SPECTRE—NOVEMBER 26th, 1992 | MORNING
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Arthur’s finger stung like all hell.
Most people didn’t understand what that meant, ‘all hell’, and Arthur’s penchant for dramatism meant he didn’t quite understand it either. All he knew? Canis demanded more bites. More nibbles. More and more and more raw skin from the tips of his sizzling fingertips and burned digits. If he had a choice, he would’ve done a bit more research before soul-binding himself to a bow that had a… well, skin tax, every time he used it.
“Prepare yourself,” Captain Holmes mused. "We have time, but not a lot of it. Given the distance, it might take him just over—'
“For what? We’re waiting on their play,” Arthur said, gesturing towards Gideon and Leroy. “And unless you two want us all to be eaten alive by that unholy damned swarm, then you’d better act quick.”
Arthur shook his hand out, charred flesh sizzling along the length of his good old notching fingers.
With his not-so-injured hand, he reached along his torso, where his bandolier of diluted p-blood awaited him: 90% water, 10% pasteurized demon blood. In truth, it was more of a painkiller than a proper healing agent, and just about the only thing that allowed him to keep his sanity and his gusto intact whenever he whipped out Canis. He’d learned that the hard way. Pain sucked. Whining and groaning sucked more. Especially in front of a bunch of dudes.
“For when they do act, warden!” Captain Holmes shouted. “Leroy, what’s the goddamn hold up here?!”
“Don’t look at me, Holmes,” Leroy said, nodding tiredly towards Gideon.
“Cruciform, get a move on, damn it,” Arthur said, motioning a finger over the red cross tattoo along the side of his neck.
Gideon narrowed his gaze.
Leroy tipped that stupid hat of his.
The fact that this old yeller was still kicking added layers to the respect he’d earned from Arthur back in the Pines—a rare thing too, that. Demonic contractors were, per the Order of the Warden’s edicts, meant to be killed on sight or repurposed into something useful. Leroy Waters didn’t fall into either category, and he had his arbiters license to thank for that, and a decent enough friendship with Marshal Whitfield to spare him the Chaptermaster’s wrath. Gideon Draves, however, fell promptly into the repurposed for something useful camp.
Arthur, frankly, wasn’t used to this level of responsibility.
Marshal Whitfield's last-minute approval of a Cruciform Division deployment came as a surprise to him, but on principle, he never argued with his master. He was, after all, second only to the Chaptermaster herself, and easily the most capable field warden in the entire chapter.
“Now, damn it! Do your.. thing! The hand thing, man! Do it!” Arthur barked.
Gideon glared at him with those dark eyes of his, and Arthur couldn’t help but stare at the brand on his forehead. The cross was shaped just like the one on Arthur’s neck, only, fleshy. A fleshy, verifiable proof of his status, framed by ritualistic tattoos that ensured such a brand was itself a death sentence if Gideon decided to act on his own.
“Yeah,” Gideon muttered. “Alright.”
Clayton Trench had gathered his bearings. His swarm was rebuilding, and it was rebuilt bigger and stronger and denser than before. Buzzes bleed into other buzzes and the chattering noise was as sickly as the scent attached to the heathen himself. Captain Holmes, seemingly, had emptied his entire supply of ammunition to keep the guy on the move along the catwalk, and Arthur had worked up more than just a sweat to burn up the guy’s stinking insectoid clouds.
“Oh, fuck, man,” Arthur muttered.
A blink later and Clayton was squatting on the railings of the catwalk just above the dance floor, which wasn't very far from the DJ stage Arthur stood upon alongside Leroy, Gideon, and Captain Holmes. The black fabric of Clayton’s track jacket convulsed, and the bandages that covered his head looked as though they were snakes of white, slithering and encircling his little skull.
“Line up the shot, Leroy,” Gideon said.
Leroy set one foot behind the other and assumed a two-handed grip around that twisted abomination of a handgun he called Old Man Winter. “Bring him here.”
