Chapter Text
When the cult had come for me
I could have got away, but didn't
I couldn't be the one to cause this any longer
Had it been a day or a year inside this skin?
I could not tell, the faces I had captured over centuries took hold
I became a kind of hunter
Eating pelts of pleading meat to acquire their appearance
Taking their form with will alone
Alive and crawling out of me
To catch its prey
Shed you foreign poison peltry
Take the rind you want
Involuntary Doppelgänger - Archspire
A rickety power generator crooned away in the far corner of the motor pool, its abrasive music echoing obnoxiously against the concrete walls. A panicked Iscariot paladin, garbed in that iconic blue-gray duster, slammed back-first against a railing attached to a short staircase up to a mechanical blast door. Red security alarms whined away, sending their spotlights around in rapid rotations. The paladin’s dual set of Colt M1911 handguns barked up a storm, their bright flashes lighting up angular impressions of their wielder’s terrified expression. “Fall back! Fall back!” he cried out into the radio piece in his ear. “Intruders! Intruders in the motor pool! Fall back to the second level – it’s him! It’s f*cking him! Contact Rome and alert – “
He didn’t finish that sentence.
Judah the Hammer rushed forth at superhuman speed, whirring past neglected carvings of eroded crucifixes embedded in the walls. Zeroing in like a heat-seeking missile onto the loathsome gleaming cross around his enemy’s neck, he swung.
A whoosh of air.
The hammer came down.
The paladin’s head exploded like a rotten pomegranate beneath that brutish cudgel. His body jerked backwards, spine breaking overtop the rusty safety rail.
Judah grunted, loosely hefting the bloodsoaked hammer back atop one shoulder, hearing the soft drips of dashed-out brains landing on the cold floor at his feet. Swirling motes of red dust repaired the still-smoking bullet wounds in his upper abdomen, reconstituting the old bronze scales back together from nothing. Crazy sh*t. Crazy, crazy sh*t.
Casting his gaze about the motor pool, he squinted and sniffed the air in search of any renegade survivors. Directional signs in German – which, hideous f*cking language, G-d; its speech and tones sounded like a feral dog trying to bark while missing its lower jaw, slobbering tongue lolling about everywhere - dotted the doorways everywhere he looked.
He found nothing, because the place was a total clusterf*ck, in smoldering ruins. Armored assault vehicles emblazoned with Section XIII logos, crumpled into ugly messes of shrapnel like they were naught more than wet newspapers. No less than twenty corpses lay cast about in tenderized chunks, their fine Iscariot dusters drenched in dark liquid from the grievous injuries wrought by Judah’s tired old hammer.
The Hammer snickered.
And those coats looked expensive, too. So much for their status symbols.
Skull fragments stuck to the walls along with crumpled clots of pulverized internal organs, exploded outwards from their former owners. The stink of smoking human meat filled the air, and flies were already beginning to congregate atop the exposed piles of flesh, from G-d knew where.
Judah’s eyelids fluttered as his closest kill’s aroma reached his nostrils, which flared open at once. He stiffened. The scent of spilt blood was the sort of smell that all but smothered one’s nose – like stepping outside into a day of unbearable humidity, when one doesn’t so much breathe as they did drink the air.
Its putrid stink of copper poured down the back of his windpipe, and it warmed his chest, promising to fill that indeterminable void that lodged itself stubbornly inside his person. The bitterness sang of sensory sweetness – of finely cooked and perfectly seasoned steak, doused in so much oil as to be sinful.
Decadent.
Beneath his notice.
With an annoyed snarl, Judah kicked the fallen corpse aside – the impact produced a dull metallic thud from his greave-bearing foot bashing the grown man’s body. So careless an action, but he felt the rib cage crunch and cave in.
Judah took a few paces away. Then he turned back over his shoulder and jabbed an accusatory finger at the dead body.
“I don’t need your f*ckin’ charity,” he barked, before turning and stomping off in a grumbling slouch.
He was not a rabid dog.
Shambling up the steps, their surfaces groaning and creaking as he did, he pulled a broken chunk of bone from his travel pouch and crunched on it absently, feeling the pure shot of raw protein fall down his gullet and then disappear into whatever strange magical aether the insides of his digestive tract had become in undeath. It abated the distracting need to tear into the dead paladin’s, face and all. As if he were wolf fresh off the kill, claiming its bounty by rolling in the mutilated viscera.
