Billy the Kid and the Vampyres of Vegas, Page 5

  But the remaining vampyres were on top of him now, catching him, holding him, tearing at him. He felt claws in his flesh, in his hair.

  And then Billy the Kid went down.

  17.

  Scathach stopped five floors below the penthouse. She had run up twenty-five flights of stairs and had encountered no one, but now she could smell the guards on the floors above. Vampyre. The metallic odor of old blood and rotten meat.

  The Shadow padded silently down a corridor and chose a door at random. It was unlocked. The room it led into was even larger than the one below, and even more opulently decorated. As she crossed the floor, she counted eight television sets. Sliding open the patio door, she stepped out onto the balcony. The view across Las Vegas was spectacular. Although it was still night overhead, the sky to the east had turned salmon and mauve and she knew it was only minutes until sunrise. The lights on that side of the city had faded and turned tawdry. Ignoring the Do Not Stand On This Railing sign, she climbed up and balanced on the railing. Turning her back to the city, she reached up and found a handhold. It was only five floors to the penthouse.

  She could hear vampyres and cucubuths moving restlessly on each of the next four floors, and she caught fragments of a dozen conversations in languages no longer spoken on the Earth Shadowrealm. The creatures were worried; some even sounded frightened. They knew the Shadow was coming. Scathach grinned, showing her own vampire teeth: it was nice to know that she still inspired fear in the blood drinkers.

  Catching the rail of the final floor, she heaved herself up onto the penthouse balcony. She stood outside the glass door and peered in to assess the situation. In the center of the huge space was a wooden kitchen chair, and tied to the chair, facing the door, with his back to her, was the man she had come to rescue.

  Scathach’s instincts were to charge in and untie him, but over the centuries she had learned to temper her first reactions with caution. Tilting her head to one side, she closed her eyes and allowed her other senses to expand.

  Blocking out the acrid, sickly smells of the city, the blood and copper of the vampyre and the paint and plaster of the room, she smelled the man. It was an odor she had not smelled in millennia, strong and heady: honey and wet grass, a hint of sea salt, the muskiness of wet bog land, the tang of peat smoke.

  Scathach breathed in deeply, indulging herself for the last time, remembering the man, remembering the time when she had been in love. She had been happy then.

  There was only his scent. He was alone in the room. And that was wrong. If he was a prisoner—then where were his guards?

  Scathach breathed deeply again, and there, right at the edge of her consciousness, was a second odor. Faint and bitter: the chalkiness of crushed eggshells, the musty ammonia of a fouled nest: the Morrigan. The Crow Goddess had been here.

  All this had to be a trap.

  Scathach turned and scanned the lightening skies, but there was no sign of the Morrigan. She unsheathed her two short swords, caught the edge of the door, flung it open and launched herself into the room. Rolling across the floor, she came up behind the figure tied to the chair and her left-hand sword flashed, slicing through the thick ropes in one smooth movement.

  The man surged out of the chair and spun to face her.

  And even though she knew who it was, Scathach felt as if she had been struck a hammer blow.

  He was as she remembered him: short, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with eyes the color of wet stone and fine golden hair hanging to his shoulders. He had been born with seven fingers on each hand.

  “I knew you would come for me,” he said in the language of ancient Ireland.

  “Cuchulain,” she breathed. The only man she had ever loved.

  18.

  “I’ve gone back to my original name. I’m called Setanta.” He rubbed his wrists, smiling broadly at her. “You’ve not changed in the slightest.” His eyes sparkled. “Except for the hair. Short. I like it.”

  “The—the last time I saw you …,” Scathach stammered.

  “I was dead.”

  The Shadow nodded. Her lips moved before she could find the breath to say the words. “Dead. Aoife and I came for you, but the Morrigan was already carrying your body away.”

  “You should have come sooner,” Setanta said quietly. He clasped his hands behind his back and stepped past her to look at the rising sun. A thin bar of amber was creeping across the ceiling. “I needed you, Shadow. But you were not there.”

  “We came … Aoife and I …” There were bloodred tears on her face now. “We put aside our differences and came for you.”

  “Do you know how long it took for me to die on that hillside?” His voice had changed; there was a streak of anger running through it. He walked slowly around the stricken Shadow. “Behind me, my entire army lay ensorcelled and asleep, and before me lay the horde of the Witch Queen. I was left to stand alone against the Queen’s army.”

