by Tim Marquitz
Another of the Felurians ran up alongside me, and I spun, slamming him in the side of his head with the pommel of the sword still stuck in my shoulder. It stopped him cold though I was pretty sure it didn’t hurt him anywhere near as much as it did me. He stared at me with wide eyes, full of offended surprise, their swirling color distorted behind the mask. I aimed the pistol in my left hand at his crotch and winked. He hunkered down to cover his nuts with the armor and his hands, having seen what I’d done to the last alien. That was fine since it was all a feint, anyway. I pressed my other gun against the top of his head. This close, the helmet would need to be made of Bill Clinton’s ego to shrug off the shot.
It wasn’t.
Steel warped and tore away, and the alien slumped, a waterfall of brains and blood spurting downward to stain his chest. His spear fell at his side, unused.
A gunshot that wasn’t mine drew my focus from the corpse. The big alien, more leopard than cuddly zebra, fired over the crowd at Longinus. The ex-Anti-Christ cleaved through one of the others just before the shot ripped into his arm. He hissed as the bullet cut a groove across his biceps and careened off his ribs as he spun away. The look he gave would have puckered assholes even in a bathhouse, but big boy must have been a special kind of dense. He just giggled and stood there, at the rear of the pack, cranking the lever of his gun back into place. Several of the little folks leapt at Longinus while he was distracted. They hacked and slashed, yanking his attention away from the gunner who hadn’t forgotten about Longinus. The alien clacked the chamber home and aimed. I shot first…a couple of times.
The rounds hit him square in the side and knocked him over. He fell out of sight behind the others. His gun spit its smoking wad into the air as he went, but I wasn’t given a chance to see if I’d killed him. Another Felurian dove at me, trying to skewer me on his spear. He missed by about a half inch. The sharpened point hissed by, and I locked my right elbow over the shaft, pinning the weapon against my ribs. I grinned and shot him in the shin. The Felurian screamed as I fired into his other leg. He dropped, and I let his spear go, driving my knee into his chin, just below the facemask. The alien grunted as he went out. I put a bullet in his neck to be sure and then yanked the sword from my shoulder. It stung as it pulled free, but it wasn’t too bad. With it out of the wound, I’d heal up quick enough. The skin already tingling, I glanced over at Longinus.
Bodies lay scattered all around him, but there was something different about the way he fought. He’d leapt into the fray quickly enough, even confidently, but I hadn’t noticed how sluggish he seemed before. There should have been nothing but dripping corpses left by now, but there were still a bunch of the enemy throwing themselves at him. A quick head count told me the majority of the aliens had gone after him. He certainly looked the scarier out of the two of us, but why would anyone leave the demon with ranged weapons for last? It didn’t make sense.
Or maybe it did.
A light went off. As rough as the journey to God’s plane was, Longinus had been protecting me. That was what the dread fiend blood was for. He didn’t need it to power the gate, but had used it so he could use his own energies to buffer the impact of the trip on me. Despite it, he was exhausted and drained of his magic, and we weren’t getting shit from the Felurians in the way of soul transfers. That’s when it hit me.
Longinus had come here thinking we would be dealing with demons and angels, magical snack packs he could use to refuel and heal his wounds with, but we’d been dumped onto the barren planet of doom. These folks we were fighting were nothing like Xyx. They were the indigenous species of Feluris. They might as well be human for all the power they wielded. That’s why Gorath was plundering the last of the magical resources.
Weaker than Longinus before he’d come through the gate, all that time spent in the containment case, he was probably sucking wind. Longinus had to have thought of that and probably figured he’d still be the stronger of the two even after all the mileage. It didn’t look like he counted on Gorath having minions already. And we weren’t gonna get anywhere if these schlubs tore up the ex-AC before we got to Gorath.
While I wanted Karra back as much, if not more, than he did, we both knew this was his show. He’d be the one to take out Gorath. I was just the assist, and this looked as good a time as any to get on that.