The aroma would be debilitating.
Judah stalked up to the awaiting blast door with a handprint pad, no doubt for ID verification. Glancing down, chewing on bone marrow thoughtfully, he found another corpse laying nearby, this one the upper torso of a redheaded Iscariot man with a full beard, the lower half of his body nowhere in sight, and the spilt intestines were still settling.
Judah hummed.
Leaning over, he yanked off one of the man’s hands with a disgusting suckle-and-snap sound. Whistling to himself, he rose back up, tossing the hand up and down a couple times, as if testing its weight. Then he slapped it to the security pad, right atop the graphic display of a handprint.
It beeped.
Judah smiled.
It turned red.
Judah scowled.
Grunting and grumbling even harder, muttering curses in Aramaic under his breath, he wiped the blood off the hand on his old white coat. The crimson stains sank into the fabric and then vanished.
Then he tried again, slower this time.
Beep.
Red.
Judah punched the blast door clean out of its frame. A deafening screech and slam followed from where it crashed into the far wall in the blink of an eye, caved inward and cracking the concrete on its landing zone.
Judah snorted, stepping inside. He eyed the hand he held, curling his lip and scratching his chin. “So damned hard to find good help these days, ain’t it?”
A beat.
Judah snapped his fingers and pointed to the hand. “Exactly.”
He tossed the hand aside and continued inside with the usual off-kilter spring in his step, shifting his weight oddly from side to side as he took to glossing over the security desk. Buttons. Levers. More buttons. Scanners he couldn’t read. Interfaces he couldn’t comprehend. Gah. Technology. So annoying.
Judah swore, if he ever found out who gave that batty old Countess a smartphone, he would kill the idiot where they stood.
An uncomfortable chill ran down his spine, and he eyed the last chunk of broken bone in his hand. He swallowed, recalling the smug look on that Gentile witch’s face when he snatched the leftovers from her hand. That lady knew how to get under people’s skin. No matter what he did, he always left their interactions feeling like she’d gotten exactly what she wanted.
Man.
That really pissed him off.
Self-impressed hag.
Judah turned around, approached what looked to be the corresponding security doorway. It was a sliding door of sleek navy metal, which only meant he had to push slightly harder to curl it around its own frame, screeching in protest all the way.
Following it, he found it traveled down several flights beneath the earth. He tossed the last chunk of bone into the air and caught it with his teeth, grinding it to dust and swallowing it like it were no more than a human’s granola bar. He tromped down the steps, not bothering to muffle the raucous sounds of his armor clanking against itself.
After a minute or two, he paused in place.
Inhaling, the scent of blessed silver and steel stained with sweat greeted him. His ears twitched. Yes, further down, just around the opening corner, he heard them. A welcoming party was downstairs. He heard the soft rattle of trembling bones, the tensing of jaw muscles, the straining of tired tendons holding musculature together, the telltale silent cacophony of a group scared half to death attempting a futile ambush on a much stronger foe.
Hah.
Been there.
Too bad he knew this trick.
Phasing into the ground, Judah shifted his presence deeper into the earth, and followed the muffled sound of shuffling boots against concrete.
A mischievous grin spread onto his face.
Yes, he was right behind one of them. He swore he could almost feel the panicked warmth radiating off the militant cultist.
Two Iscariots, he realized, on either side of an awaiting doorframe, armed and holding position for the chance to ambush him.
Without further dawdling, Judah shot his hands out of the wall, phasing them back into the physical realm. Both of his large palms clapped over the victim Iscariot’s mouth, earning him an immediate bout of desperate thrashing and muffled shouting.
Judah laughed, an ethereal echo soaring down the hallways.
Then, Judah pulled.
Caught between the ancient vampire’s hands and the solid wall, and without the ability to phase into solid surfaces like a vampire, the man was helpless. The awaiting Iscariot, a woman with a buzzcut of black hair, could only gawk in horror as her compatriot’s face rapidly went from pale to flushed, then from red to purple. Mandibles crunched in on themselves, the nose shattered inward, teeth broke and slipped out between Judah’s fingers in squirting rivers of bursting blood vessels, and the cranium began to cave in as Judah gave the man an agonizing end. The denouement arrived in a gratuitous scarlet burst as the head popped like a grape.
