The Last Raven: An Urban Fantasy Noir (Riftborn Book 1), page 6
The two canine fiends were about the size of grizzly bears, with teeth that looked like they belonged to sabre-tooth tigers. Their paws resembled something out of a horror film, with huge, serrated talons coming out of the paw itself. There were multiple lacerations on the bodies, several large holes in the chest, and each one had a cut across their throat. One of the fiends had its chest cracked open, and there were multiple instances of scorch marks around the lungs.
“It absorbed fire?” I asked, without looking up.
“One of Dan’s team was an elemental revenant,” Isaac said.
Elemental revenants were linked to one element. It let them conjure it, absorb it, even heal from exposure to it. They were powerful beings, but it hadn’t been enough to stop two greater fiends. The elemental revenant had poured fire down the throat of the greater fiend, which should have turned its internal organs to barbeque. The scorch marks were superficial; the heat wasn’t high. It looked like a half-arsed attempt at hurting the fiend.
“So, no one on the team inflicted any real damage on these fiends. And they died from wounds from a blade no one on the team carried. Where were they found?” I asked, passing the phone back.
“They were found near a lake close to where the attack took place. I’ve been there; it’s a fishing lake, it’s relatively small, and rarely used this time of year.”
“What’s weird about that?”
“According to the FBI, the tracks say that these two killed Dan’s team and ended up just over half a kilometre closer to the lake. Without leaving any tracks from the crime scene. How?”
“So, they staged an ambush against highly trained RCU agents,” I began. “Then they flew to a different location, and then they died.”
Isaac snorted.
I was silent for several seconds. “This is a fairy tale,” I said angrily. “There’s no way two fiends wiped out an entire RCU team, managed to get from the massacre to the lake with no trail, and then, magically, cut their own throats with a weapon no one can find? Obviously, we have someone else out there who killed the fiends. Question is, why?”
“Yes,” Isaac said.
“What do the FBI say?” I asked.
“Special Agent West agrees with you,” Isaac said. “Officially, Dan’s team and the FBI agents heroically died killing two greater fiends. Until we can say otherwise.”
“Don’t scare the humans,” I said. “Special Agent West going to be okay with my involvement?” I asked.
“She doesn’t really get a say in it,” Isaac told me. “But to keep things on a friendly basis, I’ll tell her when she needs to know. As of right now, you’re officially deputized as a member of the RCU. You have no rank, no badge, no wage, and don’t go around using it to get stuff done.”
“Right,” I said with a chuckle.
I put the car in gear and drove out of the hospital car park, wondering exactly what was going on in upstate New York.
I wasn’t familiar with a lot of the route and hoped the satnav didn’t direct me into Lake Ontario or something equally as ridiculous. Thankfully, it behaved itself and I was soon pulling into an empty car park in the middle of a wooded area.
I got out of the car, searching the woodland for any movement. The car park was on an elevated position, which gave me a good vantage point. There was a stream a hundred yards in front of where I stood, and three fallen trees lay along the bank of it. The remains of the trunks jutted out of the ground, wounded and raw.
“It happened over here,” Isaac said, and set off down a path at the corner of the car park.
“If those two greater fiends didn’t do this,” I said, more to myself than anything else.
“Are you thinking it was an elder fiend?” Isaac asked me.
“No,” I told him.
“It’s something bad,” Isaac said, stopping and turning back to me. “And if not an elder fiend, then it’s something we haven’t seen before. Which one of those two is worse?”
“Let’s go find out,” I said, motioning for Isaac to continue.
I heard the voices before I reached the site. There were still FBI walking around the scene. I left Isaac to go talk to them, while I followed behind at a slower pace.
I reached the end of the path and the trail below opened out, the snow having covered most of the surrounding area, where law enforcement were camped. I imagined that the whole place looked quite spectacular in the summer months.
The stream wasn’t frozen, although touching the icy-cold water made me immediately regret that decision.
“This is where the ambush took place,” Isaac said, walking back over to me.
“Agents still here?” I asked, noticing more than a few glances my way, and more than one FBI agent suddenly having to make an important phone call.
“Lots of dotting and crossing,” Isaac said with a smile.
“No RCU?” I asked.
“I’m not risking any more of my people until I know what the hell’s going on,” Isaac said. “The FBI are on cleanup—their case—they get to reassure the locals it’s all done with.”
I looked around. “How close to a built-up neighbourhood are we?” I asked.
“About ten kilometres,” Isaac said.
“Locals are probably safe, then,” I told him.
“You know that, and I know that,” Isaac said.
Fiends don’t like built-up places. They like forests, jungles, and places with caves so they can hide. If a fiend ever went into a residential area, it was either brought there by someone, the animal was already there when it became a fiend, or it ran out of food in its usual hunting ground.
At one point, LA had a big fiend coyote problem. They were fairly harmless until people started hunting them, then you get a super strong and superfast coyote bearing down on you.
