Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1) Read online

  “Not Darien, my lady. Another has come.” The imp trembled, desperately not wanting to be here. He was used to scaring, not being scared. His hissing voice was a near inaudible squeak. “The lord knight.”

  Uriel interjected, “The Lords of Atlantis are gone, never to return. The Faceless Men did their job well on that count.”

  Lilith ground her heel further in, a narrow crimson line now flowing from Uriel’s shoulder. “Hush, angel.” She paused. “The lord knight was a knight, not a true lord. He has been back many times. He is always too obsessed with his petty vendettas and his nymph to be of any real threat. It is that way with old souls. Fifty thousand years of mortal passions tends to render them distracted and useless.”

  The imp paused, wishing it could have tricked someone else into delivering this message. “He has been brought into the game.”

  That rattled the Queen of the Nine Hells. “What?” Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “He has made a pact?”

  “Not with us.”

  Uriel roared with what must have passed as laughter in the mouth of a merciless killer. “Heaven would not take an Atlantean.”

  Lilith flexed her leg again, silencing him. “No, no, they wouldn’t. Now quit talking and just look pretty, muscle-boy.” Her eyelids fluttered shut, then back open. “You are sure it is the lord knight?”

  The imp nodded, then remembered it was hiding its head between its massive bat wings. “Yes, my lady. He has made a blood pact with Yog...”

  “SILENCE!” Lilith screamed, cutting him off. “Do not speak that name here!”

  The imp coughed. “But how do you know who I speak of?”

  “There is only one entity the lord knight of Atlantis would find common cause with.” She removed her stiletto from the death angel’s shoulder. “My husband must be told.”

  No sooner was it thought than the dark lady, the imp, and the fallen archangel were in the grand hall of Asmodeus himself. When Lilith leaned over to whisper in her estranged husband’s ear, the assembled devils, demons, and forgotten gods of that gathering saw something not seen since a young Jewish carpenter had entered that very chamber, post-mortem, two thousand years ago. Asmodeus, King of All Hell, Emperor of Himself, Lord of the Abyssal Horde, and Rightful Owner of All Souls, visibly paled.

  When he spoke, it was not to anyone in particular, as if he was reminiscing in private rather than seated on his throne before his subjects. “The bastard finally did it. Good for him.”

  He turned to his lieutenant. “Bar the gates and triple the guard. I doubt it will stop him, but I’d like a few minutes’ warning before he walks in on us.”

  Turning back towards Lilith, “The party is about to get started, my dear. Got another war left in you?”

  The beautiful demoness, first wife to Adam, said nothing, only smiled. On the inside, she wondered if this would finally be the conflict that let her slip the dagger into her husband’s back.

  Part Four

  The female of the species

  “You know the difference between Hell’s fury and a scorned woman? If you keep your wits about you, you might have a chance of surviving Hell in one piece.”

  - Jadim Cartarssi, Planeswalker and Occasional Misogynist

  1

  I was pretty full of myself as I made my way back to Dorothy. Not only had I cashed the biggest paycheck I’d ever seen, I’d actually earned it. The wendigo was dead. I had his severed head in my duffel bag to prove it. I am wizard, hear me roar. Never mind that I could barely walk straight or that my shoulder was dislocated. As I strolled out of the woods, I felt like a god.

  The wind was knocked out of my bloated air bag when I got back to the parking lot. In the back of my head, I was worried about a park ranger ticketing Dorothy. The idea of cops or a tow truck showing up at this time of night was outlandish, but possible. But what I saw there had not even occurred to me as a remote outside chance.

  Dorothy had been murdered. No other word came close to describing what had transpired. All four tires were not just flat, but shredded. The windows were covered in sheets of ice; the front windshield had collapsed under the weight. The rear driver’s side door had been torn off the hinges. Deep sets of four parallel lines gouged the metal in a helter-skelter fashion, looking like the claw marks of a dog digging in wet mud. Dorothy’s hood and trunk were crumpled like discarded paper and tossed several yards away from her corpse. Both bore a crescent ring of small holes that reminded me of a very large dental impression. The engine was a tangle of torn wires and hoses; it didn’t take a mechanical genius to see that not all of the parts were there anymore. Her heart, or the engineering equivalent, had been ripped out. Car-cide, plain and simple.

