Tall, Dark & Apocalyptic (2 page)

Audie shook his head. “It’s not possible. These are monsters, Grimm.” Even as he said the words, Audie’s stomach twisted. His traitorous mind replayed the picture of Yeira lying helpless and bleeding before him. He should have swung his knife and finished her. But something inside wouldn’t let him do it. His mind rebelled at the idea. His stomach churned.

The other hunter stared at Audie, his jaw tight with emotion. “We don’t really know that for sure, Kord. There could be some who aren’t evil. It is possible that one of them is working against Edwige.” Grimm insisted.

“Yes. But simply being
against
the black witch doesn’t put him or her
with
us. There’s an abyss of possibilities between the two positions.”

Grimm narrowed his gaze as if he would argue more but finally turned away and resumed walking. They moved in silence for a few moments before Grimm spoke again, lightening the tension between them. “I’ll be glad to get back to my time,” Grimm told Audie, tugging at his great kilt. “Get this skirt off.”

Audie grinned. “Tired of playing a Scottish lord from 1744?”

Grimm shook his head. “Aren’t you?”

Shrugging, Audie answered honestly. “I don’t really mind this time. The simplicity is kind of refreshing.”

Grimm snorted. “The lack of toilet paper isn’t refreshing, man.”

“Sorceri!”

Both men turned their gazes toward the scrawny page running toward them. He looked out of place in his low-slung skinny jeans and baggy t-shirt. He must have just come through the portal.

The two sorceri met him halfway.

The page’s eyes skimmed wildly around the gore-scattered battlefield.

Audie looked around too, seeing the place for the first time as an outsider might.

The earth for as far as the eye could see was ripped and scored by guide magics and witch fire. Trees were upended, their roots reaching forlornly toward a dark, smut-filled sky.

Random human limbs stuck out from rents in the earth and dangled from bushes, black, thickened blood running from them to mingle with the char on the ground.

Headless bodies were also strewn across the ground, quickly putrefying. Though the zombies had been superficially attractive when they’d been extinguished, they quickly reverted to their decaying forms once their heads were lopped off.

It had taken the Sorceri months of battling the things to figure that out. The dark magic that kept them whole was in their brains. Without access to that magic, the body quickly reverted to its natural state.

“What is it, page?” Grimm asked the nervous young man.

The messenger blinked, swallowed hard, and turned bulging brown eyes on the two warriors. “I need to give the elders a status report.”

Audie glanced around, arching an eyebrow. “As you can see the nest of zombies has been extinguished.”

Grimm cleared his throat but said nothing.

“
All
have been exterminated?” the page asked.

Audie frowned. “All but one. Yeira Ruth got away.”

The young man stared at him for a long moment, the censure in his eyes bringing another low growl to Audie’s throat. He clenched his fists.

The boy apparently realized that he was walking along the slippery edge of a deadly chasm because he finally nodded, turning to Grimm. He handed Grimm the scroll. “Destroy this once you’ve memorized its contents.” He turned away, stumbling over rocks and uprooted trees, back toward a shimmering spot on the horizon. The portal.

“What’s my assignment?” Audie asked.

The boy turned and, just for a beat, his vapid brown gaze sharpened, turning solid black. Audie sucked in a breath. The Huntsman was looking at him through the page’s eyes.

It was obvious he didn’t like what he was seeing.

When the page started to speak, his voice emerged in the deeper tones of a man three times his age. “You must finish the task you were sent here to do, Sorceri. Find the zombie Yeira and extinguish it. Don’t come back until you have.”

Heat rolled over her skin, a sharp, biting heat that didn’t burn. Yeira’s head rolled from side to side and she bit down on the groan of pain. Her limbs were stretched wide, tethered to the hard surface she reclined upon. The tethers didn’t chafe or rub, but they held her firm just the same. The heat rose up her torso, bathed her raw throat, and halted over her face, its healing needles pinching in a thousand spots as they strove to rebuild shattered bones and bleeding fissures.

A tuneless hum accompanied the healing energy. Yeira had heard the sound enough times to recognize its creator. She smiled and pain tore at her dry lips.

“Take care not to rip apart my handiwork, girl.”

Yeira forced herself to remain absolutely still while the Healer did his work.

An hour later he finally untethered her and stepped away. The gnome moved across the room, his big, flat feet slapping against the floor.

Yeira slowly stretched her arms and legs, then arched her back. But for a residual stiffness, she felt as good as new. She forced her eyelids open, squinting against a blinding sun flooding the small space.

Her gaze slipped around the space, searching for her savior. She found him several feet away, standing on a round-topped stool with his massive bare feet hanging over the edges. He teetered dangerously on the rotating stool as he plucked at bottles arrayed across a counter with his long, spidery fingers. “You must take greater care, Glowbug. I almost wasn’t able to bring you back this time.”

Yeira sat up and turned, dangling her legs over the edge of the table. She knew from past experience that she needed to take it slowly for a few minutes. Her legs and arms would be weak from the gnome’s healing. “I know. The Sorceri caught me unaware.” Yeira frowned. “Audie Kord nearly had his blade at my throat.”

The gnome pressed his impossibly long fingers against the wooden countertop and spun the stool, dropping lithely to his butt and sliding to the ground before it stopped spinning. He waddled toward her, his big, pointed ears twitching beneath his floor-length gray hair. She realized he must have been in bed when she arrived, screaming in his lair. He hadn’t even had a chance to braid his bristly gray hair before taking on her healing.

He stopped in front of her and lifted his hand, the spidery fingers unfolding to expose a single, black pill in the center. Yeira took it and popped it into her mouth, swallowing the nasty tasting pill without water.

