Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (56 page)

Jason cracked a grin at that but then cocked his head thoughtfully and studied Henry, his dark eyes peering over the rims of his glasses.

“You can’t be that old—” Jason went silent mid-question as his gaze jumped to something behind Henry. He gripped his coffee cup tightly and the pink flush drained from his face.

Henry glanced back but only saw the three big men in bike leathers pushing their way into the diner. He glanced back to Jason, who was still staring at the men from over the edges of his glasses. He looked terrified.

“What’s wrong?” Henry asked quickly.

“Goblins,” Jason whispered. “They’re staring straight at me and they don’t look happy about what they’re seeing…”

“Don’t look at them,” Henry ordered, but it was already too late.

The men shouldered past the startled young cashier, intent upon Jason. Henry noted that the bald guy in the lead looked like he was packing a pistol. The bruiser on his left was shorter and thicker, while the thug to his right stood a head taller and sported a thick black beard.

Very briefly, Henry considered the number of bystanders and the tight confines of the diner. The fastest way to get out would be through the plate glass window at the front of the diner. But it would mean risking Jason being cut all to hell and Henry would also have to turn his back to an armed attacker. He hated being shot in the back.

He dropped his hands into his coat pockets. His fingers brushed over his flask, a piece of chalk, and then found the smooth surface of his switchblade.

“Jason Shamir, you want to keep breathing, you come with us,” the bald guy snarled as he drew alongside them. Jason kept his head down, his eyes fixed on the coffee cup that he gripped with trembling hands.

“Who exactly are you?” Henry asked.

“Fuck off, revenant. Or we’ll put you in a grave for good.” The bald guy snorted like an enraged bull.

Up close Henry tasted the black magic on his breath and smelled his hidden goblin body. All three of these guys had been transformed very recently and they still wore their human flesh like ill-fitting suit coats. Chances were, they weren’t yet familiar with their new bodies’ weaknesses.

The shorter goblin reached for Jason, and to Henry’s surprise, Jason slammed his coffee mug into the goblin’s face, knocking the guy back a step. The bald goblin went for his gun.

So much for buying a little time with small talk.

Henry bounded forward before either of the other two goblins could lay their hands on Jason. His switchblade glinted like it was grinning as it sliced through the tall goblin’s carotid artery and jugular. Blood sprayed and the goblin stumbled, then fell, bleeding out across the floor.

Henry saw the gun muzzle flash and felt a bullet punch into his chest. The impact kicked the breath from his lungs but didn’t slow his momentum. Behind him, one of the cafe windows exploded as the bullet tore free of his body and shattered the glass.

Henry’s switchblade flipped from his fingers and sank to the hilt into the bald goblin’s right eye. Henry jerked the blade free and the goblin shrieked like a baby in a fire. It crumpled back into a booth, convulsing.

Henry staggered for the third goblin, but it grasped Jason by the throat. Jason clawed at its thick fingers, but his pale face was already darkened to an alarming violet.

“Just let up a little there and I won’t hurt you.” Henry held up his hands for the goblin to see as he quickly folded his knife closed.

Distantly, Henry was aware of the people around them staring in horror. The cashier shouted into her cell phone for help. One of the cooks gripped a cleaver, his expression caught between determination and confusion. Henry’s own strength ebbed, but he fought to remain in the living world for a few minutes more.

The wet heat of blood seeped down his shirtfront as a deep pain spread through his chest.
It wasn’t really any better than being shot in the back, come to think of it.

“You don’t want to kill him.” Henry had to concentrate to get the words out. Already the Lost Mist was rising off him like steam; very soon the shade lands would reclaim him. “Just let Jason go. We can work all this out without anyone else getting hurt.”

“Fuck that,” the bulky goblin spat. “The runt’s better dead than back in the tyrant’s hands.” His meaty fingers clenched tighter around Jason’s throat. Jason jerked against the goblin’s grasp, but his strength was obviously fading in the grip of suffocation.