Judah stepped out of the wall glanced over at the remaining Iscariot, taking in the hot stink of fear coming off her in steady waves. He grinned, letting out a raspy chuff. “Shlama.”
The woman turned and ran.
Judah snapped an arm out, and the winding leather straps of his old tefillin, bound up in layers around his muscular arms, unraveled and shot outwards, snaring the fleeing woman by the neck.
“Get the f*ck back here.” Yanking her back with a lackadaisical pull, she flew backwards towards certain doom with a choked scream, pirouetting about in midair just in time for her terrified face to collide with Judah’s upraised elbow, her skull bursting open another mess of bone and grey matter.
The momentum flung her body forward, flipping in midair in a comical display before her limp remains hit the floor with a dull impact. A sawed-off shotgun clattered to the earth a moment after.
Neither of them had even fired a shot.
“Deus vult,” Judah chuckled. “Or whatever the f*ck.”
Judah continued onwards into the catacombs, finding a labyrinthine mess of hidden corridors and blast doorways awaited him. His sensitive ears zeroed in on the distant sounds of retreating Iscariots, following the scent of their frightened flight. He was in no hurry. All he had to do was knock one domino to the floor, and the rest would follow. Wherever they fell back to would no doubt lead him to where he needed to go. Hell, it wasn’t like he could waste his time searching each and every store-room individually. All he had to do was interrogate the right person to save all that effort.
Sure, maybe all a man like him had was time. He had time to kill.
But, still.
Judah was a very busy man.
A fresh scent hit his nose and derailed his thoughts.
Judah froze, caught mid-note of the old song he was whistling to himself. Inhaling further, the hairs on his arms stood on end and his lips curled back in a snarl. Sweet, burning flesh with something warm and wooden undearneath.
The f*cking Countess?
Here?
What in the screaming sh*t did Erzsébet want from the Iscariots?
Now?
When he was there?
Oh.
Oh, that conniving wench.
Cheeky coincidence, his ass.
“f*ck no, you don’t.”
Judah took off at a blistering sprint, leaping and kicking off walls with such momentum as to propel him flying down entire corridors in the blink of an eye, a veritable gale of wind and dust following in his wake. His tired eyes stretched wide open in their sockets, his thick eyebrows knit together in determination.
None of her f*cking jokes.
Not tonight. No time for it.
He was a very busy man.
The trail grew stronger, the familiar stink of Erzsébet’s unique vampiric signature bleeding through ever more. It was a foul odor – like fetid corpses burnt on a pile of fine cedar logs.
Judah rounded a corner and froze. Weak groans and faltering heartbeats greeted his ears. The approaching T-junction lay littered with a generous amount of dead and dying Iscariots, all of them messily hacked into as if a madman with a blunt bladed implement had rampaged through here. Judah slowed to a steady march, frowning as he took in the scene, passing by corpses with bloodshot eyeballs frozen skyward in death. Disembodied limbs and dropped firearms, muzzles still as warm as their former owners, lay every which way.
The Hammer knelt down in front of one of them. He tilted the dead paladin’s head off to one side, where a deep wedge-like cleaving wound resided in the man’s dark brown skin, tearing open a reddish-pink wound from shoulder to hip. The frown deepened. A cursory examination of the remaining victims confirmed his suspicions.
These weren’t the Countess’s MO.
While Judah would rather eat soap than go on a hunt with her – the hell with that – he knew enough to know that when Erzsébet wanted someone dead, she didn’t leave anything behind.
That, and he knew an axe wound when he saw it.
A contemplative rumble. Judah began to swing his hammer about in idle motions, preparing for a potential scrap.
Erzsébet’s scent.
But no Erzsébet.
So maybe a derivative thereof.
Perhaps one of her little stooges.
She had a few of those.
In life as in death, from what he understood.
Judah emerged through the far door at the end of the T-junction, passing by a high concentration of hackneyed bodies – as if they’d attempted a final stand at the door before being pushed further inside. He found more of the same on the other side. A massive, cavernous storage warehouse greeted him, one with stacks of crates and chests impossibly tall to either side of him. Old catwalks resided far above near the ceiling, and Judah couldn’t fathom how a room of this size existed just beneath the ground by only a few flights of stairs. Lighting beamed down from large, fluorescent arrays that buzzed as they emitted their harsh illumination.