It left a bitter spot in the center of her tongue. She grimaced. “I’m sorry, Healer.”

The gnome shook his head. “It is of no import. He cocked his head, fixing a round, black gaze on her. The button-like eyes sparkled with interest. “How many did you kill?”

Yeira frowned. “A dozen I think. But more escaped through the portal when the Sorceri came crashing in. Shaking her head, Yeira stretched her legs and lowered to her feet. She sucked in a breath as blood rushed through her legs and numbness gave way under needles of pain. “It’s a miracle they manage to capture any of the dead ones. You can hear them coming a mile away.”

The gnome turned away, shuffling across the tree house, toward his favorite chair. His stubby arms lifted as he walked, the impossibly long fingers quickly weaving his hair into its customary braid. “They have their purpose, Glowbug and you have yours.”

She put one foot in front of the other, using the furniture for support, and followed him across the room. “They’re closed-minded bigots.”

The gnome shrugged. “It is true.”

She lowered herself into the nearest chair and sighed with relief. “If it weren’t for them I’d be much closer to finding and extinguishing her.”

The Healer’s nimble fingers reached the straw-like ends of his hair and began to wrap the thick braid into a coil at the back of his small head. “You need the Sorceri to find and destroy the dark one, girl. Don’t forget it.”

Yeira shook her head. “I can’t work with him.”

“You must. You have no choice.”

She pounded the arm of the chair with her fist. “How the hell am I supposed to work with a man who has granite between his ears?”

The gnome’s fingers sparked and a long, silver pick appeared between them, which he quickly stabbed through the coil of hair to hold it at the base of his neck. He dropped his hands, grinning widely. “When faced with a chunk of granite, one must become a sculptor.”

Yeira groaned, dropping her head back and covering her face with her hand. She just couldn’t work with Audie Kord to find the black witch. She’d kill him if she spent more than five minutes in his presence.

Or kill herself.

Either way she’d finally be shed of him. She sighed, knowing she couldn’t give up on her current quest.

It was all that kept her from succumbing completely to self-hatred.

~
TD&A
~

The Authority headquarters were housed in an abandoned prison on an island off the Southern coast of the land mass which used to be the United States of America. In the year 2090, the Asian continent crushed the “Infidel” of the West with a nuclear bomb. The bomb set off a horrific set of events, spreading quickly from the American continent until it touched every continent on Earth. By the time the final bomb was dropped, most of the surface of the Earth was a broken, smoldering mass of rubble and the remaining inhabitants had gone below the earth to avoid the poisoned residue left behind by the bombings. Once it was safe enough for them to return to the surface, the idea was met with great reluctance. In the decades since the world-wide war, most of the human race had taken comfort from their subterranean existence, and of those who emerged from the tunnels and caverns that had become reality for most of the population, none dared to return to the opulence of that earlier time.

Gone were the towers of glass and metal and in their place were low-slung, mud-colored abodes that cowered over the landscape, their profiles too tailored to the geography to be easily seen from the roaming drones and air-vehicles in the sky above.

With geographic boundaries and alliances virtually destroyed, governing bodies no longer recognized any of the treaties or agreements they’d previously operated under. The skies were forever thick with spy craft and opportunistic enemies looking to reduce the number and will of their adversaries.

It was always a shock to Audie when he returned from one of the vibrant, simplistic earlier epochs to the one in the year 2130 where the Authority chose to sink its roots.

He understood why the elders would choose an unsettled time for its headquarters. The chaos and distrust of the time made it much easier for them to stay apart, a secret organization whose tasks would be frowned upon if they were known.

But knowing the rationale didn’t make Audie like it any better.

He stood on the rocky shoreline, staring off into the horizon where the black, rugged outline of the prison appeared to the uneducated eye as a ridge of barren mountaintops. A yard below his feet the water rushed in and crashed against the rocks, flinging salty mist into the air to moisten his skin and hair.

The wind flung the moisture-laden strands of his hair around his face and sent the tails of his black, leather jacket flying behind him.

High above him, a magically-generated bank of steel-gray clouds masked the sky, making it impossible for any spy craft to view the Authority without dropping low enough to be in danger of being shot down. It wasn’t unusual for the elders to order a craft to be shot out of the air. They had no compunction and laws that would forbid the action had long ago ceased to exist.

Like the clouds, the natural repulsiveness of the place had been augmented by the Authority’s repelling magics, which made it nearly impossible for an unsuspecting dupe to just stumble across the organization by mistake.

He pulled breath into his lungs and lifted his hand to call his guide magics. The air above his palm swirled blue, the color thickening as blue sparks of magic spun toward him from the objects in the surrounding area.

When the sparkling, blue energy swirled upward, into a narrow funnel that gained speed with every glistening spark of power, Audie pictured the distant island and closed his fist, feeling the punch of the re-ordered magic in a burst of power that slammed up his arm and skimmed through his belly.

He felt its power along his nerve endings, gathering it into a spiral in his gut as the world started to shimmer and pulse around him. Then he closed his eyes before the movement could make him dizzy and held his breath as the salt-drenched wind buffeted him.

Audie was jerked off his feet and flung into a crack between the layers of the physical world.

When he stopped moving he was standing in the courtyard of the Authority Headquarters, staring into the silver-blue gaze of the Ingress Sentinel. The eight foot tall black man stood unnaturally straight, a lethal trident clutched in one enormous fist. The man was deadly accurate with the trident and was rumored to be able to hit a fleeing sparrow in a high wind, from two hundred feet. In the dark.

Audie wasn’t sure how much of that rumor was urban legend and how much was real. He hoped he never had to discover the truth firsthand.