~~~
He visits Eddie. The lad’s story checks out.
So, now he has a time and a place. It doesn’t leave him much room to plan, but simple is best. Get in, deal with what he finds, get out if possible.
Late at night, he goes up to the warehouse to view the ground.
The full moon is close, and that’s bad. So is the proximity to the dance studio and the bike shop. “Tomorrow night” could be any time after sunset, and the sun sets early these days. The Mundane businesses could still have customers.
He scouts around back, finding a few parking spaces, a loading dock and an employee entrance. That’s better. Almost no cover, though. A couple big cottonwoods and a few new plantings. It doesn’t present too much problem, not for him. He finds a juvenile red maple with a view of the back door and wakes it up. It’s cranky, but also a little excited, like any young thing given permission to ignore bedtime. It will remember him, and give him what protection it can.
The floods over the employee lot will have to go. He spots a couple security cameras; those will have to go, too. He’ll need to cut the power once everyone’s inside. No, that won’t work; it’ll disable him, as well. Shite. Very well, he’ll cut the camera cables and forget the floods. He traces both camera leads back to a single box on the building’s south wall, the wall closest to his vantage point. It looks well out of camera range, too. Poor planning on the Ring’s part, but it makes things easier for him. Once he cuts the cables, any security goons monitoring from inside will come to him. That will even the odds.
But if there are any cameras in the building itself, he can’t get to them. And if security is handled off site, he’ll have about five minutes. No more than ten.
Shite. He’s not cut out for this. He’s done his share of breaking and entering, but never with killing at the end of it. Perhaps he’s popped a person or two, when he couldn’t help it. When he was threatened. In the heat of the moment. When he didn’t care. Aye, all right, he served in Scáthach’s wars, but that was another place, another time. Not the World-That-Is. For fuck’s sake, he’s a healer, not an assassin.
“And are you so squeamish about healing?” Scáthach had asked him. “How can you heal if you’re unwilling to wield the knife?”
She had a pithy aphorism for everything, did Scáthach. He’s sick of hearing them in his mind.
In time, he decides he’s seen all there is to see and made all the plan he can make. This is the best chance he’s going to get, and minimizing the risks is out of his control. He’s tired. He wants an end. If he ends up on the wrong side of the law, it’s no place he’s not been before. And perhaps they’ll let him plead insanity. Gods know, it could be the truth.
He goes back to the house to grab a few hours of sleep.
He lies for a long time, staring into the dark.
When he wakes Wednesday, the Thirty-First of October, his first thought is, it’s Her birthday.
A year ago, he was doing finish carpentry on a house project in the Canyon. She showed up at the job site in Zee’s cab, wearing nothing but a few scraps of black lace that turned Her skin to ivory and Her hair to flame. She kidnapped him to a hotel. He asked Her, if it’s your birthday, why am I getting the present? She said, You only turn thirty once, and he said Aye, and I got the same present when I turned thirty, though not in a hotel. I’m an old woman now, She said.
They ordered room service, but when it came they were too busy to answer the door.
He wonders how She’s spending this birthday. What She’s doing now. He wonders if She honestly believes Herself old. At the time, he thought it a joke. Now, he’s not so sure. She feels things one would not expect, and She knows how to keep Her feelings to Herself. How to turn questions aside. The eternal mystery of Her.
She will never be old to him, though. Forever the same, forever beautiful. She doesn’t believe that either, of course. It seems a crime to him, how women, all those lovely women, always find reasons to fault themselves. And for Her, it’s more than a crime; it’s a sin. He’s never known such a radiant soul, and Her body has no peer in his eyes. Her hair, Her skin, so soft. The sweet curve of Her hip, of Her breast. The light in Her face.
He needs to stop thinking of Her. If he keeps thinking of Her, he will never leave this bed. And he has work to do. A glance at the clock tells him he’s slept very late; it’s gone noon. He has about five hours to kill.
He spends the first of them meditating while sharpening his sword and a couple knives, one for his boot and one for a forearm rig. He doubts he’ll need the knives unless things go very badly, but it’s best to have a fallback position.
Scáthach tries to interrupt his meditation with something apt. He hushes her.
