Night-Blooded Boys, page 19
part #3 of Pitchfork County Series
Al snickered through his snout and flopped down into a chair, red mist sizzling on his skin. Before he was settled into his seat, he was back to looking like a normal young man.
The sheriff rubbed her eyes. “What kind of trick are you trying to pull?”
Joe rolled his eyes. “Are you fucking kidding me here, lady? You think I’ve got some special effects department in the basement just to run a scam on you? I’m trying to show you the truth. And, honestly, I’m out of time for this shit.”
“Hark,” the sheriff began, then stopped to catch her breath. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Joe returned the sheriff’s revolver, butt first. “I need you to get out to Amogen and keep their trucks from leaving. They’re trying to move something nasty out of the county, something that’s going to be very dangerous in the wrong hands, and I can’t stop them on my own.”
The sheriff nodded. “Is it illegal?”
Joe shrugged. “I doubt it, not in a mundane sense. But it’s not good. You can hold them up with some shit about permits for transporting hazardous waste. Something. Just don’t let them leave the county.”
“I don’t know how long I can keep a lid on it. If they aren’t breaking any laws…”
“You know what?” Joe was disgusted. “How about you just keep your people away from Amogen until I get the real work done?”
The sheriff’s eyes went cold and hard. “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
Joe stood up from the table and pushed his chair back in. “I’m not going to tell you how to do a goddamned thing. All I’m asking is for you to give me the space I need to do my job. That’s it.”
Stevie stood as well. “You need any help?”
Joe nodded. “Yeah, I think this is going to be a two-man job, for sure.”
“I don’t want to hear this.” The sheriff left the table. “I’ll show myself out. You’ve got your space, Hark. Try not to blow up the whole county in the next few hours. Around dawn, I’ll have my people up at the Amogen place to pick up the pieces.”
Joe shrugged. “You know how it goes.”
Joe and Stevie started to walk the sheriff to the door, but Al’s voice stopped them. “What do you want me to do?”
“Keep an eye on your sister,” Joe started, but changed tack when he saw the defiance in Al’s eyes. “These assholes came by the house once, Son. I need you here to make sure nothing happens to Elsa.”
“We could come with you. We’re not weak,” Al started, but let his words trail off at the look in his parents’ eyes. “Fine, but don’t blame me if you get into trouble.”
Stevie smiled at her son. “We’ll be fine.”
Al shrugged. “I doubt that, but I guess none of us are ever really fine.”
37
Joe headed for the basement, Stevie on his heels. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned on the light and took his wife’s hand. Her fingers were swollen, and he could feel cuts and bruises on the backs of her knuckles. He led her over to his weapons bench and turned to face her. He tried not to react to her wounds, but the sight of her face tore the breath from his lungs. “What the hell happened?”
Her grin was lopsided, pulled up at its left corner by a wicked gash that ran back almost to her earlobe. “I almost bit off more than I could chew. Almost.”
Joe took her face in his hands, careful, gentle, and put his forehead against hers. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
“It’s not about you. I had to do this. It’s done. But I need you to listen to me.” Stevie took a deep breath. “I pulled together the Conclave.”
The words were like a punch in his gut. Joe knew that Stevie had to step up as the Bog Witch, had to get her hands back on the reins of Pitchfork’s supernatural community, but hearing that she’d already done it killed a little part of him. “You picked up your mother’s crown?”
She pulled back from him, and he regretted the words. “I’m doing my job. And we did good. The taint in the water, in the land, it’s gone.”
Joe raised an eyebrow. “How did you manage that trick?”
“I worked with the Conclave,” she winced when she said the words, and Joe could tell she was holding something back. He wanted to press her on it, find out what had happened, what had gone wrong, but she plunged ahead without giving him the chance. “We used a sympathetic ritual with one of the parasites, the godsblood, as a key. It was touch and go for a while, but I think we got it all.”
