New world order, p.65
New World Order, page 65
part #6 of Crimson Shadow Series
Eyes widening at the sight of the weapon being leveled at him, the taroe focused all of his magic to Zane’s right arm, halting the weapon’s progress and forcing him to drop it.
Roaring, Zane lurched forward with his freed left arm and upper body, struggling against the anchor of his own arm in an effort to reach the last taroe holding him back from Serena.
“You’re gonna die, ya fucking ink-wizard!” Zane threatened.
“Y-you’ll have to lose your arm f-first,” the taroe stammered, struggling to sound confident.
No, Zane thought. Not the arm…
Shifting his focus into overdrive, he reached to his axe. Though it wasn’t much to look at, he’d managed to fashion a decent “holster” for the weapon with, of all things, a ripped boot strap. Looping the strip of leather through one of the belt loops of his pants and fastening it to itself, it was just the right size to fit the axe handle and keep it by his side. Though the reach was awkward with his opposite hand, Zane managed to yank it free and turned the freshly sharpened blade on himself.
“The world’s worst tattoo removal will be a good thing…” he mock-thought, remembering Xander’s disembodied words to him at the hotel. He wasn’t normally one for remembering what people said after so much time—especially when it was cryptic hoo-haw—but something about that line had stuck with him. Go figure, he mused as he gritted his teeth and began to drag the blade from his shoulder down to his wrist.
He cringed, cursed, and watched as the time-frozen world started to creep back to life as his focus waned. Clenching everything he could and reclaiming his control, he locked his gaze on the still-leering, still-confident taroe in front of him.
You have no idea how dead you are, fucker! Zane thought, using his soon-to-be target’s smug face as a focal point as he continued to work the axe.
****
Serena wished she could have taken some degree of pleasure out of disobeying both Xander and Zane and finding an excuse to get herself onto the battlefield.
She wanted to claim some sort of victory in that moment of defiance…
But, under the circumstances, there was really nothing to celebrate.
Then, watching some sneak-attacking taroe shit-fucks get the jump on Zane and put him through obvious torture while trying to get to her, she felt nothing but rage at being forced to be there.
She’d been preparing an auric bow with a three-time “FUCK YOU” for the taroes when she was swept off her feet, carried through the air, and slammed with an alarming force against the stone steps of a library.
Thank fuck I never stopped shielding the baby! she thought with only a twinge of sarcasm as she felt something pop in her lower back.
At least she’d managed to feed before hoofing it back into the city.
Not that making that trip in overdrive had left her much in the tank.
A string-bean of a perfect vampire—close to seven feet tall but all limbs and no meat—planted a bony knee between her tits, bound her arms with his vegan-shit colored aura, and began wailing on her face with a series of overdrive-fueled fists.
“Not… my… cocksucking… lips!” Serena groaned. She was ready to tell him that her mouth was insured and that her insurance would make him regret what he was doing, but then she heard Zane.
Heard the pain in his voice.
Serena loved a good dick-sucking joke—she loved it almost as much as she loved sucking dick—but she didn’t love either of them as much as she loved Zane.
Brace yourself, Onyx, she warned her unborn as she willed the auric shield she’d been maintaining in her guts to shoot upward, phasing through her stomach and barreling straight up through the string-bean’s ass.
Serena was sure the baby hadn’t felt a thing—maybe a little tug as his secondary womb slipped away—but the string-bean…
“Makes a prison-rape look like a prostate exam,” she muttered, watching the vamp’s remains crash onto the steps.
She realized with only mild amusement that his lower body looked like one of those blown-out, exploding prank cigars.
“Yeesh…” she cringed as a length of the vampire’s bowels slipped free and began a morbid Slinky impression down the rest of the stairs.
She was climbing to her feet, preparing to handle Zane’s taroe problem, when she saw the last of the three tattooed wizards fall to the street, Zane’s axe buried into his face. Scanning the street for any sign of her husband, she spotted only a bloody mass of tattooed—
“Oh no…” she whimpered, wondering if the taroe had somehow managed to reduce her husband to a small wad of inked flesh in the brief time she’d been distracted. “Za—”
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?” a beautiful voice roared at the bottom of the library steps.
Serena’s breath caught and she sobbed with joy at the sight of—
“Z-Zane! Your arm!” she gaped. From his shoulder to his wrist, Zane’s right arm was nothing more than a network of thick muscle fibers. Blood seeped across the hunk of meat and veins. “What’d you—”
“Had to get to you,” he growled, starting up the steps. “Just like peeling off a condom. Not that you’d know. Little help.” Seeing what he meant, Serena threw out her aura and wrapped it around his butchered arm. A semi-transparent purple sheen glimmered over its length, acting as a second skin for the time being. Zane, unable to see it, could still feel the pressure as it began to stop the bleeding. Nodding his thanks, he investigated her body, making an inventory of her injuries. “What happened?” he demanded. “Why would you come here? Dammit, Serena, the baby!”
