Shadowbound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Realm Protectors Book 2) (13 page)

C
HAPTER
18

The next time she touched him, he blacked out. But the visions in his head danced. Harold Storm dreamed of his father. Not the one he’d known to be his father — Gregory Storm, the ever-absent binge-drinker, the one who’d been
forced
to visit him while Harold transitioned from childhood into the formative teenage years. The one who couldn’t muster up a smile when his son had asked him to play catch on a beautiful spring day after the two had shared an uncomfortable breakfast that the young Harold hadn’t known was uncomfortable until he thought of it many years later.

That was the last time he’d seen Gregory Storm. Though he heard from him every few years. A postcard from Texas one Christmas.
Wishing you and your mom a Happy Holiday! Been working like crazy down here in Dallas. Hope to visit soon.

Then a letter three or four years later:
Tell that crazy woman to quit hounding me about the goddamned child support, Harry. Maybe you can talk some sense into her. Best from your dad. Will write soon.

Soon to Gregory Storm happened to be five years later in the form of a single letter from a lawyer when Harold had just graduated high school, the world at his feet, ready to start college the following fall. The letter was a request for a paternity test. A year before Mom had gotten the best of old Pops. The back child support he owed amounted to just less than fifty grand. And he’d be paying it for the foreseeable future, never able to outrun it. Man, he’d never seen his mother so happy, and of course Harold smiled with her. Hugged her. Handed her a tissue when she started crying. Hell, she needed the money bad. They had a stack of bills under the leg of the kitchen table so the damn thing wouldn’t tilt when they had their breakfast. And those bills were just the icing on the debt cake his mother had baked for herself.

Yes, that money would help, would be consistent. All was well and good, but Harold’s smiles were empty. He didn’t want money at all. Unless of course, it could buy him a time machine. Because all he wanted was a father.

Harold did not dream of Gregory Storm.

The man he’d dreamt of, he’d seen before. But the memory was hazy. He knew it was not a fond memory, but it was recent one. There was a lot of darkness. Smoke. A bobbing orange light. Then a sly smile and a flash. People screaming. Then clapping.

You’re a hero, Harry.

Guilt.

You’re a murderer, Harry.

Come home.

“I’ve been watching you, Harold, for a long time. Since long before you were born — hundred of years before.”

The feeling, the love the proudness, oozed from the man.

They stood in a dark room. A single lightbulb swung from high up in the ceiling, casting a faint yellow glow on the two men. As always in Harold’s dreams, his skin looked how it had used to. And the pain had vanished. Not even there as a dull thrum in the back of his mind.

“Even if you fail, Harold, you’ve done more than most will ever do in the entirety of their lives. You will not fail, this I know. I may have not raised you, but Denise Storm hadn’t raised a loser, either, no matter what you might think of yourself.”

Denise. It had been odd hearing that name. Of course, Harold had called her ‘Mom.’

“You will be tested, Harold. It will not be easy. I have lived through it.” The man took a step forward. Above, the glow shifted the darkness on his face. Harold could see his penetrating, smoky eyes, and a wispy beard that hung from his chin.

Harold tried to move towards him, but as it often went in dreams, he couldn’t move at all. That invisible hand of the Dream God held him back.

“And I have failed,” the man — his true father — continued. “But you’re a better man than I, Harold. I have no doubts about that. I cannot tell you how the test will go, I can only warn you.”

“Warn me? Have I not been tested enough?”

The man nodded. “You have, but if you are
Electus
of the Prophecy of Fates, as I suspect you are, then this test is just the first of many.”

Harold’s chest knotted. He was never very good at tests. The pressure got to him. They say pressure can make diamonds or burst pipes, and Harold had already been born with broken pipes.

“You will have to sacrifice one of them. You won’t want to, and it is not my place to influence your choice. That, you will have to make on your own.”

“Then why are you even telling me this?” Harold asked, but he never felt his lips move, or his vocal chords vibrate. Might as well have been communicating telepathically.

Now the light shined bright upon them like the rays from the sun. Harold tried to look up — no way could a single light bulb cast that much light — but his neck wouldn’t move.

