Eddie Lancaster Box Set 2, page 53
part #4 of Eddie Lancaster Series
I didn’t really know how the card worked. I assumed Zeke would find me if he decided to answer my call. If not I was on my own. Well, not my own. I had Lydia. She’d proved herself to be useful in confrontational situations, but I didn’t think she’d be much use finding the Dagger. If she was useful in that department then Lucifer and Malek would have sent her to find it instead of resurrecting me.
We finished our meals and I got up to leave. ‘I need to find somewhere to stay,’ I said. I remembered that I no longer had a home. Joshua had taken over my former home.
‘You can crash at mine,’ Lydia told me. ‘As long as you don’t snore.’
‘Ashley never complained,’ I said. I took that as a sign that I didn’t snore. What if I did, was she going to make me sleep outside?
‘Good. But before we go home we need to do something about those threads. Seriously, you look like a goon.’
It turned out that by “do something” she meant steal. She led me to House of Fraser on Fremlin walk and then made me cast a spell so the security system would not detect us. Apparently, she couldn’t cast any spells. She didn’t have magic in the way sorcerers and warlocks did, she had a set of abilities. Seemed too rigid for my liking. I would like to be able to freeze people the way she could, though. I was pretty sure I could figure out a spell to achieve the same effect.
Even though we were shopping for clothes for me, every time I went to pick up an item of clothing she batted my hand away and shook her head, issuing the garment in question a look of utter disgust. Apparently, my fashion tastes could not be trusted. Not even for myself. I doubted I was going to be in the Living Realm for long but apparently however long it was going to be was too long for Lydia to be seen with me in my current condition.
After an hour of walking around the department store and having begged her several times to just pick something so we could go, I finally had a new Lydia-approved outfit. She’d chosen a pair of blue denim jeans, an Armani t-shirt, and a leather jacket. None of it was what I would usually have chosen, but as I said, it wasn’t up to me.
‘These garments are very heavy,’ I complained, swinging my arms around as I tried to get used to the tightness of the jacket around my shoulders.
‘You look fit though, so grin and bear it,’ she said unsympathetically. Then she headed for the exit without another word.
Once outside we walked along the river as we headed to her place. She claimed she didn’t live far from the town centre, which I was glad of. Despite having only been alive for a few hours I was pretty tired. Getting into scraps really tires a guy out.
I was trying to plan out the day ahead of us when Lydia halted abruptly. I stopped and looked at her in confusion. ‘What?’ I asked.
‘Look. There.’ She pointed ahead and then I saw it. There was a set of stone steps that led up to the church that stood above, looking down on the river. A foot or so away from the top of the steps stood two figures. One of them had a purple glow about his face. A necromancer.
Chapter Twelve
‘Fuck me,’ I said in a whisper so as not to give away our position. Two necromancers in one night. What were the odds? If we could grab this one and keep him alive he might be able to give us some answers on what he and his cohorts were up to. Not that it mattered too much to me but I liked Howard and Amara and I wanted to help them out.
‘We should go a different way,’ Lydia said and turned back the way we came.
‘What? Are you mad? No, let's go and get him,’ I said.
‘And you called me mad? This has nothing to do with us. Countdown, remember?’ She jabbed my wrist right where the tattoo was to remind me of the limited amount of time I had.
‘Aren’t you at least a little curious about what these guys are up to? One of them is in Maidstone now!’ I insisted.
‘No, I’m not curious at all, and this is not your town anymore. You don’t even live here. You’re dead.’
‘That was mean,’ I said, pretending to be hurt. ‘And I’m going up there. Your job is to help me so I suggest you follow me. But, you know, it’s up to you.’ I gave her a shrug that said ‘your choice’ and then headed off towards the stairs.
‘Fuck you, Eddie Lancaster,’ she muttered and then hurried after me.
I slowed down when I reached the stairs and started to climb them on my tiptoes. If I could get the drop on them things would go a lot more smoothly. I had no idea how powerful the two of them were, so running in half-cocked would not do me any favours. And Lydia was pissed enough as it was.
