Nightlord: Orb (39 page)

He didn’t pay attention to fire safety in school.

We kept going through walls and rooms along the front of the house.  When we crossed the entryway, I put some cuts around the doorframe and kicked the whole thing into the yard.  It rang with an odd, metallic sound as it sailed over the front porch; I think the door was armored.  Firebrand set the entryway and the hallway on fire and we moved on.  Air was already sucking into the house and up through the holes we’d made coming in.

People kept showing up to shoot me.  They ran away screaming when Firebrand set them ablaze.  One guy seemed almost to explode—I assume he was carrying several guns or an abundance of ammunition.  None of them seemed to remember even the most basic fire safety.  What do they teach children in school, these days?  Maybe it’s hard to remember “Stop, drop, and roll!” when you have distractions—such as actually being on fire, in a burning building, amid streaming clouds of smoke while the alarms are trying to split your head with the noise and the sprinklers are drizzling hot water all over you.

I was doing my best.

One guard was smart.  Well, smart
er
.  The smart thing to do was
leave.
This guy waited ahead of me, watching for me to come through the wall.  He had a machine pistol of some sort.  It emptied itself in under three seconds as I came through into the room.  Most of the bullets were stopped by the combination of spider-silk layers and polymerized plates.  Only a couple found the tiny gaps between plates.  Armor-piercing bullets, I must assume; regular rounds wouldn’t go through all those layers of spider-silk.

Contrary to movie myth, I did not go staggering backward under the impacts.  Even a human being will usually stand there and suck up the bullets without bobbling around and flailing backward.  The bullets just don’t have enough momentum to materially affect something as massive as a grown man.  I have about three times the mass of a normal human, so bullets have even less effect.  And that’s before we even get into issues like shock, blood loss, and so on.

They didn’t do much structural damage to me, but bullets
hurt
.  The multiple impacts were no worse than a rough massage, but the penetrations were unexpected stabbings.  That does not encourage relaxation.  It also made me realize a weakness in my plan.  Only by good luck did I not take a round in the head.  A bullet through my brain would slow me down rather drastically—several seconds, possibly even a minute.  That’s a long time to lie down while people shoot at you in a burning building.

Before he could reload, I blinked across the intervening distance and performed long division on him, from crotch to crown.  The two main pieces fell with a slurping sound and his blood immediately began crawling over to me.  I let it crawl over me, working its way into me, while we continued to ignite the place.  My wounds spat out the foreign material—the bullets—as I continued to be a diversion.

I finished my walk along the front wall of the house.  The hole in the middle of the house acted like a chimney, sucking air from the outside to drag the fires inward.  All of that was behind me, however; my path finished in the garage.  With a little luck, anybody important would be there by now, trying to escape.

I was lucky; Tyrone was not.  He was in the supercar and waiting for the garage door to get out of the way.  I crossed the garage in a leap and landed on the hood, crushing it in, before taking the roof off with Firebrand.  I jerked Tyrone up out of his seat and gave him a good look into the fang-filled freakshow of my mouth; I can open wide enough to bite a softball in half.

Seat belts are important.  They not only help preserve your life in an accident, they make it inconvenient for undead monsters to pull you out of your getaway vehicle.  There’s a safety tip, in case you needed another reason to wear one.  Tyrone should have worn his; it would have slowed me down in lifting him out of the car.

“The hospital bills for Mark Spotznitz are nothing compared to the damage here,” I told him, standing on the caved-in hood and holding him at nose-distance.  He struggled, kicking and trying to pry my grip loose; I ignored this.  “How much did this house fire cost you?  One house?  Everything in it?  A million?  Two million?  Ten?”

I poked Firebrand through the windshield and it vomited flames all over the seats, setting the interior alight beneath him.

“How much was the car worth?” I asked.  “Oh, are your feet too warm?  That’s a shame.  I hope nothing else happens to Mark,” I added.  “I might become upset.”

