I LET GO and the sword hilt falls away into the pocket of the coat, its muffled wail trailing off in my head until it snaps off.
The sensation of that makes the skin crawl on the back of my neck and down my shoulders and I shudder.
“Damn, chica, that was some cool shit.”
I turn to the voice and find the kid standing there. He’s not shaking anymore and he’s pulled his pants up some.
I glare at him, not sure what to say.
“How you make that sword disappear?” His eyebrows are pulled together.
“Magick.”
He nods like he knows something. “I get that. My cousin, Jorge, he does that shit all the time, pulling coins from some chica’s ears and shit, hidin’ cards up his sleeve. Always tryin’ to get some, y’know what I mean?”
“It’s not the same.” His mouth moves and I jerk my finger at him, stopping him. “Don’t call me chica again.”
“What’s your name then?”
Should I tell this kid my name?
Fuck it.
“Charlie.”
“Javier.” He smiles and it makes his eyes go sleepy looking. “You can call me Javi if you want.” He pronounces it “hah-vee.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see the sand dweller move, rocking like it is about to stand up. Putting my right hand into the outside pocket of the coat, I point with my left at the girl slumped onto the ground. “Go check on her. Take her inside if she’s okay.”
He glances at the girl and then back at me; the look on his face is unsure.
“I’m not asking, Javier.”
“It’s cool; it’s cool.” He moves off.
I watch him for a second, my right hand feeling around until it closes on what I’m looking for.
I walk over to the inhuman thing huddled on the alley floor.
I pull my hand out of the pocket.
In it is a knife as long as my forearm.
Idolcarver.
Blade of Castration.
The Knife of Abraham.
The Aqedah.
Holding it in my hand makes a tickle run from the back of my throat all the way to the deepest reaches of me. The handle is plain olive wood, worn shiny from generations upon generations of hands holding it. The blade is a triangle-shaped wedge of ancient iron with one sharp edge and a spine as thick as my finger. Holding it is the opposite of holding the sword. This knife was never truly the Man in Black’s. It had been used to hack out idols to Moloch and then belonged to Abraham, who laid it against the throat of Isaac. Later, a Russian tsar and his castration cult used it to make the sacrifice of their own foreskin in some twisted ritual that went bad, really, really bad. The Man in Black claimed he took it from the bloody hand of a dying Nazi.
He’s just fucked up enough for that to be true.
With it, I’ve killed the mad priest of a cancer god, an asshole who hurt me long ago, and stabbed the Man in Black to stop him from killing Daniel with it.
Now I’m going to use it to get some information.
Squatting next to the sand dweller, I grab the flange of skin surrounding its skull. It is hard under my fingertips and slick; the flex it has is stiff like thin plastic instead of pliable, like a fin instead of a flap. I give it a shake. The sand dweller snarls, but it’s weak. There is a puddle of grainy mud spreading beneath it, bleeding out whatever it has in place of blood from the wound I dealt it.
Serves it right after what it was about to do to that girl.
I fight off the urge to go ahead and drive the Aqedah into its face and end it.
“Do you speak English?”
It growls something unintelligible.
Dammit.
I wish for us to understand each other.
The collar moves with the magick but not enough to hurt.
“Tell me how to find the Man in Black.” My voice sounds weird in my own ears, distorted by the translation magick.
The sand dweller looks up sharply, eyes wide. I can see sticky grains of silica packed into the corners of them. “Who?”
“Nyarlathotep. Also known as the Crawling Chaos.”
“He is not a man.”
“Where is he?”
“You killed me. Let me die.”
“Answer the question.”
It moans and leans away. I flick the Aqedah out and slash the edge across its arm. The knife cuts deep, with all the resistance of warm cheese. The sand dweller howls again, jerking away.
“Next time I will cut off another whole piece of you. Tell me how to find Nyarlathotep.”
“I know not where the Crawling Chaos has crawled to.”
“You know something. Your kind always know something. Tell me.”
It shakes its head.
I lift the knife.
“No, no, no, nonononono…,” it whimpers. “You found me; find him the same way.”
“You don’t think I’ve tried that, asshole? He’s gone to ground and I need you to point to that ground.”
“You’ve killed me. You have no threat.”
I put the Aqedah in my left hand and open my right, lifting it in front of him. I pull up my magick and send it down my arm into the Mark there. Heat traces out the symbol, the intersecting lines, and the curling whorls that make it. The magick begins to ooze out of the Mark, painting him a hot magenta colour as thick gobbets of etheric energy drip off my hand, sizzling against the ground between us.
The words come from somewhere in the darkness inside me. I don’t know them before I speak them but I mean them each and every one.
“Listen and hear and bear witness. I am the Hound in the Night, the Seeker, the Searcher, the Destroyer. I will chase your essence into the ether and I will harry it between my teeth. You cannot avoid me. You cannot escape me. You cannot outrun me. You are prey, mewling and broken in the outer dark. You will ask for the mercy of obliteration and find none at my hand. My plaything, my morsel, mine to keep, mine to kill, mine to destroy, and mine to harm.”
With each syllable my magick grows, the excess of it spitting from my palm like the molten sparks from a welding torch. I feel it in my bones, slipping over my organs. It spills from my eyes and runs in hot tracks down my cheeks, shimmering free off my jaw. Sheer, unmitigated terror lies on the sand dweller’s koala face like a caul.
I lean in, mouth twisting into the savage, toothsome smile of a predator.
“Now tell me how to find the Man in Black.”