Authors: Edward Lazellari
Like too many of her countrywomen, Ilyana came to the U.S. illegally from Russia to pursue a pole-dancing career. It was more than cliché—it was epidemic. The cotton rag in American money must slide softer on flesh compared with other currencies, Cat thought. There was something off about the girl Cat couldn’t quite put her finger on. Symian had targeted his victim well—her few friends were also here illegally and not inclined to go to the police about her disappearance. God help her Russian handlers if they tried to retrieve her; Hesz and Kraten would cut them to pieces.
Cat felt protective of Ilyana, but was stretched thin because she still had to tend to Tory. His crying became unbearable at one point … Hesz simply shut the bedroom door and instructed Cat to ignore him. Dorn declined to mention his plans for Ilyana. Catherine wished she could do magic—she wanted to cast a protective shield over everyone.
The clock ticked by slowly. Hesz read Malcolm Gladwell’s
The Tipping Point
, a book Cat had on her own bucket list. Perhaps he’d loan it to her before slitting her throat, she wondered. There was a deep, sharp intelligence behind Hesz’s bright blue eyes that belied his size and ugly mug. He was detached, patient, calm in a way none of the others was. The more time Cat spent around him, the more certain she was that he was not a zealot to Dorn’s agenda. Some other motive drove that giant brain and for now it was aligned with hurting her friends and family. Dorn was reading some very old parchments over a table stocked with Bunsen burners, a microscope, beakers, flasks, test tubes, powders, liquids, still coils, prongs, and the such. A small lead can with the radiation warning sat among the items.
As he read, Dorn popped back prescription pills like they were M&M’s, and his henchmen looked down, away, or at each other whenever their master did this, like a choreographed routine. Dorn’s health waned. His puffy eyes were glassy; his golden hair had lost its luster and thinned, sallow skin gave him a malnourished sheen. Cat wondered if the pills caused his decline or were holding him together.
Symian and Kraten returned with bags full of items to replace the ones they lost to Lelani in Central Park. Daniel had been seconds from death as of the last update, and all hoped Dorn would not need to use one of his special spells. It said something about the risk when Dorn’s own people were hoping against it.
“The lay pool is gone,” said Symian. His voice, soft yet stern, was like that of a father telling his wife their child had died.
“Gone?” repeated Dorn.
He clearly had trouble understanding “gone” as a concept. Dorn put fingers to his temple and tried to rub away a migraine. Cat was familiar with the pain—more than a headache, migraines fogged the thoughts, and light and sound bludgeoned you like solid objects.
“The witch,” Symian continued. He looked to Cat when he said this, as though it were her doing—like Lelani belonged to her. Symian was the most otherworldly of the rogue’s gallery: yellow where the whites of his eyes should have been with ink black pupils, grayish skin, and canine incisors. His hair was jet black and rough, like printer cartridge toner that had clumped together. How he moved through New York masked by only a ball cap, hoodie, and scarf was beyond understanding. He would never get away with it in another city. New York was still the best place on earth to be utterly alone.
“The lay line was gone when we returned,” he explained. “The pool all but dried out. We took what was left, but that spot will not replenish.”
“Where pray tell is there another source in this gods-forsaken city?” asked Dorn.
“It took us days to find that one, my lord. If we had a cleric…”
“Curse us for not including one when we went to kill, pillage, and rape people,” said Dorn sarcastically.
“There is a theory that magic can inspire laymen to accomplish great feats in its vicinity. I can search…”
So the all-powerful Lord Dorn was out of gas with no station in sight. Desperation would only make him more dangerous. Cat wanted—no needed—a break in the news from North Carolina. She was as antsy as her captors.
Oulfsan stood—that familiar preswitch look came upon him.
“My lord…,” he cried.
All in the room watched, like the man was about to explode. The switch that was normally instantaneous was drawn out this time. His face started the tiniest of expressions, an unfinished movement that looked to Catherine like the beginnings of terror. Then the man went blank. Oulfsan teetered forward like a chopped tree and hit the carpet hard. They turned him over—he breathed shallowly, his nose was a swollen broken mess, and his stare was hollow—no one was home.
“What happened?” asked Hesz.
“Was Krebe unconscious in North Carolina?” Symian queried.
“Even unconscious, he would have awoken alert on this end of the switch,” said Dorn. “Such was the nature of their curse.”
