CHAPTER 63: FULL STEP | THE RAID—V

  SPECTRE—NOVEMBER 26th, 1992 | MORNING

  ?

  Tania’s body shook.

  A vibration of a dying shockwave very nearly dislodged her clawed hands and feet from the wall she was latched onto with all fours.

  Cam.

  It had to have been him. Between all of the jumping and leaping and twisting she’d done, she’d seen vague impressions of his skirmish with Rachel Chen. She had her doubts about him when they first met—guy had all the gusto of a street thug, and tried sweet talking to her all the same, muttering about how he’d help her, so on and so forth. His display against those two bouncers proved he meant business.

  Given the screams, the wails, and the lack of movement, it seemed their battle came to a natural conclusion; and Cameron wasn’t the one screaming. Good on him. But he wasn’t moving either, which was a luxury Tania couldn’t quite afford at the moment.

  Aria had her pinned through and through.

  The damned thaumaturgist kept flinging out bite-sized balls of combustible occult energy, one after another, her stupid voice croaking to the tune of the same incantation over, and over, and over again: Furvus Ardere.

  Before Tania had even been locked into a proper one-on-one against her, she’d been hit by one of those not-so-nice orbs of black and purple, right square in the sternum. Her white thermal fused into her damaged gray skin, and the sting of it was something she’d write home about, assuming she ever found one to begin with.

  The Roséviscous rattled in her pocket. Janice never told Tania what went into it, and according to Cameron, it wasn’t meant to be consumed, but thrown. Tania bit the insides of her cheeks in a quick moment of deliberation. It couldn’t hurt. She swiped her clawed fingers into the pockets of her black cargo shorts, inadvertently slicing the pocket straight open, and gripped the vial softly as possible. Her arm reeled back, and then forward.

  Glass shattered against the ground.

  A pinkish-red liquid spilled out.

  The smell hit Tania’s nose like a truck. She’d never have to ask Janice what it was made of. Ectoplasm and menstrual blood. How Janice had even gotten her hands on either of those things made Tania sick to her stomach; worse, Esme was the one who got the materials for her, and Tania didn’t even want to know who, or how, or where that stuff was sold.

  Aria’s paled lips prepared another incantation.

  But the Roséviscous moved quickly, zipping across the ground like some sort of sentient blob.

  When it reached Aria’s foot, it took physical form. From the blob emerged an oversized fetus made of the same material; whining, wailing, crying its tears of fuschia and sticking to Aria’s body like flower colored quicksand. It clung to her leg, an anchor of wombish slime, and kept her grounded. Kept her still.

  Tania smiled a wide, fangy smile.

  “Darling, honey,” Aria began, her voice raspy, her fingers trailing in the remnant miasma of thaumaturgic power. She kicked out her leg and tried to shake the Roséviscous, only to slow herself further. “See, it’s clear to me, fuck, obvious, even, that we’re getting nowhere with this. You push, I pull. You leap, I throw. No one is gaining ground and I’m getting tired. Let’s you and me, I don’t know, call it a quits, raid the bar, forget any of this ever happened—”

  The slits of Tania’s bright yellow eyes tightened.

  She launched herself directly off the wall, the gargoyle-like miniature wings along her ankles pushing the air behind her with a clapping burst. Black talons sliced along Aria’s side, severing through her trench coat, her white tank top, and the top layer of her skin. Blood spattered onto the floor.

  Aria turned, hands raised, voice primed to announce yet another thaumaturgic incantation.

  Tania, mid-slide across the now dilapidated dance floor, kicked off her hind legs, and shot both of her clawed hands forward.

  “Tenebris Saggi—”

  Black claws dug deep into either one of Aria’s shoulders. Red trickled along Tania’s gray-skinned hands and sputtered forward into the lengthy mass of spiked, flowing black-maroon hair that curled out from her dark baseball cap.

  The impact of Tania’s pounce was strong enough to send Aria straight onto her back.

  Tania kept one hand pinned into Aria’s shoulder, digging her claws deeper into Aria’s viscera and prompting a shrill scream from the thaumaturgist. She removed the other, raised it, and prepared to slash open the curly-haired redheads throat. Dead or not, severed vocal chords would put an end to her incantations and her bullshit.

  “...Sagitta.”

  A dark potential framed Aria’s features. The Roséviscous clinging to her leg evaporated. Black and purple took the form of shadowfire that clung to her outline like a sudden and spontaneous combustion, and it all surged into one place thereafter: Aria’s pointed finger, held directly against Tania’s stomach.

  An arrowhead of brackish and occult energy—thin, precise, and focused—launched into Tania like a harpoon dart. She was ejected from Aria with such suddenness that Tania failed to register the pain until she’d landed on the DJ stage on the far end of the dance floor.

