Authors: Tony Richards
He finally noticed me again, as I stepped in closer to him. And began screeching at me furiously, quivering with rage. His shape might have become largely human, but his anger was a greater thing. He was utterly apoplectic, howling like some wild animal that had gone quite insane.
Some of his hair had come loose, and it swirled around him in the wind. His shoulders were hunched up the way the Dralleg’s had once been. His hands were raised in front of him, the weird looking fingers bunched like hooks. Spittle was appearing in damp flecks across his beard.
Nothing that he shouted was in English. He had dropped back into that same language I’d heard him use earlier.
I closed the distance and my fist went back.
And I was about to take a swing at him, when he threw himself at me. He was slightly taller and, despite the fact he’d been diminished, proved to be extremely strong. Maybe that was the tree part of him.
One arm wrapped itself around my shoulders. Then, the free hand clawed across my face, the fingers rigid and scratchy, trying to push their way into my eyes. They felt like wood.
I shifted my head, preventing him from doing that. But I could feel the skin around my temples being scored. I paid no notice to that either. Pushed at the arm gripping me, trying to loosen it and get some room to maneuver. Then I lunged up with my knee, slamming it into his hip. But it probably hurt me just as much as him. It was like banging up against a post.
His grip loosened a touch further, and I made a stab at shoving him away. He wouldn’t budge though, and was all over me again in the next moment, trying to actually bite. His pointed teeth snapped inches from my cheek, his hot, sour breath wheezing up against me.
I just wasn’t going to let him do that. So I hit him with my knee again, twice more, on the exact same spot. It wasn’t any more pleasant than the first time. But he let out a stifled yell. His gaze blurred with pain. Then it cleared again, turning bright with malice.
“You can’t stop me like
this
!” he shrieked. “Are you so ignorant?”
A hand grasped me underneath my chin, and he started squeezing. He wasn’t merely trying to choke me. He was trying to crush my windpipe.
One of my arms got clear, at last. I drove my fist into the crook of his elbow, making his arm buckle. Then I slammed my forearm, hard, into his throat.
His eyes widened. He finally went staggering backward, making heavy, ratcheting, gasping sounds. But I wasn’t going to let him get out of my reach. There was no way that was going to happen.
I grabbed hold of his collar. Swung my right arm back again. When I punched him squarely in the middle of the face, I felt the vibration of it right up to my shoulder and my knuckles felt like they’d been skinned.
It was still the most satisfying thing I’d done in days, so I kept on repeating it.
The second time, I felt his nose break with a snap like a dry branch.
On the fourth blow, he went lurching out of my grasp, staggering across the gravel roof in the direction of the square. He collapsed shortly before he reached the cornice and lay there, barely moving.
My fist was throbbing, blood oozing up into the wounds, but I barely registered that. I simply stared down at the Manitou.
He was sprawled out on his belly, twitching. God, he looked a total wreck. Frayed, torn clothing. Limbs as spindly as poles. As I watched, he tried to raise his head, and only partially succeeded.
His own blood spattered down onto the rooftop from his nostrils. And he’d never bled before, not even when I’d stuck a blade into him. So his powers really
were
at a low ebb.
“See. You’ve a human side after all,” I murmured.
But the liquid was viscous and looked a strange color, a peculiar mix of red and green.
I stepped forward again, reaching out, already knowing what my next move was. I was going to pick him up and hurl him off this roof.
His peculiar, misshapen hands pressed down. He raised his upper body, and then lifted his face toward mine. But it wasn’t that which made me halt. It was a sudden additional motion.
There was a bulge now, in the skin of his throat. It was moving up toward his mouth, not downward. He appeared to be disgorging something.
His lips shifted, something foreign pushing them apart.
I recalled the arrowhead he’d swallowed that first day we’d met. The sharp tip glinted dully as it slid out into view.
His right hand darted to it, turning it over and gripping it around the base. The fingers
became narrower and less normal looking than ever. Shorter too. They shrank around the bottom of the arrowhead, and then fused together.
His sleeve had fallen back, revealing most of his forearm. It was covered entirely with dense bark, not a scrap of skin visible any longer.
All of his pathos of before had disappeared, like the illusion it had always been. His nose was off at a curious angle, blood still running down his lip. But his eyes were burning again.
He hissed, inspected the sharp spear that his right arm had become, then grinned. It looked especially feral with the blood oozing between his teeth.
He started getting to his feet.
“You’ve put up a good fight, Devries, but a pointless one. I am forever. There will always be another road, another town, and more humans to play with. Once I’ve finished with these, of course.”
His head went from side to side.
“And that will take a while.”
Then he came at me, the flint spike pointed at my chest. It was all that I could manage to deflect it. I couldn’t stop the power of his charge, and I went backward, crashing down onto the roof with Saruak on top of me.
