New world order, p.50
New World Order, page 50
part #6 of Crimson Shadow Series
Zane was charging towards the varcol’s back in overdrive before Xander’s body had even touched the ground. Aleks, either sensing his approach or preparing to get the drop on him, began to turn in a slow-mo crawl.
Only halfway into overdrive, you murderous fuck! Zane thought, fists clenched and right arm hauling back to deliver the ultimate “FUCK YOU” into Aleks’ chest. And I’m already halfway through your ribcage!
I’m not dead, Zane, Xander’s voice sounded like an angel’s chorus in Zane’s head.
Distracted, the “FUCK YOU” he’d intended to deliver on Aleks’ doorstep wound up on his neighbor’s… unsigned and left unattended to be stolen by—
Zane realized this metaphor had gone too far in his own head when his intended target had managed to not only duck the punch, but use his own momentum to launch him skyward.
Fuck… you… Stry-ker! he thought-crawled, half-in and half-out of overdrive.
It really was such a beautiful night if one slowed down to appreciate it.
Id-i-ot, Serena’s voice chimed in his head.
Told… you… she… was in… here too, Zane, Zoey gloated.
The fact that the psychic voices in his head had begun to speed up should have been an indicator that his fall, too, would be speeding up. But, as a lot of people had been telling him all throughout the night, Zane was something of an idiot.
He was unprepared for the impact that shot up to meet him, and wound up breaking through a marble headstone and dislocating his shoulder in the process.
****
Xander’s “faith fall” had allowed him to avoid losing his head as Aleks, already in the process of dropping out of overdrive, tried to use one of Xander’s favorite time-tested attacks against him.
He could still feel where the heat of the bullet had grazed his nose.
Once in mid-fall, he’d jumped into overdrive, spotting Zane in mid-sprint towards Aleks with his mind’s eye. His friend, all fists and fury, was certain he’d just watched Xander die. He thought it only right to inform him that he wasn’t.
It hadn’t exactly worked out for Zane, but, with things time-slowed and Aleks distracted, Xander had an opening to retrieve Yang and squeeze off a shot of his own. He would have been happier with a headshot, but at that point he’d be happy just to get out of the cemetery.
More and more he had been beginning to worry that he’d just gone and saved someone a great deal of trouble by delivering himself inside those time-warped iron gates before getting himself killed.
Coun-cil’s… on… their… way, Zane announced, already out of overdrive and sounding sluggish in Xander’s mind as a result.
Xander rounded his shoulders and worked to kick his feet up and over his head as he braced for the long-awaited impact with the ground. Despite how the night had been going, he managed to time the maneuver right, and he rolled with the landing, performing a backwards summersault that carried him into a bow-legged kneel a few feet from Aleks.
The varcol was hissing and seething, toppled back and clutching at a bloody stump where his left leg should have been. The flesh around the charred leg oozed and writhed, twisting and thrashing as the varcol’s weakened shapeshifting abilities struggled with the dilemma. During the fight with Aleks’ mother, Xander and Estella had watched her transform her body in ways they hadn’t thought possible—it seemed if the varcol mind wanted a part of their body to exist as something, anything, else, that alone was enough to make it happen. Hands became claws, eyes turned to mouths, tongues turned to tentacles…
Xander nearly retched at that memory.
Now, however, with Aleks’ abilities weakened by Xander’s Cebourist spell, the destroyed limb seemed unable to communicate with itself. Rather than one cohesive transformation, small bits of singed flesh began to turn into tiny, flexing fingers. The jagged end of exposed bone seemed to yawn before stretching outward, “testing” the air, and then beginning to withdraw back into the mass of shredded meat. Xander watched, entranced by the sheer morbidity of the sight, as the bottom half of Aleks’ demolished leg stretched, pinched, and then widened to become a mouth that opened, closed, appeared to draw in a breath, and then began to shriek like a wounded animal. Seeming more annoyed with his own body’s response to the injury than actually pained, Aleks began swatting at the bloody meat-mouth, actually tearing a portion of the muscle in the process. The now-silenced length of ripped thigh muscle, seeming fed up with the treatment, elongated, twisted, and turned itself into what looked to Xander like a bald, fibrous cat’s paw that went about trying to drag itself away from the rest of the horror show.
