Pyx's Tale- A Vow Delayed Read online

  He had a black town car idling outside Pyx’s place.

  From the outside the driver was impossible to distinguish from any normal person, but seated behind him she saw it was a Munc, short for Homunculus. They were perfect for times when Stellum wanted to seem normal but didn’t want to bother with humanity at large. Which was almost always.

  Humans were ridiculously easy to fool. Monkey see, monkey do. Have just one or two human lookalikes with you, and people assumed all was well. Hell, they usually thought you were some rich eccentric person so long as you dressed the part.

  Idiots.

  Hyuul held up the bloody thorn floating above the wooden disc inscribed with runes around the rim. It spun slowly in place, eventually as Hyuul’s focus crystallized the thorn slowed and began to point north.

  Pyx had placed her sword, Gongoran across her lap. She had the whole of the backseat to herself and made the most of it. She shut her eyes and let Hyuul work, instructing the Munc to take turn after turn.

  Magic didn’t come easily to him like it did her. Interrupting his concentration would only make the trip longer. She couldn’t miss her appointment to get into Brookmoors. She’d like to see him try to get in through their defenses to bother her again.

  The car took a corner faster than it should have; she opened her eyes to look around. They must be getting close. Hyuul was having a hard time getting a bead on the Rathborn.

  Pyx felt a brief pang of guilt. She should have been worried that the Rathborn would harm somebody. Monsters loose in densely populated urban areas were shockingly common. Humans just attributed it to gang violence or something else easily explained. The truth was humanity was a whole lot less violent than they themselves believed.

  Hunters like Hyuul - and once upon a time, Pyx - worked hard to maintain order. It was something few Magi knew of, and something most of them wouldn’t have been able to deal with anyways. They were still human with frail bodies.

  That didn’t mean there were no human Hunters. Some of the most famous were human after all; they just lacked a long life. Most Hunters did, but humans were notorious for getting themselves in too deep and ending up splattered across the wall of an abandoned warehouse somewhere.

  The car lurched to a halt.

  “It’s here somewhere,” said Hyuul over his shoulder to her. “Should be easy to pick up the trail. You ready?”

  Pyx didn’t bother to open her eyes. She gave him a nod and opened the door.

  The street was surprisingly empty for mid-afternoon. Stellum senses were superior in most ways to humans, most of what came across as obvious and impending danger to a Stellum was regarded as a vague feeling of dread to a human. Still, if you hit them on the head hard enough they got the hint eventually. Especially the more superstitious folk.

  Far back in the past the Hunters had it easy. Humans were quick to lock and bar their doors and stay inside at night when they felt a monster was lurking about. It made it easier to track and kill it.

  Now everybody was outside filming everything with their phones or flat out ignoring the warning their brains were shouting at them.

  Shops clustered the street; Hyuul leaned into passenger side and spoke to the Munc while Pyx strapped Gongoran onto her back. It stuck up over her left shoulder reaching past the tips of her horns while the sheathed blade ran down to about mid-calf off to the side.

  It was a common mistake of novice greatsword wielders to have the angle of their sheathed blade too great or too shallow. If the sword was set at a shallow angle making it practically vertical, it’d smack you in the back of the head. Sometimes your legs would get tripped up on the sheath depending on how you ran. On the other hand if you set the angle too wide, alleys were a death sentence. Any narrow confines prevented you from pulling your weapon out and using it properly.

  Unfortunately, most novice Hunters didn’t live past their first mistake.

  Hyuul straightened up and motioned her over.

  Pyx walked over, all the while feeling conflicted. Had she made the wrong choice in choosing Brookmoors? She didn’t think so, but it was hard to ignore the way her blood sang in her veins. The hunt was about to start and she could see the same nearly manic thrill in Hyuul’s golden eyes.

  “Tell me we don’t have to search through all these alleys,” she said. “You know I have an appointment to keep.”

  He gave her an apologetic grin. “C’mon Pyx. It’ll be like old times.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  The hours wiled away with fruitless searching through the back alleys of Chinatown. It was worse than the labyrinthine warren of a Varkessen’s lair. Everything ran together in a confusing jumble. Though the smell of cooking food was alluring.

  I could go for some fried bananas.

  It took Pyx a while to notice that in their search they kept circling around an abandoned garment factory. There were faint traces of the Rathborn, but they were old. Far older than Hyuul had led her to believe. And none of them led them anywhere concrete.

  At least they didn’t have to contend with the police. There was nothing worse than a monster prowling around upper class suburbia. They called the cops for every little thing. Strange women prowling the streets at night? Must be here to snatch their precious, sheltered little babies.

  “What’s got your face twisted like that?” asked Hyuul, wiping his gloves on his jacket after sifting through some torn trash bags in search of a clue.

  “Just thinking about the time we were about to corner a Vasillee in that posh neighborhood in Pennsylvania.”

  “The one where the cops showed up and while trying to arrest us, let the thing get away?”

  Pyx nodded with a scowl. It had taken them another month to find that damned thing’s trail again. And in the meantime it had claimed five more victims.

