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In the wild growth of the former rice fields, old furrows were bands of shadow disappearing into a slate horizon. Fortune danced in a flattened clearing, his arms flapping, knees bent low to the ground. He showed no sign of his earlier limp. These weren’t any moves I’d ever seen, but the signs of ritual were undeniable. As he circled, I heard a steady beat. A hollow thump. If I concentrated, I could feel it shiver up through the thick soles of my boots.
My escort had only now caught up. They rounded the bend in the trail agitated. Could be they sensed my plan to bolt. Before they could get too close, I jogged into the field.
I started to call out to Fortune but decided interrupting wouldn’t be the best idea. Rituals left incomplete often had unintended consequences. With boundaries weakened, magic seeped through, uncontrolled.
I’d planned to cast a ritual of my own. A little camouflage and transformation trading my work boots for the nimble hooves of a deer. I’d dart into the woods and hook back up with Araceli at the crossroads before dusk. But I hadn’t counted on meeting the old hoodoo out here.
The open field stretched for a mile in either direction. Searching the entire plot wouldn’t be possible before dusk, magic or not. If Fortune had come here though, maybe the crossroads ritual wouldn’t be necessary?
I jogged toward him, the dry grass whispering against my pants. A glance back and I could see the two goons had stopped at the edge of the clearing. Neither seemed eager to follow.
Fortune paid us no mind. He’d sunk lower to the ground, his head bobbing with the hollow beat. The movements, the posture, mimicked a bird. Not the sleek aerobatics of an eagle or hawk, more like the lazy circling and bent stance of a vulture.
The circling took him round and round a bright red handkerchief lying limply on the ground. Closer to the clearing, I could also see the source of the thumping. The cane he always carried leaned against a hollow log. Almost imperceptibly, it would bump the log in such a way I couldn’t tell if it were reacting to a tremor or moving on its own. With each pulse, the wet ground in the tamped circle shivered.
I didn’t need any special sight to know he wove a powerful spell. Every beat reached out far beyond This World. The field quivered alongside the air. On the edge, the possessed men grew more restless. One shrugged out of his jacket, letting it drop onto the muddy ground. The other stretched with the edgy stiffness of a waking beast. They weren’t calling after me to come back. They snarled, deep guttural animal noises no human could make.
I flashed a look between Fortune and the demons, deciding to risk the interruption. “You’re about to have a problem.”
Fortune ignored me. His dance continued, the circle tightening. I could sense a building arcane surge which pressed up from the mud and down from the sky all at once. A spiritual vortex which I couldn’t explain began to form around me, inside me. Wind whipped across the field, the tall stalks bending low to the ground. One of the possessed took a tentative step toward us.
“What are you doing?” I muttered. Voice low, my insides filled with a riot of butterflies. I’d said the words more to myself than him as I took careful note of his movements, the components of the spell.
Fortune’s attention snapped my direction. The whites of his eyes were a deep, glossy brown with only a thin, feathery bronze ring around the pupil. That surreal avian gaze grabbed hold. No. Couldn’t have been him. But I felt the judgmental stare of the raven who’d appeared on my stoop the day all this started.
“I’m mindin’ the trunk,” he said. “Question is, you gonna help?”
He extended a hand and the cane hurtled toward him. He leveled it, pointed at my head, and I instinctively twisted away. As I did, I saw the hell spawn galloping up behind me.
The possessed man, the demon, had charged. He’d shed his jacket at the edge, and as he rushed into the clearing he’d also shed his skin.
Clothes bursting at the seams, the threads ragged and bloody, his skin flapped from under split pant legs and an XXL dress shirt torn wide open. The lineman’s build had swelled. His arms had inverted, hands becoming razor-clawed paws and his feet thundering hooves which tore at the earth. His skin shimmered with the golden glow of a lion’s fur, bits of flesh clinging like afterbirth.
I’ve seen some messed up creatures since becoming a shaman. Watching a werewolf eat a corpse ass first like a hyena on the savanna was up there. They at least had the respect to go full feral. This beast took me completely off guard because the man’s face hadn’t changed. All too human, he wailed in agony and misery even as he charged.
I fumbled for my gun, but Fortune fired first.
A wave of force shot from his extended cane which rippled over my shoulder and pressed my jacket tight. A challenging trumpet like an elephant followed. The bolt struck the charging demon square in the chest, lifting it ten feet off the ground and tossing it into the grass.
“Least you can do for your own is see they don’t bother me none,” Fortune snapped then fell back into his dance.
The other demon, still a man with the beast within struggling to tear free, tossed back his head and howled in anguish. I ditched my jacket and reached into my pocket for the beads of Saint Helen. Kneading the leaf between my fingers released a gooey sap. I chanted and pressed the sap to my forehead, tracing patterns along my arms like Atofo’s tattoos. A simple protective spell, I didn’t think I could manage another full-on war enchantment. My skin tightened like the surface of a drum. It grew hide-like, enough to help turn away natural attacks like claws, or even knives, or prevent a serious case of road rash. This would be a last resort.
Next, I drew my first resort — the Emperor Scorpion.
