Authors: Nic Widhalm
The car decelerated as Valdis navigated a wide turn, overcompensating in embarrassment. The priest squared his shoulders as the road straightened out, his eyes narrowing for a moment, then he let out a pent-up breath.
“I believe you. Not because I should, and not because I’m well aware that you still have a loaded gun in your holster. I believe you,” Valdis took his eyes off the road for a second to meet Jackie’s eyes. “because I saw the way that you looked at the Egg.”
“What?” Jackie said, her voice loud and false in her ears.
“I remember what it’s like, first learning about the Apkallu. I remember the way your mind reaches out and fumbles at the edge of the truth, desperate and angry to find the answers. I’ve followed that road since I was fifteen. It finally led me here,” Valdis removed one hand from the wheel, and pointed behind them. “To the castle. If I do nothing else in my life, it will all have been worthwhile just to catch a glimpse of that majestic building. Knowing that, I could hardly deprive you of your own journey. And, in the spirit of full disclosure—” Here, the priest paused, his mouth open, formed around the next word.
“You need me to bust him out,” Jackie finished.
“Well—yes. But I don’t think we’ll be able to accomplish it alone.”
“You’re Goddamned right about that,” Jackie said, without thinking. Then, hearing her own words, “Sorry, Father. Old habit.”
“Say three Hail Marys and help me save Hunter Friskin.”
Jackie laughed, the horse, hawking gasps of someone sleep-deprived and more than a little loopy. “Two jokes in the same hour! I must be a bad influence.”
Valdis smiled briefly, then his face grew serious. “We won’t be alone. But…we might have to do some convincing first. How’s your sales pitch?”
“Rusty, but I’m good at improvising,” Jackie said, patting her Beretta. She leaned back against the tattered seat and closed her eyes. “Now, assuming you don’t kill us on the way home, I’m going to catch twenty winks.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Again,” Hash said. “This time try avoiding my fist.”
Hunter grinned, his teeth slick with blood. Clenching his hands he tried to gain the focus, the calm surety that Hash had drilled into his head over the last month.
It wasn’t going well.
Begin with white
, Hunter told himself, repeating Hash’s mantra. White room, white curtains, white sky, white furniture. Eyes closed, he tried to clear his thoughts. He envisioned balloons floating toward the sky, popping as they escaped his brain. When they were gone the only thing remaining was the white room.
It wasn’t easy. Hunter’s first week, Hash had spent hours drilling the exercise into Hunter’s exhausted mind. Day after day forcing the exercise: thoughts, balloons, white room. Now, a month later, freeing his thoughts was a matter of seconds. If only the rest were as easy.
Combine your paradox
. Hunter couldn’t help a groan as he began the next step, sweat already beading on his forehead.
“Stop thinking. This isn’t a matter of mind,” Hash’s words repeated dully through Hunter’s brain. “Begin with the white space, and fill it with
everything
. It should be full, saturated, no surface left; the white consumed by blackness. There is nothing but black, not even a hint of white. The black purrs, it shakes, it consumes every last detail. There is no room. There is no white. There is no
mind
!” Hash’s voice whipped him as Hunter struggled to fill the white space. All his anger, his fear, his love, hate, despair, hope—every last bit of humanity painted the room.
“Your humanity is a shield,” Hash continued. “It’s a defense. A good defense, but still a
defense
. It can’t attack. It can’t heal. It can’t conquer. You are
Elohim
.
That’s
your weapon. You have to let your humanity fill you until there isn’t a drop left. Only then will it leave completely.
And there it was. The paradox. If Hash was right—and after the last brutal month, Hunter had a hard time doubting the man—this was the only way Hunter could control his birthright.