I put my guns away and drew on the tiny ball of energy that wormed inside me. While just a pipsqueak on the ruler that measured magical dick size, what I lacked in girth and length, I made up for with imagination. My power sputtered and roared to life. I couldn’t help but smile at the feeling. It was like eating Häagen-Dazs and getting a blowjob at the same time; fan-fucking-tastic.
My arms out to my side, I started walking toward the mass of aliens that were harrying Longinus. The ground trembled beneath my feet as my magic swirled around like a billion-armed octopus. Mystical tendrils snatched up every rock and stone and piece of rubble they came across, gathering them and drawing them back to the glistening cocoon I’d woven about my body. The debris stuck, each piece clacking into place before the tendrils ran off for more. After just a moment, I was completely covered in the wreckage that littered the field. Focused on Longinus as they were, the aliens didn’t even realize I was still there.
“Hey, assholes!” I shouted, amplifying my voice with a dab of magic. The sound echoed off the surrounding buildings and drowned out everything. The world went quiet as the echoes died away. Every eye turned in my direction. I took one last step, my stony footstep thumping loudly in the silence. “I suggest you duck, Longinus.”
I smiled, willing the stones at my face to mimic the movement all while imagining I looked like the Thing from the Fantastic Four. “It’s clobbering time!” With no other warning, I charged forward and lit the imaginary fuses behind each and every single piece of rock. Then I set them off.
It was like Motorhead played a concert in my head.
A sonic boom erupted in my ears and the debris flew in every direction…almost. Knowing how much it would suck if I ripped Longinus’ head off his shoulders with my little display, I aimed the wreckage so it stayed a couple feet above the ground. As long as he stayed down, we were good. The aliens stared like inebriated lemmings, not even realizing Longinus had hit the deck. By the time they figured out what was happening, it was too late.
The pieces of stony shrapnel ripped into them. There was no time for screams. Holes appeared all across the orange and black flesh of the aliens, dots of daylight that suddenly gushed with green fluids. The aliens danced with frantic rhythm under the barrage, unable to fall. The bloody stones traveled through to ricochet off the nearby walls. From there, they clattered to the ground, bouncing and rolling to collect once more on the field. The bodies were the last to topple. They collapsed like boneless sacks of soup, wet splats resounding until the last of the corpses oozed to earth. A gloomy hush settled over the area.
Longinus raised his head and looked around at the mess. “It appears you’re not completely worthless, after all.” He grinned as he climbed to his feet, obvious amusement brightening his face and muting the sting of his barb. After surveying the scene, he walked over and slapped me on the back with a meaty hand. “Well done.”
He didn’t say anything about his condition or why I’d had to go nuclear to keep him alive, so I didn’t either. Pride was a sin us demons really took to heart. We both understood then that our jaunt into the otherworld to rescue Karra was far more dangerous than we’d anticipated. We weren’t gonna be strolling in on Gorath and handing out an easy ass-whooping. We were in for a scrap.
A muffled grunt rumbled from under a nearby pile of dripping corpses. Longinus spun about and stared after the source, my own eyes tracking it down. A flutter of movement drew our focus and both of us walked over to it. Longinus’ grin flared up full force.
“Look what we have here.” He reached down into the puddle of alien glop and grabbed something that put up futile resistance, pulling it out of the wet wreckag
e. It was the big alien’s arm, followed by the rest of him. On the ground when I’d blasted his buddies, he’d escaped being stoned. He’d still been shot, mind you, but that hadn’t killed him. Not yet, at least.
“Why did you attack us?” Longinus asked, his tone of voice triggering disturbing images, which bubbled to life in my mind.
The alien just lolled in his grip. He was conscious, but not really all there. Not wearing armor like the others, his side was a bloody mess. His shirt was ripped free of the wounds I’d given him, and he’d wadded it up and used it to stanch the blood flow until he’d gotten too weak to hold it. It lay beside him, soaked with green.
“Lonn-loong—” he stuttered, finally raising a finger at his inability to form the word. He pointed at Longinus. “Yuuu. Afff-tur.” Longinus let him drop, and he slumped to the ground with a quiet, bubbling sigh.
