Vesik 04 - This Broken World (12 page)

“I’ll start the bacon,” I said, handing him the book. I flicked my wrist as I passed the old wood stove and said
“Minas Ignatto.”
A thin spiral of flame leapt from my hand and began to consume the wood. The burst of fire rattled the top of the stove.

“A little less energy next time,” the Old Man said. “Modifiers help you control the power of the incantation, but your control of the energy will refine it. Or burn the cabin down. And I do not want to have that conversation with Zola.”

I laughed as I pulled the bacon and eggs out of the fridge. “You and me both, Old Man. You and me both.”

He focused on the journal as the bacon sizzled in the black, cast iron skillet.

“Coffee?” I asked as I pulled a Frappuccino out of the fridge.

“That’s not coffee,” he said without looking up. “That’s milk and sugar with a hint of coffee flavor.”

“Uh huh, what’s the problem?”

“I’ll take it black.”

“You know Zola’s coffee maker practically churns out asphalt, right?”

“Perfect.” He turned a page.

I grimaced as I flipped the bacon and began prepping the old coffee maker. It smelled good, but I knew better than to attempt drinking it.

I flipped a TV tray out and set it next to the Old Man as breakfast finished cooking. He nodded as I slid a plate chock-full of bacon and eggs onto it.

“One mug o’ sludge,” I said, setting the bowl-like coffee mug beside his plate.

“Thank you.” He closed the journal and set it down on an end table.

After a few bites, my eyes trailed from the journal to the Old Man’s scarred and bearded face. “You knew Zola? In the war, I mean?”

The Old Man’s gaze lifted slowly from his plate to my eyes. He had the same gray eyes as me. “Finish your breakfast, and we will talk.”

It sounded so much like something Zola would say, I couldn’t help but chuckle.

We finished in silence. I gathered up the dishes and set them in the sink as the Old Man walked outside. I found him on the front porch, sitting on one of the steel chairs I hadn’t flattened in training with Zola.

“You knew her back then,” I said.

He nodded once as embers flared in his pipe and smoke curled slowly around his beard.

“Then you knew Philip too.”

“Yes,” he said. “I knew Philip and Zola. Not too well at the time, but I came to know Zola very well after the war. She helped me regain some of who I was after Sherman’s march.”

I nodded. One day I hoped the Old Man would tell me his stories, the stories I’d heard only through Zola of a time he’d almost lost himself. He’d been Sherman’s secret weapon, and had carved a bloody path to the sea as he burned the south to the ground.

My thoughts trailed back to Zola. “Philip wasn’t always …”

“Evil? No one sets out on a path to become evil. No sane person, at the least. Philip was not always the faceless monster you think of now.”

I frowned and looked out into the field in front of the house. A quiet wind rustled the branches of the old oak. A doe and her fawn wove their way through the edge of the woods, not giving us so much as a glance.

“Philip’s destiny is not yours.”

I turned my eyes back to the Old Man. “There’s a lot in that journal I can relate to.”

“There is much in that journal anyone can relate to. It does not bind you to his mistakes.”

“I know.”

“And then there was Hinrik.”

I nodded.

“Hinrik was an anomaly, or so most of us thought. A dark necromancer who would lay down his own life to protect people he barely knew.” The Old Man took another breath from his pipe and exhaled slowly. “I thought I was damned to walk the earth as a dark necromancer. I’d spent five hundred years convincing myself I was one of the worst beings living in this wretched place. There was always one worse. Ezekiel. He was my enemy, and my salvation, in one tidy package.

“Hinrik changed that, Damian.” The Old Man looked down at the embers in his pipe. “Hinrik changed a great many things.”

“Why? What made him change?”

The Old Man emptied his pipe. “Koda, perhaps.” He looked up at me. “What’s important is that he did change.”

“Could Philip have changed?”

“You’ve read the journal,” he said. “No. He knew exactly what he was doing with every atrocity he committed. There is no hope for someone who loses themselves to righteousness.”

***

Days passed. Then a week vanished, and then more. More things than bruises became routine as the time passed. I would wake up before the Old Man, usually right at sunrise, and cook up some bacon and eggs in the old cast iron skillet.