He was forced to look upon the old man in front of him.

A smile set deep in the white beard showed proudly.

“Hello again, Harold. Seems like its been years since we first officially met on the beach.”

“Felix — ” Harold said in a whisper, one that echoed in the very emptiness of the room they stood in, now just white-washed.

“Yes, Harold. Your questions will be answered in due time. For now, I will only answer one. I am telling you all of this, about the test, about your future struggles, because I care about you…” There was a measured pause as the man looked at him with glossy eyes. “Son,” he finished.

Harold could’ve cried, and he no doubt would’ve had it not been a dream. “What will I have to do?” he asked.

“You will penetrate the city. But it will not look like the city you know. There will be terrible apparitions. Things they have conjured specifically to twist your mind. Things to make you weak and fragile and filled with emotions. They will throw everything they have at you. But you mustn’t let them phase you. You
must
get to the Gate. The path there will be easier once you pass through, once you accept your destiny. Your fate.”

“Pass through? What gate?”

“The Gate to Satan’s cell, of course. Only you can slay him, Harold.”
 

Harold said nothing. Couldn’t.

“’He who is born into the Pack shall drain the blood of the Dark One,’” Felix chanted from his memory. “The Prophecy speaks true and so far, Harold, you have lived up to it. And so shall you complete what is spoken within it.”

“Wait, what else am I supposed to do? How the heck am I supposed to find a gate? There’s a million gates in the city.”

“When you see it you will know. As for what else you are supposed to do, well, son, that is entirely up to you.”

And the light went off like the plug had been pulled from the sun itself. Then there was a clank.

Suddenly, fire swirled in front of Harold’s vision. A large gate shot up into the sky in front of him. From it, a long staircase made of rotten wood and crooked steps extended down into the blackness, like a terrifying way into a haunted cellar. Harold saw the branches of dark trees beyond the gate, how they curled and reached out to him miles away like arthritic fingers. He smelled the death. Heard the shrieking.

Daddy, daddy, daddy. I’m lonely. Come play. Mommy said you would.

That voice, a child’s voice, raked across his brain, and Harold screamed himself awake.

When his vision focused, a great green man looked down upon him with eyes that hung from its sockets like a broken toy.

Harold could hardly control his screaming.

C
HAPTER
19

“They really did a number on her,” the woman who looked like a corpse said. Known as Cindy in the seventies. But Harold knew Cindy wasn’t the only name she had gone by for however long she’d been decade hopping.

Harold now knew her as the Grand Witch. Though, like his friend’s parents as a child, he didn’t know what to call her. He just avoided calling her anything at all. She frightened him, and asking questions that seemed so pointless in the grand scheme of things, like what he should call her, would only piss her off. And Harold had no intention of pissing off what looked like a really intelligent Zombie surrounded by a legion of mutants.

“The venom surges through her body attacking her cells. This is not good. Not good at all,” the Grand Witch said. “I’ve not seen such a case.”

The persona of Cindy had vanished with the mutton chops and a much younger version of Chet, the bartender. Harold had a hard time looking at her. That pale, swiss cheese-skin, those sunken, black rimmed eyes. Thankfully, she didn’t smell as bad as she looked. And outward appearance didn’t matter; the only thing that mattered was if her brain was as rotten as her flesh.

Harold reckoned it wasn’t. Sahara was a smart woman even in death, and she wouldn’t direct Harold here without good cause. But the oddity of the entire experience — the time travel, the mutants, the idea of seeing, feeling, smelling, tasting, everything in the entirety of Existence — did much to persuade him to just tuck tail and run.

But he had to remember he was not the old Harold anymore. And with each passing moment the world pressed heavier on his shoulders, he grew stronger and weaker at the same time.

The Grand Witch leaned in closer to the open black Audi. Sahara looked like a soaked piece of cardboard stuck to the leather backseat. Her red hair had seemed to lose its vibrant color; it had faded to an ashy, shell of its old self.
 

How it might look in a nightmare, Harold thought.

