Rites of Passage (3 page)

That made her the precision shooter.

The other gang members carried weapons that were more in line with what Finn was used to. Knives with thick wooden handles to keep the steel blades away from their skin. Chunks of concrete fastened to wooden handles, the modern version of an old-fashioned stone club. Spears with obsidian points, the tips no doubt dipped in poison.

If Finn could get to his katana, he could take them all out.

If he hadn’t been wounded.

The female goblin gestured at Finn again, this time with her gun. She wanted him to stand in front of the male goblin.

Finn obliged. No point in getting shot again for no good reason.

The gang’s leader had the kind of face that not even a mother could love. His teeth were too big for his mouth, twisting his lips into a permanent sneer. Chunks of flesh had been ripped from the ear on the right side of his head. Together with his flat skull and dull yellow eyes, the damaged ear made him look like an alley cat who’d lost one too many fights.

A not-very-bright alley cat.

“Ooveth, I presume,” Finn said.

Ooveth hit him across the face. The goblin’s hand was as big as Finn’s head, and the blow hurt like hell.

This night just kept getting better and better.

“You’re in my territory,” Ooveth said. “You will show me respect.”

“You want me to kneel?”

Another blow rocked Finn’s head in the other direction.

Ooveth had anger management issues. Finn might be able to use that if the goblin didn’t knock his head off first.

A deep thrumming filled the building, a sound like a subterranean jet airplane getting ready for takeoff. Finn felt the vibrations in his bones.

An instant later the greenish flight from the window turned bright, hot white.

Instead of filthy glass, the window now framed a rip in reality. Light so bright it hurt Finn to look at poured through the rip.

Something moved inside that light, making it ripple and writhe like a living thing.

The creep had managed to finish the portal. Its master was in the passageway, mere steps from breaking into this world.

Finn was out of time.

“We’re all going to die here,” he said to Ooveth. “I don’t know what kind of deal you made, but the thing coming through that portal won’t care.”

Ooveth wasn’t paying attention to Finn anymore. The goblin was staring into the light. He looked like he was experiencing the rapture.

Instead of responding to what Finn said, Ooveth waved his massive hand at his female lieutenant. “Take care of this annoyance,” he said.

She tilted her head. The intense light had washed out the greenish-gray color of her skin. Except for her prominent brow and misshapen nub of a nose, she almost looked human.

She raised her white plastic gun and pointed it at Finn.

“Duck,” she said.

4

From the moment Finn passed his driver’s test, his dad had told him, over and over again, that drunk driving would get him killed.

“And don’t you let any of your buddies drive you when they’re drunk,” his dad always said. “I used to be a teenager once too, you know.”

At this point in the tirade Finn’s dad would point a finger at him, and Finn would sigh. He knew what was coming.

“You’re just lucky I survived my teenage years,” his dad would say. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be around to look at me like I’m crazy.”

Finn didn’t think his dad was crazy. He also didn’t like thinking about what his parents had done to bring him into existence. He didn’t know any teenager who did.

He always got out of the conversation by assuring his dad he wouldn’t drive drunk.

Too bad his dad never warned him about drunken sword fighting.

When the creature had knocked the long, curved blade out of the man’s hand, Finn hadn’t thought twice about picking it up.

He’d never held a sword before, but this one felt like a natural extension of his arm.

But more than that, it felt like it
belonged
in his hand.

Whether it was the sword or the beer, Finn suddenly felt like he could defeat anything.

Even the winged creature charging at him.

“Future Guardian,” it said, its gleeful voice raspy but clearly understandable. “Tonight I kill two. What a present for my master.”

Finn had been about to swing for the fences when he hesitated.

What in the world was a future guardian?

That hesitation could have cost him his life if the man hadn’t knocked him out of the way.

“Get the fuck out of here, kid!” he yelled. “And give me back my blade!”

The creature’s claws slashed at the air where Finn had stood a moment ago.