“The baby’s fine, Zane, and I’m… well, I’ll be fine—looks worse than it is, I’m sure,” she explained. “But… Estella! Zane, that fucking monster got Estella!”
Zane’s eyes widened at this. “We… we gotta find Xander!”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
On Course
“Perhaps an individual must consider his own death
to be the final phenomenon of nature.”
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that
in the process he does not become a monster.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
“I will say this, though:
bad or not—whatever you want to call it—
the world needs people like Serena and the Strykers,
whether it’s the crazy dead one that sparked all those changes in the world
or his crazy kid…”
Isaac
Two minutes had come and gone. Then three. Five. Xander fought on, mowing through enemies with Yang, his kukri, and his aura. It was easy; easy enough to let his mind slip—steered solely by his mind’s eye and the Great Machine—and dwell on far more ominous thoughts than simply what sort of crazed, murderous creature was preparing to kill him at that moment.
Duck. Evade. Shoot.
Dart. Roll. Cut.
Slash. Shoot. Jump.
Mythos fell, blood spilled, and still Xander’s mind wandered.
He felt uneasy. A terrible sense of déjà vu had begun creeping across the forest of his mind, turning lush, fertile land into a barren, hopeless landscape where nothing good could grow; the only constant was a cold wind that whispered a dreadfully familiar line:
On course…
And that—those two words, without context or purpose—meant more to Xander than all the enemies rushing at him or all the enemies he’d left dead behind him.
On course…
On course…
On course…
He roared, hacking away at the next unfortunate mythos to find itself in his path. His kukri chopped nearly halfway through the watsuke’s scaly side, a reek of entrails and sea water filling the air as its insides spilled out across the street. The mythos shrieked, gnashed its piranha-like teeth, and hummed with a residual electric current that would do it no good at that moment. Watching the fury and murderous intent fade from the creatures bulbous, dark eyes, Xander set Yang’s barrel to the side of its head and pulled the trigger.
At the end of the street, a small cluster of mixed mythos breeds considered what they’d seen. Xander regarded them passively, opening his revolver’s cylinder with a flick of his wrist and dumping the spent casings before retrieving a fresh moon clip of eight enchanted explosive rounds with his aura. The enemy mythos watched him, the previously rigid fortitude beginning to go flaccid. There was an auric in the group, Xander saw, and they were insisting that it wasn’t worth it to try anymore; that Xander was proving all the rumors right—that he wasn’t a normal vampire anymore—and, finally, that they stood a better shot of avoiding Aleks for the rest of their lives than taking a shot against what they’d just seen.
Coming to a decision—one that Xander had already seen coming through the Great Machine—they turned and ran.
Xander let them run. He couldn’t bring himself to care about what they’d done or what they might eventually do, and he was reminded of a similar decision his father had made many years ago at the entrance of a terrible castle he’d just cursed the inhabitants of.
Lesson learned, he begrudgingly thought.
There was no response. Nothing new, at least.
On course…
On course…
On course…
Cursing under his breath, he moved to scan the city once again for Aleks’ auric signature, already prepared to once again come up empty.
But he didn’t…
Shining like a beacon, he felt the varcol’s aura swell with pride as he heard his voice thunder through the streets, beckoning him.
“STRYKER!!”
And there, at the end of the vast stretch of city street—separated by four blocks and a small army of Aleks’ warriors—Xander’s enemy stood…
With his stolen revolver leveled at Estella.
On course…
On course…
On course…
“No…” Xander heard himself say, staring in utter horror at a sight he’d seen too many times to count.
Those damn dominoes…
That fucking Great Machine…
He’d worked so hard to—
I’ll see you die by your own hand, Xander Stryker, Aleks’ voice chimed in his head. I just have to give you a reason.
Xander didn’t have time to think the words to bargain with Aleks before he pulled the trigger.
****
Estella…
His Estella!
His everything!
The streets, alive with more chaos than Xander had ever thought possible, seemed to bleed away and leave only the two of them. Even without the rest of it—the death and mayhem all around them—the distance seemed unbearable. Somewhere far off in his own mind, he knew he was screaming out to her.
Sound didn’t matter to him, though; nothing else mattered at that moment.
He wasn’t quite in overdrive, not yet—not fully—but the roaring hum that all sound bled into through his warping senses was, if nothing else, easy to ignore. Much of the chaos, too, had become easy to ignore, but he still spotted others around him, friend and foe alike, already in overdrive. He felt torn between two worlds: that of the not-quite-frozen and that of the already there.
All around him, what should have been a time-frozen world proved itself to be otherwise. Warring bodies crept ever-so-slightly. Those who had died but did not yet know they were dead drifted in mid-fall. One could almost believe they weren’t moving at all, but it was the sight of another stream of bullets—this one mowing down a sang who’d been caught off guard—that gave away just how far from overdrive Xander still was. Each round crept through the air, a lazy, hovering creature working at a confident pace that, yes, it would get to where it was going to deliver death.
