The Revenant Road (19 page)

26

Throwdown at the Ambiguously-Lit Rodeo of Doom

Kowalski turned toward me and flipped a 9mm toward my head. I caught it, barely.

“What is he?” Hernandez snapped. She held the sharpened iron stave in front of her, its point facing the black giant in the doorway.

“I don’t know,” Kowalski growled. “Frankel’s the Diviner.”

“Frankel’s dead,” Hernandez said.

Trocious stood casually, his thickly-muscled arms at his sides seemingly relaxed. His eyes remained focused on mine as if the hunters’ discussion was beneath his notice.

“I’m offering you a chance,” he said. “You have uncommon attributes which our side might find useful.”

I glanced at Kowalski. The old man was holding his crossbow at the ready. I hadn’t seen him reload it, but a black bolt sat notched and aimed at Trocious’s heart.

“Don’t listen to him, Grudge,” Kowalski said. “He’s a goddamned liar, just like his dead-bitch mistress.”

Trocious laughed.

“Mistress?” he said. “But you misperceive my purpose. The woman was not the cause, merely the lure. Her fate is of no consequence.”

“You seduced her,” Kowalski said. “Sucked her in with promises and then turned her into that thing.”

“She sought power,” Trocious sneered. “Her dreams called out to me, brought me to her even across the Rift, so great was the force of her desire. They were the dreams of a powerful mind, but she craved more power. Such thoughts are as meat and drink to my kind.”

“In return you gave her Death,” Kowalski said.

“I gave her Night’s Embrace,” Trocious said. “And the power to use it however her wits might allow. It was she who chose the form of her destruction.”

Trocious turned his gaze back to me.

“These others have only moments of life left to them, but
you
may choose a different destiny.”

“Grudge...” Kowalski warned.

“A destiny you will serve, willing or no.”

“
Shoot him
,” Hernandez snapped. “Goddamit, Kowalski…”

“It won’t do any good,” Kowalski said. “Can’t you feel his power?”

Indeed, in that moment even, I saw it. He seemed to vibrate with force.  Energy, an aura, some kind of power swirled in the air around Juno’s “manservant.” I
could
see
it,
a black-light cloud of dark motes spinning around Trocious like a tornado of malice. That malice reached out and swirled around Kowalski and the hunters.

“I was born a slave,” Trocious said. “I’ve walked this world since before Abraham Lincoln was born. In my dreams, one of the Hallowed Ones came to me. He sang to me tales of a faraway land, a land of olive trees and white sands, of a distant shore lapped by a deep green sea: a land where all men were free.”

Kowalski and the other hunters stood as still as statues. Tears glimmered in Hernandez’s eyes, a rictus of pain twisting her face. The hunters stood, immobilized as effectively as if they had been turned to stone by Trocious’s malice.

The manservant took a step toward me.

“The Hallowed One offered me the power to destroy my captors if I served him willingly. He offered me the lives of the ones who sold my children. I accepted, and became as one of the Hallowed. I have served them ever since.”

Trocious extended his hand toward me. In the flickering candlelight, the nails of his right hand shone black as obsidian.

“Of what do you dream, Obadiah Grudge? Power? Limitless Wealth? The hearts of your enemies laid before you to grind beneath your heel? You have only to join us and all these dreams can be made real.”

Unbidden, the face of Tobi Bernardi, the literary critic for the
New York Times,
popped into my head. A vision of Bernardi crawling naked across the floor of my mansion in the
Hamptons
with an apple in her mouth sprang into being before my inner eye. The fact that I didn’t own a mansion in the
Hamptons
seemed a minor consideration.    

My mouth hinged open.

Then another voice rang out.

“Bullshit.”

Trocious turned toward the speaker.

Kowalski was chewing his lips to pieces.

His mouth and chin were covered with blood; a pink froth dripped out of his mouth and spattered his black coat.

“Bu...bu...bullshhh...”

As I watched, Kowalski raised his right fist as if it weighed a hundred pounds and punched himself in the nose.

“Bullshit!” he hollered.

His distress seemed to galvanize the other hunters.

One by one, they
re-started,
like sleepwalkers waking to find themselves naked in the middle of the Hollywood Freeway.

“You freaks killed my father and every other hunter that was ever worth a good goddamn,” Kowalski said.

He lifted his crossbow and fired. The bolt flew across the room and buried itself in Trocious’s heart.

“Let him have it!” Kowalski roared. A second later, a fusillade of gunfire filled the room with the thunder of War.

I dove to the floor.

Trocious stood there, his arms outstretched in the hail of bullets, with Kowlaski’s crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest. 

