Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1) (26 page)

I hoped for a quick, angry rush provoked by my words. None came and the shapes vanished from the air only to reappear twenty feet to the North. “Those you speak of will soon fill my belly, too. But they did teach us many things... Leave your circle, Atlantean, and I will give you the death you crave.”

Atlantean? I focused on the new area of icy ghosts. “Afraid of circles? That’s not old knowledge. I had to teach your mate that lesson myself.”

That did it. For a split second, the wendigo’s rage triumphed, the snow forming a giant wolf body on the ground near the center of the swirling faces. It leapt towards me, its humongous body clearing the gap between where it was and the circle’s edge effortlessly. It regained control mid-flight, but too late. With sheer will and a twitch of my hand, I forced the spear into flight, catching it in the flank. If it hadn’t broken its charge, the spear would have plunged straight through its throat.

I grabbed for the chaos blade and tried to stand. My legs were used to long hours of abuse, but this night had been too much. They refused and left me eye level with its massive snout. Up close, the creature was enormous, easily six foot tall and fifteen feet long. Bright blue blood poured from its side in thick, frozen chunks.

Its breath was fetid. “Leave the circle.”

I slashed out with a katana-like blade but it bobbed back just enough. It pawed at the edge, dancing around the circle, searching for an entry point, ducking whenever I brought the sword close. “You cannot hide forever, Atlantean. The cold will take you.”

I shouted back, “And you’ll bleed to death soon enough. That spear will kill you.”

In answer, it reached back and wrenched the spear free with its teeth. A gout of its strange blood sprayed the freshly fallen snow. It looked right at me, spear in jaws, before reducing the relic to toothpicks. “A mere flesh wound, Atlantean. Leave the circle and I’ll make it quick.”

I swung at it again, this time willing the blade tip a foot longer in mid-swing. It bobbed back, but not enough and the lime green crystal slashed through the meat of its nose. The wound smoked and sizzled, cauterized instantly to angry scar tissue.

It roared, more in annoyance than in pain. The creature darted back into the storm, away from the circle. “Hungry Winter is not without her weapons. Die, Atlantean, die.”

She turned back to charge. With each fall of her paws, the wind gathered strength. She stopped with a roar that turned into wind shear beyond anything I had ever known. My feet found it in them to stand, then kept on rising, the hurricane blast carrying me up into the air.

I crashed back down, not on my legs or my sword, but squarely on my head…and well outside my circle of protection. I’d record what happened next, but the blow was an instant knockout.

19

W
endigo, Hungry Winter, moved quickly, but cautiously around Colin’s circle. The Atlantean was down, crumpled in an impossible, defenseless position. Within seconds, she was next to him. With one great paw, she rolled her meal on to its back, the better to remove the heart from the chest. His eyes began to flutter open, but it was too late. She had won.

The meal muttered to itself in a language she did not understand. It did not sound like the usual whimperings and beggings, but this meal had always been a strange one. “Mind if I have a go at it, Colin? Or do you still think you can beat it without me?”

Whatever it meant, she didn’t care and plunged her teeth into its chest. Except it didn’t quite happen that way. A quartet of black tendrils wrapped around her maw, slamming it shut. She reached up with her paws to claw her mouth free, but they too were quickly enveloped by a host of tentacles. One after another, the tentacles burst forth from her meal: this one coming from his palm, that one from his armpit, another five from his belly...

Impossibly, the meal rose, standing her up, high and away from him. Wendigo struggled, but her opponent was stronger. With an effortless snap of his body, he threw her across the landscape. A trio of Shadowland trees checked her flight, but only after she’d gone straight through the trunk of one and put dents in the other two.

She panted. “You…you can’t kill me. I am Winter, eternal. I will eat you, Atlantean.”

The tentacled Atlantean paused to consider her threat. A twitch of a tentacle sent the glowing purple book flying from circle to tendril tip. “How unfortunate for you. Some fates are far worse than death.” He spoke in the ancient tongue before turning his attention to the tome. The language he read from there was older still, its intonations shrill and piercing to her ears.

She charged him as he read, a frantic leap carrying her into the midst of the mighty tendrils. She would never land, her body frozen in air momentarily, before vanishing as if she’d never been there.

Yog Soggoth paused to inspect the newly inscribed artwork of a great winter wolf, before closing the Necronomicon and beginning the retreat into the depths of his host’s body. “Let’s see how she likes ten thousand years in the far realms beyond space and time. Maybe dog ownership will help Cthulhu’s temper.” Yog Soggoth smiled at that, before collapsing to the ground. He was stronger now, but his pact host was weak…and the banishing spell more difficult than it should have been. He would have to trust to luck, and his host’s stubbornness, to make sure he, the Walker of Shadows, Lord of the Ancient Caverns of Insanity, Master of the Unfathomable Abyss, didn’t die of hypothermia.