A puff of shadows swirled around Arthur’s feet.
Arthur turned.
Beside him, Gideon sank his very human and very pale hand into the ground.
Around them, the abyssal hand—necrotic with ebonblack skin, leaking shadows beneath the nails of its massive fingers—sank into the shadow cast by the DJ stage. It emerged from the largest shadow adjacent to Clayton Trench, which happened to be that massive ether-creature-thing. The hand crawled on all five fingers towards Clayton.
Arthur squinted.
Never mind the hand. That blue-skinned-man-monster-beast was going at it with none other than Tania, who kept that monster of a man very, very busy. Moments ago, she'd been verifiably rag-dolled alongside Cameron. Tania’s fiendish form was on full display, and it almost made Arthur wish he’d shot her with Canis. It’d be a sucker shot, sure, and entirely inappropriate, but he was still bitter about her making a fool out of him at Allure Artificery.
Cameron, on the other hand, was slung over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, donned in that ugly white-ivory shell of his, being used as a.. well. A human shield, kind of, while Tania used her black-clawed, wolfish arm like some sort of spear. Together they formed a very uncanny and occult version of a Greek hoplite, poking and prodding at a minotaur-sized alchemy experiment with blue skin and a back made of sheet metal, and hissing machinist pumps along its spine.
Arthur’s head swiveled back towards Clayton, and Gideon’s abyssal hand.
“After they pull this off, warden, it'll be up to us,” Captain Holmes said. “Keep that hand of yours notched on the drawstring.”
Arthur did so, nodding. “Ah-huh.”
Clayton’s swarm tried and failed to stop Gideon’s abyssal hand. It needed only one of its shadowy and necrotic fingers in order to wrap fully around Clayton, and with all four others, it leaped over the catwalk and crawled towards the DJ stage.
“Why didn’t you—shit! Shit! Shit! Why didn’t you pull him into the shadows, and then bring him up in front of the stage or something!? That swarm is chasing after him and coming towards us, you stupid fuckin’ Cruciform!” Arthur yelled.
Captain Holmes discarded his handgun and removed the short-sword sheathed along his lower back. He held it in front of him with the ruggedness of a jungle guide ready to cleave a machete through bamboo, mixed with the poise of a fencer. The blade was black; Drychus steel. Useful, but against a small tsunami’s worth of man-eating insects? Not very.
“Don’t waste this, Arthur," Leroy said. "Take Holmes and get a vantage point. The stairwell, maybe. After that? Take a shot. Don't miss.”
“Your shot isn’t supposed to miss,” Arthur said, bolting towards the left side of the DJ stage. “Shoot em’ in the head and kill him, man! Shit!”
“He’s a dead man walking,” Captain Holmes said. “Bullets don’t mean shit, and hell, maybe not even magic ones. We can only hope that whatever Leroy shoots him with will buy us some time. Now move! Go!’
Buy them time so that they could figure out how to actually kill him.
Arthur grimaced. He had something up his sleeve, but it was a big maybe, and given the danger they were already in, it would either save them or end up killing both himself and Captain Holmes.
On Gideon’s command, the abyssal hand skidded to a halt. Clayton’s lithe body jostled and writhed.
Leroy pulled back the slide of Old Man Winter.
He held it in place for only a moment, and the runes along the pistol activated with a pulse of light and a hiss that sounded more like laughter. The strange teeth that made up the slide of his gun chittered. What left the barrel wasn’t a bullet; but an icy, crystalline oval shape.
When it hit Clayton, it didn’t go through him.
Arthur leaned, or, struggled to lean, due in part to Captain Holmes grabbing him by the collar of his tactical gray sweatshirt. That bastard Leroy had taken his sweet time waiting to actually use the damn thing, and Arthur simply had to know what it did.
Gideon’s abyssal hand unravelled, dropping Clayton onto the ground.