  “And you got what you always wanted: that day you became a legend,” Scathach said quietly. “The stories say that you tied yourself to a stone and that none of the Queen’s army dared approach you until a raven landed on your shoulder. Only then did they know you were dead.”

  “I died because you were not there,” Cuchulain whispered, walking close to Scathach, pointing an accusing finger. The anger was now almost palpable in every word. “You are as responsible as they are for my death.” He was behind her now, and as he spoke, he lifted a huge broadsword from behind a pillar, gripped it in both hands and swung.

  Lost in her grief, the Shadow smelled the metal only at the very last moment. She heard it part the air. Instinct sent her forward and down, and the razor-sharp blade took just the tips of her spiked hair. She rolled to her feet, bringing her swords up as Cuchulain attacked.

  “I blame you, Shadow. You. You. You.” He hacked and slashed, the ferocity of his attack driving her back across the room.

  Scathach defended herself but made no move to attack.

  Cuchulain slashed at her with the huge broadsword. “The Morrigan rescued me before I breathed my last and brought me to the Tir na nOg Shadowrealm. The Elder Crom Cruach made me immortal, but in return I was bound to him for a millennium of servitude. A thousand years in the service of that monster. You have no idea of the things he made me do, and for every world I’ve destroyed, I blamed you.” He swung again, the heavy blade striking sparks off Scathach’s swords. “For every death I’ve caused, I cursed your name.” He cut again, and the Shadow jerked her head back. She actually felt the whisper of air as the edge keened past her throat.

  “Cuchulain,” she breathed.

  “Setanta!” he roared. “Cuchulain died on that Irish mountainside when you betrayed me.”

  A surge of anger roused Scathach. “I never betrayed you. Because of you, my sister and I haven’t spoken in centuries. I loved you. I have always loved you. I still love you,” she added in a raw whisper.

  “I don’t love you.” He thrust with the sword. Scathach sidestepped and the blade punched straight through what was meant to be shatterproof glass. When he jerked the sword free, the entire window dissolved into glass pebbles.

  Cuchulain pressed home his attack, hacking and cutting. He had been trained by the best—Scathach herself—and she struggled to parry and block. It was like fighting her mirror image. The force of the blows almost drove her to her knees, and the edges of her own swords were chipping and denting.

  “I took you into my home, Cuchulain,” Scathach said sadly. “I trained you to be the finest warrior in the known world. And I broke my own vow—never to fall in love with a human. I loved you, Cuchulain, with all my heart. There was nothing you couldn’t do. Nothing couldn’t do. But you betrayed and fell in love with my sister,” she added bitterly, and her anger flowed through her sword. Suddenly she attacked in a blur of metal. Cuchulain’s sword was ripped from his grasp and went clattering across the room.

  Scathach sheathed her swords and turned to face the broken window
, breathing in the crisp morning air. “The phone call was nothing more than a ruse to get me here, I take it?” she asked coolly.

  “You’re the one who taught me to bring my enemies to my ground, to fight them on my terms. I’ve been hunting you for a thousand years.”

  “I did teach you that.” Gripping the window frame, the Shadow looked out over the wakening city. She could hear car horns now, and the first white contrails from the early-morning flights were visible in the skies over Nevada. “Did I ever mean anything to you?” she asked.

  Setanta hesitated a fraction before responding. “Once, perhaps, when I was young and knew no better.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, you mean nothing to me,” he said cruelly.

  “I don’t believe that,” she said wistfully.

  “It’s true, Shadow. You failed me and I became an immortal slave to a monster. In time, I too became a monster, a master of blood drinkers and flesh eaters.”

  “You became what you were meant to be,” Scathach murmured. “You fulfilled your destiny.”

  “And now it’s time to fulfill yours—it is time to die, Shadow.”

  Scathach turned.

  Setanta was standing in the center of the room, holding a spear as tall as he was. The head of the spear was a pyramid-shaped wedge of barbed and hooked metal. The shaft was a pale white bone. “Recognize this?” he asked.

  “The Gáe Bolga,” she whispered. The Death Spear. She hadn’t seen the legendary weapon in millennia. Any wound from this weapon—no matter how minor—was fatal. “I gave that to you a long time ago.” She turned back to the window as if unconcerned. “What will you do when you kill me, Cuchulain?”