  Viscera spilled out from Tania’s core, and what didn’t was self-cauterized by the black and purple energies that shot cleanly out from her back. A deep roar forced its way out of her throat, and she writhed in place, shifting in and out of her half-step transformation. Sweat poured from her features and a small pool of blood gathered on the stage around her silhouette.

  In the distance, the sounds of a continued struggle were her lullaby.

  That lying bastard of a man Leroy and the shit-for-brains warden he’d enlisted were hard at work, fighting an unseen enemy on the mezzanine that functioned as Spectre’s second level. Her ears perked to the sound of bullet fire and the buzz of insects, and she soaked in the secondary noise of the clamors and tremors of metal bending and clanking. Noisy as it was, she couldn’t muster up the strength to bear witness to it. She could hardly move her head in that direction.

  The sniveling, pathetic cries of Aria Remeau were closer still.

  Tit for tat. Or in their case; tit for tit.

  Aria had been right. She pushed, Tania pulled, and that seemed truer now than ever before—before, it was a game of cat and mouse. Now they were both sick and tired dogs wailing on the ground, waiting for someone to come and save them, basking in the kind of misery that could only be earned by way of battle.

  Tania’s skin couldn’t maintain its gray hue. Her yellow eyes shifted back to their normal, warmer amber coloring, oscillating back and forth between proper round pupils and unsettling slits. The spikes of long and wolfish black-maroon hair reverted back to curls, one by one.

  “Fu.. fuck,” Tania muttered.

  Damn Aria and damn her thaumaturgy too. Whatever twisted magic she wielded had convinced Tania’s body that it was just as toxic as silver or wolfsbane. Her wounds wouldn’t heal, and her mangled flesh let everyone know as much.

  Worse, this wasn’t a stalemate. It was mutually assured destruction, and that result tasted sour in Tania’s mouth; worse than chugging a gallon of spoiled milk called defeat. Both were less savory than revenge, a meal that she’d long since drooled over that seemed to move further and further away from her by the second, like a deer who wouldn’t allow itself to become prey.

  A growl swelled in her throat.

  Her canine-like teeth flared out, and she clenched a clawed hand; black and jagged nails carving deep into the inside of her palm.

  “Eye patch.. braid. Claw mark… red cross,” she muttered.

  Tania sank deeper into the memory of that day: she forced herself to remember her tears, her pleas, and the face of the woman who’d made the mistake of letting Tania live. She recalled the sound of the shotgun blast. The clank of her father’s skull against the road. She’d gone full step outside of a full moon before. She could do it again.

  Her bones crunched and churned. Elbows and knees grew and snapped, ligaments undulated, and her eyes rolled back behind her head. Tania’s hair frilled outward, a wave of black maroon, and grew and grew and grew. Her gray skin reclaimed the dark-olive tones of her normal complexion, and fur erupted from her pores en masse. A pained and throbbing wail spilled from her throat, deepening into a growl and a bellow that consumed the interior of Spectre. Meat and blood squelched and closed the wounds she’d sustained from Aria’s thaumaturgic blasts—not fully, but enough to move, and enough to commit fully to the instinctual violence that coursed through her veins like a satisfying sizzle of fire on wood.

  She forced herself up from the DJ stage.

  The shadow cast over Aria Remeau’s bleeding silhouette was more wolf than woman; twice as large, face wearing a wolfish maw, body decorated in wiry and packed musculature. Her clothes ripped and tore; and the black baseball cap she wore on her head was ejected onto the ground. A large tail jutted out from her back, and the fur in place of her skin stood up like static-touched hair. Gone were the gargoyle-like protrusions on her ankles; emergent was an unaided predator, reliant only on the potency of a curse carried by blood and claw.

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  Occult energies hummed around Aria.

  Her skin lost another shade, and was closer to a milk-white than fair. She pointed both of her arms forward and began her twisted recital, the veins of her face darker than black and spreading rapidly like a virus.

  “Fame Ducitur Hast—”

  Sparks flew along the battered dance floor. Tania’s claws, longer, sharper, and denser than before, cut cleanly along the ground as she advanced, carving up the concrete into evidence of her ferocity.

  Tania’s maw clasped down around Aria’s arm.

  She growled, snarled, and bellowed as she whipped her head back, lifting Aria up into the air with her teeth.

  With a pivot, she slammed Aria into the floor and thrashed her wolfish head side to side. A shrill scream left Aria as her arm was violently torn from her body, the flesh of her severed limb rotten on Tania’s tongue.

