Book and Blade: Book One of the Hand of Perdition (6 page)

The Librarian stepped back.

"You will have to do."

"So what am I supposed to do? I mean this Library is impressive and all, but that pocket knife is hardly going to 'unravel the fabric of the universe'. I mean where do I start?"

"That pocket knife, the Weapon, will become whatever you need when you need it. Trust it, it is your most potent power."

"Power?"

"Yes. When you opened the book and read it you accepted the gifts of damnation, certain abilities. You don't feel any different now, but you will. In time you will learn what you are now capable of."

"You mean like Superman? Flying and shit?" Christopher asked.

"No, not like Superman. Flying maybe, we will have to see. As I said, no mortal has ever held this office. As for where to get started, that I can help with. I will assist in getting you information on the souls you are required to hunt and return to Hell."

"And how do I do that? Return them to Hell, I mean?"

"Use the Weapon. Anything killed with the Weapon is condemned to Hell, even innocent souls, so be careful."

Christopher was confused. He was not even sure he believed any of this. How could any of this be real?

"Too fast, this is all coming too fast," Christopher said quietly.

"Maybe, but there is one last thing you need to do. You need to leave and kill those men about to kill you. Killing is the final part of the initiation. You need to understand what it is you are and what your world has become."

"Kill them? I thought they would eventually be gone and I could just go back and find Hamlin..."

"You misunderstand your predicament. While your consciousness is here in the Library, your body is back there at the mercy of your world."

"What?" Christopher jumped up out of the chair. "You mean this is all happening in my head?"

"No, your head is way too small and simple to hold this vastness. But your consciousness has left your body to come here. Your body is..." the Librarian paused and lifted his head as though listening to something and looking off into the stacks, “Currently tied to a chair and they are starting to torture you. Seems they want to leave a statement with your death."

"So if I go back, I am going to wake up tied to a chair about to be tortured?"

"Yes," the Librarian said.

"Then why would I go back? Sounds like a good reason to stay put for a while."

"Again, you misunderstand. When they tire of torturing you, and I would believe torturing an unconscious person loses its appeal rather quickly, they will kill you. I can't say for sure what would happen to you if they kill your body before you take your first soul, but I doubt it would be a good thing for you. You have no choice. But as I said, you are not going back the same man you were. You will have new strengths. You just need to learn how to use them fairly quickly."

Behind the Librarian, a door appeared on a wall behind a row of stacks. Christopher did not remember it being there a moment ago. It opened revealing nothing but darkness beyond.

Christopher looked at the door, but didn't move.

"I don't think I can go through whatever it was I went through coming here. Whatever it was, I fear it even more than death," Christopher said.

"That was a onetime thing on the trip here. It was part of your transformation. It will not be the same going back."

Christopher nodded and walked towards the door. He didn't want to go through it. Despite what the Librarian said, he feared what lay beyond. And what was he going to do against two killers while tied to a chair? But he couldn't stay here, that was obvious. A part of him still felt he had gone insane and this was all a delusion. Either way, he had to go back to the real world sometime. He stepped through the door. As he departed the Library, he heard one last thing from the Librarian. It was hard to make out, but he could have sworn the Librarian had said,
It will be worse
.

CHAPTER TEN

Christopher drifted in darkness only a moment before the pain came again. This time however, it came from that seed left buried in the empty place inside him and it swept through him like a raging fire. It wasn't purifying this time, it was liberating and it stoked his rage. The pain was intense, but it was more than physical.

He remembered his mother and father again and his kid sister. The pain awakened the sadness and memories he had been trying to bury for the last week.

The pain showed him what he had hoped never to see again. That all shreds of his former life were gone. Courtney’s betrayal, his entire family raped and murdered without him even being able to say goodbye, all of this stoked the fire inside him. He never considered that it was corrupting him, changing him, killing who he used to be, making something more or something less. Instead he embraced it. He welcomed the pain as part of him and the anger as the purest of pleasures.

No, everything that had been him was gone, but the pain showed him something else to replace all of that. It showed him the need for revenge.

Christopher opened his eyes.

He sat in a chair, his wrists tied to the wooden armrests. He did not need to look to know that the left two fingers of his left hand were broken. Nor did he need a mirror to know that his face was black and blue, his lips swollen, and his cheeks lined with cuts. They had been working him over it seemed. He felt the pain, but it was nothing compared to the pain he held within himself.

"Well, it looks like Mr. Sleepyhead is awake. What bad timing for you."

This came from Low Voice. He was a short man, but stocky. The t-shirt and black jacket he wore seemed too small for him. His knuckles look skinned and a little bloody. He must have been the one doing the most damage. The guy standing by the door must have been High Voice. He was much bigger than Low Voice, well over six feet tall. He flexed his gloved hands like he was just waiting for his turn.

Both of them had an aura about them, gray with little swirls of darkness. Without being told, Christopher knew he was seeing the weight of their souls.

"We were hoping you would wake up. It makes this stuff much more fun. I was just about to kill you, but maybe we can take some more time."

Low Voice pulled back as if to swing, but then he caught Christopher's eye and hesitated at the fire he saw.

"What the hell?" Low Voice said.

"Exactly," Christopher said.

Christopher pulled his arms away from the arms of the chair. The ropes held but the wood splintered and fell apart as though it was made of balsa wood. He stood up and the ropes and broken wood fell away from him. The anger burned through him, and he could feel the power begging to be set free. They had torn off his shirt and when he looked down at his body, he could see power emanating from him as though he burned with mystical fire. He decided that this would not do. He couldn't be running around half naked.

Not knowing exactly how, he reached out to the shadows in the far corner of the room and pulled them to him. The shadows swarmed him instantly and coalesced into clothes of black and gray and a hooded jacket covering his head. Like the Librarian's robes, the jacket swirled with shades of black.

