Witch Hunt

by L R Deney

“We meet again, Staci Drenvauder,” Chadwick said with a smirk. “Once again I have my elites with me, and we took precautions to ward this area against demonic interference. Ergo, you cannot summon your friends again.”

  “How clever of you,” Staci retorted. “But it’s all fine by me; I’ve been meaning to kill more of you bastards. Surely you must be running out of members by now.”

  Chadwick narrowed his eyes. “Wisecrack all you want, but don’t forget that I won our first fight. You cannot hope to stand up against me.”

  “Oh, is that really how you’re remembering it? Because I seem to recall kicking your friends’ asses and yours. After all, I remember you landing on your butt once.”

  Chadwick sneered. “You ran! Both times!”

  “Yeah, that’s all about keeping my friends safe. Which reminds me.” She looked to Melanie. “Run, get out of here. Return to the camp.”

  Melanie nodded and ran away from the scene while Staci prepped another spell for the fight to come. One of the Nazis was about to go after Melanie but Chadwick grabbed his arm and held him back, pointing directly at Staci. The other Nazi nodded, his eyes narrowed with purpose.

  “So, no running this time?” Staci remarked, a ball of darkness forming in her hands.

  Flames erupted from Chadwick’s. “Yes! I shall break you and bring you to the Fuehrer himself.”

  “Nahhh…!” And she tossed the ball at them.

  They were wise to scatter when they did, because the sphere detonated when it hit the ground. The leader of the Nazis growled and sent his readied fire back at her, and she was able to just narrowly avoid being burned. More channels of fire came after her and she was forced to erect her shield of blackened energy to block most of them.

  “Y’know, boys really shouldn’t play with fire,” Staci said with a great amount of mirth. “They just might get burned.”

  That was when the Nazis only just noticed the conjured black flames that were snaking towards them across the ground. They tried their best to move out of the way, but the one in the police uniform was a bit too slow and wound up immolated by the fire. Staci had to chuckle to herself when his screams filled the street as he dropped and rolled along the ground. Even if he lived, he was going to wish he had never joined with the Order of the Black Sun.

  “Well that’s one down…” Staci mocked, still positioned behind her shield.

  “Your insolence will be your downfall, witch,” Chadwick roared, calling his two remaining underlings to his side.

  Staci showed them her middle finger. “Nope, I think it’s served me just fine.”

  “Open fire!” he ordered, fury filling his voice.

  The three Nazis sent three torrents of crimson energy flowing into her shield. They were obviously trying to blow apart her barrier and she had to focus more of her arcane power into the shield itself. Grunting, she strained against the force while she contemplated her next move. Whatever that she came up with she had to do it quickly or she was going to regret it.

  As she felt her shield weaken, she decided to try for a dodge. As she rolled out of the way as soon as the last of her shield dissipated from existence, the conflicting arcane energies exploded. Instead she was thrown clear several feet and grunted with the impact. Briefly everything was sore and she had to struggle to stand up again. Facing the Nazis, they looked pretty confident of themselves.

  “Okay, I’ll admit, that hurt,” she said with a hiss through her teeth.

  “I told you, you cannot hope to stand up against us,” Chadwick said with slight triumph in his tone.

  “Don’t celebrate too soon. Underestimating your opponent is always a fatal mistake.”

  “The only fatal mistake being made is your interference in our affairs.”

  “Whatever you want to tell yourselves….”

  One of the Nazis ran over to her as she was regaining her footing and punched her across the face. That certainly caught her off guard and the whole world spun around her. She almost met the ground again, but was able to catch herself against a bus stop bench. Feeling the fire of pain in her face, she glared at the Nazi as he came in to deliver another blow.

  But that blow never met its mark as she called forth her demonic power and wound up blocking the second swing with one of her wings. The Nazi seemed astonished as the strange shadow stuff blocked his fist, not expecting it to be solid to the touch. Then, throwing all of her weight behind it, her own fist met the dumbfounded fascist’s jaw, knocking him down cold. Then she kicked him repeatedly while he was down.

