New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (24 page)

Pain there was aplenty.

Damon ducked under the murderer’s first slash. The gleaming razor made a nauseating keening sound as it swept by, barely missing Damon’s head. He drove his fist into the old man’s groin, drawing a startled grunt of pain from him, and as Fish doubled over, Damon used the murderer’s own momentum to knock him off his feet and send him sprawling to the ground. Fish landed in a heap; Damon whirled around and went after him, stomping on the hand holding the razor. The kick should have shattered bones, and drew another hiss of pain from the killer, but he did not release the weapon; Damon had to leap back to avoid a wild swing. Fish was not a trained fighter, but his strength and speed were superhuman, and every instinct in Damon’s body screamed that even a slight nick of the darkly gleaming weapon would prove to be deadly.

The brutal fight went on amidst the wailing of children. Damon’s fury was tempered with fear – if he fell here, nothing would save the remaining victims. They would die in that cave, their fates forever unknown by their loved ones. Even worse, whatever Albert Fish was doing here was worse than mere murder. He was using the death and desecration as fuel for some evil purpose, Damon was sure of it.

More slashes hit only empty air. A near-miss cut through the snout of his gas mask, sparing his face by less than an inch. Damon’s counterblows struck the old man repeatedly, but his target’s invisible armor deflected them.

After a while, the two combatants paused for a moment by unspoken mutual consent. “I can sense the Black Gods within you, masked man,” Fish said between panting breaths. “We serve the same power. Why do you oppose me?”

Damon said nothing. A tilt of his head indicated the children in the cages, and the little unmoving body in the center of the circle.

“It was necessary,” Fish replied to the unspoken response. “Oh, I must admit I have a certain…
appetite
for young, succulent flesh. Not for fucking, no. I could of fucked all of them, but I never touched them that way. I am all for the
eating
, you see, the eating and the Blackness. It eats as well, you see. It eats pain and sorrow and the death of hope. By feeding it, I burrow deeper into the heart of light. With every little sacrifice, I learn about the Light and the Dark. I will soon have mastery over both, and then the feasting will truly begin.”

The old man’s ranting gave Damon time to think, to formulate a plan. He was not strong enough to kill his opponent with his bare hands. It was time to find a different way.

“Nothing to say, Lurker? You cannot stop me. I am protected, nurtured, by the same power that sustains you, except my dedication has earned me a more exalted rank. Bow down to me, and I’ll let you live.”

There was only one apt response to the offer. Damon let the Lurker’s maniacal laughter answer for him.

They closed in on each other once again, razor blade and inhuman power against skill and desperate intent. When fighting a man with a knife, it was impossible to avoid getting cut. Damon had managed so far only because of Fish’s clumsiness, but sooner or later a slash would drive home.

So be it, then, if it gained him a chance to end the fight.

He didn’t try to dodge the next swing. Instead, he parried with his arm in a sweeping motion meant to strike the razor blade on its flat instead of its edge. It didn’t quite work. He felt a line of coldness in his upper arm as the blade cut through his jacket and into the flesh beneath. His move allowed him to grasp Fish’s wrist with his other hand, however. Damon pulled, twisted, and repeatedly drove an elbow into the old man’s face as he wrestled him for the weapon. He could feel a cold fire spreading from the shallow cut on his arm, but he ignored the growing numbness around the wound and continued carrying out his plan.

Fish would not relinquish his hold on the weapon, and his strength was greater. Damon shifted his grip and drove down the razor blade, still held in the old man’s hand. The weapon bit into the murderer’s thigh, driven by his own strength. Through his grip on the old man’s wrist, Damon felt the blade cut all the way into bone. Black ichor exploded from the wound and steamed up in a cloud of noxious gas. Albert Fish, his gleeful expression replaced by a rictus of agony, screamed wordlessly, his strength ebbing away.

Damon wrenched the razor blade away from the murderer, getting another cut on his hand along the way; as soon as he had a good grip on its handle he delivered a savage slash onto the howling man’s throat. The screaming ended with sudden finality; the severed head of Albert Fish went spinning off in a splash of black blood, landing not too far from the corpse of his last victim. Damon watched in helpless fascination as a boiling blackness engulfed and consumed both the head and body of the still-twitching corpse until nothing but an oily foulness was left.