I heard a rip and felt more pain. The arrowhead had gone through a sleeve and gouged the side of my arm.
Still kneeling on my chest, with one hand round my throat again, he drew the weapon back.
“Give my regards to all those others I’ve sent to the afterlife!”
I got both hands where his wrist ought to be and tried to force his arm back. But it wasn’t like trying to move flesh and bone at all. There was an unyielding stiffness.
The tip began edging down again, in the direction of my face. I couldn’t seem to stop it, much less push it to one side. My arms were shuddering, with precisely no effect.
I tried to use my knees, like last time. But he had gotten wise to that. He’d positioned himself so that I could not lift them. My legs jerked ineffectually.
“Helpless at last? How excellent. It does my old heart good to see it.”
Mine was beating like a drum. The arrowhead was growing larger in my sight. I tried my best to angle it away from me, but it was like trying to push a branch. It went a little way, then bounced right back. Nothing I could do made any difference.
Before much longer, it was only a few inches away. I could see Saruak’s grin behind it. His features were glowing with delight.
Why’d Amashta brought me so far, only to abandon me? I couldn’t understand it.
I let go of his arm with one hand and tried to grab at his face. But he simply moved his it away. My palm quivered, inches short of him.
“Barely worth the effort, Devries. Where is your protector now?”
He leaned in, bringing all his weight to bear. And even though I grabbed it with both hands again, he pushed his arm down smoothly until it was hovering above my eyes.
“First the anticipation,” he was saying. “Then the pain. Then nothingness. And won’t that be nice?”
His body lifted over me. He was readying himself for one final push. And I wasn’t going to be able to stop him. I knew that, but still hung on.
“Not said your prayers?” he yelled. “Too late!”
A sudden shot rang out.
It came from our left, the next rooftop along. And was the loud boom of a shotgun, not a pistol.
The impact sent Saruak lurching off me. He staggered away several paces, although he remained on his feet. A wide, tattered hole had appeared in one side of his coat, that strangely hued blood leaking through it from his ribs. And had splinters been scattered across the rooftop? It looked like it. They were soaked in the gore too.
His hand went to the wound. His face screwed up with anguish and his eyes squeezed shut a moment. His legs started to buckle. I began getting up myself.
But he wasn’t finished yet. He righted himself when he saw what I was doing, and his gaze returned to me.
He lifted his right arm. Pointed the tip at me again.
And – with a ferocious bellow – hurled his entire bulk in my direction.
I wasn’t even fully up. I raised a hand, trying to fend him off.
The next shot came from behind me. An even louder roar, which split the evening air apart.
There was no messing, this time. No mere peppering of buckshot. The slug – a BRI saboted one – lifted Saruak off his feet so hard he almost left his boots behind.
As I watched, his body spun round in the air. And then came down with a wet slap on the cornice.
It was just a narrow concrete one. He hung there for an instant, then went sliding off, dropping the entire four stories to the ground below, leaving a wide, mud-colored smear behind.
I let out the breath that I’d been holding. Got the rest of the way up. And then, rather shakily, made my way across and peered over the ledge.
There were no illusions left at all. He might have still been powerful, a few moments ago. But no man can survive that, even if he’s partly tree.
Saruak lay motionless, quite tiny from this distance. A rumpled figure surrounded with blood, his limbs flung out at impossible angles. I watched him for what seemed like an age. Long enough to satisfy myself entirely.
He didn’t move a muscle. He was gone.
My limbs were trembling again, my chest still heaving.
Footsteps started coming up behind me. There was no need to look around to know who they belonged to.
My gaze went to the sky instead. The wind had died down. It was back to normal. There were more clouds than there had been earlier on. But in between their bulk, the evening stars shone down.
I looked across at the dark silhouette of Saul Hobart on the adjacent rooftop, who was still holding his riot gun. Raised a hand to acknowledge him. He simply nodded back.
And then a palm descended gently on my shoulder.
“Thanks, Cassie,” I think I muttered.
I could feel it when she shrugged.
“It’s what I do,” she said. “I watch your back.”
On the way back down the fire escape, the air got a little cooler round us. And then, gently at first, it began to rain. It had dampened everything by the time we reached the ground, the whole of Union Square glistening in the dark.
All the flagstones shone. And the bright globes on the streetlamps seemed to melt a little, their shapes going slightly blurry. Moisture was dripping off the statue in the middle, and the stone lions by the Town Hall steps seemed to shift gently beneath its flow. A gutter was overflowing too, there was a little stream of droplets pattering down.
My clothes were getting damp as well, but I didn’t care about that. I was simply relieved it was all over. Most parts of my body hurt like hell.
So I quietly gazed around me for a while and watched nature washing our surroundings clean.