  She looked up at the Nazis with a sneer and the Hellfire whip came out, lashing back and forth on the sidewalk before her. There was a brief moment of hesitation from Chadwick when that whip came out, all too familiar with what it could do. Still, he had his own instantaneously destructive spell and the black and red lightning fired from his fingertips, heading straight for Staci. She only held up her wings up in defense, caught off guard by how quickly he had cast it. The next shocking aspect followed, astonishing everyone present, as her wings apparently absorbed the spell.

  “What the…?” a startled Chadwick cried.

  “Oh, that’s nifty,” Staci responded with a deep, throaty laugh as her whip lashed out again.

  Chadwick, seeing it coming jumped and rolled away as it wrapped around his other underling. Immediately as it touched the Nazi, he was engulfed in the eerie green flames of Hell as his flesh melted, leaving behind charred bones that crumbled into dust. Then the whip snapped back to her side, her glowing, green eyes searching for her last remaining enemy.

  “Three down,” Staci said mockingly, allowing her voice to develop an unearthly tone to it. “Let’s see if we can go for four.”

  “You won’t have that chance!” roared Chadwick, sending a red spiral of energy speeding toward her.

  Staci recognized this spell from the last time she fought him and ducked underneath it. It clipped her shadowy wings and the pain it caused as it bored through one caused her a bit of agony. While her wings would eventually regenerate, the mere impact was beyond anything she had ever felt. Angrily she lashed out with her whip and Chadwick’s quick movement only caused her to miss and melt part of the fence down.

  “See? You cannot beat me!” he declared.

  “Is that so?” asked Staci. “The fight is not over yet, Nazi scum.”

  “I am your better!”

  “Then why are you running if that’s what you measure victory by?”

  Another lash of the whip and a parking meter was melting as Chadwick continued to be on the move. He sent a barrage of red darts speeding for Staci, and while she blocked most of them with her wings, several pierced her flesh. The pain wracked her and she struck wildly with her whip in response. Chadwick’s luck finally ran out for him and she nicked his leg, the Hell flames spreading across it.

  He cried out in pain as he stumbled away, his leg becoming swallowed by the flames further with each step. With the last of his strength, he opened a portal and stumbled through it. It snapped shut immediately after he passed through it. Wracked with her own pain, Staci dropped to her knees and dispelled the demonic power.

  “No arguing that I won this one, Chad,” she muttered.

  Chapter 26

  The cold splash of water across the two Nazis’ faces woke them up quickly enough. They looked around, finding themselves chained to a pillar inside an abandoned factory with a very displeased Staci Drenvauder looming over them. Taking advantage of their helplessness, she punched both of them, causing the one with the broken nose to scream out even further.

  “You know the rules, if you’re a Nazi you get punched,” she said with a menacing growl. “Normally you’d be dead, but I need information…. It’s a simple question, really.”

  “Well you can forget it, whore,” said the Nazi with the broken nose, spitting blood at her. “We’ll never disclose the sanctum’s whereabouts.”

  Staci chuckled, sweeping her arms around. “Look around you; does it look like y
ou have a choice? No one can find you here.”

  “Our fellow soldiers in the fight for the Fourth Reich will.”

  “No they won’t. I picked out a very isolated area before bringing you here.”

  “Your attempts at intimidation will not work!” declared the other Nazi.

  “Either way, I don’t really care. I just want to bust open your skulls for all of the bullshit people like you do to others.”

  “We fight for a noble cause!”

  Staci grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. “There is nothing noble about slaughtering millions for being different, nothing noble about lynchings or beatings or assaults just because they don’t look like you. There’s nothing noble about your hate-filled rhetoric. Now my bitch, you want to talk about where your sanctum is?”

  Staci ignited a ball of black flame in her palm, holding it very close to the Nazi’s face, sneering at him. All the power and authority were in her hands now, she could simply kill them both right here and now but she wanted to have some fun with them first. It was no more than they deserved.

