“We do, asshole!”
Another pop.
Finn felt more than heard a bullet speed past his head.
He dove toward the closest wall, trying to make himself as small a target as possible. His injured shoulder was on fire.
In an instant he’d gone from hunter to hunted, being shot at by goblins with guns, his katana his only weapon.
Goblins who could see better in the dark than he could.
Goblins who knew as well as he did that in this empty shell of a building, he had nowhere to hide.
2
“I still don’t know why we can’t just shoot them,” Finn said.
He’d been practicing with a katana for hours. The weapon was elegant, the blade incredibly sharp, but it seemed like such an old-fashioned, dangerous way to kill anything. With a katana, he had to get up close. A bullet could kill from a distance. The creeps weren’t fairies, so why couldn’t he shoot them?
Finn’s master gave him an indulgent look. “You telling me your lily-white ass is too good to learn the blade?”
Movies always portrayed martial arts masters as tiny, wizened old Asian men. Finn’s master was a powerful black man who’d been born in the Deep South. He was well over six feet tall. His shoulders were massive, his legs heavily muscled, and his tattooed skin deeply scarred from battles with the things Finn was training to kill.
“I’m saying there’s got to be a better way to do it,” Finn said.
His master laughed. “Maybe someday you’ll find it. You live long enough, that is.”
He made a circular movement with one hand.
Finn had seen the gesture often enough.
Keep going.
His shoulders ached, but he went back to practicing the latest kata his master had given him. At least it wasn’t “wax on, wax off.”
Finn used to spend his time doing things normal seventeen-year-olds did. Hanging out with friends at the mall. Going to movies. Convincing some girl to let him feel her up in the back seat of a friend’s car. Finn especially liked that one.
Now he spent all his free time learning how to kill monsters.
With a katana.
Sometimes life was just surreal.
His life had turned into a never-ending episode of
The Twilight Zone
the moment he’d seen his master kill one of those monsters.
He’d been out past curfew with one of his buddies. They’d been drinking beer and lost track of time. His buddy’s car had the kind of muffler you could hear a mile away. The last thing Finn had wanted was to get caught coming home late with beer on his breath, so his buddy had dropped Finn off on the other side of the field behind his neighborhood.
A twenty minute walk and Finn would be able to climb through his bedroom window with his parents none the wiser. He’d done it before. He had no doubt he’d be doing it again before he got out of high school and left his parents and this boring-ass neighborhood behind.
The field was empty except for a few cows and a weathered old lean-to that had definitely seen better days. A quarter moon hung high overhead in the cloudless midnight sky. Finn could see just well enough to avoid stepping in cow shit, another thing he needed to avoid in order to successfully sneak into his own room.
The lean-to sat almost precisely in the center of the field. Walled in on three sides, it had to be at least twice as big as the garage at home and nearly two stories tall. Finn had no idea what it had been built for. Whenever he cut through the field, the lean-to was always empty. It sure made a good landmark, though. His street dead-ended almost directly behind the lean-to’s back wall.
Finn always thought the lean-to might be a good place to hang out with his buddies when they wanted someplace private to drink since it was always empty.
Except that night the lean-to wasn’t empty.
An unearthly glow filled the lean-to. The glow wasn’t bright like neon signs, but more like what the glow-in-the-dark stars he had on the ceiling of his bedroom looked like once he turned out the lights at night.
And bathed by that eerie light, a tall black man was fighting a creature that looked like it had crawled out of someone’s nightmare.
The creature was shaped like a man, but it was taller than any man Finn had ever seen. It had huge leathery wings and rough-looking skin, and the fingers on its hands were long and came to sharp points.
The man’s only weapon against this thing was a sword. An honest-to-God sword!
Finn was fascinated. Maybe he was still just drunk enough to forget this wasn’t a movie, or maybe something else drew him in, but he didn’t run away.
Instead, he moved
toward
the battle.
Everyone knew magical creatures existed in the world. How magical beings finally integrated with the human world after centuries of remaining deliberately hidden was a part of both his history and government classes.
It was a whole different thing to actually see one.
Finn had never seen a magical creature. None of the fairies or elves or gnomes he read about lived in Finn’s neighborhood. None went to his school. He’d never even seen one at the mall. One of his buddies said his dad worked for an elf, but that was it.
Finn and his buddies and everyone else he knew was human. Plain old regular people without an ounce of magical ability.
Not like the man fighting the monster.
This guy jumped higher and faster than Finn thought a regular person could. Each sweep of his sword looked effortless. He did the kind of martial arts moves Finn had only seen in the movies. He wouldn’t have even seemed human except for the sheen of sweat on his bald head.
The creature didn’t sweat. Instead it puffed out huge clouds of breath in the chill night air. It didn’t look like a dragon exactly, even though Finn was pretty sure what he’d thought was rough skin was really scales, but those steamy breaths reminded him of smoke.
Could this creature breathe fire?
If it could, how cool was that!
Finn forgot all about how he needed to get home before his parents noticed he wasn’t there. He forgot about his buddies. He even forgot about the girl he’d been thinking about asking out.
He felt like his entire world—the real world, not the world of movies or textbooks or things that happened to someone else’s dad—had just gotten bigger.
It was the most exciting thing Finn had ever felt.
Which was why, he told himself later, he didn’t think twice about jumping into the middle of the fight when the creature knocked the man flat on his back and his sword went flying.
And landed right at Finn’s feet.
3
The goblins could have killed Finn several times over by now. He had no defense against bullets. The fact that he was still alive meant they were playing with him.
Like a cat playing with a mouse.
Finn didn’t like being a mouse, but at the moment he didn’t have much of a choice.
