Tim Marquitz - Echoes of the Past

Finally able to think, I opened my eyes. Michael Li kneeled beside me. He gave me a warm smile and helped me sit up. “Welcome back, Frank.”

I patted him on the shoulder before he stood and stepped away, allowing me to see the rest of the room. Katon stood there looking like he’d tried to buttsex a wolverine. He looked like a zebra, only with black and red stripes, his dark flesh doing its best to heal the damage inflicted on him.

“You okay,” I asked.

He nodded and gave me a shallow smile. Happy to see him alive and recovering, I glanced around the room for Mihheer. I vaguely remember him being there when Gorath set his cronies on us, but I had no clue what happened after that.

The alien was in the corner. Rahim held him down. In his human form, the wizard looked dapper as he clutched to Mihheer. He even spared me a smile with teeth showing. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about his prospects of being a successful singer.

Mihheer was slumped in Rahim’s hands. He looked unconscious. What was left of his ruined face was a wash of red and protruding gray bone. Yellowish-green fluid seeped from a gaping hole in his head where I could have sworn he had a horn before. A couple of his teeth protruded through his lower lip, and spittle and blood ran to join the mess that pooled in his lap.

“Damn. You guys did a job on him.”

Katon chuckled and looked to Rahim. “I told you he was out of it.”

I glanced back and forth between the two as they shook their heads in something that resembled amusement. “What?” After a moment of laughing at what I presumed was my expense, Katon reached down and lifted my arm. In my hand was Mihheer’s missing horn. I tossed it aside quickly and shook the residual goop from my fingers. I looked back at Mihheer, pointing. “I did that?”

Katon nodded. “That you did.”

I sighed, trying to remember what had happened, but my memories were so jumbled it would take Stephen Hawkings to piece them together into any sort of coherence.

“Scarlett.” My cousin sprang to mind. “Did you find her?”

“Not yet,” Katon answered, seriousness returning. He gestured to Michael. “Since the brute force approach didn’t get us anywhere, I called Rahim and Michael down to help out.”

Mike went over to the alien and knelt down in front of him. “Let’s see what he’s got going on inside there.” He dropped to his ass and crossed his legs, taking slow and deliberate breaths.

I got up, a bit unsteady on my feet, and stumbled over for a better look just as Michael’s eyes shifted. They went from brown to silver in an instant, mercurial in their swirling flow. He rolled his head on his neck and started to mutter. The words were quiet and distorted, nothing making any sense. If I hadn’t seen him do his act before, I would have thought it was just me being out of it. His hands twitched in his lap as though he were signing with Tourette’s.

While I stood there watching, Katon handed me a bundle of clothes. “You mind covering that thing up? You’re freaking me out.” He motioned toward my crotch, drawing my eyes. I realized I was naked and my dick was hanging there more than half-riled. “It was one thing to watch you slaughter werewolves with a full on erection, but this is the part of the date where your pretend you have a little modesty.”

The word was foreign to me, but I slipped the pants on. It was getting a little chilly, anyway. By the time I was dressed, Michael was done. He sucked in a sudden breath and shuddered, his eyes wide and back to being brown. He shook his head and growled as he got to his feet.

“His head is like an abstract painting on crack. Everything is in symbols and sigils and strange shapes that no doubt make up some kind of language, but it’s certainly not one I understand. He doesn’t see things like we do. The only images I can pick out appear to be Asian, if that makes any sense.” He raised his hands in defeat. “All his thoughts are jumbled together, the flickers of bright flowers and Chinese letters mixed in amidst the Giger-like sharpness of the alien sigils and signs. It makes no sense.”

Once again not knowing Mihheer’s language was screwing us. I started to get mad when I remembered the scrap of flesh I had stashed in the God room. “If you had a key that translated some of the symbols, do you think you could work something out?”

Michael shrugged. “It certainly couldn’t hurt. If the symbols are less abstract than their presentation, we might be able to figure something out to help us find Scarlett.”

“If you’ve got something, Frank, let’s get it,” Katon said. His concern for Scarlett was etched clearly across his healing face.

“I’ll be right back,” I told them, waving off Katon’s offer of assistance. “Stick around and make sure the weres don’t come back for their buddy.” I was out the door and down the hall before he could argue.

Still recovering from the double whammy, I wanted a few minutes alone. I felt like I was hung over, and not just from any old party, but from the binge of the century. My head throbbed and my brain sloshed around as if it’d broken free of its mounts. It was hard to walk because my legs were trembling and weak, but I pushed on. This might be the only chance we were gonna get to find Scarlett, so I had to keep going. Despite the psychic trauma, I kept my senses purring away at full throttle. I had vague memories of some of the werewolves managing to get away before I went ballistic, so it was possible I’d run into them, and I really wasn’t feeling up to the rematch.

I moved along as quickly as I could and made it to the God-proof room after what seemed like forever. The first thing I saw was Chatterbox rocking back and forth and looking forlorn.

“Still no contact?” My stomach tightened.

He wobbled his head, the maggots in his eyes sloshing about. If he were capable of tears, he probably would have cried. I felt pretty much the same. Still unable to reach Karra, I was getting worried. It was bad enough not knowing where Scarlett was, but for Karra to be missing was driving me nuts. I wanted to reach out to Longinus to see if she was just giving me the cold shoulder, but we still needed to find Scarlett. She was the priority right now, I told myself.

“Keep trying, CB. I’ll be back to check in.” I collected the skin tablet and book.

Just as I started out of the room, I caught the tiniest flicker of a familiar presence. It was gone before I could I could even process it, but it was enough to give me a general direction of where it came from. Rather than dart out after it, I walked out like I hadn’t noticed anything. Thinking the presence was the person who’d been following me around Hell, I didn’t want to let them know I had spotted them.

I made my way down the corridors, moving in the general direction of where the DRAC guys were holding on to Mihheer, but not directly there. If I needed help, I wanted to be close, but I didn’t want to lead anyone back to the group unless I had to. With all the weres and vamps having a hit out on me, and Gorath aligning himself with them to make my life miserable, I didn’t want to risk dragging Katon into another ambush. Even with Rahim around to even the odds, they didn’t need the grief.

Doing my best to act like nothing was out of the ordinary, I took my time traipsing about the ghetto labyrinth as I looked for a good place to spring an ambush. I kept getting miniscule traces of my tailgater as I moved along. Whoever they were, they were good. They stayed right at the edge of my senses, which kept me from identifying them. The only problem was that it made it clear the person knew me…the old me. Since my power up by Baalth and the tiny boost of Azrael’s essence, my natural range had extended just a bit. The person following me felt they knew the limits of my power and were trying to stay outside of them, but they kept crossing the line. That was why I kept hitting on the familiar essence, but it wasn’t enough for recognition.