Night Kings: The Complete Anthology (33 page)

With crushed spirits, he sunk his head low
and accepted the many stabbings as karmic punishment for his
lengthy list of foul deeds. It was a dark world he lived, one that
required moral sacrifices to be made in order to quell the distrust
that swirled around him. He wasn’t human, and although he’d
traveled this world for over three millennia, Victor Dukane hadn’t
managed to become one of them. He could only hope now that his
daughter might find better luck, but it was a tall task to ask for
one so young, confused of her origins.

“Father.” a familiar voice whispered into his
ear. “I see you, father. I don’t know why, but yours is the only
face I see.”

It was his daughter that communed with him,
but she did so while not on this world. She was displaced from
space and time, lost to the great divide amongst the cosmos. How
she got there he hadn’t the slightest clue, but wherever she was,
it was of great comfort to the battered father. Elsa found a safe
haven.

“Where are you?” she asked in trepidation of
his response. “Where am I for that matter? It’s so cold here, so
strange, and there’s nowhere for me to run. I’m alone, father, and
I’m think… I think I’m in big trouble.”

Her other sensed the dangers that loomed and
took her from this world. It was a protective measure, one that
could easily be misconstrued as abuse if one had no prior knowledge
of their ways. Elsa would survive Salem’s day of reckoning. She
would live on, somewhere, and sow new roots into the ground. She
live her life in blissful ignorance of her origins until the moment
her other conscious burned up the last of its light. Then it would
be the darkness that found her; and not a soul on this planet would
be able to escape her wrath.

Victor couldn’t answer his daughter. He
couldn’t depart to her any worldly wisdom that would lift her
spirits in these dark hours. He could only grin and bear it while
more punishment was supplied to him. The next warlock to the cross
flashed a sinewy grin in Victor’s direction before he leapt into
the air to stab at his prey. The knife found a place in between the
traitor’s false ribs, and when the warlock landed he was met with
the warm spatter of blood on his face.

He exploded in a fiery passion that prompted
him to smash his head against the first brother he came across. He
leapt back into air several times in attempt to retrieve the
sacramental knife. In his last attempt the warlock managed to grab
hold of the knife long enough to snap one of the traitor’s ribs on
his way down.

The torment Victor Dukane was forced to
endure brought a guttural whelp to the surface that, past his blood
clotted throat, echoed throughout the remains of the sunken temple.
Still the knife stayed lodged in his side.

“Now, now, brothers,” a surprisingly calm and
collected Hans Brackhaus said to his followers. “Tear him apart too
quickly and it’s the brothers in the back of the line you’ll have
to answer to.”

Hans motioned for the largest of their
brotherhood to step out of the line and approach. With an
indifferent wave in the direction of the traitor he charged the
paragon of meat and muscle with the task of the knife’s
retrieval.

“Puny monster,” the warlock said as the two
of them met at eye level. “You’re as cowardly as you are
frail.”

The warlock drove the knife as deep into
Victor’s frame as he could before he finally pulled the steel from
its tender socket. He bellowed with laughter as he took another
stab at his nailed up prey, but when he turned around to pass the
knife to another he discovered the mayor had at last found his
voice.

Victor Dukane wouldn’t let his daughter
become a vessel for the darkness. There was enough evil in the
world when he got here; and to fan the fires any further would
result in the destruction of this world. No different than his
last. He broke through the blood lodged in his throat and cried out
to his daughter in support.

Elsa Dukane wouldn’t be alone in the world
any longer. Not while her father still drew strength from the white
beyond.

His eyes burst into molten lava that spewed
forth from his elevated position to the pews below. The cry that
once carried with it the pains of his many hardships became a
towered force that struck at the very foundations of the temple.
The pews began to rock back and forth that saw the unseated crowds
look to one another, each and every one of their brows furled in
the same malcontent confusion.

The roof of the nave started to collapse
under the stress and the submerged portions of stone and rock
crumbled to the ground. Warlocks everywhere shuffled from one side
of the room to the other too avoid what fell from above, but not
one of them thought to reach out and contain the outstretched hands
of the blasphemer.