‘If I didn’t have to protect you, I would kill you myself,’ she hissed at me. I looked back at her with my finger to my lips. The murderous look on her face told me she’d got the message. It also told me I’d regret this later.
I stopped near the top where I could hear their voices. I stayed out of sight, eavesdropping.
‘It shouldn’t be a problem,’ a low voice said.
‘If he leads both of them to us then we will end them. But he has to isolate Howard and Amara. If they have their followers around them then we will be unlikely to win,’ replied a rasping voice. That had to be the necromancer.
‘Joshua will be able to separate them from their soldiers. They’ll feel safe around their own kind,’ said the other voice. I guessed it was a vampire. One of Joshua’s vampires. And from the sounds of things Joshua was planning a coup. ‘But once Howard and Amara are gone, Joshua wants your word that you will not try to subjugate us, or depose him.’
‘He has it. As long as he works with us.’
I peered around the wall at the top of the steps and saw the necromancer facing my way, the wall was at his back. Like the one we’d taken care of earlier tonight, he was wearing a hooded cloak. His eyes glowed from beneath the cowl. The vampire had his back to me. I glanced back at Lydia to see how she wanted to proceed. She shrugged. Brilliant. I hoped she’d be more helpful once the fighting started otherwise I was going to have to take on both of them single-handedly.
I held my hand out before me and wiggled my fingers, sending a pulse of power through them. My fingers glowed purple as the magic warmed them. My magic had always been green before. Dying must have changed it.
A nudge in my side reminded me that this was no time to daydream. I got my head back in the game and thought of the spell I wanted to use. I nodded, more to myself than to Lydia, and then stood up and took the final couple of steps into the small churchyard above. Necromancers were so cliched with their churchyards.
The vampire turned just as I flung my spell at him. He started to dart to the side but Lydia got him with that time-slowing ability that I was rapidly falling in love with. The vampire didn’t get far before his entire body froze, mid-step. Both feet were raised off the ground a couple of centimetres and his head was pushed forwards like a chicken’s. It was kind of like when you pause a DVD and catch one of the actors in a weird pose. He didn’t stay that way for long. My spell hit him and a blast of purple ripped through his front and out his back. He couldn’t move to react but I saw the pain in his gaze. Lydia released him from her hold and his body flew into a nearby tombstone which he smashed in half. He then landed on the ground and lay still. His skin wasn’t turning grey so I guessed he wasn’t dead. If he stayed down he might stay that way.
‘That was terribly disrespectful,’ rasped the necromancer.
‘Pot, kettle, mate,’ I said, turning my attention to him. I whipped the same spell at him but he caught it in a hastily conjured barrier spell. It would’ve been too easy if I’d knocked them both out with one spell each. Where was the fun in that anyway?
Lydia stepped forward and the necromancer moved with surprising speed. His arm flung out and a spell slammed into her midsection and sent her tumbling back down the steps. I made to go after her but then the necromancer spoke and drew my attention back to him. Lydia was half-angel. I was sure she’d be fine.
‘I am intrigued by you, young man. Clearly, you have returned from the dead and yet you are in perfect condition. How is this so?’ asked the necromancer. He was rubbing his palms together repeatedly, power crackling between them. I kept my eyes on his hands warily, expecting that magic to come flying at me any second now. I shifted onto the grass and positioned myself behind one of the many tombstones. It would provide good cover against his attack.
‘I’ve got angels on my side,’ I told him. And that was all I intended to tell him. He didn’t seem terribly impressed by the information. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was attending a meeting with him.’ He pointed at the slumbering vampire.
‘No, I mean what is your grand plan? What are you all up to? Why do you want to get the vampires working for you?’ I fired my questions at him like weapons. If there was one thing I loved it was answers.
‘You have a lot of questions. But I have already answered one of yours. It is your turn to answer one of mine. Who are you?’
‘I’m not playing a game with you. Tell me what you want or I’ll send you back to the Dead Realm like I did your friend,’ I warned him. I raised my hand and brandished a buzzing ball of energy.