When the second demon charged in a flurry of shredding clothes and flesh, I had zero guilt about sending a volley of lead center mass. The Emperor Scorpion bucked with each pull of the trigger. I held my ground, tracking the rounds as the beast bore down. Rooted in a shooter’s stance, the defensive armor settling over my skin, I let out a roar that mingling with the gunfire and inhuman screams.
Blood leaped off the beast in crimson clouds and dense spatters as the heavy caliber rounds tore through their target. Two in the chest, a third struck its shoulder and it stumbled. Front paws staggered only five yards away. The demon’s head swung, trying to shrug off the pain. A bestial tongue lolled from the human face. I tightened my shoulders and took careful aim.
Demonic possession didn’t usually involve this gruesome of a transformation. Wounds or pestilence might mark the afflicted or they’d start jawing in ancient tongues. This? I couldn’t be certain anymore whether this creature had ever been human. Could be a full-blooded demon visiting from the underworld like their boss. I couldn’t kill it permanently, but I could banish it from This World without all the fancy Latin.
I aimed the gun at its head. The human face regarded me almost pleadingly. I obliged.
I watched as the limbs retracted. Heard the sickening crunch as each one relocated in their sockets and golden fur melted away. Shirtless, Mordecai’s personal bodyguard lay there in the mud, three bullets to the torso and one through a shattered jaw.
Whatever I’d gotten into with this damn sword had just gotten worse.
Fortune’s thumping continued. Underlying it, I heard two powerful beats, out of synch with the rest. Hooves. I didn’t turn in time to get my gun up.
The first demon blasted out of the tall weeds. I fired twice from the hip as it slammed into me. My clotted chest sloshed as I absorbed the blow and then skidded through a slurry of bent grass and mud. Fortune kept his circling even as the monster went for the kill.
My gun had been tossed into the muck. A desperate attempt to reach for it produced a mouthful of blood. I snapped Atofo’s knife into my hand right as the beast came crashing down.
People will tell you there’s an art to a knife fight. The art is in not dying. You drive the blade home, over and over, until somebody stops moving. Wrists aren’t great targets. Femoral arteries only good if the scramble on the ground gets tangled into positions nobody wants. You can slit the throat of somebody unaware, but once they know about the blade, their arms, hands, fingers all get in the way.
When your opponent is some mythological nightmare crushing you into the mud, raking you with claws set in sledgehammer paws? You fight like a predator.
Hooves smashed my shins. Claws tore into my clothes and raked my skin. Escape wasn’t possible. My entire world was a blur of fur and a constant spatter of blood trailing the demon’s ebony claws. None of its blood ever left Atofo’s knife.
With every stab, I felt the blade pulse and watched the face flicker. Demonic features disappeared and the all too human face grunted in shock as the otherworldly blade scraped bone and cleaved flesh.
And I could sense Atofo’s knife. It felt...happy.
My toughened skin wasn’t invulnerable. Gashes tore open with a queasy ripping sound. I kept my free arm near my face and throat, to avoid being blinded or worse. My screams melded with the pitiful cries of the hijacked soul, left human enough so that he could be tortured by the transformation.
I stabbed and gouged and twisted until the strikes sunk in freely, no resistance. Every stab, a meaty squelch. We both slowed. Fatigue. Effort. A skin of blood formed at the corners of my mouth. It dribbled down my chin.
Finally, the beast took one lazy swat. The paw planted itself deep in the mud next to my face. It swayed, weakly, side to side, trying to steady. The fight gone and the scramble of limbs no longer shielding it, I drove my knife under its chin.
The demon toppled to one side and I let its weight tear the blade free. The knife glittered with blood. Up to my elbows, I wore the same inky blood.
I tried to catch my breath but gasped instead. The sticky ground clung so closely, I wasn’t sure I had the strength to pull free. My muscles, my bones, ached. I was tired. So tired. I lay there, gurgling, unable to move my head but able to search with my eyes until I found Fortune.
The spiraling circle of his dance had closed. Strutting so low to the ground his heels almost touched the backs of his thighs, he hovered over the handkerchief. He held poised, reaching. His strange eyes found me.
“You ain’t ready to join them yet. Best you head to the crossroads,” he said. “Dusk done about come.”
He was right. Out in the flooded fields, I heard the water slosh. Oars paddled on the river. I saw Fortune’s head swivel toward the noise. He’d heard it too. My own sun hung low, locked away in a box in an evidence locker. He knew I’d tested fate one last time.
With a defiant scowl, Fortune snatched the handkerchief off the ground. A shadow rose as though he’d tossed the small square of cloth high into the sky and it had grown to blot out the fading light. That shadow floated down to conceal my fallen body, cool and inviting. The churning of oars ceased.
I felt air rush into my flooded lungs. My body lifted, a delayed reaction to earlier, hazy signals sent to the muscles in my legs, my back to rise up and stand. The focal point of mystic energies in my chest buzzed and hummed. The whispering of the grass became the rush of an ocean. A live wire, I refrained from reaching out to that power, content to let it burn and cleanse.
When I’d basked in the strange energy long enough, I checked the clearing. Fortune had disappeared.