Joe could feel the other shoe hanging over his head. “Except?”
“Except whatever they’ve already pulled out of the ground. Whatever they’ve already drilled was out of reach.”
“So that’s what they were doing.” Joe grabbed a satchel from the weapons bench and started slipping a few toys into it. “They were out at the mine, loading barrels of that shit onto trucks.”
Stevie sighed. “We have to stop them. If they get those barrels out of Pitchfork, we are all well and truly fucked.”
Joe could hear the change in Stevie’s tone. She wasn’t speculating, she was stating a fact. “What do you know?”
“We have to stop them, Joe. The godsblood is dangerous. I don’t even know what it’s capable of doing. It changes people. Enough of it can change the world.”
Joe finished loading up his satchel. He slung it over his shoulder and turned back to Stevie. “Then let’s make sure they don’t get away with it.”
38
Hiking with Stevie was very different from hiking alone. The wilderness seemed to embrace the two of them, making their trip through the hills surrounding Amogen feel like a simple walk around the block. Even better, her power hid both of them like a deep shadow. They were as close to invisible as anyone ever got.
Joe pointed down toward the warehouse, and Stevie nodded, leading the way down to the edge of the Amogen property. She leaned in close to Joe and whispered into his ear. “I don’t know how strong the veil will be down there. They’ve corrupted the land; my power won’t be quite as strong.”
Joe nodded and whispered back. “Do what you can.”
They crept up on the rear of the warehouse. There were guards stalking the perimeter, but they had the stiff-legged, slack-jawed look of the infected about them. From tangling with them at Pari’s house, Joe knew they were tough and hard to kill, but not the brightest bunch, and he and Stevie had little trouble avoiding them. The pair slipped through the perimeter and into the warehouse. They made their way through a maze of forklifts and crates, creeping closer to the activity at the front of the warehouse.
A pair of suits overseeing the loading of the trucks drew their attention. The obvious leader, the taller of the two, was pointing to an enormous collection of silver cylinders. “All of those have to go. Get the godsblood into the barrels, and get them the hell out of here.”
The shorter man nodded. “Yeah, that’s what we’re doing, but we only have so many trucks, and half of them are on the dump runs.”
“Stupid fucking idea.” The tall man was poking and prodding his iPhone, face lit by the screen’s sickly pale glow. He glared at the thing, pissed that he couldn’t get a decent signal. “It’s going to take hours to do this. We should have put all the trucks on getting the payload out.”
The shorter man shrugged. “Nobody asked me. And it’s not like we could have left the rest of that shit just lying around. The company doesn’t need that kind of heat.”
“You think it’s going to get any better when we dump it?” The first man coughed out a bitter laugh. “There’s going to be all kinds of heat when they find out what got into the water. Pouring a few thousand gallons of toxic sludge into the river’s not going to hide the godsblood that leaked out.”
“Guess they shouldn’t have fucked with us, then.” The shorter man rubbed his hands against the cold. “Look, I need to get over to the tanks and make sure they’re emptying them all. You good here?”
“Get the fuck outta here, I got this.”
Stevie tugged on Joe’s arm and motioned to the rear of the warehouse. He followed her deeper into the shadows and away from the activity. “We’re going to have to split up,” Stevie whispered.
“That’s crazy.”
“You need to stop them from getting whatever’s in those canisters out of Pitchfork. I can stop them from dumping their poison into the water. But we can’t do both if we stick together.”
Joe rubbed his chin. “Be careful.”
She grabbed the back of his head and pulled him in for a kiss. “You, too.”
Stevie vanished into the shadows, gone before Joe could react.
He hoped she knew what she was doing.
39
Stevie flitted through the warehouse like a spirit, using every trick she could muster to strengthen her veil against prying eyes. She didn’t have time to sneak around, she had to shut the fuckers down before they turned Pitchfork into a toxic wasteland. Despite her injuries, she felt more alive than she had in years. The power of the Conclave still rested within her, on loan from the other witches until this mess was over.
