Forsaken: The World of Nightwalkers (27 page)

She had never seen a Wraith before, and she didn’t even think she knew anyone who had. She wondered if her father, who had been alive for eight hundred and twenty-two years, had ever crossed paths with one. It was said, however, that witnesses were few and far between strictly because they never lived to tell the tale. It was rail thin, as if it had some sort of wasting sickness. And the smell…the smell of it was the foulest thing she’d ever known.

She covered her mouth and nose, gagging from the stench and from the fear that it was going to reach out and touch her, even though she knew it was dead, that it couldn’t possibly have survived.

Suddenly she felt Leo reaching down for her hands, the strength of his fingers wrapping around hers, giving her comfort and reassurance. Once again it was a support that she needed more than anything in that instant. And it meant something to her that he was giving it to her in the middle of all this deadly madness.

He pulled her close to his back. Close enough that she could feel his warmth. She suddenly felt the urge to cuddle up to him, just so she could feel the vigor of him. It was a ridiculous impulse to have at the most ridiculous time.

They went past several more doorways and went down several more hallways. They seemed to go on and on, and it felt like they weren’t getting any closer to their goal. Faith’s heart was beating like a drum, every once in a while missing a beat when she thought she heard something over the clamor of it and her breathing.
Why oh why do I have to be so loud? Can they hear me? Are they able to sense me?
She had no idea what their skills or weaknesses were, had no way of preparing against them if she could.

As for Leo, it was as though he were taking a walk in the park; every step was made with ease, every move was succinct and sure.

“We’re close,” he told her in that nearly airless whisper. “I think what we’re looking for is either through this door, or the other one off the hallway parallel to this one. Stay very close.”

As if he had to remind her. Leo knew she was scared because every time he touched her to bring her closer in he could feel her whole body shaking. But he was much more relaxed now that he knew he could kill them using the methods he was most comfortable with. Guns were good and all of that, but nothing beat a good, dependable knife when it came to moving through a place in stealth. The maneuver he’d used to take out the Wraith was one he had practiced hundreds of times and utilized more times than he could count. It allowed for a quick death and prevented an opportunity for the target to raise up a vocal alarm.

Leo gently tested the knob to the door. He began to doubt this was the right room the minute it turned easily in his hand. If this was such a powerful nik, why wasn’t it being guarded with more than a juvenile alarm system and carelessly unlocked doors? The tongue of the doorknob slid out of the latch with the smallest of clicks. With a single finger he gave the door a small push, letting it swing open by several inches. The room was as black as pitch, just like all the others before it. Grey had offered him night vision goggles, but he had declined. The fewer encumbrances he had the better off he was. Besides, they cut off his peripheral vision and he needed eyes in the back of his head for this mission. He signaled Faith to stay with another gentle touch of his fingers, and moving as silently and lightly as was possible he slid through the door and did a fast sweep of all corners of the room as best he could in the dark. But for Leo, it had never been about just what he could see. It had been about instinct. The instinct to sense when there was another body in the room. He wouldn’t have been able to explain it to an outsider. There was just a different feel to a space when something living was in it.

As far as human bodies were concerned, that is. He had no idea what he was up against in this setting. Like Faith, he would be the first to admit this was a poorly prepared plan. Not knowing everything about their enemy was the largest deficit. The second deficit, he realized, was that Grey hadn’t told them what the nikki looked like. He’d only said “You’ll know it when you see it.”

He hated cryptic bullshit like that, but when Leo had pressed him Grey had refused to respond. And since Grey was the one with all of the power in the situation, he’d had very little choice open to him. They had to do this. So it had just been about gritting his teeth and hoping for the best.

The room was not very large, but he knew right away that there was nothing of import in it. Nikkis were alive. They would move or breathe or something to that effect. He pulled his gun, flipped on the laser sight and quickly ran it around the room. It was only a thin red beam of light, not meant to be a flashlight, but he could see what the light looked like as it hit the target of the wall and it helped him make out the molding and indentation of another door.

