Shadowpact #1

Jason Blood sat slumped in his chair, brooding. He stared absently out his apartment window upon a view of Gotham City that others would have found breathtaking, but his eyes were focused on vistas more distant. On his lap was an ornate, oversized book, yellowed with age. The Eternity Book. No matter how much one read in the Eternity Book, no matter how many pages one flipped, it always seemed open to a middle point. Always… until tonight. It lay opened to the last page now, and Jason Blood could scarce believe what he had just read there.

It was too big. There was not much that Jason Blood hadn’t seen in his career as an occultist. Not much he hadn’t done, bonded as he was with one of Hell’s nastiest demons. He had battled witches and warlocks, repelled alien invasions with the superheroes of Earth, staved off inter-dimensional incursions--- but what he had read on the last page of the Eternity Book he had never seen before. Never imagined in his most haunted dreams. It took a lot to frighten Jason Blood. He contemplated this fact as he steepled his fingers to keep his hands from shaking.

This was too big. He needed help.



One Month Later, Roanoke Island. Nightfall...

On a grassy knoll, under the brightness of a full moon, a pentagram was drawn upon the ground, and within it, her limbs staked to the points of the star, was a witch. She struggled against the ropes that bound her to the ground, pulling in vain. Twelve men stood in a circle around the pentagram, all of them reading from the psalters they held before them, muttering in unison. A thirteenth man stood within the circle, very close to the witch. He was dressed in antique homespun, wearing a tall, brimmed hat, with a brass buckle, the powdered locks of a judiciary wig flowing out from it.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” pronounced the thirteenth man, Mr. Melmoth, the Witchfinder-General of the Croatoan Society. He was long-legged and gangly, with high cheekbones, an angular face and a finely manicured moustache and beard.

“We shall, like unto a hammer, stamp out the witch,” intoned the congregation as one.

“Wheresoever thou shalt find her, put her to the torment!” Belying his Puritanical garb, Mr. Melmoth nevertheless spoke in a languorous Southern drawl, as if her were a preacher at a revival. His thin-lips curled into a smile.

“With fire and iron and water we shall try her body unto its final crisis,” came the fervent response.

“Azar help me, I’ll kill you, Melmoth,” moaned the witch, tossing her dark hair, her chest heaving. The small bindi jewel on her brow caught the starlight and gleamed crimson.

This seemed to amuse Mr. Melmoth to no end. He jabbed a finger down at the witch, and said, “By her own lips she is condemned, my brothers, as a foul temptress of Temple Azarath. Long have we in the Croatoan Society striven against those whores and whore-masters, that they should be wiped from the Earth!”

An angry murmur went up from the twelve similarly-garbed men. Mr. Melmoth knelt by the witch’s head and whispered into her ear, “It does not have to go so hard for you, Raven,” he said as pleasantly as wishing her a good day. “Just give up to me the location of Temple Azarath. We may even let you live until the Stygian Passover cometh.”

The witch called Raven turned her face up to his. Her eyes were sharp, reflecting emotions she struggled to contain. “You idiot, do you even understand what sort of unspeakable harvest your Lady intents to reap here on Earth?” A ragged, hysterical laugh escaped her. “You cannot possibly fathom the madness and horror of an Outer God! Believe me, damn it, I should know.”

The droll smile on Melmoth’s lips did not slacken. He stood, arms out to address his congregation again. “The witch is unrepentant! And so we fulfil Our Lady’s commandment!” He withdrew from his waistcoat a long sliver of iron, like a needle. He staddled Raven’s body, holding the sliver in one hand like the baton of a conductor as his congregation began a chant in a language that had never been spoken on Earth.

“Whore of Azar, I will have your soul-self!” Melmoth hissed down at her, eyes bright with anticipation. He weaved the iron sliver over her, almost teasingly. “I will draw it out of you like a poison, and leave you an empty husk. I will pin it to my body and wear it like a cloak, and I shall do such things to it as to blacken it for all eternity!”