  I circled the damage five or six times, trying to convince myself there was some hope of salvage. There wasn’t, not even if I summoned a horde of gremlins.

  As the shock faded, anger rose to replace it. I wanted to resurrect the wendigo just so I could kill it again, very, very slowly. Failing that, I...

  “Hey, Colin? I appreciate the sudden surge of homicidal intent, but...”

  “But what?”

  “Not all those claw marks look the same size. And those bite marks…its mouth didn’t look nearly that large.”

  I walked towards the front end, avoiding the dark puddles of gasoline, oil, and anti-freeze as best I could. I didn’t have to look hard to confirm my fears. The marks appeared in three different widths—medium, large, and not-quite-Godzilla size. If there had been only two sets, I might have tried to justify it as the difference between front and rear claws. But three... I held up my hand for comparison to each grouping. I was fairly certain the one I killed had claws close to the large set, but well below the giant set.

  I stumbled backward and crashed down on my butt. My balance was usually pretty good, but this was more than I could handle as rage mingled with fright. There were two more wendigoes out there, at least. One of them had claws that spanned well wider than the one I had barely, luckily, managed to kill. I didn’t know much about canine paw-to-body size ratio, but I suspected that meant at least another fifty to a hundred pounds of total body weight. Looking at the way the Detroit steel had been shredded, I decided most of that extra mass was muscle.

  Why had only one attacked me? If all of them had worked as a pack, I would have been dead meat, sanctuary or no sanctuary. The one I killed must have found me first, but why didn’t the others pounce while I was finishing him off? I turned my attention to the smallest indentations. They were shallow, more insult than injury. If the biggest one was a hundred pounds heavier, the smallest could be fifty pounds lighter, barely more than a large puppy.

  I processed the facts and found them unpleasant but satisfactory: the increased rate of attacks, the supernatural heavyweight scared off by a half-assed shield spell, the varying claw sizes. I didn’t like it, but they added up. The smaller marks belonged to a baby, a newborn wendigo out on its first hunt with mom and dad. The wendigoes...

  “God, how I hate that plural.”

  The wendigoes had been feeding more often to support the pregnant mother. When she ran from me at the store, it wasn’t because my magic was a threat to her…but it might have been a danger to the thing in her womb.

  So what had I killed? It was male, a fact I had learned while digging my dagger free from its belly. Typically, in Earth nature, males are physically larger than the females. But I didn’t know if that applied to Shadowlands biology. Still, I leaned towards father rather than an older child. Baby or no, a mother would have rushed in at me to avenge her child’s death. But a father might be expendable. She wouldn’t want to risk her newborn to fight me in my sanctuary.

  “Of course, we aren’t in the sanctuary right now.”

  That got me back on my feet and moving. I loaded up what I could out of Dorothy’s remains, though a lot of my library was little more than papier-mâché now. I had unpacked some things into the hotel room earlier, but I was still going to have to leave a lot behind.
Not wanting the cops to find my vehicle here, mauled and half-frozen, I removed her identifying marks. The license plate had been torn off and partially shredded, but the VIN number on the dash required a little effort with my Swiss army knife.

  There was enough gasoline pooled around her for a funeral pyre, but my lighter was gone. I fumbled around in my pockets.

  “This is taking too long, Colin.”

  “Yeah, I know. She could be back any second. She’s probably taking the baby back to the den and then coming for me with a vengeance.”

  Looking at the ruins of my Dorothy, that sounded all right; millennia-old nursing mother or not, the bitch was going to pay for this.

  “Not if we die first. Here, let me speed this up.”

  I felt my right hand wave, watched it happen more as a spectator than an actor. A surge of power went out through my palm. The puddles under the car began to spit out black smoke as pale green flames appeared at the edges. The energy expenditure made me feel dizzy, light-headed, but I was still aware of the growing heat as the flames rapidly spread.

