Dark War

EIGHT

We saw no sign of Lazlo when we stepped outside, so I figured he was still tending to his cab. Besides, the only times he’s sure to show up is when I’m truly desperate for a ride, and as much as I wanted to get to Demon’s Roost, our current situation wasn’t exactly a dire one. Bogdan said farewell and headed off on foot to track down whatever Arcane sources he intended to consult, and I can’t say I was sorry to see him go. After a few moments of discussion, the rest of us decided to follow suit and take shanks’ mare, as some of the longer-lived Darkfolk put it, and we headed down the sidewalk, traveling east in the general direction of Demon’s Roost.

Varney was thrilled. “Righteous! There’s more chance of getting good footage if we hoof it!”

I didn’t reply. I was still mad at him for the “improved” video he’d shown us earlier. And, truth to tell, I was a little depressed, too. Without realizing it, I’d kind of gotten used to being a celebrity in town, but seeing how Varney’s producer had felt the need to noir-ify the footage Varney had shot of me made me realize that maybe my unvarnished life wasn’t all that fascinating after all. Being brought back down to earth was probably a good thing, if sobering.

We hadn’t gone far when my hand vox rang – actually, its mouth called out the words “Ring-ring, ring-ring!” – and I answered. It was Tavi.

“I’m at Papa Chatha’s,” he said. His voice was guttural and hard to understand, and I knew he was still in his wildform. “I can’t get inside because of the security spells on the place, but I’ve sniffed around outside. It was hard to pick up Papa’s scent, not because he hasn’t been here for a while but because you’ve been here recently. Nothing personal, but the scent of ripe zombie tends to be a bit overpowering.”

“But you found a scent trail.”

“Yes. There’s another scent mingled with it that I don’t recognize, though it’s similar to certain breeds of Demonkin. I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to attempt to follow the trail and see what I can turn up.”

“All right, but if you find him, call me before you do anything.” I’d come to respect Tavi’s skills, but Devona had hired him not because he was a fighter but because he was a reformed thief. He’d stolen something from the notorious demon Mammon who hired me to retrieve the object. I’d done so after a certain amount of highly skilled detecting, but in the process I learned that Tavi was a decent enough sort who stole primarily for the sport and challenge of it. It had taken some swift talking on my part to convince Mammon not to devour Tavi’s soul for his crime. In the end, Mammon reluctantly agreed to spare Tavi, and Devona offered the lyke a job working for the Midnight Watch. His knowledge of thievery, coupled with his contacts among Nekropolis’ criminal element, had proved invaluable to Devona’s business, but as swift and clever as Tavi was, he wasn’t a warrior, and if he did manage track down Papa and the other missing magic-users, I didn’t want him to try to deal with the situation on his own. I’d already saved his mixblood ass once, and I didn’t want to have to do it again.

Tavi promised he’d do as I asked, then hung up, and I imagined him racing away from Papa’s shack, following the scent trail at top supernatural speed. I tucked my vox back in my pocket, relayed Tavi’s report to the others, and we continued walking.

There were still plenty of people crowding the sidewalks, and traffic roared by in the street at suicidal speeds, but the atmosphere in the Sprawl was noticeably subdued. The pedestrians were quieter than usual, continuously casting furtive glances about and keeping their hands in their pockets, no doubt grasping a weapon or two. There were fewer vehicles than normal in the street, and those that passed by were more often than not armored – or encased in force fields of magical or technological origin. Hood, roof, and side-mounted weapons were prominent, everything from machine guns to rocket launchers, energy blasters to curse throwers.

The threat of open warfare in the Sprawl might not have been enough to keep the die-hard partiers indoors, but it had made them more cautious. The Sprawl was already a powder keg most of the time, and Talaith’s destruction of the bridges had lit the fuse. The only question was how long it would take to burn down and ignite an explosion.