Thinking about the others made Stevie’s heart ache. They’d all survived their encounter with the fallen god, but it was a near thing. Some of them wouldn’t be right for weeks, maybe months. Yet they’d all willingly given her leave to use their combined might until the threat from the godsblood was ended. Stevie could feel their pain, a distant, nagging ache, and knew how much they were suffering for her sake. While she used the bond of the Conclave to ease her own suffering, to keep on fighting instead of curling up in a ball and crying for a few weeks, they had to live with their personal agonies.
There was also power flowing into her from another source. The earth here was corrupted by the darkness Amogen had stored in the warehouse, but, to her surprise, that seemed to amplify rather than reduce the strength it fed to Stevie through her ties to Pitchfork. She felt something disturbingly familiar rising up from the earth, joining with a darkness she’d thought she’d purged from herself. There was still some trace of the godsblood within her.
Stevie rushed past guards at a full run, and no one even blinked. She whispered spells to give her legs extra spring and her strides vast length. She flew across the compound faster than she’d dared believe possible. She caught up with the short man and his convoy of trucks in less than a minute.
She glanced back toward the main compound. They were far out of sight from the warehouse, and she didn’t see any other trucks headed her way. Now was as good a time as any.
Stevie darted along the road until she was a hundred yards ahead of the lead truck. She planted her feet in the middle of the road and pulled on the strength of the earth until it sang in her veins. This, she realized, was how her mother had felt every day of her life. The Bog Witch was Pitchfork, its strength and its defender against the outside world. Stevie felt righteous in her anger. These people had come to her land to destroy her territory. They’d come as thieves. She’d make sure they never left.
When the first truck’s headlights splashed over her, Stevie let her veil drop. The truck slammed on its brakes just as Stevie barked an eldritch curse that slashed through the vehicle’s front wheels.
The SUV slipped on the gravel road and slewed sideways, presenting its flank to Stevie.
She screamed a blistering string of curses that shot from her mouth with a tornado’s hellish roar. A black bolt soared down the gravel road, kicking up a rooster tail of dirt and rocks behind it, and hammered into the lead truck with a thunderous impact.
The bolt punched through the SUV’s side and erupted into a geyser of dark energy inside the cab. Its raw force pitched the vehicle up onto two wheels before exploding out through the windows. Stevie thrust her hand forward and hissed a crooked spell that smacked the SUV like a giant’s hand. The truck tumbled into the pickup behind it, tangling both vehicles in a pile of shrieking metal and screaming men.
A pair of trucks slid to a stop on either side of the accident, spilling armed men into the darkness. Stevie didn’t wait to see what they had planned. She lobbed a wordless hex at the truck on the right and disappeared back into her veil before the men on the left could get off a shot. She fled into the darkness beside the road.
The hex landed with a sizzling hiss. Black tendrils rose into the air around the men, darting at their faces. The air reeked of sulfur and blood. Stricken by terror, half of the men dropped their weapons and tried to run while the other half sprayed panic fire into the darkness surrounding them. Stevie laughed at their screams and shouts of confusion, drunk with righteous fury and filled to bursting with an inhuman force that craved death and destruction.
She leapt into the night sky, and her power carried her onto the cab of the rearmost truck. It was idling in the road, two men in its cab staring out into the darkness, trying to figure out what had happened on the road ahead of them. Stevie punched through the driver’s window and clamped her hand over his mouth to kill his scream of terror. By pure reflex, she reached into the man and tore his soul free of his body. It twitched in her grip like a burning shadow, and the man’s body went limp. Before she could stop herself, Stevie had the man’s spirit inside her, trapped in a special prison deep within her own soul. It burned, but it felt so very, very right after denying herself for so many years.