“I said
again
,” Hash roared from the opposite side of the room. Hunter stood in the middle of the wide, padded floor, twenty feet from his mentor. The room looked like the martial arts dojo’s Hunter remembered from TV, when he was a kid watching “Kung Fu” with his mom. In fact, the first time he’d entered the room Hunter unconsciously bowed before stepping on the padded floor. Hash had laughed, not harshly, and nodded. It was only later, once Hunter had spent more time with the squat, muscled man, that he realized his mentor hadn’t been nodding—he had been keeping rhythm.
It was a rhythm Hunter had become very familiar with over the last month.
Across the room Hash began to nod again, keeping time with the pulse repeating through the Domination’s mind. Hunter couldn’t hear the pulse. Not yet. According to Hash it would come with time, but he had said it with a queer lilt to his voice. Not lying. Hunter was familiar with lying. No, Hash had seemed…well, if Hunter didn’t know better he would have said Hash seemed afraid.
He first heard the lilt in the Domination’s voice a month ago, on their journey back from the
agioi.
On the limo ride from the cold, windy field Hunter had asked Hash what it meant, why Mika’il and Bath had argued so vehemently, why Karen had suggested another trial.
“Apkallu aren’t exactly common,” Hash replied, lounging against the opposite seat, his massive arms bulging as he crossed them. “The
Adonai
are weakening every day, they need fresh blood. Losing you, a Power, is a blow.”
“A Power?”
Hash nodded, looking out the window, gazing upon the snow-covered stillness of the prairie. After almost a full minute of silence Hunter asked again, impatience creeping into his voice
Hash blinked and turned back to him. “Sorry, you lost me for a second. Weird night. Let’s see, a Power: sixth order, second choir. Full of righteous strength and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” He smiled at the last bit. “No pressure.”
Hunter, still reeling from the soul-wrenching experience of the
agioi
,
only minutes removed, stared at Hash. “So, that’s it then. That’s what Bath was after: my order.”
“No. He wanted to know your
family
. T
hey probably had an idea of your order before the christening. Not tough to guess if you have the right tools.”
Hunter, thinking of the fight that Bath had tricked him into, nodded stiffly. Hash uncrossed his arms and leaned forward. “Hey look, you’re no slouch kid; we can always use more Powers. Might have been nice if you were a Domination, but still, better than another Arch.”
Hunter said nothing, remembering the look in Karen’s eye when she spat at his feet. Hash bobbed his head—even then, keeping rhythm—and sighed again. “Alright,” he said. “I guess you should hear it now, God knows it’ll be all over the cloister soon enough. Your christening wasn’t exactly…”
“Normal?” Hunter raised an eyebrow.
Hash laughed. “Yeah, you can say that. Your sigil,” he pointed at Hunter’s left arm. “It…changed.”
Hunter rolled up his sleeve and looked at the mark on his upper bicep. Before it had been loops and swirls, kind of pretty but nothing recognizable. Now, the swirls had morphed into triangles: three, connected in a descending vertical row, smallest to biggest. They were surrounded by a tight circle, and bisecting the pattern, a long, straight line. “Yeah,” Hunter said. “I kinda remember that part. So, that’s…” he searched for the right word. “Unusual?”
“Well, who can say? Things are always sketchy in an
agioi
, and a christening is stranger than most. The mark
should
change. Once. But yours…
”
And there it was. The lilt. Hash was definitely hiding something. Something was wrong with Hunter. Maybe he was defective, or inferior, or…
something
. All Hunter knew was Hash didn’t feel comfortable talking about it, and had refused the subject every time Hunter brought it up over the ensuing month.
“Strike!” The command penetrated the white, almost black space of Hunter’s mind.
Not yet!
He thought.
I’m not—
Hash’s fist slammed into Hunter’s jaw, sending him crashing to the ground. A grunt exploded from his lips as Hunter’s large frame collided with the padded floor. This wasn’t his first fight, though, and on his way down his foot shot out, tangling in Hash’s legs and dragging the grizzled old man do the floor with him. Hunter fought for purchase, his arms snaking through Hash’s iron grip, searching for leverage, but it was already too late. He hadn’t achieved his paradox.