Later, he goes down to the Mall to be seen. Since he’s been back, he’s been on the Mall every day; it wouldn’t be good to break his routine at this point. In case anyone’s watching him. He hasn’t spotted a tail. It’s possible the Ring is too complacent and does not consider him a threat. Their mistake. They can have no idea of what he’s capable. Of his rage.
At five in the evening, as the sun sets, he drives up to the battleground. He leaves the truck at the Valmont Dog Park and walks the rest of the way, sword in hand, not caring at this point whether anyone notices him. It’s Samhain, All Hallows, after all. If there is a witness, likely they’ll think the sword is part of a costume.
The thought makes him smile. He does not have to see himself to know it’s not a nice smile.
He remembers how Caitlin has told him that he’s a bad man. She was teasing, of course. But She was more right than She knew. Than he has ever let Her know.
The juvenile maple receives him with glee; it doesn’t get many sentient visitors. Only the odd raven, and ravens don’t tend to gossip. Knowing he’s as safe as he can be with the tree’s aura surrounding him, he indulges it for a while, always with one eye on the warehouse parking lot. In time, the maple gets bored, gets tired. He lets it sleep. The evening grows very quiet.
The moon rises, one day from full, bathing the landscape in silver. He falls into a predator’s trance, aware of everything, involved in nothing. There is only the night, the darkness without and the darkness within merging into one thing. He is the goal and the goal is him. Nothing is separate. Nothing exists outside everything.
In a time that means nothing to him, a van pulls into the lot. Two large people get out; he identifies them with a piece of his mind that surfaces for the purpose. Men, likely the security goons, come to set up. They’ll be armed, both with magic and with hardware.
The goons unlock the building and go in. He waits. More time passes.
A sedan arrives, followed by a compact. They disgorge four suits, two of them women. That’s six, half the members of the Ring he and Caitlin have been able to spot. They gather around one of the cars to chat, perhaps exchanging the small news of the day. One of them is carrying a travel mug.
Why do they have to look so normal?
He has only the word of the lad from the coffee shop that this is the Ring at all. That, and the location. He’s never laid eyes on any of the principals close up, only the trawlers who hunt the Mall, and without Caitlin he couldn’t be sure of them. He knows Christopher Fisher’s name, but not his face.
What if this is some innocent meeting?
For a minute, he considers calling the whole thing off.
Then the gods, for reasons of their own, decide to smile on him. Two more cars pull up and a suit gets out of each. He recognizes one of them; he’s marked the man talking to the bookkeeper from the Walnut Street shop, and speaking with a couple of the Mall Trawlers, too. What’s more, Caitlin had identified him as a mage before She left.
Good enough. That’s eight. There should be four more.
He waits, but no more cars arrive. His trance slips; he begins to feel the press of time. Agitation creeps up on him like a slow infection, making his heart jitter and his face break out in a sweat. If he hesitates too long, th
is chance will be lost.
It has to be now. He’ll deal with the other four in another way, if he can.
Picking up his sword, he makes his way to the box with the camera leads, silent as the shadow the moon casts behind him. He cuts the leads with the knife from his boot. If the security goons are monitoring inside, they’ll know now there’s some problem. One, perhaps both, will be coming to check.
And any off-site security will be on its way as soon as they can determine the issue’s at the warehouse, not with their reception.
Awareness of time is a bell tolling through his head.
He edges around the corner of the building, goes to the entrance. Draws his sword and drops the sheath on the stoop. Checks the door. They’ve left it unlocked. Good.
He slips inside.
The room is some kind of storage area, the kind of place one might expect to find in a warehouse. Large, relatively open, with ranks of box-covered metal shelves. It’s dim, almost dark, lit only by a slash of gold coming from an open door at the far side. He starts across, and has covered half the distance when a big shape appears in the door, backlit, faceless. One of the goons, on schedule. And he’s standing in that gold slash as if in a spotlight.
For a second, they just stare at each other and he realizes, despite his intent, despite his planning, he’s as shocked to see the goon as the goon is to see him. He’s reached the point where plans become actuality, and nothing ever quite makes one ready for that.
Then the goon is reaching into his jacket in slow motion, and he’s moving much faster, almost too fast. The sword comes up and flashes down, through the notch of the goon’s neck, halfway to the opposite armpit. Good, he thinks, missed the collarbone; that can be trouble. The goon sags, clearing the blade with his own weight, and he rips it free the rest of the way, ignoring the sudden hot jet of blood that comes in its wake.
