The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy (94 page)

A wind blows in from across the river. It’s almost as cold as HD’s breath, and I feel it now, for all my running. The wind lifts papers,
plastic bags and dust. It makes the whole mess dance, and in the middle of it all HD stands—not a hint of rhythm about it. It’s humanoid, hunched over. I can’t make out a face. Just the shadow. This is the Hungry Death—formless and, well, hungry.

“I’ll claw the flesh from your bones,” HD spits. “I’ll chew and grind and crush–”

“You’re nothing without me,” I say. “A Death brought so low that it is little more than a minor irritant. Do you think Water would laugh? Me, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“You need me,” HD says.

“Perhaps,” I reply. “But you need me even more. How can you be Death when all you are is detritus?”

It shifts.

But not far. I can feel it, in the park beyond the bridge. The Gallery of Modern Art, just behind it. The gallery’s great square structure rising like some temple to a god of sharp angles, iron and glass.

The lights on the bridge flicker. Bringing us in and out of shadow. But I don’t need vision. HD’s presence is so loud in my head, so magnetic, that I can’t help but be drawn to it.

HD slouches there in the middle of the park. Standing still, crows circling above it. This time I don’t run. I don’t need to.

Death waits for me, and it won’t need to wait for long.

T
he lights that border the park are strobing in time with the throbbing of my broken finger.

HD has moved again. Further into the shadows, I can feel its gaze upon me. I get intense and thankfully brief flashes of myself from his perspective. I know that I am either going to win this monster back, or it’s going to kill me.

“I’m here,” I say.

HD shifts around me. First to my left, then to my right. Shadow things dart down from the sky. There’s a detonation of darkness, a shifting night-bound form rises before me.

I am looking into my own eyes. A shade, a mirror thing.

Crows line his limbs, they cover his body like a cloak. They caw and they click and they groan. I stare into hundreds of beady eyes. It’s impressive, this living cloak of Avians, but also remarkably empty. Is this all HD is capable of?

“You need me,” I say.

The crows lift from its limbs. “No I don’t.”

“Yes you do. Without my form you’re just a concept. You’re too used to operating through others, generation after generation, we’ve bound you. And now,” I grin, “now you can’t handle being free. Look at you here, you desired this with all your heart. You tried your hardest to break free and, when it is finally given to you, you’re cowering in the dark. You’re the Hungry Death. You’re the nightmare, and yet you hide.”

Crows strike me, drawing blood, but I keep going. HD and I are wrapped too tightly around each other, it can’t hurt me as much as it would like. A bird strikes my eye. Something bursts, my vision darkens. But I don’t need sight. All I require is will. “You need me.”

I keep moving. Fluid runs down my face.

Fingers grab at me, and suddenly I’m being lifted into the air. I struggle in that grip, but can’t get free. The Hungry Death walks to the riverside and throws me in. Cold water closes above my head. I splutter, break the surface, and gasp for breath. I’m bleeding all over, I can only see out of one eye, at least a couple of my fingers are broken. My lungs burn in my chest. My clothes grow heavy, pulling me down. I struggle out of my jacket and swim to the shore.

HD hasn’t moved.

“Is that all you’ve got?” I snarl as I drag myself from the water.

He grabs me again, throws me back into the river.

I’m slower coming out this time, shivering and cold, but I still manage it.

“I’m going to keep coming,” I say. “I’m going to keep coming because I need you. I need you to stop Morrigan. And you need me. The world is ending, but it’s not your end. People are dying, but it’s not your death. You need me because your enemy is burning in the sky, and without me you are nothing but dust and shadows and bird shit.”

HD strikes out at my face, I duck beneath it, then spring up fists clenched and hit back hard as I can. It’s not ready for it. Its nose crunches beneath my knuckles. I’m shivering and frail, but I’ve just broken HD’s nose. The smile I’m grinning isn’t Death’s rictus. It’s mine, fuck it. It’s mine.