I walked around the area of destruction. It hadn’t even been a day since the attack took place, and there were still signs that it had been a hell of a fight. There were trees with impact damage and scorch marks. A bloody handprint on one tree trunk, and more drops on the nearby bushes. I imagined the RCU agents fighting for their lives as their own people died.
“Where was Dan found?” I asked.
Isaac pointed off into the distance. “Best we can establish, he was hit and thrown into those bushes. It saved his life.”
“And Annie?” I asked.
“Must have thought she was dead,” Isaac said, sadly. “She called in a Code Red, and we went from there. By the time we got here, the fiends were gone, and we were left cleaning up. The dog walker called in the fiend’s bodies, and things got a lot more complicated.”
Code Red: Agent down, send help.
I walked off the path, following the mass of human footprints through the snow until I spotted a cabin in the distance. There was a small lake beside it.
“These are fresh,” I said, pointing to the prints.
“Lots of law enforcement trudged through here,” Isaac said. “But no fiend trails.”
I frowned. “The wounds on their bodies, hell, they shouldn’t have even been able to walk from the attack site to the lake. And there are no signs at all that they did?”
Isaac shook his head.
I continued on to the bank of the lake and walked along it until I was looking up at the cabin.
I crouched down as the water lapped at the bank a few feet from me.
“Two fiends found here, both dead, both mutilated, neither looking like the kinds of creatures that could take out almost an entire RCU team,” I said, running through my thoughts. “They were already dead when they were dumped here, and made to look like they’d died after a great fight.”
Isaac gave me a small smile. His own suspicions were obviously confirmed by mine.
I walked over to the dark wooden cabin, which was on stilts keeping it off the lake and wet bank, and tried the door. It was open. I swung the door and tentatively stepped inside. The cabin wasn’t very big; a set of bunk beds in the corner, a small stove, a sink, a cupboard, and that was it. I opened the cupboard, which was full of fishing gear and medical equipment.
There was nothing in there of any help. No blood, no evidence that the fiends had ever stepped inside the place.
I left the cabin and looked around. The ground was firm, but there were no tire tracks or drag marks. I walked over to the far side of the cabin and stared over the still lake at the dock on the opposite side. And the two boats moored there.
“You have a theory?” Isaac asked.
“Something killed the RCU and ran,” I said. “Not these fiends, something else. The bodies of these fiends were taken by boat from that mooring station and brought here. Might be worth checking if the dog walker was one of the people involved. You know his name? What does he do for a living?”
“I can find out,” Isaac said. “The FBI were looking into it.”
“Someone was trying to shift the blame of the attack onto these fiends. But that doesn’t account for whatever did attack Dan and his team.” I walked down the steps of the cabin to the ground. “You know I’m . . .” I stopped, unsure I could finish that sentence.
“Yeah, I figured,” Isaac said.
“I can’t do what I used to do,” I told him. “I just can’t. I’ve tried. I’ve tried to find out how to reverse whatever the hell happened to me. I just want you to know if there’s a fight, I will go down swinging, but . . . I’m not the person I was. Not while I’m hobbled like this.”
“You’ve spent four years trying to fix yourself?” Isaac asked. “I thought you just needed time to sort your head out.”
“Well, that too,” I said. “I’ll explain later; I just needed you to know . . . I’m there for you.”
“My wife and children would be without me if you hadn’t saved my life multiple times over the years,” Isaac said. “Whatever you need, I’m there to help.”
“Thank you,” I said, wanting to move the conversation on. We could talk about everything else once we were done trying to find information about the attackers.
“There was venom inside Dan’s wound,” Isaac said. “You ever heard of something that can do that? Elder fiend?”
“Deliver venom through its claws?” I asked “Sure. It’s not an elder fiend, though.”
Elder fiends were created a little differently to lesser or greater. When a tear happened and an animal on earth walked through, just as an animal in the rift walked through, an elder fiend was created. It merged the two creatures and, considering animals in the rift are considerably more dangerous than most of those on Earth, it didn’t end well for anyone coming across it. Elder fiends were hyper intelligent and aggressive, but they were rare and they didn’t ambush and then wait a bit. They burn out quickly and leave a lot of bodies in their wake before they need to hibernate, to restart the cycle of violence.
“So, if it’s an elder fiend,” Isaac said tentatively. “And I know, there hasn’t been one in centuries, but say that’s what this is. Say someone has one that they let loose and it killed people; they covered it up. You ever heard of an elder fiend who willingly works with people?”
I shook my head. “You’re thinking it killed everyone, ran off, and people came to cover up the mess?”
Isaac nodded.
I looked around, trying to figure out where an elder fiend would have gone. Isaacs’s theory was the best I’d heard, and frankly, when you have nothing to go on, even something you can’t usually conceive needs to be considered. “The fiend would have wanted somewhere quiet,” I said. “Every other case of elder-fiend attack, there was an outburst of violence, and then it found somewhere safe to hide out.”
“There’s a lot of places it could go,” Isaac said.
“What’s up there?” I asked him, pointing to a row of large rocks that jutted out from a slope leading into a denser part of the woodlands.
