John Miller - Death Draws Five

“Angel,” Ray called out. “You’d better get over here. Quick.”

There were twenty or so in the pack, and they didn’t seem to be afraid of Ray.

Ray whirled at a sudden sound at his side, but it was only Angel. She looked as if she were about to make a remark, then saw the spider-things. “My God!” she said.

“Don’t blaspheme,” Ray reprimanded.

She shook her head. “I wasn’t blaspheming. I was praying.”

“Pray harder,” Ray said, “because here they come.”

The arachnids were on them, tittering like high school girls as their fangs clacked together, dripping steaming ichor.

“Save my soul from evil, Lord,” Angel said, “and heal this warrior’s heart.”

Ray caught a burst of light in his peripheral vision, and the arachnids reared back, screaming, as Angel plunged into their midst, her flaming sword held high. She screamed. Ray couldn’t tell if it was from anger, fear, or revulsion, as she swung her sword and sheared through the front set of legs of one of the things. It collapsed, grimacing ferociously. Angel lunged. Her sword speared the thing’s body, white and hairless like a dead fish, and it burst like a balloon, spattering her with droplets of ichor that steamed as it ate into her fighting suit.

“Watch out for their blood!” she shouted in warning, pirouetting to cut the legs out from under two others that were trying to circle them.

Ray realized that they were in a bad spot. He danced into the midst of their attackers, swinging right and left with the morningstars. One missed, the other crunched an all-too human-looking face. The spiders’ titters changed to disturbing high-pitched screams, but they still came.

Ray turned and twisted like a dervish. He saw Angel shouting wordlessly as she held off half a dozen of the things with long sweeps of her sword. Thankfully, the spiders seemed more afraid of her, or perhaps it was the light emitted by her weapon, than they were of him. So many gathered about him that he had to shift constantly to avoid their lunging, clacking jaws. Luckily they couldn’t spit venom, but it was only a matter of time before they’d both be splattered with enough of the poison to do some serious damage.

The pack was all around them as Ray caught something out of the corner of his eye—a human figure, talk and bulky, dressed in a long leather duster that swept to the ground, standing and watching.

Perhaps, Ray thought, directing.

Ray moved in a seemingly random pattern as he attacked the hunters, taking off a leg here, battering a head there, pulping a squishy abdomen, clenching his teeth as venom spattered, clinging to and eating away his fighting suit. It soon looked as if gigantic destructive moths had been at it.

Half a dozen of the things were broken around Ray, screaming like girls with broken arms, but still dragging themselves after the pack, their fangs clattering angrily. He hadn’t spotted Angel in long moments, but he could still hear her fighting at his back as his seemingly irregular movements took him in a curving path to the observer watching the hunting pack, maybe ten feet away. One of the spider-things stood at his back, between them.

Another hunter lunged at him from the front. Ray pulped its head like a bug on the bathroom floor, whirled, and dove to the ground. He slid between the legs of the arachnid behind him, who stood there with a look of almost human astonishment on its caricatured features. He raked the bottom of its gut as he went by, twisting desperately to avoid the deluge of steaming fluid that burst from it like a ruptured bladder, and grunted aloud when some splashed on the back of his hand. He turned a complete somersault and came to his feet face to face with the observer, morningstars raised high.

And he froze.

The thing had no face. Its head was a featureless white cone that tapered to a wet red tentacle that quivered like an eager tongue.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Something clung to its neck, its mouth fastened onto its dead white flesh, its large eyes regarding Ray with unblinking hatred.

“Ti Malice!” Ray blurted aloud.

Not many knew about the obscene Haitian ace who had wreaked unaccountable havoc before vanishing from human ken over a decade and a half ago, but Ray was a compulsive reader of secret government files and there wasn’t much he didn’t know about obscure aces. Especially the bad ones.

The Haitian’s tiny arms encircled the thing’s thick white neck, his slug-like body hung down its back. Malice rose up, his mouth coming free from his mount’s neck with an audible slurping sound. Malice’s mouth was like that of a lamprey: round, ringed with tiny, sharp teeth, and a tube-like tongue that sucked the blood from his host. He hissed at Ray, spitting dark, purplish blood. The thing he rode raised its featureless face to the moon and somehow howled, sending shivers down Ray’s back.

It moved. But Ray moved faster.

He blocked the thing’s lunge with one of the morningstars and swung the other like it was a baseball bat and Ti Malice’s head was the ball.

He hit a home run. Malice’s head splattered at the impact. The feeble grip of his arms around the creature’s neck broke, and Malice shot backward and hit the ground twenty feet away, bounced and rolled, leaving a smeared trail on the thick, gray grass which twitched agitatedly above the tiny body, and finally closed over it like hungry snakes.

The creature slumped to the ground, shuddering all over. Ray stood over it, undecided. It lifted an arm, as if in supplication, and behind him Ray sensed all movement stop. He held his blow as the thing stood. Not quite human-shaped in its long trench coat, it regarded Ray with its featureless face. Ray forced himself to look back. Forced his gorge to stay down. After a moment, without making sound or gesture, it walked backwards among the trees.

What was left of the hunting pack followed it, taking a wide berth around Ray as it did so. As they vanished among the eerily-moving trees, Ray let out a long breath he didn’t realize that he’d been holding. He turned to look at the battlefield, the ground splashed with ichor and littered with smashed and slashed spider bodies and parts.

“Angel!” he called, and realized that she had slumped to her knees, her head down, unmoving.

Peaceable Kingdom: The Angels’ Bower

Jerry started to feel a little uncomfortable under Barnett’s smiling scrutiny. Ray departed to go on this mysterious mission to pick up the kid and Fortunato excused himself as well, leaving only Jerry and Barnett alone in his office. Jerry cleared his throat and spoke, just to break the increasing sense of tension the inscrutable Barnett had been projecting.

“Nice office,” he said. “It looks familiar.”

Barnett nodded. “It’s a copy of the Oval Office in the White House. I felt very comfortable there.”

“Uh-huh,” Jerry said.

There was another long minute of silence until Barnett seemed to feel that he’d softened Jerry up sufficiently, and spoke again.

“I just like to get to know my friends, Mr. Creighton,” Leo Barnett said, “so I can tell them more easily from my enemies. It is Mr. Creighton, isn’t it?”

Jerry’s guilt for ragging on Billy Ray for lying to him returned, redoubled.

“Well,” Jerry said after a moment, “let’s say that’s my name for the purposes of this discussion.”

Barnett nodded after another a long moment of silence stretched between them. “I see that in your own way you’re a careful man. I can understand that. Even admire it. I’m a careful man as well, and I like to know whom I’m dealing with. I had you checked out by some of my connections, and you don’t add up. Your past is shadowy. The history that does exist is rather unusual. By the way—I hope you don’t mind my excluding your man Sascha from this little conversation. Though I’m willing to trust you to a point, I don’t like the idea of exposing myself to a telepath, even a low-grade one, for any length of time.”