The goblins had pinned him down against the front wall of the processing plant, where he was in clear view from the goblins’ position at the back of the plant. Bullets struck the concrete floor in front of him every time he tried to move. His shoulder throbbed where he’d been shot. His arm on that side—thankfully not his sword arm—was useless, and his head felt wobbly.
He’d never been shot before, but he’d been hurt enough over the years to know his body was going into shock. Even if he could get away from the wall, he wouldn’t be able to run very fast, if at all.
Add to that the fact that the interior of the plant offered exactly zero places to hide, and Finn knew he was in the worst position he’d ever been in since he’d become a Guardian.
He could very well die here tonight, and all because he hadn’t simply killed the creep the moment he’d walked into the processing plant and been done with it.
He closed his eyes for a moment. Thinking about what ifs really would get him killed.
He had to center his mind on the here and now.
Had to get the job done.
Somehow.
At least he didn’t have to be quiet. The goblins knew exactly where he was.
“You invited your friends to the party?” Finn asked the creep.
“Happy coincidence,” the creep said.
Finn didn’t believe it. The creep had been counting on the goblins to show up. That’s why it had been biding its time.
He’d been stupid, all right.
His master had been stupid, too, the night he’d died.
The creep stood up and crushed the remains of its last cigarette beneath one massive foot. It lumbered to the nearest window and began to etch a circle in the filthy glass with its claws.
The sound grated on Finn’s nerves. Worse than fingernails on a chalkboard because he knew exactly what the creep was doing.
It was creating a portal for its master.
Finn had to figure out a way to stop it.
The sound of a heavy body smacking against concrete drew his attention away from the creep.
The goblins were coming through the windows at the rear of the plant.
Finn had never liked goblins. Their greenish-gray skin looked diseased. Their feet and hands were too big for their bodies. Their over-sized, pointed ears stuck out like bat wings from either side of elongated skulls complete with heavy brow ridges and stunted, malformed noses that looked like a human’s nose, only half rotted away.
Maybe those noses were the reason goblins didn’t mind the stench from their unwashed clothes. Or maybe it was the things they ate. Goblins also didn’t care how long the things they ate had been dead.
From where he sat, Finn could make out the strips of colored cloth wrapped around their wrists.
Great. Just great.
Not only were his attackers goblins, they were gang members.
The processing plant must be their territory.
And he was smack in the middle of it without their permission.
Finn wondered what the creep had given the gang in return for allowing it to use their turf to create its portal. Maybe the creep had promised that its master would grant the gang favors once it arrived.
If so, the gang was about to be deeply disappointed.
The Elder Gods did not keep promises made by their minions to vermin that inhabited a world the Gods intended to conquer.
Finn didn’t know for sure that the monsters the creeps served were the Elder Gods of myth. But the more he’d studied the creeps—and the more he learned from the ones who’d begged for their lives before he killed them—he believed their masters were the massive, terrible creatures men mistook as Gods in ancient myths and stories handed down through the ages.
He also believed that at least one of them had made its way through a portal to this world, and found it a tasty treat indeed.
Otherwise why would the monsters keep trying to come back?
The goblins congregated at the far end of the building as if they couldn’t decide what to do. Finn counted nine of them.
On a good day he could handle nine goblins. Even on a bad day he could hold his own against that many with only a few minor injuries and maybe a broken bone or two to show for it.
But never, even on his worst day, had he ever gone up against nine goblins armed with guns.
Steel was poison to fairies and goblins and their kin. Just picking up a gun should have caused the goblins incapacitating pain, much less holding one long enough to fire it with any precision.
And at least one of these goblins was a precision shooter.
The shots that had kept Finn pinned down had been placed in exactly the right spots to prevent him from running for a window or back toward the open bay door he’d used to enter the plant. But none of the shots had come close enough to actually hit him.
Which meant that the gunshot to his shoulder hadn’t been an accident. The shooter had wanted to wound him—to incapacitate him—but not kill him.
The goblins probably wanted him alive so they could present him to the creep’s master.
But then why not shoot him in his sword arm?
He’d gone for his katana right before he’d been shot. The shooter should have known which arm to take out of commission.
Just like the guns, this made no sense.
An eerie green light started to emanate from the circle the creep had etched in the windowpane. It threw a ghoulish aura over the interior of the plant.
“I’ve always wanted to kill a master,” Finn said to the creep.
The only response Finn got was a grunt. Apparently the time for distracting the creep by insulting it or its master was long past.
Too bad. Finn had some good insults lined up.
He watched the creep slice open its wrist. Blood that looked black in the greenish light seeped out of the wound.
The creep dipped a claw from its other hand into the blood and began to draw symbols on the glass.
The goblins hooted and screeched with glee. They must have felt the same energy in the air that Finn did.
The use of dark magic always gave Finn chills, but the goblins apparently enjoyed it. They scrabbled toward the window, all but two of them walking with their backs hunched forward like great, invisible weights were tied around their necks.
The other two had to be the leaders of this particular gang. They stood with their backs straight and looked down their stubby, misshapen noses at where Finn sat leaning against the wall. Both had stringy hair that hung nearly to their waists. Finn was surprised to see that one of them was female.
Both of them held what looked like white plastic toy guns in their hands. Only Finn knew they weren’t toys.
The female goblin gestured at Finn. “Stand up,” she said. “You’re in the presence of Ooveth.”
He didn’t move. “You say that like I’m supposed to be impressed.”
She shot a chunk of concrete out of the wall two inches to the left of Finn’s temple. Her yellow eyes burned with repressed rage.
“I won’t tell you twice,” she said.
Finn stood.
He’d just found out what he needed to know.
Ooveth and the female goblin were the only ones with guns, but she was the one assigned to keep the prisoner in line.