Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1) (14 page)

“Given your past loves, suicide and revenge probably amount to the same thing.”

“There you are, I was starting to hope you were gone.”

“You wish. I just didn’t like playing around with the Oracle of the Unseelie Court.”

“You could have warned me,”
I pointed out.

“I didn’t know who Duchess was related to until after. And
…
wait a sec, where’s the Necronomicon?”

“The hotel, remember?”

“Why am I awake then? I wasn’t going to wake up, unless
…
oh shit.”

“What?”

“Colin, how long has it been this cold?”

“The Eye of Winter brought it with her.”

“Are you sure?”

I sniffed at the air. The foul sewage smell of her breath was almost gone. A glance at the half-burned candles showed they were back to a normal orange flame. But the cold was still as strong as when she was…I jumped to my feet, grabbing my athame and the nearest candle.

What happened next was a frantic blur, more reaction that thought. Even as I rose, a whitish gray mass like a giant snowball crashed down from the top of the rock. I flailed an arm, backpedaling. Something solid, cold, hit my forearm. The dagger ripped out of my grip. The whirling mass of snow and fur yelped and spun. My brain suggested teeth like sharp icicles were lunging at me, but the foe was as formless as a blizzard. I swung hard with my other arm.

Candle and hot wax collided with something. Fire sizzled out on contact. The wendigo screamed, a howling storm wind. It sprinted away, trying to escape. It should have kept coming. My weapons were gone, but the fire must have scared it. I tapped into my mental sanctuary. With a thought, weeds and branches on the upslope lashed together, blocking its flight.

Frustrated, it turned back to fight. This was my game now; its surprise advantage was spent. Three candles sat between me and its charge path. I shoved all the energy I could into tiny flames, willing them to life. I couldn’t throw a fireball, but amping up existing fire was different. The triplet of candles belched out a curtain of fire. The wendigo’s momentum hurdled it through the blast. What came out on the other side looked more hairless Saint Bernard than ice demon. Without its veil of winter, it was reduced to an oversize dog. I softened the mud under its paws, sinking it up to its belly. Its body temperature quickly froze the ground into a prison.

While it struggled, I ran to my duffel bag. I had to finish this now. An ancient evil might underestimate me once, but if it escaped, it would never enter the sanctuary again, no matter how well baited. I snatched out the mall-bought katana, yanked it from its sheath, and charged. I stabbed with it, silly me, and for one dread moment, I thought the sword would snap in two. But steel was steel and, under my weight, it plunged into the wendigo’s flesh halfway to the hilt. The wendigo yelped, then sank prone. Its black blood poured out on the ground in a sheet.

I collapsed to the ground. My left arm was numb, half-frozen from where the wendigo had landed on me. My right shoulder was complaining about the sword thrust and I suspected its complaints would only get louder. But my heart was still connected to the rest of my body and the wendigo was dead.

“Are you sure?”

I started to object, but I had seen my fair share of horror movies.

I groped around for my dagger, but didn’t find it. I grabbed my staff instead and forced myself back to my feet. I smashed the wood against its head. When I tried to lift it for a second swing, my shoulder firmly declared that was enough of that. My legs were relatively fine, so I gave it a solid kick. The third such steel-toe kiss knocked the beast free of the frozen Earth. With its belly exposed, I solved one of the mysteries of the evening: The hilt of my vanished athame barely poked out from its chest. I understood then why it had been so eager to retreat: its initial pounce had impaled it. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

Third Interlude

T
he hulking giant knelt deeply before his mistress, his feathery wings spread prostrate at Lilith’s feet. “The vampire is clever for one of his lineage. He is steadily resisting the temptations and...”

Uriel’s deep tone was interrupted by a loud popping noise, followed by a frantic high-pitched squeaking disguised as a voice. “My lady, my lady, I bring terrible news.”

Uriel growled, the death angel’s words laced with violence. “I was granted audience, imp.”

