<strong>Dark Aesir (http://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=32223.msg1716730#msg1716730)</strong><br/><strong>Morrin Street, Brooklyn</strong><br/><strong>1:30 AM</strong><br/><br/><br/>Jonah stepped over the low burned out ruin. It was all that remained of the house that flames ate the days ago, devoured along with a family and a guest while the happy husband was down in the river becoming acquainted with the fish.<br/><br/>The sound of distant thunder comes rolling across the tall black buildings behind him, thunder filled with the voices of winged anger.<br/><br/>He tried to ignore it, standing there in his gray hoodie with the wings drawn on the back in black felt tip marker.  The sooty earth around his tennis shoes clung to him, clotted with debris, the life of a house bled out into its ruined husk and scabbed into soot.<br/><br/>A hiss sounds nearby …<br/><br/>...and  Jonah turned his head shadowed into inky nothing by the raised hood.<br/><br/>Crouching by a shapeless lump that could have been a stove is the figure of a woman, naked and stained in the ash that was the last breath of this place.<br/><br/>Again thunder sounds, closer this time, and full of wing beats and gnashing teeth, wild screams birdlike, lustful and grating all at once, a knife blade slow across a guitar string, just over the brownstone line behind him. He does not have much time.<br/><br/>The gray mantled young man strode across the black ground toward the melted appliance and …<br/><br/>...the figure scuttles away into a corner. Pieces of ash flake off its form. It is a beautiful form, not thin but fleshed in desire, full and rounded in the hips and breasts like a prefect fruit, full in the hand. But the soot keeps flaking away. Her body wavered as if through a heat mirage …<br/><br/>...letting him know that it was illusionary, just a hallucination. His fevered brain trying to tell him something, trying to make a link for him, a link he could not see on his own.<br/><br/>And the soot just kept falling off her as she squatted in the shadows, flakes falling away to reveal her beautiful body underneath only to have that flake away as well, over and over.<br/><br/>Jonah felt he could get no closer.<br/><br/>She will run, she will disappear. She is not real but even as a fiction he can get no closer.<br/><br/>He was missing something. something was missing.<br/><br/>The thunder sounds again and this time it is right over him. The world lights up and the Aesir rises in him like a tide of flame. The clouds above are orange and burning from within, blackening the roiling sky with a hateful heat. In those low laying sheets, always curling, harpy images burn to their bones and scream a harrowing ancient Greek and Phrygian song as they claw the air, swimming with their tattered wings. A quivering ball of viscous fire rolls along the street sweeping out a tentacle of flame toward the ruined house and him.<br/><br/>But the power of the Aesir grabbed time and dragged it down to a syrupy halt. Panicy breath froze in his chest and the flickering fingers of the fire iced down to static white orange line  and the sooty groud shifted under Jonah's feet.<br/><br/>He launched himself sideways fighting the slow moment to get away from that beam, get behind the stove, get away from that light!<br/><br/>When the endless power of time shrugged off the mosquito of his will and lurched back into motion the young man hit the ground and rolled to a sudden stop, contorted behind the stove waiting for the lance of fire to spray across him, to lap over the edges of the smoothed metal and taste his pain. But there was only light, no fire, just a white bright light...car lights.<br/><br/>The long green chevy ground to a halt along the street its light clicked off tipping the world into darkness instantly. Jonah blinked fiercely trying to get his night vision back. The Aesir was gone.<br/><br/>Suddenly he heard a door open and then close. He cursed silently just in time to hear another door slamming. Two of them. What were they doing? Had the seen him?<br/><br/>Shifting inch by inch, he raised his head slightly to peek past the smoothed edge of the metal lump and there were two men silhouetted by the sodium streetlight scattered into a white haze behind them.<br/><br/>Each has red glowing eyes that burn in the black shadow under their perfect fedoras and on their backs crouch a harpy image, burning orange claws digging into the shadowy suits, the creatures look around trying to spot Jonah, they are looking just for him. He knows it.<br/><br/>What are they doing here? The answer didn't even need the Aesir to surface. When he got Vincent to talk. They knew he would be coming here.<br/><br/>There is something I am missing, he thought.<br/><br/>And then she is on him.<br/><br/>The soot girl suddenly embraces Jonah from behind grasping him high around one shoulder and low around his waist.<br/><br/>He very nearly cried out in alarm.<br/><br/>Her lips make a wet sound as she presses a fever hot kiss to his cheek.<br/><br/>“Oohh baby yes touch me sweety...come on, don't be shy...I know she doesn't beg for it like I do...give me a little taste baby...let me do that for you first...” she says whispering into his ear, words for only him, quiet intimate words and her candy scented breath fell down his ear like a penny down a well clanking off a sudden need somewhere close to the bottom.<br/><br/>The men shifted slightly and looked around, …<br/><br/>...their brilliant red eyes tracking over the ruined unnameable shapes that were once a living room, now a tomb.<br/><br/>One of them opened his coat with a deft flip and pulled out the small revolver. Jonah flinched …<br/><br/>...against the soft, ashy body.<br/><br/>Guns, they had guns. Of course they had guns. They had not come here to debate.<br/><br/>Aboard the shadows shoulders the blazing harpy grins an impossible wide grin full of shark teeth stretching her lips to black wires around her serrated smile.<br/><br/>The sooty woman's soft breasts presses into Jonah's back and one of her hands flees into his lap finding him suddenly ready for her. She grasps him there, grips his length and …<br/><br/>...he fights the urge to throw her off, or to give in.<br/><br/>“Ohh baby ...I'll let you do anything...you have to be quick though baby...Freddy is coming over tonight...just give to me fast....give it to me fast and hard...” She hisses in place of a moan and her grapefruit tongue touches his ear like a battery jolt.