“Why would he be after you?” I asked, the alien’s attempt at speaking having finally made some semblance of sense.
Longinus shrugged.
“He is one of the Eidolon.” A quiet voice snapped our heads around. Rala stood there amidst the ruin, the old man no longer with her. She pointed at a small, black spot almost invisible under the flow of the alien’s gory side.
I leaned down and wiped the blood away, revealing what looked like a tattoo. It was an image of a phoenix, its flaming wings rising up out of the smoking ashes portrayed at the bottom of the tat. The edges were reddened and slightly swollen, as though it were fresh ink.
“That is the symbol of the Eidolon.”
“Your master mentioned them earlier, girl,” Longinus said. “Who are they?”
“They are the servants of the alien, the one who steals the life from our world.” She hocked up a nice phlegm ball and spit it at the alien. He groaned at its impact but did nothing to wipe it from his cheek.
Longinus yanked the alien back up, crouching so their faces were just inches apart. “Tell us where the rest of your people are.”
The alien stared for a moment, saying nothing, and then a shudder rolled through him. He went limp a second later, his eyes rolling upward. Longinus growled low in his throat and let the Felurian fall once more.
“I can tell you where more of his kind may be found,” Rala offered, “but only if you intend to kill more of them.”
Longinus nodded with enthusiasm. “That we do, girl.”
And with that, we were committed.
Nine
After Rala told us what she knew about a sect of Eidolon who had taken up residency relatively close by in recent days, I shooed her off. While my instincts weren’t red-flagging her as someone I shouldn’t trust—no more than my usual paranoia opined—there was just something about all this that felt weird.
Longinus and I had searched more of the bodies and found more of the phoenix tattoos scattered about the dead alien bodies. They didn’t all seem to have them, but then again, it’s not like I was picking up squishy meat divots to check. There were still enough to make it obvious these folks were all part of the same crew.
Rala had said the Eidolon had come to Feluris about a week back, which corresponded with Gorath’s arrival. While the timing was perfect, it still seemed kind of coincidental unless he was packing more power than we suspected. It didn’t seem possible he could have gathered anyone to his side so quickly without a show of force, of some kind. Of course, he could well have set things up ahead of time, somehow. My head spun with the possibilities.
“These aliens carry nothing to show their purpose.” Longinus shook green goop from his hands. It hit the ground with a moist plop.
That was something else bothering me. “The big one said they were after you.”
“We’ve established that.”
I rolled my eyes at his obtuseness. “Why?”
“Perhaps they are tracking us. In a world devoid of magical energy, I suspect my presence is an obvious beacon.”
While I didn’t want to say it, Longinus wasn’t but five feet from me and I could barely feel his energy pinging off my senses. Someone would have to be looking for him specifically to notice his power, and only if they themselves were charged up. I changed tack. “Okay, that’s possible, but how would the Eidolon know your name?”
He turned and stared at me as though I’d asked the dumbest question ever, but the glimmer in his eyes told me he was thinking about it, at least.
“Gorath has no idea who you are.”
“I’m Karra’s father, damn it.” He spit the words out.
I sighed. “How would he know that? Do you think she told him anything?”
“Of course she wouldn’t.”
“Exactly. Karra wouldn’t tell that bastard shit, and we both know that.” I let that sink in for a few seconds to emphasize what he already knew but was simply too angry to accept. “And since none of the aliens we’ve encountered since we’ve been here have survived to report your presence, how the hell would Gorath know you were here in this universe, let alone trying to save her?”
He harrumphed and paced in a tight circle. “It doesn’t matter, Triggaltheron. We need—”
“It does matter, and that’s what you’re not getting.” He stopped and glared at me but I went on. “Gorath doesn’t even know you exist. He wants Lucifer and…” I started to say what I believed was the purpose of kidnapping Karra, but decided against it, “…for whatever reason, he thinks Karra is good bait.” I went on before he started thinking too hard about that last bit. Realizing Gorath was likely holding Karra so he could collect the real chum—which was me—wasn’t a road I wanted to go down just then. Longinus would have made the swap so fast it would have given me whiplash. “It makes no sense that he would send people to hunt you when it was me that screwed up his plans on Earth and sent him scrambling here in the first place. This,” I spun in a circle, waving my hands to encompass the chunky chaos strewn across the field, “is all wrong.”