Leroy’s shot had gone straight to his chest, and that oval shaped thing, it wasn’t just ice, but a pair of icy lips that spread open into a proper mouth after hitting him.
Twisted, jagged teeth chattered on his body, and their plaque grew, and grew, and grew. Ice plaque. Arthur hadn’t ever seen anything like it. Frost spider-webbed out from the chattering teeth, growing and spreading like a virus that slowed Clayton’s movements by way of whatever unholy damned artificery made that gun of Leroy’s tick. Every time he tried to move, the frost grew, and grew, and grew, crusting over entire ligaments. A fast-acting sickness with no cure. Main symptom: frostbite.
Clayton’s swarm responded in full, its occultic locusts or man-eating-whatevers flooding towards their master, covering his features, clinging to his body like some sort of exoskeletal cocoon. He hadn’t recalled them because he wanted to, but rather, because he needed to. Their hive was threatened by CCD; Colony Collapse Disorder.
“Gideon,” Leroy said, voice strained. He placed Old Man Winter on the inside of his dusty old leather jacket.
“Yeah,” Gideon said curtly. “On it.”
Arthur raised a brow.
Given the fact that it downright immobilized Clayton, he figured that it was a one-and-done sort of deal. Artificed items were odd, and Arthur never did bother trying to understand them, but over the years, he’d learned this much: the more powerful the effect, the longer the wait between uses. Leroy had been saving that, and he’d wasted a shot on Clayton Trench that would’ve been better served on the man he was really after.
Arthur grimaced. “No fucking funny business, Cruciform. Do what you’re here for, nothing more, nothing less. You dig?”
“He digs, Arthur.” Leroy placed a hand on Gideon’s shoulder, a wry smile on his face.
Ebonblack fingers crawled towards Gideon and Leroy. The massive hand wrapped around the two of them and clenched. They sank into the shadows casted on the DJ stage with an undeniable umbral puff.
?
Arthur and Captain Holmes had made their way back towards the hallway leading into the dance floor, stepping over a crater that took up half of said dance floor, and past the somehow-still-breathing body of a woman in an orange jacket with a Chinese jian-sword that looked older than Brinehaven itself. Cameron’s work, no doubt. Arthur smiled at that. The townie had pulled it off. His smile faded, however, upon bearing witness to what he presumed to be Tania’s handiwork. A shame. The pretty lady she’d killed wasn’t left pretty—just a corpse missing an arm.
“How much time do we have, man?” Arthur asked. His hand hovered over the orange and glowing drawstring of Canis.
“Not much,” Captain Holmes said, his Drychus short sword still in hand.
“Uh, not much as in, a minute or two, or like, thirty seconds?” Arthur asked.
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“Not much as in I don’t know, damn it! Two, three minutes maybe, assuming Leroy’s shot there still has him fighting off a body-wide coldfront. His swarm, it’ll warm him up once all of it digs its way back inside that rotting thing he calls a body.”
Arthur exhaled. “Alright, so—our gameplan? How the fuck do we kill this guy?”
“I was still just a rank and file constable back when this guy got arrested, put on the Registry, and sent to Blackpool Penitentiary," Captain Holmes began. “Details are hazy. What I know is what I’ve already told you; he found some book, and after he did, ended up a ritualist. The so-called beholder of the Law of the Husk.”
“Yeah, I remember, 'cause’ you said just that, like, a few minutes ago,” Arthur said, exasperated. “Dude’s just a brain and a rotting corpse, and bullets won’t kill what’s already dead? I get that right?”
“A few of my bullets, from when I had been firing at him before? They’re specially made, anti-occult, you know, brass jackets over Drychus steel, otherwise they’d—”
“We’re pressed for time here, man, come on! Get to the point! Shit!” Arthur pleaded.
Captain Holmes looked at him harshly with those beady, oxen eyes of his.
“Point is, when I was laying down fire, more than a few of them landed. My aim isn’t like yours, but it’s nothing to scoff at. He’s still kicking.”