One. He steps over the body and into the hall, leaving bloody footprints in his wake.
The hall stretches out in two directions. He could tell from the angle of the first goon’s approach that he came from the right, so that’s the way he goes. Some doors up ahead, closed. Industrial-style office doors with panes of glass set into the tops. Only one shows light, and he guesses that’s the security station. On the way to it, he checks the doors he passes and finds them locked. That’s fortunate, no distractions from that quarter. Perhaps the gods are still smiling on him.
He halts just short of the lighted door, peers through the window sidelong. Aye, it’s security, as he thought. Eight flickering monitors on the far wall, set so you have to be sitting with your back to the door to watch them. Again, careless. Bad placement, bad planning. It tells him the Ring never expected something as bald as his attack.
The remaining goon is watching the monitors. He has his jacket off. It’s slung over the back of his chair, and the slump of his shoulders marks him as bored. Not for long.
He cracks the door open, almost wishing it would make a sound. It doesn’t, and he slides past it, closing it silently behind him. Three steps bring him up behind the goon in the chair. The goon senses him, catches a flicker of his reflection in one of the monitors, perhaps, for he swivels his chair around.
“So what was it?” the goon is saying. “Animal, right?”
“No,” he replies, and the goon dies with a sword in his throat.
Two, and neither of them had time to react.
He pauses to wipe his sword on the dead goon and glances at the monitor bank. Two show static; those would be the cameras whose cables he cut. Two more show images of the front parking lot and the front door. The rest are interior. A room with a reception desk. A hallway, not the one he’s just come down. A cellar, empty of people but set up with chairs and cots. What he can see of the furniture is equipped with restraints. That, in street parlance, would be where the bad shit goes down. The sight makes his blood boil.
All those areas, he can ignore. Not the last. It’s a conference room, a Mundane conference room, and the remaining mages, the ones he spotted outside, are sitting around the table.
He’d half-expected a group of mages of this sort meeting on Samhain to be conducting a ritual. Paying tribute to whatever evil force they worship, if they worship anything but their own profit. Seeing them at a business meeting, even if their business is vile, is somewhat disappointing. But then, perhaps it’s a form of paying tribute, at that.
The table could cause problems, get in the way. Then again, it could cause problems for his targets, as well.
He leaves the security station. The lad from the coffee shop said the conference room was on the second floor, so he hunts for a stair. It’s back the way he has already come, past the first goon’s corpse. He starts up as quietly as he can, taking the steps by twos. He doesn’t think he has much time left, if someone on the outside has been alerted.
At the top of the stair, he halts. The second floor is smaller than the first, only a short hallway with doors to either side. On the right, three doors, probably offices. On the left, only one. Much of the left wall is glass, from waist level to a foot below the ceiling. Windows with shades drawn and lights behind them. He can hear the murmur of voices from within. That’s where he’s going, where his business lies.
A door on the right, close to him, opens and a man comes out, adjusting his belt. Restroom, apparently. He could deal with this one now, save himself trouble later. But the man heads back to the conference room without a glance toward the stairwell, and he cannot bring himself to take the fellow from behind, with no warning at all. So he lets him go, for the moment.
The man goes into the conference room. He gives it a beat, then follows.
He opens the door. Doesn’t throw it open, no dramatic gesture. Just opens it, as if he’s expected, as if he has every right to be there. Enters the room, and closes the door behind him.
Six faces turn toward him.
“Look in every face,” he remembers Scáthach telling him. “See your enemies. See what you’re removing from the world.”
He tries, but the features don’t register. Extraneous details keep getting in the way: a pen in someone’s hand, a shade of lipstick. The shape of the table, oval. Its position across the center of the room.
The positions of his targets. A man at either end of the table, one in the prime of middle-age, one verging on old. A man and a woman on either side, two quite close. Then one of them, he doesn’t know which, throws a spell at him. He feels it hit him, and break, and dissolve into nothing. Like an egg, like a snowball. Harmless. So that works, then.
He smiles, revealing teeth.
“We are so fucked,” says one of the mages, the young man closest to him, the one with brown hair. Perhaps it was he that threw the spell.
“Aye,” he answers. “That ye are.”