‘So it was you who aided the vampires,’ he said with quiet anger.
I felt something brush my foot and glanced down just in time to see a filthy skeletal hand enclose its boney fingers around my ankles. I screamed and tried to move back but the skeleton was surprisingly strong. It held on fast and I fell onto my back, the hand still grabbing me. I heard dirt shifting all around me and as I looked I saw bodies digging themselves free from their graves.
I blasted the hand around my ankle and burned it to dust with magical fire. The spell singed my ankle but it was easy to heal a wound caused by own magic. Lydia might be less pleased about the damage to my brand new jeans.
I jumped to my feet and got off the grass as quickly as possible. No skeletons were going to dig their way up through a concrete floor. I watched with horror as more and more graves emptied their residents. I looked back at the necromancer and saw the curl of a smile under his hood.
‘You will die for what you did to my compatriot. It is a shame that you will never see our army march across this place trampling those who stand against us.’
I opened my mouth as if to speak and then quickly released a spell at him. A fork of lightning shot out of my hand and took him by surprise. He had no time to conjure a barrier. The lightning got him right in the chest and lit him up like a firework. I saw the agony on his sagging, rotten face as his body was lifted into the air and flung over the wall. His scream ended with a sudden crack and then at once the dead stopped rising. Those zombies that had risen flopped down back to their lifeless states.
I rushed over to the place were the necromancer had been standing and peered over the wall. I hadn’t meant to kill him. His body lay on the gravel several feet below. His legs were twisted horribly and one of his arms was almost hanging off. I wondered how many necromancers there were in total and how many they had already recruited into their army of the dead. And more importantly, what was the purpose of it all?
The necromancer’s fingers wiggled. At first, I thought I’d imagined it. Then his legs cracked and snapped back into place. His arm reattached itself and he began to push himself up off the floor. Once back on his feet, he stared up at me, his purple eyes finding me like searchlights shining from his wasted face.
I began to call on my magic but before I could a burst of fire was shooting up at me. I flung myself out of its path and once again landed on my arse, only this time it was on the concrete and it hurt a lot more. The fire missed me by a lot and flew up into the sky where it fizzled out. It was quite mesmerising to watch. I hurried back to the wall again, but as I expected the necromancer was gone.
I turned back to the churchyard only to find that the vampire had fled too. So I was left with nothing. What a disaster that had turned out to be.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Well, that was totally worth it,’ Lydia grumbled as I reached the bottom of the steps. She was sitting on the gravel, nursing a wounded arm. She was moving her hand over it slowly, her palm glowing with white light. I guessed she was healing it.
‘I found out that Joshua is planning on betraying Howard and Amara. I should probably warn them about that,’ I said. But, of course, I didn’t have a phone. Nor did I have a phone number for Howard or Amara. But I did have something else. ‘Can you teleport to them and give them a heads up?’ I asked Lydia.
She raised her head slowly and channeled pure annoyance my way. Wow, it was as if I’d asked her to cut off her arm and give it to me. ‘Do I look like a messenger?’
‘Would it help if I said please?’ I added, trying to be charming. I could tell that it didn’t work by the way she stood and squared up to me. I was fairly certain that she could kick my arse in a fight. I’d already seen her kick a zombie across a graveyard. ‘Look, things will get really bad If Joshua takes over the vampires. He’ll have every vampire in Kent trying to kill me which will mean we’ll fail in the tasks given to us by Malek.’
She seemed to be swayed by my words as her glare softened. ‘If I do this I want your word that you won’t charge us into any more pointless fights. We stay on the task we’ve been given,’ she said. Reluctantly, I nodded. And then she vanished.
I stood for several minutes gazing out across the still, dark river. This part of town was quite nice when there weren’t people around. The bridge that led over to Lockmeadow Plaza was quite pretty at night. The way the moon caught the metal gave it a majestic quality that it lacked in the daytime. In the light of day, it was a huge metal monstrosity.
