THREADED MOON

Part IV: Unsheathed Blade

By Hunter Lambright

Los Angeles, Now

“Follow the vampires.”

Jack Weiss, the new Baron Blood, whispered these words of wisdom to Alex Wilder and Molly Hayes as they traversed the back-alleys of Los Angeles by foot. “If they are gathering, then chances are good that Topher’s calling them back to him.”

“Got it,” Alex said. Part of him wanted to utilize his recently-implanted speed powers to rush ahead and fight off the vampires, but he knew he couldn’t leave Molly alone with a vampire. The girl was tough, but he would never forgive himself if something happened to her while she was supposed to be under his watch. “We should be getting pretty close.”

“I can see them gathering. We’re at the edge of their matrix,” Baron Blood agreed. “We need to be in the center, where we’ll have the best chance at helping whoever they have cornered.”

“This is so cool. It’s like a horror movie,” Molly whispered in excitement.

Alex grimaced. “Except if you get bitten, you don’t get saved between the credits and the sequel. This isn’t a game, Mols. You have to be careful.”

“I know, Alex,” Molly said, crossing her arms over her chest and pouting. “You have to take the fun out of everything, don’t you? Me and Gert already beat a vampire, remember?”

“The same one who came back to do this,” Alex said, rolling his eyes. “I remember.”

“Look alive, guys,” Baron Blood said, coming to the end of the side street where it opened up onto a grassy square. “We’re here.”

“You had to use those words,” Alex said, but got over it in a hurry. “Chase and Nico are in there!” The gears in his body began turning as he charged up to make a super-speed run into the middle of the frenzy, but Baron Blood stepped in front of him.

“We have to do this carefully. One misstep and every single one of us dies,” he said. Alex was loath to admit it, but he knew the vampire was right. He looked up, trying to get a mental handle on the situation before they ran in, guns blazing.

Nico, Chase, and an old man with softened Japanese features and white hair stood next to a beat-up Ford Bronco II. The back of the Bronco was open and Alex saw Karolina lying inside. He hoped she was unconscious and not worse. He knew that he would feel responsible even if there was nothing he could do. All he could do at this point was hope that she would be okay when everything came crashing down.

“Let’s do this,” Alex said, activating the gears that Jonas Harrow had installed into his body. He would pay for this later with one heck of a power-induced hangover, but for now it was a necessary evil. Alex dashed into the center, stopping when he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Nico. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Alex?” she asked, her eyes filling, for a fleeting moment, with joy. Then they darkened back to business. “Does it look like I’m okay?”

“No,” Alex admitted. Molly and Baron Blood joined them as he spoke, ducking under the wingless flight of the vampires around them. Alex looked to Graham, Nico, and Chase. “Meet Jack Weiss, the new Baron Blood. He’s on our side.”

Graham nodded respectfully. “I heard you’d been turned, too. My brother didn’t treat you so much as a friend after that, I’m afraid. We never knew he was so fickle until he got a taste of power.”

“I know what you mean, though if it means anything, while we were alive, he was proud of you,” Jack said. “The way I see it, Topher died the minute he was bitten. That thing commanding those vampires? That’s not Topher.”

“I thought we could save him, but he’s been twisted beyond anything I had imagined,” Graham replied. “I won’t stop until I put the monstrosity in my brother’s body into the ground for good.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jack replied.

There was a noticeable change in the vampires’ flight patterns. No longer were they flying in a spiral so much as they were angling upward and downward, changing their predictability and allowing themselves more mobility than that of a streaming range of bodies.

“Do you hear it?” shouted a voice above all the noise of the creatures of the night. Topher’s eyes glowed purple and his face radiated with energy as he shouted. His arms were up in the air, drawing some kind of energy from the vampires he had called.

Alex narrowed his eyes. “Is he…pulling power from them?” he asked.

Graham grimaced. “It looks like that.” He turned to his granddaughter. “Nico, use that Staff of One, if you will, to see if there’s a flow of power from the vampires to your great-uncle.”

“That man has no relation to me besides the magic in his veins,” Nico said, wrinkling her nose up. “He may have been your brother, Graham, but all I see is something twisted and disgusting.” She raised the Staff of one toward Topher and shouted, “GO WITH THE FLOW!”

