The Beast That Was Max (29 page)

Max nodded to himself. He might not know how to stop the twins' father, but he knew someone who might have an answer. He just needed a flow of blood and water. And a mother who cared enough to come across worlds to offer help.

Max went to his car and drove off, hunting for a source of blood. The Beast danced in the haze of pain behind Max's eyes.

~*~

Corners flashed by, mostly abandoned, locked in cold darkness illuminated by lonely streetlamps. Prostitutes ventured through snow and ice when he slowed to cruise by them, cursed when he sped off. A parked tractor-trailer with a driver slouched against the truck cab window tempted him. A police cruiser turning back toward the highway tugged at his restless rage and reckless instincts. He had counted all of their professions among the victims demanded by his work and his appetite, at one time or another, but hesitated now to pursue any of them for his need. The Beast jumped at the sight of each, just as his reason urged him to get on with what he had to do. They were all meat for the slaughter. They all held the blood he needed to summon a spirit. But something held him back from making the necessary sacrifice, and it was neither pain nor weariness.

Max shook his head, irritated by his paralysis, angered by the apparent birth of a drive to kill for a reason beyond his personal necessity. Even saving the twins was not enough. And though the Beast, in its ghost state, was strong enough to aid him in his work, it lacked the power to drive him into the state of frenzy he needed to be in to kill indiscriminately. It was as if the glimpse of Pale Fox's torment over the loss of his twin, and the god's abandonment of any reality except the one in which he could find her again, had driven a wedge between Max and his appetites.

Max's grip on the steering wheel tightened as a realization struck him. He did not want to kill an innocent. He did not want to follow Pale Fox's path and drag in a helpless bystander, like the man whose body Pale Fox had possessed, to get what he wanted. He needed to find someone that needed killing.

Without thinking, he drove toward a block well-lit by a yellow corner bodega sign, a bar, and closed pawnshop and used furniture and clothing warehouse. He parked on a corner around the block, within sight of the bar. Waited. A tall, husky blond man singing and waving a short pea coat over his head emerged, accompanied by two shorter, stocky men laughing, kicking at street debris, throwing snowballs at the singer. A bus pulled in to the corner, obscuring them for a few moments. When it pulled away, they had quieted. A woman, bundled up in a long coat and hat, carrying a pharmacy bag, quickly crossed the street in front of Max and headed up a quiet block of six-story apartment buildings. The blond man put on his coat. They spoke among themselves, then split up, the blonde leading while the other two trailed on either side of the street as they went after the woman.

Max turned off the headlights and followed them through the cold, abandoned streets.

They caught her as she fumbled with keys at the door to an apartment building. While two kept watch on the street, the blonde jumped up the steps to the entrance and hooked his arm around her neck. Her cry was choked off and she was dragged off her feet, swept down the stairs, surrounded by the others, and carried struggling down the street. The pharmacy bag and its contents lay strewn across the stairs. She had no chance to cry out. Max was reminded of wasps stinging a worm into paralysis and dragging it off to plant eggs in the body.

They took her into an alley between two buildings, one shuttered and abandoned, the other closed tightly with curtains and blinds against the night. By the time Max reached the alley mouth they had beaten her into stillness and removed her coat. The woman was sprawled across garbage bags, half in the light from the streetlamp facing the alley. Her jeans were pulled down below her hips, sweatshirt rolled up to her shoulders, breasts flattened against her body, brown face bloodied, eyelids fluttering. The men jostled around her, glancing up occasionally at the windows shut and gate-locked against winter, thieves, and the stench of garbage. Max ducked back, anticipating one of the men looking back at the alley entrance. Moments later, Max looked back in. Night sucked the harsh sound of the three men's breathing out of the air.

Max raced his shadow to come up behind the closest man to the mouth of the alley. He snaked his hand under the chin, pushed his knee into the back of the man's knee, pulled with one hand clenching the back of the coat, and pushed with the chin hand. As the man flailed and gasped with sudden vertigo over the shift of balance, Max drove the head into the brick wall. The man groaned as he slid, stunned, to the ground. Turning, Max caught the second man charging with a kick to the knee. As the second man staggered forward, grimacing, a quick side step and arm trap gave Max the advantage. He led the assailant into the same brick wall into which he had thrown the first man.

