Justin Gustainis - Those Who Fight Monsters Tales of Occult Detectives

I wasn’t a Djinn. My body — my body—

It is only a body, the cold core of me whispered. And I am a Djinn. A Djinn . Not an animal, driven by meat and fury.

I shuddered and went limp under Luis’s weight, a submission that made the beast within me shriek and writhe inside. He didn’t move for a long moment, then whispered, “Cass?”

“Let me go,” I said. My throat felt raw with fury, as if I’d breathed in superheated air. “ Off! ”

He rolled away. I rolled the other way, breathing hard, and crouched with my back against the rough bark of a pine tree. I felt hot, still, and the fury pounding through my veins was maddening, trembling on the edge of uncontrollable. My shirt hung in rags around me, and the fluttering pieces annoyed me; I pulled it free and threw it away, snarling, and glared down at the thin sports bra that I still wore beneath it. I had ripped it in places, but it was mostly intact.

My denim shorts had survived my frenzy, though they were fraying at the hems in untidy strings. I struggled with an urge to strip them off, rip at them with teeth and nails, and closed my eyes to focus on slowing my hot, panting breaths.

The howls sounded again, a longing chorus that pulled at the desire inside me.

“Cassiel.” Luis’s voice. He’d ventured closer, but he was keeping a safe distance between us. “What happened?”

“The avatar,” I said. “I saw him.”

“ Him? ”

“The Bacchae are followers. They have no mind, only hungers. I saw the avatar. He thinks. We have to stop him if we want to stop them.”

But the Bacchae were his guard, his army of teeth and flesh and claws. There was no avoiding a confrontation with them, if we hunted him. Just as there was no avoiding the fact that I remained perilously close to becoming one of them. I had to push aside the memory of the avatar’s eyes, of the furiously empty hunger in them, of the sweet, hot intoxication of honey on my lips and in my blood. I had to. Or I would turn on Luis in an instant, and the first drop of blood I drew would trigger the final frenzy, reduce me to a naked, clawing, biting animal made of hunger and lust. I would not stop. I would take everything from him, down to the marrow of his bones, and then I would be lost.

“Can you handle this?” Luis asked me. He sounded tense, cautious, ready to move back at a single tremor from me. “Because I need to know. I can’t turn my back on you if you’re not in control.”

“I’m fine,” I lied. I had to make it true by sheer will; Luis couldn’t defend himself from other threats if he had to watch me as well. “We have to find the avatar now , if we want to survive the night.” Because the Bacchae would have caught Luis’s scent by now, that rich male musk that had drenched me in frenzy. They’d chase him down and rip, rape, consume. It was what the avatar had infused in them. Individually, they were normal human women, probably mild and gentle creatures. But here, in the wild, with the honey and wine in their veins, they were Furies.

I rose smoothly and loped off into the dark. Luis cursed and stumbled in pursuit. I did not need a flashlight, now; my eyes pulled in light in new ways, new colors, painting the world in flashes of red and gold and white. The eyes of the avatar, shared with his hunters.

I could feel him out in the darkness, moving through the forest. Wandering. Seeking … whatever fathomless thing avatars sought. It was nothing humans could understand, and the human body it was using at present would be destroyed in the process, either from hunger or thirst or sheer overdriven exhaustion. It would leap to another male body if it could, unless there was nothing to receive its spirit. Then it would sink back into the earth, back into sleep.

Luis. Luis would be here to receive it. I couldn’t permit that to happen.

In the next second, I realized that I couldn’t worry about that; I had to think of myself first. The avatar’s presence pulled me like a tide, drawing me closer, and I heard him now, padding through the forest, plunging through brush and thorns, leaving bare, bloody footprints on the ground and rocks. I smelled his rotted-honey stench.

I ran, loping like a lion giving chase, feeling the frenzy inside me mount and boil.

I burst out of the trees into a clearing. Overhead, the stars were white cold chips set in an onyx sky. A crescent moon had cleared the eastern horizon, bathing the small meadow in icy light.

The avatar stood in the center of it, staring up at the moon, arms raised. His back was to me, and I saw the claw marks scoring his back, his buttocks. The scratches and cuts. The trickling black blood.

Ecstasy was a deadly dangerous, shockingly beautiful thing.

I dropped into a crouch, teeth bared, made all animal in his presence. The pounding of sweet, hot fire inside me rose up, burning all my control to ashes.

All except that ice-cold core that had been mine since the beginning of time. I am Djinn, it whispered. I am not his meat. I will not be turned.

His back remained to me. His worship was aimed at the moon, and I could see the shudders running through him — sexual, most surely. I could feel the pulses from here, booming inside me like a drum.

I could not approach him, not without losing what little control remained. If I did, I would end up pinned beneath his rampant body, screaming, biting, giving and receiving violence and sex.

I reached instead for the rich warm glow of power, grounded through Luis, and brought it up around the avatar’s feet.

The grasses whipped up, knotting into ropes, growing at a staggering pace. They tied his ankles, then wrapped his legs, his torso … and a thick, meaty vine whipped around his neck and began to tighten.

Behind me, I heard the hollow shriek of the Bacchae. They had found Luis’s trail now, and I sensed the hot burst of his fear through the link between us. He couldn’t outrun them. Not in the dark. He’d have to turn and fight — a battle he was sure to lose.

The howls and shrieks burst out of the night, and I thought I heard Luis call my name, but my world had narrowed to the avatar, and the vine around his neck. I poured all the power I could muster into it, commanding the living green rope to tighten, to squeeze, to crush the life out of the avatar before his minions tore the life out of Luis.

It wasn’t going to work.

The vine was withering fast. The earth didn’t wish to kill him; the creature was part of it, part of her . A memory, a nightmare, a dream. Something lost and almost pitiable in its hunger and loneliness. I couldn’t fight him with the tools of the earth. Iron wouldn’t kill him. Neither would stone. I could batter at him, and the life inside him would heal all I inflicted, because he was raw, bloody power, and nothing else.

I lunged, hit the avatar in the back, and slammed him face down to the grass. The bonds I’d put around him withered, blackened, and turned to ash, and his slick naked body writhed, bucked, tried to turn to face me. I couldn’t risk that. I put a hand on the back of his head and slammed it deeper into the dirt, snarling, but somehow he slipped free, and his body moved beneath me, and then his eyes…

…his eyes …

I felt sanity pour out of me like water from a broken jar, and the moonlight burned cold and empty, blinding me, and suddenly I wanted … I felt … I was …

No.

I am Djinn.

The thing inside me, the thing in the core of me, that tiny spark of ice and rage that would never be human, seized control of my hands, grabbed the avatar’s jaw in my left hand, the back of his head in my right, and pulled power out of Luis in a blinding flood, a scorching wave that burned my muscles with its force.