Night Moves

by Gail Z. Martin

  The water cannon had drowned the candles, smudged the runes he’d spray-painted onto the dirt, and knocked off his SS hat, leaving him bedraggled in a wet bathrobe. But the staff in his hands was no joke, and I could see a red glow inside the gargoyle’s eyes. As long as Hawthorn had the staff, he could control its power.

  “You can’t stop me!” Hawthorn shouted, gripping the stave like he meant to fight. Blair, Father Leo, and I closed in from three directions. Going after one of us meant the other two could still get in another shot. “I will release the Vril and become more powerful than you can imagine.”

  “Nice bathrobe,” Blair yelled. “It just screams ‘evil villain.’”

  I seized the momentary distraction and ran forward, looping the lariat of the animal control pole over the staff, and yanked with all my might. Hawthorn was just as beefy as Howie had said, but I didn’t expect to be stopped cold. He chuckled and lowered the staff, pointing it my way. I dove aside, as an electric arc blazed through the air where I’d been standing a second before.

  Fuck. I dropped and rolled. The air smelled of ozone, and the scorched ground told me I’d have been fried if his lightning bolt had connected. Blair and Father Leo took cover, and we fell back to Plan B.

  Cue the wolves. A single, lonely howl was soon joined by a mournful chorus. It sounded like a couple of dozen wolves surrounded us in the forest, and just for a second, I saw terror drive out the smug certainty in Hawthorn’s eyes. The howling definitely rattled him.

  Blair seized the moment and slung a flash grenade right at Hawthorn. I squeezed my eyes tight. Seconds later I was running right for Hawthorn, seizing the advantage since I expected the flare and he didn’t. While he was momentarily disoriented, I tackled him, grabbing onto the staff with both hands. We rolled through the fresh mud, me trying to keep the damned thing pointed away, and him trying to blow my head off with it.

  He was burlier than me, but I had longer arms. We tussled, yanking the staff one way and the other, until I decided fuck this whole thing and kneed him right in the orbs.

  Hawthorn’s eyes bulged and in that instant, when he sucked in air and his eyes crossed, I jerked the staff right out of his hands, just as Donny appeared beside the truck.

  “Donny, go long!” I yelled and sent the staff wheeling through the air. Donny’s easy to spot, because he looks more like a punk Malamute than a fearsome wolf. He leaped into the air and caught the staff like it was a game of fetch.

  The gargoyle head bobbled free, falling to the ground as Donny took off into the woods with the wooden shaft—the part that was magically useless.

  I rolled away from Hawthorn and grabbed the knob, tossing it to Blair, who caught it and lobbed the head to Father Leo. We had a nice setup for a game of magical monkey in the middle, until I realized Hawthorn had gotten to his knees. He held out his right fist, and I saw the gleam of the Death’s Head ring and realized we’d been so focused on the staff, we missed the real danger.

  “I will raise the Vril, and you will all kneel!” He staggered to his feet, and if I was going to die in the next few minutes, I’d take pride in having racked the balls of our would-be evil overlord.

  The wind had picked up, light at first, then rustling through the tops of the trees. But it was the rumble beneath our feet that worried me more. The fracking had probably destabilized the shale all around the drilling, which meant that if they’d pumped out the natural groundwater, what was above those suddenly empty air pockets could collapse like a bad soufflé. We needed to end this.

  The wind grew stronger, and the upper branches careened back and forth. I figured it was some psycho side effect of his crazy Nazi ring, as dust devils rose and gusts tugged at my shirt and whipped through my hair. Hawthorn’s small camper rocked on its tires, buffeted by wind that rattled a loose metal panel and sent a lawn chair flying.

  That’s when I realized that Blair had circled around behind Hawthorn. A shot rang out, taking off most of his left hand, including that damned SS ring.

  He screamed in pain. I dove for the bloody fingers and jerked the ring free. I closed my fist around the trophy and rolled over to find myself looking down the barrel of a genuine military-issue Luger pistol.

  “Give me the ring. It’s mine, they promised me!”

  “Blair, Mark, watch out!” Father Leo shouted. I rolled as hard as I could to the right, having no idea what was going on.

  I heard a horrendous crash and might have yelped in understandable panic. When I lifted my head, I saw that the wind had stopped, but not before it dropped Hawthorn’s camper right on top of him. All I could see were his legs, which stuck out from under. As if on cue, the propane tank exploded, sending up a fireball. Linda and the coven came through, after all.

  I didn’t need to think. I tossed the one ring of power into the flames.

  But before I could get too stoked about our victory, the ground shuddered again. I backed up fast, as the earth crumbled and cracks opened in the hard dirt. Between one breath and the next, a sinkhole opened, taking Hawthorn and his blazing camper down to Hell.