Max sank at the knees slightly and raised his hands as he caught sight of the third man as a blur of motion coming quickly up on him. The attacker's fist deflected off Max's raised shoulder. Max redirected the blow past his face with one hand, reached low with the other as the man's solid body crashed into him. Max sank deeper, letting the man roll up on his shoulder. His high hand grabbed hold of the attacker's lead arm; his low hand hooked around the crotch. Max pulled, pushed, stood up. The third attacker, carried by his momentum, went up easily in Max's arms. He cursed, and the smell of alcohol blew out with his condensing breath. Max flipped him over, sent him to the ground headfirst, hard. Bone cracked. Fluid and blood dribbled from torn skin and a broken skull, staining the man's blond hair and making it clump.

The Beast howled with its victory, though Max had hardly needed to call on its rage and power. Without a god to lend them power and overcome their drunkenness and lack of skill, they were no match for Max. An invigorating rush of energy washed through Max, a consequence of the Beast's elation. Max took a deep breath and savored the partial and temporary relief from pain and exhaustion.

The fight had been quick and quiet, and no one had been alerted. Max wondered if anyone would have noticed if there had been noise. He went to the woman. She opened her eyes, stared at Max. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but the Beast lurked behind his eyes, twisted his lips into a sneer, rumbled in his throat. Her fingers dug through the taut plastic of the bags under her. Her mouth opened, eyes widened. Her feet sank between the garbage bags as she tried to push herself away from him. The scream was coming, rushing out just behind the terror contorting her brown face and blinding her vision. Max raised his fist. The blow was sudden and unexpected, he was certain. She would never be able to separate his face from the other three and describe it accurately.

The Beast rose up, ravenous. Max's erection pushed unexpectedly against his pants. The woman's legs were spread apart, and her panties dug into the flesh below her belly. The scratches on her breasts inflamed the Beast; the puffiness around her eyes and the bloody cuts on her face incited wild appetites, promised savage pleasures. The Beast's call was answered by his own lusts, and Max took a step toward the woman while his hands fumbled with his pants.

He remembered the twins and his love; Chiao and her warning about letting love and fear lead him; Pale Fox and the god's terrible need; his pledge not to sacrifice innocents. Max hesitated. The Beast rode over his resolve, but Max hung on. He turned, stepped to the alley wall, punched bricks once, twice. Hanging on to the pain, Max wrestled the Beast down into darkness. His own desires he swallowed, until his gorge rose and he had to vomit thin and bitter acid. Stomach fluttering, Max went back to the woman and pulled her clothes together with trembling hands. He replaced her coat, found the little purse she had carried in a pocket, as well as keys, and put them in her hands.

One of the attackers moaned, and Max went to the two shorter men and knocked their heads into the wall again, until only soft breathing escaped their slack mouths. The big blond man was dead. Max dragged him farther back into the alley, where a snowdrift accumulated against the back wall. He set a fire in a small trash pile he built in the drift. Snow melted, water flowed. Max dragged the dead man to the drift, cut a gash in his throat, and let blood join the water's flow.

"Chiao," Max whispered. He listened for sirens, for the sound of a car on the street.

The old woman came after a few minutes, pale, transparent, veined with rivulets of blood. She looked like the dream she had claimed to be, her form shifting and wavering two feet off the ground.

"The god is stronger than I am," Max told her.

"My daughters . . . not safe. . ."

"I know. I tried to save them, but I don't have the power. Can you help me? Enter me, give me some of your strength?"

“. . . restless sleep . . . can't. . ."

Max kicked a garbage bag. "Call on another part of yourself, Chiao. A warrior, or a magician, or something useful."

“. . . too far . . ."

"Too frightened." Max glanced at the man he had sacrificed to call the god, wondering if he should have gone through all the trouble. "Give me something, damn it! You warned me, but gave me nothing to fight him with. What can I do to stop Pale Fox?"