We’d gotten maybe halfway to Demon’s Roost when that question was answered. There were two popular dance clubs on either side of the street here: Overhexed, which catered primarily to Arcane clientele, and Disco Infernal, a demonic hotspot. But the action wasn’t confined to the clubs’ interiors tonight. Revelers from both places had taken to the street, where they stood in two groups, facing each other. And from the way they were shouting and gesturing, I knew that they hadn’t met for a civilized cross-cultural exchange. Traffic had been blocked off at one end of the street by a barrier of mystic flame, while a jagged line of sharp bonelike projections protruded from the asphalt at the other end. It seemed that neither the demons nor the magic-users wanted anyone to interrupt their little get-together.

The sidewalks on both sides of the street were deserted here. Evidently our fellow pedestrians possessed stronger survival instincts than us and had gotten the hell away at the first sign of trouble. I figured it would be wise of us to follow suit, and I motioned for everyone in our group to stop.

“I think we should quickly and quietly retrace our steps, then cut over a couple streets and take a nice wide detour around this block,” I said.

“I like that idea,” Devona said softly, never taking her eyes off the shouting demons and magic-users.

“I like it very much.”

The two groups were an eclectic mix of their kinds. Many of the Arcane were dressed in standard Nekropolitan street clothes, but some wore period costumes: medieval robes, stark Puritan outfits, Arabian finery, Native American deerskins, Aztec capes, stage magician tuxedos or sparkling gowns, and a good number of them carried wooden or metal staves with lux crystals affixed to the ends. The demons varied more in their physical forms. Some were the standard diabolic type, like Scorch’s true shape, while others were bizarre amalgams of different animals: insects combined with fish, mammals with lizards, birds with crustaceans and so on…

Some of the demons wore ethnic garb that indicated which human mythology they belonged to – Chinese, Japanese, Inuit, Persian, Egyptian, Hindu – while some appeared so alien that their shapes not only defied description, they defied perception. Creatures that appeared to be made of a series of floating transdimensional geometric shapes that seemed to warp in and out of existence, and others that were purely conceptual in nature. I saw one demon I recognized as Schadenfreude, and another that was Antidisestablishmentarianism.

But despite the two groups’ striking differences, they had one important thing in common: they clearly loathed one another, and given the aggressive way they were acting, I knew it would only be a matter of moments until…

A heavily tattooed Arcane man wearing a dragonskin jacket raised his hands and began chanting a spell in a language I didn’t recognize. The words seemed to echo in the air, and despite the fact that I have no nerve endings in my ears, it hurt to hear those words spoken aloud. A few seconds later, a half-dozen other Arcane joined in, and soon all of the magic-users stood chanting, hands raised toward the sky.

The Demonkin’s reaction to the spell was dramatic.

They fell back several steps, roaring and hissing, shrinking in upon themselves and averting their gazes as if it was too painful to look upon the faces of the chanting Arcane.

“What’s happening?” I turned to Scorch, hoping she might be able to tell me, but she didn’t respond.

She stood there with her hands pressed over her ears, eyes squinted closed, jaws clenched tight, as if she were trying to shut out the world – or perhaps just the Arcanes’ chanting.

“The magic-users are attempting a binding spell!” Devona said.

I understood what was going on then, but I had a hard time believing it. The enmity between Demonkin and Arcane goes back centuries, back to before the Darkfolk left Earth and emigrated to Nekropolis, when witches, warlocks, and wizards would attempt to summon demons, bind them to their will, and enslave them. Having a powerful creature like a demon to command was an attractive prospect for a magic-user, but you can see how a demon would find the arrangement less than appealing.

After the founding of Nekropolis, slavery of any sort was outlawed by Dis and the Darklords, more as a practical matter than for any other reason. It’s hard enough to keep the peace in a city full of monsters without having to worry about them running around constantly trying to enslave one another. The prohibition against slavery included the summoning and binding of demons, but the fact that it was now a major crime didn’t seem to deter these Arcane in the least, and I doubted any of them considered what they were doing as breaking the law. After all, war was in the offing between Glamere and the Sprawl, and people – Darkfolk or human – are only too willing to suspend the rule of law during wartime… especially when it gives them an excuse to indulge the darker side of their nature.

