Black Cat, White Moon
Chapter Nine
Rise of the Beast
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Hush little baby, don't say a word
And never mind that noise you heard
Its just the beast under your bed,
In your closet, in your head
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Jason Gideon, retired BAU agent posing for more than fifty years as a human, gritted his teeth as the Beast crawled through him, dragging claws and gnawing with serrated, knife-sharp teeth. Heat like hell's black flames licked at the inside of his skin, at every shred of muscle and sinew, as if the devil burrowed beneath his flesh to feast on muscle and bone, gnawing away, legions of man eating rats feasting inside him. He swallowed the screams of pain and blood lust that rose in his throat, and snarled when Hotchner tried to touch him.
"Get away!" Gideon growled, his voice bestial and enraged.
"Gideon-" Hotch began, glancing over his shoulder at Razielle and Reid where they lay on the floor, gasping for breath. "Gideon, you have to stop the shift."
"The Challenge must be answered," Gideon snarled, and a trickle of something black and salty dribbled out of his mouth. Blood? He wasn't sure, and neither was Hotch. "He has challenged me, and I must answer. They will kill everyone here if I don't answer them... get away, Aaron."
"But-" And Hotchner put one hand on Gideon's shoulder. The swipe from Gideon's pale, shaking hand scored four bloody furrows in the BAU agent's forearm. "Ah!"
"Get back!"
"Don't touch him, Hotch," Morgan cried, kneeling over the two fallen. "Help me with Reid and Razielle!"
But by the time the senior agent had managed to wrench his eyes away from the sight of Gideon's rippling flesh, as if carnivorous mermaids swam inside him, the Night Child had already rolled herself onto her side and ripped the silvery dart from Reid's throat, and both could breathe almost normally. The pinprick of the needle was nearly invisible, but Reid's blood was burning in his veins.
"Reid!" Garcia sobbed as the younger man twisted and writhed in pain. "Reid, Reid… Hotch, do something! He's dying!"
"I can't-" He began to protest, but Razielle shoved him aside.
"Get out of my way, you idiot!" The furious huntress shoved her tumbling dark curls out of her face and stabbed herself with the needle-from-the-spoon in the tip of her index finger. Dark ruby liquid welled up. She acted instantly, smearing the dark blood rolling down her finger over her romejul's lips.
"Lick your lips. Come on. Spencer? Spencer! Spencer, lick your lips!"
He did, a spasmodic jerking of his tongue over his soft mouth even as he moaned in the grips of whatever had been on the needle once embedded in his throat. Razielle felt her eyes burning, but she refused to shed tears. Not yet. The Night Child would not allow Reid to die, not when she'd only just found him. She couldn't heal him, but her blood could act as temporary relief from the poison. It would buy them... perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. He would be in pain, he would suffer horribly, but it would keep him from surrendering to the pain and dying. No one with Hunter blood in their veins could surrender so easily to Death.
Razielle inhaled sharply at the scent of smoke and cooking meat. Cooking meat in a burning building meant one thing - dead humans.
"Razielle!"
She jerked her head around to look at her Uncle Jason, who groaned as the flesh of his fingertips split down to his palms. Blood dripped steadily onto the floor, pooling around his prostrate form. Eyes like cavernous pits pinned her.
"Uncle Jason...." She whispered softly, awestruck. The huntress had never seen him shift before into the Beast.
"Get them to the Car!"
"I can't!" She yelled, frustration filling her with near-panic. Biting her lip, she tried to get her arms under Reid's twitching body. "The Car isn't here yet!"
"Where is it?!" Gideon demanded, his voice roughening and roiling with fury until the preternatural huntress felt the psychic fur beneath her flesh bristling in response to the Beast struggling to get out of him. The Night Child growled at him, and Gideon roared, "Where is the Car?"
"On its way, that's all I know! Shift, Uncle Jason!" Razielle added, getting Reid into her shaking arms. If Morgan hadn't been helping, she probably would've dropped the convulsing genius. Desperation tinged Razielle's voice as she cried, "Please! We need you! Hurry up!"
