CHAPTER 56: OLD TESTAMENT

  GARLAND HEIGHTS—NOVEMBER 25th, 1992 | AFTERNOON

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  Dean huffed, eyes baggy and puffed.

  Blood stained his body and holes had been torn in his kevlar vest, his workwear jacket, and the hardy jeans painted in the odd splotch of burgundy. Broken vials of pasteurized demon blood lay by his feet, and his dirty blond hair was lathered in grease and sweat. Around him was a fading field of ice, half-melted and fused with dirt and the odd puddle of ink.

  Opposite of him, standing in front of a frozen and icy dome stood Leroy, panting heavily with eyes reddened by a forced wakefulness. Blood-red ice froze over the parts of him that required attention—portions of his torso, his shoulders, bits of his upper thigh, his back.

  All three of the vials of pasteurized demon blood he had on his person had yet to be touched. If he drank one, he’d be too tempted to drink another. Double-dosing or triple-dosing this close to the raid was foolish, maybe even more foolish than withholding from it in the first place. All Leroy knew was that he couldn’t afford a hangover come tomorrow. Not this close to the raid. He needed a clear head.

  Charred leather dotted his trusty jacket in more places he would’ve liked, and in spite of his tiredness, punctuated by a pronounced ringing of the ears and a sluggishness to his breathing, he wore a smile.

  “What… the fuck are you smiling about?” Dean said, spitting blood where a flame once was.

  Leroy lurched over with both hands on his knees. “That’s five vials you’ve taken. Two.. hnng…on day one, three today. Even with them being spread out, you’re looking at one hell of a hangover, Dresker. Don’t know what that looks like, haven’t known or met anyone stupid enough yet.”

  Leroy lazily clenched a fist and slogged his arm down. From one of the remaining pockets of ice, a sword-shaped blade emerged and zipped toward Dean.

  Dean's thumb hummed with power. Leroy grimaced. He hated this ring the most—a lanky coppery ring set with runes around a resin-preserved scarab. A scintillating greenish gold of a beetle-like insectile chiton covered his right arm up to his elbow. He grabbed the blade of ice and crushed it between his fingers.

  Leroy expected to end things sooner, but Dean had realized early on that the only way he could win was by forcing Leroy’s attention elsewhere: towards Cameron and Moira.

  Dean had faced certain death more than a handful of times, and on each occasion, by way of one of his many rings, he chose to focus his assault on the dome of ice that kept Cameron and Moira safe. That meant more ice from his frozen field had to be repurposed and fed into it to fix where he’d pierced it, which meant he had to focus less on killing Dean and more on keeping his underarbiter and his hired witch alive.

  Persistent use of Yaerzul’s brand was equally as taxing, and forced Leroy to tap into reserves of energy that he frankly lacked. Paired with a gnawing hunger in his stomach and the inefficiencies of two night’s worth of sleeplessness, sentry duty was about all he could muster by the end of it.

  And over the course of those two days, he’d grown more familiar with Dean than he would’ve liked between unspoken, mutually agreed upon breaks in their skirmish, where both combatants were forced to gather their bearings in one way or another.

  He even learned most of the names of each of his rings and their components, all of which Dean admitted he acquired by corpse-robbing incoming migrants seeking to make it through the Pines to Brinehaven—the ones who, for some reason, braved the hinterlands rather than attempting entry through the main road. In the years that passed he’d apparently gotten them all appraised to learn the nature of their components.

  Spitfire, worn on his index finger, made from the tongue of a zmei, spirit serpents of fire that haunt widowed women in the Balkans.

  Ichor, worn on his middle finger, was made from the severed and shrunken tentacle of an adolescent kraken.

  Carapace, worn on his thumb, which he’d just used against Leroy, made from a resin-casted scarab.

  Bane, worn on his ring finger, was the one that unsettled him the most. It was made from the eye of a witch, supposedly.

