Authors: Joe Ducie
“Where’d your friend go?” Annie
asked. She sat back down and for just a moment blocked my view of Emissary.
In that split-second, he
disappeared, as these supernatural monsters are wont to do.
“Fuck.” I blinked. “That is… Emily
left.”
“She seemed nice.”
“Oh yes, she
seemed
nice.”
I wasn’t looking at Annie, and she
noticed. She glanced over her shoulder and scanned the bar. “What’s the
matter?”
“People are about to die, I’m
afraid.”
“What?”
The bar exploded. Ka-
boom
style.
A fireball of hot red flame, tinged
pink, smashed into the wood and sent splinters of sharp metal, timber and glass
flying in every direction. The two female staff behind the bar were simply
absorbed by the flame, disintegrated to ash and less than ash. The half dozen
or so patrons standing on the drinking side of the fence were blasted back,
ragged and broken and dead before they hit the floor.
I
leaped
out of my chair and,
as quick as thought, cast a brilliant argent shield against the hail of deadly
projectiles and the concussive force of the blast. The shrapnel impacted
against my defense and was bounced back into the pink flame. The dining floor,
and Annie, was spared a gruesome death.
My young detective was only just
reacting to the chaos. Her eyes bulged, and her hand went into her jacket for her
weapon—the third time she’d had need to draw it around me. People were
screaming, and the air stank of blood, bone, and steel.
A whirling cloud of black smoke hid
what was left of the bar. I glared into the choking mist and confusion.
Emissary came screaming through the
smoke—still wearing the guise of a man in a fine suit—unblemished by the
explosion. Some of its human facade had fallen away. Both of his eyes were
pitch-black now, and his jaw had unhinged, stretching his mouth open almost
comically wide. Rows of sharp, yellowed fangs were wreathed in pink-red, near
auburn, flame.
The creature, whatever he truly was,
had
breathed
explosive fire into the bar.
With a cry I threw my arms forward,
and twin beams of Dante’s Lightning—a trick I’d picked up years ago from some
of the secret, unpublished epics by Alighieri—burst from my palms in wicked,
electric-blue arcs and struck Emissary in the chest. It paid well to have had a
grandfather in charge of some of the most powerful tomes in existence.
But that was a long time ago. Part
of those “times were.”
The lightning bore into the
creature, and with a flick of my wrists I
wrenched
him a staggering step
to the side, using his own momentum against him, and hurled the bastard through
the wall and out into the courtyard and the street beyond.
I cracked my neck and shrugged. It
had been a good few months since I’d used such devastating, yet satisfying,
Willfire. Like riding a bike, really.
“What in the hell was that?” Annie
screamed.
I ignored her and ran forward,
through the heat of the bar, leaping over mangled remains, and out into the
cool night air. The street was alive with people fleeing or gaping at the
torrents of black smoke and pinkish-red flame escaping Paddy’s.
Emissary had been thrown clean
across the courtyard and into the street. He lay slumped and laughing against
the crumpled door of a red car. The fancy suit wasn’t so unblemished anymore.
“You,” I said, palms alight with
silver smoke, “just destroyed something I cared about very much.”
“Hello, Declan Hale.” Emissary
laughed, holding his sides as if they might split. “You call that a punch? That
barely tickled. If I’d wanted a kiss, I would’ve asked your mother—”
Another blast of superheated energy
seemed fitting. I hurled a bolt of power, red flame wrapped in crackling
lightning, as fast as thought—Emissary
blurred
and was suddenly standing
six feet to the left. My bolt struck the red car and sent it crashing across
the road, spinning to a screeching stop on its roof against the wall of a bank
thirty feet away.
“Too slow, Joe.” Emissary laughed
again. Blood spurted from his nostrils and down his shirt. “Pick up the pace,
Ace. Don’t tarry, Larry. Better watch your back, Jack! Ha-ha…
Pathetic
.
