by Ben Zackheim
“And let you have it?” I said with a voice that didn’t sound like my own.
“Okay, hand it over, creepy man. This thing is pulling some heavy magic on you.” Rebel took a step forward. I took a step back. “Kane. Give me the sword.”
“No.”
“Give it to me now or we’re having this out right here and now.”
I lifted Excalibur up, the tip pointing right at my partner. I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t want to do it. It was like I was caged in a rage that guided my hand. If Excalibur was going to get me in a fight with Rebel, it had better know how to turn me into a swordsman. I would die with a Glock in my hand. Sharp things were always Rebel’s thing.
She lifted her hand and tapped her fingertips together. They sounded like ten marbles bouncing off each other. But even in my possessed state I knew that those things wouldn’t feel like marbles when they hit my skin.
She attacked first. Typical. I sidestepped her just in time. The sound of her hands slashing the air was probably what Death sounds like when she whistles.
“No music for me, Rebel?” Don’t you think we should have a death march? Heavy on the drums would be good.”
“No one’s going to die, Kane. I’m just going to remove something from you. Something you won’t need later.”
The hot rage wasn’t enough to damp out the fear I felt at that moment. I wanted to kill her but I wasn’t prepared to find out what part of my body Rebel thought I could lose. She has a dark sense of humor.
I stepped forward and swung the blade, keeping her far enough away so that I could move away from the cave wall. She’d done a good job of pushing me up against the spot where the Guardian’s body lay. She probably planned to have me trip on the corpse. She always thought ahead like that. Me, I usually point and shoot. I was out of my element and I knew it. I just wish the sword knew it too.
“Rebel…” I said. I’d managed to push the anger down enough to use my own voice. She must have heard the pleading tone because she let her guard down.
I stabbed her in the shoulder.
Her screech echoed through the cavern. It was so loud that whatever spell I was under broke. Even the sword was scared by the fury in the sound. We were messing with a force of nature here, and it wasn’t Excalibur.
When Rebel glared up at me her eyes were orange. Like fire. But in the seconds that she kept me in that gaze the orange turned to yellow and then white.
I was going to lose something. Maybe something I did need.
Her lunge had the power of the wind behind it. I’m not sure if she called up a spell or if she just stirred the still air with her pounce. Either way her nails were in my stomach. I could feel them inching around, as if they were looking for the off button.
I dropped the sword. The pain made everything go away. It made everything dark.
I thought the thing that she’d taken from me was my life.
I guess I wouldn’t be needing it anymore.
Chapter 9
In the darkness, I dreamed.
My bedroom ceiling. The one from my childhood room.
Outside my window, there was a procession of people I didn’t know, walking down the hill to my parents’ tomb.
A sliver of sunlight hit the white scrap paper sticking up from between the attic’s floor boards.
The images swam in my head and then they settled on one in particular.
My hands. A little boy’s hands.
The short breaths that I took into my lungs were like a kid’s breathing, not a man’s.
The part of me that knew I was an adult in Peru was afraid. It was telling me that I was really there, in the attic, with the box.
“Hello?” I said to no one. But I’d been there before. I knew no one would answer me. No one was there. This was the day I’d escaped the halfway house. I’d fled to my old, abandoned home just so I could lay on my bedroom floor one last time and stare at the familiar constellations of glowing star stickers on the ceiling. I’d stuck them to the ceiling with my mom.
I yearned for my parents. They could tell me everything.
Who I was.
What I was.
I took a step and felt the floor under my small feet. It was solid. I heard the sound of my sneakers as they squeaked.
Then the walls burst into flame.
The flame reached for me. Its heat made me squint and back away.
“Kane,” a low voice said.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“Kane,” it said again. It sounded like a woman. I could make a form out in the red fire. The flame parted like a blooming flower and she walked from it, her eyes wide. She opened her mouth and it was darkness. Solid black. The dark grew and grew, flowing from her face and reaching for me.
I’ll never get that sound out of my head. She screamed. My mother screamed.
❖
I woke up with Rebel staring down at me.
“Is this Hell?” I managed to mutter.
“Funny, asshole,” she said in her raspy voice. It had a scratch in it right near the end of most words. I guess you could call it smoker’s voice but she didn’t smoke. “I gave you the last of the potion. You’ll make it,” she said.
I tried to remember the dream I’d had. It had opened a whole bunch of old wounds. They hurt more than my wounded stomach.
“The sword,” I muttered, trying to sit up.
I wanted Excalibur back in my hands.
It felt so good in my hands. The things I could do with it if I could just find it again.
Rebel slapped me.
“What the hell was that for?” I yelled.
“You were getting that look on your face again. This is not good, Kane. I can’t be trapped down here with you if you can’t fight it. You won’t be able to resist the sword’s call, and I’ll be dead ten minutes after I fall asleep.”
I tried to stand. “What are you talking about? I’m fine.” I couldn’t stand. I fell back onto my butt.
“Excalibur has a spell on it. A possession spell. Way too advanced for me. Only a master Magicist could pull one off with this much power.”
I spotted a bundle of cloth on the ground. “You put the sword in there?”