Gideon roared as his sternum cracked in half lengthwise and his ribcage split open, ripping the flesh of his torso in a messy seam down the center, from collar to groin. Something wet and snarling and far too large was trying to crawl out of the mess of his guts.
Garcia screamed. Morgan and Hotch gaped in horror. Then something very big and very, very bad wrenched their attention away from the bleeding man.
Something large, with four massive feet a third the size of Buicks, and standing over seven feet tall at the shoulder slammed through the door to the office and roared. It was not the Car, it was not Gideon's Beast, and it was most definitely not a good thing.
Razielle leapt to her feet, growling like an angry cat, her eyes slitting and beginning to glow a toxic green as Dreaming Nero, one of the four sons of the King of Slumber, stepped across the threshold of the great room, snarling, glistening ropes of saliva dripping from his muzzle, his delirious eyes like oil spills on puddles of water swirling in his face as he stalked toward her.
The huntress glanced at her Uncle, still in the throes of his shift. No help, not yet.
The flesh of Gideon's ravaged body continued to split open as the thing inside him struggled for freedom… and vengeance.
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Hunting you
I can smell you
Your life
Your heart pounding in my head
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The Car barreled through another red light, straight past a squad car in the next lane, unobserved, unnoticed, cloaked in the essence of the night.
It couldn't smell, not like a human or a Night Child or a hound could, but it could smell in its own way, and right now it smelled the blood of the Knight Lyon, Lord Jason Gideon of Ratchet-Upon-the-Sand, and the scent of two of the Princes of the Dream Demons - Dreaming Nero, that mad, mad thing whelped by a Night Mare, and Dreaming Caligula, madder than Nero, the incestuous offspring of Morpheus the King and his mindless zombie of a daughter, Camille de Lyrium.
And the third Dream Demon Prince, Dreaming Tiberius, he too was coming, the Car could actually See him as he slashed his way through the humans of Vegas, cutting them down invisibly as he passed, a whirlwind of death and blood. It was almost like a neck-and-neck race between the creature of living metal and the demon slicing through the ranks of men.
The Car felt that shatter-glass-kitten tone again, caressing its black steel frame, and knew its Mistress was getting increasingly desperate for its appearance. She needed it. She was in danger, the Night Child. Razielle called for it.
The Car's speedometer needle jumped from 60 to 90, and it slipped through the streets of Vegas like a lightning fish.
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My blood runs with the beasts
Though no crescent, cross
Or wandering star
Shalt witness my defeat
Born of jackal in the Vatican
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The Beast, wet and slick with Its birthing fluids - the blood and gore of Its host, whose corpse even now cooled in the night - crept through the flickering shadows cast by the blazing veils of hellish fiery dancers, slipped like a serpent between the dancing flames, intent on the Interloper.
Its eyes did not blaze as the Interloper's did, that intruder into the territory of the Beast with the wings un-grown, so It could prowl through sights and sounds and reality unknown. It crept forward on silent feet, massive paws of ragged black fur and retractable claws the size of daggers. The pads of Its feet brushed silently against the linoleum floor. Unlike the Interloper, the Beast did not pant heavily or drool ropes of toxic saliva. It simply padded through the shadows, intent on destroying Its enemy.
The kitten-child, the winged one's daughter, she stood between the Interloper and the Beast's own Pack. Oh, the Pack, the Beast's mortal children... and the three who were not so mortal… the Hawking, and the kitten-child, and her other half. No, not so mortal, that other half. The Beast had always known, even when shackled by Its pretend-mortal shell of flesh.
The Interloper tensed, and the Beast hunched down, readying to spring. Blood was calling, blood was begging for the Beast to drink, and especially the blood of the Interloper, whispering in the veins of the creature as it slowly stalked nearer to the kitten-child and the rest of the Pack. This monstrous beast had issued a challenge, and the Beast would answer - with claws, and fangs, and rivers of blood.