Finn handed over the sword and tried to get out of the way. His feet didn’t seem to want to work right, like he’d lost any coordination he might have once had along with the sword. He fell in a disjoined heap on the dirt floor of the lean-to.

Right next to the raging battle.

Up close, the creature smelled like a combination of cigarettes and the rotten stench of sulfur. The claws on its feet and hands were tipped with razor-sharp talons. Scales that glistened wetly in the eerie light covered its body instead of clothes. It had yellow eyes in a face that looked entirely too human for comfort, like someone had crossed a lizard with a man.

The man could have been a badass fighter in a
Shaft
movie. He wore a black leather jacket and black jeans and heavy black boots. The backs of his hands were covered with scars, and a long scar ran down one side of his face from his ear to the corner of his mouth. The edge of a tattoo was visible on one side of his neck.

And he knew more martial arts moves than Bruce Lee.

One of those moves brought the sword straight down at—and through—the creature’s arm at the wrist.

Its severed hand hit the ground next to Finn. He scrabbled backwards away from the hand just in case that thing could come at him on its own. It would be about as logical as anything else that had happened to him that night.

The creature bellowed as blood poured from the stump where its hand had been. It lunged at the man, but he slid to the ground beneath it, the sword held up in front of him.

The creature couldn’t stop in time. Even though its leathery wings flapped in what Finn thought was an attempt to put on the brakes, the creature impaled itself on the sword.

The man used the creature’s weight to flip it over his head. It landed in a boneless heap on the far side of the lean-to.

Finn let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He scrambled to his feet, ready to congratulate the man, when he noticed the creature was getting to its feet as well.

“Not good enough, Guardian,” it said.

The man rolled to his feet. He didn’t look surprised.

The creature lumbered toward him as blood the color of midnight gushed from its wounded chest.

The man didn’t wait for the creature to reach him. He ran toward it, swinging the sword in a graceful, deadly arc.

This time the creature’s head hit the ground next to Finn.

He yelped and jumped away.

The eerie glow in the lean-to winked out of existence, plunging the field into sudden darkness.

Finn stood rock still as he waited for his eyes to adjust. He figured by the time he could see again, he’d be alone in the lean-to wondering if what he’d just seen was a very vivid drunken dream. If that was the case, he might never drink another beer again.

To his surprise, once he could see well enough to get his bearings, the man and the decapitated creature were still there. The quarter moon gave off just enough light to let Finn see the carnage.

“That,” Finn said, his voice a mere ghost of its usual self, “was messy.”

The man nodded. “Cut off the head. Only way to kill these suckers.” He pointed at Finn with his index finger in an eerie but unmistakable impersonation of Finn’s dad. “That’s lesson number one.”

Finn blinked. “Lesson?” he said.

“You saw the green light, right?” the man asked. “Before you decided to go all Dirty Harry on me?”

Finn nodded, even though Dirty Harry used a gun—a big one—not a sword.

“Most people don’t,” the man said. “Or even if they do, they tell themselves they don’t so they don’t have to get involved. You? You waded right on in.”

He took a rag from an inside pocket of his jacket and began to wipe down his sword. Finn heard a cow grunt as it settled down for the night, and one of the neighborhood dogs started barking its fool head off, as his dad would say.

A dose of normal with the weird. Yeah, this night was real
Twilight Zone
material.

“We got a lot to talk about,” the man said, his attention on the blade. “If you decide to do what you were born to do, that is.”

“You mean, kill those things?”

According to his dad, all Finn had been born to do was be a pain in the ass.

“They’re called ‘creeps,’ and yes, I mean kill them.” The man shrugged, still not looking at him. “Take years of training until you’re good enough. You up for it?”

Finn remembered how natural the sword had felt in his hand, like a part of him that he hadn’t known was missing.

“Will I get my own sword?”

The question earned him a snort and the ghost of a grin. “It’s called a ‘katana,’ and yes. Once you earn it.”