“
Drop him!
” someone shouted, behind me.  Oh, yes; the garage door was up by now.  I glanced over my shoulder as a bunch of high-power flashlights spotlighted me.

“Okay!” I shouted back, and dropped him into the burning interior of the car.  While he screamed, I moved, causing the front of the car to skid in the opposite direction.  I went forward-left, out through the garage door, planting my feet hard on the driveway to slow slightly, to turn, using the guy on my extreme left like a bounce rail in a pinball machine.  He crunched and flew away while I hammered concrete with my feet, charging down the rough line of tough guys who were only now starting to turn to face me.  Firebrand blurred, gleaming bright and hot, carving through mortal flesh and bone as I blasted past everyone.  Four men started to fall over, dead and in pieces without yet realizing it.  The three outside my reach on that run were still turning to look for where I’d gone.

I came out of overdrive and slammed to a halt, ankle-deep in lawn, standing at an angle.  I went back the way I’d come, ignoring Tyrone’s screaming, while blood from subdivided corpses flowed and crawled all around me.  Streamers of it flailed upward, wrapping around me like crimson tentacles and sinking into my clothes.  The three survivors stared at me while I grinned at them, fangs out, blood writhing all over me, Firebrand blazing brighter than a magnesium flare, white as polar snow.

Their eyes shifted up, at something above and behind me—something about one of the other garage doors?  Someone about to come out and shoot me, maybe?  A shooter in a second floor window?  I glanced back.

Firebrand’s blazing glare threw my shadow on the wall.  It was much darker than I expected.  Not only was all color leached from the area it covered—I don’t see color in darkness, only shades of grey—but things actually seemed
dim
within my shadow.

The guy hanging out the window, clutching at his throat, seemed to have my shadow’s hands squeezing his neck.  As I watched, the shadow jerked him out the window and threw him down to crunch on the driveway.  It shrank down and resumed acting normally.

Yeah.  Okay.  So, that happened.

That’s new.

Maybe I’ll pretend it didn’t happen and move along.

As for the guys already in the driveway, monsters were above their pay grade.  Morale collapsed; they turned and ran for it.  I let them while I helped Tyrone out of the burning garage and extinguished him.  He wasn’t as badly burned as Mark, but I made my point.

I heard fire engine sirens in the distance.  That suited me.

“You remember that name,” I told Tyrone.  He stared at me, whites all around his eyes, still screaming.  I couldn’t tell if it was terror or pain from the look on his face.  His spirit screamed from both.  That also suited me.  “Mark Spotznitz is the worst sort of bad medicine.  I’m the Dark.  I’m his guardian demon.  I don’t protect him.  I do nasty things to people who bother him.  Do you get that?”

Tyrone failed to acknowledge understanding.  I seized him by the hair and picked him up.  He didn’t have a choice about eye contact with the black-eyed monster on his driveway.

“I asked if you got that,” I repeated, stroking my tendrils through him and leaving cold trails through his flesh.  At the same time, I opened my mouth wide enough to swallow a baseball and ran the tip of my industrial-length tongue along one of his cheekbones.

If the loss of sphincter control is any indication, Tyrone understood.  I chose to take it as such.

I went back into the house to let Firebrand spray flames up through the second floor and into the attic, enhancing the chimney effect.  Then we punched a fiery hole out the back of the house; we might as well make sure it was a fully-involved structure fire.

With a fire engine coming up the street, I stood out back and stuck Firebrand into the rear wall of the house.  It cried out in glee and enhanced the flames.  Everything started burning hotter.  I drained the power from another gem and fed the magic into Firebrand; the roof didn’t exactly blow off, but it did shift and start burning brightly.  The dragon-sword pulled fire from the front, drawing it farther back in wild, writhing streamers of flame, shattering windows with the heat and igniting everything on the way to the rear of the structure.

No insurance claim for this place.  Some sort of accelerant was clearly indicated.

I ran across the back yard, hurdled the wall, and found Mary already waiting for me.

“You’re late,” she teased.

“I was busy being theatrical.  How did I do?  Was I an adequate distraction?”