And then, suddenly he felt it. Knew something was there. He jolted to the right just as something hit him with a screeching growl. It plowed into him, sending him crashing down into the floor. He felt the impact clawing across every one of the partially healed wounds in his chest and he couldn’t help the low, gravelly sound that escaped him. The gun went skidding across the floor, the knife did not.

The thing was incredibly strong, no doubt about that, he admitted as he was jerked up and then slammed back into the ground. His head struck and a numb ring echoed throughout his skull. It was the last free shot this thing was going to get. He went to go for its neck when he felt it jerk away from him. To his shocked witness, he watched Faith pull something that had to weigh at least 225 by the feel of it right off its feet, flinging it into the wall. But instead of hitting the wall it went right through it, phasing completely through as though the wall wasn’t even there. Then before Leo could fully regain his feet the Wraith came barreling back through the wall with another rasping screech of anger. But instead of a physical attack, this time a cylinder of yellow energy whipped around it before barreling toward them. Again, Faith stepped up, throwing herself between the energy blast and Leo, the power she harbored deflecting the attack right back onto the attacker. Like a nuclear blast, the thing was struck and became an instant, momentary pile of burning ash in the shape of a man…before collapsing into a heap of disintegrated cinders.

“Okay, no more skulking. That thing was screeching loud enough to wake the whole damn house,” Leo said, not having the time to be utterly impressed by Faith…or utterly terrified by the power these things were wielding.

He crashed into the next door, knowing that it was going to be locked. He didn’t bother checking for forms of life because if they all could phase through walls like that, then it was a waste of time.

He was reaching for his flashlight, but the moment they were fully in the room they could see the nikki.

“Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me!” Leo ejected.

It was a horse. A winged blue horse with a sparkling pink mane like some kind of overgrown My Little Pony. That was when he got hit by the stench of horse manure in the room.

“They must have phased it in through the walls,” Faith said breathlessly. “It’ll be hard, but we can walk it out the way we came or…”

“Or?” he prompted, somehow already knowing what she was going to say.

“Or I can grab hold of a Wraith, deflect its phasing ability into the walls ahead of us and, as long as we’re connected together, we should all move through just fine.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s all I can think of!”

“Great…just great,” he grumbled, trying not to feel sickened and terrified as he retrieved his weapon. “You’re going to commit suicide and I’m supposed to stand and watch? Stand and hold on to a
blue horse
and watch?”

The demand was soundly punctuated by a very long, very low sound of flatulence.

The horse nickered.

“Jesus, when did my life turn into a goddamn carnival?” Leo asked no one in particular. “Lead the horse through the doors. Follow my light. We’ll walk it out. I don’t want you touching another one of these Wraiths if you can at all avoid it. Now
hurry.
”

But just as they were about to drag it through the first door, the horse nickered again as it splayed out an impressive thirteen foot wingspan and struck a shoed foot against the tiled floor so hard sparks flew from the contact. If Leo had to interpret horse-ese, he’d say that definitely equated a desire to stay put. There was no way they were fitting the horse through any door if it kept its wings spread out.

“We’re so going to die,” Faith said weakly. She looked around the room, trying not to panic. Then her face lit up and she leapt for a burlap bag stamped with the word “apples” on it. She grabbed as many as she could and quickly held one out to the horse.

“Stands to reason there’s a bag of apples,” she said cooingly to the horse, “because you
like
apples. Now don’t you?”

Like a cobra, the beast shot forward and snatched the apple from Faith’s hand. It bit into it, half of it falling to the floor, the other half chomped juicily between its teeth.

“Just keep them away from me,” Faith said, as she backed out of the door, holding an apple out to the horse. The horse retracted its wings, folding them down tightly to its body, and clip-clopped through the door in pursuit of its next apple. It was going to be slow going, Leo thought with virulent fear clutching in his gut. The alarm was already raised. It made sense that Wraiths would descend on the room with the most valuable commodity in it first to check and see if all was well there. Leo took point again, turning his back on Faith, his shoulder touching hers as they walked back out the way they had come. A Wraith literally came out of nowhere. Jumping out of a wall and leaping onto Leo. Or trying to. Leo raised his weapon and put it down with a shot through its left eye.

