Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) (28 page)

The hideous limbs, horrid bodies, and haggard faces always remained only a few feet from his eye. Others had spread out, flying over the snow-dusted street. They twisted as if on nooses, swooped like vultures, and intertwined like maggots.

Jonathan continued to check every ten minutes, lest he be caught unaware and should they decide to assault the windows once more.

After an hour, when they still had done nothing, Jonathan had begun to wonder why they hadn’t tried to get in another way. There were windows below and above the office, yet they seemed unaware of them.

Jonathan didn’t voice the question or even dwell on it long; he was too aware of fate to tempt it in that way.

Wendell fell asleep two hours after the bombardment had stopped. Jonathan let him.

Wendell’s dozing allowed Jonathan the chance to recoup from the spells without hiding the affect it had on him.

It gave him the quiet to find the balance between need and desire, and it gave him the space to worry about what would come next.

He had known of the Sluagh from his studies but not from any actual firsthand accounts. That worried him. He tried to think of other creatures of their ilk but could only liken it to picking a silver pin out of a steel-wool mountain.

An hour after Wendell had finally closed his eyes, Jonathan looked out the small spot in the window and saw the Sluagh gather into a dense cloud.

He watched as, at street level, they compressed tightly together. The consolidation of their forms became so thick it blocked out the light from below including the streetlights. It appeared as though the street directly under the building was as dark as a hag’s eye.

Suddenly, the swarm rose up.

Jonathan swore under his breath and almost stepped back from the glass.

However, instead of mounting a renewed attack, the abominations surged past him and up into the sky. A scorched column of putrid malignance, they circled once over the street and then flew off west. They again resembled a flock of dark birds.

On the street below, from what he could see, not a single scrap of flesh remained behind.

Jonathan surmised that the damaged ones had absorbed each other and the dead to make themselves ‘whole.’

For fifteen minutes, he continued to watch the western sky, waiting for them to return. Even after he believed they were actually gone, he still checked regularly over the next hour to be sure.

D
awn found Jonathan suffering from not only fatigue but from a body throbbing with aches and pains from head to foot. However, he had been in worse conditions in his life.

Not much worse
, he conceded, but he could take it.

To counter the heavy feeling in his eyes, he had drunk a can of Red Bull followed by a can of Coke.

Jonathan felt more alert by the time Wendell woke with the light of day hitting his face.

He looked abashed that he had slept at all. “Are they gone?”

“Yeah,” Jonathan nodded. “About an hour after you conked out they took off.”

“Oh.” Wendell straightened in the chair. “Sorry about that.”

“Wasn’t much happening; no reason you shouldn’t have slept,” Jonathan told his client. “All seems calm at the moment.” He rapped his knuckles lightly on the wood desk. “You should probably take the opportunity to use the facilities—such as they are.”

Wendell turned his head towards the closet and seemed to debate it. With a shrug, he walked in and, pulling the door shut behind him, said, “Hey, you cleaned up in here.”

“Yup, about five—six in the morning. I was getting a bit punchy and needed something to distract myself.”

It wasn’t a lie. Nor was it the full truth.

Jonathan had needed to do something, but it wasn’t because of boredom. The need, the bone-deep craving to perform more magic, had been gnawing on him with the cold determination of a crab on a dead sailor’s face.

He had used tidying and reorganizing the closet as a way of keeping himself focused on something other than his addiction.

The mention of the attack last night put a burr in Jonathan’s brain. He got up to survey the outside world. Everything looked normal—copacetic—at first glance, but Jonathan knew something wasn’t right.

It took him a moment, but he finally realized what bothered him—The Lucky Monkey wasn’t open.

He glanced behind him at the old clock above the office door. It read quarter after ten, just the time he’d remembered it being. Bao always had the open sign glowing by ten sharp.

The incongruity swam briefly through the back of Jonathan’s thoughts. Before he could catch hold of it, Wendell emerged from the closet.

“And that’s why I was never a big fan of camping,” the lanky man said, walking back to the chair inside the protective circle.

“You’d hate this job, then,” Jonathan replied, with a final glance down at the street.

“Seems pretty exciting,” Wendell replied wryly.

“Yeah, but too often, what I get is fidelity cases.” Jonathan settled himself back behind his desk. “Following around some husband, or wife, because of a found condom or too many late nights. You think crapping in a closet is rough; try doing it in a car.”

Wendell grimaced. “Ugh.”

They ate a breakfast of cold noodles and dumplings. For Jonathan, this breakfast was nothing out of the usual, though today it did make him wonder about the restaurant not being open yet.

Most mornings, his first meal of the day was leftover Singapore noodles and a beer. Wendell passed on the beer, but did take a Coke to wash down his meal.

Jonathan noticed that, as Wendell ate, his eyes constantly darted to the windows. When they did, he would pause in his chewing.

“It’s unlikely something will come during the day.”

Wendell looked towards him and gave a half-hearted smile. “Unlikely, but possible.”

Jonathan sighed. “Yeah.” He took a swig of his beer. “Unfortunately, anything’s possible.”

Wendell glanced to the window again.

“Maybe if we . . .” He shook his head and filled the gap in his speech by taking a sip of his Coke.

“You’re worried about the windows.”

“They look even worse than they did last night. What if—I mean, if something comes . . .”

“If something comes, I’ll deal with it, as I did the sluagh.” Jonathan stabbed his fork into his noodles.

“But if we could cover them . . .”

“With what?”

“I-I don’t know.”

“We might be able to jerry-rig something, Wendell, but consider it. Do you really think a couple shelves haphazardly nailed over the windows will make you any safer?”

