Metal Guardian: An Urban Fantasy Adventure (Rings of the Inconquo Book 2)

by A. L. Knorr

  “There were days when we were kept from the rigs, once for a whole week.” He gave himself to a long yawn. “They still paid us … paid us to not work ... but we couldn’t tell anyone what we’d seen … what we’d seen dug up.”

  “What did they dig up?” I pressed, my natural love of archeology matched by my ulterior motives. “What did you see?”

  Iry’s head dropped and then bobbed, his eyes flaring wide before settling back to their half-lidded state. “Huh … I’m sorry what was that Ibby?”

  “What did you see?” I tried to keep my voice even. “In the oil fields.”

  Uncle Iry yawned again and shifted in his chair, settling lower.

  “Not much … I kept by the engines, but there were things, old things that were churned up … Then we’d move to another rig, another site … after we waited for a day or more … you got used to it …”

  His breathing fell into a raspy rhythm, and I knew he’d nodded off, but I wasn’t satisfied.

  “What did you see, a’am?” I asked, my voice sharper this time. “What were they?”

  My uncle continued his deep, sawing breaths. Choking back a frustrated grunt, I leaned forward to give him a shake. Reached for his knee—

  “Ibby!”

  I looked to see Jackie at the doorway to the kitchen.

  “He’s tired; let’s get him to bed,” she said quietly, patting the air soothingly. “You can ask him tomorrow.”

  I felt a rush of irritation, but I smothered it. I was childishly impatient. If I tried to force things, I was liable to end up behaving as crazy as I was afraid of looking.

  “You’re right.” I touched his shoulder.

  “Sorry.” Uncle Iry grunted as he woke and looked at me.

  “Time you were in bed, a’am,” I said softly and then held out a hand to help him up.

  He took it, and as I steadied his drowsy rise, I felt another pang in my chest. He staggered a little as we moved toward the hallway, and his hand came to rest on my shoulder. One arm around his narrow waist we shuffled down the hall at an angle. I opened the door to his room.

  There were two bedrooms in the apartment, but Jackie and I were happy to share so that Uncle Iry had his own space. The light from the hallway revealed meagre furnishings. A bed with built-in dresser drawers sat along the wall and a small desk and chair below the window. The room put him right across from the bathroom. In a flat where you were competing with two ladies for the loo, that was no small advantage.

  “It’s wonderful,” he sighed, and then pulled away and half-collapsed, half-sank onto the bed. “Thank you, ya binti.”

  Sprawled across the bed, the dim light silhouetting his dark skin against the white sheets, he seemed a shadow of a person. His breathing was even, but so shallow his back hardly rose and fell.

  Gently as I could, I removed his shoes and placed them at the foot of his bed, out of the way of his path to the bathroom.

  “Night, a’am,” I whispered as I drew the door shut behind me. “Welcome home.”

  My uncle was here, through trial and travail, and though it would take some adjustment, it was certainly a blessing.

  ---

  “Isn’t it weird, though?” I wondered aloud, more to myself than Jackie. We’d finished cleaning up and were sitting in the living room. We were tired and had plenty to do tomorrow, but Uncle Iry’s revelations meant that neither of us felt like we could sleep just yet.

  “You mean the bit about the stuff they dug up?” Jackie was already in her pajamas––knee-length athletic shorts and a grungy old shirt. She knew I was fretting over the last part of my conversation with my uncle. It could be anything, but his reference to ‘what had been dug up’ had filled me with a dread fascination.

  “If it had been some kind of safety thing, they would’ve just told them, right?” I tucked my legs underneath me on the plush loveseat. This one had come from Jackie’s old flat, as––after the fork punctures and bullet holes––my old one had had more stuffing out than in.

  “Unless they were doing something they shouldn’t.” Jackie shrugged. “Maybe they were leaving oil spills or something and didn’t want workers to be around to witness it.” She flipped over to lie on her stomach.

  “It doesn’t sound like spills.” I replayed Iry’s words in my mind. “He acted like they saw something they didn’t expect … something that scared them.”

  Jackie and I shared a long, fearful stare, and then a shiver.