“That…” Zane, clutching his arm, groaned, “… is some next-level fucked up shit!”
Before either of them could think of taking advantage of the situation, Xander saw Aleks turn away from his injury and begin to issue an auric call to the opposite side of the cemetery, the limited-yet-still-far-reaching strands of his aura breaching the far gate and vanishing into the night.
A moment later a series of rapid auric blips registered in the distance.
“Shit!” Xander growled, moving to stand. “Stop them!”
“‘Them’?” Zane repeated, confused, “Them—who?”
Xander could sense their auras arrival before they were visible, but he kept himself from saying “THEM!”—knowing that Zane wouldn’t be able to do anything until he had a visual. Unfortunately, this left Xander struggling to juggle the arrival of five… no, six freshly fed sangs. They flashed into existence, creating a pyramid-like barricade between them and Aleks. In an instant, Xander and Zane were face-to-face with three hissing sangs with two more waiting behind them acting as backup. The sixth—easily the largest and, Xander was sure, the fastest—was already kneeling over Aleks and working to scoop him up.
“NO!” Xander roared and lunged, only to have to sacrifice the effort to dodge a strike from the nearest sang.
Growling at the interference, he took a long swipe at the new vampire’s neck, tearing out a good portion of its throat. His death wasn’t immediate, but Xander was pleased to see him change his priorities as he stumbled out of his way and began focusing on containing the ceaseless torrents of blood.
Zane, grinning at the opportunity to take on an opponent he knew he could handle, released his injured arm and used his freed fist to drive a punch into the face of the sang closest to him. A pained gurgle melded with a wet crunch and the vampire’s jaw fell several inches, stretching his face into a startled grin. Sneering at this, Zane drove his forehead into the bridge of the still-whimpering vampire’s nose, driving the cartilage back into its skull and sending it toppling back with a shrill howl into the chest of the reinforcing vampire that had been waiting behind him.
The last capable line of defense tried to make a grab at Xander, who lunged past him and worked to grab at Aleks as the hulking sang secured him in his arms and began to stand. Knowing that he’d never manage to stop the rescue effort and that, injured and exhausted as they were, they’d never manage to keep up in a chase, Xander shifted his focus but maintained his reach. Flexing fingers found purchase on their target and worked to secure the grip.
As his gaze locked on Aleks’ own, Xander dared another reach, this time with his aura, and sent Aleks off with a message:
Happy healings, motherfucker!
A soft clink sounded as a familiar chain snapped, and Xander couldn’t help but smile.
Glancing down at his open palm, he saw the ruby eye, inlaid in a silver diamond-shaped setting, glimmer victoriously back up at him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Revelations
“The suicide arrives at the conclusion
that what he is seeking does not exist;
the seeker concludes that what he has
not yet looked in the right place.”
Paul Watzlawick (1921-2007)
Xander and Zane rode back in relative silence. They rode in Sawyer’s car, but it was not Sawyer who drove it. Despite the agreement and all the screaming and cursing that it had taken for Sawyer to claim the car from Serena, it was Serena behind the wheel. Beside her, twisting around in the seat to all-but face Xander, was Estella. She looked uncomfortable, but Xander could tell it had nothing to do with her seat or Serena’s driving.
You were watching… he thought-spoke to her, not looking up from his lap. He’d folded his hands there, cupped them lovingly around his mother’s pendant, and they gave him something to focus on.
I had to, Estella replied. I knew what Aleks had done to you the moment it started. I knew what he’d do the instant you said you’d lower your defenses. Powerful as you are, you are your own worst enemy, Xander. Giving a monster like Aleks an opening like that…
Xander gently squeezed the pendant before forcing himself to look up at her.
Her blue eyes were bloodshot, the skin surrounding them puffy and red. She’d been crying, and the aftermath of that fact hurt him to see.