She drew strength from the imprisoned spirit, consuming it in a single devilish gulp, and drove her fist down through the roof of the truck and into the back of the passenger’s head like a piston. Bone crunched, and the man’s life gurgled out of his slack mouth. Stevie’s rage felt good, just. The interlopers had to pay for the crimes they’d committed, and those they’d planned to commit.
She leapt to the next truck, a golden-haired demon on a mission of vengeance. Stevie didn’t try to soften the impact of her landing this time, but drove both heels into the truck’s roof hard enough to punch six-inch divots into the metal. One of the men shouted and shoved a gun out of the window, but Stevie didn’t give him a chance to fire it. She pointed a finger, and a tendril of shadow whipped down and into the window, blasting through the man’s skull from ear to ear. His partner shrieked and ran, slapping at the gore stippling his face as he fled. Stevie let him get a few yards away before leaping again.
She landed on him with both feet. His spine snapped, and he crumpled, skidding across the dewy grass with Stevie crouched on his back. He moaned, and she stomped down on his skull, crushing his face into the earth.
The rest of the crews were out of their vehicles, shouting and firing their weapons into the night. Stevie felt a lucky shot crease the air next to her left ear, and a wicked grin spilled across her face She felt alive, really alive, and she would have her vengeance on those who’d hurt her and hers. The time for playing was over.
Thick clouds scudded across the stars and moon in answer to the Bog Witch’s need for darkness. Thunder crackled and shook the earth. Sheets of rain poured from the night sky, churning the earth into mud. Lightning crawled through the clouds like jagged serpents, ready to strike at Stevie’s command. She laughed, and the thunder answered. Stevie threw her head back, and her wet hair slapped against her back. She ran for the trucks.
By the time she reached them, the men had other things on their minds. They were shooting into the trees on the far side of the road, shouting to one another as they filled the air with a storm of lead and a thunder all their own. Stevie kept her head low and skirted to the edge of the firing line.
Ghostly shapes burst from the trees in an unruly, shifting charge. They flopped and surged and flowed like strange water, crossing the ground even as bullets punched into their pale flesh and spilled their black blood. The sheer weight of shots being fired had slowed their advance, but they had no intention of stopping. They hissed and chattered and pushed into the withering hail. They didn’t flinch or scream as the bullets tore into them, but simply kept pushing forward, leaning into the barrage of bullets. A boy-thing with no head crawled forward, the black core of its body leaking onto the grass beneath it.
Stevie threw her power behind the firing line. Bolts of lightning plowed into the earth behind the trucks, chasing the men forward.
One man was too slow to move, and a bolt sheared through the left side of his body. His arm exploded off his torso like a firework, spilling blood and flame as it spun through the air. His face became a charcoal mask, and spikes of electric blue power burst from his eyes as he fell to his knees.
That got the rest of them moving.
The gap between the black-blooded boys and the men narrowed to a few yards, then a few feet. They were running out of ammunition, and the boys were not running out of determination.
Stevie watched as the two forces met. There were so many boys—she prayed they weren’t all Pitchfork’s children—the gunmen never had a chance. White forms crashed into the men and bore them down through sheer weight of numbers. The men screamed as little fists pounded against them, as tiny fingers pushed into their noses and ears and eyes or forced themselves down their throats.
That drew Stevie’s anger. The last thing she needed was to have these little fuckers recruiting more soldiers to their cause through infection. Flush with power and swollen with rage, Stevie decided to end the threat at its root. She reached spectral fingers into the nearest black-blooded boy and clenched her witch’s fist around the parasite within.
She gasped in surprise - there was nothing left of the boy except for the parasite. It had filled its flesh to the fullest, which explained their strange inner workings. The boys here were gone. All that remained were their parasites, linked together to form a single, savage mind. “Fuck you,” Stevie growled, and ripped the dark infestation loose.
The first black-blooded boy popped like an overfilled appendix. The second collapsed into a jittering heap that melted away to nothing. The third burst into black flames that burnt away its skin and left behind the spastic parasite.