“Then Krebe is…,” said Kraten.
“Krebe is dead,” Dorn confirmed. He popped another pill and pounded on his temples.
CHAPTER 36
WE USED TO BE FRIENDS
1
Dorn looked over the last of his men on this world. His migraine had escalated—only two Treximets remained. If he did not get home soon, he would die a failure, forgotten in a foreign land.
How did it come to this?
No matter what, the Kingdom of Aandor could not be allowed to reclaim its rule over the other nations of the old empire. Farrenheil had worked assiduously for centuries to create a paradise free of the lesser races—those creatures that at one time or another had hunted men, or worse, in their disdain, failed to help when it had been in their power to do so; to allow the ogres, trolls, gnolls, frost giants, goblins, kobolds, and myriad of other races prey on men. The elevation of inferior races, a sharing of man’s knowledge, their power, their magic, was an invitation to doom the purity and dominance of mankind on his world. This could not be allowed. If Dorn had to die, he would not go alone. Prince Danel would accompany him into the afterlife—a fair price for ripping Dorn from his beloved Farrenheil … from Lara.
Strategizing through his migraine was like swimming against a strong current in icy waters. Dorn pointed at Ilyana and barked, “Prepare her!”
Dorn put on a full-length apron and long surgical gloves. He began mixing components for the compound. In a large five-hundred-milliliter beaker he put in water for oxygen and hydrogen, graphite dust for carbon, liquid nitrogen, calcium tablets, red phosphorus powder, potassium, sulfur, sodium, and all the remaining minor elements of life. Small bits of plants, weeds, tubers, fungi went in next—beside the beaker he set one of his mana stones and then lit the burner. The concoction soon boiled into a dark muddy green. Dorn opened two wrappings of sealed wax paper. In one, long white hair strands from a polar bear in Central Park, in the other the shorter gray strands of a wolf. The spell called for the hair of a single beast with follicles still attached. One beast. Dorn dumped both sets into the boiling mixture. In the reflection on a beaker he saw Symian wince.
“No mistake,” he told the half-troll. “The ancients kept the creature lines pure because they sought to preserve some capacity for reason. Our creations will be given but one single unyielding directive with no restraint in ferocity. We are returning to Aandor
without
these creations. Let this wretched world deal with them after we’re gone.”
What made this spell different was the nature of its accelerant. Radioactive isotopes as a catalyst would supercharge cell mitosis. Dorn whispered a spell to create a bubble of hyper-dense air around the lead container. It would protect him from the radiation. Opening the container, he removed a few small bits of fissionable material with some lead tongs and plopped them into the beaker. He quickly shut the container.
“The girl,” Dorn said. Hesz lifted Ilyana with one hand and lay her on her back with her lumbar region across the arm of the couch. With his powerful arms, Hesz held her legs and chest down. Dorn ripped off her micro skirt, exposing her midsection, and she screamed. He ripped her underwear off next and stuffed it into Ilyana’s mouth. Symian cranked the stereo to drown her muffled screams. Cat jumped up to confront Dorn, but Lhars grabbed her.
“Please, Lady MacDonnell … now is not the time for hysterics,” Dorn said. “You are about to witness my endgame … my final solution.”
Dorn sliced a line across Ilyana’s lower abdomen from right to left between her belly button and mons veneris.
“Sadist!” Cat screamed, struggling and kicking. “Leave that girl alone!” she cried.
Dorn produced a pair of long-handled tongs with tiny cupped ends and carefully inserted it into the gash. Ilyana’s cotton gag absorbed her horrific screams. What little noise she produced accompanied the soundtrack of her vivisection—“We Used to Be Friends” by The Dandy Warhols. Dorn peeled away her flesh, slicing deeper with the knife when needed, searching for his prize. He searched and searched, prodding through her guts, pulling everything out—to no avail.
2
“Leave that girl alone!” Cat screamed. But even as she said this, the thing that had nagged at Cat all this time became horrifically clear—the thing she would have realized much earlier if not for all the fear and tension distracting her—Ilyana’s large hands, huge feet—and Adam’s apple.
Dorn, agitated, continued to pull pieces of Ilyana out like a child ravaging a toy box for his favorite ball. Her cries of protest grew weaker until they were barely a moan.
“Dorn, stop!” Cat yelled. “She’s transgendered!”
“What?” asked Symian.
