With a low growl, created only from frustration, he rose from his seat and walked across the room. There was something in the air that was making him slightly edgy today. He had no doubt that it was something to do with the dark, rare magicks that he was about to call upon, but it wouldn’t do for him to even get even the pronunciation of these words wrong.
In the small bedroom, he collected his books into a grey duffel bag and rummaged around in his cupboard for the protective amulet he wore in public – it stopped people from noticing his… less than normal outdoor attire. “Come on, where is it?” Sometimes, the shaman wished he had another person living with him; someone to listen to and prevent his incessant rambling. Talking to himself helped him to get things straight in his own head and he used himself as his own sounding board. “Aha, gotcha!” he reached into the shadows of the cupboard and closed his hand around a lumpy, furry rock pendant. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing to drape around his neck, but he knew things would be a lot less comfortable if he didn’t wear it.
The shaman – who had never seen the need to take on a human name – stared across his bedroom at the old, yellowing book, which just stared back at him, accusingly. “Why can’t you be written in a language I know?” The shaman was usually quite good at translating rare demon languages but this… this looked rather like a mixture of two or three dead languages. It was probably written in such undecipherable scribe so people wouldn’t be able to translate it into English and act on it. Which begged the two big questions; a, what had the spells done that was so awful? and b, if it was so bad, why write the spells down in the first place? He had but a few hours to get the next spell right.
It was early afternoon, and Robyn and Carly were both sleeping off the effects of the previous day. Robyn dreamt of the new life that was beginning outside, the life she could never be a part of. That was okay though – she didn’t exactly tan well anyway. Even though she was dreaming, Robyn could now remember everything said between her and Carly with unrivalled clarity. Robyn had strange dreams though. Of beautiful chaos and confusion on the moonlit streets and familiar red rain, which wasn’t rain at all but blood. She grabbed Mika’s outstretched hands and together they danced beneath the stars in blood rain, just as he had promised. Robyn laughed, but instead of staying inside her head, the hollow sound bounced through the house she and Mika had taken as their home.
“They don’t know do they?” she said to her dream Mika. “But I do.” Robyn turned her face to the sky, rejoiced in the free-flowing blood and the screams all around her. She squeezed her eyes shut tight against the sudden glare of light. “They haven’t got a clue…” When she opened her eyes, Mika was not in front of her. She looked down to the tarmac road and saw a pile of ashes that were still smoking. Robyn held her hands up in front of her eyes, letting the sticky red rain drizzle through her fingers and started crying as she saw smoke beginning to rise from her own fingers.
She woke with a start and sat bolt upright in her bed, taking several deep breaths that she didn’t even need. Mika, who had been watching Carly in her fitful half-sleep, rose from his seat and raced up the stairs, into the bedroom. The door crashed open as he kicked it with his boot. He hated himself for leaving Robyn alone and felt guilty for allowing her to have her bad dream alone. A human emotion he seldom felt any more – except when it came to Robyn. “What is it?” What they shared was deeper than the infatuation or lust felt by most, theirs was a genuine love. “What happened to make my baby cry?” He looked towards the curtained window and could feel the bright sun burning outside the window, wishing the curtain was thicker so as to keep the light further away from Robyn’s sore eyes.
“Are you really here?” She pawed at his shirt with one curled up hand, as if she thought he might just disappear. “It’s happening. I saw lovely things – people screaming and shouting in perfect agony. And it was raining the blood of little angels. Then it all changed – the sun came out to play.”
Mika sat on the bed and played with her long hair, running his fingers through the sleep-rumpled locks. “Nothing’s gonna happen, Robyn,” he told her again.
“Do you promise?” Robyn stood up and hummed along to music only she could hear, swaying as she heard the stars calling out to her. “The stars are dying. Soon, we’ll never see them again. No more feeding or hunting. It will kill us all.” She snapped her head round and looked straight at him with hard eyes. “Everyone will be stained.”
“It’s okay, baby. We’ll stop it.”
“It’s already happening, Mika. Things are already changing.”
“Things always change!” he snapped. “We can’t always stop them but we always try!”
This time, Robyn didn’t pull away from him but just glared at him, unflinching. “They don’t have to change,” she affirmed. Ignoring the hand that Mika offered her, she took a step to the edge of her bed and stepped, soundlessly, onto the wooden floor. Robyn reached out one strong arm and pushed Mika to the floor as she stalked towards the door, not sure what she was going to do.
Mika wouldn’t hold that little pushing incident against her – Robyn was in her own little world again. Over the generations they had spent together, Mika had learnt how to recognise and deal with her moods. It somehow seemed to hurt more when she hurt him without meaning to – even when it was less painful.
