Chapter VIII

The elevator crawled slowly to the top floors, each second passing painfully by. If he had taken the stairs, would it perhaps have been faster on these legs? But he had the corporal to consider as well – she wasn’t human but that was no guarantee she was as fast as he was.

What he would have done for a pair of wings in that moment.

‘You’re sure you’re going to be okay?’ asked Morgan as he checked the cartridge of his Austere.

‘Stop fussing.’ Shalia was checking her own gun. The weapon, gleaming silver with a blue pulse along its length, was almost too large for her hands, though there was little doubt to suggest she was anything other than a fantastic shot. ‘You haven’t seen me when I get serious.’

‘You mean you haven’t been serious ‘til now?’ But his heart wasn’t really in it. He was too distracted by the growing scent of blood and cooked flesh.

Shalia caught his lack of enthusiasm and didn’t grace it with a reply.

‘But who could be pretending to be me?’ Morgan wondered aloud. ‘And why?’

‘Maybe you have a copycat.’

He turned sharply at that. ‘Yeah. The infamous Burning Butcher, alright. I had admirers. Put plenty of them in the ground, too.’

‘You sound almost proud.’

‘They were all monsters, corporal. They would’ve just as easily put me in a grave if they had the chance.’

She wouldn’t meet his eyes. She murmured, so slow if he had been anything other than human, he wouldn’t have caught it, ‘And you weren’t?’ Past-tense.

The elevator slowed.

‘Of course I was. I was the worst one. But it wasn’t because of what I am on the outside.’ He thumbed his chest. ‘It’s because there’s something broken right here.’

‘That feels like an excuse, sir.’

He had no reply for that. She was right, after all.

The elevator came to a stop on the fourth floor from the top, Red Dawn’s storage and training facility. Crates and shelves lined the right-hand side of the large space, the left dedicated to yoga mats, training equipment and a vast weapons cache on the wall, currently depleted. Guns of every size, capacity and stage of technological development nestled amongst blades and knives with honed edges shined to a murderous gleam. Morgan spared the weapons barely more than glance, but the corporal’s eyes were wide.

‘This way,’ he urged, indicating a concrete staircase with steel bannisters to the right. ‘There’s no one here.’

The pair raced up quickly to the next floor.

Into a fiery hell.

The fire sprinklers were doing a damn fine job, but the flames they were attempting to extinguish weren’t ordinary fires. The recreational floor was divided into several sections: a large, empty ballroom space for the Dawn’s gatherings stretched out onto the building’s one and only terrace, furnished with a large pool and barbeque area where the people afraid of the flames milled about. Adjacent to that and near the elevators, once-opulent couches – many now only charred remains – crowded around billiard and table tennis tables. Destroyed TV screens sat on red brick walls lit by flickering fairy lights. A great, round meeting table dominated the foyer – currently engulfed by flame.

Brave Dawn members were attempting to put the small fires out by a variety of means, some taking turns bringing in buckets of water from the small corner kitchen, others using shirts and jackets to temper the small flames threatening to engulf more sofas and coffee tables. One enterprising individual was even attempting to work a fire extinguisher but couldn’t quite pull the pin. Shalia snatched the extinguisher from the man and yanked out the pin in a practiced move, handing it back.

Morgan felt himself shutting down, becoming smaller, lesser, that critical soldier tempered through years of bureau work waking with a stretch and a yawn. The speculative eye to appraise and assess, consider problems and solutions calmly, emotionlessly. It was the antithesis of the Vorvintti bloodlust that simmered in his veins, mostly quiet but always present. An absence of rage, only cold, careful consideration.

Bodies smouldered on the floor and between burning sofas and smashed tables. Dawn members moaned and complained from the places that weren’t currently on fire, nursing broken and charred limbs. Shalia coolly assessed the victims one-by-one.

‘Can you tend to the injured?’ asked Morgan, his gaze elsewhere.

‘I could, but what about you?’

He nodded over to the ballroom area. ‘I’ll take care of that.’

It was a battle between true monsters.

A black wildcat, as long as Morgan was tall, snarled, teeth glistening knives above a pink tongue, swiping claws just as deadly. It crouched, velvet black fur rippling along a muscular back, and pounced.

And Morgan snatched its throat from the air.

‘Lieutenant,’ gasped Shalia. ‘He looks exactly like you.’