As the light from the Staff of One subsided, the group’s eyes adjusted to the sight of pale orange light filtering—no, almost flowing like water—from the bodies of the vampires around them into Topher’s pale, shuddering body. Purple power emanated from with Topher, and the Staff of One itself throbbed blood-red. Even Graham glowed with magical energy. His was golden and aged, wise with his years. Its glow carried an almost radiant tune with it, but even his light was almost overwhelmed by the strong and still-strengthening glow that came from Topher.

“Soon he will be too strong for me to hold him off,” Graham said. “We have to disturb the flow of magic to him or it will take the Sorcerer Supreme to stop him.”

“Yeah? How the fuck are we gonna do that?” asked Chase. He held his gauntleted hands up. Instead of spewing flames, his left hand glowed shone with light and his right hand stirred with blackness. Alex wondered how much more had changed in the past twenty-four hours that he couldn’t see.

Graham turned sternly to Chase. “The only reason we’re alive is because he’s drawing power from them. The instant we attack those vampires and interrupt his ritual, we become a threat once more. However, if we can destroy enough vampires, he cannot draw from their innate power, and he will be vulnerable to my command over our family energies.”

“So that’s the plan?” Alex asked. “Destroy as many vampires as we can in a short amount of time?”

“Yes,” Graham replied. He looked at Chase. “Do you have your light power turned back on, boy?”

“I’m not your boy,” Chase retorted. “And yes.”

Alex looked at Molly. “You have an important job, Molly. I need you to protect Karolina.”

Molly crossed her arms over her chest and puffed out her lips. “You’re just saying that because you don’t think I can take care of myself.”

Alex sighed. “Molly, you know that we only do this because we care about you, right? We don’t want you getting hurt.”

“But I’ve already beaten vampires before!” she protested.

“Once, and you got lucky,” Alex said. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Look, we’ll talk about this after everything is over so that we don’t end up sidelining you all the time, but right now Karolina really does need to be protected. And unless you have a stash of wooden stakes hidden in your kitty hat, that’s what you can do the best. Okay?”

Molly’s eyes rolled toward the ground. “I guess…fine.”

“As soon as we start attacking, they’ll all converge on us. We won’t have a choice but to press the attack,” Graham explained. “Let’s plan this carefully—what was that?”

Everything froze. The vampires stopped as one of their own fell, tumbling out of the sky, the wooden shaft of a crossbow bolt sticking out of its heart. All eyes turned to the black man with the crossbow, who stood with his motorcycle in front of him as a half-shield, grinning behind his dark glasses.

“Shit’s going down!” shouted Chase in the midst of the silence. He ignited his left hand and a white beam cut a swath in the vampires, sending everything that had once been still into a frenzy. In response, the vampires swarmed.

“Here!” Blade yelled, throwing a pair of water pistols at Alex. He caught one in each hand with quicksilver reflexes, eyeing them absurdly. “Shoot the bastards!”

A vampire dove low toward Alex and he shot it with the water pistols. The vampire wheeled away, screeching as it clawed at its face, burning from the acidic sting of the holy water. Blade grinned at the sight even as he took two more vampires out with well-aimed crossbow bolts. Another vampire came at Blade from behind, but he killed it by pointing his crossbow behind his head and shooting blindly.

“What are you waiting for? Kill them!” Blade shouted, his canines gleaming in the light of the swirling energies.

Alex revved up his super-speed and ran to the fallen vampires. He ripped the crossbow bolts from their withered chests and twisted at his hips with his arms spread outward, puncturing two more vampire hearts. Then, just as quickly, he wrenched the bolts back out and ran for the next closest vampire.

Jack, still fully adorned in his Baron Blood gear, fought with the vampires nail and tooth, clawing at one after another. He ripped with the suit’s claws at the neck of a vampire until he removed the head from the body. The head went sailing across the battlefield into a dumpster where it landed with a dull crunch next to banana peels and half-eaten cheeseburgers. Under the mask, Jack couldn’t help but grin at the justice. His people had disowned him, and now he was exacting vengeance on them in return for the years he had lost in captivity. He considered himself no traitor because he had never found himself adopted into their culture. No, for Jack, justice was definitely the idea for it.