These men had all the power in the world and
still they couldn’t stop one man from bringing their house of cards
down upon them.

Maybe it was the damage done from all the
artillery fire the temple took in the Revolutionary War; more than
half the building crumbled to dust in those skirmishes and saw the
rest of the structure on already shaky foundation to begin
with.

Or perhaps the mayor was aided by the goddess
high above in one last attempt to cleanse the world of the horror
she unleashed. It wouldn’t have been the first time their goddess
had struck at the warlock race. Where she had been guided by
benevolent intentions and passive responses in the past, perhaps
now the goddess used this man to strike at them with a closed
fist.

The last possibility that ran through the
minds of Hans Brackhaus and his associates was that Victor Dukane
contained all of that power, himself. These men of Nordic descent
didn’t need to know the true source of that power. They only needed
to know the vessel for its might, and that vessel was strewn up
before the entire assembly.

“Shut him up!” barked Hans, but the frantic
leader wouldn’t wait for another to take that action from the man
most deserved of its reward. He pushed through the crowd with no
thoughts on that stubby knife they’d used for the ceremony. He
desired the swift judgment that the claymore his brother in the
front carried, and when he reached the front he made the sword his
in proper Viking fashion.

Victor saw the glint of the moon flash across
the large sword carried towards him and used it as a catalyst to
push past the all of the guilt, the transgressions, the greed and
the hate. The sins that kept him locked in this most unpropitious
of places.

“You force my hand, brother!” Hans frothed at
the lips, and with a weighty heave, raised the claymore high above
his head. “We’ll meet again in the hell that waits for men such as
you and me. There we shall finish our discourse as true
equals…”

Victor howled in anguish as he summoned the
power to force his wrists through the spikes that kept his nailed
to the cross, but he had little time before the raised sword
crashed down upon his head. The louder Victor’s cries became the
more incandescent his eyes grew, until not even he could see the
blade inches from his head.

The cross blew apart under the weight of the
claymore, but when the light subsided, Victor Dukane’s remains
weren’t among the flurry of splinters and hunks of wood. A lone
raven stood in his place, a feather’s breadth from the sword that
almost saw him cleaved in half.

“Get the blasphemer!” Hans cried desperately,
his sword wedged in the wood where it would be of no use.

Loud cracks of thunder emanated from the
temple’s floor where the warlocks hurled bolts of lightning in his
direction. Their attempts only furthered the damage wrought upon
the Sunkeeper Temple, and after more than a few bolts from below
their arched sanctum crown came down on top of them. Victor
narrowly avoided some of the debris that came down, and managed to
use the gap it left behind to carve out a path of escape for
himself.

Victor broke from his cage, back to a world
that accepted him through the good times and the bad. He couldn’t
abandon that world in its hour of absolution. If her daughter was
to know of their ways, she would learn so from a father she could
look upon with a proud face and know the truth about her
origins.

It was the highest of Salem’s mountains that
Victor emerged from, a height higher than he usually flew, but one
that granted him true sight of the events that plagued Salem. He
could see the forces Hans mentioned as they seeped into every
suburban street. In their wake, flames spread from home to home,
where displaced homeowners were either cut down or forced to flee
with the crowds of likeminded citizens.

Victor could aid them humans in the battle
for Salem and see the evils he witnessed below never live past the
night. What couldn’t be done was right the many wrongs of his past.
He couldn’t take back the centuries on the run or the sacrifices he
had to make. He couldn’t nurse Elsa back to childhood so she could
revisit her other properly. All Victor had was the fight before him
and where he stood on the line. This time it would be on the right
side.

With the prospect of sins duly paid off,
Victor Dukane used his powerful wings to soar towards the swirled
mass of black that descended upon his city. He would fight for his
daughter in hope she might have the one thing on this world he
never had—a home.