Better dead it was, then.

Henry lunged forward and grasped both Jason and the goblin. He pulled them through the broken window and down into the dark murk of the shade lands.

***

The goblin let out a shocked cry as it was wrenched from the living world. Jason thrashed against Henry like an eel submerged in alcohol.

A hazy, dank atmosphere enfolded them and the diner faded to shadows. As they sank deeper into the depths all sign of the living world disappeared. A twilight gloom surrounded them and black currents swirled over their bodies like rafts of rotting kelp. Jason shuddered reflexively at the contact. The goblin choked and coughed as its lungs rejected the deathly air, but it didn’t release Jason.

Henry seized the goblin’s hands and tore them from Jason’s neck. Jason fell, coughing and gagging, to Henry’s feet. The goblin made a dazed attempt to reach for Jason, but Henry shouldered it deeper into the darkness. The goblin staggered and then doubled over, heaving as if it were attempting to vomit its true body from the tortured shell of human flesh restraining it.

Not that it would have done him any good. The shade lands eroded all life, regardless of form.

Henry dropped to his knees. Jason stared up at him, white faced with the pain that every living being suffered in the shade lands. Fortunately, the atmosphere alone didn’t kill quickly; it drained life the way a pitcher plant ate through the struggling bodies of drowning flies.

The dark atmosphere even fingered the edges of Henry’s wound and lapped at his warm blood. But the dark didn’t worry Henry. The voracious hunters lurking within the gloom were another matter. Ghosts came in many forms and some were ravenous.

Slowly, dozens of luminous forms drifted out from the murky depths. They shone, translucent and tangled as jellyfish, all faint light and endless appetite. Some bore recognizable features while others had long ago melted into strange colonies of the hurt and hunger. Countless broken souls fused by a desperate need to reclaim even a sliver of life. Hungry ghosts.

The goblin flailed and screamed a long distorted howl as three ghosts clasped it in their tentacles and sank their needle teeth into its flesh, ripping away pieces of its muscle and drinking the living warmth from its blood.

Henry remained on his knees at Jason’s side. Reflexively, his bloodied hands found his flask. He slugged back a deep drink of his old poison as the ghosts closed in around him.

His tongue felt like ice and his throat tightened to a frozen trench as he swallowed. The poison spread through his bloodstream, chilling his veins like liquid nitrogen. Agony flared through Henry’s bones and ground into his muscles. But it felt so familiar he hardly noted it.

He’d died so many times now.

As one long swaying ghost extended a tangle of luminous tentacles toward Jason, Henry caught it in his frigid grip. It fought him, but the ghost’s need for life was only that of one young man lost in terror and still praying for salvation. Henry’s grasp was the void of a black hole, a chasm of emptiness torn in him by the countless souls he’d held and his own multitude of demises.

Henry drew the power from this ghost as well, drinking in its anger, fear, and even the faint spark of hope that had trapped it in the shade lands. Henry tasted the sick bitterness of love betrayed and a body tortured in the embrace of an iron lady. He felt screams rock through him and heard laughter answer his pleas for mercy. He took those memories and many more.

He drained away every agony from the trembling soul, taking them for his own, until the ghost ceased its struggle. Its fury dulled in his hands. Its cold light dimmed and at last it lay, no more than a helpless cinder, in his palm.

“Your rage is mine now and I will not forget the wrongs done you,” Henry whispered to the ghost. “Leave this place and let your sorrow be mine.”

He spat on the cinder and slowly it kindled to a hot gold light. Then Henry hurled it upward and it ignited like a firework, tracing brilliant streaks across the gloom as it tore free of the shade lands. And for just an instant, the darkness fell back, exposing a rolling landscape as white as bone.

Then the dank atmosphere closed in again.

The remaining hungry ghosts drew back from Henry’s reach, receding into the darkness. The goblin’s remains were stripped nearly to its skeleton. At Henry’s side Jason lay as still and wide eyed as a corpse.