Leaning back on the hood of the Bronco, like a young man who couldn’t help but enjoy himself, Chase wielded both light and darkness deftly. He confounded the vampires when the dark energy surfaced and he fried them when the light was in control. And the entire time he did this, he cackled like a madman.

“Chase is high,” Alex told Nico in a brief pass across the ring of vampires. He ran past again. “I can’t tell if that’s good or bad.”

Nico waved her staff, gritting her teeth, concentrating too hard to answer Alex. The pinball spell was still in effect. She used it as one of the spinner arms, knocking attacking vampires away from Graham, who sat on the ground, his legs crossed Indian-style, whispering nonsense words as his magic built up. Points continued to rack up over the staff in neon lights, though she had no idea what would happen if she got a high score.

Molly stood on the Bronco’s bumper, holding the spare tire like it weighed nothing. She swung it from side to side, bashing any vampires who got close out of the way. In the split-seconds of respite, she looked down at Karolina’s still form and mentally begged her to wake up. Then she swung the tire again, forcing the incoming vampire to bite rubber. Of all the kids, Molly had the hardest time fighting them. She had to force herself to understand that these things were no longer people, even if the vampires that had their arms outstretched because they wanted to suck her blood happened to be wearing pink cardigans and high heels. It was impossible to ask of a twelve-year-old, but if any was up to the task, it was Molly.

Alex dodged another attack from the sky. He knew, soon, he would tire and his body would go into recovery mode. Looking at the sky, he realized that there was no way he could take out the remaining hundreds of vampires before he was out cold.

“We’re not going to make it in time,” Alex told Nico on his next pass through. “Look at the sky. There are too many.”

Nico looked up, but her grimace lightened. “You look at the sky,” she said. “Air support just arrived.”

Alex’s eyes went skyward as a dark, green glow joined the myriad of colors and energies that mixed into the fight. Primo Falcone, his body encased within the form of a gigantic falcon construct made of energy. The falcon ripped and tore at the vampires with its beak while its talons scattered more. Primo himself lay prone at the center of the bird, the draft from its wings’ beats causing his clothes to billow around him. “Cavalry,” Alex whispered.

Seeing his opportunity at the newfound distraction, Blade straddled his motorcycle and gunned the engine. He pushed the accelerator as hard as it would go in full knowledge that it would practically destroy the engine, but he didn’t care. This was a stolen ride from someone who had already been turned. He would find another. In his hands, this motorcycle was a tool of destruction. The motorcycle raced toward a steep incline. Just as it hit the top, Blade rolled off the bike. It arced up into the sky. Then, at its climax, the fishing line that had been tied around his ankle drew taut, triggering the explosive he had rigged on the gas tank. The resulting explosion sent shrapnel in all directions. Metal components pierced vampire flesh. Vampires screamed inhuman screams. While they were distracted, Blade took the time to load his crossbow and hit every wounded vampire with a wooden bolt in the heart, inflicting a much more lethal wound than the first.

Then, as vampire bodies dropped from the sky, Blade finally rolled to a stop. He grinned. This was his element. This was his job. He was born for easy nights like this.

At the Bronco, Graham continued summoning his power. Nico looked at her grandfather, hoping that he knew what he was doing. She caught sight of something lightning-fast plummeting from the sky. It landed on the pavement and dented the street with jagged spider-webs in the tarmac. Topher looked up at his grandniece. “If you leave my brother’s side, you will have a place in my kingdom as my queen.”

She spat in his face. “We’re not from Kentucky, you creep,” she said snidely.

“Have you ever been there? I was there when Woolworth’s Store in Lexington ended segregation. It’s not as bad as you think,” Topher said. Even when his mouth shut his canines sat on his lower lips, digging into the skin. “I have seen more in the past sixty-five years than you can imagine, Nico. I’m only a stupid teenager in body, not in my mind. I know the value of choosing my battles. Now choose yours.”

“I choose to fight for the right side,” Nico said, taking a stand.

Topher’s face contorted with rage. “Stupid child! I’m going to make you pay for siding with my stupid brother!”

“She won’t have to,” Graham said, standing up behind Nico. “Honestly, Topher? You’re going to ‘make her pay?’ Who is the one who hasn’t grown up yet? You sound like a villain from the pulps.”