Chapter Fifty Four

Night Kings: Old World Cull

Gregory Blackman

Awakening

The unknown girl awakened to an empty grove
of mysterious origin. She didn’t how she came to this place, or
why. She only knew it wasn’t of this world, or any other she had
seen before.

The dead forest she left behind was gone, now
replaced by sights never before seen by human eyes. It was a
distant land, one where trees of crimson snaked upwards to the twin
suns that hung in the sky; fields of grass, a near perfect
substitute for Kentucky bluegrass, seemed to stretch on for miles
on end, and in the distance, golden snow capped peaks that spiraled
up into the sky. She walked, and she walked, each step with her
head affixed to the skies of gold, crimson and amber.

A palace of light and crystal high in the sky
caught her attention and forced her to search higher and higher to
its inevitable end. The castle sat atop an overturned mountain,
frozen in its inverted place, as if no force on this world could
ever dislodge it from its grounds. She wasn’t sure if the
inhabitants were human, supernatural, or if there was anyone
inside, at all. They could be long gone from this world, their
mighty structure left afloat for any population below to
worship.

“Well I’ll be damned,” she said to the
forests of red that surrounded. “I bet moving in was a royal pain
in the ass.”

At the highest of the fortresses’ towers,
past the clouds and the haze, she caught the sight of two suns that
hung in the same blissful ignorance of this planet’s denizens.
Wherever she was, whenever she was, she wasn’t where she needed to
be. That path had been ripped from her by the passenger of light
that refused to show its true self.

Piece by piece the events that led to Elsa’s
awakening began to return to her. She was locked in a cage,
threatened with death, or worse, and forced to flee parts of her
city engulfed in flames. When Elsa looked everywhere for her
friends it was to her home she went in search of her father.

He could be ill-tempered, heavy-handed, and
an all around tyrant at times. In spite of those instances, Elsa
could count on her father to have her back, through thick and thin,
whether or not she wanted it. He would always be there. Yet, when
Elsa arrived home she discovered her father had left the premises.
His whereabouts were unknown to her, but she pressed on in search
of her in the woods behind their home.

Elsa found her father, but not in the manner
she expected. It was in her loss of consciousness that she came to
meet with Victor Dukane. Elsa could say little to him before she
was ripped from her side, but the impression he left upon her said
a great deal. He was afraid of those in his company and desperate
to see his daughter far from this cursed land.

“Great,” she said to no one but herself, “to
top it off, I’m locked up in a personal Never Never Land of Hell.
This isn’t Salem and it’s certainly not Kansas. So where did I go?
How can I get back to my friends and family—?”

A misplaced step almost saw her saw into
stumble into a hole in the ground. She caught her balance in time,
but nearly fell over a second time when she looked down into that
fissure. The crack in the ground led way to a cavernous maw that
went down and down for what appeared miles. It was almost farther
than the eye could eye, but see she did after her eyes adjusted to
the darkness.

It opened way to another world far in the
distance, one littered with more trees of red fire and yet another
sun to orbit both sides of the world in a perpetual daylight. This
was a flat world she found herself in, a world theoretically
impossible with what Elsa thought she knew of the universe.
Wherever in the cosmos she was, it wasn’t a world she could stumble
upon on her own. Someone brought her to this place, possibly her
other, for reasons still unknown. Yet, when Elsa realized this it
only aggravated her other’s frustration for this world, and all the
ones beyond. No longer was theirs a symbiotic accord.

“Who are you?” Elsa shouted to the skies
above. “What do you want from me, huh? What the hell did I ever do
to you?”

If Elsa wasn’t being hunted by the
supernatural races she was being thrown into cages or sent across
the cosmos to worlds she never believed possible. It was enough to
drive a girl to the darkest places of her psyche, to crack, break
into a million pieces. Elsa stayed whole through the events,
although she had yet to decide if that was for the best or not. She
was lost to herself, her friends, and the emotions that threatened
to swallow her; whole if they had to. Where she would end up was
anyone’s guess but hers.