She hopped up and caught the edge of the wall, peering over.  I joined her.  The house was an inferno.

“I’d say you managed it.  Are you always a pyromaniac?” she inquired.

“No, but it tends to happen when I’m angry.  I feel much better, now.”

“You need a hobby.”

“I have hobbies.  People annoy me by interfering.”  I dropped to the ground and she joined me.  There was a bloodstain along her right shoulder and a healing wound on that side of her neck, from windpipe to right below her ear.

“How did you get injured?” I asked.  She shrugged.

“Soft tissue.  When the fire alarm went off, the guard behind me cut my throat.”  She rubbed it lightly.  “That’s when I killed him.  It’s amazing how people stop paying attention to you once they cut your throat.  Even mortals can be deadly for several seconds after a wound like that.”

“Anything else unpleasant?”

“Aside from some valuable paintings going up in smoke, no.”

“Alas.  So, how did we do?”

“Never count anything until you’ve gotten away,” she replied.  “We’ve been standing here and chatting.  Let’s go.”

We sprinted off into the night.

Once we were dressed in more mundane attire, we sat in the shelter of a bus stop and dried out a little.  An electric bus pulled up and we rode it for a while, drying further.  Mary paid by feeding bills into the thing rather than use a credit card or digital stick.

She finally picked a spot to get off and we walked a bit more.

“Why all the walking?” I asked.

“Fewer data points to correlate,” she pointed out.  “Every time a bus door opens, it’s logged.  Every cab call, it’s logged.  It may take a court order to pry it out of the data vaults, but some people can get a court order—or bribe someone, or blackmail someone, or—well, you get the idea.  We’re making it harder for the data analysts to build a statistical universe and much harder to prove anything in a court of law.”

“I’ve always tried to do that.”

“Then we need to go over your techniques,” she groused.  “You simply don’t understand this modern era.”

“You’re probably right.  But how are you doing?  You were wounded.  Are you hungry?”

“Not especially.  I grabbed a quick bite from the one who cut my throat.  How about you?  You looked as though you had a few dozen holes in you.”

“I also cut several people apart.  Remember how blood chases after me?  It works on the large-scale spills, too.”

“Eww.  Convenient, but eww.”

“I do want to take you with me on a hunt, and soon.  I have things to teach you about being a soul-devouring monster.”

Mary had no reply to that.

Eventually, we did get home.  We dried out and changed, then repaired to the living room to count loot.  I built up the fire and hung Firebrand in the fireplace.  Mary was good about not noticing.  Then we started going through her satchel.  Francine came in, yawned, and plopped down next to the fire.

“I’ll say this,” said I, somewhat later, “one good thing about criminals is the way they love to deal in cash.”

“I’ll say,” she agreed, tapping a stack of bills to straighten it.  “I should have gotten a partner sooner.  Knocking over mob houses is profitable.  Much more profitable, even after the split.  Maybe you should kill everyone, next time, without burning the place to the ground?  We’d make a much bigger haul.”

“Could work,” I allowed.  “Maybe I can afford that passport, now.  And maybe a motorcycle, too.”

“Motorcycle?  What for?”

“You said cabs are tracked and logged.  It’s not like I can ride my horse to a heist; people notice.”

“But the anti-theft system, the built-in phone, the RFID, the holographic layer on the license plate… all that will go into the data vaults every time you go through a stop light, into a parking garage, or pass a public building or traffic control point.”

“Oh.  I guess I’ll have to skip the motorcycle, then.”

“I’d say so.”

“How does organized crime manage anything?” I asked.

“They aren’t really my area of expertise, but I can think of two things they have going for them.  First, they have a lot of people.  If nobody does anything repetitively, or if someone has a good, legal reason to be tagged in a location regularly, the data mining monkeys don’t have anything to work with.  Second, unless it’s public data—federal, state, or local law enforcement, mainly—the privacy protection laws require a court order to get it.  So the monkeys don’t get to look at most data; they’re working from a much more limited set.”