  On his pinky was the one he called Jailhouse, which he’d yet to use. A trump card, according to Dean. He was waiting for a chance to use it, and swore by the fact that it would curb Leroy’s confidence by way of an overdue defeat. Over the course of the two days that had passed, Spitfire was used the most, then it was Carapace, and then Ichor after that, which had only been used a handful of times. He’d only seen Bane in action once.

  Some could be used seemingly without limit, while others demanded some level of time to drag out another use. If there was any rule of thumb to it, the more potent the ability of the artificed object, the less frequently it could be used. In his conversation with Esme, she’d said certain things required more components, and others less. It followed, then, that some of Dean’s rings likely needed more materials to work with than what he had.

  Dean’s enthusiasm for his rings hadn’t crossed over into other areas.

  Not once had he touched upon the full extent of what he’d done to Silvio, and for all of Leroy’s anger regarding the situation, he imagined whatever had been done to him to get Leroy’s location couldn’t have been worse than what Leroy himself had done over the years. His time as a member of the Syndicate made his later years as an arbiter look tame in comparison.

  The air of respect that grew between them was something they seemed to silently take into account without ever fully acknowledging, too. If the roles were reversed, Leroy would’ve done the same to whoever Dean’s Silvio was without a second thought. In another life, Dean would’ve been one hell of an arbiter—assuming he never got his rings nicked away.

  “You stay sharp now, this isn’t.. uhhng—fuck—the moment to be slacking,” Dean said, voice punctuated by pain.

  His voice focused Leroy’s attention back towards him, an attention that grew harder and harder to maintain with each passing minute.

  Two days of complete physical exhaustion had a way of doing that, and Leroy couldn’t help but once again wish for his youth back in moments such as these.

  “You don’t seem too spry yourself,” Leroy said with a huff.

  Dean pursed his lips. Smoke pulsed from his nose, and with a delayed jerk, he spat another baseball-sized orb of fire in Leroy’s direction.

  Leroy raised a single slothful finger. A small shard of ice intercepted it. Steam burst out from the union of ice and flame.

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  “Sooner or later, Dresker, the Civic and Occult Authority will take notice of what’s been going on here, and if they haven’t already, they will,” Leroy said, slapping himself in the face, blinking widely.

  “Let them come,” Dean said.

  Bane hissed with occult power. The eye laden into the ring itself erupted in a dark orange, and with more focus than it should’ve taken, Dean pointed his ring finger towards a pile of scrap and then towards Leroy.

  “Fuck,” Leroy muttered.

  Metal creaked and avalanched down from the small hill’s worth of old pipes, cast-iron sheets, and rusted parts. Dean wasn’t manipulating like a kineticist would, he had marked Leroy as a recipient of bad fortune: the receiver of localized disaster.

  The prospect of getting crushed to death squeezed out whatever adrenaline was left in Leroy. He planted a foot, stepped off center line, and pivoted. Dim blue encased all that was left of the field of ice, and all of the frost was repurposed into a row of three walls. Crystals of ice spattered out in different directions as the barriers absorbed the blow, with only the final of the three walls still standing.

  Leroy leaned a tired hand on it and wheezed.

  Dean paced towards him, panting like a dog. “Don’t look like you can keep this up for much longer, old man.”

  Leroy steeled his gaze. “You picked the day for it, I’ll give you that.”

  “There something you wanna say?”

  Leroy gestured behind him towards the dome of ice. It held up strong. “You focused on that more than you focused on me, and I’ve been focusing on that at the expense of focusing on you.”

  “Didn’t peg you for the type to make excuses,” Dean retorted.

  Leroy scoffed. “Look. Pissed as I am, the fact is you’re far from the apple of my eye. And I’ve got a hunch that you were betting on that.”

  “Bettting on what?”

  “Having to babysit, damn it,” Leroy said.

  His vision blurred in and out, and each blink felt heavier than the last. The ringing in Leroy’s ears grew louder by the second, and exhaustion weighed him. To continue to hold himself upright against the icy wall—just leaning against it—felt Herculean. Dean’s youth kept him upright, and with the amount of remnant pasteurized demon blood in his veins, he was in a better condition than Leroy.

