Justin Gustainis - Those Who Fight Monsters Tales of Occult Detectives

I don’t remember twisting his head, but I remember the springy, tough resistance of his neck, his body trying to fight me, and I remember the exact instant that the fight was lost, and his bones snapped with sudden, muffled clicks. I kept twisting as the body went limp beneath me. Kept twisting, jerking his head back and forth as if I would wrench his head off his shoulders like a bloody triumph.

His eyes…

His eyes faded into confusion, and then into silent darkness.

I felt, then saw, the black flood pour out of the corpse like mist, creeping over the meadow in all directions, searching for a host. It couldn’t take me. The ice inside me wouldn’t thaw.

Luis. It would take him first.

I stumbled away from the avatar’s body and raced ahead of the mist.

I fell over the first of the Bacchae less than a hundred yards out from the clearing; her naked, battered body lay shuddering on the side of the narrow path. She was curled into a ball, shut away from the horror of what had taken hold of her. Without the avatar’s power fueling them, the Bacchae were just … lost.

I picked her up and carried her. I couldn’t leave her. The mist might reject a female avatar, but it might not. I had to keep all of them away from it.

I found Luis lying another hundred yards out, with the other two Bacchae. He was dirty and scored with cuts, but he’d avoided any serious injury. The Bacchae were, like the one I carried, naked, bloody, and pathetically bruised by their time of insanity; the bottoms of their feet were raw wounds, sliced and torn by their rampage through the forest. They had been knocked unconscious. Luis had collapsed, his breath ragged, felled most likely by the raw power I’d pulled from him to destroy the avatar’s body.

I dumped the third Bacchae, and turned to face the black mist. It was mere threads now, spread too wide and too thinly. The last whisper of the nightmare, creeping over the ground, crawling, searching blindly for rescue.

I dragged Luis another twenty yards, as a precaution.

The mist reached the Bacchae, and they twitched and whimpered and whined, even in their deep trauma.

It couldn’t touch them. It had wounded them too deeply already. That was one small blessing.

I took hold of Luis’s limp form beneath the arms and hauled, gritting my teeth, pulling him one torturous inch after another down the treacherous path until finally, I looked up to see that there was no black mist flowing toward me.

It had pooled on the ground, exhausted, and as I watched, it sank slowly into the ground from which it had come.

Gone like the nightmare it had been.

I collapsed next to Luis, my eyes full of the moon, and like the other Bacchae I curled in on myself, cold and empty and sick with what I had felt.

Luis stirred enough to gather me into his arms, and we lay together in the cold with the whisper of pines around us, as Mother Earth dreamed her insane, cold dreams of hunger and fear and loneliness and need.

After a long few minutes, Luis rolled to his feet and went back up the hill. I didn’t have the strength to protest, curling back into my traumatized ball. The world seemed so cold. So quiet.

One after another, he carried the naked women down the path. He’d retrieved our packs, and he spread out a thin insulating ground cover, then bundled the three together under a blanket. He fed them some water, a little food, and gave them gentle touches on their hair, their faces.

They needed gentleness. I knew, because I was myself starved for it, and I hadn’t sunk so deeply into the violence as the others.

As Luis worked on building a campfire, I managed to pull myself to a sitting position. He was shaking with exhaustion and weariness as he tried to set match to tinder. I took it from him and lit the fire, watched it catch with dull eyes, and took the bottle of water he passed me without much enthusiasm. The first mouthful tasted like filth, and I gagged and spat it out. My mouth still remembered the taste of honey and blood.

The second mouthful was better, and I swallowed and kept swallowing until the foreign taste was gone.

Luis settled back against a tree, stretching out his legs, and I sank down next to him. Not touching, not quite, until he reached out and pulled me closer. My head fell against his shoulder, and I felt his lips brush the dirty, sweating skin of my forehead.

“You’re safe now,” he said, and the heat of his body — a gentle warmth, not the burn of the avatar — crept into me in slow waves. Animal comfort, but a very different kind. I felt trembling muscles slowly begin to relax, and my breathing slowed to a deeper, slower rhythm. “Did he — did you — are you all right?”

I knew what he wanted to ask, and looked up into his face. He had dark eyes, shifting and gleaming in the firelight, but they were not empty. What was in them was gentle and warm and sweet, and it too came from the earth, from human kindness and compassion and … love.

“He didn’t take me,” I said, in all the ways it could be meant. “He couldn’t. I’m not human, Luis. Not fully. You understand that?”

He did, and it made him sad. He touched my hair, stroked it, and the pleasure of that echoed inside us both. I relaxed and let my head rest once more against his chest, listening to the hollow rush of his breathing, the solid, steady beat of his heart.

“Don’t worry about it. Being human ain’t what it’s cracked up to be,” he said, and I knew he was looking at the women, who might never be able to face what they had done. What had been done to them, by forces they couldn’t possibly comprehend or resist. “I’m glad you’re who you are, Cassiel.”

In that moment, that oddly gentle, oddly sweet moment that I closed my eyes and let the night steal over me … I was glad, too.

Rachel Caine is a fictional person who writes many, many novels, including the “Weather Warden” series (8 novels to date, and one more in 2010), the “Morganville Vampires” series (8 novels, with 12 planned), and the “Outcast Season” series (3 novels so far, with 1 more to come). She lives in the Dallas, Texas area. Her website is at www.rachelcaine.com

Cassiel was once a Djinn (genie), and is now, thanks to a disagreement with a higher ranking Djinn, trapped in human form as a punishment. Her only hope for long-term survival is partnership with a supernaturally-gifted Warden, Luis Rocha, who controls the elements of the earth. Cassiel and Luis both reside in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when not battling supernatural forces elsewhere.