  Aria’s wailing continued. Her voice trembled to the tune of severed tendons and exposed arteries. Tania could smell the fear on her; the kind that caused a cornered animal to lash out because there was no other choice. A thaumaturgic blaze surrounded her, and her lips parted, weakly, ready to present an incantation as something just shy of a whisper.

  Time felt slower at that moment.

  Tania stared at Aria's pale features, the trembling of her lips, and recalled her earlier plea for a truce. She wasn’t here out of some sense of duty, this woman was here because she was being paid to be here, and Tania wondered if that meant she ought to be condemned to death. She hadn’t thought twice about killing that woman at the door, and she couldn’t say she felt guilty for it, and she was uncertain now if she’d be guilty if she put an end to this woman.

  Eye patch. Braid. Claw mark. Red cross.

  She didn’t have any of those things, only the fear of a death that seemed inevitable by Tania’s hands. Yellow and daring eyes studied Aria, and took into account the damage that was already done: the laceration on her side, the deep puncture wounds on either one of her shoulders, the stub of what used to be her arm spewing blood without a moment of pause.

  “Fame.. D… Duci—”

  Tania’s arm snapped forward. Her clawed hand wrapped around Aria's entire skull. Her fur-covered palm silenced the thaumaturgist, whose muffled breaths were hot against the inside of Tania’s hand. Tania clenched. Five black claws dug into her head.

  Aria’s body ceased to move, and Tania removed her hand with a visceral slink.

  The slits of Tania’s eyes widened ever so slightly with a softness to her gaze. There was no guilt, but a specific kind of sadness that she knew would pass. She’d forget this woman’s name and forget the way she smelled, and she’d go to bed later without losing any sleep. Aria Remeau wasn’t killed. Only people could be killed, and at that moment, Aria wasn’t a person. She was a doe-eyed deer who’d wandered too close to something she was meant to run from.

  ?

  She found Cameron sitting in the crater he’d dug out for Rachel like a grave.

  Only, she wasn’t dead.

  Tania could hear her heartbeat in her chest; it was faint, but present. Her being alive ran contrary to the screams she’d howled out only moments ago, and Cameron’s victory seemed pyrrhic at best. Still, the extent of the damage he could dish out wasn’t something Tania would be scoffing at anytime soon. Whatever he’d done, it looked like he’d set off a bundle of TNT two times over.

  The crater was deep enough and wide enough to pierce the foundation, and Tania had to avert stray pieces of piping and the steel rods of the dance floor’s foundation as she slid down to reach Cameron.

  Somehow, he looked worse than her.

  Cameron raised a hand in greeting and his stupid eyeball-thing of a pet whirred like it was happy to see Tania.

  “Look like you got your ass kicked,” Tania said, her voice three tones deeper.

  In securing his victory, the idiot had also secured a completely limp arm, and had shrapnel fusing the fabric of his gray pullover with the blood and flesh that had been pierced. Puncture wounds caused a brown-red to dampen portions of his upper torso and both of his thighs.

  “And you look ugly,” Cameron said, not with a smile, but matter-of-factly. He’d never seen her full-stepped, and was surprisingly non-reactive to her wolfish appearance.

  “Scary. I look scary. Like the Big Bad Wolf,” Tania said.

  “You look.. hhng.. like you’re four or five Little Red Riding Hood’s away from being one fat fucking dog,” Cameron said, his voice straining.

  The cool-guy act wasn’t convincing her. He’d talked a whole lot of shit about not needing that Roséviscous, only to practically be sitting in a pool of his own blood and half a cripple.

  “You let her live, Cam. Why?” Tania asked, glancing towards Rachel Chen’s unconscious body.

  “Don’t know,” Cameron said.

  “I smell a lot of things, you know, but the scent of bullshit on someone’s breath is stronger than the actual shit that comes out of people’s ass. Spill, Cam.”

  Cameron glanced towards Rachel. “I had a chance to, is all.”

  Overhead on the mezzanine—Spectre’s 2nd level—Tania’s lupine ears perked to the noise of insects. Now that she was closer, and the adrenaline of her fight with Aria had stilled, an overwhelming scent of rot and pestilence prompted her to sneer and squint. Tears trailed out from her yellow eyes, like she’d been exposed to the chemicals of ten-thousand onions soaked in a lake filled with the fluids of dead bodies.

  “Augh, fuck!” Tania growled. The only thing that stopped her from throwing up a waterfall of bile was her dignity.

  “Yeah,” Cameron muttered. “Took a second for that to waft in my direction too. Pretty bad, isn’t it? Worse than bad. Once upon a time I thought I was nose blind. Not anymore.”

  “Cam,” Tania said, half of her large, wolfish hand covering her lycanic maw. “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Look,” Cam said, wincing as he adjusted his posture. “Rhett, Luisa, I don’t think they deserved what we did to them.”