A couple more spells hit, dissolve. He wonders for an instant what they’re throwing at him, some kind of compulsion, most likely. An order to back off, stand down, let himself be taken. Compulsion is the Ring’s specialty, after all. One of them.
Then one of the mages moves. It’s the man on the far side of the table, a fair man about his own age. Under his suit, he has the body of someone who works out. Lifts weights, probably. Does sport, likely football, the American kind. He’s quick enough, but ungainly; his muscles fight each other. He slams shut the briefcase that has been resting open on the table in front of him, hurls it, flings himself over the table after it in a flying tackle.
Brave, but suicidal. He brushes the briefcase aside. It pops open again, scattering papers. He steps left in its wake, sword coming over in a double-handed sweep as the fair man plummets into the space where he had been standing. The blade takes the fair man through the spine, severing it with a blow. The body continues to fall; the sword comes free and he lets the follow through return him to his original position.
Three.
Someone—one of the women, he thinks, but can’t be sure—screams. Until that moment, they have not actually bel
ieved in him. He doesn’t blame them, not really. In the twenty-first century, it’s much easier to believe in magic than in the power of the sword.
Most of the mages are on their feet, now. Everything speeds up and slows down, both at the same time, the way it happens in battle, and his blood begins to sing. The woman on the near side of the table, a plump, middle-aged woman like someone’s grandmother, makes a run for the door, straight at him. It startles him a bit, this panic move. Reason should have told her to stay out of range, but, of course, reason is no longer operating here. He brings the sword up at an angle. Some bizarre instinct makes her try to fend it off with her hand. The hand goes flying across the room; he reverses his strike and the blade comes down across her neck. She crumples at his feet as he jerks the weapon free, stepping over her.
Four.
His feet have brought him close to the older man at the foot of the table. The fellow is simply standing there, shaking like a leaf. He looks as though he might have shit himself in terror and perhaps he has; it wouldn’t be the first time someone has. An unsteady hand comes up in a warding gesture; a spell bounces off of him. He thrusts, and the older man falls backward, clutching his throat.
Five.
He’s left the door unguarded behind him. As he spins back toward it, the brown-haired man on the near side of the table stumbles out of the place where events have frozen him, seeking escape. He falls to his knees, picks himself back up, tries to run the few steps to freedom.
He’s not fast enough. He, Timber—for in this fierce moment, he knows his own name—leaps the corpse of the middle-aged woman and whirls, putting his back to the door once more. The sword flashes, but in his panicked rush for freedom, the brown-haired man does not seem to notice. He impales himself on the blade.
Six.
He hears shrieking, a series of continuous, high-pitched squeals like a whistle blowing, like a rabbit in a trap. The remaining woman, a young blonde no more than twenty-five or –six, is running back and forth on the far side of the table, unable to make up her mind where to go. Right or left, it won’t matter in the end. But the noise pierces his brain like a knife; he wants it to stop. He springs for a vacant chair, uses it to launch himself over the table, comes down on the other side. The woman’s on his left, still screaming, tears pouring down her face. A straight thrust to the heart puts her out of her misery.
Seven.
And now only one remains, the middle-aged man at the head of the table. The man with authority written on his face. Through everything, this one hasn’t moved. He just sits there, hands steepled in front of him, as if he’s watching a mildly entertaining program on the television.
“You’re MacDuff, aren’t you?” he says. Cultured accent. Wealthy. Educated.
He has to remind himself that this man is evil.
“Aye. And I guess ye’d be Fisher.”
“And you’d be right.” Fisher extends a hand. “I’m pleased to meet you at last.”
The man has balls, no doubt of that. He glances at the hand without bothering to hide his loathing for it, for everything it represents.
“I canna say the same.”
Fisher shrugs, withdraws his hand. He says, “We could use a man of your talents, you know.”
The breath goes out of him. He feels like he’s taken a punch to the gut. His gorge rises, just as if he had.
“Ye canna be serious.”
It’s hard not to be drawn into conversation, hard to remember he can’t spare the time. And Fisher may be counting on that. Contriving a distraction, hoping for rescue.
“I’m very serious. The pay’s extremely good.”
His mouth fills with bile; he’s forced to turn his head and spit.
“Nothing in this world or any other can ever, ever persuade me to condone what ye do.”
Fisher looks at him for what seems a long time, then sighs. He sounds genuinely disappointed.