“How did you know I’d come here?” I finally asked Cass.
I had left her behind, after all, when I had vanished from the house.
“A voice in my head told me,” she said, very matter-of-factly.
She’d been gazing at me oddly for a good while, by this time.
“An old
woman’s voice?”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Yeah. In case you hadn’t noticed, stuff like that happens round here all the time.” She pulled at her lip. “Who was she?”
“I’m not really sure.”
Which was the truth, and she seemed to accept it for now.
The wind had done one final piece of damage. One of the banners over Union Square had fallen halfway down. It read, 285
TH
REUNI
“Roll on the 286
th
.” I walked along the sidewalk, limping gently toward Saruak’s corpse. “This one didn’t exactly go as planned.”
“What does, round here?” Saul Hobart asked, coming over to us from the other side.
I didn’t answer him, though. As I got closer, I began to notice something odd. It was difficult to tell in the dim ochre light, the wetness, but …
The cadaver was no longer its usual colors. Even the blood splashed around it had gone duller. When I’d peered down from the rooftop, everything had looked the way it ought. Not anymore.
I came to a halt. Even his texture had changed. And everything – his skin, his clothes – had turned a uniformly dismal color, mostly grayish-brown, with just a hint of green.
The rain was leaving pit marks all over him. I prodded at him gently with a toe. A piece dropped abruptly off and crumbled into fine particles, which the drizzle sluiced away.
I remembered that leaf mold in the churches. Every final ounce of him had turned to that.
When I gave him a second prod, his body fell apart completely. And the water took it in a thin gray wash across the paving stones. It began running off into a gently gurgling storm drain.
Cassie let out a derisive snort.
“Ashes to ashes,” Saul remarked.
“Dust to dust,” I finished for him.
He looked at my injuries, then went away for about a mi
nute. He came back with a first-aid kit, from his own car presumably. Moved me into the shelter of a doorway and started dabbing disinfectant on my wounds, then binding up my arm and damaged fist.
All the while he did that, they were both peering at me with the same stupidly inquiring expression on their faces.
“Well?” the lieutenant asked.
“Well what?”
My head was hurting worse than any other part of me, and it wasn’t the fight that had caused that. I was thinking about everything that had happened to me and trying to understand it. And it wasn’t in the least bit easy. There weren’t many points where my mind could get a grip.
“What the hell was that about? And you, of all people. Magic, Ross?”
I jutted out my lower lip. “It wasn’t me.”
He looked unconvinced, seeming to believe that I was trying to duck the issue.
“It sure looked like you.”
“Appearances can be deceptive. You must have learnt that by now?”
His eyes went narrow. So I sighed and looked away from him.
“There’s plenty of time for this later, Saul. To tell you the truth, I’ve a lot of figuring out to do.”
Then something else occurred to me. All the while I’d been Amashta’s lightning rod, I’d felt disconnected, torn apart from who I really was. And that hadn’t left me at all comfortable or happy. It was like something had been robbed from me rather than added. I felt pretty sure I didn’t ever want to repeat that.
“If it’s any consolation,” I told them both, “I
still
don’t like magic. It …”
I fumbled for the correct words.
“It simply didn’t feel right.”
And then I quickly changed the subject.
“Is everyone okay?” I asked. “The townspeople, I mean.”
The big lieutenant smiled back quietly.
“One teenager fainted on the Iron Bridge. Her boyfriend’s probably still performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her as we speak. That apart?”
He gave the laziest shrug I’d ever seen, his shoulders rising like a pair of hills.
“Everyone’s just fine.”
“What are you going to do now?” Cass asked me, obviously concerned about the state that I was in.
The edges of the world were getting faded by this juncture, sheer exhaustion closing in around me.
“Go home,” I murmured. “Sleep for a week.”
But then the cell phone started ringing in my pocket. And so someone, obviously, had other plans.
“Hand them over, Devries.”
Wasn’t this just typical?
A few hours ago, almost all the major adepts of Sycamore Hill had been very firmly under Saruak’s power. Not too far back – as I recalled – they had actually run away from him. And now here we were again in Gaspar Vernon’s study. And, stern and patrician to the last, they were acting like nothing had happened.
The status quo had been restored, and that was what genuinely mattered to them.
As it had been last time, only one small lamp was on. The room was half shrouded in blackness. Behind the desk sat Levin, Kurt van Friesling, and Cynthia McGinley. Her sister Dido, Walter Cobb, and Martha Howard-Brett were standing in the deep shadows behind them, barely visible at all.
Vernon himself was on his feet in front of me, chewing at the fringe of his moustache, a hand the size of a dinner plate extended at me.
“The gemstone and its setting. Give them up.”