Lydia returned right next to me. ‘They said thank you. If you need a favour whilst you're in this realm they’ll provide it if possible. As long as that favour doesn’t result in Joshua being spared.’
‘There’ll be no danger of that,’ I said quietly. I was still enjoying the view of the river. Everything looked better at night. ‘Let’s get some rest,’ I said finally, tearing myself away from the water.
Lydia had a small one bedroom house just around the corner. It was right on a busy road which made it incredibly cheap to rent. The sofa was too short for me to lay on properly, which I found odd, so she invited me to sleep in her bed. She warned me that I was to stay on my side, not fidget and not snore. I agreed to the rules, though once I was asleep I would have very little control of anything I did. I stripped off my jacket and jeans and climbed into bed in my t-shirt and shorts. I kept my socks on too. I usually slept without socks on but it seemed strange to take them off when sharing a bed with someone who was practically a stranger. There seemed to be a certain intimacy about it.
After being with Ashley and living with her for so many months, it was an alien concept to be climbing into bed with another woman. Especially one who was almost ten years younger than me, and someone I’d only met that day. I wasn’t the sort of guy who climbed into bed with any old person, so this was a first for me. Luckily, I was exhausted so I didn’t have to deal with the unusual feelings because I fell asleep pretty sharpish.
When I woke up I found that in my sleep I had broken one of the rules. Though evidently, so had she. I was cuddled into her body, my head rested on her small chest. One of her skinny arms was draped around my shoulders. She was still sleeping and her chest rose lightly with each deep breath she expelled. Even though she was asleep I could still feel my face flushing in embarrassment. I slithered out from under her arm and retreated to my side of the bed. Even though I hadn’t done anything intentionally I still felt like I’d betrayed Ashley. It was only a cuddle but it was still something I shouldn’t have done. I wasn’t feeling guilty because of the act itself, but because I liked it. Don’t get me wrong, there were no feelings for Lydia inside me, but sometimes it’s just nice to have that human contact. If I ended up being here another night maybe I would try sleeping on the sofa. This feeling of guilt in the pit of my stomach was not something I wanted to carry with me when I returned to Ashley.
The idea of returning to the Dead Realm did not feel great either. A sort of despair gripped my stomach. It was sort of like when you know you’re about to lose something nice. Despite the nonstop fighting in the hours since my return, I was enjoying my time in the Living Realm. I felt… well, alive. And I liked it. The Dead Realm was too quiet with all its neat streets and deserted beaches. I liked the bustle of the world. The noise of a busy town.
As if to complement my thought, a loud horn went off right outside the house. It was the sort of horn that only big vehicles like trucks and vans made and it started me enough to make me jump up from the mattress.
‘What the fuck?’ Lydia shouted as she sat bolt upright in bed. She looked wildly at me as if she were under attack.
‘Just a truck,’ I said, grinning broadly at her surprise.
‘Fuck off,’ she growled and then collapsed back to the mattress. I shimmied out of bed and crossed to the window to see what the horn-blasting was all in aid of. Parked up on the side of the road directly outside Lydia’s house was a giant monster of a motor home. It was a motor home I’d seen before a good many years ago. I recognised the marked and dented metal of the battered home on wheels.
‘Zeke’s here, Ash,’ I said, and then clamped my mouth shut. My eyes widened in alarm at my own words. I’d only just gotten over the guilt of accidentally cuddling Lydia and now I’d called her by my girlfriend’s name. This was not going to be a good day. I turned slowly to face her but she’d already fallen asleep again. Thankfully. At least I wouldn’t have to explain myself to her.
By the time I’d pulled on my jeans and bolted down the stairs, Zeke was already waiting at the door. He didn’t look like he’d changed at all even though it had been about ten years. He was so tall he made the door frame look small; he was at least seven feet. His long black hair hung about his brown face. His chin sported a long craggy beard with a hairband wrapped around it about halfway down. Most of his enormous body was concealed by a cape-like trenchcoat. The Doctor Marten’s boots on his feet looked like they could crush a man’s skull. In short, he looked awesome.
