"What do you think of that, Sara?" he asked, then continued without waiting for her to reply, "My word, but I think it's going to be such fun."
He advanced on Braze, his knife raised, when from the doorway behind them a voice spoke.
"The fun is only about to begin, blood drinker. For me, that is."
The vampire’s trance still lying heavily upon her, Sara would have liked to turn her head, to see those steel grey eyes looking coolly out at the monster about to kill his brother.
Instead, Clement obliged her as he stepped into the room, placing himself between her and the Journeyman. In a white-knuckled grip, his sword gleamed.
"Oh. Another guest for the party. The errant half-brother come to save his undeserving sibling.
The Journeyman turned away from Braze, a second knife appearing in his other hand.
"Well, why not...the more the merrier, as they say."
The long blade that should have lifted the creature’s head off its shoulders slammed into the mattress and just inches from Braze’s face. Somehow, the thing that named itself the Journeyman had moved with a speed that defied all reason, its own knife forcing the sword to the side.
“Turn around, vampire. Your time on earth has come to an end,” Clement said.
“Vampire? You name me as such, but look at me and tell me...where are my fangs?” it replied as it turned to look at Clement with its single eye.
“Do you seeeeee, what I meeeeeean?” it asked with a hissing sound issuing from between its broken teeth.
Clement saw.
The creature’s face had been hammered flat. Even its lips had been burned away.
“Yeah, I see, and I don’t care,” Clement said, then burst forward with a lunge from his sword meant to cut the monster in half.
Instead, it appeared to one side of him and his own momentum carried him forward.
Clement curled away from the flickering of the knives it held, narrowly avoiding having his own abdomen opened wide. As it was, he had felt the hot lick of a blade and blood begin to run along his waistline in a shallow flow.
The grey eyed man spun around, bringing his sword back up then paused to look at the creature facing him.
Desperately, Clement searched for calm within the storm of violence. He reached out within himself, looking for that which always came of its own volition, the sense that his cause was just and that a higher purpose guided his hand.
Instead, he found only doubt while the crippled vampire brandished long bladed knives in both its hands.
It was as if the two opponents had come to an unspoken decision, then suddenly they were flying at one another. Steel against steel, sparks flew in the darkness as they spun and parried.
Clement tried everything he had ever learned. He jumped to the side, feinting first one way, then to the other, doing all that he could to force the monster back.
They danced a deadly dance as they flew together only to break apart again. Desperately, Clement tried to pit brute strength against the creature, then their faces drew horribly close together and it spoke to him.
“What an interesting weapon you have there. The craftsmanship is astounding. However, as soon as I dispose of you I will dispose of it, for you see, it obviously has a terrible effect on him and I can’t have that, can I?”
Clement risked a quick glance at his brother upon the bed. He was in chains but seemed calm, so far unhurt, although it did look as though his strange tattoos were of a far lighter hue than he remembered.
“Trying to distract me won’t work, vampire,” Clement said through gritted teeth, “My brother is just fine and is going to stay that way, if I have anything to say about it.”
The thing leered at him as they trembled with the force they each used against one another.
“Stupid, blind fool. I wasn’t talking about your brother,” it said, then spun away from him, its blade flicking out as Clement came within a hair’s breadth of having a wrist sliced wide open.
As he danced his own pirouette, Clement had just time enough to see Sara look hard at Braze after hearing the Journeyman’s words. And in the next instant, he saw her eyes go wide with the dawning of some understanding.
He had no time to consider what had just happened as he brought himself round to chop down hard with his sword like an axe, trying to drive the Journeyman back.
But, the creature did not relent and its knives flew together time and time again in a crossed lock that Clement’s sword could not cleave apart.
They circled round one another in a seeming stalemate, when suddenly the thing said, “I think I have tired of this.”
It cocked its head to the side as if hearing something from afar, then continued, “Yes. I’m quite sure that I have. And time presses for us all, does it not?”