She saw me staring at the bundle. “I wrapped it up so you can’t see it, touch it, smell it. Or use it on me.”
I felt its power over me fading. It was still there, but I had my wits about me enough to say, “Sorry about that.” I guiltily glanced at her bandaged shoulder.
“You couldn’t have known,” she said. “Now we have a bigger issue to deal with.”
“Yeah. Getting out of here.” I passed my eyes over the dark space, squinting to see a hole, a crack, any sign of a lifeline between the tomb and the outer world. Nothing.
Rebel doused her light casting us in 100% bona fide darkness. Dark’s dark. The dark you imagine takes you in death.
“Hold your breath,” she said quietly.
“Why?”
She sighed, frustrated. “I want to listen. On three. One, two…”
We sucked in some of the precious, stale oxygen. The sound that followed was as pure a silence as the dark space was black.
Still, blanketed in quiet, I did pick up a light clinking sound.
Rebel exhaled. “Did you hear that?”
“Yeah. Is that your fingernails?”
“No, it’s coming from behind the cave walls. Let’s walk the perimeter and see if we can find it.”
I struggled to my feet. After a few seconds of tip-toeing near the wall, Rebel sighed and said, “Can you breathe any louder?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Is the essential function of my lungs upsetting you? Maybe if you hadn’t poked them with your fingernails I wouldn’t sound like my great uncle Bernie sleeping on the porch after a bender.”
“You had a great uncle Bernie?” I could hear the glee in her voice. Something else for her to file away in her index of torture material.
“What was that? I heard it again,” I said.
“Yeah it’s coming from over where you are.”
“I think you’re right.” I was near the collapsed tunnel so whatever was making the sound was probably coming from there. Then again it was tough to tell where any sound was coming from in the massive circular cave.
The tapping became louder. Harder.
“Shit. I think they’re coming back for us,” she said.
“Then we’d better be ready for them.”
The sound got louder until it was more like a hammer hitting stone.
“This isn’t possible. How can they be moving through the debris so fast?” Rebel asked no one. Because I was as clueless as she was.
We stood back against the wall opposite the tunnel and waited. The sound grew louder and louder until we had to cover our ears with our hands.
Then, in one split second, the whole cave was filled with thunder and dust.
I dropped down in the “Oh shit I’m going to get blown up” position. Flying debris, some the size of a pebble, some the size of me landed all around us.
Part of the flying junk was a huge boulder. What size? Depends on who you ask but it was big enough to crush my skull. But just before it hit me a small shoulder rocket emerged from the smoke and slammed into the projectile before it could hit me.
I heard barking as I clasped my eye, probably screaming in pain. The dust settled and I rolled onto my back. That’s when I realized that the barking was laughter.
“Great, we got hunted down by some masochists. What a way to go,” I said.
Just then I saw a red laser poke through the mist, followed by four red eyes. They swayed back and forth as if their owners were swaggering toward the butcher house. I hoped that Rebel had enough fight left in her to get away through the hole these punks made.
That’s when I recognized them. The punks. They saw me on the ground and ran up to me smiling, gesturing in the air with their arms, glee coming out of their pores.
They were telling me a story. I couldn’t hear a thing. The explosion had shut down my eardrums.
It was Cassidy and Rose. The twins. Our other team members. Oblivious to my deafness, they must have been telling me all about how they’d just saved me from a flying boulder with a sweet shot from their Stinger missile.
But then they stopped smiling and stood there staring at me. I assumed they were shocked and scared and maybe even a little apologetic. They walked right up to me and looked at my face.
They started laughing.
It was at that point that I remember who I was in the presence of. The two biggest dicks on the planet.
Rebel stormed up to them and gave each of them a light slap at the same time with both her hands. That shut them up. Just barely.
I smiled.
But why were they laughing at my face?
Chapter 10
We walked down the new tunnel that the twins had made.
I remember thinking, Why are we walking downhill? Didn’t we walk downhill to get to the cave? I wasn’t sure how they’d cleared the rubble enough to strut right into the treasure room.
But I got the answer when we emerged from the mountainside. They’d blown out a tunnel underneath the caved-in cave. The debris from the original cave-in, the rock and stone that had made our tomb, had simply rolled away into the jungles of Peru.
Brilliant.
We hopped down the ramp of stone. The twins turned around when we reached the bottom. They surveyed the destruction, arms crossed, pleased with themselves. Cassidy and Rose may be jackasses but they were good at their job. I looked forward to hearing how the hell they knew we needed help.
I took in the fresh air and waited for my hearing to come back. Rebel looked fine as she stared at me. We smiled at the fact that neither of us had shirts on. Her overcoat barely covered her naked top.
“The sword?” I asked Rebel. She shushed me. I was talking too loud. I still couldn’t hear much.
She reached into her overcoat and pulled out the bundled cloth. She pointed at the cave. Cassidy and Rose strutted toward us, laughing.
“What the hell is so funny?” I asked, trying to be a scary pile of helpless jelly-man, barely able to stand.