Devona put her arm around Scorch as if to lend the demon strength and turned to look at me. “We have to stop the spell, Matt! If we don’t she’ll become the Arcanes’ slave, bound to them until they set her free!”

I sighed. “Of course we do. Shamika, you stay here and take care of Scorch. Devona and I will be right back.”

Up to this point Shamika had been staring wideeyed at the scene in the street, but she tore her gaze away and gave me a solemn nod.

“But if the Arcane finish the spell and Scorch becomes bound, get away from her as fast as you can,” Devona added. “They’ll be able to make her do what they want, and she won’t be able to resist their commands.”

Shamika nodded once again, and I turned to Varney, who was watching the action in the street, undoubtedly filming it all with his cyber-eye camera.

“As for you…” I trailed off. I wanted to tell him to stay put, but I knew there wasn’t any point. “Just try not to get in the way.”

“Will do,” he said. “You know, Matt, you get into some of the strangest situations.”

I sighed again. “It’s a gift.”

Devona gave Scorch’s shoulder a last squeeze, and then the two of us starting walking into the street, Varney following close behind.

“I don’t suppose you know any way of blocking a binding spell,” I said to Devona.

“None whatsoever. I figured we’d just do what we always do: stick our noses in where they don’t belong and see what happens.”

I grinned. “I thought I was the improviser and you were the planner.”

She shrugged. “What can I say? You’ve rubbed off on me.”

We continued walking toward the two groups, and while I did my best to project an air of casual calm – letting anyone in Nekropolis see how scared you really are isn’t conducive to your long-term survival prospects – I frantically tried to think of some way to diffuse the situation Devona and I were about to insert ourselves into. I’d restocked my weaponry before leaving the Midnight Watch, and I now carried a few of my more interesting toys in my pockets, but I couldn’t see how any of them would prove useful against an angry mob of combined Arcane and Demonkin.

As we neared the two groups, I noticed a small shop a couple doors down from Overhexed called The Teahouse of the Gibbous Moon. It had a large front window, and sitting at a table, keeping an eye on the incipient mayhem in the street, was a figure garbed in a voluminous crimson cloak with a large hood. At first I didn’t think she saw me, but then she lifted her teacup in greeting, and I gave a slight nod in return.

Devona had picked up on the exchange, either telepathically or through old-fashioned observation.

“Who is it?”

“The cavalry,” I said. “I hope.”

As we drew nearer to the mob, I could see that the binding spell was coming along nicely. Most of the Demonkin lay curled in fetal positions on the ground, rocking back and forth as they let loose blistering streams of curses or, just as often, loud wails and streams of tears. I wasn’t sure how much longer it would take before the spell was complete, but I doubted we had more than a few moments at this point. No time left for subtlety.

I reached into my jacket pocket and brought out what appeared to be an empty glass vial sealed with a black rubber stopper. “Cover your ears,” I warned Devona and Varney, and then I hurled the vial toward the mass of magic-users. It struck the ground at the feet of an Arcane woman who appeared to be wearing a gown made of shifting multicolored mist. She held her hands raised above her head and was chanting along with rest of the Arcane, but the moment the vial burst her voice – along with the voices of her fellow magikers – was drowned out by a high-pitched shrieking. The sound rapidly grew in volume until it seemed to fill the entire world, and the Arcane broke off their chanting and clapped their hands over their ears to block the deafening noise. It didn’t bother me – no nerveendings, remember? – but Devona pressed her palms tight against her ears to muffle the sound.

Given her sensitive vampire hearing, the noise must’ve been incredibly painful for her, but the only reaction she showed was a slight tightening of her lips. A tough gal, my Devona.