“It might . . .” He dropped his shoulders. “No, probably not.”

“Besides, the only nails I have aren’t big enough to hold anything heavier than a sheet of cardboard,” Jonathan confessed, pushing his meal away from him.

“Can you—you know, magic them?”

“I could, but if I ward against the undead and something else comes . . .” He took a smoke out of his case. “Look, there are simply too many variables.”

He picked up the book he had started reading last night to better prepare himself, Cox’s ‘Death Among Us: a Guide to Reapers, Revenants, and the Returned.’

“I could spend the entire day trying to ward against everything in this damn book, for something completely different to come at you.”

Jonathan put the book down and sighed.

“I’m sorry, Wendell. I’m not happy about the state of the windows, either. I just . . . I can’t see wasting time doing something for nothing. Our biggest defense is that circle around you. It hasn’t been fool-proof, but it has given us the edge.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, too.” Wendell said, “I just . . . well, my sleep wasn’t exactly soothing.”

Jonathan nodded and lit his smoke.

“I’m also worried that if we did manage to seal up the windows, we’d be at a disadvantage of not seeing what might be coming.”

“I suppose that makes sense.” He looked at the windows again, but his eyes had lost the glassy look they had before.

“So, those things.”

“Sluagh.”

“You’d never had to deal with them before.”

“No, no that was a new experience for me.”

“Does that happen often?”

“Let’s just say it’s another reason I keep myself so well-read on things.”

Wendell seemed to have finished eating as well, though from nerves or being full, Jonathan didn’t know.

Jonathan realized the smoke in the room only came from his cigarette. Putting it down in the only free space in the full ashtray, he got up and went into the closet.

“Something wrong?” Wendell whispered.

Jonathan looked over his shoulder and saw Wendell, rubbing the back of his neck.

“I’m just refreshing the brazier. It’s something I can do to help keep you safe.”

After grabbing a bottle of patchouli oil and a handful of caraway seeds, he came back out. A few drops of the patchouli on the dark red coals and the room filled with a sweet earthy smell.

“It’s like placing a ward in the air itself,” he told Wendell calmly, brushing the caraway seed off his palm over the brazier.

Something rattled against the window behind Jonathan’s desk, and they both jumped.

Outside, on the small ledge, stood a raven.

Jonathan cursed silently.

He hadn’t even realized he had raised his right hand until he felt the skip of his heart as the energy touched it.

He rolled the fingers of his hand into a ball, digging the nails into his palm. Fighting back against the need to let the power flow, he pushed at the white dragon, wrestling it back to the place behind, between, and beyond his own self.

When he has succeeded, he grabbed up his smoke and dragged deep on it. He finished what remained of his beer in one long swallow, trying to remember what he had been doing.

The raven hopped outside the fractured glass, looking in. It unnerved Jonathan, but he thought it best, for Wendell, if he didn’t react to it.

Jonathan pointedly sat in his chair with his back to the bird. He poured a double of bourbon and picked up the book once more. He tried his best to be calm, but after last night’s attack, he knew he needed to be ready for anything—thus the book. However, he found it hard to concentrate on the pages.

Wendell kept his eyes on the bird. Jonathan didn’t think the fascination was due to any ornithological leanings.

“It’s just a bird,” he said, after failing to concentrate on his reading.

In truth, Jonathan had run through his mind all possibilities of what the raven might be, other than ‘just a bird.’ It was associated with Morrigan of Celtic myth, the goddess of the battlefield—she who knew who would die in battle. Jonathan dismissed this association. Wendell wouldn’t be battling; that was his job.

Most other references for ravens related it to a trickster god. That they had always been associated with death was undeniable. Wolves and ravens—the two benefactors of battle.

Jonathan almost said, ‘it’s just another psychopomp,’ but caught himself in time.

Lunch came and went without incident. However, at one o’clock, Jonathan’s mind felt as if an aggressive throw pillow had started a fight with it.

Opening the center desk drawer, he quietly pushed his chair back and stood up. Taking the revolver out of the desk, he told Wendell to stay put. His client turned in the chair to look towards the doorway but kept his ass planted on the seat. He was well out of sight, or danger, from anything coming through the front.

Jonathan dashed into the outer office, careful not to touch the line of basil and salt that stretched across the doorway between the two rooms.

He tried to listen for any sign of what may have tripped his warning system. He thought he heard the sound of feathers rustling. It was faint, though—the memory of a sound in his head more than the real thing reaching his ears.

Raising the gun, he thumbed back the hammer, and readied himself for whatever might step in front of his doorway.

All was still.

He heard nothing but his own heart counting the seconds as they passed.

Then something stepped into his view. Something beautiful. Fair of face with flowing dark hair. Tall and commanding, yet graceful and delicate in its movement.

He actually began to lower his gun as he took in the magnificent sight. Its lush lips smiled and Jonathan felt warm. Then he looked—truly looked—into the eyes of the one that stood before him.

He snapped the gun back up and slid his finger from the guard to the trigger.

The eyes housed in that handsome face were cruel. The gaze that regarded him spoke of hunger and death.

Jonathan remembered the sound of wings and a creature from the book that lay open on his desk.

Memitim.

“Yea, his soul draweth near unto the grave, and his life to the destroyers,” Jonathan quoted at the figure before him.

The lush lips curled back into a grimace. The long, delicate fingers spread and resembled nothing less than claws.

It vaulted towards him, ignoring the salt and basil completely.

Jonathan had known, as soon as he’d realized what form of life he faced, the salt would be ineffectual in deterring it. He didn’t hesitate to unload two rounds into its chest when it moved.