“I’m more than that!” Topher cried out. Magical energy shot out of his hands toward Graham.

“You’re a boy who still has the brain of a teenager!” Graham replied. He pushed Nico out of the way and pushed back against Topher’s energy with some of his own. “You may have seen more of the world, but your dead brain can’t mature anymore. You’re at a dead end, Topher.”

Topher growled, pouring more of himself into the energy battle against Graham. “You don’t know anything about me, Graham! As soon as I disappeared, I was abandoned! You were gone the last year before I was gone! You know nothing about who I was then and who I am now!”

Graham grunted. The lines in his face deepened. “I have seen hundreds of people like you both on the battlefield and off it!” he exclaimed. “If anyone has a right to think they know what you are, it’s me!” Then he shoved more of his bloodline’s magic toward Topher.

“You disowned me!” Topher responded. “You were the only family I thought I could trust and you got rid of me as soon as you determined that you thought I was dead!”

“It turns out I was right, didn’t it?” Graham yelled. The voices were getting harder to hear over the roar of the magic. If Nico hadn’t been terrified, she would have been amazed at the spectacle before her. The place where the two magicks met exploded in a dazzling display of light and noise. Even as she stepped backward, using her pinball-arm Staff of One to deflect any attacking vampires, she felt herself weakening inside. The magic that they were attacking each other with came from the Minoru bloodline, she realized. By calling upon so much of it, as few members of the bloodline as there were to share it, they were stealing some of the magic from her.

Topher screamed. “It was always about you, wasn’t it? The war hero? The redeemer of the family legacy?”

“I did everything I did in life because of you, Topher! The price of my services in the Pride was that you would be returned to normal and take my place in paradise!” Graham responded.

Nico gulped. The Pride? Her grandfather had been a part of the Pride before her parents had? That there had even been a Pride before her parents was something new to chew over, but there was no time for it now.

“Shut up!” Topher replied. “You’re lying! Everything you say is a lie!”

“Never,” Graham said. “You were my brother. You still could be. You don’t have to be a monster anymore.”

“So now I’m just a monster?” Topher spat. “Fine! I’ll give you what you want!”

He pushed with all that he had. The line in the center, where the magic met and scattered, drew closer and closer to Graham. Seeing that he was losing ground, Graham placed his feet and hands on the ground, steeling himself. He found the energy he needed and pushed back again, forcing the midline back to the space directly between them. Nico didn’t see the shard of magic as it ricocheted off the center until it hit her shoulder. Her body absorbed it and suddenly her eyes were opened.

“You see it, Nico?” asked a voice that she thought she recognized but couldn’t place.

As her vision cleared, Nico saw that the battlefield had disappeared. She knew that that couldn’t be true, but at the same time she also knew that her mind was no longer there. That battle was in another dimension. The real battle, on this plane, was where the true action was.

The voice continued. “When two members of a family use the family’s magic against each other,” it said, “everyone in that family that still lives can feel it, sweetheart.” A figure, a silhouette of white light, stood in front of her.

“M…Mom?” Nico asked.

The figure didn’t answer. It put its finger on her chest. “Do you see it, honey?”

Nico saw it. A white line drew from her chest to the midline of the magic fight between her great-uncle and grandfather. Then she realized that two more lines drew off from the center as well. She could feel them both tightly. The five lines together connected to a large circle outside, forming a gigantic pentagram. “I see it,” Nico said quietly. “Who are they?”

The white silhouette pointed to the line that drew off to what Nico perceived to be the right. “That one you should recognize, Nico. You saw that line every day even if your eyes weren’t open to its existence. That line goes to your father.”

“Dad…survived?” Nico asked, but the figure had moved on.

Its long, shining finger pointed to the second line, to the left. This line was laced with blackness, like a piece of white yarn with a several black threads woven inside. “Pay attention, Nico, because this one is more important,” the silhouette said. “I should have seen this one, but I always believed it was wishful thinking.”

“Where does it go?” Nico asked with parts both trepidation and eagerness. “Who else is left in our family?”

The silhouette sighed. “Somewhere at the end of that line lies your little brother.”