“Then how the hell did you guys get this guy the first time, back in, what, 1989?”
“The Special Response Unit. But they aren’t here, and even if I phoned them in, it'd be too late,” Captain Holmes said solemnly.
“You’ve got a Drychus steel sword-thing in your hand, damn it! Go up there and cut his head off!” Arthur said, nodding towards Clayton.
Overhead, heavy footsteps and the noise of a big-bodied skirmish resonated out through Spectre. Tania and Cameron were busy, and their opponent's unintelligible groans were hard to determine. Dust and debris and, strangely, splashes of alcohol dripped through the newly made holes in the 2nd level mezzanine. Not so strange, maybe. That was where the nightclub’s bar was, after all.
“Christ! Are you daft, or something? What the hell are they teaching you wardens these days?! Common fucking sense clearly isn’t apart of your basic training! What the fuck did I say earlier, Arthur!? The insects, bugs, locusts, whatevers, they eat people! Which means you, me, and anyone else who gets too close!”
Arthur opened and closed his mouth. “I… fine, fine. I’ll just keep shooting him.”
Arthur’s fingers sizzled as soon as they notched a nothing-arrow into Canis’s burning hot drawstring. Each time he drew it back, his artifact took more from his fingers, chewing up and spitting out his skin as boiling and fleshy residue that dripped from his half-charred digits. Arthur flared his teeth, gritted them, and bit down so hard that he felt like he was liable to make his gums bleed. Rapid firing was never smart. Canis demanded respect. Canis demanded gentle handling. Thus far, Arthur had granted it neither.
A dozen hounds of fire formed a pack, splitting up to encircle the black mass of swarming insects that created a silhouette around Clayton, who remained immobile, leaning on both knees.
They all slammed into their target, exploding into dog-sized bursts of fire immediately upon impact. Arthur squinted, and his nose reeled at the absolutely putrid stench that was born by way of cinders, insect innards, and what Arthur assumed to be Clayton’s gangrenous flesh. A plume of smoke and cinder made it hard to see.
Arthur dropped Canis. He fell to a knee and gritted his teeth, trying to ignore the smell of the ash peeling away from the skin of his fingers.
Captain Holmes withdrew something from his utility belt. A proper, non-diluted vial of pasteurized demon blood was in his hands, and he bit the cork off. He damn near shoved it into Arthur’s face.
“Drink it, warden,” Captain Holmes insisted. “None of that watered down shit you’ve got on that bandolier across your chest.”
The burn scars wouldn’t ever go away. He’d made his peace with that. But on days like today, when he relied too heavily on Canis, his fingers looked more fiendish than human, and they smelled almost as worse as Clayton Trench. Feeling in his fingers these days was minimal; and if it weren’t for the Vatican’s access to pasteurized demon blood, he probably would’ve lost his hand years ago.
Arthur gulped it down.
He’d been using the diluted version of it for so long, he almost forgot how bad it tasted. His face scrunched up in displeasure, only to settle deeper into utter discontent when he noticed that Clayton Trench was still very much alive. Laid by his body were sizzled piles of insects, but even a pack’s worth of flame hounds wasn’t enough to turn the bastard into a pile of cinder.
Arthur grabbed Canis up off the ground. “Another.”
Captain Holmes eyed his utility belt. “Look, warden, don’t know if you’re familiar with what double-dosing does to a person, but—”
“Alright, fine, whatever, damn it! I.. I have an idea, but I need my fingers steady so that I don’t miss. If you won't give me another dose, I'll need a favor. Well, I'll need a favor anyways.”
Captain Holmes nodded. “Consider it done. Whatever it is.”
Arthur glanced down at Canis. “It’s too early for me to do what I’m about to do, but it’s all we’ve got at this point. Curators, they.. we have this thing we can do. They call it Possessive Resonance, it’s… shit, it’s too much to explain right now. What I need you to do is make sure I’m not eaten alive. You understand? I’ll be unreachable, until, well, I’m not.”
