Page 9 of The Malevolent Eight
‘Hey, you want to see something funny?’ Corrigan asked, giggling like a schoolboy and pointing to the sands below the gallows.
Temper was hopping clumsily in a circle, a massive grin on his blood-soaked muzzle, playing toss with the head.
‘What ails our prancing comrade?’ Aradeus asked.
Shame peered over the edge of the gallows. ‘The beast appears. . .is he drunk?’
‘Auroral blood,’ Alice explained, failing to hide the fact that she was licking her own lips. ‘Some find the taste. . . inebriating.’
As if our misbegotten coven wasn’t creepy enough, I thought.
‘Aw, I think it’s cute,’ Corrigan said.
One day, we were going to wake up in the middle of the night to find Temper draining all our blood, at which point I was definitely going to tell Corrigan, ‘I told you so.’
Until then, I had more pressing concerns, starting with figuring out who had the power to possess an angelic Valiant, to scorch the aethereal hand of a Lord Celestine and then to enact one of the most unpleasant murder-suicides I’d ever witnessed. Oh, and let’s not forget she’d threatened to do likewise to all of us unless we allowed the Great Crusade between the Aurorals and Infernals to sweep unhindered across the entire Mortal realm.
First, we had to round up the kangaroo before he passed out from his whirling, drunken dance.
Oh, and deal with the townsfolk, who’d finally started moving. A woman who looked to be in her forties stepped forward. She was modestly dressed, but her air of effortless authority told me she was probably the town mayor.
‘Why’d you go kill them angels?’ she asked.
‘Self-defence.’
The mayor grabbed my arm. ‘Our townchoseto side with the Lords Celestine.’ She turned me around and pointed to the gleaming alabaster spires that were already crumbling as the Auroral will faded from the settlement. ‘They promised us a shining city– every home a palace– no more need for us to toil in the fields or drudge for money.’
The indignant outrage might have been more convincing if I’d believed the mayor was as big a rube as she pretended to be. ‘And in exchange?’ I asked her. ‘All you had to promise was your souls and those of your children, right? A thousand generations of your descendants, condemned to serve as foot soldiers in their endless Crusade?’
She did a passable job of hiding her embarrassment. ‘We. . . We thought. . . When you showed up here, fighting those demons so fierce and all, we figured you for heroes.’
Since no one else was bothering to help Corrigan carry Temper, I went over and grabbed one of the unconscious kangaroo’s arms and slung it over my shoulder. ‘We’re trying to be heroes,’ I admitted, following the others back into the desert, where our horses were likely praying to whatever horsey gods exist that the seven of us weren’t returning so they wouldn’t have to deal with Temper looking at them funny all the time. ‘We’re just not very good at it yet.’
Chapter 6
The Hero Business
We did a lot of blowing stuff up over the next few weeks, riding down dusty dirt paths and well-kept cobbled roads to find quiet backwoods villages, boring one-horse towns or heaving overcrowded cities. . . Wherever the emissaries of the Lords Celestine or Lords Devilish had managed to convince the locals to sign a pact, we’d come along and convince them to tear it up. Sometimes persuasion and logic got the job done; other times, we’d get chased out of town by an unexpectedly well-armed mob. We could’ve fought back, except for that whole ‘not killing the Mortals’ thing. Hells, most of the time, our only injuries came from trying to restrain either Corrigan or Temper from blasting our pursuers to death or drinking their blood. Fortunately, one of those two hotheads was usually sane enough to help us talk the other one down from going berserk. There’s something unsettling about witnessing a vampire kangaroo patting the cheek of an enraged thunderer while cooing soothingly. . . actually, it was worse when Corrigan tried to calm Temper down, which involved a lot of weeping and hugging and recounting of childhood traumas that the big brute had never even revealed to me before.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Corrigan had insisted one night when I’d confronted him privately about the matter– we were supposed to be best friends, after all, even though neither of us had much conception of what that meant.
‘You thinkmychildhood wasn’t traumatic?’ I asked indignantly. ‘Or Galass? Or Alice? We’re wonderists, for fuck’s sake– trauma’s practically the only requirement for any sort of mystical attunement! I’ll bet even Aradeus got locked in a root cellar by his parents or touched inappropriately by some close relative when he was a kid.’
Corrigan ignored my tirades. Those nights when we were too far away or too unwelcome to find lodgings, he’d huddle with the kangaroo having deep heart-to-heart chats with a beast who didn’t even speak our language– or any other language that didn’t involve grunts, growls or the occasional hiss that preceded Temper ripping out the throat of the nearest angelic or demoniac before draining them of blood.
‘That can’t be healthy,’ Aradeus observed in the aftermath of our attack on an Auroral recruitment camp. ‘One would expect a vampiric being to become more robust with the consumption of blood, yet our comrade is looking increasingly bloated and sickly after these bouts of gluttony.’
‘Constipated is more likely,’ Alice said dismissively. She wasn’t especially fond of Temper, who was much too like the mystically engineered beasts of her own realm. ‘Look how he bears down on his haunches, clenching his teeth afterwards.’
Corrigan, looming behind us in a distinctly threatening manner, said, ‘Nobody fucking laugh, understand?’
Whenever Temper went into one of these post-gorging fits– which really did look like someone experiencing overwhelming constipation– he’d end with a single bound in the air, as high as his powerful hind legs would carry him, and land on his face, where he’d lie unconscious until morning. I swear, keeping a straight face during this performance required more self-discipline than performing a twelve-hour abnegation ritual.
Not even Galass could explain what was going on with Temper’s odd behaviour. She tried to link her attunement to the flow of the kangaroo’s blood to ease his discomfort, but her hair suddenly turned white and her hand shot away as if she’d been stung. Only after her tresses returned to their normal colour would she tell us that there was a planar breach inside Temper, like a mystical attunement that wasn’t able to pierce the veil between realms. That of course led to questions about where he’d come from in the first place, which was my cue to change the subject by going over the tactical plans for our next attack.
We’d drawn a line in the proverbial sand back in the Blastlands, where the Seven Brothers had become unwilling portals to this realm from the Auroral and Infernal demesnes. We’d vowed then that we would do whatever it took to prevent the Great Crusade from engulfing humanity. Most high-minded moralists skip over the ethical implications of such a vow, but Corrigan and I were mercenary war mages, Shame, when an Angelic Emissary, had witnessed the darkest depths of human desire and Alice, a demoniac, had been trained as a Justiciar by the great Hazidan Rosh herself, so we all knew there would be a hefty price for denying the Lords Celestine and Lords Devilish their precious crusade. As for Galass, she’d been raised as an Auroral Sublime, to be offered as a reward to Ascendant Princes doing the work of the Celestines upon the Mortal realm. She knew thateverywar got ugly, and trying tostopa war would likely get even uglier.
So we’d set one rule: no attacks on humans, not even if they’d given in to Auroral or Infernal blandishments. We would fight back if they came at us, and not hesitate to kill to save one of our crew, but otherwise, we’d leave Mortal recruits alone. Luckily, angelics and demoniacs alike considered human soldiers far beneath them, so they were generally housed separately. Once we’d given up trying to convince the humans to abandon their newly signed pacts, there was almost always an opportunity to leave a trail of demoniac or angelic corpses to help the locals reconsider the merits of our well-put arguments.
