The Last Raven: An Urban Fantasy Noir (Riftborn Book 1), page 31
I stepped through the ruined exit and found Dale’s head pinned to the wall with a butcher’s knife. His body was nowhere to be found.
“Fuck,” I snapped, stepping past the head of a man who had tried to do good. He hadn’t deserved to go out like that.
I pushed through the large set of swinging double doors and found more bodies in the hallway beyond. All three had jackets with FBI in big yellow letters, although most of them were spattered with blood now. All of them had been cut through by something large and sharp. I wondered why they were there; maybe Emily had arranged to get backup after all.
There were more of Mason’s guards in the hallway, too, one on the bottom of a set of stairs that led up to the rooms above, and the other two next to a giant hole in the wall where flickering lights revealed it to be some kind of function room.
I reached the hole in the wall and peered inside. Chairs had been stacked up on either side of the room, although on one side those had toppled over onto one another, forming some weird pyramid, the legs jutting out all angles.
The lights, I discovered, were from the set in the ceiling that presumably were used for parties. They occasionally changed colour.
There were no bodies inside the function room, but the sound of something hissing turned me around, my gun ready.
Emily’s face appeared beyond the hole, her hands frantically gesticulating for me to get out of the function room. She looked bloody and battered but was otherwise alive. Another noise, this time from the raised stage at the far end of the function room, behind heavy curtains, drew my attention. It sounded like someone was trying to get the last bit of milkshake out via a straw.
I took a step back toward the hole as Emily hissed something I couldn’t hear. I was waiting for whatever was behind the curtain to show itself.
The curtains began to move, and Mason appeared between the two, dragging something in one hand. He was completely naked and practically bathed in blood, his hair matted to his scalp. He licked his fingers and casually tossed the item he was holding off the stage.
The item in question was Dale’s body, which hit the floor with a sickening sound as Mason beamed with pride.
Mason had thrown a two-hundred-pound body like it was a bag of flour. That could not possibly be good.
“Luca . . .” Mason began.
I shot him twice in the chest and once in the head, the latter sending him crumpling to the floor.
I kept the gun aimed at Mason, who didn’t move. It couldn’t possibly be that easy.
“They won’t work,” Emily shouted, finally getting into the room. “I was trying to tell you: bullets from a rift-tempered gun do nothing but piss him off.”
“They shut him up for a bit,” I said, taking the little wins where I could get them. “How many of your people are alive?”
“Don’t know,” Emily said. “We arrested Mason here, contacted my boss, arranged transport, but some of Mason’s people attacked us, trying to get him out. In the fight, he turned into . . . something. There were five of us and a whole bunch of people who’d been rescued, not to mention the guests in the hotel.”
“I saw three bodies with FBI jackets,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” Emily said. “Mason isn’t . . . He’s just not human anymore. He’s . . .” The dark red spear hit Emily in the chest, throwing her back and pinning her to the wall ten feet behind her. I barely had time to react as she let out a cry and died.
“Oh, don’t spoil the surprise,” Mason said, getting to his feet.
I shot him again, emptying the entire gun, reloading a new magazine, and doing the same as Mason laughed.
“It’ll take a bit more than that,” he said. “Callie betrayed me, but I knew she was going to. I knew she was making a second serum, a better one, so I took one of the vials. I was going to get it reverse-engineered. I managed to take the vial serum before they could stop me. It’s soooo good, Lucas. Is this what you feel like all the time? The power running through my body. You ruined my building; you killed my people. I’m going to kill you, and then I’m going to hunt that traitorous cow down and tear her head off.”
Mason’s body transformed all at once, his legs growing three times their normal size, his arms too. Two more legs sprouted out of his abdomen—one either side. His torso became elongated and swollen, turning a deep shade of purple as his skull became misshapen and lengthened, his jaw audibly breaking as two sets of piranha-like teeth jutted out of his gums. When he was done, he looked like part insect, part fish, part human. The ends of each limb were still hand-like, although there were claws where the nails had been.
