Wesley Snipes - Talon of God

“I did,” St. Luke confessed. “But you have no one to blame but yourself. A smart businessman should have known I’d never have been so free with my fortune if there was any chance of your surviving to claim it.”

“Survive this, asshole!” the police chief bellowed, his voice transformed in rage as he threw Talon’s sword to the ground. The beautiful blade was still crashing into the cement when Korigan pulled his cannon of a semiautomatic pistol out of his coat and aimed it with both hands, emptying the entire magazine straight into St. Luke’s chest.

The rich man didn’t move the whole time. Didn’t even flinch as the bullets ripped into his already bloody chest.

And he definitely didn’t go down.

“What the… ” Korigan said, eyes wide as he pulled the trigger on his now empty gun again and again, getting only hollow clicks. “What the hell are you?”

“What you can become,” St. Luke said, brushing his long, elegant fingers over the bloody holes Korigan had just made in his chest. His unmoving chest, Lauryn realized for the first time. “I told you, friend, it’s too late. There is no antidote, no cure, no salvation for anyone in this city. Nothing can save you once the fall begins.” He grinned wide, showing them a wall of bloody teeth. “You were all damned from the very beginning.”

“NO!” Korigan roared, throwing his empty gun at St. Luke, who dodged easily. “I don’t believe in any of this! I’m not—”

But he was. Even as he screamed that he wasn’t, Korigan was changing, his body rotting before Lauryn’s eyes. By the time his voice gave out, he looked like a walking corpse, not that it slowed him down. If anything, he actually seemed to be getting bigger , his putrid flesh pulsing and expanding as he stumbled toward St. Luke.

“You bastard!” he gurgled, the words mangled by his swelling throat as he grabbed the billionaire. “I’ll take you to hell with me!”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” St. Luke said calmly, barely seeming to notice the huge, monstrous hands Korigan had wrapped around his torso. “You see, you’ve got it backwards. I’ve already been to hell, and I brought it back with me. ”

His hand shot out as he finished, the elegant, bloody fingers punching right through the wall of Korigan’s bulletproof vest and into the flesh beneath. It was a horrifying sight, but even when his entire hand was inside Korigan’s chest, St. Luke didn’t let go. He did the opposite, clenching his hand around the bones inside the bigger man’s torso before he jerked down, using his own inhuman strength to force the thing Korigan had become to its knees on the floor in front of him.

“Accept your fate, Victor,” St. Luke whispered, his blue eyes gleaming. “Embrace the monster you truly are, or die like so many others on this bloodiest, most beautiful of nights.”

“Never,” Korigan spat, his bloody eyes furious. “I will never be one of your monsters!”

St. Luke’s face fell into a look of supreme disappointment. “Then die,” he said, throwing the rotten man with a flick of his hand straight back into the black cube at the lab’s heart that he’d been gazing into when they’d arrived.

With everything else that had been going on, Lauryn hadn’t had a moment to spare for the strange dark cube at the lab’s center. So far as she knew, it was just another unspeakable terror in the billionaire’s collection. But the moment St. Luke threw Korigan into it, she realized she was wrong.

Though St. Luke had tossed the rotting pile of flesh that had once been Chicago’s corrupt police chief with enough force to send him flying straight across the giant room, the moment he entered the shadows, all trace of what had once been Korigan—his body, his scream, even his stench—vanished. There was no ripple, no fading. He was simply gone , and the longer Lauryn stared into the darkness where he’d vanished, the more sure she became that it wasn’t simple darkness at all. It was something else entirely, something no living soul should see.

“That takes care of that,” St. Luke said, brushing his bloody hands together to remove the last remaining flecks of Korigan from his slender fingers. “Now.” His eyes flicked to Lauryn. “Where were we?”

Up until this point, Lauryn had still been thinking of St. Luke as a man. When his cold eyes found her now, though, she finally understood the thing in the room with her was human in form only. But even as the primal terror that followed turned her legs to jelly and sent her to the ground, the words came again unbidden to her mind, louder than ever.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

“More poetry,” St. Luke said, his footsteps echoing on the bloody floor as he walked toward her. “It really is quite moving. But dazzling with language is an old con-artist trick: useful only on those too feebleminded to find their way through it. Tell me, little doctor, does that include you?”

He stopped when he reached her, bending over to look her in the eyes. He was so close, the blood from his bullet-riddled shirt—his, Korigan’s, or someone else’s entirely, Lauryn couldn’t even tell at this point—dripped down to land on her clenched fists. Each drop was cold as snow and burned like acid, scoring her skin before she snatched her hands away.

“What are you?”

“You know,” he said with a slow smile. “If you are what I think you are, you know. But the really interesting question here is who are you , Lauryn Jefferson?”

Lauryn set her jaw stubbornly. “A doctor.”

“Really?” His eyes flicked to Talon’s sword, still lying where Korigan had tossed it down on the bloody floor, several feet out of reach. “That’s an awful big scalpel for a doctor.”

“It’s not mine,” she said stubbornly. “It belongs to Talon, and he’s going to be coming for it soon.”

St. Luke grinned like that was a marvelous joke. “Considering he’s with Lincoln right now, I sincerely doubt that. I know the Soldiers of El Elyon can seem infallible, what with their monk-like discipline and Biblical magic tricks, but take it from someone who’s dealt with them for a very long time: planning is not one of their strong suits. So far as I can tell, their only strategy seems to be ‘wait for sign from God, hope it turns out.’”

Lauryn set her jaw. “It seems to work for them.”

“Does it?” St. Luke asked, turning around to wave his hand at the giant room packed full of lab equipment and nightmares. “Do you think all this was built in a day? Or a year?” He shook his head. “I’ve been working on this for ages . If the SEE had any real idea what they were doing, they’d have sent Talon to stop me last year, or the year before that. They most definitely wouldn’t have sent him alone . But sadly for Chicago, God couldn’t be bothered to send one of his cleanup crews around at a point when it actually would have done some good, which is why I have the free time to stand here discussing it with you. My victory is already assured. But just because the idiots who found you first are a bunch of disorganized, borderline psychotic Jesus freaks with terrible planning doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be one, too.”

Lauryn blinked. “What?”

“You’re obviously prime material,” St. Luke explained. “I just met you a few minutes ago, but I already know that you’re determined, driven, talented, and selfless to the point of absurdity. I know all of that because a SEE warrior—and not just any SEE, but their poster boy Talon himself!—latched on to you. He even went so far as to entrust you with his sword , which I don’t have to tell you doesn’t happen often. But just because he wants you for his team doesn’t mean you have no choice in the matter. You still have your free will, which means there’s still a chance for you to join the winning side.”