Captain Holmes slowly nodded. “Quite the gambit, Arthur. I’ll do my best.”
Arthur smiled. “Let’s hope Gerard Baptiste is just as agreeable. We aren’t exactly on good terms. Fingers crossed he lends me a hand, just this once.”
Canis erupted in a greenish-blue ghostfire. Arthur’s eyes spilled out a wraith-like light, and the phantom of a ghostly apparition struggled to fully take form. Arthur strained, ghostfire trailing from his bated breaths. Gerard didn’t like to be bothered, not ever, but he was the only wielder of Canis who’d managed to manifest an ability from it with enough firepower to exterminate Clayton. It was the only shot he had; other than maybe Janice’s potion, which, still unused, Arthur doubted would be of much help. He couldn’t even remember the name of it, much less what it did.
Arthur’s vision faded in and out.
Captain Holmes turned his back to Arthur, Drychus blade in hand. He held it with that same grip Arthur remembered from the DJ stage: heavy yet poised, the perfect union of an undergrowth cutting and hoity-toity French fencing. He rushed towards Clayton, and Arthur’s eyes widened. All of that fire hadn’t killed Clayton, but it sure as hell did melt the frost and the laughing, chittering smile of Old Man Winter right off of his rotting body.
“Enjoy your break, warden. Let your hand cool off. Still got one more thing up my sleeve,” Captain Holmes said, the slide of his gun stalling the moment he ran out of bullets. “Courtsey of our girl Janice. Can’t say I’ve ever drank Beastseid… suppose there’s a first time for everything, eh, Arthur?”
Captain Holmes removed a vial from the inside of his pocket. Reddish-brown liquid sloshed around the inside of it. He bit the cork off and drank it. His skin shifted to a muddish-maroon color, and he rushed towards Clayton without so much as a second guess.
He wasn’t faster, he wasn’t stronger, he just moved with all of the instinct and the aggression of a creature without a name, as if he’d been the result of a warden flipping open a bestiary and placing a finger on a random page. In the short time that Arthur had known Captain Holmes, he’d gathered that he was a brave man—one had to be, given his line of work. And now, he wasn’t just brave. He was fearless.
Arthur’s mouth opened, but no words came out.
He couldn’t move, not right now, let alone speak. But he had the striking suspicion that, even if he could, Captain Holmes wouldn’t stop to listen.
?
Clayton Trench was back on his feet. His swarm didn’t spread from his silhouette, but covered him completely, like a living, breathing, reactive set of armor ready to chew up and spit out anything that got too close. He’d since crossed over from the battlefield of a dance floor and into the front of the hallway atrium.
Captain Holmes braved the insectoid plume. He stepped close—far, far too close. Every slash he made was practiced, efficient, violent, and true. Captain Holmes pivoted as best he could, timing his strikes to emerge at the tail end of twists that might yet spare him from getting eaten alive.
?
Arthur’s face twitched in protest.
Ghostfire leaked out from his eyes and his mouth, and he remained paralyzed all the same. He could already hear Gerard’s dissonant whispers, his nagging, his incessant whining: his ranting speech about how he never wanted to be disturbed, his usual spiel about how it was already bad enough that he had to share an eternal prison with all of the other sorry motherfuckers who’d bound their soul to Canis.
The Possessive Resonance wasn’t sticking.
“Gerard Baptiste, lend me your stren—”
A second voice should have echoed Arthur’s own. It should have been Gerard’s, and it should have been saying the same thing, but the bellowing, angry, and ghostly whispers were only words of dissent.
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Drychus steel hissed. Unholy insects buzzed. Captain Holmes slashed with a two handed strike, carving a large and sizzling chunk out of Clayton’s rotting torso, severing through his black track jacket, his bandages, and his rotting skin. What emerged wasn’t blood; it was another plume of black.