Dreaming Nero, with the eyes of fever and madness, crept toward Razielle, and then Razielle said the words, the words that made the Beast remember, and It watched and waited for the moment when It could leap upon the Interloper, and with Its jackal jaws rip the creature's throat out.
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"Am I going to die, Garcia?" Reid whispered.
The flames were spreading, had already created a fiery gateway across the shattered and splintered doorway, but the creature between them and the portal to that mini-hell kept them in the room as smoke began to pour inside. Soon they would all suffocate.
The weeping woman shook her head and smoothed back Reid's hair, murmuring softly, "No, no, baby, no. You're not going to die. Razielle's not going to let anything happen to you, nothing. Not a thing."
"I feel like I'm dying," he mumbled.
"You're not dying, Spencer," Razielle said without turning to look at him. She kept her eyes focused on the furred creature stalking towards them. "Not yet, anyway. I bought you some time. Now I've just got to take care of Dreaming Nero."
You couldn't 'take care' of me if your life depended on it, whelp of the Hunter.
Everyone in the room heard Nero's voice, a hissing sibilance echoing like dry bones in the mind, and stared at the snarling, gimlet-eyed creature with wide horrified eyes. Everyone except Reid, convulsing with poison, and the stalking Beast, and Razielle.
The Night Child spread her feet and twisted her fingers, and the air between them began to shimmer. She turned her head only once to look at Reid, because it was what Nero expected and allowed. But she caught a glimpse of Gideon's corpse - for nothing resided in the torn and bloodied flesh any longer. Scraps of muscle and skin, cracked and broken bones, lay in a spreading pool of blood.
The Beast had vanished.
"I am Razielle, daughter of Shekinah of the Hunters and the Marquis de Carabas," she said, squaring her shoulders. Something shimmered in her hand, but no one could tell what that something was. It had no clear shape, no definition, no play of light to give it substance. But her long, claw tipped fingers curled around this shimmering thing with a surety that bespoke years of use.
"I am Heir to the Cradle," she added, "the Lady Gryphon, Spawn of the Hunter King's Daughter, Child of the Night."
She flexed, and the shimmering thing extended down from her clutching hand and down, till the end of it just brushed the ground.
"I am romjule to Spencer Reid, eternal esquire to the Broken Halo, ally of the Cobalt Hawking." She brought the shimmering thing up to shoulder height, hefted it and swung it once around until it rested in her clenched fist, the handle held before her face, the length of it raised in defense.
Spare me the titles, Razielle.
"I was Dragon's Claw, the Devil's Assassin," the huntress growled from between clenched teeth, eyes narrowed, slitted like a cat's. Jade gaze glinting like knives, she continued, "I am the patron saint of murderers. I am slayer to the oath breakers, and the Shatterer of Dreamers and Dreams."
How dare you!
With a thunderous roar, Dreaming Nero leapt at her as a vicious snarl filled the room, and a shadow sprung from the flickering darkness cast by the spreading flames, tackling the monstrous Dream Demon Prince and bringing it to the ground.
"What the-" Hotch began, eyes wide and, for a moment, glinting ice blue and vertical, like a hawk's.
Razielle, Night Child, preternatural huntress and assassin, swung her glittering blade so that the glass-sharp edge bit deep into Dreaming Nero's heaving side. As blood sprayed, Razielle cried, "Go for the throat, Uncle Jason!"
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When contrary winds blow across the sands
Their murmurs can be easily swayed
But when storms quicken one cannot placate
The howling of their murderous rages
Winged seraphim hold love's trembling hand
Beside our waiting graves
As war roars about our precious land…
Tonight in flames!
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Disclaimers: I don't own anything you recognize.
Copyright stuff:
Section one: this is Enter Sandman again.
Section two: Haunted by Evanescence
Section three: something from Cradle of Filth - don't remember the title
Section four: Tonight in Flames by Cradle of Filth
