Dark Game (Merikh Book 1) (24 page)

“What should I do?” I asked Mouse. I didn’t trust whatever had possessed the deputy, and I definitely didn’t trust Foster. By the look on Claire’s face it was clear she had no idea what the right choice would be, either.

Mouse looked around at the death and destruction that had come to the bank vault. I could see her piecing together what she could of the events leading to me holding the dagger out for her to take.

She reached out and took it from me, and the world exploded into fire.

The energy that had been pulsing before was now an endless torrent of heat as both the deputy and Foster screamed at me. Through the overwhelming force of the ritual ending I could feel the vault rocking against the earth it was buried in.

Foster charged me and bashed me aside. I fell on his robe and twisted in time to see him snatch the dagger from Mouse and backhand her off the altar and to the floor. The deputy stood in disbelief at what she was witnessing.

Foster tossed the dagger to the floor and turned to me. “You have failed to save your friend, Merikh. I will take her apart, break her again, and then I will do the same to you.”

He sneered at me and turned to Mouse. She’d backed into a corner, stumbling over bodies that were beginning to pile up. She kept her eyes on Foster but her hands were searching the floor for a weapon. The power of the ritual that had filled the room to bursting was starting to dissipate, pouring from the door and back out into the world.

I got to my feet again, clutching Foster’s red robe in hands I could barely feel anymore.

Foster watched me rise. “Do you think you can still save her?”

I removed the plastic bottle of ambrosia from within the robes. “Does she strike you as a damsel in distress?”

I tossed it to her and she caught it easily. Foster took a few seconds to react, which was all the time Mouse needed to lift the bottle to her lips and down the remaining liquid within.

Everything got chaotic as she got back to her feet. As bodies rose around us and Foster advanced on her, I could see the power flooding her body. A determined look replaced the worried one of before. She didn’t wait for him to reach her, leaping forward and landing a punch that snapped his head back and sent him sprawling.

I ignored the fight, sure that now she was his equal in strength she’d be more than a match for him in skill. I’d found a set of keys in the pocket with the ambrosia and I carried them to Claire and Patty. The first key I tried unlocked the padlock to their chains.

Patty dashed first, dodging around the shambling corpses and hitting the stairs before Claire was even on her feet. The look on the god’s face was one of wonder as she took in the movement in the room.

“Time to go,” I said, pushing her toward the door. I wasn’t sure what was about to happen but I was pretty sure it was going to be overwhelmingly violent.

“I am the god of charity,” she said in a whisper that somehow carried across the entire room. “I offer my power to these poor souls.”

Her eyes lit up and the rising dead began jerking where they stood. The seizures became more and more violent as her eyes grew brighter, until it was over and they fell to the floor again.

As Claire went back to looking like an ordinary waitress, I turned to check on Mouse. She had Foster backed into a corner and wasn’t letting up. He was a broken man, barely able to stand, blood coming from a dozen places on his naked body.

Mouse grinned through the blood covering her face, none of it hers, and grabbed him by the neck. She twisted and I could hear the crack from across the room. When she let him go he fell to the floor, and this time he didn’t get up.

“We should leave,” I called to her. She spun to face me and for a moment the mania in her eyes scared me. But then she recognized me and her glare softened.

Two of the bodies, one a housewife covered in blood and the other the burned deputy, hadn’t fallen when everyone else had. They now stood together and faced an empty part of the room, and began speaking in a language I didn’t understand. The words seemed to crawl under my skin, though, rattling my brain with their power.

As though through a fog, I thought I could see who they were talking to: a thin man in archaic clothes, his face haggard but his head held high.

A moment later he was gone and the room was shaking. I waited for Mouse to join us and led them out of the vault.

The Knight: Alain

The gods faced the knight. Their borrowed bodies appeared impassive but he could feel their anger through the chain. When they spoke it was in a language he’d never heard before, a language of power that rocked the world.

“How,” was all Ahn said. The knight knew what he meant, could feel the remainder of the question in his mind.