  “I am Setanta,” he insisted. “There is a war coming, Shadow. The Elders will reclaim this Shadowrealm. I have been told to build a vampyre army, to create legions of cucubuths and hold them in readiness to unleash them on San Francisco and Los Angeles. When the war is over, I will control the entire West Coast of America.”

  “You could stand against them and fight with me,” she suggested. “We’ve faced down monsters before.”

  “I prefer the winning side.”

  “Did you ever wonder why I loved you, Cuchulain?” Scathach asked.

  “Everyone loved me,” he said arrogantly.

  “I loved you because I once saw in you the very best of the new human race. But that love blinded me to what you really were.”

  Setanta ignored her words. Drawing back his arm, he flung the Gáe Bolga. It screamed through the air. “Time to die.”

  “Time to die,” Scathach echoed. Without looking around, she stepped to the side, caught the spear in midair, turned and flung it back at the young man.

  Setanta managed a single horrified scream before the spear took him high in the chest. The weapon vibrated, the bone-white shaft shimmering with bands of color. Setanta’s golden hair turned gray, then white. His smooth skin ran with wrinkles. “You said you loved me …,” he breathed.

  The Shadow’s face was a mask. “I loved Cuchulain, but you’re Setanta.” She clapped her hands sharply together and the man exploded into fine white powder. For a single moment, a cloud hung in the center of the room, a vaguely man-shaped outline in dust.

  The door burst open and Billy the Kid appeared. The sudden draft of air sent the powder curling past Scathach, through the broken window and out into the morning air.

  Billy was red-faced and gasping and his entire body was covered in filthy grey-black grit. “You okay?” he wheezed.

  “Fine.” She turned back to the window and watched the Crow Goddess swoop over the city, following the almost invisible twist of dust in the air.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  Scathach crossed the floor and lifted the Gáe Bolga, tapping the head against her boot. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “And the person you came to rescue?”

  “Set free,” she said. She looked Billy up and down. “I am pleased that you survived.”

  “I’m rather pleased myself.” Billy grinned. “The vampyres—with a—were so intent on fighting me, they forgot about the sun!” He brushed some of the filthy grit off his clothes. “You should have seen it. One moment they were getting set to eat me and the next it looked like an explosion in a flour factory!”

  “And then you raced up here to rescue me,” Scathach teased.

  Beneath the gritty ash, Billy the Kid’s cheeks flared crimson.

  The Shadow squeezed his shoulder hard. “You remind me of someone I knew a long time ago.”

  19.

  “You never did tell me what’s in the jar I delivered,” Billy said as they pulled out of the garage.

  Scathach nodded. “Yes. The jar. Have you ever heard of Pandora’s Box?”

  “Sure,” the Kid answered, then jerked his thumb behind him toward the trunk of the car. “But that’s a jar, not a box.”

  Scathach smiled, showing her vampire teeth. “Well, pithos was a bad translation. It doesn’t mean ‘box.’ It means ‘jar.’ ”

  “So we just drove to Las Vegas with all the evils in the world in the trunk of my car?”

  Scathach nodded happily. “I could hardly leave it at the dojo. Someone might have opened it.”

  Billy shook his head and let out a sigh. “All the evils of the world,” he murmured. “Can I ask what you’re going to do with them?”

  “I was going to lock them away where they would never be found.…”

  “But I’m guessing you’ve changed your mind,” Billy said.

  The Shadow smiled. She dropped her mirrored Aviators onto her face. “There’s a Shadowrealm I’m going to release them into. It’s the home of the Elder Crom Cruach.” She paused and added hesitantly, “You could tag along if you like. It’ll be dangerous.” She turned to look at him and peered over the top of her glasses. “It might even be fun.”

  An authority on mythology and folklore, Michael Scott is one of Ireland’s most successful authors. A master of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and folklore, he has been hailed by the Irish Times as “the King of Fantasy in these isles.” “Billy the Kid and the Vampyres of Vegas” is a short story based on Scott’s worldwide bestselling Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series: The Alchemyst, The Magician, The Sorceress, The Necromancer, and The Warlock, all available from Delacorte Press. Also available as an ebook original is the short story “The Death of Joan of Arc.”

  You can visit Michael Scott at dillonscott.com.

  Follow Michael on Facebook and on Twitter.

 

 

  Michael Scott, Billy the Kid and the Vampyres of Vegas

  (Series: # )

 

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on Archive.BookFrom.Net
Share this book with friends