find Silas standing there a few feet away, holding the great sword he’d been swinging the first time they met in one hand, Wyatt’s rapier in the other.

  “You forgot this in the truck.” Silas held out the sword to him then took Wyatt’s gun from his belt and passed it to him as well.

  It was a Glock 31 and when he had first bought it, his shooting instructor, Bill, had complained that he hated Glocks because they were ugly. When Wyatt said he didn’t plan to enter the weapon into any beauty contests, Bill didn’t have much to say about that. He had gotten good with it, but it wouldn’t make much difference if something came after him that bullets wouldn’t stop.

  Wyatt wasn’t wearing a belt, so he made sure the safety was on and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans. The sword he held loosely in his right hand. He stared out at the ocean and waited to feel like a hero, but he just felt scared and a little dumb.

  “You remember what I said about guns?” Silas asked.

  “They don’t always kill the creatures, yeah,” Wyatt said. “But you know, a bullet in the face has still got to hurt.”

  “Fair enough,” Silas said.

  Thunder crashed and rumbled like marbles in a jar. Flashes set the sky on fire and Amarok walked along the sand where the water lapped at it, sniffing, his strange dark fur appearing to sparkle with embers each time the lightning cracked across the clouds.

  Wyatt walked around the body of whale, trailing his fingers over it as he went. It was cold, but he imagined the flesh beneath his fingers pulsing with life and he could almost feel it in his fingertips. Every time lightning crashed, he felt it in his fingers. The salty air was sweet with the taste of shattered oxygen molecules.

  “Wyatt, stay close,” Silas said.

  Amarok began to howl and the sound of it stole Wyatt’s voice completely and dashed anything he might have said to Silas to pieces. It was awful, like no animal’s cry or howl he had ever heard, so loud that his ears ached, so terrible that it sent an icy spike of terror through the pit of his belly that nearly dropped him on his ass right there in the sand.