Carly was half-dreaming, but was sure she had seen the man watching her and had then left. Of course, it could just be her hazy mind playing tricks on her and she almost wished it was. If she couldn’t see anyone moving, sure it could be because there was no-one around to see, but the reason that kept cropping up was that she was so close to dying that she simply wasn’t aware of it. She knew that wasn’t the reason – it took more than a day and a half of torture to crack her – but she couldn’t shake the thought that it might soon be true. She could just about hear fuzzy voices in one of the upstairs rooms and could no longer hear the roar of the fire in the corner. Her left side wasn’t warmed by the heat given off by it, and came to the logical conclusion that it had simply died out.
“Ricky.” In one of her feverish dreams, she and Ricky were together. “Ricky..”
“What?” It was a cool evening and they were sitting together on top of a large grassy hill in the nearby park. They were sitting on Ricky’s denim jacket – he was always too macho to admit that he was cold.
“Look, the stars are starting to come out.” Carly pointed up at the lone star that twinkled in the twilight. “Make a wish.”
“Nah.”
“Why not? It’s lucky to wish on the first star you see.” That was an old myth her mother had taught her as a child. It didn’t actually work but it was a nice thought.
“Don’t need to. I’ve got everything I could wish for right here.” To some people that line sounded so corny, and Ricky wouldn’t normally have said it, but here and now it was true. Something in the air had put his emotions into overdrive. “All my wishes have come true.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah, well.” Ricky picked at some imaginary fluff on his checked shirt; Carly looked up at the two or three stars joining the first and wished the moon would show. “I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic.”
“Promise me you’ll never leave me.”
“They’ll have to kill me first,” he told his girlfriend.
Carly fell silent as she felt an unidentifiable, yet familiar, pang of guilt in the pit of her stomach. Why did she feel that sudden pain? And why did it feel like it should be there?
“Why didn’t you protect me?” growled a voice from behind.
Carly turned around and couldn’t believe what she saw. “Ricky?” His face was twisted in agony and two trickles of blood ran down either side of his neck as he stood over her. Carly was staring straight up at a small handgun. “What’re you doing?”
“You could have saved me. You decided to save
your own skin, you selfish cow!” He flexed his hand around the rubber grip but made no move to pull the trigger.
“I thought we were supposed to be in Heaven. Why are you doing this?”
“Now I’ll never be free!” He held the gun steady and he stared blankly at her with hard blue eyes with none of the love and compassion of just a few minutes before. “You had what they wanted and you didn’t even put up a fight. Not for me, and not for the world. For the greater good.” Ricky stared down at the gun in his hand, confused as to how he had got it and why he was threatening his girlfriend with it. But his judgement was so clouded by anger and hate and… a sudden urge to get justice, he didn’t think twice about pulling the trigger.
Carly opened her mouth wide and screamed herself awake. The need to take in more air was there, but her brain was still too fogged by sleep to process that impulse. She opened her eyes, and saw Mika watching her with that unwavering and intense gaze he had perfected. She could almost feel his eyes boring into her skull, and somehow she knew that he could see what she was dreaming. Carly stopped screaming when she saw him and started breathing deeply, vainly trying to get some much-needed oxygen into her empty lungs. “Why are you watching me sleep, you freak?” Part of her thought that she shouldn’t be calling him names, but the rest of her knew that it wouldn’t really matter.
“There now. Doesn’t it feel better?”
“He – he had a gun.”
“Guns,” he mused. “Now there’s a thought.”
“He pulled the trigger. It was so loud,” she said to Mika. He might as well listen to what she had to say if he was going to watch her. He actually seemed quite interested in what she was saying. “Like a little explosion, or something. And suddenly, there was all this blood, soaking into the ground. It was everywhere, getting my clothes all sticky and red – I can’t remember if it was my blood or Ricky’s, I didn’t see but there was so much of it. Then I heard more gunshots but they sounded really faraway, and they weren’t normal pistol shots. They sounded like machine gun fire.” She looked up at Mika who was watching her with great interest as she spoke. “We were looking at the stars and he told me how much he loved me then I looked at him and he just went postal. That’s it,” she finished. “It’s only going to get worse before it gets better… for us, anyway.” She didn’t doubt for a second that this murderer and his strange girlfriend would be in their element when it got to the worse part.
“This was all your dream?” He didn’t care to share his theory that her dream might be something to do with the one that Robyn had had. He also didn’t bother, either, to tell her that he was hoping to stop this before it got much worse. The humans were doing a pretty good job of destroying their race without the promise of Paradise making them do it even faster.
The professor strode into the room and set his briefcase down on the large, oak-panelled desk in the middle of the room. He opened the hard, leather case and withdrew a handful of papers full of his neat handwriting, and laid them out on the table before him. “Afternoon gentlemen,” he greeted, though he used the term gentlemen very loosely. There was one human in the light, spacious room – a young man with spiky brown hair who was dressed in a black Armani suit with a fancy Calvin Klein pen between his fingers. Somehow, he made this expensive outfit look casual, a task made even harder by the gold Rolex strapped to his wrist. “Bet that lot must’ve cost you a pretty penny.” The professor knew that the cost of the outfit was nothing but small change to him, but didn’t feel in the slightest bit embarrassed by his own high street suit. If any thing he felt over-dressed compared to the third and final figure in the room – a figure completely covered by dark red robes which almost touched the floor. He wasn’t quite sure if this one was human or – he wasn’t sure if he actually wanted to know. It was much easier to deal with each other if they didn’t get overly-familiar.