A flurry of blows almost too fast to see hammered Clement to the floor. His sword fell to the side with a thud and then the shadow was leaning over him, its single eye gleaming with cruel delight.
“For all your efforts, you are no match for me, little man. Neither you nor your poisoned sword will stop me.”
Sara screamed, the vampire’s stupor still leaving her sluggish as she groped about herself for something, anything, that she might throw at the Journeyman.
That was when she saw it.
As with the rest of the suite, the bedroom’s far wall was of towering glass. The view of the city beyond was extraordinary and all the more so because the clear panels rose far higher than any glass she had ever seen in any other building. She was sure that it was heavily reinforced, doubtless with some cutting edge technology that Abraxis Industries had yet to release in the marketplace.
But what she saw then took her breath away. The view of the city, and its miles and miles of lights in every direction, had begun to bow inward.
The Journeyman saw it, too, as it took a step back from Clement, its knives drooping slightly in its hands as it turned toward the glass wall.
There was a whining sound, almost as if someone nearby had begun to pull a single, screeching note from a badly tuned violin. It was a sound that grew and grew while the wall bulged inward to a point that should have been impossible.
When Clement saw the Journeyman hesitate, he began to inch his hand closer to his sword hilt. He had been pounded down by the creature as if he were of no more consequence than a housefly. Yet, while it was distracted, he might have one last chance, even if it meant his own life in exchange.
His fingers were outstretched, almost to the point of touching the sword’s pommel, when Clement caught a glimpse of Sara’s face. He followed her stunned regard and his breath blew out of him.
“Sara!” he shouted even as he was turning away, rolling into a ball and facing away from the bulging glass, “Cover your face. Now!”
Sara heard Clement at the same time as she saw the Journeyman take another step back, for once without anything to say.
Like a lightning strike in slow motion, she saw great jagged fractures appear like the branches of a tree sprouting from nothing in the glass wall. Then, she, too, was flinching away, doing her best to cover her face with her hands.
The high keening sound stopped. Then, like a bomb burst, the glass blew inward in a storm of shards.
Sara felt thick chunks of it raining down upon her back. There were some heavier than others, but when she risked a glance through the fingers covering her face, she saw that while thick, the glass had broken in cubes and not jagged pieces that would have meant all their deaths in an instant.
Thank God...no, thank Braze, for safety glass, she thought. Sara gingerly put a hand down to the floor, trying to leverage herself enough to turn around. She looked up to where she had last seen the Journeyman and she froze.
Her breath stopped and it was not because she saw the Journeyman still standing, somehow proof against the violent glass explosion, but because of what she saw coming in through the opening.
It could have been Lucifer himself, only she saw no tail, nor did the being carry a pitchfork. What she did see, though, was something straight out of the Book of Revelation.
Black anger raged upon his face and it was a visage of terrible beauty. Sara knew without any question in her mind that before her now stood something that exists only in the worn pages of the blindly faithful.
This was an angel and dark flames danced over his shoulders and through his windswept hair. Enormous wings upon his back folded themselves as he set his feet upon the glass strewn floor, their color a steel grey that shifted with otherworldly iridescence.
And as he opened his mouth to speak, Sara saw deadly fangs between his full, luscious lips. What stood before them now was of such magnificence that it hurt her to look at him, and it was all the worse because she knew that he was a fallen being.
"Caim. It is enough. Your audacity is only exceeded by your vanity...fool.”
Sara saw the Journeyman flinch away from the dark angel’s words, as if the black fire that danced in a penumbra around the being would reach out and scourge him.
“You seek greatness. You wish to elevate yourself. For that I can but congratulate you.
“That you seek to rise to my height, however, is unacceptable.”
None of them dared breathe as the angel spoke. For him, only the Journeyman seemed to exist, the rest of them far beneath his notice.
“I see them, these cunning bones of your plan...you would play the game of the wolves among men. A new method of battle toward conquest for a world that has moved on from what we have always known.