The organization of the surrounding wares formed a natural corridor forward, terminating some hundred feet in the distance. Judah’s greaves announced his presence against the concrete floor, splashing through puddles of blood and squishing organs. He stepped on a dead Iscariot’s arm and it snapped at once. His weight alone was enough.
But that wasn’t what Judah gave a sh*t about right now.
What he gave a sh*t about was the presence of two figures far off in the distance, perched atop a towering wall of wooden crates. They were swathed in shadow, backlit by the unpleasant lighting. One tall and broad, one average in stature. They appeared to be mid-conversation, murmuring in hushed tones. Soft laughter.
The stink of burning meat and cedar.
Judah stomped forward with a clank. “You kids are damned sloppy, you know that?”
The figures didn’t so much as jump, turning to address his entrance. The taller of the two approached, and their visage took shape. Cresting easily six feet in height, perhaps a couple inches above Judah’s own height of six-foot-nothing, was a muscular ox of a woman. Their skin was pallid, and they were garbed in a cropped shirt with no sleeves that hugged their imposing physique and laid their dense abdominals and arm muscles bare. The garmented featured forest greens and light browns with winding floral patterns, and the color of the athletic shorts and strapped combat boots they wore matched. A scarf with long, stringy tassels, inlaid with further floral and botanical imagery, wrapped about their shoulders. With one thick arm, they leisurely tossed about a curious weapon that made Judah’s hackles go up on sight.
It was a fasces.
A reinforced oaken club with segmented slats, the business end topped off with a sleek axehead the hue of obsidian, with an inverted cross inlaid in the design – this one made unique by a second, smaller horizontal line above the main one of the crucifix pattern.
And it was a classic symbol of ne’er-do-well European politicals.
Man.
Judah f*cking hated this place.
“You’re one to talk, old man,” the figure shouted. Their voice was low, vaguely effeminate but only by a small amount – it was the sort of voice one could listen to and physically hear the sneer on the person’s face, even if you couldn’t see it. The jeering delivery didn’t help matters. “Thought you were all about making chunky salsa!”
Judah looked down to one side, finding an incapacitated paladin still twitching, and he casually lifted a boot up and squashed their head underneath with a satisfying crunch. The fingers of the victim spasmed in the sudden death throes, then went still. “Well, when I do it, at least I don’t leave stragglers.”
The figure scoffed, stepping forth and further into the light. Judah saw their face now – strong-jawed, soft-cheeked, with a severe brow and a snub nose. Their hair was shaved down nearly to the skin on either side of their skull, with the top of their head being a fluffy mop of soft, blue-silver hair. Whether it was dyed or by transmogrification magic, he wasn’t sure. Long, dangling earrings comprised of old coins dangled from their pointed ears – a telltale line of smoke rising from the piercings betrayed their silver composition.
Yep.
Definitely one of the ladybug’s flying monkeys.
“Hey, man – sometimes you gotta leave one still kickin’ as a warning to the others, yanno?” they crowed, pounding a fist to their chest with obvious pride.
Judah grinned sardonically. They thought they were funny. And you know, maybe they were.
In the barely-noticeable, mildly annoying, lung-tickling kind of way.
With a growl, he took a threatening step forward. “What I wanna know is, the f*ck are you doing here in Cologne? This some wackadoo kill-stealing scheme, or what?”
The individual swung their fasces in a spiraling circle, clicking their tongue and looking to their still-shadowed companion with a widening smirk – the kind of expression a street delinquent might give their dimwitted pal as if to silently say, oh yeah, we’re f*cking this guy up. Their red eyes gleamed and they bared their fangs in a gloating smile, displaying a slight underbite. “More like stealing from the dead.”
The Hammer went absolutely still.
His pupils narrowed to slits.
He spread out a hand. “Run that by me again, chief?”
The interloper laughed with an obnoxious snort on the last inhale. “This yours?”
They reached down behind them and lifted up a long, thin object, thrusting it overhead in a triumphant gesture with a tight fist. It was a spear.
And Judah knew that spear. A gasp caught in his throat.
It was here after all.