How did you ever survive Lord Oblivion? Or the Tome Wars?”
“By fighting!” I fell to one knee
and slammed my open palm against the paving stones. The ground beneath Emissary
erupted and sent him flying back into the road. He landed with a thud and, as
fast as I could blink, found his feet again.
Emissary licked his finger and held
it up to the wind. “Winds of change, my lad. My boy-o. Sonny-Jim!” His
shit-kickin’ grin faded and he stared at me with those dead coals for eyes.
“Follow me if you dare, Shadowless. I’ll kill a thousand before midnight—and
ten thousand before dawn—if you don’t.”
Oh, I dared. With that supernatural
speed, Emissary dashed away from the burning shell of Paddy’s and the dozens,
if not more, people he had killed. A black contrail of shadow clung to his wake
as if it were the dark oil of the Void.
I ran out into the road and
recovered a motorcycle, abandoned in the chaos, idling on its side in the
gutter. Some years since I’d had need to drive, and that had been an
Eternity-class troop carrier above the devastation at the Fall of Voraskel, in
the final months of the Tome Wars, but this would have to do.
I choked the throttle and was
rewarded with a satisfying roar from the engine just before it stalled. “
Fuck
.”
I keyed the ignition and brought it back to life. “I’m coming for you, you
bastard.”
Annie jumped onto the bike behind me
and slipped her left arm around my waist, hugging me close. Just how much had
she seen? Her eyes were wild, teeth bared. Her other hand held her gun, pointed
toward the sky.
“Get off please, Annie.”
“No thank you, Hale. You get after
that… that man.”
Emissary had reached the end of the
street. He disappeared around the corner, a smoky blur, away from Riverwood
Plaza and toward the coast road. No time to argue.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I gunned the engine, and we were
away.
“I’m sure you have questions.”
“
Yes
.” Annie hissed the word
in my ear. “Oh, yes.”
“They’ll have to wait. This thing
we’re chasing is… dangerous.”
Annie’s reply was lost to the wind
as I hit seventy kilometers per hour on the bike, chasing Emissary down Shenton
Avenue toward the coast. He ran with impossible speed, warping the air around
him and leaving a trail of sparkling black shadow in his wake. I was reminded
again of Void light, of the space between universes.
If he is of the Void, I thought,
then, shadowless, I have an advantage. Is that why Emily warned me?
An unexpected boon of forfeiting my
shadow to Lord Oblivion atop of Atlantis had been the ability to traverse the Void
almost unmolested and absorb the essence of the creatures that dwelt there: the
mindless and the horribly sane—Voidlings. Few Knights in their long history
could claim to have traveled the Void successfully. Aloysius Jade could, just,
and a few others I’d known. At the time my shadow, something so immaterial, had
been a small price to pay for the Degradation, a shield of concentrated magic
around the Lost City, but I’d been screwed in the fine print. Shadows, it
turned out, had purpose.
Now the Old Gods were at it again.
If Emily, Timeless Emily, was to be believed, then unleashing Atlantis and
severing the Infernal Clock on the eve of my death had released the Everlasting
from some sort of forgotten prison. That was a loose theory, mainly speculation,
but it sat right on the soul. The light hitting the truth cast the right sort
of shadow. Emily was many things, but a liar...?
Well, yes. But only when it came to
matters of the heart. I almost loved her for that.
A summer shower had come through not
too long ago, and the dual carriageway down Shenton Ave. to the coast was
slick. The appealing smell of the road after rain hung in the air as the wind
whistled past my ears at eighty, then ninety, kilometers an hour. I swerved in
between the traffic, hell for leather, after Emissary.
If the Knights had abandoned True
Earth, then that made me the only sheriff round these parts—at least so far as
Forgetful monstrosities were concerned. And the thing we were chasing now by following
his wake of oily night, while not in any of the bestiaries I’d studied growing
up, certainly fell under my purview.
Emissary threw a car at me.
