Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

“The Bacchae are followers. They have no mind, only hungers. I saw the avatar. He thinks. We have to stop him if we want to stop them.”

But the Bacchae were his guard, his army of teeth and flesh and claws. There was no avoiding a confrontation with them, if we hunted him. Just as there was no avoiding the fact that I remained perilously close to becoming one of them. I had to push aside the memory of the avatar’s eyes, of the furiously empty hunger in them, of the sweet, hot intoxication of honey on my lips and in my blood. I had to. Or I would turn on Luis in an instant, and the first drop of blood I drew would trigger the final frenzy, reduce me to a naked, clawing, biting animal made of hunger and lust. I would not stop. I would take everything from him, down to the marrow of his bones, and then I would be lost.

“Can you handle this?” Luis asked me. He sounded tense, cautious, ready to move back at a single tremor from me. “Because I need to know. I can’t turn my back on you if you’re not in control.”

“I’m fine,” I lied. I had to make it true by sheer will; Luis couldn’t defend himself from other threats if he had to watch me as well. “We have to find the avatar now, if we want to survive the night.” Because the Bacchae would have caught Luis’s scent by now, that rich male musk that had drenched me in frenzy. They’d chase him down and rip, rape, consume. It was what the avatar had infused in them. Individually, they were normal human women, probably mild and gentle creatures. But here, in the wild, with the honey and wine in their veins, they were Furies.

I rose smoothly and loped off into the dark. Luis cursed and stumbled in pursuit. I did not need a flashlight, now; my eyes pulled in light in new ways, new colors, painting the world in flashes of red and gold and white. The eyes of the avatar, shared with his hunters.

I could feel him out in the darkness, moving through the forest. Wandering. Seeking … whatever fathomless thing avatars sought. It was nothing humans could understand, and the human body it was using at present would be destroyed in the process, either from hunger or thirst or sheer overdriven exhaustion. It would leap to another male body if it could, unless there was nothing to receive its spirit. Then it would sink back into the earth, back into sleep.

Luis. Luis would be here to receive it. I couldn’t permit that to happen.

In the next second, I realized that I couldn’t worry about that; I had to think of myself first. The avatar’s presence pulled me like a tide, drawing me closer, and I heard him now, padding through the forest, plunging through brush and thorns, leaving bare, bloody footprints on the ground and rocks. I smelled his rotted-honey stench.

I ran, loping like a lion giving chase, feeling the frenzy inside me mount and boil.

I burst out of the trees into a clearing. Overhead, the stars were white cold chips set in an onyx sky. A crescent moon had cleared the eastern horizon, bathing the small meadow in icy light.

The avatar stood in the center of it, staring up at the moon, arms raised. His back was to me, and I saw the claw marks scoring his back, his buttocks. The scratches and cuts. The trickling black blood.

Ecstasy was a deadly dangerous, shockingly beautiful thing.

I dropped into a crouch, teeth bared, made all animal in his presence. The pounding of sweet, hot fire inside me rose up, burning all my control to ashes.

All except that ice-cold core that had been mine since the beginning of time. I am Djinn, it whispered. I am not his meat. I will not be turned.

His back remained to me. His worship was aimed at the moon, and I could see the shudders running through him — sexual, most surely. I could feel the pulses from here, booming inside me like a drum.

I could not approach him, not without losing what little control remained. If I did, I would end up pinned beneath his rampant body, screaming, biting, giving and receiving violence and sex.

I reached instead for the rich warm glow of power, grounded through Luis, and brought it up around the avatar’s feet.

The grasses whipped up, knotting into ropes, growing at a staggering pace. They tied his ankles, then wrapped his legs, his torso … and a thick, meaty vine whipped around his neck and began to tighten.

Behind me, I heard the hollow shriek of the Bacchae. They had found Luis’s trail now, and I sensed the hot burst of his fear through the link between us. He couldn’t outrun them. Not in the dark. He’d have to turn and fight — a battle he was sure to lose.

The howls and shrieks burst out of the night, and I thought I heard Luis call my name, but my world had narrowed to the avatar, and the vine around his neck. I poured all the power I could muster into it, commanding the living green rope to tighten, to squeeze, to crush the life out of the avatar before his minions tore the life out of Luis.

It wasn’t going to work.