It was stupid, he admitted, but it wasn’t for nothing.
He saw Estella’s bloodshot, puffy eyes drift down to his hands, and a small curl tugged at the edges of her lips. You got it back, she sounded just as relieved by that as he had been.
Xander nodded and slowly opened his hands to reveal the pendant. The glare from a passing streetlight caught the ruby’s eye and refracted its scarlet brilliance in that instant. Then another. And another. The rhythm of the passing lights and their glow off the gem made it look like a small heart pumping in Xander’s hands. The sight made the breath catch in his lungs, and he had to cover it again before the reality of that metaphor grew powerful enough to break him.
I hurt him, too, Xander went on, forcing himself to change the subject. Though he was sure that it was just the residual insanity that had begun to slip by during his fight with Aleks, he thought he felt the pendant thrumming against his palms. Used the Cebourists’ magic to weaken him, and then blew off the motherfucker’s leg.
Estella looked happy to “hear” this, but the joy didn’t spread into the realm of hope. I’m glad for the small victory, she started, but we both know that he’ll be able to heal from it.
Xander nodded and looked out through the window at the passing view of the city. I know. But it’ll take time. Between reversing the spell’s effects and putting himself back together, I’ve at least bought us a little extra time.
How much? she asked.
Xander shook his head. Not nearly enough, I’m sure, he admitted.
“You two gonna quit passing notes and share with the rest of the fucking class?” Serena demanded from the driver’s seat.
“Serena!” Zane growled, cutting a glare in her direction from behind Estella’s seat. “Now’s not the time!”
“No. It’s a fair request, Zane,” Xander sighed, looking at the rearview mirror and seeing Serena’s purple eyes looking back at him. Early on in the drive, he’d caught her adjusting the mirror and now realized it had been to sacrifice her view of the passing road in exchange for one of him and her husband. “I’m guessing you two have already passed your own notes on what Zane saw?”
“Notes? Stryker, Zoey and I were practically watching everything from Zane’s head while it was happening!” she informed them.
Xander frowned at that. “Then what do you want to know? If you saw everything then—”
“Whoa!” Serena interrupted. “Let’s be clear about something: Zoe and I couldn’t see shit, not like your wife was seeing things, at least. What we had was more like a fucked-up radio broadcast with a shit-ton of static and a bunch of random, blurred images. We got the impression that you used some spell on the cocksucker, and that this somehow slowed him down and made him weaker. We got the impression that you and Zane had a bit of a dancing match with him, that you did some weird shit that ultimately got Zane’s shoulder fucked up, and that you sent that ingrown nutsack hair running—so to speak—in the arms of one of his bitch-boys after you shot off his leg, which, from what I’ve ‘heard,’ resulted in some sort of nightmare show the likes of which have genuinely unsettled my otherwise unshakable he-man. All of this, however, amounts to a cold bucket of piss when the reality of the situation is this: Zane has no fucking idea what happened back there, ergo we have no fucking idea what happened back there.”
“What happened back there,” Xander said with a sigh, “was I discovered a weakness in Aleks that’s just as much a strength.”
Serena glared back at him through the adjusted mirror. “That supposed to mean something, Riddler? How can something be both a weakness and a strength?”
“He’s crazy, Serena. Totally and utterly batshit insane,” Xander answered, returning his gaze to the window, but no longer looking at what existed on the other side of it.
Serena was quiet for a moment—everyone was; the only sound in the car the airy current and its rhythmic hiccups every time they passed something that interrupted the flow—as Xander’s words were considered. Then she said, “And that’s both a weakness and a strength?”
Xander nodded. “Trust me,” he said, “I speak from experience.”
Serena sighed and swerved to catch their exit. “Anybody ever tell you that you make pussies wet when you’re cryptic like that?”
“Pretty sure you’ve said everything about pussies that can be said to a guy, Serena,” he said with a groan.
“Yeah? Well, I ever tell you I like to grab my labia in the shower and flap them around like a little fleshy cunterfly?”