“No idea,” Isaac said as his phone rang. “It’s Emily. I need to answer this.”
Isaac unbuckled a dagger from his belt and passed it to me. Just in case, he mouthed.
Isaac walked away to talk to Emily and I walked over to the rocks. They were much larger than I’d first thought, and there were gaps between some of them that were big enough for someone to walk through, up, and back into the woodland.
I climbed the slope, walking to the side once I’d gotten to the top and looking down into the rocks. The path actually moved sharply to the left, away from the woodland, and down toward a path that led through some overgrown bushes that had been trampled by something big.
“Whatever came through here was in a hurry,” I said to myself.
I found a piece of dark brown fur tangled on the remains of the bushes. I picked it up and turned it over. It was matted with blood, and a second piece was almost a metre long by the time I’d untangled it from the thorns it had been caught on. A piece of pink flesh sat at the end of the fur. It would have hurt to have been torn free, but there was no blood trail to follow.
I continued on, finding more clumps of fur, and was halfway through a patch of open land when I heard the sounds of distress. I paused and listened again; it was a long, low howl that was quite unlike any animal. A mixture of wolf, bear, and boar, something cobbled together that shouldn’t exist.
The howl sounded again.
What the hell is that? I drew the dagger from its sheath and discovered it was rift-tempered. It had a faint purple-and-blue sheen to the metal blade.
Unfortunately, guns didn’t always work as well as other rift-tempered weapons. Tempering the gun was fine, but the bullets didn’t always absorb the power, and tempering anything with explosives inside tended to blow up, usually when someone was holding it. I wished the knife was a bow; it was the most dependable long-distance weapon that could be rift-tempered. It wouldn’t keep me in one piece if it was an elder fiend, but it was better than a solitary dagger.
Even so, I continued on. If there was an elder fiend, it needed to be dealt with before it hurt others. I moved toward the outcrop, keeping low and precise, as another howl sounded. When I was a few feet away, I spotted a cave to the side of the outcrop. It was barely big enough to sit a person, and the fiend was curled up inside of it, watching me with large red eyes. I had no idea what it was, but it was not an elder fiend.
Blood had pooled outside of the cave, running in between the cracks of the ground. The creature moved, and I saw that it had the rear of a wolf, the upper torso of a bear, and the head of a boar, but it was all done with humanoid proportions. It had hands and feet instead of paws, and strips of bloody fur fluttered in the breeze, as if the creature were unravelling.
“What the hell are you?” I asked it.
It could only answer with another pained response.
“You killed all those people,” I said, taking a step forward.
The creature poked its head out of the shadowy cave and nodded once. Huge tusks jutted out of a chimera face that was halfway between a boar and a human.
“Did someone do this to you?” I asked, my voice full of barely concealed anger.
It nodded.
“Who?” I asked.
The creature screamed, the sound vibrating in my chest.
“This is a rift-tempered dagger,” I told it, holding the dagger up for it to see. “I can end your suffering right now. But you killed people. You hurt my friend.”
The creature nodded.
“You were controlled?”
A shake of the head.
“Ordered to?”
Another nod.
“Are you alone?” I asked it.
The creature shook its massive head.
“You going to attack me?” I asked it.
A shake of the head. “Can’t . . . move.”
“I want the people who made you,” I told it.
The creature picked up and threw a brown rucksack toward me. It landed near my feet. The creature lifted its head out of the cave, exposing its jugular to me. “Please,” it gargled.
I stood before the creature and pressed the tip of the blade against the throat of the creature. “I want you to know,” I whispered, “this is better than you deserve.”
The creature turned slightly to look at me in the eye, and I jammed the blade up into its throat, tearing open the creature’s neck and leaving it to bleed to death on the ground.
I looked back at Isaac as he arrived on the scene, an expression of shock and horror on his face.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked.
CHAPTER SIX
A lot of things happened in a short space of time. The first thing Isaac did was call Emily while I went through the backpack of the dead fiend-creature. I really wanted to come up with a new terminology for them, because fiend-creature was bad, but my suggestion of calling them “what the fuck was that thing?” was shot down pretty quickly by Isaac.
I had more questions than answers at this point. Who, or what, had created the thing in the cave? How had it been able to kill nine members of an RCU-FBI joint team? Why was it peeling apart? Why had it been left to die? Why go to the trouble of placing dead fiends to take the fall but leave this thing in a cave? The latter question bounced around in my head. Surely, whoever had sent it to kill Dan’s team hadn’t just wanted to throw away their assassin. If they had, they’d have just killed it. The more information we found, the more questions I had.
Isaac finished talking to Emily and immediately called Hannah, while I started looking through the backpack; so far, I’d found a change of clothes, a wallet with twenty dollars in it and no ID, a piece of paper with several names on it, all of whom belonged to attacked members of the RCU, and a set of car keys to a Toyota somewhere.
“Two fiends,” I said to myself. Somewhere out there I’d place good money on a second human-fiend. That idea didn’t bring me a lot of good feelings.