“Surprise,” the thing that used to be Mason screamed, laughing as it climbed down from the stage. He roared and a second dark red spear flew from the spines on his back. I dodged aside as it smashed into and through the well behind me.
Horror and fear filled me. I’d never seen any human do what Mason had done, and for good reason. It was beyond monstrous. If he got away, and if Mason could turn from human to creature at will, a whole lot of people could die.
It was time to kill an elder fiend.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
In my entire two-and-a-bit thousand years of being alive, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d gone up against an elder fiend alone. Not a single one of those encounters had been anything close to a good time, and I’d almost died in at least half of them.
Despite that, there are two things I knew when it came to fighting one. The first was to not get hit, which might sound obvious, but it’s much easier said than done, and the second was space. Get into as much space as possible. If you’re fighting a creature that’s faster and stronger than you, you want to be able to move away when you need to. I’d once fought an elder fiend inside a network of cave tunnels. Never again.
Elder fiends are as smart as a human, but the more damage they take, the more the animalistic parts of their brain took over. I hoped that Mason would be the same.
Mason laughed as I turned and ran out of the hole in the wall, bounding up the stairs three at a time, letting my smoke make me more agile. I was out of sight of the hole when I turned to smoke, billowing back down to beside the hole, through the wooden bannister, using it to anchor myself above it as Mason’s long legs came out first, almost probing the darkness of the hallway for danger. A spine crashed through the bannister beyond, destroying several of the stairs. The sound was deafening as Mason’s huge head poked out of the wall.
There was a brief moment when I thought my plan was working. That moment died a death the second his head turned a hundred and eighty degrees—which from the shape of it looked impossible—and his mouth opened wide in a horrific smile. Two eyes, both several times larger than when he’d been human, stared at me. They were nothing but darkness, and occasionally, I thought I saw them ripple.
I pulled back the smoke anchoring me in place and dropped down, my daggers in my hands, aiming for his head.
Mason’s head moved too quickly for me to hit, but as I fell, I changed targets, slicing through his left leg. The rift-tempered daggers sliced through flesh, muscle, and bone like they were made of paper. I landed on the ground, immediately turned to smoke, and billowed past the howling Mason, back into the function room. I’d have rather had the space, but I didn’t want the thing chasing me through the damned hotel.
Blood spewed from Mason’s severed limb, spraying the noxious smelling, tar-like substance all over the floor and walls as he turned back to me, his eyes radiating hatred. He put the limb in his mouth and sucked for a moment before I heard a crunch and he spat out a chunk of his own leg. The bleeding had stopped.
“Well, aren’t you just a big old bag of tricks,” I said.
Mason took a step toward me, testing the fact that he now only had five legs. I wondered if I could get a few more removed and really limit his mobility. I couldn’t go blow for blow with him, and I certainly couldn’t keep dodging him. I had to fight. I just had to fight smart.
I sheathed my small dagger and sprinted forward, which, judging from the expression on Mason’s horrific face, wasn’t something he’d expected. I slashed at his other leg, but he moved it out of the way, almost scurrying back to put distance between us.
Which was exactly what I wanted him to do.
I reached for the rift-tempered throwing knives on the back of my belt, grabbed one, and spun away from Mason, throwing the knife at another leg. Mason batted the knife away, but I’d already drawn and thrown a second. This one hit home in one of his two huge eyes.
More blood, more screaming as he tried to remove the dagger, but the slick, tar-like blood made it all but impossible. He moved his hand ever so slightly, and I threw a third dagger at his remaining good eye. He dodged it and charged, his roar reverberating through me.
I turned to smoke, trying to dodge the lunge from his one good front leg, but he fired another spine at me, tearing through my smoke and forcing me to re-form as pain exploded through my body. I threw myself aside at the last moment, but he grabbed my ankle and tossed me across the room, firing a second spine at me, which I only dodged at the last second by turning to smoke and allowing it to rip through me.