  “Can’t pass out on me yet. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  I had a vague sensation of walking, stumbling, as my battered body moved away from Dorothy’s pyre. Then the pain and exhaustion caught up with me and everything went black.

  2

  I won’t detail my escape from the park last night, largely because I couldn’t remember it. I assumed it was long, but uneventful, because it was nearly noon by the time I woke up in my hotel room. Going to Mass was out, but at least I was alive and in one piece. My head throbbed dully, but I didn’t feel any unexpected bumps or bruises. In fact, given my certainty that I had dislocated a shoulder last night, I felt pretty damn good. My left arm was slightly tender from where the wendigo landed on my dagger, but I had most of my mobility and the pain was not full-blown frostbite. A couple of Excedrin down the hatch might be enough to get me up and running at full speed.

  Waking up went faster after I saw what was on the pillow next to me. The black leather of the Necronomicon was open, its yellowed folio pages casually settled to a page that was mercifully free of illustrations or sketches. I quickly checked behind every door and inside every piece of furniture, then checked them all again before I was satisfied I was alone in the room. I tried to ignore the writing on the open pages, but couldn’t help seeing the title of the essay on “Manipulating the Color and Shape of Space and Time” etched at the top. I closed the book and stuffed it in the bottom dresser drawer, opposite a well-worn Gideon’s Bible. It was not the first time that memory loss and that damnable tome had been paired. The aftermath of previous occurrences made this one all the more frightening.

  I shoveled back a handful of Excedrin, far more than what was strictly necessary for my minor league headache. I wanted to partake in the holy sacraments more than ever, but it was too late in the day for a morning Mass. I considered finding a phone book to see if I could come up with an evening service. Beyond that, the day was a blank slate. I doubted many stores or public buildings would be open on Sunday this deep in the Bible belt. People were probably still at church for a potluck supper or at home watching football. October is still football season, right?

  The idea of “at home” caught in my head as my eyes landed on the packet of stuff I had requested from Lucien. There was one person in this state I wanted to be at home today, though I doubted she was much of a churchgoing, pigskin fan. Sitting around trying not to think about what I was doing with the Necronomicon last night was not likely to be productive, but finding her would do wonders for my sense of security. I grabbed the pendant necklace I had bought at Gaea’s Treasures and the woman’s letter to Valente and got busy. Object reading wasn’t my specialty, but I had a luck-based tracking spell that was fairly decent. A severed wendigo head might convince her that she was in over her head and that it was time to call off the curse.

  I doubted it though. From the angry, hateful, caustic tone of her letter, I doubted she cared. She wanted Lucien to suffer and didn’t really care if she had to die for that to happen. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to oblige her. Killing a cannibal ice demon was one thing; killing a woman, even a demented, insane one who riled up ancient demons, was another thing entirely. But even if she did call it off Valente International…the wendigo and I would still have business to settle. The mother wasn’t going to forgive the death of the father and the scent of Dorothy’s funeral pyre still stung in my nostrils. I might be able to get Valente out of this, but I was staying all in.

  3

  After an early afternoon breakfast, I started walking out towards the lake. The tracking spell was primed and ready. The lake was a good distance away and the wendigoes’ lair was on the far side, so I hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. I wanted to wait until I was a lot closer before I started pumping energy into the necklace. On top of that, I was still in the “city” and I’m not much for following around a pendant in public—at best, it gets me weird looks, at worst, somebody will come along with a torch and a rope.

  What I really needed was a new set of wheels, since otherwise I had one very long walk ahead of me. I stopped by an ATM, drew out my daily limit, then went with one of my better tricks. I figured I had earned a little good karma and it probably wouldn’t kill me to take out a line of credit on a luck spell. I closed my eyes and focused on the result I had in mind, me sitting behind the steering wheel. “Father, I could use a little luck here. Show me the way to go so that what you want can happen. Amen.” Not exactly high magic, I grant, but it had helped me before in the past. Luck magic is dangerous if you don’t invoke a greater being to govern it.