Varney didn’t bother to protect his ears. Maybe he was even tougher than Devona, or maybe his ears also had cyber implants and he was able to mentally turn down the volume on them. Either way, he simply watched and recorded the action unfolding before him.

The shrieking only lasted a few seconds, and when it was over, the Arcane slowly removed their hands from their ears and turned to look at us, confused.

“That was a gift from a friend of mine named Scream Queen,” I said, shouting so that they could hear me over the ringing in their ears. “She was nice enough to bottle a bit of her voice for me. It probably didn’t do too much permanent damage to your hearing, but it did manage to shut you all up long enough for us to get your attention.” Scream Queen was a banshee and lead singer of Kakaphonie, one of Nekropolis’ hottest pop bands.

Devona and I, along with the rest of the Midnight Watch, had helped her out once, and she’d been so grateful that – after paying Devona her fee – she gave me a few of her screams. How the banshee had managed to store them in a glass vial was beyond me, but I was grateful that it had worked. Up until the vial had shattered, I hadn’t been a hundred percent sure that it would.

A middle-aged Arcane man – dressed as an Elizabethan nobleman in doublet and breeches, complete with a broad ruffled collar – stepped forward and scowled at me.

“This is none of your business, Richter,” he said, speaking with an accent that sounded more Brooklyn than English. “This is between us and the hellrats.”

The demons, who had begun recovering from the effects of the binding spell the moment the Arcane stopped chanting, had risen to their feet. They snarled upon hearing the derogatory term and fixed baleful gazes on the Arcane man, many of which were literally smoldering with hate.

I was mildly surprised he knew who I was, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been. Even for Nekropolis, I’m a one-of-a-kind monster. And I had garnered a certain amount of fame over the last few months.

A demon spokesperson stepped forward then.

The creature appeared to be formed from lumpy mounds of yellowish fat, making its gender impossible to determine, but when an orifice opened in its rough approximation of a head, the voice that came out was distinctly female, if a bit liquidy.

“You don’t speak for us, wand-waver,” she snarled.

“Now, now, children,” I said. “Name-calling isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

“They started it!” the Elizabethan warlock said.

“We were minding our business in the club when a group of them came in and told us that we were no longer welcome in the Sprawl.”

“No, your people started it!” the lumpy demon said. “Several of you materialized inside our club and enchanted the music system so that instead of disco it began playing chamber music!” She shuddered at the thought, and a number of her fellow demons did likewise. I thought both types of music sounded equally horrid, but then there’s no accounting for taste, especially when it comes to demons.

I glanced back at Shamika and Scorch. The demoness had shaken off the effects of the binding spell, but she remained standing on the sidewalk next to the girl. It wasn’t like Scorch to hang back when there was trouble, and I guessed she was suppressing her more violent urges because she didn’t want to leave Shamika unprotected. When it comes down to it, Scorch is a pretty decent sort for a demon, not that I’d ever tell her that. She’d probably set me on fire for insulting her.

“All right, so you guys don’t like each other,” I said. “Now that we’ve established that, why don’t you return to your respective clubs and get back to boogieing down or whatever the hell it is you people do for fun that doesn’t involve trying to kill each other.”

Lumpy looked at me. At least, I think she did. It was hard to tell since she had a complete absence of facial features. “Don’t you keep up with current events, zombie? Their people destroyed both of the Sprawl’s bridges!”

The warlock sneered at her. “Only because your people have been kidnapping magic-users!”

“I know you Darkfolk are only too happy to have an excuse to tear into one another, but are you really this stupid?” I asked. “The Weyward Sisters destroyed the bridges. I ought to know: I was on one of them when they did it. And as for the disappearances, so far there’s no proof who’s behind them. But I can tell you this much: whoever’s behind this, all Demonkin didn’t abduct the magic-users, and all Arcane didn’t destroy the bridges. So why fight with each other?”

Lumpy and the Elizabethan warlock looked at me for a moment and then looked at each other.

“He makes a lot of sense, doesn’t he?” the warlock said.