“Brother?” Nico asked. The silhouette didn’t respond. “Mom?”

That was when Nico saw the lines at the edge of her vision blur. The magic was pulled away and drew itself in circles until it popped out of focus and all that was available in her field of vision was the physical fight going on between Topher and Graham. She had fallen to her knees sometime in the middle of her second sight, but that didn’t matter. She held onto the Staff of One tightly with both hands. Tears streamed down her face, blackened by mascara.

“Stop fighting!” she shouted. “Stop it!”

No one heard. Then, something welled up inside her. She tapped into the family energy that was dispelled by Topher and Graham’s firefight and channeled it into the Staff of One, forcing it all together into the image of one spell that she hoped would end this all. “SHATTERSPELL!” she shouted.

Every movement ceased.

A beacon of light shot from the tip of the Staff of One into the sky. It struck the focal point of the dome. For a moment, nothing happened. Then a series of cracks began, crackling down all side of the dome. Where those cracks emerged, sunlight broke through.

“No!” shouted Topher. “What have you done?”

“I’ve ended this,” Nico replied, weeping.

Topher drew himself to the shadow of an alleyway, using his superior speed. “All who wish to survive! Follow me!” he hissed.

Those of his vampire chorus who survived attempted to follow, though the number that actually made it to his alleyway only numbered in the dozens. Many were cut down by the quick thinking of Alex and Blade, each working in tandem as Alex ran Blade the crossbow bolts that he twisted out of vampire corpses in time for Blade to shoot the same bolt again into another vampire. Those who did not make it to the shadowed alleyway but were not killed by a man were cut down by a ray of sunlight as the salvation of daylight came through the rapidly disappearing dome.

“Thank you,” Jack mouthed to Alex before he, too, made a rapid exit toward a dark enclosure. Alex let him go.

Blade ran to the alleyway Topher and the rest of the vampires had disappeared into, but his prey was not cowering there in fear. Instead, all he found was an empty alleyway and a manhole cover. Blade looked to Alex and Chase. “You kids did good work, but I’m going to finish the job,” he said. Then he nodded at the boys and dropped down through the manhole cover to continue his work.

As daylight filtered through to the ground, Primo landed lightly. The falcon disappeared as he touched the ground. “We’d better get going if we don’t want to get bagged as the Teenage Council of the Underworld,” he said. “Helicopters are on their way in. They took off as soon as the dome began to crack.”

Alex helped Nico to the Bronco as Chase revved up the engine. Primo shut the tailgate as Molly sat next to Karolina, her jaw still open in awe at the power she had seen Nico wield.

Nico looked at Alex. “Where’s Graham?” she asked.

“Gone,” Alex said. “He took off as soon as it was over.” Nico nodded and buried her head between her knees.

Chase looked around the inside of the Bronco. “Ready to rock and roll, kiddos?” No one answered, and so he gunned the truck out of the center of the street and on its way back home…

The Hostel

Alex walked around, freshly awake from a power nap that recharged his cells. The Hostel had been closer than their homes once the dome broke up. It seemed like a good safe house while they waited for the madness outside associated with the vampire attacks to calm down. He knew that things were in a rough shape after everything that had happened, but hoped that somehow things had boiled over during the time he was asleep. This may not have been tougher on them than the loss of their parents, but it had been devastating on the heels of that loss. Part of him doubted himself. How was he supposed to run a city if something like this happened as soon as he took the job?

He knocked on Karolina’s door first. There was no answer. He tried the handle and found that she had locked it. “K? It’s Alex. Mind if I come in?”

“Yes,” Karolina said.

Alex grimaced and moved on. He knew that she was going through a rough patch. She had been taken out at the beginning of when all the craziness was going down. No wonder she was angry. He would have been angry, too.

Molly’s door was partway open. Alex peeked in and saw her lying on her side. Her back was to him and her body rose and fell with the rhythmic breathing of sleep.

Alex moved on to Chase’s door. “You there, man?” he asked.

“Not right now, bro,” Chase said from inside his room. Alex heard a zapping noise from inside the room and something crashing to the ground. “Now that I can think straight, I’m, uh, experimenting.”