  No voice thundered out of Heaven and no cars fell from the sky, so I started walking again. This kind of spell was subtle: no flash, no kaboom. It would work, though, provided I paid attention to whatever help Heaven offered. I had gone five blocks before a sign caught my eye: Redwind Drive. Not many street signs spell out words like avenue, boulevard, or drive. I took that as my sign and hooked a left on to Redwind Drive.

  The road twisted off to the right through a slice of modern suburbia. The houses were nice, but not luxurious. A few people were out mowing their lawns, quite possibly for the last time until spring. A pair of kids were playing with a large dog, though I couldn’t quite make out who was chasing who. I wandered slowly forward, keeping my eyes open, without looking like a burglar casing a job. The street went on like this for fifteen minutes. I was starting to feel like I had missed something when I saw her.

  An older man stood in his driveway, bent over the hood of a midnight blue 1964 Ford Mustang. From the way his elbow was pumping, he must have been polishing a blemish out of the wax. It couldn’t have been a very big flaw; she practically beamed in the afternoon sun. I strolled closer before calling out, “She’s beautiful, sir.”

  The man turned and grinned, a gray mustache above his lip. “Thank you.” He looked around at the other yards. “At least, I assume you mean the car. Never know when one of those neighbor girls is going to get it in their head to sunbathe.”

  “Even if there was a girl, she’d have to be quite a looker to compare to a first production year Mustang.”

  He cocked his head, a hint of frustration creeping over him. “My nephew posted that ad? I told him I didn’t want to sell her that way. Internet, bah.”

  I laughed, wondering just how much good karma I’d spent on this one. I looked up and down the street to make sure there were no buses heading my direction. “No, sir, no Internet, just a Ford man. She’s…well, I’m sure I’ve never seen one in such good shape.”

  “Well, that she is. I always wanted one when I was young. Couldn’t afford her till I was well past the middle of the road. Probably for the best. How anyone survives to be older than twenty-one, I’ll never know. I would’ve wrapped her around a tree when I was a kid.”

  I walked up the driveway to get a better look. “That would have been a shame…both for her and the tree. A car like that ca
n give an oak a run for its money.”

  “That’s true. She’s all-American steel.” He wiped his hands on the edge of the towel before extending his right hand. “Steve Daniels.”

  We shook. “Colin Fisher.” If he wasn’t worried about giving me his name, I wasn’t worried, either. “Ad? You’re not thinking of selling her, are you?”

  “I’m afraid so. My wife and I are moving. Costa Rica. Beautiful place, but not for her. They drive like maniacs down there…and tax you a fortune to import an American car.”

  I started to reach out to pet her, then thought better of it. “You mind?”

  He nodded. “Not at all.” His eyes stayed on me as I ran my hand along the edge of her frame. My nerves were electric at the connection. There was luck and then there was Luck. I did a double-check in the sky for any signs of falling asteroids.

  “You sure you didn’t come about an ad?”

  “I’m sure. I’m in the market, but…” I hesitated. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just prayed for help in finding a car.”

  His eyes stayed hard on me, then relaxed. “That’s where you’re wrong. I think I do believe it. I’ve been asking God to show me the right person to sell her to. I can’t stand the thought of someone driving her who doesn’t love her the way I do. Do you need her, Mr. Fisher, or just want her?”

  “Need. My Dorothy…I mean, my old car…was stolen.” I didn’t care for lying to the man, but, a believer in prayer or not, trashed by supernatural beasties was probably more than his belief, or his heart, could handle.

  He nodded. “How much can you afford?”

  “I’ve got five thousand on me. Whatever else you want, I can get when the banks open tomorrow.” It wasn’t a great car-buying strategy to issue a blank check, but I was in love. Dorothy was family, like an old aunt who could cuss and talk about new movies, but still knew how to bake cookies and make chicken soup. The Mustang was more like the head cheerleader in high school.