Lilith lifted one foot and pressed her spiked heel deep into Uriel’s muscular shoulder. “And the audience bores me already. You have your orders concerning Dr. Green. I suggest you follow them.” She turned her attention to the imp, her ember red eyes drilling through him. “Do not bore me, imp.”

The creature was more shadow than substance, giant oversize wings and long, lithe tail concealing the tiny devil-body connecting them. “An Atlantean, my lady.”

“There are many Atlanteans, foul slave. As I recall, there were seventeen million of them when their empire fell.”

The imp stuttered. “No, no…a knight, my lady. One of their knights is back.”

Lilith smiled, a thing of sensuous beauty, though all in the chamber realized how much more dangerous it made her look. “I know this. One of my best chaos demons escorts him even now. He is already pact-bound to us.”

“Not Darien, my lady. Another has come.” The imp trembled, desperately not wanting to be here. He was used to scaring, not being scared. His hissing voice was a near inaudible squeak. “The lord knight.”

Uriel interjected, “The Lords of Atlantis are gone, never to return. The Faceless Men did their job well on that count.”

Lilith ground her heel further in, a narrow crimson line now flowing from Uriel’s shoulder. “Hush, angel.” She paused. “The lord knight was a knight, not a true lord. He has been back many times. He is always too obsessed with his petty vendettas and his nymph to be of any real threat. It is that way with old souls. Fifty thousand years of mortal passions tends to render them distracted and useless.”

The imp paused, wishing it could have tricked someone else into delivering this message. “He has been brought into the game.”

That rattled the Queen of the Nine Hells. “What?” Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “He has made a pact?”

“Not with us.”

Uriel roared with what must have passed as laughter in the mouth of a merciless killer. “Heaven would not take an Atlantean.”

Lilith flexed her leg again, silencing him. “No, no, they wouldn’t. Now quit talking and just look pretty, muscle-boy.” Her eyelids fluttered shut, then back open. “You are sure it is the lord knight?”

The imp nodded, then remembered it was hiding its head between its massive bat wings. “Yes, my lady. He has made a blood pact with Yog...”

“SILENCE!” Lilith screamed, cutting him off. “Do not speak that name here!”

The imp coughed. “But how do you know who I speak of?”

“There is only one entity the lord knight of Atlantis would find common cause with.” She removed her stiletto from the death angel’s shoulder. “My husband must be told.”

No sooner was it thought than the dark lady, the imp, and the fallen archangel were in the grand hall of Asmodeus himself. When Lilith leaned over to whisper in her estranged husband’s ear, the assembled devils, demons, and forgotten gods of that gathering saw something not seen since a young Jewish carpenter had entered that very chamber, post-mortem, two thousand years ago. Asmodeus, King of All Hell, Emperor of Himself, Lord of the Abyssal Horde, and Rightful Owner of All Souls, visibly paled.

When he spoke, it was not to anyone in particular, as if he was reminiscing in private rather than seated on his throne before his subjects. “The bastard finally did it. Good for him.”

He turned to his lieutenant. “Bar the gates and triple the guard. I doubt it will stop him, but I’d like a few minutes’ warning before he walks in on us.”

Turning back towards Lilith, “The party is about to get started, my dear. Got another war left in you?”

The beautiful demoness, first wife to Adam, said nothing, only smiled. On the inside, she wondered if this would finally be the conflict that let her slip the dagger into her husband’s back.

Part Four

The female of the species

“You know the difference between Hell’s fury and a scorned woman? If you keep your wits about you, you might have a chance of surviving Hell in one piece.”

- Jadim Cartarssi, Planeswalker and Occasional Misogynist

1

I
was pretty full of myself as I made my way back to Dorothy. Not only had I cashed the biggest paycheck I’d ever seen, I’d actually earned it. The wendigo was dead. I had his severed head in my duffel bag to prove it. I am wizard, hear me roar. Never mind that I could barely walk straight or that my shoulder was dislocated. As I strolled out of the woods, I felt like a god.