I re-formed on the wooden floor and coughed up blood. The spines on Mason’s body were almost pure rift energy. I could not afford to be hit by any more if I wanted to come away from this fight anything close to still breathing.
I drew another throwing dagger as Mason edged toward me. He moved with menace but also some caution. He didn’t know what other tricks I might have.
I had two throwing knives left and my knuckledusters, the latter of which required me to get a whole lot closer to Mason than I really wanted to be.
When there was twenty feet between us, Mason took the chance and closed the distance between us in a huge leap, firing two more spines from his back that smashed into the wooden floor where I’d been standing, throwing up debris all over. I turned to smoke and moved back up onto the stage, re-forming as Mason leapt up at me again. I turned to smoke once more, moving back down to the function room floor, re-forming myself just beyond where the two large spines were jutting up from the floor.
Mason roared and leapt off the stage, landing just in front of the two spines. A swipe of his remaining hand sent them flying across the room. He smiled like he’d spoiled some particularly wonderful plan.
I threw another dagger at his face and darted toward him. He swiped at the dagger and moved to the side, showing me one of his side legs, which looked like it was made of his ribs. He stamped down with the sharp point of the leg, but I turned to smoke, moving between his mid and back leg, re-forming myself underneath Mason and slamming my dagger up into what was essentially Mason’s thorax. I ran up toward Mason’s head, keeping hold of the dagger and slicing through his abdomen, turning to smoke, and moving out the other side as green and black gore fell out beneath Mason’s body.
Mason slid on the gore but hit me in the chest with his hand, sending me sprawling as he used his two middle legs to hold himself together.
I was just getting to my feet when he barrelled into me. I flew across the room, impacting with the wall before I could do anything about it. I hit the ground hard, all of the breath knocked out of me, as Mason grabbed me around the throat, lifted me off the floor, and repeatedly smashed me into the wall until pieces of plasterboard covered me.
I drove my dagger up into Mason’s arm, but he jerked away, taking the dagger with him. I threw my last dagger at his face, which hit him square in the mouth, but he backhanded me quicker than I could move, and I saw stars as I hit the ground a dozen feet away.
My head swam as I managed to get to a kneeling position, only to be hit in the back again by a charging Mason. It took me a moment to realise that Mason had quite literally run over me. Blood poured out of the wound on my back, trickling down my arm, over my fingers. I didn’t know how bad it was, but I think when a semi-elder fiend runs over you, it’s probably not good.
Mason’s hand wrapped around my throat and lifted me off the ground again, bringing me closer to his face and the snapping maw that awaited.
I’d already slipped the knuckleduster onto my hand before Mason had steamrolled me, and waited until I was only inches away, Mason’s foul breath making my stomach flip, when I punched him in his good eye.
The eye burst like a water balloon, which is exactly as disgusting as that sounds, but Mason dropped me and I put all of my strength into a punch that broke his jaw, leaving it hanging uselessly. I walked away from the blind, thrashing Mason, grabbed one of his spines—being very careful not to touch either end—and ran with it like a lance back at Mason.
The spine pierced Mason’s throat and I pushed it up as far as it would go, pinning his bottom and top jaws together.
Mason made a noise that I’d rather never hear again. I staggered away to pick up the larger of my two daggers.
I turned my back to Mason, who was trying to remove the spine from his neck, and ran over to the second spine, throwing it like a javelin at Mason. It wasn’t a particularly good throw, but it hit him in the shoulder of his good arm, giving him something else to worry about as I ran at him, past his flailing arm, and cut through the middle leg that was still keeping the contents of his thorax from spilling over the floor. I carried on, hacking at his rear leg and darting away as Mason toppled onto his side, his guts spilling out onto the floor.