  The Vril. Fuck.

  Then I heard chanting. Father Leo had jammed the gargoyle head on the muzzle of his shotgun and used it as a makeshift staff, gambling that the word of power Simon had found for us would work. Only unlike Hawthorn, Father Leo intended to bind the Vril energy and keep it locked in the depths where it belonged.

  Leo must have been making it up as he went, because I heard the German phrase, but it was mixed in with the Latin rite of exorcism and some other incantations that sounded like he’d gone off the standard Vatican script.

  A pillar of fire burst from the sinkhole, smelling of sulfur and burned plastic. Then a force sucked the fire back into the crater, and suddenly the clearing was silent.

  Father Leo had stopped chanting. Blair edged out from where she had taken cover behind my truck. I stared at the hole in the ground like I expected a balrog to rise from the depths, but not even a plume of smoke emerged.

  “Is that…it? It’s over?” I was covered in mud, my head throbbed, and I was bleeding and bruised, but I was alive, and so were my friends.

  “Yeah,” Father Leo replied, sounding a little shaky. “I think so.”

  Donny padded out of the forest, still holding the wooden staff. He brought it to me and dropped it at my feet, then sat down and wagged his tail, waiting for a treat. I pulled a dog biscuit out of my jacket pocket and tossed it to him. “Good boy.”

  When I looked out at the tree line, I glimpsed yellow eyes, watching me, and the silhouette of dozens of wolves. They’d helped to unnerve Hawthorn, and they’d shown up when we needed them, which counted as doing us a solid in my book. I gave them a snappy salute, and the wolves faded into the shadows.

  Blair went to stand beside Father Leo, who looked freaked out, and I ran to the truck to grab a sports drink and brought it to him. He gulped it down, then glanced at the gargoyle head still stuck on the barrel of his shotgun.

  I’d thrown the ring into the fire without a second thought, because it seemed the right thing to do. But now the fire was gone, and the idea of tossing the gargoyle’s head into the depths along with the ring felt wrong.

  “We’ll deal with it,” Father Leo said with a wan smile, like it was taking everything he had to stay standing.

  That’s when I realized that Linda and five other women had emerged from wherever they’d been hiding.

  “Thank you,” I said. Linda’s hair was mussed, but otherwise, she and her coven sisters looked unscathed.

  “It’s was a tad cliché, but we worked with what we had,” she said with a shrug. “Thank you for doing what we couldn’t.”

  “You’re welcome. And, for the record, I thought we worked pretty well together. Truce?” I held out my hand.

  She hesitated and then shook it. “Truce.”

  I figured it didn’t hurt to have the coven on our side. They might come in handy again someday.

  In the distance, I heard sirens.
Someone must have noticed the fireball. “Time to go,” I said, getting under Father Leo’s arm so I could support him on the way back to the truck. Blair followed closely on his other side, but he made it back on his own two feet. Donny, still in his wolf form, was right behind her. I steadied Leo as he climbed into the cab while Blair stuffed the gargoyle head into my lead box, and then she and Donny crawled into the back seat.

  “Here,” I said, digging a protein bar out of the glove compartment. “There’s a bottle of water in the bag in the backseat.” Blair reached over Donny’s furry head and handed it up to Leo as I drove out just a bit slower than we roared in, not wanting to attract attention. We had already gotten to the paved road and were out of sight before the sirens grew closer.

  “Well, that didn’t go the way I’d pictured it, but whatever works, right?” I said. I wanted a shower and a stiff drink, and then a nice quiet evening with my dog. There’s no place like home.

  9

  “Much as it hurts to admit it, you were right,” I told Smith and Jones when they showed up the next day at the rectory and called a little come-to-Jesus meeting. “The monster attacks weren’t random, and there was an outside agent. This time.”

  I was willing to give them credit for the heads up, but that didn’t mean I thought every cryptid from here on out was part of some secret, subversive plot.

  “You ignored protocol,” Jones, the CIA guy, ranted. “You didn’t call. We have teams for this kind of thing.”

  “We handled it,” I replied, refusing to let him get under my skin. I was pretty damn proud of what we’d managed to do. And since tipping off Cheech and Chong would have required ratting out Phoebe and her friends, the pack, and the coven, I wasn’t going to second-guess our decision.

  “Actions have consequences,” Jones said, sounding like every sunglasses-wearing dark-suited government asshole in every movie ever made.

  “Bruce and Dick here have a problem with how we did our job,” I said to Father Leo.

  “There are rules,” Jones growled.

  Father Leo raised his head and looked at Smith, the Occulatum agent. He said something in Latin that sounded remarkably uncharitable, followed by a dressing down that I’m pretty sure included some old-school Roman profanity. Smith paled, then gave a sharp nod.

