C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

“There’s so much iron in your world it would be difficult to pinpoint its location,” Dafydd said. “And it’s been in transit. But we’ve been on this road heading south a while now.”

“And that thing came from the south,” Kelly finished as all three fixed gazes on the creature sprawled across the nearby car.

Sudden life twitched through it, and Lara heard her own whisper echoed by the other two: “Oh, shit.”

Kelly braced herself, hands high on the steering wheel. “Should I rush it? A thousand pounds of metal ought to put it down for the count again, right?”

“You can’t. There are too many people.” Lara got out of the car without thinking and pulled Dafydd’s door open for him. Kelly let go an aggrieved yell and pushed her own door open, half standing in the driver’s well.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I don’t know! Stay in the car!” Lara ran forward, whispering the brief exorcism she knew under her breath. It wouldn’t be enough, and she cursed herself for not having memorized a longer one in the days before Dafydd’s release.

He was at her side, stronger again now that he was no longer trapped in a vehicle and with the staff once again bright in his hand. Still pale, still fragile, but the sunrise did him the favor of lighting his golden eyes to fire. In that light there was no pretense of humanity about him, his hair too fine, his bone structure too delicate. Panic caught Lara under the breastbone and she hissed, “Dafydd, get back in the car! You can’t—”

“I can hardly allow you to face that thing on your own,” he said just as softly. “You have no weapons, no armor—”

“No way to protect you! Get back!”

The trooper had looked up as soon as their car doors opened and came striding toward them in the dawning light. “I’m going to have to ask you to get back into the car—” He broke off, gaping, and an orchestra crashed raw song through Lara’s mind. Too late; it was too late to hide Dafydd or herself, and if she had any doubt, it was belied by the trooper drawing his sidearm as he advanced on them. “Down on the ground, both of you!”

Lara put her hands in the air, slow actions that made her vividly aware how she was disobeying the trooper’s command. She poured conviction into her voice, steeling it with truth and willing the man to hear that truth. “Officer, that thing they hit, it’s dangerous and nobody’s equipped to stop it. You need to get everyone out of here now.”

He wavered, halting his approach but not retreating. “I said on the ground!”

“Get on the ground, Dafydd. Do it,” Lara snapped, when the Seelie prince hesitated. “He’s more likely to shoot you than me. You’re male.” And exotic, she wanted to add, though she suspected the trooper would use the word “weird” instead. The creature twitching on the car hood no doubt verged on too much strangeness already. She didn’t want to add to it, not when it could mean Dafydd’s life.

Dafydd, reluctantly, did as he was told, lying on his belly with his hands out, though he continued to clutch the staff defiantly. The trooper scowled at him, expression barely hiding fear, then leveled his weapon at Lara again. “Both of you!”

“I’m unarmed, Officer. I’m smaller than you, and I’m wearing high heels. I can’t possibly rush you. I’m no danger to you at all. You know I’m telling the truth.” Lara’s throat hurt from the effort of making the words true, so the officer couldn’t doubt them even when he wanted to. That was power, real power: she recognized it even as she struggled to command it. “None of us is a danger to you. That thing over there is, though.”

“That thing is dead!”

“No.” Lara spoke at the same time the ranger did, startling both herself and the officer, who shot a quick hard look toward the other official. The woman stood up, her mouth a thin grim line. “It’s badly injured, but not dead. I’m going to have to …” She stepped toward her truck.

Lara, barely audible even to herself, whispered, “Don’t.”

The thing—the nightwing, though it was far more massive than the little demons they’d encountered before—lashed out with a limb so flexible it could have been a tentacle. But no tentacle gleamed the way this did, like it was ridged with cartilage. It seized the ranger’s legs and yanked backward. She jerked to the earth, unable to catch herself, and Lara knew without seeing that the bones of her face were broken. One of the paramedics shouted and ran forward. Stupid , Lara thought, but she did it herself. She heard Dafydd scramble to his feet, and heard a shot fire, and then Kelly’s scream.

Nothing else could have taken her eyes from the nightwing. Lara spun, fear gutting her as she saw Kelly fall to the ground. A misstep brought Lara low, skirt tearing as she hit the asphalt, and another tentacle lashed out, snapping through the air where her torso had been an instant earlier.

Lightning shot out of the clear morning sky and severed the tentacle. It dropped on top of her and she screamed, struggling to throw it off as it writhed and twitched and then, terribly, began to contort. Wings stretched and split from its crackling shape, then claws, then burning eyes and a mouth full of dagger-sharp teeth. Whatever horror the nightwings had become, they weren’t confined to it: separated from the whole, they took on their old shapes again, and this one leapt at Lara.

Its claws scraped asphalt as she rolled, eyes wide and searching for weapons. There was nothing: no rocks, no branches, the modern highway system too tidy to present her with a chance for survival. The nightwing pounced a second time and she flipped onto her back, catching its throat as she’d done with one of its brothers what seemed like a lifetime ago now, back in the Barrow-lands. The useless exorcism rose to her lips and was drowned beneath a shriek as the monster caught her forearm in clawed feet and raked upward, leaving deep scores in her skin. Powered by a sudden rush of pain, she flung the thing away and scrambled to her feet, determined to kick it to death if she could do nothing else.

Instead, Kelly Richards appeared above it, and rained death with a dozen sharp blows from a crowbar.

For an instant she and Lara stood facing each other, Kelly’s face alight with triumph in the gold light of sunrise. Her friend was beautiful, Lara thought suddenly, beautiful with violence, beautiful like a Valkyrie, full of passion and strength. With her hair spilling around her shoulders and a bloody crowbar in her hands, she made a convincing modern warrior woman. For an instant outside of time and thought, seeing her seize the opportunity to become someone so extraordinary was wonderful and even fun.

Then she threw Lara the crowbar and ran like hell for the car as the trooper shouted, “Put down your weapon! Put the weapon—put the weapon down!”

Lara, incensed, shouted, “Shoot the goddamned monster!” and threw herself toward the amalgamated nightwing, crowbar raised like a sword.

Some part of her recognized that she herself had become a warrior in the past few days. There was no other answer for the boldness that drove her to charge the massive creature enveloping the car that had struck it. She was armed with a crowbar and passion, nothing more, but the pairing proved formidable: a tentacle wrapped around the bar and she swung like a pro hitter, smashing the glittering black thing against the wrecked car’s door. Ichor splattered and the damaged piece fell away, beginning its terrible transformation into a nightwing, into a component piece.

Lara bashed it ruthlessly, turning it to spattered goo before it became what it had been, and swung again as another tentacle lashed at her. The thing was formless, shapeless, creating of itself what was necessary to attack, and she couldn’t imagine how the ranger or the officer had thought it an animal at all. Unless—and it seemed possible—it had held some near-earth shape as it hunted, simply so it wouldn’t draw attention to itself. That need was gone now: Lara and Dafydd were its prey, and the law enforcement agents and paramedics were nothing more than collateral damage.