The oak table shook a little as the robed figure put his human-looking feet up on the smooth surface, half slipping off his black flip-flops. “Aaah,” he sighed as he leaned back in his leather chair. “You people really like your leather, don’t you? I’m not complaining, though.”
“Leather’s comfortable,” said the wealthy human. “People work faster and better when they’re comfortable.”
“Is that right? How interesting.”
The man in Armani looked out of the large window which made up almost one whole wall of the room, and squinted against the bright sun. They were on the twenty third floor of a large office building behind the warehouse and the people walking around on the ground were barely visible even as tiny dots. “Are you comfortable? Don’t you think you’d work harder if you were sitting in a chair like this?”
“Yes, I probably would,” agreed the shaman – who may or may not be human. He looked human to the professor, but appearances could be deceptive. This warehouse and office block looked, to the casual observer, like any other place of business – no-one would have imagined that this place held the secrets to a, hopefully, new and improved life. “But I sorely doubt that everyone you employs works from one of these seats.”
“No, they don’t,” he conceded. Most of the workers – secreraries, typists, and the like – sat in cushioned computer chairs. “But they’re still comfortable. I haven’t had any complaints.”
“I hate to interrupt this conversation,” began Professor Wright, “but could we discuss the issue at hand.” He shuffled the papers he had taken from his briefcase.
“Well, you called this meeting. What are your problems with how things are going?”
Professor Wright looked between the other two figures and stared at the door, expectantly. “Shouldn’t we wait for the Information Officer? I mean, she should be here.”
“I’ve left her a dozen messages but there’s no word of her.”
“She’s probably sick. There’re a lot of flu bugs going round,” said the shaman. “I wouldn’t worry too much.”
“Anyway,” sighed Professor Wright. “I’ve got no problems as such but, as of lunchtime tomorrow, we’re not in a position to turn back on this. I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page.”
“You sound like you’ve got some concerns.”
“It’s just,” he paused, searching for the right words. The shaman took his feet off the table and leaned in to listen. “I’m not so sure this is the right way to save the entire human race. I’ve –“
The shaman took over. “There’s been an increase in street crime in the last few months. It seems to be getting worse. But we knew that things would get worse before they get better.”
The third man tapped his pen against his cheek as he thought. “But it’s only been a slight increase, hasn’t it?”
“Well, yeah. But it’s a big difference overall. And after the move becomes permanent, it’ll get really bad and everyone will be fighting each other.”
“Look,” said the professor. “You just said that things will get worse. I’m just not sure I want to be partly responsible for destroying half the human race.”
“How are you getting on with that text?”
The shaman opened the ancient book and hunched over it, pulling the dark hood of his robes further over his head. “Not too well,” he admitted. “I think I know what it’s written in. I think it’s two different dialects of Alvareshnik, but they’re at such different ends of the spectrum that they look like completely different languages.”
“Alvareshnik demons?” asked the professor curiously. “Never heard of them.”
“You wouldn’t,” said the other suited man. “Not if you don’t research demons, and also because they’ve been extinct for almost two centuries.” He was one of the few people who actually believed in real demons, which was partly why the plan to rid the world of monsters had appealed to him.
“Not your run-of-the-mill hell-bent-on-total-destruction kind of demons either. It actu
ally makes a weird kind of sense. I’ll need to do some research on the race – maybe if I understand them, I’ll understand the spell they used.”
“It’s worth a shot. How are the calculations going, prof?”
“As you know, it depends heavily on his spells going right. I’ve worked out that by tomorrow, the sun will’ve moved too much for it to be stopped. We can stop saying the spells but that won’t stop it from turning. And I personally think that things will be harder if we let the sun go at it’s own pace.”
The shaman closed the book and peered across the table at the sheets of writng. “Which is why we need to decide now if we want to stop it. Because it’s our last chance?”
“Well, I don’t want to stop it. This is our only chance to cleanse our world of anyone who wishes to cause harm.”
“What you need to understand is that violence is going to escalate beyond belief before the final stage is completed.”
“But the end result will be no violence?”
“Yes, but there might not be anyone left to demonstrate that. No-one human at any rate.”
“So, is everyone agreed?” asked the shaman, holding down the urge to look out of the window. He wasn’t the biggest fan of heights, though he was braver than many in his tribe – some of them didn’t even have the proverbial guts to cross over into the human dimension. “No turning back?”
“Agreed,” said the two men in suits. “Well, we’ve started it. It’s not really right to go back on it when we’ve decided to give them Heaven.”
The shaman stood up and leaned across the table. “It’s too late to back out now,” he said, picking up on the professor’s doubts.
“I’m not saying we should stop, I’m just concerned that maybe the world is better off without this – it’s their choice to hurt each other.”