Sahara’s hand flopped into the Witch’s. She brought it closer to her face. Fingers traced the black snakes running along her forearm.

She sighed, turned her head to Harold.

Harold recoiled without knowing. Something…just unsettled him about the Witch.

“You can call me Roberta, Harold. Roberta Washington. That is my name. I know you are wondering.”

Harold narrowed his eyes. Had she been able to read minds, too? All along?

“It is the first name I remember. A name that burned in Salem with the rest of my coven. 1693, but I remember it vividly.”

“Roberta…that’s a nice name.”

“Thank you, Harold. You are too kind.” She turned her head back towards Sahara. “Come we must purge her of the venom.” She snapped her fingers, and two of the green mutants —
Squeebs, she called them,
he thought — reached into the car and pulled Sahara out as if she were a bag of groceries.

One of the green humanoid things had a dark mark near its upside down lips. Harold felt the jolt of guilt rock him. He wanted to apologize, but the thing didn’t seem to remember their little tango, didn’t remember the harsh uppercut Harold had thrown at him in the toxic water. Maybe he was grateful. That mark actually did well to draw the eyes away from the rest of its unnatural face.

And the one with the mark along with the one whose eyes hung from their coiled optic nerves like a pair of fuzzy dice from a rearview mirror, pulled Sahara free with ease. Then the one Harold had punched adjusted and held her like a baby.

Harold reached out towards her, touched the blackening skin of her left arm. It burnt with a warmth like a devilish fire; a fire Harold had felt lick against his skin in the coliseum surrounded by Demons and crazed Shadow Eaters.

The mutant pivoted, brought Sahara closer to his glistening green flesh. “
Fren,”
he said.

Harold’s fingers clenched into a fist.

“He means friend,” the Witch said. “The toxins have muddled his speech. He likes you, Harold.”

“Friend?” Harold said, heart thumping inside of his chest.

The Witch started to head towards the rundown building formerly known as the Lake, Old Hanging Eyeballs trailing closely behind her like a puppy.

“
FRENNNNN!”
the mutant bellowed.

Now the guilt burned deep inside of Harold. He let his head fall down, and shook it. “Friend,” he returned. And something like a frown passed over the mutant’s face, which if Harold had been hanging upside down, he would’ve seen how happy of a smile it was.

The mutant turned and followed the Grand Witch.

Soon they were back inside of the Lake. Sahara was sprawled out on a table that looked so old and creaked so loud that Harold was sure it would buckle under her mass. Surprisingly it didn’t.

Roberta nodded towards the mutants, and they nodded back and the two of them hobbled toward the lake. Harold glanced out of a cracked window and saw the two of them join the ranks of what looked like a great, green wall surrounding the building.

“Now, Harold,” Roberta said, “this will be messy and unpleasant and all manners of gross. I advise you to leave.”

Harold looked onto the corpse giving him orders and thought if he could stomach the presence of her, he could stand whatever was going to happen to him now. Then he remembered her telling him her name, like she’d read his mind, and his thoughts quickly shifted to something else. Nothing good. He thought of the gate from his dreams. Those black branches curling, closing in on him, wrapping their harsh limbs around his throat, squeezing with force a million times greater than that of a possessed Vampire.

He closed his eyes, took a shaky breath. He’d be alright. He could handle it.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Protector.”

She turned away from him, showing him that white hair that hung scraggly down the rippled flesh of her back as she opened a cabinet under a counter and dug through its contents. Harold watched her muscles flex under the black dress she wore, tattered and chewed on by the maggots.

Something you’d get buried in four-hundred or so years ago,
Harold thought.

He would’ve leaned in closer because he swore the clothing had been a little crisped, like maybe a certain group of frightful Colonials had tied her to the stake and burned her in that very dress, but the fear was too great. Her back was turned to him, yes. But there were eyes in the back of her head. She was all-knowing, all-seeing.

Harold slowly learned to never underestimate a Witch.

When she turned back, she held a few lengths of a chain. She tossed him a couple which flew at him with enough force to make him dodge out of the way, and they landed amongst a pile of broke, rotting wood, and coiled like metal snakes.