Melmoth stabbed down at empty air, but Raven gasped. And when he reversed the sliver, threading it through the air like a needle, the tip of it trailed a speck of blackness that was pulled from Raven’s body. She cried out. The crackling ebony form of her soul-self resisted, but with every inch Melmoth raised the lancet, it slipped more and more from Raven.

The chant of the congregation grew rhythmic and demanding. Melmoth wore a triumphant, hungry look as he wielded his needle. Raven pressed her eyes closed, straining against the bindings both physical and arcane of the pentagram, tears running down her cheeks.

So it was that no one at first noticed the man approach the circle, torch in hand. He was not dressed like one of them, but clad in contemporary garb. His red hair was streaked with a center swath of pure white.

“Stop this, immediately,” he demanded. He did not raise his voice, but somehow, over the din of the chanting, Melmoth heard him. He craned his head to peer at the newcomer, squinting in the light of the flickering torch.

“Jason Blood.” Melmoth’s eyes narrowed. He still held most of Raven’s soul-self on the tip of his lancet, but all his attention was on the red and white haired man in the turtle-neck sweater. The congregation fell abruptly silent, turning towards Blood as well.

“I want no part of the feud between the Croatoan Society and Temple Azarath, but this witch is not for you. I need her.” His voice was cool and confident, and his eyes did not waver from Melmoth’s. “Get away from her. Now.”

For the first time, the Witchfinder-General lost his perpetual smug smile. “Who are you, Blood, to come between the Lady and her sacrifice?”

“You know who I am,” there was the hint of a warning in Blood’s voice. “And your Lady’s hunger knows no bounds. The morsel of one less soul will not abate it.”

In pain, Raven writhed on the ground beneath Melmoth, her soul-self quivering like a pinned moth. Melmoth looked from her back to Jason Blood.

“This witch is ours by right!” he snarled. “Our Grundies seized her on the material plane, far from the sanctuary of her cursed Temple!”

Blood was unwavering. “Nevertheless, she will be coming with me. Release her now, please.”

“Or else what?” sneered the Wichfinder-General, but there was a nervous quaver in his voice.

Jason Blood shrugged. “Or else my friend will kill every single one of you.” It was said plainly, but the light of his torch flared in Blood’s eyes, giving him a sinister appearance.

Melmoth saw the demon in Blood’s eyes and he sucked in a breath. He tipped the lancet back down towards Raven releasing her soul-self, and stepped away from her. “Mordecai, unbind her,” he spat at one of his flock. The submissionary leaped to obey, as Melmoth turned back to Blood. “You may not have wanted a quarrel with the Society, but you have one now, Blood. And come the Passover, not even Etrigan will stand against the coming of my Lady Styx.”

Blood was impassive as Raven was led to him. He draped an arm around her shoulder, keeping her steady, and said. “Melmoth, unless I am very lucky, I very much doubt any of us will survive to see that grave Eucharist. Good evening to you all.”



That Same Night, the Backwoods of Kentucky…

The two figures crashed through the thick underbrush, heedless of the brambles and thorns that ripped their clothes and tore their flesh. From behind them came the sounds of pursuit: the angry voices of men, the urgent, fearsome barking of dogs. Beams from flashlights pierced the woods all around them, but in their headlong rush to escape they stayed just ahead of the angry hunters.

“Here,” whispered the woman with the platinum hair, pulling her much larger companion across a dry streambed, and into the shelter of the hollow formed by the roots of two dead trees. They hunkered down into the mud, neither daring to breathe.

Abigail Arcane pressed into him, looking up at his face. Most would have blanched in terror at what they found there, at the pale, corpse-green cast of skin, the drooping, dead eyes, the flesh roughly sown together in places… But not Abigail. She saw deeper. She saw not the centuries-old monster her uncle had helped to create, but the man it had become.

The Spawn of Frankenstein lifted a thick finger to his lips. The sound of voices grew louder, more distinct.

“They came this a’way,” called one, shrilly. “I thought I saw ‘em cut back towards the bog!”

“Don’t lose ‘em, Harlan,” another yelled back over the braying of hounds. “Did you see that thing? It’s a goddang freak o’ nature and it’s gonna kill that girl.”

