MONSTERS IN THE MIST

A strange melancholy had permeated the village of Dalwen, deeper than the thick fog around them. Tal Harveston had been a popular boy, and the people here took the news of his demise hard, like he had been their own son. With that mourning had come both terror and resentment—fear that it would happen to another of their own, anger that the Reapers had done so little to save Harveston from his fate.

Remy bore it well enough. He was used to hate. He had paid his respects to Harveston’s mother, a woman in her early forties who looked like she had aged twenty more. He kept his visit short and offered her some small compensation—the dead boy had been the family breadwinner, and this would be enough to let her live comfortably for a few years. Enough still to set her other two sons up in trade or in an apprenticeship when they came of age.

This wasn’t the first time. There were missing children all over Aluria, triple this year than it had been in previous others. He hadn’t found all their families yet, but the ones he had he could do nothing much for either, beyond offering his condolences in coin. Not all of them had accepted. Many a grieving parent had thrown it back at his face.

The village had been spared the details of what had happened to Tal Harveston after he’d been taken away by the Reapers, but they knew the monster the Reapers had fought.

The woman accepted the bag of coins. She wouldn’t meet his gaze.

The other villagers had been hesitant to talk to him, but the idea of some terrible creature worse than a vampire overcame that reluctance. The other mutilated body, still unidentified, had been found on the main roads between Glycespike and Wyndbrook, just as Jack had told Remy. No one in the neighboring villages traveled through those paths anymore. Not since the body’s discovery, and not since the fog had settled around them like a thick, hazy soup. They would have to leave Glycespike eventually, they said—vegetables to deliver, livestock to bring to market in the larger towns. But not just yet. No one wanted to be the next corpse. There were rumors of it being a curse.

Elke disguised herself well. She’d met up with Remy, her face scrubbed free of oils and paints and her bright red hair tucked into a severe bun. Her clothes looked homespun and rough-stained, and it took a closer look to see that she was even a woman. This was not the first time she’d accompanied him on a hunt. Objectively speaking, she probably had more experience with this than Remy did.

Late afternoon resembled nightfall in these parts. Remy could barely see more than twenty feet in front of him, and it was getting cold.

If the villagers were right, then what a fucking horrible night to have a curse.

There was no real strategy here but to wait by the roads to be attacked. He tempted fate by spinning Breaker above his head, the movements sure and practiced, the knifechain whizzing merrily along in a circle. It had always calmed him in his youth, and it was calming him now.

“You look ridiculous,” Elke said.

“You know, the people from Tithe tie heavy coconuts around thick bamboo and carry them above their heads as they go from one village to the next. This is a similar exercise.”

“That would explain both their and your impressively contoured arms.” Elke knew why he did it, knew better than to push. She stretched. “If I’d known it would be this cold, I would have stayed at the village and coaxed a little more fire from the Glycespike inn.”

“You’re not supposed to feel cold anymore.”

“You’re right. It’s my hair. It’s all scraggly and frizzed from the damp, even tied back like this. Being dead doesn’t do much for your hair.” She had brought a fire lance with her, one she’d forged herself. It was part of her human disguise, but Remy suspected it was also a matter of pride for her, proof she could make better weapons than what the Reapers possessed.

She’d convinced him to bring a second lance along, though that had never been his style. Remy had little patience for them—he liked his battles up close and in-your-face messy. But there was enough in those strange reports that he’d let caution overrule his pride.

“A couple more hours.” They’d found shelter near some trees, only a few feet away from the main road. The biggest piece of the body had been found right around here; Remy could still smell the faint metallic scent of it, remnants of blood on the ground too miniscule to see.

There had been no new attacks in the area since Jack had made his report. Either Tal Harveston had been responsible for the last killing, or this second creature was biding its time.

Remy was wagering on the latter. Harveston had left his victims intact. That was almost two weeks ago. Jack reported the attack nearly five days after Harveston had supposedly been taken in. The body should have been discovered long before that.

“You could still find your way back,” Remy said. “I’m told the inn’s famous for their mulled wine.”

“They don’t take the time to spice their bottles with blood like you do for me. My hair will survive.” Elke stilled. “Remy. Wait.”

He’d heard it, too. A faint shuffling noise, grunting. It sounded loud in the otherwise total stillness around him, amplified by the fog. This was no horse and wagon coming their way. It was something larger. A hell of a lot larger.