The bullet in Aleks’ stolen revolver no doubt thought the same…
Of Estella.
And then, of course, there were the sangs darting around the scene—those active in overdrive and creating the illusion that they existed in fast-forward—and seeming to taunt Xander’s stagnancy in that moment.
The single moment when he needed that speed—their speed—most of all.
On course…
On course…
On course…
The Great Machine, over and over and fucking over again, had been pushing him to see this moment, and every dragging step he took was a nightmare of reliving it. He’d stood this ground, run this course, and made every conceivable shift that he could think of.
Thousands of passes…
Dreaming and dreading of nothing but this moment.
And Aleks, that sick fucking son of a bitch…
Had aimed for Estella’s stomach!
His eyes were locked on Xander, his face beaming—triumphant!—and his mouth peeling back painfully slow into a horrific grin.
… make you do it, Stryker! he whispered in his head.
Xander saw the bullet breach the barrel of Aleks’ stolen revolver, and he roared again; pushing that much harder. He could feel his body breaking under the force, and he invited it to happen.
Let me come apart at the seams, he prayed. Take me apart piece-by-bloody-piece. Just please—PLEASE!—let me get to her before it’s too late!
Aleks’ bullet lurched and then stopped, held at the threshold of the barrel. He’d reached overdrive! He’d—
A sang’s aura flared with malicious intent as he came at Xander from the side, moving to tackle him off course. Xander’s aura struck like a sickle blade, cutting him in half at the waist. The legs staggered and dropped, threatening to tumble into Xander’s path. He shifted to evade them, stumbled, and used his aura to stabilize in mid-sprint.
Time jumped into being for an instant, and Aleks’ bullet celebrated another inch. Xander could see it hanging in the air between the barrel and Estella’s belly.
Push! Push! Push! he chanted to himself.
She will die, a voice chimed in his head. She MUST die!
He prepared to curse at Aleks before realizing it hadn’t been the varcol’s taunts he’d heard. The Great Machine, he realized, was trying to preach the same garbage it had been from the start.
Bullshit! he thought. I won’t—
You will not reach Estella in time! the voice said, and this one sounded more like his own voice inside his head. You must save Ruby!
What does Ruby have to—
She must die!
Xander nearly faltered at this.
More of Aleks’ sangs moved to converge on him, likely acting on their master’s orders. Again and again Xander’s aura lashed out, fighting to keep the incoming swarm away from him. They didn’t even need to work on killing him, Xander considered with a flurry of rage—they only had to slow him down; only had to stall him.
They only had to let that time-frozen bullet finish its journey.
And then they’d all be able to celebrate knowing that they’d destroyed Xander Stryker without having to spill a single drop of his blood.
Estella…
You WILL NOT make it! the voice told him again.
Then, with the gears of the Great Machine whirring like the grinding teeth of an enraged creature, Xander remembered something Stan had said:
“That wife of yours, Xander, has kept you alive at every turn. I could not have foreseen her at any point prior, but, without her, every step you’ve taken since your reawakening could have been your last!”
Ruby!
His aura whipped and thrashed, reaching out for Estella—aiming to pull Aleks’ damned bullet right out of the air—only to be knocked away by the varcol’s own.
But his efforts seemed lagged somehow; his aura—everything about Aleks, in fact—seemed weaker.
“Starting from the suicide mission in Maine—when Estella demanded that you come back to her despite your initial plans—and everything ever since; it’s been her keeping you alive and ensuring the next victory could even have a chance of coming to fruition. It was your rage at Lenix for what he’d done to her that pushed you against all odds, it was the chance that she was out there after that fact that kept you driven to find her, and it was she who brought you back from the madness my powers had dragged you into.”
Save Ruby!
Xander threw the kukri out ahead of him, watched it spin through the air before it embedded itself in the gut of a sang working at a high-sprint directly for him. The force threw him off his feet and held him in midair. Passing the time-frozen corpse, Xander yanked his blade free, snatched the dead vampire in his aura, and worked to hurl it into the path of Aleks’ bullet.
Only to have another sang sacrifice his would-be attack to tackle the weaponized corpse off course.
“And, like you said yourself, you’d have never survived against Lenuta without her—without her new strength or without the drive to push past your own limits to protect her.”
SAVE RUBY!
Xander rolled around an incoming sang, ducking the punch from another, and threw out his aura in a cyclone to throw them both as far from him as possible.
He was close!
So close!
“You must be prepared, no matter the circumstances, to see her as the key to everything—”
SAVE RUBY NOW!
Closer now, Xander could almost reach out and—
He watched in horror as a sang wielding a bloodied sword brought his weapon down on Xander’s outstretched arm; watched as the blade passed through the limb with a spurt of blood and a sharp, awful pain.
“—be prepared to disarm yourself and just as quickly arm yourself at a moment’s notice—”