“Ah, well. It was worth a try. By the way, this isn’t over. You know that, don’t you?”
“It’s over for you,” he says, and takes off Fisher’s head. The body slumps forward over the table, neck stump spouting gore.
Eight. And it’s done. He comes to himself, standing in the room with the six new corpses he has made, splattered with their blood, and begins to shake. Reaction, he’s experienced that before. But never in his life has he felt so sickened with himself. He wants to vomit until there’s nothing left in him. He wants to crawl under the table and go to sleep until the horror passes.
He can’t do either. His time is up, or it will be soon. He has to leave.
On his way out of the killing ground, he spots the security camera over the door, its red light blinking like an eye. A sweep of his sword brings it down and another destroys it. It won’t make any difference, because there’s bound to be a tape somewhere of what just passed in the conference room. But he can’t do anything about that. And trashing the camera makes him feel better, a little.
Down the stairs, down the hall. Step over the corpse of the first goon, cold now, blood congealing like jelly. Through the storeroom and out the door. Pick up the scabbard he left on the stoop. Sheath the sword. His hands are trembling, and he’s dripping blood everywhere; it’s in his mouth, in his eyes. He tears his shirt off and uses it to mop away the worst, but it’s soaked and doesn’t help much.
There’s a mat before the door. He takes a moment to wipe his feet, so his boots don’t leave tracks, show which direction he’s gone.
Then a van comes around the south side of the building, and he doesn’t wait to see who it is. He’s running across the parking lot, through a vacant field, and down Valmont, back to the dog park where he left the truck. He rips the door open, throws the sword in and himself after. The tires squeal as he heaves the wheel around, and then he’s speeding down the highway, putting the Ring, and the slaughter, and his sickness as far behind him as he can.
Back at the house, he pulls the truck into the alley instead of leaving it out front as he usually does. The cab stinks with the blood that’s come off him; he’s left smears on the wheel, on the seat, on the door. All Hallows or not, he doesn’t want any passing stranger to notice that, get ideas, start asking questions. He’ll deal with it later, tomorrow; he can’t do it now. Despite the full moon, the darkness is too thick. Or perhaps it’s the darkness inside his soul.
Inside, he rips off the rest of his clothes, kicks off his boots, leaves them on the kitchen floor. The t-shirt, the jeans, there will be no cleaning them; they’ll have to be burned. He can’t afford to lose the boots, though. Not yet, not until he can replace them. He hasn’t got another pair. He hopes they won’t mark him too badly. Most people don’t pay attention to boots, won’t identify the stains. But his stomach heaves at the idea of forcing his feet back in those things; he doesn’t think he can do it. Dump the boots, then. He’s got running shoes. They’ll work.
He cleans the sword. He tries to clean himself, standing under the shower until the water turns to ice. But though the runoff turns clear, though he scrubs and scrubs until he nearly scrubs through his skin, he still feels dirty. Tainted. Irredeemably stained, like his boots, like his clothes. And there’s nothing he can do, to get rid of himself. To erase what he’s done.
He keeps seeing them. The faces. At the time, they hadn’t registered. Now they’re stark snapshots plastered on his eyes. Even the goons, whom he’d hardly remarked. One succeeds another, like movie stills, like cards being shuffled. He remembers every one.
And he always will.
“You’ll live with it,” Scáthach had said. “Or you won’t.”
But he must. The Battle Blessing assures he must. He supposes he’ll die someday, somehow. His first oath to Scáthach implies as much. But he can’t make it happen. He can’t throw himself on an enemy sword. He doubts even a bullet would do much more than slow him down.
Right now, this blessing seems more of a curse.
“You’ll live with it. Or you won’t.”
<
br /> He supposes he’ll become accustomed. Perhaps with morning, the faces will fade. Perhaps with the coming of light, the horror of himself, of what he’s done, won’t cut so deep. But in this moment, he’s alone in the dark, and his light is far, far away.
And it comes to him, then: the reason for his second oath. The promise to return to Her. Caitlin is his light, the beacon shining on his dark road. Without Her, he is lost. And perhaps this bitter blessing has been given him for more than a single purpose. Perhaps there’s work yet to do.
He sleeps, and wakes, and knows where he is.
He is on his way to Her.
Without Holding Back