I was beaten, bloody, and would no doubt feel like a sack of warm crap in the morning, but as I placed my boot on Mason’s throat and forced the spine further up into his head until it burst free from the top of his skull, I felt a sense of relief as he stopped moving.
I spent a little time removing Mason’s head, just in case. It was unpleasant work, but the dagger made it easier, and when it was done, Mason’s body dissolved into mucky brown water. I tossed his head to the side of the room, where it too dissolved. One dead Mason the elder-fiend wannabe.
My knees hurt as I fell to the ground, reaching around to my back to find the hole where Mason had punctured me was healing, but like every other part of me, it would feel like shit sooner than later.
I looked over at Emily, her body still pinned to the wall. She’d been a good agent, had tried to help people, and like everyone else with her, she had paid the ultimate price for that. I winced as I got to my feet and walked over to her, pulling the spine free and lowering her body to the ground.
I removed my phone and found there was a signal, so I called Gabriel.
“Lucas,” Gabriel said, sounding more than a little concerned. “We tried to contact you.”
“Yeah, had a little trouble with Mason,” I said before explaining what had happened.
“Are you okay?” Gabriel said. “We’re on our way.”
“That’s good,” I said. “My body wants to fall down, and I don’t think that’s a good condition to drive in.”
“We’ll be there as soon as I can,” Gabriel said. “I assume Mason is definitely dead, yes?”
I nodded, realised Gabriel couldn’t see me, and sighed. “Yep. If I ever have to fight an elder fiend alone again, please shoot me. It would be quicker than what just happened.”
“Keep safe,” Gabriel said. “We’ll be there soon.”
“Cool,” I said, dropping the phone to the ground and crashing to the floor beside it. “Ouch.”
During the fight, and immediately after, my adrenaline had overridden the need for my body to scream at me, and with the adrenaline gone, my body decided to make up for lost time. Healing would take a while, but I shouldn’t need a trip to the embers now that Mason was dead. I sat, and it was then that I saw a briefcase in the far corner of the room.
With much cursing, I got to my feet and walked over, picked the briefcase up, and sat down to empty the contents onto the floor. There was a binder, a phone, a set of car keys for a Bentley, a money clip with hundreds of dollars in it, and an empty hypodermic needle.
I tried the phone, but it was protected by a thumbprint, and seeing how Mason’s thumbs were now puddles of goo, that wasn’t going to work. Instead, I opened the binder. It contained maybe fifty pieces of paper and looked like a sort of sales pitch for the vile shit that Dr Mitchell and Mason had been working on. It advertised that there were going to be a few dozen vials of the same monstrous stuff that Mason himself had taken. Dozens of those bastards. “Fucking hell,” I said aloud.
The phone rang, which made me jump, and then promptly made me curse myself for being an idiot. I looked at the screen on the phone. Callie Mitchell.
You didn’t need a thumbprint to answer it, so I swiped the green button across to the right.
“Mason?” Dr Mitchell asked.
“Your friend isn’t able to come to the phone right now,” I said. “What with him being turned into goop and all that. You know he stole one of those second serums you were working on?”
“You killed an elder fiend?” Dr Mitchell asked, sounding somewhat impressed.
“He wasn’t an elder fiend,” I said. “I’ve fought elder fiends before, and they don’t go down that easily.” I tried to sound full of confidence and bravado, but everything hurt, and I just wanted to sleep.
“You sound hurt, Lucas,” Dr Mitchell said. “Did he hurt you? I can help you; I can make you stronger.”
“No,” I said. “You can’t. I wonder, though, how long have you been peddling this shit? You’re a riftborn, yes? So, why are you so determined to create monsters to try and kill so many of us?”
“What I am is of no consequence to you,” Callie snapped. “Although I find it fascinating that you were able to disconnect yourself willingly from the rift when we last met.”
“Yeah, I’m full of surprises,” I told her. “So, you’ve sold a shitty serum that makes people peel apart. I don’t think that’s going to end well for you when the people you sold it to find out.”