The wind was knocked out of my bloated air bag when I got back to the parking lot. In the back of my head, I was worried about a park ranger ticketing Dorothy. The idea of cops or a tow truck showing up at this time of night was outlandish, but possible. But what I saw there had not even occurred to me as a remote outside chance.

Dorothy had been murdered. No other word came close to describing what had transpired. All four tires were not just flat, but shredded. The windows were covered in sheets of ice; the front windshield had collapsed under the weight. The rear driver’s side door had been torn off the hinges. Deep sets of four parallel lines gouged the metal in a helter-skelter fashion, looking like the claw marks of a dog digging in wet mud. Dorothy’s hood and trunk were crumpled like discarded paper and tossed several yards away from her corpse. Both bore a crescent ring of small holes that reminded me of a very large dental impression. The engine was a tangle of torn wires and hoses; it didn’t take a mechanical genius to see that not all of the parts were there anymore. Her heart, or the engineering equivalent, had been ripped out. Car-cide, plain and simple.

I circled the damage five or six times, trying to convince myself there was some hope of salvage. There wasn’t, not even if I summoned a horde of gremlins.

As the shock faded, anger rose to replace it. I wanted to resurrect the wendigo just so I could kill it again, very, very slowly. Failing that, I...

“Hey, Colin? I appreciate the sudden surge of homicidal intent, but...”

“But what?”

“Not all those claw marks look the same size. And those bite marks
…
its mouth didn’t look nearly that large.”

I walked towards the front end, avoiding the dark puddles of gasoline, oil, and anti-freeze as best I could. I didn’t have to look hard to confirm my fears. The marks appeared in three different widths—medium, large, and not-quite-Godzilla size. If there had been only two sets, I might have tried to justify it as the difference between front and rear claws. But three... I held up my hand for comparison to each grouping. I was fairly certain the one I killed had claws close to the large set, but well below the giant set.

I stumbled backward and crashed down on my butt. My balance was usually pretty good, but this was more than I could handle as rage mingled with fright. There were two more wendigoes out there, at least. One of them had claws that spanned well wider than the one I had barely, luckily, managed to kill. I didn’t know much about canine paw-to-body size ratio, but I suspected that meant at least another fifty to a hundred pounds of total body weight. Looking at the way the Detroit steel had been shredded, I decided most of that extra mass was muscle.

Why had only one attacked me? If all of them had worked as a pack, I would have been dead meat, sanctuary or no sanctuary. The one I killed must have found me first, but why didn’t the others pounce while I was finishing him off? I turned my attention to the smallest indentations. They were shallow, more insult than injury. If the biggest one was a hundred pounds heavier, the smallest could be fifty pounds lighter, barely more than a large puppy.

I processed the facts and found them unpleasant but satisfactory: the increased rate of attacks, the supernatural heavyweight scared off by a half-assed shield spell, the varying claw sizes. I didn’t like it, but they added up. The smaller marks belonged to a baby, a newborn wendigo out on its first hunt with mom and dad. The wendigoes...

“God, how I hate that plural.”

The wendigoes had been feeding more often to support the pregnant mother. When she ran from me at the store, it wasn’t because my magic was a threat to her…but it might have been a danger to the thing in her womb.

So what had I killed? It was male, a fact I had learned while digging my dagger free from its belly. Typically, in Earth nature, males are physically larger than the females. But I didn’t know if that applied to Shadowlands biology. Still, I leaned towards father rather than an older child. Baby or no, a mother would have rushed in at me to avenge her child’s death. But a father might be expendable. She wouldn’t want to risk her newborn to fight me in my sanctuary.

“Of course, we aren’t in the sanctuary right now.”

That got me back on my feet and moving. I loaded up what I could out of Dorothy’s remains, though a lot of my library was little more than papier-mâché now. I had unpacked some things into the hotel room earlier, but I was still going to have to leave a lot behind. Not wanting the cops to find my vehicle here, mauled and half-frozen, I removed her identifying marks. The license plate had been torn off and partially shredded, but the VIN number on the dash required a little effort with my Swiss army knife.