  Indignation soured Leroy’s tired face. Dean Dresker was a right bastard and a real thorn in his side, and he now stood only a few feet away from Leroy, which was the closest he’d ever gotten to him thus far.

  “Why don’t you take off those girly damn rings, and we settle this the old fashion way,” Leroy said, finding some modicum of strength to stand straight again.

  “Don’t think you’d much like that,” Dean said. “Bullet to the brain would be cleaner. Less.. personal.”

  “This isn’t personal?”

  “It’s what you’re supposed to do,” Dean said. “What’s expected of a person who's responsible for other people. See, I’m Old Testament. Eye for an eye sort of thing, and I don’t much care for if the world goes blind or not, long as I’ve still got mine and the people who run with me still have theirs. They gotta’ have some way of knowing where to look—who to look towards—and a man who can’t protect what is his ain’t nothing much to look at. Those guards, hell, can’t tell you the names of half of em’, but they were mine.”

  “Then you understand… why I can’t let you take another step,” Leroy said, spitting a glob of blood to the side.

  “Sure do. But it don’t mean I’m going to bloody my knuckles again, did enough of that on your buddy.”

  Dean inched closer and closer to Leroy, his boots cracking stray dredges of ice that once made up a field of frozen anger. A slowness pulled against him. What remained of his wounds were pink and raw, caked in dried blood and off-red that mirrored the fatigue and franticness in Dean’s black eyes.

  Jailhouse, a handcuff-shaped ring black like Drychus steel, hummed with power along Dean’s pinky finger.

  Cold whispers drummed in Leroy’s head. Yaerzul tried to speak to him, but none of his words pierced through the throbbing pain in his temples. Usually, Leroy could decipher the madness and find words in the flurry, but by now, it was just as well that it was a hallucination born of exhaustion.

  With a lugged cadence to his final step, Dean reached toward a barely standing Leroy.

  Leroy narrowed his eyes.

  Weakly, he tossed two fingers up, but the dim blue of Yaerzul’s brand did not attach itself to any of the remnant ice. Not the final of the three walls he’d erected, not the icy dome behind him that kept Cameron and Moira safe. It attached to the blood-red ice that froze over Leroy’s wounds: portions of his torso, his shoulders, bits of his upper thigh, his back.

  All of it was reshaped into a singular bloody spike that bursted out toward Dean.

  Instinct kicked in, one of Dean’s rings hummed—and it wasn’t Jailhouse.

  Carapace erupted along his thumb, crusting over his arm in an insectoid greenish-gold. He planted one foot behind him and grabbed hold of the spike, his face twisting and straining.

  Leroy held his fingers up. They trembled and shook.

  Paleness washed over his face, whitening his skin by the second as the spike persisted and grew, fed a steady supply of liquid from all of Leroy’s re-opened wounds. A yell escaped Dean, echoing through the junkyard as he struggled to maintain ground.

  Leroy fell to one knee, but held up his shaking arm. His vision blurred and his eyes grew heavier with every blink.

  White noise filled his ears.

  He couldn’t hear the shatter of the ice behind him, but he felt the fleeting coldness on his back, and the exhale of the icy dome that had held its breath for two days and two nights to keep something in—and now that something was out.

  To his right he felt the ground shake ever so slightly, and saw the beige denim of Cameron’s jacket flutter in the air.

  White-ivory covered his body and a persistent, unyielding aura of red energy leaked from him like the scarlet droplets of a wax candle. He reeled an arm back, and the energy coagulated around his arm, kneading itself into a mass of white-ivory that turned his entire arm into a bone-colored battering ram that dragged along the ground like an anchor. Built into the end of it was some sort of white-ivory piston.

  Through the blurred noise, he heard only two thing: the impact of Dean Dresker being launched upward and through the flickering signage that read LIEBERMAN SCRAP & STACK and a name that wasn’t whispered, but declared with a bellow that thundered out through the junkyard, spoken by a voice that wasn’t Cameron’s, but left his mouth all the same.

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  LEROY WATERS

  CAMERON KESSLER

  DEAN DRESKEr

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