“You were so busy looking for something powerful you never considered that I might be the culprit.” The knight used all his willpower to hold Ahn’s gaze, afraid that if he looked away he’d never be able to look back. “I orchestrated this, and you were too confident to see what was going to happen.”

“What is going on here?” Ehl said. As usual, it hadn’t deigned to notice him even when he was speaking.

“This shade of a human is to blame,” Ahn said softly. “Her energy is free in the world again.”

“Impossible,” Ehl spat, turning an angry glare on him.

“Difficult, but not impossible,” the knight said. He held his head up under the growing pressure to bow and scrape at their feet. “Wan helped me elevate the assassin, helped make him more. We amplified the spark of DeLacy’s gift and gave him a taste of Despair’s power. He is on the path now.”

“And…her?” Ahn asked, afraid to say her name for fear of conjuring her. That fear, the only constant emotion in his master since he’d become his slave, was what had started the knight on his journey to today.

“Wrath’s prime disciple was already going to summon her. Or try, anyway. All I did was move the assassin into place to take control in the event he succeeded. “

“This monkey hid all this from you?” Ehl said to Ahn. “You could not see the danger?”

“I hid it from you too,” the knight said, his courage surging. “You cannot imagine a being as beneath you as I am ever being a threat.”

“You aren’t a threat, knight,” Ehl said, shaking its head. “But she is, and you’ve prepared a path for her. With the ritual destroyed but not undone, she won’t even have the brief limit Foster would have put on her.”

Ahn’s head was shaking, as well. “You have no way of understanding what you’ve done.”

They remained silent for a time and the knight presumed they were excluding him from a conversation they were having. He was content to wait. He’d waited for so long already.

Foster began to get to his feet in the corner, his neck at an unnatural angle. The knight was amazed at the kind of punishment the prime disciple could take and still continue.

Ahn glanced at him and the man dropped to the floor again. This time he wasn’t getting up.

“I would send you to the nether,” Ahn eventually said, “but there is no point. We will have to end this world before she returns.”

The knight hadn’t been expecting such a drastic action and he raised his hand as though to ward it off. “You would start over?”

“Start over,” Ehl said, “or risk her having a hand in the game. We choose to start over.”

“Why do you fear this person so much?” The knight had no idea who this woman was, only that Ahn and Ehl were proud to have removed her from the board and were scared of her returning to the game. That had been enough, but he hadn’t expected them to give up at the thought of her return. He counted on them being too stubborn, or brave, or powerful.

“She is not a person, monkey. She is one of us, a god.”

“Only she will return with the mind of a human,” Ahn said. “All of our dominion over reality, with the sensibilities of a barely evolved ape. She will tear this world apart. At least this world.”

“I can return Despair to you. He can become Wanehl again. Or Wanahn, if you prefer.”

“We could deal with Despair,” Ehl said, its sneer letting the knight know it had very definite ideas of how to deal with its wayward child. “You have not the slightest idea how to hold onto him. You only took him because Ahn was distracted.”

“I was,” Ahn said.

“He is not yours to give. And he doesn’t matter.” Ehl dropped the human it was wearing on the floor and hung in the air in its energy form. It was a ball of red and black, glowing softly. Ahn dropped the woman and took its place beside Ehl, its glow spearing the knight’s brain.

“Say goodbye to your world, knight,” Ahn said, every syllable a crash of thunder in his head. “You, whose name was once Alain, have doomed this place.

“Stupid monkey,” Ehl said, its voice evoking a feeling of abject terror.

Time froze. The knight – Alain – felt the unraveling of the world in his soul; a painful ache that grew as the light faded from the room. The pain reached his limit and continued, forcing him to his knees as the gods grew more powerful. They were drawing the world back into themselves, feeding on creation.

The pain grew stronger still and through his connection to Ahn he could feel stars going out. The dissolution of the universe went unobserved except for him as the gods had left time frozen.