The manservant grew a foot taller, his shoulders bulging, shifting as his muscles twisted and expanded. The bones in his legs broke themselves and reformed. His feet turned black, became hooves. His face elongated, nostrils flaring—

Blood. Wet. Darkness. Laughing, laughing in the light…

—and his forehead broadened and extended. As the hunters’ fire tore into him, Trocious roared. His upper body hunched forward, grew heavier, even more thickly muscled. A dense black fur covered his torso, back and shoulders, and two long black horns burst through the bones of his skull.

What stood before me was something I remembered from Greek mythology, a monster, half-man and half bull, cursed by a god to live in seclusion and darkness for all eternity.

Kowalski fired another bolt.

Trocious snatched the shaft out of the air and flung it at one of the hunters, a short, stocky woman with a blue Mohawk. The shaft pierced the hunter’s throat and pinned her to the armoire.

Then he charged.

The hunters scattered, diving out of the monster’s path. One hunter, a muscular Asian man, was unable to get out of the way. Trocious impaled the hunter with those massive horns, lifted him off his feet and rammed him into the wall.

The impact shook the whole house, smashed plaster from the ceiling. Behind me, a huge chandelier crashed to the floor. Trocious left the hunter half-suspended in a man-sized depression in the wall, spun, and charged Hernandez.

The one-eyed hunter pulled an iron stave from the leather sheath strapped to her back. A moment before Trocious struck, she dove out of the way.

Trocious thundered past Hernandez. Before he could turn and run her down, Hernandez came up
behind
the bull-man and plunged the stave into the small of his back. The bull-man roared. He lashed out with his horns and struck Hernandez a glancing blow to the upper body. The one-eyed hunter flew ten feet through the air, landed on the long table and slid unconscious to the floor.

A lithe black woman darted in with a stave in each hand and rammed them into the top of the bull-man’s right buttock. Trocious roared and whirled, swinging its head with enough force to break the black hunter’s neck and fling her corpse the length of the dining hall. 

Another hunter swept in swinging a long-handled axe to behead the bull-man. Trocious whirled and countered with one long horn. The shock of the impact snapped the axe handle in half. The bull-man lashed out with one massive fist and pulped the hunter’s head. 

Two more hunters attacked in unison. One of them opened fire, peppering the bull-man with rounds from a semi-automatic shotgun. The creature staggered, reaching for the staves in its back. It seemed more affected by the iron spears: Bullets only seemed to annoy it.

The second hunter, a tall, redheaded man, threw his stave like a javelin and struck the bull-man in the shoulder. Trocious roared, spun on its heel and thundered toward me.

“Move!” the redheaded hunter cried.

At the last moment, he shoved me out of the way.

Then the bull-man ran him down.

“Shoot it!” Kowalski cried.

He was talking to me.

I glanced down at the silver automatic in my hand as the bull-man reached the far end of the dining room, spun on its heel and came for me.

I fired.

A gout of blood bloomed across the creature’s massive chest. Blood fountained out of the wound and splashed the floors of Juno Kemantari’s formal dining room.

The bull-man lunged toward me and I fired again. A red geyser spattered the shoes of the black-haired hunter crouching behind the monster. It was Hernandez.

This time, the bull-man shrieked.

The swirling black cloud began to flicker. The lambent particles slowed and began to fade. With a shout of triumph, Hernandez hurled her stave. It pierced the bull-man’s neck and punched through his Adam’s apple.

Trocious bellowed, and began to shrink.

The bull-man turned and stampeded toward the open French doors.

But Kowalski and his crossbow barred the way.

Trocious put on a burst of speed. But he was considerably slower now, bleeding heavily from his wounds.

Kowalski fired.

The bull-man veered to the right and Kowalski’s bolt shot past my left ear and buried itself in the wall inches from my head. Kowalski dove out of the way as the bull-man  smashed
through
the wall.

Trocious fled, bellowing, into the night.

I stood there with my gun aimed at a gaping hole in Juno’s dining room wall. Her candle-lit domain was a blood-splattered disaster. Around me, the hunters were scrambling to attend their wounded. I couldn’t move, couldn’t let go of the gun.

Hernandez got to her feet, her fists pressed against a deep gash in her side.

Kowalski moved to help the one-eyed brunette. But before he could take more than three steps Hernandez lifted one forbidding hand. Her contempt for him and for me was plain. It shone from her like a silent beacon of rage.

Kowalski nodded, but a flicker of pain contorted his features as he moved off to help the survivors.

A delayed adrenaline surge did a
Soul Train
Line through my nervous system and Kowalski’s gun tumbled from my hands. It struck the floor, bounced once and fired.

Next to Hernandez, a
painted
ceramic bust of Juno dressed as Jane Mansfield exploded in a shower of brightly-colored shrapnel. The one-eyed hunter dove onto her face.

Shattered porcelain rained down on her shoulders.