The smell of blood grew thicker.

This accursed fog was a frequent problem on other hunts, and it was just as much an obstacle now. Remy crept forward steadily, newly forged knifechain in hand, since ranged combat seemed like the better idea at this point. Elke was beside him and keeping pace, just as silent and just as swift. There was another grotesque sound from somewhere closer; a grating, crunching noise, followed by something wet and squelching.

The road before them cleared enough for Remy to see that he’d been wrong after all, except that the horse lay on the road on its side, clearly dead. The cart had been overturned, and something was hunched over it.

It was a nightmare. Its back was turned toward them, and Remy saw the protruding bone sticking out between its shoulder blades, the blood vessels pulsing and running underneath the waxy, near-transparent skin. It had a vaguely human shape—long stumps that could be legs, two more that could be arms if you discounted the three more bursting from the sides of its tumorous upper back, all bulging outward like flayed muscle upon flayed muscle. Its skin was a slime made of flesh and looked ready to slide off at a moment’s notice, and he was reminded of Dr. Agenot’s report of the Harveston boy’s rapid decomposition. It was a massive pockmark of a creature twice his size, and it was blocking the path, a significant radius around it now stained red.

Whoever had been manning the cart was also dead. Their remains were unrecognizable as human, save for a huddle of torn cloth on one side of the wagon. The creature continued to feast.

“Preserve us,” Elke breathed from behind him, the closest thing he’d heard a vampire utter to a prayer.

The most pragmatic solution would be to ride hard back to Elouve, summon all the available Reapers there, and return with an army to fight the beast. The most arsed solution would be to remain and take it on their own because it could escape in the interim.

For Remy, who was accustomed to making bad decisions, it was an easy choice to make.

The knifechain was deadly sharp, but not even he had been expecting it to plunge through the back of the nightmare’s head, the thickest part of the blade sliding back and anchoring to its forehead. It stopped chewing, and rose on its stumps, turning. Remy had to fight to keep his hold on Breaker firm lest it be pulled out of his grasp, even as he viewed the entire monstrosity for the first time.

There was no face. All Remy could see was a bloated eye staring back at them, an eye that took up space where nose and cheekbones should have been. His knife burrowed out from the center of its forehead, but to no obvious effect.

It had no mouth. But from its chest cavity, teeth half as long as his scythes emerged from a cavernous hole that stretched across it from shoulder blade to shoulder blade; still bloody, still gnawing on the remains of the poor traveler and their horse.

This wasn’t a vampire. This was a demon dredged up from the pits of hell.

“Bloody fuck,” Remy said.

The horror spat out a glob of squirming fat on the ground and then advanced toward them, chest-mouth curled at them in a terrifying grin.

It was faster than Remy wanted it to be, bearing down on them with its tree-trunk legs. Remy ran in a semicircle around it, yanking hard at his chain before it could further entangle itself around the monster’s head. Thankfully it yielded, and the knife was pulled back out with a sickening tear, blue-tinged blood spilling on the ground.

Without either needing to say a word, Remy and Elke split, dodging into opposite directions. Elke was faster and loaded up with firepowder. She reappeared at the monster’s left, her lance already leveled at its head as she pulled the trigger.

A cascading stream of fire shot out from the muzzle, Elke handling the hard recoil expertly. It scored a direct hit on its forehead, exactly where Remy had aimed at with his knifechain, and the brute began to burn brightly like a torch, the flames soon swallowing up the rest of its head. The great, staring eye slid shut…

And opened again just underneath its torso, right below the wide mouth and its sharp teeth.

Remy shifted his aim. The arms were the immediate threat, and he managed to cut down a limb before the monster could reach him, narrowly avoiding a grab. His scythes cut through another appendage, and he swung low and managed to take out one of its stumps before the monster’s weight was on him, pinning him to the ground, Breaker between them. The fire atop its head had been extinguished, leaving blackened carcass and charred, visible bone. Remy could smell its rancid breath up close, the teeth snapping dangerously near his face before he managed to twist Breaker so that his blades bit down into the void that passed for its mouth. It reared back, giving him enough space to move and drive it again right into the beast’s shifted eye.