An old, rusty-headed spear of simple iron that once shone with proud radiance under the ancient Judean sun – its glint was deeply diminished, here, now, reflecting only the harsh lights of modern illumination technology. A tattered old tassel hung from the site where metal met shaft, and the dark wood of the main handle was much withered with age.
He’d know that weapon f*cking anywhere.
An utterly volcanic surge of white-hot anger pulsed through his veins. He began to breathe heavily, ragged and feral noises rattling up from his vocal chords. He ground his teeth together as he extended a shaking finger at the smiling thief.
“You get your filthy f*cking pagan mitts off of that, you whelp,” Judah thundered, his voice shaking the whole warehouse. He stomped forward, swirling his hammer about. “That don’t f*ckin’ belong to you. God. This f*cking continent and its lowlives. Evropa.” Judah spat the term as if it were the filthiest pejorative he could fathom. “No matter what you cultists play dress-up as, one thing never changes – you f*cking jackals think you got the right to put your grubby little paws all over anything that isn’t yours.”
The figure doubled over laughing, before lifting the spear up and twirling it about like it were a new toy. Selfishly. Profanatically. “Seriously? You’re this peeved about an old stick? Man. You people really do need to get with the times.”
Judah hurled his hammer through the air with a snarl, his great mop of shaggy curls dancing wildly about his head.
The figure jumped at once, springing an impossible height into the air. “Hey! New kid! Batter up!”
The other figure sprung forth from their shaded position as the twirling hammer whizzed by underneath their partner-in-crime. A gnarled, twin-headed axe the hue of the midnight sky, lined with extracurricular spikes raised overhead. A blinding arc of red light, a deafening clang of metal against metal, and a generous cascade of clumpy particles of red. Judah’s hammer, so deflected, fell limply off to the side.
Judah grunted and flexed a fist. With a puff of ruddy dust, the hammer vanished and reappeared in his fist, just in time for the shower of drifting particles wafted past him. Some of it landed on his coat, his face, the ground surrounding him, and began to melt into tiny droplets of red.
The Hammer frowned, looking around.
Snow?
Judah’s eyes shot back up. The other vampire – because he could be damn well sure they both were at this point – was now in full view. He co*cked his head to one side. The man he was looking at was…
Well.
Extra was putting it nicely.
The man, perhaps in his early thirties or so, was of average height and build. An unkempt mess of wavy brown hair hung down to his shoulders. He wore a dark denim vest covered in patches, hand-sewn by the looks of things, and adorned with spikes with the sleeves torn off, leaving fluffy patches where they once attached. On either wrist, black leather gauntlets with rusty nails sticking upwards, and the same could be said for the open surfaces of the man’s thick, heavy black boots. Twin bullet belts criss-crossed over the man’s torso, and another lay around his waist. His jeans were black denim, ripped at the knees. Leather motorcycle gloves adorned the tight fists that held an extravagantly-shaped black battleaxe, looking so ostentatious as to resemble a prop rather than a proper weapon.
And the man’s face?
Yeesh.
Just… Yeesh.
A garish mixture of black and white facepaint adorned the man’s facial features in angular swirls and smeared rivulets. What resembled trickles of black blood trailed down from the man’s lips, which were parted in a fang-bearing snarl, as if painted to look like dried blood oozing from his maw. An inverted cross was emblazoned in black on his painted-white forehead. A worn iron Mjolnir pendant dangled around his neck.
Judah blinked. “The f*ck am I looking at?”
The other vampire landed beside the man with a thud and a mighty chortle, throwing a muscular arm around his shoulder and tugging him close – too close, if the sudden disconcerted expression and choked noise of surprise was any indication.
“Hey, listen, old man, we gotta bounce – but next time you see the Hellsing chumps?” They jabbed a thumb at themselves, sneering sad*stically. “Tell ‘em hi, from Dorottya and Argus Hexhand.” They socked the man in the gut, a bit too hard, given the doubling over and choked sound it wrought. “You know what to do, right bud?”
Then, ‘Argus,’ apparently, grumbled something unintelligible, digging inside one of his pockets. He tossed a flashing coin into the air. There was a blinding burst of red light, and Judah threw his hand up to protect his sensitive eyes.
When he opened them again, both the vampires were gone.
And the spear with it.
“f*ck!” Judah roared.