He felt Hash’s hot breath across his cheek as his mentor ground Hunter’s face into the floor, his massive arms wrapped around his student in a bear-hug. Hunter tried to control his breathing as Hash had instructed, tried even now to complete the paradox. But as his mentor pressed his face deeper and deeper into the padded floor, Hunter felt a lance of pain streak across his white/black room, shattering the space like a thousand gray mirrors. Rage flooded his muscles, strength coursing through his pinned arms.
“No,” Hash stood up, and Hunter turned to see the squat man staring down at him in disappointment. “Not like that.”
Hunter tried to push away his anger, tried to remember the breathing exercise Hash had taught him. No use. Distant screams sounded across the dojo. The sweet, coppery scent of blood tickled his nose, sending his nostrils flaring. Red washed the room, and distantly Hunter saw Hash retreating back toward the single door, the only entrance to the training room.
“I said
no
, Hunter.” Hash’s words were dim and echoed, as if he were at the end of a large corridor. Hunter’s ears rang with the tortured cries of the wounded, the smells and sounds of battle flooding his pores. He launched himself at Hash.
Through his red filter Hunter could see Hash’s moves before he made them. As the grizzled giant dove to the left, Hunter adjusted his course without thinking and met him at the corner of the room, already ducking under Hash’s incoming fist, sweeping his legs from under him. Hash tumbled to the ground, and, their situations suddenly reversed. Hunter followed him, twisting the man’s massive arms roughly behind his back. His mentor swung his leg around Hunter’s calf, and pivoted, forcing Hunter to either release the squat man or allow him to break Hunter’s leg. But in his red haze Hunter wasn’t thinking—he was beyond thought, beyond motivation. His world had narrowed to kill or be killed.
So he let Hash break his leg.
Distantly Hunter heard rather than felt the sharp, dry crack of bone as Hash twisted against his student, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about the pain. In this moment there was no white room, no paradox. Just destruction.
Deliberately, purposeful, Hunter began to rain blows upon the back of his teacher’s skull. Hash struggled against the two-hundred and fifty pounds of muscle sitting atop him, and gradually his struggles grew from reasoned, planned strategy, to frantic thrashing. Hunter’s fists continued to drop, his muscles singing with each blow, his body responding in an almost sexual abandon.
This
was life,
this
was purpose. The fight, the kill.
Raising his fist high, lost in the final moment of abandon, Hunter never felt the blow that knocked him unconscious.
“…power…?”
The voice echoed distantly through the blackness, familiar and remote.
My voice,
Hunter thought, knowing at once this was a dream.
The car ride with Hash.
The vision swam from the murky dark and solidified into Hunter, head between his hands, feet tapping restlessly as the car sped through the crisp winter night.
A month ago. Has it only been that long?
Across from Hunter sat his strange companion, the brick of muscle that had stood next to Mika’il at the ceremony—
what did Bath call it? The…christening?
The man was shorter than Hunter, his skin a light charcoal and his head shaved, and was covered head to foot in rock-hard slabs of muscle. On another it would have looked bulky, disproportionate, but like all Apkallu, this man pulled it off. He was older, with faint lines already forming under his eyes and at the corner of his lips, but even that was somehow attractive.
He lounged in the limo seat across from Hunter, languidly drinking a brown, murky liquid from a rocks glass. “I know,” he said. “Confusing, huh?” His voice was deep, rough, like gravel on concrete.
Hunter removed his hands from his aching head, still sick with fatigue and nauseous from the drive. His body felt in two places; here, in the limo, racing through the dark, snow-covered prairie, and the rest of him back there, in what Karen called “the beyond.”
The man passed him a glass similar to the one he held in his other hand. Hunter reached forward, his fingers shaking slightly, and grabbed the drink. Before he could question what it was—God, he hoped it wasn’t scotch—he threw back the beverage in one quick gulp, grimacing at the taste.