Taking the hint, Alex moved on past Gert’s empty room. He wondered how long it would be before everyone went out to their respective houses, but he guessed it would be awhile. After all of this, he didn’t think anyone really wanted to be alone. He knew that Primo was out trying to find out how his brother was going to do, so he skipped that room, too. He moved on to the room he had been saving for last.

“Nico?”

There was no response. He tried again. “Nico? It’s Alex.”

“Go away, Alex,” Nico said. “I need to think.”

“I want to help, Nico,” Alex said. “I’m a good listener.”

There was a sound of shuffling inside before the door creaked open a sliver. “I’m not sure I believe what I saw,” she said. The door opened wider and Alex walked in. He sat down on the creaky, wooden rocking chair and waited.

After a few minutes, Nico spoke. “Alex, have you ever wondered if any of our parents survived down there?”

Alex thought for a minute. “No,” he answered. “I haven’t. I always just thought it was a done deal. Normal people who eat bullets don’t get back up.”

“My parents weren’t normal people,” Nico replied. “When I was in the middle of that magic fight or whatever you want to call it, I could see the ties of my family. I was tied to those two, my relatives, but I was also tied to two more relatives. This, this figure told me that one of them was my father, that he survived that Control woman’s bullets.”

Alex chewed this over, realizing the implications. “Dammit. That bites hard.”

“It gets worse,” Nico said. “There was another line besides the ones to my dad. The figure said that it belongs to someone else, that it belongs to my brother.”

“Brother? You have a brother?” Alex asked. “Why didn’t you ever—?” He read the look in her eyes. “You didn’t know, did you?”

“They always talked about the miscarriage,” Nico said, staring at the floor. “I mean, they didn’t always talk about. It was just something that came up when I was little, saying I wanted a little brother or sister. They explained why I couldn’t, because Mommy had miscarried when I was younger.” She laughed bitterly. “I don’t think theyknew that he was still alive.”

Alex nodded. “If it happened, it’ll be in the Abstract. Do you want me to go look it up? It might comfort you to know an answer before we got off searching for a brother who might not exist.”

Nico shook her head. Then she leaned forward and put her hand on Alex’s knee. “No,” she said, standing up. “I want us to look it up.”

Karolina sat alone in her room. She wiped at the crust of dried tears and shook herself. If she wasn’t careful, one day she was going to find herself in a refrigerator someday. She knew that she couldn’t let that happen to her.

She was sick of being pushed around and taken out early. Though she was a girl, she was just as much a part of the team as they all were. She stripped off the bracelet that would hold her powers in check no more. If they were going to have her, they were going to have every bit of her and not just the parts of her that were acceptable. Gone were the days of put-my-unconscious-body-in-the-back-of-the-Bronco Karolina.

I-can-take-care-of-myself Karolina was back in the room and had taken the floor.

The room was divided in two. Yin and yang, Chase thought. He liked the sound of that.

In one hand, he wielded the power of light, and in the other, he held a globe of pure darkness. When he called upon the powers, his eyes matched his hands. Human vulnerability had been stripped away by a drug. He wondered for a brief moment what Cloak and Dagger would think of that.

As he thought that thought, he lost control over the light power and destroyed the ancient lamp on the bedside table.

He grabbed his cell phone and cursed. “Pusher Man, Pusher Man,” he muttered. “You gots some ‘splaining to do…”

Physique’s Studio

Primo Falcone touched down outside Physique’s operation studio much later than he had expected. With the sheer number of helicopters and military personnel in the city, he hadn’t felt comfortable flying all the way to the studio. He would be of no use to his brother if he was stuck in military lockup while Matti’s life was on the line. He sincerely hoped that Physique had been able to isolate the infection.

When he walked in, he saw Physique in her scrubs. The doctor with the transparent skin turned around. He could barely see the tear tracks against the backdrop of her skull.

“What happened?” he demanded, recognizing the redness in her eyes. “Where’s my brother?”

Physique could barely bring herself to talk. She pointed at the operating room. “There,” she said, shaking her head. “I-I’m sorry, Primo. Your brother…the infection had spread throughout his body. The more I isolated, the more I found.”

“No,” Primo said. He could hear it in her voice, the words that were coming next.

“I’m sorry, Primo.” She swallowed hard. “We lost him.”

NEXT: Snakeskin Tears