“You need me,” I growl, and punch HD in the face again, hard enough that its neck snaps back. “You fucking need me.”

HD tries to grab me, to hold me. But I punch it hard in the stomach, dancing out of its reach.

Crows swarm around us, like a cloud of gigantic mosquitoes.

I can sense their hesitancy, their unwillingness to come down in support of either side now I’ve shown that I’m prepared to fight, that I’m not done with yet. But this hesitation is only going to last so long.

HD kicks out with its long legs. It’s a movement almost too fast to see, but I manage to evade its clawed foot. With the punches that follow I’m not so lucky, but I’ve realized that it doesn’t matter. HD’s blows rain down on me, but they do not hurt. Not much. Not as they should when Death is arrayed against you. I swing out again, and knock the Hungry Death under its chin. It’s like punching a child. HD falls flat on his arse.

It weeps, the huge gasping tears of a drunk.

“Ape. Ape. You stupid fucking clever apes. I was DEATH! I devoured. But then you devoured me, your thirteen. So reckless, so mad. I was meant to devour. I am meant to devour!”

The sight shocks me. I step back a little. The crows circle us, a great dark mass blocking out the comet, and obscuring the city.

“You need me.”

“All right. All right. I need you. I am you. AND I HATE IT! Inside you I am all potential power even if it is constantly checked. Here…here, I am nothing.” He scrambles back against the low retaining wall. Garden plants behind him. “The sky’s too big. How did it get so big?”

I reach out. “Give me your hand.”

He does, without hesitation, holding mine with a desperation that I didn’t quite expect.

The air shimmers. I feel his presence enter me, the merest nail point of pressure. Then another. And another. A thousand tiny slivers, a million, and more. He slides roughly into every cell of me. HD doesn’t make it easy, but perhaps there is no other way.

Then those tiny slivers burst. The sensation’s worse than the roughest of pomps. Imagine every cell of your body being sliced open
by the edge of a sheet of paper: slow and long. Last time this process occurred in increments and even then it brought down a plane. This time it’s all at once and it’s horrible.

The lights that line the park flare then shatter. Glass tumbles—a brittle fractured rain. I fall to my knees and howl.

The cry that tears from my throat, raw and loud, stills the earth. It echoes back at me down from One Tree Hill, from the sky and the ground. It runs through my body like the memory of thunder. I gasp, one last weary gasp.

All is still. I can breathe again.

When I look up, I can see with both eyes. I’m whole once more—how did it ever come about that I required the madness of HD inside me to be whole? Crows cover the park around me, and there’s something unapologetically regal in their bearing.

“Awcus. Awcus,” they say.

I spit blood onto the grass, it sizzles there, as thought it were alive. “We’ve a war to fight,” I say. They lift into the air, a storm of wings and caws.

And I hear it. That familiar rhythm, the one that nearly drove me mad, but is now so welcome because it means we still have a chance.

The World Pulse beats in my ears. I’m Death again.

And people are dying nearby.

Pomps, my people.

I
shift into Queen Street Mall. Screams and shouts, gunfire and smoke, and all of it lit with the cold blue light of Hell and the comet.

The battle isn’t going well. Stirrers have taken control of Queen Street Mall, from the portal all the way up to the edge of George Street. Lissa’s at the front, her bloody hands closing around a Stirrer’s throat. I kick its legs out from behind.

“Their heads,” Lissa says. “Touch alone doesn’t do it anymore, you have to mark their heads it’s the only thing that works. It’s a bitch of a job though!”

Someone sighs, soft and sad, nearby. I turn my head. Catch a glimpse of one of my Pomps—Gale, North Sydney—having her throat torn out.

Lissa slaps her palm against the Stirrer’s head and it drops to the ground, just as Gale rises clumsily, a Stirrer now. Lissa’s ready. She brushes Gale’s brow and stalls her too.