The Hammer flung his weapon down to one side in abject frustration. A loud, reverberating crunch of concrete followed, a small crater punched into the surface. Spluttering up utterly incoherent gibberish, Judah stomped in a circle, fuming. Red veins stretched across his eyeballs, and his pupils had shrunk to the draconic slits so endemic to a vampire enraged past the point of sanity. And once again, despite the lack of a need for oxygen, he kept on breathing in and out in haggard, dry wheezes.
Then he thought of something.
Breathing…
Stopping in his tracks, he looked around and shut his eyes, concentrated on his other senses again. His ears twitched.
Then he snapped his gaze off to one side, where a felled Iscariot paladin lay against a large crate. A telltale smear of scarlet against the dark concrete beneath told Judah that he’d likely crawled over there, propped up in a sitting position, one gloved hand clasped over a devastating wound on one flank – an axe stroke looked to have severed one arm halfway down the bicep and continued into the man’s rib cage. He was quietly hacking breaths in and out, showing he was still alive. Lucky bastard.
Or perhaps unlucky.
Judah stomped up to the man and crouched down in front of him.
“Hey. Bastard. Knock-knock,” he rasped, bopping the wounded man atop the head with a fist. “I heard you runts had something of mine. Guess I was right.”
The man, spitting a long lock of black hair away from his face, which was riddled with scars, chuckled. “I’ve heard that before,” he said, his words marred by a strong Italian dialect.
Judah snorted, looking around at this veritable dragon’s hoard of stored artifacts. “Yeah. Bet you have.”
“A shame you’re chasing a phony. Do you know how many holy relics have convincing enough fakes to make men shed blood in the name of claiming them?”
Judah paused, and then shook his head emphatically. “Nice try, kid. I know my brother’s spear when I see it. The real shame here is that you’re still alive to tell me why the Blood Countess’s little stooges beat me to it before me. And where they’re taking it.”
“You think I know?” The man glared up at Judah, seeming utterly uncowed by the terrifying sight. “If I did, I wouldn’t tell a heathen like you.”
Judah laughed his mad, meandering cackle, and then his voice went deathly quiet. “You gotta spark of tenacity, kid. Save it for a fight you can win.”
The paladin narrowed his eyes. “You’re on a snipe hunt, old man. Your brother’s true spear shattered under that falling elephant like the rest of his broken body.”
Judah smiled and nodded along as if agreeing with an amusing parable being recounted by an old friend.
Reaching down to his hip, there came a long hiss of iron scraping against sheathe as he drew out a forward-curving shortsword – an ancient Greek makhaira. “You know,” he crooned. “Maybe I ain’t one to judge. This here? Took this offa the still-warm corpse of the first Greek general I ever had the glory of killing, way back in the day. Since then? Whole lotta Northern filth has died on this f*ckin’ thing.” He brandished and experimentally spun it in his hand in practiced flourishes and mimed parries. He scratched his beard, as if thoughtfully examining it for the first time. “A-po-llo-ni-us, I think the guy’s name was. Pompous schmuck came marching his happy little ass down to Judea with a badass little army, two thousand strong. Macedon’s finest. Hah!” Judah barked the laugh, loud and punchy. “Dolts were so smug, so confident – so sure they had nothin’ to fear from teeny, tiny old Judea that they didn’t even question it when we lured them into those hills. Couldn’t get into their big-boy pants in their fancy f*ckin’ Macedonian phalanx up there.” Judah drawled the words with melodramatic flair, like a young child mocking a concept by repeating it in an obnoxious whine.
“And me and my boys? We knew the land. That land was in us, and us, in it. Still is.” A mad gleam entered his eyes. “We fell on top them from every side. Hellenics gurgling up blood from their mouths and nostrils, throats punched open with arrows we stole from their buddies just to shoot ‘em right back home. Phalangites getting separated in narrow passes, dragged screaming into the dark until simple daggers and homemade knives gave’ em the ol’ pincushion treatment. And me? Cracking skulls and breaking spines. That’s when I first got a real taste for splintering bones with that darlin’ old thing over there.” He pointed to the nearby hammer, as if gesturing to a friend in an unseen audience. “With a ragtag gang of six hundred men, we hacked those f*ckers to pieces. A force of the deadliest empire we knew – thrice our size. Can you imagine? The looks on those sniveling imperialists’ faces when their glorious, civilized commander died in combat to a wild, barbarian brute like yours truly?” Judah slapped his knee, roaring with thunderous laughter. “f*cking priceless. Seriously.”