  Without any fresh clues, they went to the garment factory. It didn’t take long to find a point of ingress. Hyuul ripped the plywood nailed up over the nearest window. The noise of grating metal sliding against wood filled the deserted alley and made Pyx’s skin crawl.

  “Lady’s first.”

  Pyx looked at him and grinned. “Pussy.” She placed a hand on some crushed glass and leapt into the darkness.

  They searched floor by floor, one of them covering the points of exit and the other venturing further inside. Ancient machines littered the place. Footing was remarkably unsteady, and she was sure the fluffy white fibers peeking out of the ceiling and bits of the wall were asbestos.

  They found more signs of the Rathborn, including a few victims that couldn’t be more than a week old judging by the smell.

  To any human, it would’ve been pitch-black inside. Even to Pyx’s normal vision it would’ve been nothing more than shades of gray. Better than darkness, but her natural eyesight in the dark left a lot to be desired. A full blooded Stellum could see far better than she could.

  That’s where the masques came in. As well as protecting her eyes, they provided illumination in the dark and hid the inner light of her eyes from things that went bump in the dark. All she had to do was think of what she wanted and the masque obliged.

  It still looked stupid.

  The darkness was about as bright to their enhanced vision as a full moon night. Dark, but images had sharpness to them that her natural eyesight lacked in the dark. Still, the sun was beginning to set and Pyx was strangely worried about Sylvie.

  Despite the imminent danger she was in - Rathborns were no joke - she had the strangest sensation that Sylvie was in trouble and that Pyx wasn’t there for her. Instead she was off chasing a life she had given up. A life she had vowed to walk away from.

  Yet here she was, skulking about an abandoned warehouse looking for a monster to slay.

  “I found something,” said Hyuul. He was further in the room, kneeling down in some sort of office room away from the production floor.

  Pyx was guarding the stairs. Two floors down, two to go, she thought. The sun slanted through the
broken and dusty window panes. Thick, soupy golden light spilled through them. Dust motes danced in the beams. She kept her eyes pointedly elsewhere so her night vision wasn’t ruined.

  The upper floors weren’t quite as dark as the first two had been. That was probably to keep people from breaking in. No good people. Like Pyx and Hyuul.

  “What is it?” Pyx came over silently, barely leaving more than a faint scuffling in the dusty floor.

  “Do you recognize this?” He held up a thick spike of ivory material that looked a lot like a tusk. It was about as long as her forearm.

  She took it from him and twisted it around before realization sparked in her. The slight ridges in the tooth, the dark threads that gave the ivory-like substance its strange coloration, they were strangely familiar to her.

  Her breath caught in her throat and fear sent a shiver down her spine. She dropped the item, knowing full well what it belonged to, and also knowing they weren’t hunting a Rathborn.

  Not anymore.

  “Hyuul, that was a tooth. We need to go. Now.”

  He stood up, dusting his gloves off and taking out his breakers.

  She always gave him shit about them, they were black rods tipped with gold at either end, and were about two feet long. They had always looked like a magician’s wand to Pyx, the sort that pulled rabbits out of a hat and sawed a woman in half. They were only lacking the white tip.

  “This isn’t the time for your macho bullshit, Hyuul. That tooth came from a Gxen.” She took a moment to let that sink into his thick head. “Got it? Good.” She headed for the stairs.

  If they were up against a Gxen, they’d need a lot more than two people. Pyx had only seen one at a distance, and that was enough for her. They were a Horror, a distinct classification of monsters that didn’t come from their plane of existence. The kind of things that ate Rathborns.

  “But the Contract.”

  “Screw your Contract, Hyuul! Do you want to die? If there’s a Rathborn here, it’s been gutted and eaten by the Gxen. We’re going. You can come back in a few days when the Gxen has gone and you can claim you killed the Rathborn.”

  The faint scratching and clicking sounds from the stairwell told her that their window of escape just shut like a coffin lid. She had just enough time to shove Hyuul down behind a divider in the office and dive behind the desk herself.

  Peeking out, she saw it in all its hideous glory.

  The Gxen stood nearly seven feet tall; vaguely humanoid except where you’d expect a neck was a ridge of spiny bone stretching down its back. It had a vestigial looking head with black sunken eyes recessed into where a neck should go. It gave a whole new meaning to “no neck.”

  In place of a chest and stomach was a vertical maw jam-packed with fangs of varying sizes. Its long muscular arms ended in three claws and a thumb claw half a foot long. And the worst thing of all to Pyx was its skin. It had the sickening look of an over microwaved hot dog, rubbery and yet stiff and slightly wrinkled.

  She cursed to herself. They could leap out the window; they might survive the fall from a third story window if they didn’t land on anything below. But then the Gxen would be on them, and if they did get hurt they just signed their own death certificates.

  There wasn’t even enough room for her to draw Gongoran, and she wasn’t ready yet to throw away the one advantage they had. They needed to achieve resonance to have any chance of fighting this thing.