“No,” the knight said, trying to climb to his feet from the misty floor where he found himself. There was nothing to press against anymore, not a molecule of matter remaining nearby for him to use.

“What’s the matter, monkey?” Ehl spoke in a language the knight had never heard before, though he understood it instinctively. “Did you think we were lying when we said it was over?”

“Why is he still there?” Ahn’s voice speared the darkness that was all that was left of the world, and the knight heard it and understood.

“Enough,” he said, and the old metal room returned. “Enough,” he yelled, and the Earth was restored. “Enough,” he said in a voice that was more than human, even if it was less than a god.

And reality returned.

“How?” Ehl said.

Epilogue

We stumbled out of the bank to the quiet street outside. Mouse had to support me as the power of Despair left me.

Most of the people the mysterious entities had brought to attack Foster had made it to the vault and were now dead, but some were still alive. They stood around the main hall of the bank in confusion, looking down at themselves and at each other. They didn’t notice us, and nobody got in our way.

Claire took us to the diner, where Patty was already waiting. She’d run into the street and, when nothing chased her or was waiting for her, realized she had nowhere to go.

We sat at the counter and drank coffee, nobody saying anything. I was barely able to stay upright but I could feel my healing beginning already. I wouldn’t die, it seemed, but the pain was still there.

“So,” Mouse said when she finished off her mug. “Someone want to tell me what just happened?”

“Foster tried to summon a dead god more powerful than any of my brothers, and we released that power into the world without a body.” Claire said it without emotion, though what emotion a person would add to a statement like that eluded me. “We saved the world, possibly, but lost the town.”

“There’s an upside,” I said, wincing as the rib I’d broken earlier shifted in my chest. “We completed the contract by the deadline.”

“Oh,” Mouse said. She grabbed the coffee pot and poured herself another mug full. “Good.”

There was nothing for us to say to each other after that. We were all too shell-shocked by the evening. Mouse had returned from the dead and killed a man. I’d practically died and managed to release an unknown power into the world. Patty had seen her entire town destroyed, and was now privy to secrets she could never share with anyone, if only because nobody would believe her.

And Claire had failed in her mission to protect Midway. She didn’t seem upset about it, though, and mentioned her plan to return to her former life.

Neither Mouse nor I cared what she was planning. We got a ride from her to where the van was still parked out on the country road, with no further intention of speaking to her. Patty was more difficult to ignore.

“Let me come with you,” she pleaded. She stood in the road beside the van, between it and Claire’s car. “There’s nothing here for me anymore, and I can’t go home to my parents. I can’t go anywhere with normal people anymore.”

“We’re not normal?” Mouse said, but she knew we weren’t and conveyed it in her voice.

“I can be helpful. I can learn to be helpful. Don’t leave me here.”

I left it up to Mouse; I had bigger things to think about, like my broken and mangled body.

“You can come,” Mouse said. “Behave yourself and don’t get in the way.”

And as easy as that we had a third. Patty climbed in the back of the van and took a seat. She wisely kept her excitement from showing, choosing to be as unobtrusive as possible. This was wise, and I decided she showed promise.

“You’ve stepped into a bigger world,” Claire said from her car. “This isn’t the last time you’ll have to deal with magic, or with us.” She meant gods.

“As long as we don’t have to save the world,” I said.

“That, at least, seems unlikely.” She didn’t say goodbye or wave. She just drove away.

“That chick’s weird,” Mouse said as she pulled away, too.

“She’s a god,” I replied.

I healed slowly, taking the better part of a month before I felt comfortable leaving our tiny apartment in the city. Patty had a job at a bank a train ride away, and Mouse was sitting around waiting for me to be ready for more work. She was also driving me insane, so I told her I was going to get a paper and left.

The incident in Midway had been chalked up to the meth in Littleton getting into the water supply and driving everyone mad. It was a neat bow on the situation and made everyone feel safe. When I lifted the paper from a rack, the front page news had changed to something about the upcoming elections.

“Merikh,” a man said as he stepped up to me from the street.