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Jackie admitted, pressing her face down onto the pillow.

  “Me, either.” I felt cold and wished I could reach the blanket folded over the couch Jackie was lying on. “But, ignoring it won’t make it go away.”

  Jackie ground her face into the pillow, then raised her face just enough that her words weren’t lost in the cushion. “We have a lot to be afraid of, but we don’t know if this is one of them.”

  I sighed heavily, not having anything to raise in argument against her, but still not convinced. Something squirmed and itched at the back of my mind, refusing to solidify just as it resisted attempts to ignore it. It was something that had happened today, but what?

  “I suppose we’ll just have to wait until he wakes up tomorrow,” Jackie continued. “Ask him about what he saw. Maybe it’ll be nothing special, like some rare mineral deposit or old dinosaur bones.”

  I snorted and rolled my eyes. Trust Jackie to label dinosaur bones as ‘nothing special’.

  She knew my faces well enough to elaborate. “I’m talking about our kind of special,” she said, lowering her voice and glancing at the hall like she expected Iry to appear. “The ancient demon, superpowers, boyfriend’s-an-evil-kidnapper sort of special.”

  Remembering Sark stoked a familiar anger in the pit of my stomach.

  I wouldn’t call myself a hateful or even vengeful person normally, but what he did to Jackie stirred a dark and fierce place in my heart. It was made all the worse by knowing he’d escaped. He’d been a little the worse for wear, sure, but after all the turmoil and pain he caused it was cosmically unjust that he’d snuck away to lick his wounds as I battled the demon he unleashed. Just remembering his sneering, cruel lips, his leering, hateful eyes …

  The same eyes I’d seen at Heathrow today.

  The realization hit me like a punch to the stomach, and I sagged back against the loveseat exhaling heavily.

  “What?” Jackie half rose from the couch. “Ibby, what’s wrong?”

  “Sark,” I rasped, my mouth suddenly dry. “I think I might have seen him today.”

  Jackie’s whole body went rigid, like a terrified rabbit, then she was up on her feet. Her fingers curled into claws.

  “Where?” she snarled. “Where did you see him?”

  Her eyes settled on me, and I was a little alarmed at the rage in her eyes.

  “At Heathrow,” I began but then quickly added, “I’m not sure it was him … I just saw someone who might have been him. A shabby-looking man. He was staring at me, but I only saw him for a second.”

  I watched Jackie as she worked hard to compose herself, to get control of the anger and fear she was feeling. Gradually, her hands relaxed.

  “You should call Dary,” she said, finally. “Maybe she’s seen Sark. This seems like an emergency to me.”

  Daria, or Dary, was an old flame of Lowe’s, my friend, mentor, and a ghost. She was a complicated, not-quite-human freelance provocateur, who’d saved my life more than once. On parting company, she’d left a means to get in touch with her. She’d been emphatic, though––she was only to be contacted in the case of an emergency, both for her safety and ours.

  “Okay,” I nodded, but then we jumped as a harsh, electronic buzz shattered the silence.

  Jackie swore savagely as she snatched her phone off the coffee table. I pressed a hand to my chest, as though I could slow the hammering of my heart.

  “Pietr, you bloody knob,” Jackie growled as she jabbed at her screen with a thumb.
“I told you I’d give you the griddle tomorrow.”

  Pietr lived in a flat down the hall, and he happened to have an electric griddle big enough for me to make kisra on. Jackie had learned this fact because, even though he was twice her age, he’d offered to make crepes for her once. Jackie had turned him down on the crepes because he said he would make them after they spent the night together, but had remembered when I had asked where we might find an electric griddle. Pietr, probably still sour over Jackie turning him down, had been slow to hand over the griddle, and now seemed eager to get it back.

  “It’s clean,” I grumbled, turning toward the kitchen. “I’ll get it.”

  “No, I’ll get it,” Jackie huffed, still glaring at her phone. “You need to call Dary.”

  I was too tired to argue, so I shuffled toward the room I shared with Jackie. In the back of the overburdened closet was a small lockbox with a combination lid. I drew out the box, thumbed in the combination, and opened it. Inside was a plastic bag where a phone lay in three pieces. I drew out the body of the phone and connected the flat, square battery and the thick rectangular antennae, just the way I’d been shown, and then waited for the analog screen to come to life.