". .. trick. . ."

"Trick? What kind of trick?

". . . trick the trickster. . ."

"How? With what?"

".. . his pride . . . his need. . ."

"What does he need?"

“... everything . . . my. . . daughters .. . his . . . sister . . . a host . . ."

"The man he's using, Legba's follower, his body's being used up. The eyes are gone, and some skin. But I can't wear Pale Fox down. He'll kill me before I finish the job."

“. . . make an offering . . . draw him out. . ."

"Another body?"

“. . . a form . . . a soul . . . to be. . . possessed. . .”

“But I don't want him stronger, damn it!"

“. . . catch him . . . in form . . . he cannot use . . .”

“A dead body?"

“... won't come to death . . . only life . . ."

"So what are you saying? Tell me—"

“—offer ... what he needs . . . but in . . . stranger … when he comes . . . take it away . . . he will be caught .. . in between . . . trapped ... in soul . . . follow it ... as he followed me ... to his death . . ." Chiao drifted toward him, reached out with curled fingers, faded before she could touch him. A mist of water and blood settled to the ground.

Max glanced at the bodies in the alley, still searching for a plan. The only one that occurred to him was to somehow trick the god into believing the woman was one of the twins, lure him into trying to plant his seed in her, and somehow kill the host body while the god was distracted. The woman's chances of survival seemed poor. He shook his head, dismissing the thought.

Max left the alley to retrieve the Buick. He opened the trunk, laid out the thick plastic he kept for blood work, hog-tied the smaller of the unconscious men, and put him in the trunk with a half-formed hope of using his soul to bargain with Pale Fox. As an afterthought, almost as a part of his habit of cleaning up after his pleasures, he put the dead man in, as well. The third he bound, gagged, and secured to a drainpipe bolted into the wall. After closing the trunk and starting the car, he went back and roused the woman by pressing snow against her face. He left before she fully regained consciousness, and before the Beast could further inflame him with its appetites. On the drive back to Pale Fox's hiding place, Max could think only of Kueur and Alioune.

~*~

The building was silent when Max returned, dragging the two men in with him. He brought them to the foot of the stairs, checked once again on the one still alive, tugging at the binding knots, went upstairs.

The twins were sitting naked, cross-legged and opposite one another in front of a single fire drum. The others had been overturned and their fires had spilled out and extinguished on the concrete floor. The twins' heads were bowed, their hands upturned in their laps. They might have been meditating, except for cuts, bruises, swollen joints, and the blood splattered over their bodies and faces. Pieces of foreign flesh clung to their bodies, and their mouths were framed by gore. Even from a distance, Max could see them trembling.

Pale Fox was not sitting with the twins. Max peered into the shadows, careful to stay in them, until he found the god silently pacing at the far end of the floor, appearing and disappearing behind a massive machine that reached nearly to the ceiling. Pale Fox made no sound until one of the twins moaned.

"Shut up!" Pale Fox screamed. Long, limping strides took him out of the darkness, into the flickering light. His body was ravaged: burned patches of skin across his back and chest flapped in the air; several fingers and the tip of his nose were gone; bone lay exposed at his cheek, the top of his head, and at an ankle. Dried blood and viscous, white fluid surrounded his wounds.

"Bitch," he continued, standing over Kueur, sniffing the air through his ruined nose. "What can I do now?" To Alioune he said, "Kill you? Is that what you want?"

Kueur managed to spit at Pale Fox. It was then, watching her thin spray of saliva strike the god, that Max noticed Pale Fox's genitals had been ripped away. A wide gash lay open between his legs, dark and moist with blood.

"You think you've won," Pale Fox continued. "But you should pray I find a way to plant my seed in you before this body dies. Because if I can't," he said, kneeing Kueur's head, "I'll leave you crippled and helpless, waiting for my return. And I will come back. If I have to drive my own followers across the ocean, I will come back. Now that I've found you, my sweet daughters, I'll never let you go."