“That he does,” Lumpy agreed.

They fell silent for a moment.

“I hate people who make sense,” Lumpy said.

“Me too.” The warlock pointed a finger at me, and a beam of white energy shot forth and struck me on the chest. At the same instant the warlock spoke a single word: “ Discerpo! ”

I didn’t feel anything, but I suddenly found myself unable to support my own weight. My legs fell out from under me, and I tumbled to the ground. My head hit the asphalt and bounced a couple times before coming to a stop. My face was pointed toward the rest of my body, which lay in a haphazard pile, but I could see that my hands and feet were no longer connected to their corresponding limbs.

Both the Arcane and Demonkin laughed at my predicament, and I supposed I should be grateful that I’d managed to unify them, if only for a moment and not exactly in the way that I’d hoped to.

Devona knelt by my head. “Are you OK, darling?”

“I’m fine.” I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “After all, it’s not like this is the first time I’ve lost my head.”

The warlock grinned in delight. “Did you like that? It’s a spell of my own devising, one designed to split a person apart. While it’s nothing more than an inconvenience for you, it’s usually fatal – not to mention a hell of a lot messier – for living folks.”

His grin took on a nasty edge. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

He pointed his finger at Devona and shouted, “ Discerpo! ”

As before, a beam of light lanced forth from his finger, and even if I hadn’t fallen to pieces, I knew I wouldn’t have been fast enough to get Devona out of the way in time. But just as he had at the Bridge of Nine Sorrows, Varney moved with incredible speed, grabbed hold of Devona’s shoulders, and snatched her out of the beam’s path before it could strike her. With nothing to stop it, the beam of mystic power continued streaking through the air toward the section of sidewalk where Scorch and Shamika stood. Scorch tried to get the girl out of the way, but the beam was moving too fast and it struck Shamika. She was momentarily wreathed in sparkling light, and then she fell in upon herself, collapsing onto the ground in what appeared to be hundreds of small pieces.

I didn’t have time to wonder why the spell had affected her differently than it had me. Scorch howled with a mixture of fury and sorrow, and she spun to face the warlock. She began running toward him, her teenage girl guise fading as she assumed her true fire demon form, her clothes vanishing as her body outgrew them. The warlock looked momentarily taken aback – the sight of a fully grown and enraged fire demon coming at you tends to do that – but then he pointed his finger (which was only shaking a little) at Scorch, readying to use his separation magic on her.

Varney still had hold of Devona, and though she struggled to free herself of his grip – no doubt so she could attack the warlock too – he held her tight.

As fast as Scorch was, there was no way she could reach the warlock before he unleashed another blast of magic at her, and if Devona couldn’t get away from Varney to stop the warlock, Scorch was a goner. And as a severed head lying on the street, all I could do was watch.

“Well, now, what are you children up to?”

The voice – an elderly woman’s – was gentle and kind, but there was something about it that caught the attention of everyone in the street, and all heads turned to look at her. Scorch stopped running, and the warlock lowered his hand without releasing another bolt of magic. They, like everyone else, focused their gazes on the newcomer. Her crimson cape came within an inch of brushing the ground, and it was trimmed with silvery fur, as was her hood which she wore up, cloaking her features in shadow. She wore a tunic and leggings, both of forest green, and brown boots. In her thin, age-spotted hands she carried a pair of silver daggers that, despite the gloomy half-illumination provided by Umbriel, somehow still seemed to glimmer and glint in the light.

No one spoke. No one moved. No one dared breathe. Most of them probably hadn’t seen her in the flesh before, but they all knew who she was, and they were all terrified of her.

She stopped when she reached me – or my head, anyway – and looked down. Within the shadows of her hood, her thin lips stretched into a smile.

“Hello, Matthew. It’s good to see you. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner, but I had to finish my tea.”

“No problem, Granny. A woman has to have her priorities.”

Her smile widened. “I’m so glad you understand.”