“Not if we kill it first, boys,” called out a more steady voice. “Bode, take the dogs up by Nod Hill, see if you can get a sniff. Earl, Harlan, the rest of you follow me.”

Her head buried in the Spawn’s chest, Abigail could not help the tears that moistened his ragged, sleeveless trench coat. There would be no rest for them no matter where they went. She felt his hand on her head, smoothing out the snarls of her hair as they listened to the sounds of their pursuers fade into the distance.

When at last they crawled from their hiding place, the woods were quiet but for the insistent chirping of crickets.

“Leave me,” he implored her, his voice deep and sonorous and stricken. “As long as you are with me, you will be hunted. Tell them I kidnapped you, that I carried you away from your kin. Please, Abigail---.”

She covered his mouth with one small hand, having to stand on her tiptoes. Tears drew dirty tracks down alabaster cheeks.

“Never,” she said, like an oath. “I defied my family for you. I crossed the world to find you… You live here,” she took one of his large hands in both of hers and pressed it to her breast. “How can I ever leave you, Adam?”

Adam, she had named him. A man unborn, but created. Before her, he had not taken a name. Before her, he had had no one to share it with.

Wrenching his hand away, he turned from her. He could see it clearly. He would be the death of her. All that he had ever loved, in all the long centuries since that first spark, he would destroy. It was too much for him to bear. He began to walk away, trudging up the muddy slope of the dry riverbed.

“Adam!” The word was wrenched from her, too loudly. “Don’t leave me. Don’t you leave me.”

“Go,” he slashed down with his arm, not looking back. “A mortal’s span of years is too short for the misery I will bring you,”

He put his head down and ran.

The galvanic forces that pulsed through his immortal form made him faster and stronger than any man of woman born. She gave chase, but he disappeared into the distance, tireless and swift. The tortured cry of his name rose up into the night, echoing among the trees. No doubt the mob from town would hear her and find her now. Rescue her from him. It’s a goddang freak o’ nature and it’s gonna kill that girl, the man named Earl had prophesied. That arrow lodged firmly in his heart.

Abigail, forget me, he beseeched the part of him that was her, that would always be her. Forget and forgive…

He knew not how long he ran, blind and uncaring through the woods, but eventually he found himself in a clearing. Slabs of old stone jutted from the earth, some in the shape of crosses and angels, most leaning crookedly. Moss and ivy crept up the untended graveyard, but doubtless the dead did not care, nor did they mark the passage of a monster through their rows and weed-choked lanes.

It was not good to be in the open. Without Abigail, he did not fear the mob; but a confrontation would leave many of them hurt or dead, and he just wanted to be left alone. Up ahead, at the end of the path through the graveyard, he could see a house, a sprawling, dilapidated affair. Once, it must have been grand, with a wide veranda and many gables and turrets. But it was dark now, rickety with age and falling apart in places. It was derelict, clearly abandoned.

He staggered up the path toward it, unheedful of the mist gathering at that doorway to nightmare.

“Come no closer, monster,” the clipped and cultured tones of an English accent seemed to come from nowhere.

He froze in his tracks, with one foot on the steps up to the house, as a form coalesced out of the mist. He narrowed his eyes, unsure what he was seeing. Standing there now, in the open doorway, was a man in Victorian finery, his backswept hair was jet with a streak of white, and his skin was as delicate and pale as Abigail’s, but his eyes were the red of burning coals.

Adam took a step backward, sweeping away the tails of his coat and tightening his hands into fists.

The man had a patrician dignity, and stared down on his visitor with a weary detachment. “I see only wrack and ruin biting at your heels; would you compound misfortune by seeking refuge in this accursed place? Dare you enter the House of Mystery?”

“Who would bar my way?” snarled the Spawn of Frankenstein. In the distance, he could hear the dogs barking again.

“Only I, most accursed of all,” The man on the veranda stepped into a slanting beam of moonlight, lips curling back to reveal fangs. “I, Andrew Bennett... I… Vampire!”

TO BE CONTINUED!