This morning I rubbed my shoulder and winced while I cooked breakfast one handed. I was a convert to asphalt coffee, and I sucked it down gratefully. “Wasn’t one of the fairies supposed to come heal us by now?”

“You said Nixie told you they’d be late.”

I frowned as I remembered. She’d just told me a few days before. “Dammit, how hard did you hit me on the head?”

He changed the channel on the small TV and asked, “Which time?”

I laughed and started slopping breakfast onto some chipped plates, eggs covering the sunflower pattern along the edge.

“Her again?” I asked, setting the plate of fatty breakfast goodness on the Old Man’s TV tray and looking at the small, pixelated reporter. “What was her name?” It hadn’t been long since she’d been standing in my shop harassing Frank. “What’s she doing in southern Illinois?”

“Showing us our enemy,” the Old Man said. The arm of the couch creaked as he clenched his hand around it.

“We’re covering the murders on the bridge between Brookport, Illinois and Paducah, Kentucky. As you can see behind me, the police have the area surrounded and the suspect has made no move to run. We have evidence of the murders, and it is not for children. Roll it.”

Shaky video played on the TV. The Old Man leaned forward and I stared in horror. Ezekiel stood in the center of a narrow blue bridge. Ten Watchers hung from the top of the steel structure. At least half of them were already dead, either from hanging or from the large, bloody gashes etched across their chests. Some, still alive, hung suspended in crude rope harnesses.

Ezekiel raised his arm toward one of the dead women. I couldn’t see the flow of power, or the change in the auras, but I had a good idea of what was coming. Her pale face twitched and the swollen tongue vanished into the corpse’s mouth before her arms flexed, and the bonds broke.

It was faint, being so far from the microphone, but I could hear the man next to her scream “No!”

The dead Watcher reached up and grabbed the noose around her neck. She pulled herself up the same old rope Ezekiel had used to hang her. I watched in awful fascination as she chewed through the rope. She shimmied along the ledge to the next rope, and slid down to the screaming man. He thrashed and screamed as she started to chew his face off.

The video feed swung back to the reporter, who stared at the monitor in the van beside her. I knew she was watching the rest of the event unfold. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.” She turned away from the screen and vomited. She glanced back toward the bridge. Ezekiel still stood there, motionless.

The reporter wiped her mouth. “What’s that sound? It’s a … we’re hearing a rumble and—”

The camera shook violently.

“Earthquake?” asked a voice from off screen.

“They failed,” the Old Man said. He sighed, and that mild expression of emotion sent a chill into my bones. “She should be running. That’s a summoning ritual.”

The camera panned away from the sick reporter and then zoomed and blurred momentarily until Ezekiel’s form filled most of the screen. His lips moved in his pale, sandy face. His eyes were entirely black on the pixelated screen, and I didn’t think it was a trick of the light.

The river boiled.

“So rises a Leviathan.” The Old Man stood up and walked away.

I stared. My jaw grew slack as the first tentacle wrapped itself around the bridge behind Ezekiel. The supports began to bend and screech. There was a roar … but it was more than a roar. It was a thousand lions, distorted and tortured and crying for blood. My skin crawled as the light reflected off a dark, dripping form.

Screaming joined the raucous screech of tortured metal and the Leviathan’s roar. The reporter and the cameramen came to their senses. The cameras panned back to the bridge, where dead Watchers devoured living ones. Ezekiel casually swept his fingers in the direction of the Leviathan. The camera locked onto another of the dead Watchers when she moved. The bullet holes in her chest and a blown out cheek—a good sign the police hadn’t been sitting idly by—didn’t seem to be slowing her down as she shambled toward the edge of the bridge.

The reanimated Watchers abandoned their gory feast and dropped to the pavement below. A trio of hideous beaks revealed themselves in the black mass of the river monster. The undead Watchers stepped over the railings one at a time and reached out to the beast. Tentacles snapped out, crushing them and dragging the remnants to each of the beaks in turn. The Leviathan roared again, and the beast’s flesh seemed to grow, expanding to dwarf the bridge, then shrinking. I closed my eyes and looked again.

The Old Man walked back into the room. “You cannot see the entire creature on film. Only its non-magical shell. It is hunger and destruction incarnate.”