It didn’t make a sound; Remy wasn’t sure it had the required vocal cords to do so. It simply lunged back, away from him, giving Elke another opportunity to reload and fire another round, this time right at the gaping mouth, the overtly large and ragged teeth. But instead of fire, a fine bolt of lightning shot out from the silver muzzle, and Remy swore he could feel it crackle into his skin, even from several feet away.

The monstrous thing swallowed her shot whole and then staggered, already off-balance from the loss of one leg. Its body was glowing like a hot furnace, Elke’s attack tearing through whatever entrails it had left, lighting it up from within. Whatever coarse skin that helped shield it from outside flames didn’t from the inside, and Remy could see the blood vessels underneath its flesh turning a fiery red. He relinquished Breaker to grab at the fire lance Elke had provided him, having enough self-preservation to know that he would not want to get up close to the monster again no matter how great his love was for melee combat. And when it turned back his way, he fired.

The fire lance’s weakness, even in the ones Elke built, was that it could only deliver one discharge at a time before needing to reload. Its strength was that Elke had modified theirs for double the firepower. The shot practically tore the creature apart, reducing it to a thick soup. It flooded the path before them, more liquid now than solid. It was a whole damn mess to clean up.

“Lightning?” Remy asked weakly in the aftermath. “Your lance has lightning?”

“Not quite the type of lightning brought down from the clouds, but very effective, wouldn’t you say?” Elke tried not to sound too shaken. “It’s all built on rather sound science. Might need a few more modifications, though—it jolted me, just a little. Perhaps more insulation—”

“And what the hell was that?” Remy asked, slowly rising to his feet. He’d been expecting some twisted kind of new rogue vampire. Not something that could barely pass for human, hunting so close to the villages. Rai Takenori was not the kind of man to exaggerate. Remy should have believed his descriptions.

“Are you seriously considering bringing it back to your manor?” Elke asked, appalled when Remy reached into his satchel.

“We need to know where it came from. We need to warn everyone in Elouve. The fog might have helped in keeping it out of sight, but if there are more of these things out there, then we’re all in more trouble than we realize.” He’d brought more sacks, but he’d also been expecting something a lot more solid to bring back. There was also the impossibly foul odor rising from the remains, which was making his eyes water and his nose threaten to mutiny.

Elke sighed, and then took to reloading her fire lance. “At least the chain’s still intact this time. I’d think adding more knives would do better damage beyond just the one you have.”

“I was thinking that adding spikes might be a nice option.”

“What a dangerously novel idea. Shall we send for more Reapers to scrape what’s left of this creature off the roads?”

“I’ll mark an area to warn people to go around,” Remy said, sounding doubtful over his own plan. He moved past the steaming mass to survey its other victims. The horse had been horribly eviscerated; whoever its rider was, even more so. There was an assortment of vegetables scattered on the ground beside the wagon. The beast had ignored those.

Remy bent over what was left of the man and quietly muttered a short, brief prayer over the remains. “Head back to Glycespike and ask the headsman to send word back to Elouve,” he said. “I’ll stay and make sure no one disturbs the scene, warn them away if need be.”

Elke nodded, not even bothering to protest. She would reach the village faster than he ever could. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, you’d better find somewhere safer to keep your vigil. As you said, there could be more of them out there.”

It was sound advice, and after Elke had gone, Remy returned to the forest edge to keep watch, taking out a few packets of gunpowder and saltpeter to reload his lance. After that, he took up Breaker and resumed his habit, the chain whirling aimlessly above him, lulling him into a meditative wakefulness. The fog was still as thick as ever, and the cold was starting to get through, but he barely felt the chill.

He stared at the sodden mess that had once been the hulking, inhumanly grotesque creature—no word existed yet to accurately define what the mutated beast was. Now that the danger had passed, he was starting to think about the magnitude of what they had just discovered. Takenori had mentioned a stark difference in the Harveston boy when he’d taken the vampire in a second time, making mention of the boy’s increase in size and mass, though his descriptions of it had been so mildly understated compared to the reality Remy found himself looking at now.

Was this the same kind of mutation that the Reapers had encountered? The reports were now over a week old. Had they already located the persons responsible for this new breed? Was this the reason the queen had ordered most of the Reapers to Kerenai?

And if that wasn’t already enough to ruin his day, the congealed, soup-like mess on the ground began to move.

It was a faint quiver at first, one he could almost put down to a strange trick of the light through the filter of darkness about him, except that it did so again, with much more force and visible shaking.