Henry touched his cold cheek and Jason blinked.

“It was beautiful for a moment,” Jason murmured. He looked hollow and haunted. Then he asked, “Can I go home now?”  

Chapter Five

A searing acidic sensation flared through Jason’s muscles and then both darkness and pain rolled back from his prone body. His eyes watered as if burned by chlorine, but he still made out the familiar expanse of pale blue sky above him.

Falk’s silhouette loomed over him, seeming almost black against the sudden flood of sunlight.

“You’re safe, Jason.” Then Falk staggered and crumpled to the ground like a slack sail.

For one moment Jason simply lay in the narrow alley beside Falk, reeling between horror and disbelief. He didn’t even know if he could move his arms or legs. His entire body burned and tingled with numbness.

The sweet, rotten stench of trash surrounded him and black flies darted between a nearby dumpster and Falk’s prone form. Jason clenched his eyes closed. He wanted to howl from the turmoil that this day had made of his carefully balanced life. He’d wanted to sob like a seven-year-old boy. Anger, pain, and fear churned through him with a force that sent tremors through his body. Or maybe that was just shock, he thought. Maybe he was just going to have a nervous breakdown right here and now.

But he fought to keep his terror down—fought to keep a grip on himself and regain the control that he’d spent years mastering. This entire day had been strange and frightening—he didn’t even understand half of it—but falling apart wouldn’t make anything better. It never did, he knew that.

With an effort, he pulled himself upright. He’d lost his glasses somewhere in the HRD Coffee Shop, but as he gazed down at Falk, the battered man looked dull, as if a shadow had fallen over him, blotting out that luminous quality that Jason had grown accustomed to. The front of his coat was dark with blood and his limbs seemed oddly stiff, as if rigor mortis had already set in.

Horror welled through Jason at the thought.

Agent Falk couldn’t be dead, Jason told himself. But he’d seen corpses before and instinctively recognized the lifeless slump of Agent Falk’s form. Still, he didn’t want to accept it, because he’d just met Agent Falk—just started to warm to his rough looks and crooked smile. And if he was dead, then it was Jason’s fault, because he’d fought to protect him; there could be no doubt that those three goblins had come after Jason.

He can’t be gone. He can’t be…

Despite the clumsy numbness of his limbs, Jason groped at Falk’s throat, feeling for a pulse. When at last he registered a faint kick beneath his fingers, the relief that washed over him was out of all proportion, verging on pure joy.

“Agent Falk?” Jason’s voice sounded as rough as his throat felt. “Agent Falk?”

Falk opened his eyes. His gaze seemed far away and Jason couldn’t tell if he could see him or not.

“Agent Falk?”

“Yeah…” His response could have been a low groan, but then he dragged in a rough breath and went on. “I’m with you…Give me a minute…”

“Should I call an ambulance?”

“No…Waste of their time. Just give me…a minute.” He pulled in another ragged breath and a little color seemed to come back to his cheeks. He blinked and his gaze rolled to meet Jason’s stare. “I should be able to walk the worst of this off.”

“There’s blood all over your coat—”

“It’s nothing. Most of it isn’t even mine.” Falk rolled to his side and then slowly pushed himself into a sitting position. “I don’t know what’s worse sometimes, going or coming back.”

Jason wasn’t certain he wanted to know exactly what Falk meant by that. He didn’t think he could stand too many more revelations today. He already felt so helpless against the onslaught of weirdness that this day had been.

Falk scrubbed at his face as if he were just waking up. His fingers left bloody tracks across his cheek, but he didn’t seem to take note of it.

“What about you?” Falk asked. “Are you all right? You think you can walk?”

Jason would have laughed at the question coming from Falk in his condition, but in truth he wasn’t sure if he could even stand.

 When he tried, he discovered his limbs were alarmingly clumsy and weak. Still, he managed to rise to his feet. He swayed slightly and then steadied himself against the hard edge of a dumpster. “I’m just a little dazed and bruised, but I think I’m okay.”