  I winced as a heavy rap sounded at our front door.

  Did he have to knock like a gorilla trying to knock bananas out of a tree? It played hell on my nerves and might wake Uncle Iry. I heard Jackie heft the griddle and curse under her breath as the screen came to life. I thumbed number one and hit send, then thumbed number two and hit send again. I held the phone to my ear. Sounds of static crackled and popped, then there was the sound of ringing. I heard our flat door open and Jackie’s voice sharp with irritation.

  “If you’re calling this number there better be a good reason,” Daria’s voice came over the line, cold and flat. “Leave a message and I’ll—”

  A gong-like crash followed by a cry of pain resounded from the front of the flat.

  The phone tumbled from my fingers, and I raced toward the sound.

  “Bastard!” Jackie shrieked, and another metallic thump drew an agonized scream, a bit weaker this time.

  “Jackie!” I shouted as the bangles slipped off of my arms and into my hands with a thought. I wanted to be ready, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

  Jackie straddled the doorway, wielding the electric griddle like a battle-axe, chopping down on a man who cowered on the ground. For a heartbeat, I thought it was Pietr, but as he cringed away from another blow, I saw his face. Sark’s haggard and grimy visage, just as I’d seen it at Heathrow, looked up at Jackie in mortal terror.

  It would have been hilarious if not for the fact that Jackie seemed within inches of beating him to death with Pietr’s griddle.

  Chapter Four

  Sark turned out to have more fight in him than he’d looked.

  One foot snaked out and caught Jackie’s leg.

  Jackie didn’t topple, thanks to her training, but she did pause as she shifted her weight to her back leg. Capitalizing on the momentary reprieve, Sark threw up a hand and, like it had been swatted by an invisible sledgehammer, the griddle flew from Jackie’s grip into the hallway. Unimpressed by his display of Inconquo prowess, Jackie fell on him with a flurry of pounding fists and flying elbows.

  I stood in the living room, my bangles dangling from my fingers, the two of them so entangled I held off launching my own attack.

  “Jackie!” I shouted. “Out of the way!”

  My instructions drew Jackie’s attention from her abuse of Sark’s ribs and upraised forearms, and Sark, opportunistic as ever, snatched a fist full of her T-shirt. Jackie snarled and lunged to smash his exposed face, but Sark used her momentum to send her rolling over the top of him.

  Jackie hit the hallway floor, hard. With a grunt, she sprang into a crouch. Sark, his eyes wide with terror scuttled backwards like a ragged crab into our flat. He opened his mouth, but before more than a syllable was out, I let fly with the bangles.

  The copper hoops spun through the air, stretching and thinning like they were melting in a centrifuge. By the time they reached Sark, they’d become two thin strands of copper. One wrapped around his chest and arms, while the other curled around his legs. With a reflexive mental effort, the ends of the bands clicked together, and Sark was securely bound.

  No longer able to use his hands or feet, he crashed to the floor with a winded squawk. He landed on his shoulder and gave a sharp hiss, writhing on the floor like a worm next to a flame.

  Jackie pounced on him, hammering at his face with her fists. For a second, I stood stunned, unable to tear myself away from the horrible expression written lividly across Jackie’s face. By the time I shook off my bewilderment, I realized Sark had stopped trying to cringe away from the blows. His head lolled around in a sickening boneless way after each punch.

  “Jackie!” I shouted. When she didn’t stop, I rushed over and grabbed her by the shoulder. “Jackie, stop!”

  My best friend in the world whirled around, letting Sark flop nervelessly to the floor, her hands raised. I thought she was about to box me, but a heartbeat later, she was staring at her hands. Sark’s blood covered them, but the fury of her blows had opened red tears in her skin. Jackie and Sark’s blood mingled across her knuckles and lay spattered across the front of her shirt.

  “I-I-I,” Jackie stammered, still gaping at her hands. “I’m sorry.”

  “Wash your hands,” I said, a bit more sharply than I intended. “Someone must have heard all that.”