“Keep doing brain shots,” Faith told him. She was breathless with her fear. But he could see the light of life in her eyes, even through the darkness. He knew exactly how she was feeling. Nothing made you feel more alive than when you were facing the possibility that these were the last few seconds of your life. “They’ll keep coming otherwise. If they’re like any other Nightwalker they can heal fast and have incredible stamina.”

“Incredible stamina, eh? We’ll have to test that one out after we get the hell out of here,” he said with a grin.

Leo felt something snare him around his ankle, and he went down on his knee as it tripped him up. He turned his weapon downward and could see a Wraith’s hand phased up through the floor from the basement, through his booted foot and gripping painfully tight at his ankle.

That was when he realized that Faith’s head to toe clothing was about as effective a protection as a layer of baby powder might have been on her naked skin. These things could phase right through her, touching her from the inside out.

“Faster,” he said after raking the knife across the back of the hand holding him. It released with a muffled scream coming up through the floor. “Thank Christ we’re on the first floor.”

“We just have to make it out the door. Grey said he’d be able to get us as soon as we get out the door.”

“Let’s pray he’s a Djynn of his word.”

Faith didn’t reveal how much she thought a Djynn’s word was worth. She could only hope as much as Leo was hoping. She held out another apple as they turned another corner. Was it her, or did this place seem bigger on the inside than it was on the outside?

It probably was. Like Grey’s little gingerbread house, there was some kind of spatial distortion that allowed them to pack a lot of rooms into a small space.

Leo grabbed hold of her arm, hurrying her along after him. She had to resist in order to make sure the horse was still engaged by her lure. But she needn’t have worried. It was following eagerly along. And, apparently, apples gave the poor thing terrible gas. Even if they weren’t making a racket clomping their way out of the house, the sheer stench of the horse’s farts would have led everyone right to them.

“Back door!” Leo called out triumphantly. He jerked the door open sending a stream of bright sunshine into the hall. A series of screams made them start as the light revealed a crowd of four Wraiths coming through the walls. But the moment the sunlight hit them their bodies solidified mid phase and they were left screaming in agonizing pain, heads and torsos writhing and smacking around in a desperate flail to be free of their agonizing prison.

“Sunlight makes them solid!” Leo realized, even as he watched Faith turn from black to pale white at the touch of the sun. “They can’t phase! That’s their weakness!” For good measure he shot through the glass of two windows on either side of the door, allowing them to coax the Pegasus out into daylight in relative assurance that no more Wraiths were going to endanger their mission and, most of all, none were going to endanger Faith. The horse nickered and shied, clearly unaccustomed to the light.

“Christ, is this thing able to go into sunlight?” he thought to ask a little too late.

“We don’t have any choice!” Faith pointed out. Faith moved forward between flailing hooves to grab its mane and shush and soothe the frightened beast and Leo felt his heart lurch with fear, thinking any second she was going to be trampled to death or kicked in the head.

But after some more sweet cajoling and two more apples the horse willingly followed them onto the stony path. And true to his word, the moment they were free of the house they were teleported away, horse and all.

“My god, she’s beautiful,” Grey said with truly obvious admiration after standing a moment in awe after they had materialized in front of him. He moved forward, reaching out with a tentative hand, as though he were afraid to touch it. But then Faith remembered that it took only a touch for a Djynn to claim a nik as his own, and Grey had clearly waited a very long time for this nik…and the nik quite obviously was a source of great power.

“Hello, my love,” Grey said softly as he approached, nodding in gratitude to Faith when she handed him an apple to offer the beast in friendship. Faith was amazed by the change that came over Grey, by the incredible softness in his demeanor. “You’re safe and now you’ll be able to run free and eat all the apples your heart desires.”