“What the fuck is that?” I asked as I started to gnaw on a piece of bacon, looked back at the TV, and set the whole plate down in disgust.

“Where Philip was cautious and secretive, Ezekiel will be merciless and bold.”

“He’s Anubis,” I said. “He’s a necromancer, not Aquaman for fuck’s sake!”

The Old Man actually laughed and settled on the couch again. “The reason I am so hard on you in training. The reason Zola was so diligent. However unlikely, we knew this could happen in your lifetime. When a Seal falls, through the death of Ezekiel, or Edgar, or any of the Guardians, the Old Gods of the Abyss will begin to break through into this world. You will yearn for the days when Philip Pinkerton was all that haunted your dreams.”

An ear-piercing scream drew our focus back to the television. The camera was sideways on the ground, and a rubbery tentacle was dragging a man in headphones toward the river.

The reporter wasn’t forming words anymore. She screamed and vanished into the van before it barreled out of the frame. As the camera refocused, another tentacle, a dozen feet thick, wrapped around a small car, dragging it into the river. The bridge began to give way. Metal screamed and the earth shook. Another tentacle shot out of the abyss and swung toward the camera. The picture dimmed into shadow and was lost in an explosion of static.

I clenched my jaw and turned to the Old Man. “We should be out there helping. It could be my family out there dying.”

“Croatoan.” The Old Man almost growled after he said it.

“What?” I glanced at the static on the TV. “That was Croatoan?”

“No,” He rested his chin on his fist and leaned forward. “I killed Croatoan. This one is of his ilk.”

I wanted to ask him what it was like to battle Croatoan, to fight a Leviathan. How did he do it? How in the hell did one man kill an Old God? “What happened in Roanoke?” I asked, even though I half expected the Old Man to stop talking again.

“I lost my temper.”

I slowly raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not trying to be humorous. It is something you’ll have to be careful of too. You’ve read Koda’s manuscript, yes?”

“I … yes. How did you know?”

“Last year, in Boonville, you seemed very concerned with becoming a dark necromancer. I haven’t heard you mention it once since.”

I nodded. “I spoke to Koda about soularts at great length. I see those arts differently than I did before.”

“You spoke to him?”

“His ghost, yes. He’s still around.”

The Old Man looked down at his hands. “I did not realize he was still with us. Koda was one of the first to realize a dark necromancer may not always be a hellish blight upon humanity.” He met my gaze. “Koda’s manuscript gave Hinrik hope when he had none. Such a sacrifice. All to banish a demon. He saved many lives.”

“So did Maggie and Carter,” I said. “And they were good people.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

W
e’d just squared off to begin training when I felt a small surge in the ley lines behind the cabin. The Old Man and I exchanged nods and headed around back, past the old stone well.

“My shoulders are so happy,” I said. “It’s got to be one of the fairies.”

A small white and gold figure fluttered out of the woods and exploded into a seven-foot colossus, trailing a cloud of fairy dust. Foster threw his arms out to his sides, golden chainmail tinkling as he moved. “Damian!” He crushed me in a hug, at which point I realized my ribs hurt like a bitch.

“Ow,” I said, but I hugged him back anyway.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, slapping my shoulder.

I winced again.

“Damn,” he said. “You’ve been getting a good workout.”

“Even trained with Aeros,” the Old Man said.

Foster extended his hand and traded grips with the Old Man. “I bet that kept him on his toes.”

“Kept him diving around like a drunk duck.”

Foster laughed and turned back to me. “It will be good to have you in Faerie.”

“It’s damn good to see you,” I said.

“Is Glenn aware of the Leviathan?” the Old Man asked.

Foster nodded and his face shut down. “We saw.”

The Old Man nodded, and they both fell silent.

“How’re Aideen and Sam and, well, everyone?”

“You mean Nixie?” Foster asked. He raised an eyebrow, seeming glad to change the topic. “Nixie’s great. Although if she doesn’t shut up about you coming to Faerie, I’m going to have to put her out of my misery.”

That made me smile. “Sam?”

“Sam is safe as safe can be. You never told me what Jasper was.” He leveled his gaze at me, eyebrows drawing down over his slightly slanted eyes.

“What he was?” I asked.

“God of dust and bones. He’s a reaper.”

I blinked.

The Old Man whistled.