The Morgan-that-wasn’t-Morgan did indeed look exactly like him. It even wore the same clothes he was currently wearing, jeans and a black shirt, and had the same mop of curly black hair around a dishevelled face framed by glasses perched on a long nose. It would have been a perfect replica, if for the fire rippling on its skin like fur. His Sleight, it seemed, was something that just wasn’t within its capabilities to copy. Although it did get the heat just right; Morgan could feel it from where he stood.

The panther pawed at the not-Morgan’s grip, claws raking across flesh without leaving a scratch. An iridescent darkness blacker than night rippled up from the panther’s fur like liquid, engulfing the beast until only the liquid was left. The oil-like fluid bounced out of the fake’s grip and coalesced several feet away into the haggard form of Rhiley. He was breathing heavily. From pain or exertion Morgan couldn’t be sure.

Both Rhiley and the fake spotted Morgan then.

The not-Morgan broke into a grin, flashing fangs far longer and sharper than they should have been.

‘It’s about time,’ it said in his voice. But the undercurrent of malice and pure, primal hatred didn’t belong to Morgan at all.

‘Morgan,’ Rhiley panted. ‘It’s Killian, it’s your dad –’

Rhiley turned back to his attacker just in time. His body exploded into a murder of crows just as the not-Morgan’s fire-tipped fingers went for his skull. But not before the fake could snatch one of the birds from the air, the rest cawing with alarm. It became a small pillar of flame in its grip, then a pile of ash. The rest of the murder found Morgan’s side, where it came back together into Rhiley. He clutched his shoulder with a groan, where beneath his fingers blood gushed from a missing chunk of flesh.

Morgan noticed his father, Killian, amongst a pile of corpses at the imposter’s back. He wasn’t dead, but with the bruises, burns and cuts he had sustained in the fight he soon would be. The old man was panting, glaring bloody-murder at the fake’s back and pointing a shaking gun at its head. More so than the white in his blond hair or the wrinkles at his eyes and mouth, it was his laboured breath that showed Killian’s age. A man once feared by the lesser gangs in Joudai, the man that had heralded the end of the Vorvintti and their totalitarian mob rule – reduced to little more than a gasping old relic. Age took the best out of all of humans.

Morgan’s calm shattered.

The imposter broke into a sprint – not for Morgan, but for the pile of corpses where Killian lay several feet away. It would have been faster for Morgan to draw his Austere and fire from a distance, however is mind had deserted him – he wanted that fake’s throat between his fingers. Wanted to burn it alive, show it what true hellfire felt like. His Sleight came alive in a violent burst of steam and heat, blood boiling instantly into furious motion. He moved quickly to make up for the distance, heedless to the skin burning away and healing, muscles tearing and reforming, joints and bones snapping and grinding back together with the need to move faster, faster, faster, all that remained a steam-fuelled creature of desperate fury.

The world slowed to a crawl, moments of impact marked in the milliseconds between one decisive action and the next. The shattered remains of Morgan’s consciousness came together to reach for the thing-that-wasn’t-Morgan’s neck.

And the fake’s fire-tipped fingers reached for Killian’s skull.

They were too close to Killian – the heat threatened to engulf them all, let alone a human. Time was now a strange thing, moving both too slowly and faster than Morgan could process. It felt like centuries before he was able to command his limbs to tackle the imposter away from Killian instead. He drove his arms and shoulders, obscured by steam, into the fake’s ribs, taking them both down and away from his father. Morgan pinned the fake to the ground with his thighs.

A howl found its way past non-existent lips too tired to regenerate anymore and into the imposter’s face. The noise shook the windows in their frames, the glasses in cabinets – the hearts in the people that heard it. An inhuman scream, like a demon straight from hell – nothing of Morgan was in that terrifying wail. His skin was slow to regenerate and drew on his reserves of strength. So he didn’t bother growing it back at all.

Morgan squeezed his hands, the muscles exposed, around the fake’s throat, slamming its head against the marble and splintering the stone. Flame met steam in battling curlicues of smoke and vapor, neither one prevailing over the other.

‘I knew it,’ the imposter said in his voice, sinister smile twisting Morgan’s features. ‘You’re still the same monster I remember.’

Morgan snarled, canines fully extended. He must have looked quite a sight without the skin to soften his features. The fake wasn’t impressed.

‘That power won’t get you anywhere,’ growled the not-Morgan.

A sharp pain seared Morgan’s chest, one to either side. When he glanced down, a pair of hidden knives pierced the sides of his abdomen.

A precise blow, right between the ribs and into his furnace-like heart.

Morgan’s internal fire guttered without the heart to pump the burning blood through his veins. Nothing moved – no steam, no regeneration. Frozen in stasis. Morgan couldn’t find the strength to lift a finger, let alone remove the daggers piercing his chest.