Longinus shook his head. “The why doesn’t matter.” His voice was like a rumbling river freed from a shattered dam. “I’m going to tear these Eidolon limb from limb and find my daughter.”
As smart as he was, it always came down to power in his world. Hulk smash! Longinus had never had to scrape by on his wits or contacts, never had to rationalize a problem from the ground up because he’d always been able to muscle his way through it. Strength was his answer, as it often was with the supernaturals in his league. Since it succeeded every other time, he didn’t feel the need to change his tactics.
I didn’t live in that world and never have. More often than not, I’d gotten by with being smarter (or luckier) than the folks trying to kill me, slipping through a situation by the hair on my shriveled nut sack rather than whipping them out and beating folks down with them. None of this made sense from that perspective. If Gorath had sent the Eidolon after Longinus, he had a reason and it wasn’t that he thought they’d succeed in killing him. The aliens we’d fought were grunts, the big one just a larger variety of cannon fodder. None of them packed the kind of power to take out Longinus. They could wear him down, but…
And there it was.
“Damn it. He’s trying to weaken us…you.”
“With this?” He motioned to the corpses. “He’s throwing flies at a bull.”
“This particular bull has had his horns dulled.” The words were out before I could think to filter them.
Longinus’ eyes narrowed, and I could feel his power building like the red at his cheeks. “I hear cowardice in your voice, Triggaltheron, not wisdom.”
I chuckled, unable to hold it back. “Well, I sure as fuck don’t want to die. That’s what you’re hearing, and this feels like a setup to me.” As dim as I could be sometimes, I’d been setup enough times to know what one felt like. This had setup written all over it.
“We came to face down this Gorath. If he is leading us closer to him, then what do we have to lose?”
Besides our lives and Karra’s, our pride, and quite possibly our watertight ana
l fortitude? I guess nothing. “If he’s figured out we’re here, hunting him down, he knows, firsthand in fact, just how taxing the journey is. It seems to me like he’s trying to wear us down, you specifically seeing how you’re the real threat, before we make it to that final confrontation. Can you not see that?”
“So you would risk my daughter’s life while we chase the tail of Jesus’ pet rather than follow the clues we’ve uncovered?”
It was like arguing with a wall; a really, really, really, thick one. “That’s not what I’m saying…not exactly.”
Longinus drew a deep breath and let it out in a huff. He held his hand out before him, and I felt a sudden spike of magical energy. A blue dot glimmered to life in his palm as his power faded. He tossed the blue thing to me, and I caught it, realizing it was a mystical gem similar to the one I’d used to draw Mihheer out of DRAC headquarters.
“It appears we have different ideas as to what is best for Karra, and we’ve no time to argue which is best.” The inference was that my way sucked. “I will follow the Eidolon scum to their hive and find what I can there. Do what you think is best.” He motioned to the gem. “Should you need assistance, you can use the gem to contact me.”
The blue dot throbbed in my hand so I slid it into my pocket. This was stupid, but we’d wasted enough time arguing already. Longinus was dead set on chasing after the phantom bread crumbs that had been laid out before us. There was nothing I could do to convince him it was a mistake, so I just nodded. He stared at me for a long moment, as if waiting for me to argue some more, and then turned away when he realized I wasn’t gonna. Longinus stormed off without another word.
I stood there until he walked into the shadows of the buildings and slipped between them to disappear from sight. As much as I didn’t want to be left alone on this alien planet full of people out to kill us, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Gorath was leading us into a trap and Longinus was walking right into it. The trail might eventually lead to Karra, but by the time we got there, we’d be too weak to save her…or me.