How they’d learnt of their existence, I wasn’t quite sure. Divined it, maybe. I’d detoured home and collected the pieces off my living room floor, understanding that they wanted to examine them. But there was such a thing as asking nicely.
“A slightly less aggressive tone might be appropriate,” Judge Levin intervened, with faint, thoughtful smile.
So at least I had one of the great and good on my side.
“In the first place, we owe Mr. Devries and his friends an awful lot. In the second …”
And he eyed me mildly through his rimless spectacles.
“I believe that he has other concerns, regarding the object in question.”
“Like what?” Vernon asked. “Good God, this stuff? It could be the key to lifting Regan’s Curse. We’re the real magicians here. He has no right to hang on –”
“They might also be the key,” I pointed out, breaking across him, “to getting my family back. And if I’m going to leave them in your care, I’ll need your word on that.”
“You have
my
word,” the judge told me firmly. “On my life, on the lives of my sons, and on every principle that I hold dear.”
His gaze held mine like a vise.
“Is that good enough for you?”
I
reckoned that it had to be. And so I got the pieces of broken jewel and silver out and then surrendered them.
The halves of gemstone flashed in the weak light as Vernon turned them over. Then he peered warily at the marks engraved into the setting.
“I’ve never seen anything like these,” he grumbled. Even his voice was subdued. “How on earth did Jason Goad get hold of something like this?”
“Did he find it here, do you suppose?” Cynthia McGinley wondered. “Or in Vegas?”
“If the latter, then it poses an even bigger question,” Levin said. “This thing, as I understand it, was with Regan Farrow when she put her curse on us. It must have lain there with her ashes. Which meant that nobody in town could leave, from that point on. So who carried it out of here?”
The metal caught the glow of the lamp and seemed to change the quality of it a little.
Did they even know about the woman’s voice, Amashta? Apparently not. They hadn’t mentioned it. It hadn’t come to me again, not since the rooftop. But I didn’t want them studying me as well, so I decided to just hold my tongue about that whole business. Or at least till it was more appropriate.
For now, let them stay convinced it was the pendant that had aided me, the same way their talismans and crystals did.
“All such questions will be answered,” Vernon barked out confidently. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, you mark my word.”
It was Kurt van Friesling’s turn to address me.
“I must say, I’m surprised by the course you took this evening, Devries. Not like you at all.”
“When needs must,” I told him.
“Well exactly. How pragmatic. We’re prepared to reward you for your services,” he said. “And Cassandra Mallory as well, of course.”
My mouth came open. But he held a palm up, stopping me.
“No objections, please. You have to keep body and soul together. After all, there might be more you can do for us in the future.”
I didn’t doubt there would be. And the prospect of that made me even tireder than I already was. The whole room seemed to drift a little.
“Is that it?” I asked.
Gaspar Vernon’s moustache bristled like I’d just offended him. But then, he simply nodded
“For now,” he growled at me quietly. “For now.”
I was still turning it over during the drive home, the windscreen wipers marking time. All those strange things Amashta had told me. The way she had described it seemed bizarre. It was as though she were alluding to some kind of plan that I was part of. Some grand scheme, beyond my understanding as yet.
Did destiny have a role for me? In which case, it was one I’d prefer to turn down. All I’d ever been, or wanted to be, was an ordinary man.
But perhaps I wasn’t going to be allowed that luxury.
The house was still dark, when I finally got back. I clicked on the hallway light. And immediately, the quietness of the place began to seep all over again through my skin and into my body. This had once been such a noisy place. So full of life and love.
I leant against the doorframe wearily. And then turned it all over for a last few seconds.
Defender? What did
that
even mean?
Now it genuinely begins? But I thought that we’d come to the end. Could it be possible I was wrong about that?
I was far too tired to think about it anymore, and so I went into the kitchen. I switched the light on there, and I noticed something on the table.
It was a massive wicker hamper, piled to overflowing with a variety of foodstuffs. There were cans of clam chowder and lobster bisque. Pots of caviar. Brown packages filled with truffles. Baguettes, cheeses, and even a bottle of champagne.
‘Food on your table for a year,’ Woodard Raine had said.
He had even stuck a handwritten note in the top of it.
A deal’s a deal, sport.
It was signed with a simple W.
I picked up a muffin curiously and bit into it. Then I went across to the sink and spat it out. The same thing happened when I tried a bunch of fat red grapes.
It wasn’t that they tasted bad. It was simply that he’d forgotten to give them any flavor whatsoever.
Which, again, was pretty typical. The hell with magic. It was too confusing, too capricious. I preferred a simpler life.
I went across to the fridge and got a bottle of beer out. Took a pull at it, but then I stopped.
I couldn’t drink right now, because I needed to use my car again. I’d realized I had one more place left to visit.