Finn thought about it. Could he kill something? Kill more than one somethings? He’d never gone hunting in his life, and he didn’t like it the one time his dad had taken him fly fishing.

Then again, the fish had never tried to disembowel him.

“Those things,” Finn said. “The creeps. They’re bad, aren’t they?”

“So are the things that sent them here. The worst.” The man finally looked up from the clean katana and stared at Finn, all traces of humor gone from his expression. “It’s a hard life. A lonely life, but I like to think that everybody’s life is worth defending at any cost. That’s what’s at stake here.”

A chill ran down Finn’s spine.
Everybody’s life
. His parents. His buddies. The girl he wanted to ask to the movies.

And
he
could make a difference?

He could save them from a threat they didn’t even know about?

And probably wouldn’t believe if he tried to tell them.

How could he live with himself if he didn’t at least try?

He felt more grown up than he ever had before, even when he got behind the wheel of his parents’ car for the first time, brand new license in his wallet, without his dad in the car to supervise.

“Okay,” Finn said. “Count me in.”

The man held out his hand and Finn took it.

“Welcome to the Guardians,” Finn’s new master said.

5

Finn’s years of training as a Guardian had been long and hard. He’d built muscles he didn’t know he had. Learned martial arts kicks that threatened to split his groin in two. Developed calluses on calluses until his feet looked like old shoe leather, and he didn’t even get a nifty uniform out of the deal.

But the most important thing he’d learned, especially when he was still an apprentice, was to follow commands without question.

One of those commands was “duck!”

When the female goblin told Finn to duck, he didn’t hesitate.

He dropped to the dirty floor of the abandoned processing plant at her feet, and she shot Ooveth right between his stupid yellow eyes.

The gang leader hit the floor like a bag of rotten meat. Thick black blood bubbled up from the wound in his forehead, hissing and spitting like his brain inside was boiling.

“What the hell?” Finn said.

Lead bullets, no matter how they were jacketed, didn’t kill goblins any more than they did fairies.

Or creeps, for that matter.

Finn should know. He’d tried more than once over the years. The best he’d done was blow a creep’s arm off with a .50 caliber handgun. He’d still had to cut off the creep’s head with his blade to prevent it from completing its portal.

Even a shot to the head shouldn’t have killed Ooveth, but he was clearly dead.

“Special bullets,” the female goblin said.

The remaining gang members turned on her. She took out four of them before her gun clicked on empty.

“I could use a little help here,” she said to Finn.

He lunged to his feet and drew his katana in a move that wasn’t quite as smooth as it should have been.

He ignored the floaty feeling in his head. Yes, he’d lost a lot of blood, but he wasn’t finished yet.

He’d taken out two of the three remaining goblins by the time the female goblin had retrieved Ooveth’s gun. She shot the last goblin in the back of its head as it ran away from her.

The floor trembled beneath Finn’s feet.

The creep had fallen to its knees, its head pressed to the garbage-strewn concrete.

It was in prayer, Finn realized. A supplicant praying to its master.

Finn squinted at the portal.

Something was coming through. Something massive.

A monster from Finn’s worst nightmare was pulling itself through the portal on thick, muscular appendages. Finn refused to think of them as tentacles. They were more than that. They were almost alive on their own.

The appendages seemed to scent the air. The window frame surrounding the portal. The filthy floor. They left wet, slimy trails wherever they went, and the trails hissed like acid.

Finn realized he’d stood like he was rooted to the spot.

Watching one of the Elder Gods being born into this world instead of trying to stop it.

That was his second mistake of the night. One mistake was all it took to kill his old master.

But Finn could still stop this. All he had to do to was cut off the creep’s head.

He tried to run toward the creep, but he’d lost too much blood. The fight with the goblins, as brief as it had been, had taken too much out of him. The most he could manage was a staggering walk.

He wouldn’t reach the creep in time.

The female goblin was on her way toward the back of the building. Finn didn’t trust her, but he had no other choice.