“She was born a man and changed into a woman by medical procedure,” Cat explained.
Dorn’s hands and clothes were covered in blood. Ilyana had gone completely quiet—her head dangled limply off the couch, her deathly stare pointed toward Cat. It was too late. From Dorn’s expression, one would think his head was on the verge of exploding. He stepped away from Ilyana as though repelled by something repugnant.
“My lord,” said Symian. “I did not know such things were…”
Dorn put up a single finger as if to say
not one word more.
“Find me a new source of magical energy,” Dorn said softly, almost too soft to believe given his disappointment and precarious mental state. Cat heard what was not spoken at the end almost as clearly as if it were:
And I’ll let you live.
Symian left quickly, as though his boss might change his mind at any second. Whatever the sorcerer had intended, Ilyana was pivotal to his plans. Maybe the guardians could turn this delay to their advantage, Cat thought. The very next moment, Cat realized she was wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. Dorn looked at her like a starving man looks at a roasted turkey leg. Whatever it was he needed from the tranny, Dorn had resolved to take it from Cat.
“I apologize, Lady MacDonnell,” he said, almost sounding sincere.
Hesz grabbed Cat and pulled her toward the couch. He placed his toe underneath the front of the couch, and kicked it up until it fell backward. Ilyana rolled off and onto the carpet with a bloody splat. Hesz righted the couch with a foot again and placed Cat in the same position over the armrest. Ilyana’s blood seeped into Cat’s clothing, even as Kraten cut her blouse with a knife, like a paramedic in triage. She was stripped to her panties and secured; Dorn approached with a smaller, clean scalpel.
“Oh God, please,” Catherine begged. She cried uncontrollably. “I’m pregnant. Please. Please!”
Dorn considered this for a second. “I have no intention of killing you, my lady. I simply cannot keep my promise not to
hurt
you.”
He didn’t cut all the way across her as he did Ilyana; instead, Dorn made a small, almost professional, incision on one side of Cat’s lower abdomen. Cat screamed—her voice drowned out by the stereo. The cutting was agony, layer after layer peeled away until he could reach inside with a fresh pair of tongs. When he found what he wanted, he severed it with scissors and pulled it free.
“A woman is born with all her eggs,” Dorn said to his men. He showed Cat her own severed ovum sac. “Thousands of them,” he said, “enough for her lifetime.”
“No!” Catherine wailed.
“Fear not,” Dorn said. “The conceived child is safe.”
Cat struggled against Hesz, pounding on his massive arms, but it was like beating on concrete pylons. “You son of a bitch! Give those back!” she cried. The pain in her abdomen was too intense and Cat thought she’d bleed to death.
Dorn produced a small vial and sprinkled a familiar white powder on Cat’s wound. It sizzled and burned like a motherfucker just like the time upstate when Lelani used it on Cat’s shoulder. The cut began to sew itself up. Hesz let her go.
“Why?” she sniffled. “You didn’t do that for Ilyana? You gutted her like a pig!”
Dorn rolled the vial between his fingers playfully. “The ingredients of this remedy include a phoenix’s feather, a basilisk’s egg, and the claw of a griffon,” he said. “This vial is worth more than this entire block of buildings. It is not for the salvaging of gutter rats. Being the wife of a nobleman has its merits. You and I are friends, after all.”
“Friends…? You cut out my ovary you fucking piece of shit!”
She spat in Dorn’s face, proud of the long hard stream she was able to aim true. He smiled and pushed her spit to his lips and lapped it in.
“There’s a satisfactory sense of irony in that soon, the good captain will be neck deep in his own murderous stepchildren,” he said.
Dorn handed Lhars a quart-sized flask to fill with Ilyana’s blood. He poured the blood into the mixture and it turned a muddy purple. Dorn read from the ancient scroll, his hands positioned on either side of the beaker like the open part of a clap, channeling his magic between them. The words Dorn uttered sounded ancient beyond time, simple, sharp, the language of men before they lived under roofs of their own making, the building blocks of all speech that was to follow. As the words exited Dorn’s mouth, they took on a power and purpose of their own, fueled by a spirit within the scrolls. Something took over Dorn’s voice, old beyond imagining; an intonation that could never share a world with men, released from a long sleep. Everyone in the room except for Dorn covered their ears. The sound cut through anyway, stimulating the most primal parts of the brain, the place where everyone’s inner lizard still resided.