I shift to her side—already people have come between us—and without a word, Lissa passes me a knife from her belt. I slide it fast across my hand. And I fight as I’ve never fought before. I shift and strike at the nearest Stirrer, then shift on to the next. I’m stalling them as swiftly as I can, and each stall is horrible and hard. But my appearance has made a difference. The tide of the battle turns.

I lift my hands, and a hundred crows sweep over my shoulder and into the melee. I follow, bloody fists swinging. The Stirrers fall back.

I can hear Ari yelling in the distance, her Welsh accent booming across the mall.

We fight and time passes in blood spilt and Stirrers stalled. I can’t tell how long, except that it feels both endless and over all at once, until there are no Stirrers left, just the remnants, their corpses bubbling. My Pomps let out a ragged cheer.

Lissa hugs me. “We could have done with that sooner,” she says.

“I came as fast as I could.”

“HD?”

“We’ve come to an agreement. Whatever Morrigan did won’t happen again.”

“So, you’re stuck with him?”

“Yeah, and I can deal. What happened here?”

“About half an hour after you left there was a rush of them through the portal.” Lissa sighs. “We weren’t ready for their numbers. Didn’t help that our dead ended up…you know.”

“Yeah, fighting for the other side.”

“Steve, it was horrible, I never thought I would have to do that again.”

It always is when it’s a friend. I kiss her gently.

“And it’s only going to get worse,” she says.

About a hundred Pomps stand by the rift in Queen Street Mall. Alex is there too. The whole mall has been cordoned off. Brace symbols glowing and marking every exit point. There are camera crews everywhere. A rift in reality is somewhat newsworthy, and rather hard to cover up. Though I’ve heard it’s playing havoc with their electrical equipment.

“Where did all the cops come from?” I ask.

“We’ve a response unit for this sort of thing,” Alex says.

“So you’re telling me you’ve had systems in place for this?”

Alex grins. “We’ve always had emergency response protocols—call ’em ERPS.”

“And I didn’t know about this because …”

Alex clears his throat. “Because we were a little worried that the emergency might be you.”

“Fair enough.”

“So … Morrigan’s back,” Alex says.

“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, Steve. Besides, it means I get a chance to kill him.” He slaps a round into the magazine of his gun.

“Get me everyone you can, Alex. I need to make as many Pomps as possible.”

“Yeah, there’ll be no shortage of volunteers. Morrigan’s little Schism, and the whole Rillman-Solstice thing. People are itching to strike back at that.”

“Tell them it’s bigger than that, tell them they’re fighting for the world.”

“I’ll get as many here as I can.”

An hour later I’ve doubled the number of Pomps on the ground and the Stirrers have stopped their assault on the breach. I peer through the portal, there’s nothing but the Underworld, not a Stirrer in sight, not even a soul. I’d feared that the dead might flood the living world, I guess they’re too busy escaping it.

Even more news cameras are among us now, it seems ridiculous that I have to waste a good twenty people to keep them back, and shielded with brace symbols. The triangle and the line are getting a good workout today.

“We were never going to keep this one quiet. It’s all over Twitter—#Queenstmaul,” Alex says.

“Do you really think you kept the Regional Apocalypse quiet?” He smiles. “At least we could pretend about that one. This, well, this is pure spectacle!”

I look at that glowing deadly portal stretching up into the sky, reaching towards the comet, I wonder what will happen if they meet. “It is, isn’t it?”

Standing here, I can feel Mog somewhere beyond the portal. HD stirs within me, Morrigan can’t be too far away in the Underworld.

Cerbo taps me on the shoulder, he’s quite pale, sickly even, and I guess it has nothing to do with the splashes of blood across his face. “When were you going to tell me?”

“If it became necessary.”

“Losing control of the Hungry Death, that wasn’t high on your list of things to inform me?”

“Look, it’s back where it belongs. HD is under control.” It grumbles a little inside me, but nothing more, and for that I’m extremely grateful.