She turned to look at the Elizabethan warlock and the lumpy fat demon. “You’ve had your fun. Now why don’t you all head on home like good little dears, hmm?”

Several of the demons and magic-users in the crowd began to slowly move away, but the Elizabethan warlock, though shaken, held his ground.

“You don’t scare us, Granny Red. You might be something of a legend, but so what? Nekropolis is chock-full of beings just as famous as you, and most of the time they don’t live up to the hype.”

I looked at the warlock. “Some friendly advice: if you want to live, you will turn around and haul ass in the opposite direction as fast your little Shakespearean shoes will carry you.”

The warlock sneered down at me. “I’m Arcane!

I’m not afraid of some old wo-”

That’s as far as he got. Granny Red stepped forward almost nonchalantly, her knives flashed in the air, and then she stepped back. The warlock stood for a moment, eyes wide with shock, blood gushing from a dozen wounds, and then he toppled to the ground, dead.

Granny turned to the crowd, the warlock’s blood dripping from her silver knives.

“Anyone else like to show Granny how tough they are?” she asked sweetly.

Demonkin and Arcane alike decided that discretion was the more sensible part of valor, and they turned and fled en masse. When they were gone, Granny walked over to the warlock’s corpse, cleaned her blades on his clothes, and then tucked them into sheaths on her leather belt. Varney had kept hold of Devona the entire time, but he let go of her now, and she came over to me and picked my head up. Her mind reached out to me.

Is that really her? she thought.

Yes. Granny Red, the most feared monster killer in history. A myth made flesh, a bedtime story told to so many children over the centuries that she came to life, birthed from the collective unconscious of the human race. She was a young girl when she started out, of course, just like in the story, and she began by hunting werewolves. But she branched out as she got older, and when the Darkfolk moved to Nekropolis, she followed. Everyone fears her, including, I suspect, the Darklords themselves.

I’d first met Granny when I was trying to track down a murderous cyborg lyke who called himself the Megawolf. She’d been on his trail too, and we’d ended up working together to take him down. I have to admit that Granny scares me too. As much as I don’t like to think about it, I am a monster, and slaying monsters is her one and only purpose in life.

In many ways, she’s as single-minded in her motivations as a great white shark – and ten times as deadly. And because she’s literally a living legend, she’s intimidating as hell, truly larger than life – or maybe in her case, larger than death.

Granny turned to Devona and smiled. “I’d heard Matthew had found himself a nice girl. I’m so pleased to meet you, my dear.”

Granny held out her hand, and Devona tucked me under one arm while she reached out and shook Granny’s hand. I was impressed to see that my love trembled only a little as she clasped hands with Granny. Granny gave her hand a gentle shake and then released it. Devona kept a smile fixed firmly on her face, but I could feel her tension through our telepathic link. Granny has killed more than her fair share of vampires over the centuries.

Granny lowered her gaze to me. “It looks like you’re quite literally in good hands, Matthew, so I think I’ll go back and have another cup of tea. It was lovely to see you again. And remember-”

“Don’t talk to strangers,” I finished for her.

She grinned, nodded, and walked casually back to The Teahouse of the Gibbous Moon. Only when she was inside and the door closed did we relax.

“So that was Granny Red. How interesting.”

Devona turned – which was good, since I wasn’t at the moment capable of doing so – and I saw Shamika had joined us in the street.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “and I’m very glad you’re OK, but I thought you were blasted into pieces by the warlock’s spell.”

She laughed. “You call that a spell? A reasonably competent Arcane child can cast spells stronger than that! It was simple enough to reverse.”

I reached out to Devona through our link, and I could sense my love’s skepticism. Devona isn’t Arcane, but she specializes in security, both mundane and mystical, and is therefore quite knowledgeable about magic. I could sense that Shamika’s words didn’t ring true with Devona. It was something that needed to be looked into – later. Right now we, or at least I, had more pressing problems.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” I said to Devona, “I’d appreciate it if you could try to put this Humpty together again.”