‘You finally quiet now?’ jeered the fake. The knives slid closer to home. Each inch felt like a frozen icicle sapping the strength from him, cold spreading from the inside. He could only scream in his mind and hope his glare was enough to melt the fake into ash.

‘If I take your head,’ the imposter snarled, sliding the knives in further, ‘would you die for good?’

It didn’t get the chance to test its theory.

A shot rang out into the hall on a great rush of air, like a giant letting loose a breath. A streak of blue broke through the steam and flame and took the fake square in the jaw.

The end of Corporal Balmaris’s Austere glowed a quickly vanishing orange. Her aim was, as always, impeccable. She didn’t lower the gun until she stood directly over the fake, and even then, her aim never wavered from its forehead. Rhiley joined them, shoulder now healed, and yanked Morgan away from the unconscious fake. Morgan was limp in his arms until he set him down and pulled the knives out, one by one.

He came alive then with a scream as the knives, more ice shard than steel, left his body. The wounds healed themselves from the inside out, a low growl never leaving his throat.

The fake was still alive. The blue shot was a kill type – orange was a non-lethal stun until unconscious and yellow a mild electrical current – and yet the fake was still alive. The fire had not left its skin and its chest rose and fell with laboured breaths.

Morgan got shakily to his feet, steam coming to life slowly, hesitantly, from between the gaps of exposed muscle.

‘Lieutenant,’ the corporal warned.

‘‘Ack,’ he barked, unable to form complete words from a lipless mouth.

She took a few steps back, her gun never leaving the imposter.

He was nearly at the not-Morgan’s feet when the fake went up in flames. Rhiley, Shalia and Morgan backed away then. The flame was a hungry thing, fingers snaking this way and that in search of fuel. The fake was completely engulfed; it couldn’t be seen beneath the blazing light.

Morgan squinted, trying to catch a glimpse of the thing inside. A vague, humanoid form, growing larger and less human with each second. It wasn’t just that the flames were hot and ravenous – those weren’t new things to Morgan. The problem was that they weren’t his. He had no idea of their strength, or the threat they posed. Like meeting a wild dog after taming your own. He knew the flames were dangerous, but he wasn’t afraid of them. Fire was just another weapon to be used. But it couldn’t be underestimated.

The fire eased – the master’s leash being pulled back – and revealed the imposter for what it was.

Morgan and the fake, they could have been a pair of demons recently escaped from hell, for the fake’s new form was the stuff of nightmares. Like a flame that had been given life, there was now a large, floating body of fire that rippled and shifted, floating above the ground, its colour dimming and brightening. Hands, human-like, came and went from the flames as though the imposter wasn’t quite used to this new form. The only discernible feature other than that was a shifting face that appeared within the fire – sometimes the snapping head of a wolf, sometimes the glare of a man, and yet other times the great, twisted visage of a demon spawned from hell.

The thing’s ever-changing gaze zeroed in on Killian. ‘Too bad,’ it said in a new voice of ash and whispers piled upon one another. ‘I’ll kill him faster next time.’ Shalia, Rhiley, the other Dawn members lurking on the sidelines – the imposter peered at them all, one by one, until it found Morgan. ‘I wasn’t expecting people to care about you. I’ll go for the head next time. Tell Ling I said hi.’

Morgan could barely take a step forward. ‘‘Ait…!’

On a rush of wings made of pure flame, the imposter took to the air and rushed out of the balcony doors and into the night sky. Morgan watched it flee until it swooped into a dive and disappeared from view. Patches of skin began to crawl into being across his cheeks and mouth, an unpleasant tightness of new flesh.

‘Corporal,’ he said with new lips.

‘Lieutenant?’

‘Do you have that syringe of concentrated janthin with you?’

‘Of course, sir…?’

‘Give it to me. Quickly. Then Rhiley will know what to do.’ After a moment he added, ‘Please.’

He had to fight to gain control of the shaking starting up in his hands, the killing dirge becoming a crescendo and a voracious emptiness threatening to pull him under starting in his guts.

Shalia scrambled for the syringe in one of the pockets on her chest.

He wanted so very badly to have her blood in his mouth. To tear the flesh apart like tissue paper and feel that warmth in his hands. He clamped a hand over his mouth, digging his teeth into his palm, and curled around the black hole forming inside as though trying to stop an implosion.

A faint pinprick at his neck. Shalia’s voice, distorted as though coming from a great distance: ‘It’s over, lieutenant.’

Then, nothing.