“Nothing,” Cassidy and Rose said together. I could hear them well enough. They’re accustomed to shouting all the time. They need to so that they can hear themselves over the other one’s constant chattering.
“What’s going on, Rebel?”
“It’s your eye,” she shouted.
“What about it?”
“It’s a cyborg eye!” Rose yelled, smirking.
“Your right eye is a different color,” Rebel broke in. “The explosion must have busted the iris up or something.”
“But I can see fine.”
“Good!” she said. “Actually, it looks kind of cool.”
We rested for a while and then gave all the bodies (and body parts) a pseudo-proper burial because that’s how we roll. I don’t mind kicking ass but I always show respect after I smite my enemy and defile his fighting spirit with the agony of defeat. I’m pretty sure Rebel feels the same way, just with more swear words.
It took an hour to get back to base camp. It was the most fun I’d had that day. I got to enjoy the beautiful view of Peru in the moonlight as we walked down from the foothills. It really was an amazing country. So rich with life. So many places to hide from the world.
Base camp, for this job, was our car. A Fiat. That would be Cassidy’s fault. He claims he didn’t know the difference between a Fiat and a Ford. “Hey, look, my thing is explosives. Give me boomboom. Give Rose the car reservation crap.” I obliged him by taking him off car duty forever. And assigned him to motel reservations. He didn’t like that.
Having Cassidy and Rose around is like being a parent to kids. Not just any kids, though. Psychopath kids who you see coming a mile away and do everything to avoid but end up with them anyway. They stick like glue. They stink like glue, too with that lab of theirs. That was the real reason I kept them around. Rebel actually really liked them. She felt some kind of big-sister thing. She’d provide awful advice and they’d take it and multiply it by 1000 times the awfulness and I’d get to pick up the mess.
But in the final analysis the lab made it all worth it.
I had it built under the family estate, Batman-style. The siblings designed the whole thing, down to the special FEMA tiles that prevented leaks of poisons that could take out all of New York City, 40 miles away. Yeah, it was scary stuff. But they were my best bet against the foes we were working against. As long as they made me great weapons for every occasion I’d tolerate their genetic asshole-y disposition.
“I want to drive the Fiat,” Cassidy said out of nowhere.
“Since when do you know how to drive?” Rose asked, cocking her eyebrow.
“Since you started asking stupid questions,” he shot back.
“You’re not driving the Fiat, Cassidy,” I said.
“Why not? You let her drive the Ford.”
“That’s because she knows what a Ford is.”
“And I don’t call steering wheels ‘round turny things’,” Rose said.
“And she doesn’t think brakes are only for using at 150 miles per hour,” Rebel added.
“Well, no actually that was me,” Rose said.
“I’m driving,” Rebel said.
“Fine,” Cassidy said, pouting. He flicked the button on a small black box in his palm. The sound from over the hill sounded like a beast in pain. Rebel crouched, ready for a fight.
But we figured out what it was when the chattering sound got closer to us. The helicopter hovered over the ridge and gently laid down on the flat ground in front of us. Cassidy and Rose smiled and hopped in. Rebel and I watched them fly off.
“They just left without us,” Rebel said.
“Yeah.”
“How did we get so lucky?”
“We make our luck. Give me the keys.”
“You sure you can see okay out of those eyes
?”
I glared at her. She threw me the keys. I slid into the driver’s seat and adjusted the rear-view mirror. My left eye was still green, but my right eye was bloodshot and silver.
Rebel grabbed my chin and surveyed my face. “It’s a good look for you.”
“We need to get the sword back home fast. If the Vampires made it here before us then they’ll be right on our tail.”
“Agreed. You ready to put the sword away?”
“Yeah,” I said, closing my eyes. I focused. I blocked out everything. I ignored the wind. I ignored the smell of rental car. I ignored my hunger.
It was time to get Excalibur somewhere safe.
We were about to hit the open road and the open road was the most vulnerable place to be.
The air around us started to hum and a slice of blue light cut through the air between the passenger seat and the driver seat. A crack formed and a portal of blue light opened. It gave off the smell of salt water, as usual. I reached for the sword in the back seat, but Rebel snatched it up first. She still didn’t trust me to touch it.
She slid the sword into the portal herself.
This was my one spell. My Solo spell, meaning I’m the only person known to possess it. There was only one other Solo spell on the planet and it was my teacher, Skyler’s. His Solo was similar to mine. It could transport people from one place to the other. No one knew where mine led. I just used it as a safe for the items we collected.
Solos are passed down. Skyler got his when he was a kid. A powerful wizard at his school cast it for him right before he died.
No one knows who gave me mine. I’d been searching for the answer my whole life. I was sure it had something to do with my parents. But neither of them showed any ability to cast magic before they died.
My portal was a powerful asset for Spirit. It was why I was assigned to retrieve Vampire treasure. As long as I lived, the loot that I stored inside was safe. If I died then everything inside would disappear forever. It made me the perfect soldier for missions like this. Whoever our opponent was, they’d heard about my gift. I was famous. They knew my death would mean they’d never get the treasures inside. The portal makes me safe. It makes everyone around me dead, because they end up being pawns in the never-ending game to get to the prize.