  “We’re grateful for your help,” Smith said in a flat tone that told me he was lying but intimidated. I could work with that. Jones opened his mouth, and Smith gave him a look that could curdle milk, so his partner shut his yap without saying anything else.

  “Now that we are aware there may be…complicating factors, we’ll be sure to keep the bigger picture in mind,” Father Leo said in an icy tone that told me the Padre was well and truly pissed. “We’ll keep you posted. And, I expect that we’ll learn of any new intelligence that might affect our territory in a timely fashion?”

  It really wasn’t a question, and they knew it. Jones remained stone-faced, but Smith nodded.

  “Yes. Of course. And I’ll put your report through as soon as it’s received.” Smith steered his partner out of the rectory foyer and back to their big, black SUV with the heavily tinted windows that pretty much screamed “secret government operation.” We watched them drive away, and both of us let out our breaths when they finally vanished from sight.

  “You think there are more ‘outside actors’ stirring up monster problems?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Probably so,” I allowed. “But not tonight.” I elbowed him and grinned. “It’s poker night, or did you forget? Let’s play some cards, drink a little whiskey, and raise a little hell.”

  Authors’ Note

  The locations used in these stories are real places, all around the towns where we grew up. We’ve taken a few liberties here and there for the sake of the story, but anyone who’s familiar with the area will recognize landmarks. That’s part of the fun for us, taking the places that we know so well and putting a little different spin on them.

  Tamarack Lake is a beautiful spot for a summer picnic, and the trails in the Allegheny Forest out near Kane are wonderful for hiking. The old swim club also exists—it’s been abandoned for years, but Gail remembers going there as a kid. Fracking—shale gas mining—is also real, and it’s very controversial because of its unpleasant side effects.

  Wewelsburg existed, as did the Thule and their obsession with Vril. Sometimes real history is weirder than anything you can invent.

  And while Mark’s corner of Pennsylvania doesn’t have a big coal mining history, much of the rest of Western Pennsylvania is undermined by thousands of miles of tunnels that are so old, they are unmapped and their extent unknown. Mine subsidence insurance is common with home owner’s insurance in that area, protection for the times the ground suddenly opens up when an old mine tunnel collapses and takes your car, yard, or house with it. Yes, that happens on occasion. It goes with the territory. Welcome to our little corner of the world.

  If you’re intrigued by Travis Dominick and Simon Kincaide, they have their own series! Travis is a main character in the Night Vigil urban fantasy series about an ex-priest and a former FBI agent hunting demons near Pittsburgh, which begins with Sons of Darkness. Simon is a main character in Gail’s Badlands series about a psychic medium who teams up with a homicide detective to fight supernatural killers. Badlands is urban fantasy MM paranormal romance, written under her Morgan Brice name. All of our urban fantasy series overlap, so Mark Wojcik has cameo appearances in our other books, too!

  About the Authors

  Gail Z. Martin writes epic fantasy, urban fantasy, and steampunk for Solaris Books, Orbit Books, Falstaff Books, SOL Publishing, and Darkwind Press. Recent books include Vengeance, Assassin’s Honor, Tangled Web, Sons of Darkness, Convicts and Exiles, and The Dark Road. As Morgan Brice, she writes urban fantasy MM paranormal romance. New books include Witchbane, Burn, Dark Rivers, Badlands, Lucky Town, The Rising, and Treasure Trail.

  Larry N. Martin is the author of the new sci-fi adventure novel Salvage Rat, and the new portal fantasy series, The Splintered Crown, A Tankards and Heroes novel. He is the co-author (with Gail Z. Martin) of the Spells, Salt, and Steel: New Templar Knights series; the Steampunk series Iron & Blood; and a collection of short stories and novellas: The Storm & Fury Adventures set in the Iron & Blood universe. He is also the co-author (with Gail) of the Wasteland Marshals series and the Joe Mack - Shadow Council series from Falstaff Books.

  Find them online at www.GailZMartin.com, on Twitter @GailZMartin and @LNMartinAuthor, on Facebook.com/WinterKingdoms, at www.DisquietingVisions.com blog, on www.Pinterest.com/Gzmartin on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/GailZMartin and BookBub https://www.bookbub.com/profile/gail-z-martin. Gail is also the organizer of the #HoldOnToTheLight campaign www.HoldOnToTheLight.com Never miss out on the news and new releases—sign up for our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dd5XLj

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  Copyright © 2019 by Gail Z. Martin & Larry N. Martin

  Cover Design by Natania Barron

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is coincidental. Except that bit about
that guy. That’s totally a thing.