I allowed myself a moment of shock
and awe as a solid ton of steel and glass hurtled end over end through the air.
I caught a glimpse of a terrified young man behind the wheel before swerving
across two lanes and up onto the median strip to avoid the impromptu missile.
The car slammed into the road behind my bike with a
crunch
of metal on
asphalt and the sprinkle of shattered glass.
Even over the wind and the
screeching tires, the roar of the bike’s engine, I heard the demon laughing.
Annie gripped my sides almost hard enough to force the air from my lungs.
“Good god...” she breathed, hot
against my ear. “What are we chasing?”
“Hold on!”
The two lanes merged into one as I
kicked off the center strip and back onto the road. I ducked through an amber
light and cut off a police car. Sirens whirled to life behind us. A third horse
entered the race.
Gliding above the road on his clouds
of dark light, Emissary cut the corner over the coast road and took a hard left
down toward the Indian Ocean. From our vantage point as we descended downhill
toward the water, I could see a whole suburb of houses and a string of streetlights
along the coast leading to Hillarys Boat Harbor about two kilometers away.
Emissary made for that brightly lit
harbor. I’d only been down that way a few times in the last five years of my
exile, but it was well-used. A boardwalk encircled the bay, broken by a
seawall, full of tourist shops, bars, and restaurants. Given free rein in
there, the monster would get his thousand dead before midnight all too easily.
Annie’s comrades were still hot on
our tail, weaving in and out of traffic. Red and blue sirens followed in our
wake. I had to downshift as we took the bend onto the coast road, but it was a
straight line to the harbor now, and we gained on Emissary.
Or he’s letting us catch up...
Annie rested her forearm on my
shoulder alongside my head and pointed her gun up toward the swirling mass of
shadow. She took aim, thought about deafening me, and lowered her arm with a
growl. Above, Emissary laughed—his voice a dull roar not unlike crackling
flame.
A minute later, we entered the car
park of the harbor, a thousand lights from the jetty and boardwalk twinkling
orange and white against the night. Emissary landed on the rooftops about a
hundred meters away and disappeared from sight, just as a three-car cadre of
police screeched to a halt behind my idling bike.
“Don’t move! Switch off the bike,
mate!” shouted one of the officers. He held a hand on his gun, and his partner
pointed a taser at my face.
Annie jumped off the bike and
flashed her badge.
“Officer...?”
“Murie. Gary Murie, Detective.”
“Officer Murie, there’s a man here
that just killed at least a dozen people in Joondalup. I’ve called in back-up
and tac support, so you’re with me now. We’re going to take him down.”
“Who’s he?” Murie asked, slinging a
thumb my way.
Annie stared at me, her gaze hot and
lips pursed. “He’s... a consultant. This is Declan Hale.”
“Now that we’re all friends,” I
said. “Don’t get in my way.”
I shifted down a gear and spun the
back wheel of the bike, forcing Annie to jump aside, and then took off across
the car park alone toward the boardwalk. I heard the detective and her officers
calling after me, but I didn’t stop. They had no idea what they were dealing
with and would just get in my way.
Crowds scattered and dived for cover
as I drove down a small flight of limestone steps, onto a grassy barbeque area,
and out onto a bridge spanning the water over the harbor. I used a convenient
wheelchair ramp to avoid a set of wooden steps that led up onto the boardwalk
and gunned the bike along a strip of restaurants and bars, wide-eyed patrons
gawking at me as I zipped past.
Where are you?
The boardwalk split the harbor in
half. On one side were the docks and boats, on the other a strip of beach and a
small fairground. If I kept following the boardwalk around, I’d end up back at the
start in the car park where I’d abandoned Annie. So I stopped and listened for
the screams.
They started soon enough, away to my
right, toward the boats.
I could feel the vibrations of a
hundred pairs of feet running and clamoring against the boardwalk, and
something else—dull explosions, rattling the support pillars and shaking years
of dust down from the corrugated roof panels.