Epilogue

I
was still walking with a limp when Valente’s Christmas party rolled around. The party was Inner Circle only. That meant two things: One, everybody thought they were a big shot; two, the cost of the buffet and bar could have fed all the starving kids in Africa for the next decade.

I wanted to think I was the exception to the inflated ego norm of the room. I wasn’t. I was on the arm of a beautiful woman considered dangerous even by the standards of these lunatics. My inability to discuss how I lost the top of my left ear to frostbite or where I picked up my limp made me mysterious. In absence of facts, rumors flowed. My favorite held that I had called forth an ice demon to snow under Wall Street for 48 hours, allowing Valente to avoid what otherwise might have been disastrous financial losses. I wasn’t about to correct them and not just because I wasn’t sure what had happened that night myself. In a room full of assassins, telepaths, and corporate espionage experts, professional demon summoner was a reputation to be envied.

Veruca and I were doing all right, though I’d hurt her feelings by not inviting her along for the wendigo hunt. I had told her most of what had happened, but I thought she thought I was holding out on her. Nobody likes a story with an unknown ending. We still got along well, with her spending most of her off hours in my apartment, but it felt like there was a distance growing between us.

I could have closed the gap, but I didn’t. I knew what Veruca was and accepted her as she was. She didn’t know what I was. Making a pact was one thing…but I knew now how woefully inadequate that description was for me. Yog Soggoth, an ancient evil from beyond the limits of reality, lived inside of me. I didn’t make a deal with the devil. I was the devil.

The night of the storm changed that relationship, too. For my part, I had finally come to grips with what I was: part-Harvard dropout, part Old One. For its part, Yog Soggoth understood his limitations. He needed me, though I’m not sure either of us understood why. It was like he had one tentacle in me and another still firmly anchored in his prison beyond the walls of the universe. Without me and my body, he might as well still be trapped there.

Something had changed regarding Sarai that night, too. I had poured through countless deceased Jane Doe reports, tales of women with amnesia, and other reports Valente had sent my way. But in my time in the Shadowlands, the time when Yog Soggoth and I were one, I felt…something. Sarai was alive, even if only in my dreams. Yog Soggoth had done something with her, hidden her somewhere, maybe even tucked her away in whatever prison Yog Soggoth had rotted in since the creation of the world. I still didn’t know what had happened to her, but I did know there was a chance to get her back.

THE END

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following acknowledgements will most certainly miss multiple people of great importance… You have my sincerest apologies for the oversight and my deepest gratitude for your contributions.

I want to thank my wife and daughters for their patience and tolerating those times when I disappear into the solitude of my writing. They are both my reason for publishing and my surest ground when I need to return to reality. Josiah, you missed out on this book (aside from a few kicks from inside a pregnant belly), but I assure you, you’ll have your chance to get in on future acknowledgements.

I want to thank both Yelena Casale and Tina Moss for their help in editing the book and their belief in my voice. I hope this is the beginning of great things for all of us. I would be remiss not to include all the City Owl Press authors and the group Facebook discussion for their encouragement and inspiration.

I certainly did not invent the genre of urban fantasy. While I first met it in the works of C.S. Lewis, I owe a deep debt to Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Jim Butcher, and Laurell Hamilton for developing both the genre and my imagination. If my characters are half as real to the reader as Harry Dresden or Anita Blake are to me, then I am honored.

I owe a debt to those groups of gamers who let me practice and develop my storytelling voice and the individual names would overwhelm the size of this page. Whether it was in my home, yours, or at one of our live action settings, I thank you for the opportunity and hope you all had as much fun as I did. Tim and Joe, I owe special thanks to both of you.

A special thanks to Norman Public Schools for giving me the time that I needed to finish this project.

About the Author

Joshua Bader is a retired professional vagabond wizard who now leads a much more settled life in Oklahoma City. He dabbles in the mystic arts of writing, mathematics education, pizza delivery, and parenting. He shares his sacred space with his wife, two daughters, three dogs, and a cat, with a baby boy adding to the chaos in April 2016. Josh holds a masters in psychology from OU, but his wizarding license has been temporarily suspended due to a suspicious frogging incident.

About the Publisher

City Owl Press is a cutting edge indie publishing company, bringing the world of romance and speculative fiction to discerning readers.

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