  “The bouncers at the door,” Tania said. “They came after us.”

  “Yeah, I know, and maybe we didn’t have much of a choice, I don’t think, not with the way that it happened. Part of me wishes it could’ve ended differently, but.. chaos, randomness, the quickness of fucking—I don’t know, objects in motions. Guns, knives, claws. Whatever. Sometimes it just happens the way it happens,” Cameron said, his voice level and assured. “Other times, I think we have a choice. A chance to give a proper double-take, and ask ourselves if we’re meant to be someone’s executioner.”

  Tania felt like covering her ears. Cameron’s words mixed in with the white-noise of the buzzes overhead. There had to have been hundreds upon hundreds of pungent insects up there, and with a brief glance, she could see what looked like cloud’s worth of black bobbing and weaving around the catwalk and the mezzanine.

  She heard footsteps, too. Leroy’s. Captain Holmes’s. That bastard warden with the red cross tattoo, and even the lithe steps of whoever reeked of decay. None, however, were as pronounced as the heavy, pounding steps of something that reeked of ether. Something that, in essence, reeked of her; some twisted byproduct of the experimentation she wasn’t even aware of until Cameron and Janice had woken her up and pulled her out of Bluestein’s processing plant.

  “Sometimes, Cam,” Tania said, glancing back towards him. “It just has to be done. People who are in the way know they’re in the way, and they stand in front of you anyways.”

  Cameron slowly stood up, groaning all the while. “Might make your trigger finger feel a little lighter, sure, but a bullet is a bullet. It kills all the same. We… tell ourselves, Tania, that we either want to, need to, or have to. I think it can be one, or two, or all three, maybe. But I also know that those three things can be just as true for, well, the opposite.”

  Tania raised a brow. “You’re losing me here.”

  “Life,” Cameron said, slowly but surely stepping out of the crater, eyes focused on the stairwell leading up to the mezzanine. “When we spare people, you know. Or.. if and when we save 'em’. Want, need, have. One, two, or all three.”

  He wasn’t in the condition to walk, and with where he was going, Cameron wouldn’t be any use to anyone. Tania leaped out from the crater, landed behind him, and threw him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He didn’t resist, but his winces and groans were loud enough to bother her.

  Guts whirred around him, per usual, a bit more alert than usual, ready to blink if need be, its single eye keenly observing Tania. Tania couldn’t blame it.

  Just beyond them, in the hallway atrium that led to the dancefloor, was a metal containment vat, or tube, or something that Tania wished she had a proper name for. It was large, around eight-feet tall, and currently empty.

  The lingering scent of men was around it, and the closer they got to the stairwell, the stronger it became. Bodies on bodies on bodies. Dead men. Dead women. Whatever had exited it had been quick to take care of whoever those people were. There was another scent, a stronger one: perfume. Lilac, oranges, and a tint of something like chocolate truffle. It was strong enough to leave a trail that Tania could almost see, and that trail went straight out the front doors Tania and Cameron had broken down.

  “Leroy tell you all of that?” Tania asked sternly. She leaned Cameron up against the first couple of steps leading to Spectre’s second level.

  “The first part, yeah. The grim stuff. Him and another guy. Gideon.”

  “And the second part?”

  A soft smile spread across Cameron’s face. It was the first time he’d ever looked something close to handsome.

  “All me,” he said.

  The trembling overhead continued. “We should go. Drink some of that whatever-it’s-called and get up off your ass.”

  “Fresh out,” Cameron admitted.

  “What? How?”

  Cameron nodded towards the crater. “It was all three or none. I broke her spine.”

  Tania exhaled. “And now you’re a benchwarmer.”

  “And now I’m a benchwarmer,” Cameron said. “I’ll be.. hnng.. fine. Drag me up, I’ll armor on and be a riot shield for a little bit. Or something.”

  “Better hope it holds up. That arm of yours looks like it’s.. well, shit. Dislocated or something.”

  “Worse.”

  “Worse?” Tania said, eyes widened.

  “I think I tore a bicep, and a tricep, and I can’t feel my fingers on that side,” Cameron said matter-of-factly. “Or my forearm.”

  That smile was still on his face, but wider than before.

  “The hell are you grinning about, Cam? You’re leaving me and the rest of them to do the heavy lifting,” Tania retorted.

  “Last time I saw Rachel, Leroy beat her by the skin of his teeth.”

  Tania raised a brow. “Yeah. So did you.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cameron said. He smiled a big smile. “That’s the point.”

  TANIA ACKERMAN

  ARIA REMEAU

  CAMERON KESSLER

  GUTS

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