  Jackie shambled toward the kitchen, never having raised her eyes from her crimson fists.

  I looked down at Sark. For a second, I thought he was dead. In that second, my mind whirled through a kaleidoscope of feelings, some of which surprised me. I’d always expected some kind of incredible guilt would come crashing in at having been part of a person’s death, like a huge moral wrecking ball, but that wasn’t what I felt. There was disbelief (can he really be dead?), and a bit of panic (how do I get rid of a dead body?), but no guilt, no horror at what had happened. In that second, my mind accepted that Sark was a bad man, a killer. He’d come for me and Jackie, and now he was dead. Simple. Cold? Yes. But frighteningly simple.

  Then I saw his chest rise. Another breath and his right eye rolled groggily toward me. The left side of his face was battered, the eye swollen shut. His good eye shone with dull recognition and not much else, so though Sark was alive, he was barely hanging onto consciousness.

  Something drew my gaze past our open front door, and I groaned aloud. Laying in the hallway was a heap of humanity and polyester that was Pietr. Leaving Sark to bleed on our floor, I rushed to check on our fallen neighbour. I was thankful to see he was still breathing, but he sported a nasty knock on the back of the head that had seeped blood onto the collar of his windbreaker. I gently rolled him over and saw a lump on his forehead, already the shade of aubergine.

  I shook him, but he only managed a weak groan.

  “Oh bollocks!” Jackie growled from the apartment. I looked up and saw her drying her hands as she watched me from our doorway. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know.” I shot a look up and down the hallway. “But unless you want the police asking about him in a few minutes, you’d better get over here and help me.”

  I slid my hands around one of the stout man’s beefy arms, and Jackie tossed the towel and did the same. Together we hauled him into our apartment, closing the door after retrieving the skillet from the hallway. We moved Pietr into the living room, skirting Sark, who lay watching us with a dumb, one-eyed stare. It was a chore to drag Pietr up onto the couch, but we managed despite him being a hundred kilos of dead weight.

  “Now what?”

  I met her wide-eyed stare with one of my own and then threw up my arms.

  “How the bloody hell should I know?”

  Jackie winced at the outburst, a hurt look coming into her eyes, but I was too bewildered and scared to care much.

  “We can�
��t just leave Sark there and wait around for Pietr to wake up,” Jackie offered, which only served to stoke my panicked ire.

  “Thank you, Jackie,” I snapped. “I hadn’t put that part together yet. I was still stuck on the how do we know if two men with serious head trauma aren’t about to die in our flat.”

  Jackie bristled a little then, her jaw clenching and unclenching, but she let out a slow breath and then looked over to Pietr.

  “For what it’s worth, I think he’ll be okay.” She thrust her chin at our neighbour. “A knot like that means most of the swelling is on the outside, instead of against his brain.”

  I looked at Pietr, who, while utterly senseless, seemed far better off than Sark, bloodied on the floor by the door.

  “And him?” I nodded at Sark.

  Jackie’s face hardened, and a chilling trace of her former ire was back. It was a twisted, hard-edged face that looked down at the fallen man, and couldn’t have looked less like the best friend I knew and loved.

  “Who cares?” She glared down at Sark. For his part, Sark’s expression didn’t change as he continued to watch us with idiotic placidity.

  “Hey, look at me.” My tone was firm enough tone to pull Jackie’s attention back to me. “I care.”

  “Why?”

  The question was delivered in a tone so flat and icy, so unlike the warm, bubbly Jackie, that I had to remind myself who I was talking to.

  “First of all,” I began, squeezing patient calm into every syllable. “If he dies, we don’t know why he came or who will come looking for him. Second, he’s no threat to us right now, so killing him would be murder, and third, I’m hoping we haven’t decided that summary execution is ours to choose because I will have a problem with that.”

  Jackie looked at me, her brown eyes stony, but as I met her gaze, they began to soften. Tears beaded in the corners of her eyes, and she raised her wounded hands to the sides of her head. Her gaze slid off of me, back to Sark, and then down to her hands as she held them out in front of her. Her mouth opened and closed, and then she nearly doubled over, bracing herself on her knees.