  “They would do the same to us if they had the chance,” replied the Nazi. “Better them than us.”

  “It must really be sad to be so insecure in your so-called genetic superiority to think that you would be ‘ethnically cleansed,’” Staci said with a laugh, teasing his chin with the flame, watching him squirm. “That said, I wouldn’t be crying or losing any sleep if people like you were gone.”

  “Go ahead, torture us, we still won’t give you anything you want.”

  “Who said anything about torture?” Staci asked menacingly before grabbing the Nazi by the face with the flame still in her palm, causing it to ignite across his head.

  The fascist screamed as he struggled against the flames that consumed his head. Before long he was dead and his skull was a black, charred thing hanging limply from his neck. The odor of burned flesh permeated the area, smelling faintly of pork. She turned her gaze to the other Nazi, the one with the broken nose.

  “So, about your sanctum,” she asked again.

  “I don’t care what you do to me, cuck,” retorted the man, spitting out blood again and what looked like a molar. “I will die proudly for the Fourth Reich.”

  “Do you hunger for death so soon?”

  “It doesn’t matter; the Fuehrer would kill me all the same.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “No, but you do need to know where our sanctum is.” He looked over her briefly and chuckled. “And what irony it would be if it was under your nose the entire time?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Oh, nothing….”

  “Fine.” She extended a spike of black, arcane power from her hand and jabbed it through the Nazi’s eye and into his brain, killing him instantly. “Two more down.”

  “You have quite a temper there, Staci,” a familiar voice said from behind.

  “Aku no Shi, what do you want?” Staci turned to face the woman. “Or better yet, how do you keep finding me?”

  “I have my ways.”

  “I’m sure you do. So a better question is my first, what do you want?”

  “I wish to offer you my apologies.”

  That caught Staci off guard. “Oh?”

  “Yes, I have looked into the circumstances of your bounty and determined that you have been truthful.” The other witch gestured to the dead fascists. “I assumed that these are the Nazis you’ve been hunting?”

  “Two of them, there’s far too many of them left.”

  “And you will be hunting down the rest, I assume.”

  Staci peered back at the two that she had just killed. “Oh yes, definitely.”

  “Then I will join you.”

  Again, Staci was caught off guard and stared at the woman in shock. “You will?”

  “Yes, I believe your cause is the more honorable one and with Azramoas in the state it is, it is also the most virtuous.”

  “What state is Azramoas in? Did you find Grithnak okay?”

  “I found Grithnak just fine, although he is in prison at the moment. Azramoas has become what you would call a police state. A dictatorship, really.”

  “What? How in the fuck? I mean, it was always on that tipping point, but how did it slide in that direction?”

  “It was because of the new Speaker, he is currently passing numerous reforms that have been giving him more and more power over the city. No longer a mere Speaker for the Council, he is now practically a king, ruling with an iron fist over his subjects. Friedrich Fromm.”

  “I fucking knew it! I knew that fucking bastard was Black Sun.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “You said Grithnak was in prison? How did he get there?”

  “By refusing the authorities like so many others in the slums have. Azramoas tried shutting down all of their bars because apparently word got out that Grithnak had helped you lay low after the demons attacked the capitol.”

  “So they were expecting to punish the population of the slums because of me.” Her eyes narrowed and her hands balled into fists.

  “Yes, that is exactly what they have done. And now riots consume the slums as mobs of its residents fight the City Watch.”

  “Fuck!”

  In her rage, the Hellfire whip came out and lashed toward the two dead Nazis. Almost immediately, their bodies melted as did their metal bindings. The Hellfire briefly licked at the pillar that they had been tied to, but because the flames of Hell burned so hot, they also burned quickly and thus the fire quickly died out.

  “So sick of this shit,” Staci growled, calling back the whip.

  “I don’t blame you for your rage, but you must focus your energy onto more productive tasks.” Aku no Shi gestured toward where the Nazis had been before they were incinerated.

