Page 41 of Geist Fleisch
The ghost left him no time for doubt, grabbing the bearded Brownshirt nearest them and throwing him with all their might into the glass. It shattered, showering the man in shards as he fell to the floor, covering his face. The kid who’d called them out snatched up one of the splinters and swung it through the air, clumsily at first, then with more deliberate strokes as his frightened gaze darted over the floor, looking for Callum’s reflection in the shattered mirror.
Clever bastard.
Callum cried out as the solidthunkof a heavy truncheon sent a shock through his right shoulder.
“Hier!” the ringleader who’d wielded it ordered.
Max quickly pulled Callum clear of another swipe from the kid. They caught his arm and pulled him into a solid punch that sent him reeling, clutching his face. The glass shard fell to the floor. The commander, who could have matched Heinrich for stature and musculature, barrelled down on them again. Max spun them out of the way, grabbing one of the larger glass shards as they went. The attacker aimed a solid kick at the moving shard, only for Max to catch his foot, straighten his leg, and plunge the glass deep into the beefy muscle of the man’s thigh.
The Nazi’s scream drowned out Callum’s gasp as Max ripped the glass splinter up the man’s leg, tearing a deep gash before plunging the crude weapon into the brute’s neck. Callum lifted the shard, at last seeing the blood on his now gory outline.
The kid peered through fingers that cradled his bleeding face. He went to stammer something, then when words failed him, fled towards the front door.
“That’s right, fuck off home!” Callum barked. “Go on, get!” A final lunge yielded a startled cry as he sliced through the kid’ssleeve. The bloodied red armband sank to the floor like a popped balloon.
They’d killed a man. Callum could no longer feel Max. He could only feel warm blood from the dead commander pooling around his bare feet. He looked around the room at the beaten and broken Nazis, wondering how many of them had shared their leader’s fate. It may not have been Max’s first time killing, but it was Callum’s. Unless he counted complicity; the man Max had possessed at the bar, for instance, or the men Robert had killed while Callum watched.
Life by the sword. Is that what his life was to be, then?
The breaking of the mirror had left a small hole in the wall behind it, too deliberate and perfect to have been a casualty of his battle. A green glow came from inside, the same odd shade of green that had surrounded his reflection in the glass. There also came an odd, low hum that was neither nature nor machine. It soon altered pitch, until it sounded like air being sucked from the room. A week prior, he would most certainly have left it well alone. Now, with his mind awakened to a multitude of possibilities within the impossible, he reached inside, until the room around him darkened.
“A fool might have doubted you.”
Callum recognised Heinrich’s smooth voice before his eyes adjusted to the sudden gloom. Little by little, the shape of a man wearing a crisp cream suit defined Frank in the shadows, sitting on the sofa with Jacqueline next to him. Both were unrestrained, their manners awkward as if a stranger they didn’t like had invited them for tea. Heinrich slid a firm hand across Callum’s chest to announce his whereabouts. Callum pulled away with a scoff.
“A rescue, is it? How mundane.” Heinrich looked down at the blood that had stained his clothes when he’d grasped Callum and smiled.
Callum clenched his fists. “There’s more where that came from.”
“Callum,” Frank cautioned him. It was the first time Callum had seen genuine fear in the man’s eyes.
As Heinrich kicked the body of the dead commander, Callum realised he was still in the same room. It was darker now, like a shadow of where he’d been before. But every fallen book, destroyed piece of furniture and unconscious Brownshirt lay right where he’d left it. A place that existed in parallel, occupying the same space as the everyday world. The idea might have excited him, were he not so preoccupied with small matters like rescuing Frank and not dying.
“A simple human might try to make good on that threat.” Heinrich tutted his tongue as he stepped over the corpse. “Oafish bastards, aren’t they? Of course, oafish bastards often come in great numbers. With enough sustained anger, they can level nations. That fury will feed my master for centuries to come.”
The images of Heinrich’s awful kiss returned from the back of Callum’s brain, and their re-emergence tasted like death. Callum felt every bit of it in the pit of his stomach. The pain. The loss. The fear. Over and over, feeding on its own endlessness. For all Heinrich’s evil, he wasn’t a liar. Each horror dragged through Callum’s mind with grim inevitability. There was no longer any question as to whether each image would come to pass, only how long it would last, how many times it would happen, and how many souls it would destroy.
In the depths of his gut, each new death fed him its own strange rapture. He could smell ash, taste blood, feel the fires against his skin, but far from the terror it had raised in him in the Tiergarten, or in those first seconds of its return, each new horror now filled a void and purpose he’d not understood or even noticed until now. Callum stared at his hands as inch by inch, the fleshiness of his palms returned, the living world reclaiming him as Heinrich’s master feasted on death. Perhaps, in some cruel, immutable way, he understood the feast they required. A natural, rotting decay. A work, not of monsters, but of men.
“Callum!” Frank’s voice broke through the fugue like a stray ember that had singed his mind’s eye. The effort visibly exhausted the man.
The winds returned, humming just as they had when Callum had pushed his hand so foolishly into the green hole. A dark wind to obscure the truth behind the hellish feast.
“Where is your master?” he asked Heinrich.
“Here, there, and everywhere,” the man answered with a playfulness as helpful as it was precise.
Callum felt another familiar sickness in his gut. Was it Max’s presence, or had he imagined it? He now understood Max could not occupy his body for long, for fear of destroying them both. Such was his growing familiarity with death and its persistent spectres. But Callum needed Max now. With their combined might, could they take Heinrich down like they had the Nazis? Perhaps with help from Frank and Jacqueline, but even with the combined might of all four—the human, the vampire, the ghost soldier, and whatever Callum was turning into—their fight would not be won with brute force.
Jacqueline’s gaze held his, as fearless as it was inquisitive. No more was she simply the catty socialite that kept Robert’s company. Far from horrified or helpless, see looked intrigued.
“I mean it,” Callum said with a voice as calm and reasoned as the look on Jacqueline’s face. “If you expect me to give your master this feast—”
“Giveit to Them?” Heinrich laughed. “You overstate your importance.”
Callum nodded, keeping his cool. “Whatever They need from me, They can have it. But I want Max. I want the two of us to be together, unbothered and at peace. After that, whatever your master feeds on, whatever this brings into the world or changes, I want no part of it. Not even a glimpse, is that understood?”
“Oh, Callum,” whispered Frank, wearily shaking his head.