Estella’s aura vibrated with embarrassment, but she couldn’t keep herself from laughing at that.
Xander, realizing that he wasn’t as reborn and open-minded about the subject of sex as he’d previously thought, delicately dragged the pad of his thumb across the pendant in his hands as he turned to face Zane. “Cunterfly?”
Zane shrugged and gave a dismissive roll of his eyes. “Would you rather she talked more about Isaac’s cock?”
“Do you two ever talk about anything except genitals?” Estella asked, though her giggles betrayed that she wasn’t as disgusted by the conversation as Xander.
“Sure do, Goddess,” Serena said, taking a sharp turn that had Zane falling against Xander and Estella falling against her. “Sometimes we talk about assholes.”
****
“Sana’s stalling The Council?” Xander asked.
Estella nodded and said, “She told Serena that she could keep them occupied until dawn.”
Xander regarded Serena with a suspicious eye. “She told you that?” he asked, certain there was more to it than that.
Serena shrugged, catching on. “I asked her to keep them away for as long as she could, yeah. So fucking what?”
Folding his arms across his chest, Xander said, “And I’m willing to bet that’s exactly how you said it, right?”
Another shrug. “I might’ve said that I don’t give a fuck how she stalls them, provided they were stalled for as long as possible,” she admitted.
Xander raised an eyebrow back towards Zoey, deciding he trusted her judgement more for what he was about to ask next. “And what are your thoughts on how she’s been stalling them so far?”
Zoey blushed and glanced back towards Serena, then flinched.
Xander turned back in time to catch the crazy blonde making throat-slitting motions at the blue-haired auric. Rolling his eye, he looked back at Zoey.
“She’s… uh, well… So far she’s tricked four of The Council’s elders and two of their drivers into thinking they were either ill or in need of a rest stop. Eventually one of their more keen auric minds caught on to the invasion, and they boosted shielding everyone in their caravan. Then Sana began altering the signals on their GPS systems.”
Xander raised an eyebrow at that. “Aurics can do that?” he asked, bewildered to hear it.
Zoey shrugged. “I guess so,” she said, obviously just as bewildered. “I honestly never thought to try something like that.”
Sana really is something special, Xander thought. Then, nodding to Zoey, he said, “Go on.”
Zoey nodded back. “So she started in with their navigations system, and up until recently that’d been working. Then somebody obviously realized that the path they’d been taking wasn’t making sense.”
“And?” Xander pressed.
Zoey shrugged. “That’s it. Sana told me only a moment ago that their GPS signal had gone offline.”
Xander smirked and shook his head at that. “Sons of bitches must have rediscovered maps,” he mused.
“Maps?” Serena echoed with a scoff. “How archaic!”
“Can you even spell ‘archaic?’” Isaac asked with a smirk.
“Sure can!” Serena boasted, turning to face him. “A-R-C-F-U-C—”
Isaac rolled his eyes and cut her off with, “I can already see that my point’s been proven.”
“Only point you’ve ever proven,” Serena shot back, “was that Hefty should release a brand of prophylactics.”
“Ah!” Isaac exclaimed, “Yet another word you probably can’t spell.”
“Spell?” Zane said with a chuckle, “I’m surprised she even knows what prophylactics are!”
“Are you fucking—whose fucking side are you on, queef-nugget?” Serena growled, smacking her husband in the chest.
“In this case?” Zane said, rubbing his chest, “I’m on my side, the side that knows that Donkey-Dick there probably laughs at Magnums and that you wouldn’t be able to pick a condom out of a lineup between a sandwich bag and a hairnet.”
Serena frowned at this and crossed her arms, pouting and looking away. “Not my fault I like the feel of—”
“MOVING RIGHT THE FUCK ALONG!” Xander yelled, clapping his hands for emphasis before turning back to Zoey and asking, “So is there anything else Sana can do to stall them? There’s still another few hours until sunrise and, from the look of things, The Council can be here in an hour if nothing else is done.”
Zoey nodded, smirking. “She just bought you some time, actually. Admittedly another trick I didn’t know we had.”