  “Yes, you’re right. Come on.”

  Without saying any further words, Staci led the way out of the factory. There was no more sitting around in the sidelines. The Nazis were winning; they had numerous people they kidnapped, and now Azramoas. Before soon, they would become a major threat to the world again. That could not be allowed.

  ◆◆◆

  Julia Frandsen wandered the halls of the capitol alone. Quietly she wondered if Aku no Shi had found her answers. Frandsen herself was having doubts herself about everything that had transpired after the last week or so. She was honestly starting to lose track of everything that was happening because now it was all accelerating at a rapid pace.

  Had Staci really killed Ravenford or was it someone else? It seemed too convenient with the way Fromm had benefitted from everything. Ravenford’s death, Okar’s apparent kidnapping, all of it directly benefitted Fromm, and there was no doubt that Lacosse was on Fromm’s or Andersson’s payroll. He always voted with them, always, without fault.

  Everything was becoming evident, Drake Okar had seen all of it coming and she had failed to. Now she was alone, with no ally on the Council. Each further vote had been a total disaster after disaster. She found herself abstaining rather than voting against because there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was outnumbered.

  “I’ve been a fool,” she muttered to herself.

  “You have indeed,” answered a voice that she fully recognized.

  Julia turned around and saw the knife in his hand as he advanced. “It’s been you the whole time!”

  “Yes, yes it has!”

  He charged her and despite her attempts to flee, he was quick enough to grab her and wrestle her to the ground. They rolled for a bit, Julia desperately trying to push the man’s knife away, but finally he was on top. She let out a scream as he pushed the dagger down to her chest, but despite her effort to block this, she only caused his hand to slip and bring it down into her throat instead.

  “Well, that works,” he said, before standing up. “Long live the Fourth Reich….” Then he ran as soon as he heard the booted steps hurrying in his direction.

  Julia simply gurgled on h
er last words as everything grew dark around her. It was him, it was him, it was him, it was him….

  Noooo… they must kn—

  Chapter 27

  Staci lay awake, staring up at the ceiling, pondering in the dark. She struggled to formulate at how she was going to find the Nazi sanctum when she had no real clues to go on. They seemingly came and went like ghosts (Ghostapo, ha ha.) and yet they had to have a home base somewhere. Somewhere where they had to have been taking the people that they were kidnapping. But where?

  It nagged at her that she was at a literal loss in figuring it out. The only lead she had had been trashed by two lunatic werewolves and a cowboy, and the two Nazis she had captured had refused completely to answer her questions. All she had to go on now was that it had probably been “under her nose the entire time.”

  Okay, so if it had been under her nose the entire time, where was it? Azramoas? Was there somewhere else she wasn’t thinking of, because she was sure that the Black Sun would have been attracting some kind of attention in Azramoas. These Nazis apparently wanted their actions to go unnoticed by the arcane city’s authorities and government. So then, where were they?

  She had to reevaluate everything that she had learned over the course of this hunt for these insidious kidnappers. They were taking minorities off the streets, they are apparently planning a mass sacrifice to usher in the Fourth Reich, they were meeting regularly at the Runestone to recruit members, they installed Friedrich Fromm as Speaker of the Council of Magic, but apparently they were under her nose the entire time. What did that even mean?

  It was infuriating and frustrating all at the same time. How does she even recognize why it was? What had she missed? He had just looked her up and down and said it, bluntly and refusing to cooperate any further, subtly mocking her. Where could it be? That was such a distracting and annoying question that continuously gnawed at her mind.

  Argh! Where are you fuckers?

  So she went to the Runestone expecting to find out more about the Nazis, only to get ambushed by the bounty hunters. Melanie and her ran out of the bar before their infighting stopped, and then they saw the lone fascist, presumably on his way to the bar pass by the nightclub and disappear into the crowd once he saw that he’d been spotted. That was as close as she had come to finding anything out.