  It was a little known fact that extraplanar creatures were uniquely tuned to specific frequencies and by finding and introducing the same frequency (resonance) a Hunter could weaken its quarry. Sometimes to the point of debilitation altogether.

  Most living creatures couldn’t be triggered by any sound capable of being created from its home plane, but a being from another plane altogether? Well, that was fair game. Only it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The frequencies varied wildly, it was a living creature after all and not a piece of wood.

  That and she had absolutely no idea what a Gxen’s resonance was.

  Pyx slipped out her phone from a pocket in her jacket, shielding the screen so the light didn’t bleed and give away their location. She scrolled through her music with a flick of her fingerless gloved thumb. Resonance was a trick her mom had shown her.

  She felt a momentary pang of loss. Mom had wanted her to pursue the arcane arts, not follow in her footsteps as a Hunter. Soon, she thought. But to get to Brookmoors I’ll need to get past a Gxen, so I’ll need every advantage I can get.

  She looked over at Hyuul curled up like a viper, ready to spring. Thankfully he was looking at her and she didn’t need to find a way of getting his attention without getting the Gxen’s. She signed to him, moving her free hand in a blur of symbols and shapes: I need a harmonic baseline if I’m going to make out a resonance. I need you to keep it busy.

  He gave a brief nod of understanding and signed back with a dorky thumbs up.

  Hyuul was hopeless.

  Pyx was just happy that he apparently had no idea how screwed they really were. She nodded to him and bounced up onto her heels, becoming a prime target to the Gxen. It was the way Hunters worked, you didn’t ask your partner to go out on their own while you huddled. If you wanted them to hold it off, it was on you to provide an opening.

  Only, the Gxen was gone. She had only looked at her phone for a second. Where had it gone?

  She set her phone to record and leapt out over the desk, nearly twisting her ankle as she landed because the floor was so damn dusty. With one hand she cleared Gongoran from its sheath. It wasn’t meant to be wielded one-handed, but it’d do in a pinch. Besides she had to keep an eye on her phone and there was no way in Hell she was going to walk out there with a Gxen unarmed.

  Gongoran gleamed, catching the thick golden light of the fleeing sun with its wave-edged blade. She flicked her gaze skyward and found the Gxen on its back scrambling across the ceiling using its claws as footholds. How it did it so soundlessly, she had no idea.

  It skittered towards her like a bug. Its vertical, fang-filled maw wriggled with anticipation. She fought down the rising bile and leapt to the side just as it pushed off the ceiling where she was, right in front of the office where Hyuul was waiting.

  The Gxen made a sickening series of snaps. Its four limbs twisted around the wrong way to brace itself on the ground. Pyx cringed and took a few extra steps back. Before the Gxen could get to its full height, Hyuul exploded out from the office swinging his breakers with practiced precision.

  Crackling echoes bounced off the large empty space as each hit connected with the Gxen’s back. His breakers hit with the force of a sledgehammer; multiplying the force he swung by orders of magnitude. A decent swing would crush through a cinderblock, reducing it to gray dust.

  It merely bounced off the Gxen’s hide.

  Sure. Why not be resistant to bone-crushing force?

  There was a silver-lining. The force of his repeated blows did pick up on her phone. She glanced at the frequencies that it had caught. It wasn’t a full sample, especially considering it hadn’t even hurt the damn thing, but it was enough to give an educated guess.

  It looked silly to an outside observer, and Pyx was glad to let most other Hunters thing she was a stupid girl who needed a dance track playing to fight monsters. The reality was, music was a constant shifting set of frequencies that often played in a similar range. Rarely reserved to a single artist, but she’d collected a few bands that fit the bill and she happened to like. There was no harm in it.

  Some bands had a unique sound for reasons she couldn’t understand. Moorbolgurs diamondhide was impossible to penetrate without a Magi, that is unless you played Imagine Dragons. She never did understand why. To be honest, she didn’t care. Results were king.

  The Gxen swung out and caught Hyuul with the back of its meaty clawed hand. He went flying into a monstrous sewing machine and disappeared into a cloud of dust. It twisted about to face Pyx, disregarding Hyuul entirely.

  Awesome
.

  She had to make a choice. With a flick of her thumb she scrolled halfway down her list and tapped. Hardcore gangster rap it was.

  The music blared out from the speakers and the Gxen drew up short for all but a moment at the strange sound. Deep thumping beats pulsed from her hand, held out towards the Gxen. The second passed and it lunged the rest of the ten feet towards her.

  Shit. Okay, no gangster rap. How about punk?

  Whatever it was, it was something with a thumping hard sound. That was all the hint she’d gleaned. She managed to switch up the song and spin out of the way. A feeble slash of Gongoran swept across her most vulnerable areas to keep the Gxen back.

  Hyuul had recovered and was charging its crouched form, Pyx barely had enough time to shout out a warning. The Gxen kicked out with surprising force, raking its clawed feet towards Hyuul who had just managed to pull up short. The claws missed eviscerating him by inches.