It was done. Now all he had to do was survive long enough to release the children.

He managed two steps towards the cages before the burning cold reached his chest. He felt something inside him react to the poisonous energy. The taint within welcomed the poison and melded with it. Alien thoughts rushed through Damon’s mind. He saw himself dragging one of the screaming children from a cage and placing him in the circle. He saw himself carrying on with Albert Fish’s grotesque works, surpassing the dead murderer’s every atrocity with his own.

An old vision returned to him: himself, no longer remotely human, as he became the mad ruler of a mad world. It was a terrible sight, but also a tempting one. It offered a freedom of sorts, freedom to indulge in the rage that had festered inside of him since his dark apotheosis in the trenches, freedom to revel in destruction, to become a god of death…

Damon found himself lying on the blood-spattered floor of the chamber. He had no memory of falling down, and no idea how long he had lain there. The children’s crying had died down to muted sobbing and sniffling. The cold burning was quickly fading away, much like the memory of a bad dream. His right hand was holding tightly onto something. He forced his clenched fingers to open and saw the Codex. He might not be able to access it fully, despite his best efforts, but the object had somehow given him the strength to survive his brush with the lethal energies of the Outsiders.

That taint remained, however. If anything, the fight with Albert Fish had helped it grow within him. Damon feared that sooner or later it would consume him. But that was something to worry about later. He had children to return to their parents.

And after that, a cave to explore, for it was linked to and close to the Power Itself. He might learn much there.

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 17, 2013

The high-stakes card game was held every Sunday night in the basement of a deli in Brighton Beach. There’d been a couple of guards at the entrance. I’d quietly taken care of them. They would live; they would have likely lived even if my new conscience hadn’t been tagging along, but in either case I was trying my damnedest to not be a killer tonight.

The six Mafiya bigwigs enjoying their card game and the eight bodyguards standing around looked up when I kicked down the door. As soon as they saw who it was, everybody started going for a gun. Damn few people are ever happy to see me.

Normally I would have pulled my own gun out and things would have gotten pretty loud. This time, however, I stepped aside and yelled: “Say hello to my little friend!” Christine had asked for that introductory line, for no good reason I could think of.

My little friend was wearing a gray-and-black bodysuit along with a face-mask, both courtesy of Condor, and her hair was still dyed black. She didn’t look terribly impressive at first glance, but she made up for that with her actions. As soon as I stepped aside, she concentrated and all fourteen Russians were flung against the room’s far wall as if swept up by an industrial-sized broom, and stayed stuck to it, held there by the force of her will. One of them managed to get a shot off before being slammed on the wall, but Christine caught the bullet on her force field. The wall wasn’t big enough to accommodate fourteen people, some of them of considerable girth, so the Russians were stacked two or three deep in some places. For their sake, I hoped none of them had skimped on their deodorant. A couple had gotten banged up pretty good when Christine picked them up and sent them flying. One of them was bleeding profusely from a scalp cut. Christine looked upset at the sight but she didn’t say anything.

All in all, it’d been the easiest take-down I’d been involved in. Having a Type Three Neo on your side could be damn useful.

We walked side by side towards the immobilized Russkies. They were squirming and cursing up a storm. “Listen up, assholes!” I shouted, which got them to quiet down. “If you don’t want my friend here to turn up the pressure until you end up as paint on the wall, get ready to answer some questions!” Christine amped up her telekinesis, not quite as much as I would have preferred, but still more than enough to let the Russians get the idea that they were like so many bugs caught between two boards and that she was quite able to figuratively lean on the top board until they were literally squished.

“What… What do you want to know?” asked one of the guys on the outer layer, a big fat fuck with a shaved head and a goatee. From the jewelry and high-quality prison tattoos, he was pretty high on the Mafyia pecking order.

I showed him the flier with Christine’s picture, the one that had been distributed among New York’s underworld. “Who is in charge of this? Who wants to find this girl?”