Arthur wanted to scream, to yell, to tell Captain Holmes to stop, to step back.
He couldn’t.
Captain Holmes braced. He was swept back by the sheer force of the insectoid rupture and sent skidding across the ground, his broad-shouldered body tussling across the ground. His Drychus steel short sword was forced out of his hands.
Clayton slowly stepped towards him.
?
Insects crawled along Captain Holmes.
He writhed in place, convulsed and struggled to push himself up to his feet. Clayton neared Arthur, both arms extended, as if ready to welcome the warden into his embrace. Arthur saw it all through the green-blue luminance of the ghostfire leaking from his eyes, and his lips trembled. Fear and dread ran away from a third and far more harrowing feeling that Arthur couldn’t place.
The crawling mass of black, scuttling and skittling and scurrying across Clayton’s body parted from his face and left room only from his red eyes and his chapped lips.
Closer and closer and closer Clayton’s arms neared.
The ghostly whispers of Gerard Baptiste were silent for the first time since he’d tried his hand at the Possessive Resonance. A tear flowed out from Arthur’s eye, dampening only one small wisp of the ghostfire that refused to extinguish itself in spite of Gerard’s voicelessness.
Arthur had failed. He couldn’t pull it off—and now he was going to die. Not for some greater conquest, not for the infinite crusade against evil that he’d been promised by the Order of the Wardens, but at the hands of the unholy he’d vowed to slay. He’d never wear the title of marshal. He’d never live up to his master’s expectations; he’d fade away as not even a candle light in a city full of hellfire.
He wanted to close his eyes in resignation, if only to accept the fact that he’d failed. But he couldn’t do even that.
The droning buzz of insects persisted; and it grew louder by the second.
And louder. And louder. And louder.
Between the chittering was the sound of footsteps. Boots.
Boots that walked, ran, and stopped with such a suddenness that their arrival was itself an announcement.
Captain Holmes inserted himself between Arthur and Clayton’s embrace. Insects crawled around his features and out from under his Civic and Occult Authority uniform. They’d spread to his neck and his hands; more red now than black, like thousands upon thousands seeds trapped in clotted blood.
Clayton Trench was more curious than angry. That curiosity evolved, transformed, and presented itself as a twisted delight in the form of a smile. Bugs crawled out from his open-mouthed smile.
Captain Holmes remained firmly fixed between Arthur and Clayton, claustrophobically so. Clayton Trench hugged Captain Holmes from behind. He was short enough to fully rest his head on Captain Holmes’s shoulder, with arms just long enough to wrap fully around his chest.
Arthur’s eyes shook.
The ghostfire of his gaze died.
“All flesh must hollow itself, that the lesser lives may inherit its frame. To speak the names of worms is to quicken one’s own shell,” Clayton said.
Clayton’s black and pupal cocoon washed over Captain Holmes. Thousands of chitinous black dots took a piece of his face for themselves. They burrowed holes into his cheeks, crawled up his nose, beneath his eye sockets, filled his ears, and pumped their way into his opened mouth with such force that his jaw broke in one fell swoop. They chewed and gnawed and devoured in tandem and shared the smile worn by their master.
Clayton’s body dropped, frostbitten, burned, and filled with bullet wounds.
Captain Holmes’s eyes opened. Insects crawled across his red pupils. “The Law of the Husk was thence spoken.”
Possessive Resonance, wherein she called upon the power of one of the previous curators who have wielded the Blade of One Hundred--in essence, this allows a curator to form a bond with a previous user and temporarily utilize the ability that they manifested when they soul bonded to their curator object.
Anyways..
Arthur really screwed the pooch with that one. Gerard Baptiste was not as nice as Teng Zexian, who was more than happy to help Rachel. And now our golden boy from the Civic & Occult Authority isn't so golden anymore.
ARTHUR YEAGER
CAPTAIN HOLMES
CLAYTON TRENCH
LEROY WATERS
GIDEON DRAVES
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