Helpless Spooktober

“Caleb, get back!” Tuija’s voice lost its way to Caleb’s ears, when Stana’s hands clenched around Caleb’s arm.

At first, he felt nothing but the sapping rains of Vancouver swathing Stanley Park in a new bit of fresh grass. As he tried to tug away, the cloth on his arm turned red as embers, orange as fire. He yanked at her hand, but nothing would free it, her fingers like talons down to the bone. Caleb roared and spun through the grass, tried to kick her off, get the spindle-creature of a woman to let go, as flames as pure and profane as those which torched the Dover Grove burst along his body.

He was no god, he was as human as Tuija, he... Caleb combusted. An unholy conflagration spiked from the wood pile and herbs, a line of dripping oil rushed from Stana’s body and blood to the pile of placed lumber.

Mika grabbed Caleb, Leonidas brought his shield down again and again on Stana’s arms, but some unnatural feat kept her safe. One by one, name after name, Lisa Fricton lost both arms in a freak manufacturing accident. Otis Carval crashed his car, investigators wondered at the way his hands split off from the rest of his body, as if cut in a sick guillotine. Name after name, the act of selling out, of giving their Names for magical comforts, for extra cash, for a new dog the same as the old which died too young. Too soon. What did they care, atheists and the desperate?

Stana shrieked and gnashed her teeth as the fire consumed her hair too, down her back.

Shoulder to diaphragm, Tuija ploughed into Stana’s wounded stomach. The force of the strike, of Leonidas’, of Mika’s stabbing slashes broke through the litany of names Stana had taken. Used like convenient wrappings left out in the rain.

Through his agony, Caleb heard the boom of Ares’ basso voice, felt Leonidas yank him back from the blaze by his shoulder. The pressure of Zeus’ rain and Mika’s blessed wing strokes were a memory Caleb’s mind would compile in the infinite hereafter, when he kept no other purpose but the searing investigation of how the world could pitch so far off its axis.

Tuija back-pedalled into Caleb’s chest, the shield hung at a strange angle, the alloy bent and Tuija’s arm with it. “For the love of all that’s holy get the fuck out of here, Cale-”

The blow struck with a dry smack of Tuija’s back against the armour at Caleb’s chest. Both beings were flung backward into a desiccated cedar stump hard enough to rattle Caleb’s bone cage.

— Char & Ash