“Archangel,” Fatso said. Great. Archangel had been the asshole in white who’d gotten Cassandra killed. Unfortunately, I’d chopped his head off with his own flaming sword a couple days ago, so he was a literal dead end. Fucking hell.

“Who’s Archangel’s boss?”

“He come from Ukraine,” Fatso answered; his accent and grammar were getting a lot worse. “I don’t know who bosses him. He gives orders. We no ask questions.”

“How about the creepy guy in the black suit?” Christine asked. “The guy with the weird smile.”

“Mr. Night,” the Russian said, looking even more scared all of a sudden.

“Where can we find Mr. Night?” she said, doing her best to sound mean and scary. It came out a little squeaky; she needed a bit of practice. Then again, a squeaky voice and the power to sweep up a roomful of Russians without lifting an eyebrow will get you a lot further than a squeaky voice alone.

“He comes, he goes, the Devil’s Grandmother knows where he is! I swear! I don’t know where he is!”

He sounded sincere enough. The ease with which Christine had overpowered his entire gang had left the guy too shaken up to try anything.

“He’s telling the truth,” Christine confirmed. “He’s scared crap-less, and he’s telling the truth. He’s also not a nice guy. None of them are.”

“Yeah, I could have told you that.”

She started biting her lips. “I’m getting some more stuff from them. More than emotions. Thoughts. Memories.” She was a telepath, too? Was there no fucking end to what she could do? “Oh my God. Murder. Rape. That one,” she said, pointing to a good-looking fucker with a thing for silk shirts. “He and… little kids.”

“Get out of their heads,” I told her. “Now.”

“Okay.” She looked like she was about to vomit, but there was an angry gleam in her eyes I recognized instantly. I didn’t need any powers to tell what she was thinking now. Turn up the telekinetic pressure all the way, and that entire pack of murderers and rapists and pedophiles would turn into paste. She could do it, and why the hell shouldn’t she? It’s not like we could turn them over the police; we had nothing on them. All those assholes needed killing, and she could do it just by wishing it.

“Don’t do it. It’s not worth it,” I heard myself say.

“Do what?”

“You know what.” Killing is easy, but it comes with a price. I still remember the faces of every asshole I’ve killed. My stepfather. Pedro the Pimp. Giamatti as he plunged to his death. Pasty-faced Archangel. And many, many others. They would all drop by and visit me, late at night or even during the day, in dreams or at random times when I was awake. You learn to live with it, but I didn’t want her to. I did not care if the assholes stuck on the wall lived or died, but I didn’t want her to have their faces etched into her soul for the rest of her life. “Just don’t do it.”

Christine shuddered and shook her head. “I wasn’t going to… I don’t think I was going to.” She shook her head one more time. “Crap. That sucked. Okay, they don’t know anything useful. I guess we should go.”

“Just keep them on the wall a while longer, okay?”

She nodded, and I walked to the table where they’d been holding their game. There was a nice pile of cash on it, mostly in hundreds and fifties. I grabbed all of it and stuck the money in a couple of cloth bags. I always carry a couple of folded cloth bags in my jacket pockets, just in case I happen to stumble on small portable stuff that needs liberating.

“You’re robbing them?” Christine said.

“Crime fighting doesn’t pay. Crime does.”

“Pown and loot. You really should give
World of Warcraft
a try,” she replied, smiling a little bit.

“Yeah, maybe I will. I like the live-action version better, though.” I turned back to Fatso. “Hey, Boris, did you know that fuck over there likes little children?” Fatso shook his head. “You might want to look into it. Anyways, we’ll be on our way. Follow us and I’ll kill every last motherfucking one of you.”

Christine released them from the wall as I shut the door behind us. I heard the thuds of several bodies hitting the floor, along with loud cursing and shouts of pain.

None of the Russians followed us.

* * *

“Stop the car, I’m going to puke!”

Christine looked much paler than usual. I pulled over and she opened the door, leaned out and was noisily sick. I held her hair and steadied her while she shook and heaved. When it was over, I offered her some napkins from the glove compartment. She wiped her mouth and used another napkin for the tears in her eyes.