Any doubt was put to rest when the thick goo began to clump together of its own accord, slowly building itself back up from the ground, rearranging melted flesh and hardening bone to reconstruct the familiarly horrifying shape of the one-eyed, several-armed, grinning-chest anomaly that he’d thought they’d already killed.

“Fucking hell,” Remy groaned, shoving more sulfur and silver shells down his fire lance’s barrel.

He’d managed to fire at the monster before it could completely reconstitute itself, up to half a waist and a pair of legs, the unnerving, gaping mouth of death already formed. The blast took out a goodly part of hip bone and thigh, but the rest of its body seemed to absorb the impact, growing over the area like his shot didn’t matter.

Heart pounding, Remy switched to his more favored style of fighting—in-your-face combat, though more in-your-stomach, given the current situation. The ungodly eye was back, sliding open to focus on him just as he sliced right through its gaze with the scythe. While it might have built up a quick immunity to the fire lance, the silver in his blade still affected it well enough. Blood sprayed across the air, and Remy rolled to the ground just as another appendage grew directly out of one of its legs, nearly impaling him. It wasn’t growing back into the same shape this time, with three legs and more on the way, choosing to stunt its height this time for a better grip on the ground. Its mouth was still the same, though, made of teeth and the shrapnel left behind by his and Elke’s fire lances.

He was in trouble. If it was capable of re-forming itself even after being obliterated at its most basic organic level, then nothing he could do would stop it. Remy’s only hope was to keep it engaged and prevent it from disappearing into the fog long enough for Elke and other reinforcements to show up.

That was much harder than it sounded. Remy cut off more limbs from beneath the now massive, sphere-like blob, then nearly lost his own leg when it rolled forward without warning, bone-teeth snapping as it tried to take a chunk out of his thigh.

Something blurred into view before him, and the monstrous thing was shoved back without ceremony, a thick cut across its midsection, bisecting its mouth.

Remy sprang to his feet, but Song Xiaodan was already blurring away again, reappearing behind the creature. He could hear her heartbeat from where she stood, even more irregular and rapid than when she had sat with him at the gardens. “Get out of the way,” she instructed him grimly, “and close your eyes.”

Remy, being a Pendergast, did not get out of the way, nor did he close his eyes. But when the Lady Song began to glow, seemingly without any other light source other than one that appeared to be manifesting from within, he was wise enough to stay out of the blast radius when the monster turned to face her.

Remy didn’t quite see what happened next, nor could he explain it. The unearthly light that had bathed Xiaodan streaked out in all directions around her, and for a moment the fog around them seemed to dissolve from the force of that brightness alone. It was as if the sun, rarely seen in Aluria, had taken up lodging inside of her and was unleashing six months’ worth of daylight all at once to make up for its previous absence.

It was a fatal sunlight, twentyfold the range of what a fire lance had and a hundred times deadlier. The monster didn’t just melt like it had previously; Remy never thought that the act of being visibly evaporated could be so violently forceful, but Xiaodan’s light was unrelenting.

In that moment, she was stunning.

Nothing of the beast remained when the light faded, save for the previously drying blue-black blood it had bled onto the ground.

“Hello again,” Lady Song said to Remy, somewhat weakly. There was still the hint of a halo about her, like she hadn’t completely been able to rein in the rest of the glow yet, and it highlighted the silver in her eyes. She was breathtaking, like a goddess who had condescended to step down from the clouds in answer to his prayer. Remy stared at her, dazed, until she stumbled, and the sounds of her heartbeat returned him back to the moment—beats that were far too quick and far too loud.

The light finally disappeared, like a candle unexpectedly snuffed out, and the cold and fog closed in again. He rushed to Xiaodan’s side when she tried to stand, and she only let out a brief sound of complaint when he stood back up with her in his arms.

“The bloody fuck are you doing here?” he asked.

“Same thing as you,” she mumbled, exhausted.

Likely she’d gone off without her fiancé knowing, judging by Remy’s previous encounter with someone Zidan Malekh considered family. “Don’t move.” He was relieved to hear her heartbeat slowing, her breaths no longer sounding labored. “What did you do?”

“I brought out the sun, Armiger.” Xiaodan sighed against him. “I would have thought that was obvious by now.”

And then, before Remy could say anything in rebuttal, she lost consciousness.