<br/><br/>Freddy! Frederico Valentine! Daddy was humping one of Freddie's girls? One of his special girls? Jonah turned his head …<br/><br/>...and there she is, Georgina Haley, the beautiful bombshell who sings torch songs at Valentines club. And sings them for Freddy special.<br/><br/>Her face flaked away with only more beautiful underneath. It was horrible and alluring, the lust in her face....good god, how could any man say no to that. How could... It was then that he noticed the small  hole high in her forehead almost where her golden hair cut across in its honey sweet line before sweeping back down her naked back.<br/><br/>“Hey!”  Said one of the shadows fumbling in his coat for his gun.<br/><br/>The fire-in-glass harpy on his shoulder points at him screeching a keening cry of death and blood, of agony coming. The Aesir rises suddenly like an orgasm, like a cough, like a jump from a building.<br/><br/>He spun and flung a rock as the gun stretched out toward him. The sonic explosion shook the whole ruin and its blasting sound struck him like a physical blow. That was no little revolver. The blackened timber beside his head exploded shredding the side of his hoodie, he was already in motion though, digging his feet into the dirt and leaning into the motion, the run toward the shadow with his scarlet harpy rider. It was only six of seven steps but it felt like slow city blocks whirling past him as he jammed another foot down pressing himself forward.<br/><br/>Then, in an instant he was there on the big man, bigger than he had seemed from his hiding place.  Aesir swept the big gun aside as it fired again lighting them both up in the primitive flash of an unleashed explosion. The big man looked surprised. Aesir got that a lot.<br/><br/>He planted his thin palm into the big man's face feeling the shock travel down his arm and into his shoulder, almost jolting it out of its socket. The blow lifted the suit into the air sending his perfect fedora tumbling  like a flipped coin.<br/><br/>The harpy screeches an angry sound right into Aesir's face before lifting off the body...<br/><br/>...as it tumbled under the earthquake force of the blow.<br/><br/>Twisting on one foot, Aesir cartwheeled the body, sending it into a burnt heap of wood. The pile scattered, suddenly bowling pins. The big man and his big gun rolled bonelessly to a stop face down and painted black, his arms at unfortunate angles..<br/><br/>The sky still burns with the shrieking harpies and cinders float in the air around him. In an instant he sees a web of red lines light up around him. Hundreds of red lines like tiny burning threads in the air all around him. The ones that touch him burn like acid, like wasps digging at his skin and they move constantly as if whipped in a phantom wind.<br/><br/>He cried out,  turning and twisting to get away...<br/><br/>... from the lines that sliced at his arms and legs.<br/><br/>The first crack sounded behind him but he couldn't move, couldn't jump or run.<br/><br/>The threads hem him in...<br/><br/>...and he suddenly wondered if this was the time. The last moment, his one breath before the end.<br/><br/>Aesir saw the bullet from the other mans revolver blast its way down one of the threads close to his chest. When it passed him other threads winked out making the effort to stay away from them easier.<br/><br/>Pow!<br/><br/>Pow!<br/><br/>Pow!<br/><br/>Pow!<br/><br/>Thread after thread blinked out as...<br/><br/>...Aesir bent and turned flicking his thin body this way and that.<br/><br/>Suddenly there are no more lines. The harpy looks suddenly surprised and peers down at the shiny metal weapon in the man's hand.<br/><br/>Click!<br/><br/>The young man rocketed forward like a charging bull. His feet seemed to shake the ground as they struck, driving him forward like a freight train loosed from its tracks. The shadow brought the gun across Aesir's face when they met but it didn't even faze him as the unstoppable force smashed from the young man and the shadow rocked back off his feet, caught in the great raging wave. Aesir clutched him through his jacked and shirt, his iron fingers holding the shadow by his muscles and the bones of his chest just within reach if...<br/><br/>They smash though the door frame, it shattered across the shadow's back...<br/><br/>...as the harpy clawed at Aesir' eyes.<br/><br/>But he didn't need to see, his rage fueled the tsunami of his movement. A step vaulted him and the shadow onto the bumper of the green chevy, the next step crushed a footprint into the hood, the next step sent both of them through the windshield. Aesir felt the shadows ribs suddenly give up their purchase and speak their own elegies in a chorus of dull pops in concert with the sound of shattered glass chiming around them.<br/><br/>The back seat gave way as metal and springs complained only for a moment.<br/><br/>Then they were in the backseat.<br/><br/>The harpy is long gone and...<br/><br/>...the figure of the man lays in the ruin of the car, lit by the street light as he gasped for breath flecking pink froth onto his lips. Aesir wanted to ask questions, to grill the man but it was all there. Five shots, the burned body of the guest and a whole family, none of them identifiable in the city morgue, Daddy in the river and none of it leading back to Freddy V.  Aesir had never trusted the law to sort out the vagaries of the human animal.<br/><br/>Still feeling like a god, he kicked the back door open and tasted the coppery tang of his own blood as it ran down his throat. Then the Aesir left him...<br/><br/>...as the burning clouds above him misted dark and then black into the night sky sending the screaming harpies up into the night.<br/><br/>The pain blasted across his face and his knees buckled with the intense surge of weakness that sometimes followed the Aesir. Nausea ran into his veins  like a vipers poison. Touching his face, his fingers cam away sticky with blood and he turned his head, spitting. Jonah expected a tooth to clatter across the lit asphalt but it was a chunk of bloody glass. With shaking limbs and dry retches heaving through his form he struggled to his feet as the sirens sounded in the distance.<br/><br/>Spitting again to clear his crimson stained mouth eh shuffled across the street certain he could not clear the scene.<br/><br/>“What a time to be a hobo again” He groused. If the cops got him it would not be pretty. Not for anyone. He could swear he heard the sound or a harpy wailing in those distant sirens. Fucking harpies.