Low Voice stepped back, eyes wide with panic. High Voice recovered faster and pulled out his gun.

Christopher felt the impact of the bullet in his stomach. He was knocked back and stumbled. But unlike his other gunshot wound, which he noticed no longer seemed to matter, he could feel his body repairing the hole almost instantly. Again, the pain was nothing compared to the pain he carried within.

He felt something calling out for him, and he saw the pocket knife on the ground by the bed. On instinct he snatched it up. It almost leaped into his hand, eager and, he could tell, thirsty.

It shifted in his hand, lengthening and erupting in a mixture of black and red flames. The flames did not harm Christopher, in fact, they seemed to give off almost no heat. The knife had become a sword in his hand. He had hoped it would be something more modern, maybe a gun, but it was what he had to work with.

Two more rounds hit him in the shoulder and thigh, spinning him slightly.

He realized the bullets would not kill him, at least not quickly, but they could fire at him faster than he could heal and that would slow him. So whatever these new gifts were, he was not exactly bulletproof. He had to act.

Low Voice had his gun out despite the terror on his face. Before he could fire, however, Christopher swept the Weapon up, slicing through the man’s thick forearm without resistance.

Low Voice screamed a very high pitched scream. Christopher reversed the direction of the sword and sliced Low Voice through the torso diagonally.

Again there was no resistance, and the Weapon's flames spread over his entire body. His scream ended in a gurgle as both parts of his body hit the ground. But then there was a new sound. A weak, pitiful warbling scream.

Low Voice's aura now strung from the sword to his body like cheese from a hot slice of pizza. This was where the sound was coming from. The sound of a soul being pulled out of its body.

With a sickening wet sound, Low Voice’s soul pulled away from his body and was absorbed into the Weapon.

High Voice had realized his gun was of little use and ran out the bedroom door. Christopher looked around quickly and found the Book on the floor next to the bed. He slipped it into the interior pocket of his shadow jacket.

With a short run he jumped through the window, shattering glass and wooden frame all around him. He wasn't sure he could fly, but something told him that the thirty-foot drop would no longer hurt him.

He had more strength than he had thought, and the momentum of his jump carried him well past the sidewalk. He landed on his feet in the center of the street. He was alone on the street for the moment. No cars were around. For now, the neighbors were inside, but that would change soon. Bursting out of a third story window made a lot of noise.

Christopher sniffed the air. He could smell something, something rancid yet sweet. He realized he had smelled it up in his room. Yes, it had been the scent coming off of High Voice. It was the smell of his soul.

He sniffed again, it was coming from behind one of the cars parked next to the house. Christopher started toward it. High Voice jumped up from behind the car and ran down the street. He got in the passenger side of a large black sedan. As soon as he was in, it pulled away from the curb with a squeal of tires.

Doors were opening and neighbors were stepping out on their porches. He didn't have time to see their reaction to a man cloaked in shadows wielding a large flaming sword.

Again acting almost on instinct he crouched down and leaped. He landed with a loud thud and dented the top of the sedan.

Before he could be thrown from the car roof, he held the sword in both hands and thrust down into the passenger side. The Weapon cut through metal and flesh easily, he felt it sink home in High Voice's soul and heard the same faint warbling scream as High Voice's soul was ripped from his body and sucked into the ever-thirsty Weapon.

Before he could pull the Weapon free and strike at the driver, the driver screamed in terror and made a sharp right turn. Christopher was thrown from the roof of the car, but he managed to hold onto the Weapon.

He landed on a parked car, smashing through the windshield. He kicked open the passenger door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, the cuts and scrapes from the fall and glass slowly fading.

At the end of the street the sedan turned north and disappeared. He could go after it, but he was suddenly tired. He staggered slightly as the realization of what he had just done started sinking in.

He had been running on adrenalin and instinct since the moment he came back from the Library. Now it was all leaving him. The anger, the hate. He felt himself calming down.

Around him more neighbors were coming out of their homes and looking around. In the distance he heard sirens. In New York you heard sirens all the time, but this time he thought these might be for him. He had to get out of here.

He ran into the alley nearby. Without knowing how, he dismissed the shadows that formed his clothes and the sword once again become a Swiss army knife that easily slipped into his front pocket. The Book became a small book of some sort in his back pocket. Now clad only in jeans he ran through the alley that became a garden area for the nearby homes and then across the street to the courtyard area at the rear of his home.

Once there he took only a few steps before the shock of what had just happened fully hit him. He sank down into an over-sized living room chair and tried to understand what he had just done. He had killed, had almost been killed.

He had been... possessed by some sort of power that he now understood came straight from Hell. His hands shook, his whole body shook. He heard a noise and it took him a moment to realize it was his sobs.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ambros Falk was not in a good place. There was blood on his shoes and maybe a piece of flesh. He did not really like this part. It was necessary, but he did not enjoy it the way Rath did. That man seemed to revel in the smell and feel of blood. To Ambros, it was just good business.

Ambros turned back to the chair where the half-alive body of what had been a former business partner slowly bled to death. Rath stood above him, blood dripping from his red, wet hands. His tall, gaunt body showed no signs of exertion, although he had just spent the last ten minutes progressing from simple beating to ripping out the man's intestines and playing with them in front of him. His mouth, too wide for his face, was split into a maniacal grin.

Ambros had the horrible idea the Rath was using everything he had to hold back from diving in to the man’s gut with that large mouth. A part of him believed that if he left, Rath would just dive right in.

He was wearing that stupid black wide brim hat. Ambros thought it looked ridiculous on top of his head, especially with Rath being so tall. It made him look like a clean shaven, demonic Abraham Lincoln. Why couldn't he just wear a nice suit like Ambros, look more professional?