In a sudden blur of movement, Judah brought the sword up and plunged it directly through the paladin’s left knee. The kneecap burst in several directions with a series of wet cracks, the tendons snapping and severing. The man, for all his bravado, grit his teeth over a pained scream that he tried to stifle and failed. Judah let go, watching the sword wobble to and fro with the impact, stuck in the man’s leg. His smile faded at once. “All’s to say – shut the f*ck up and cut the sh*t, little man. That nasty old ladybug’s the last person to waste her time gallivanting off to pilfer some fake spear. You louts are crafty, but that ugly crone’s wilier than any of you. So come off it. How’d they know it was here, and where did they take it off to? You uglies always know each other.”
The paladin grunted, weak and spluttering, fighting to steady his breathing. “Why don’t you just drink my blood and steal my memories? Or perhaps place me under your thrall, and coax me into lovingly whispering my secrets to you like a helpless little lamb?”
Judah gagged, sticking his tongue out in contemptuous disgust. “Would you eat out of a damned dog bowl? f*ck that. ‘Sides. That would spoil the fun. I don’t need cheap tricks to get you to sing.”
The paladin still did not respond.
Judah huffed, reaching over and grabbing hold of his ankle in a tight grip, lifting the injured man’s leg and propping it to his shoulder. Grasping both his meaty hands around it, he began to squeeze. Threatening. Promising to bend it in the direction legs were decidedly not meant to bend. He stared at the Iscariot for a meaningful moment.
“Last shot to fess up, bucko.”
The paladin stared up at him, one eye stuck shut with blood from a gash in his forehead.
Then he spat in Judah’s face.
A beat.
Judah calmly wiped the spit from his face off on a coat.
Then he popped his lips. “Suit yourself.”
Judah bent the man’s leg forward at the ankle with his thumbs. A muffled crack, a short burst of vibration beneath his fingers beneath the paladin’s clothing and skin. A stomach-turning sound like a waterlogged branch being forcibly snapped in twain erupted into the silent warehouse as Judah pressed his thumbs ever forward, tearing open the limb and snapping the Achilles tendon with a noise like a whip cracking. The Iscariot released a guttural shout of agony, thrashing helplessly.
“Spear,” Judah seethed. “Where?”
The Iscariot panted hysterically, messily smashing words together from incoherent sounds. “I’d tell you to go to hell, but I think you’re already there.”
Judah casually whistled as he slid his hands down another inch, cracking the man’s leg again in the same sad*stic manner as before - as though he were breaking each individual vertebrae of a caught snake, one by one. He wrung out a further crackling scream. “Yawnin’ here, paladin,” Judah said. “Talk.”
“f*ck you. f*cking heretic.”
Another sickening snap, another segmented inch of broken tibia and fibula. Another. And then another. An animalistic growl tore out of Judah’s curled lips as he administered this punitive trifecta of maiming. In the old days, this would have been all but a death sentence. Judah wasn’t sure if that made him merciful. He was sure that he didn’t give a f*ck.
“You’re one to talk,” Judah seethed. “Supercessionist f*cking infidel. Where are they taking my spear?”
“I don’t know.”
Making a manic noise, Judah braced one hand atop the man’s knee and the other beneath it – and with the latter, he pushed forward to a ninety-degree angle. The kneecap shattered, and the shin bent into full-scorpion shape. The Iscariot threw his head back and howled, his voice breaking several times over in his torture. He sounded like he was about to cry.
“Ain’t you a tough cookie?” Judah simpered, jostling the flopping and fragmented sock of meat and broken bone that was once about two-thirds of a functional human leg. Droplets of blood shook out from incremental breaks in the skin, soaking the pants leg and trailing downwards in rivers.
“Slow and godless?” the paladin wheezed with a weak laugh. “I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Judah roared in his face, spittle stretching between his thick fangs as his jaw popped out of its socket. In a flurry of chopping motions with a flattened hand, the Hammer made a battery of strikes up, up and up the man’s thigh, breaking it forward at inch-long intervals until he reached the hip.
Like it was… The f*ck were those things called?
Glowsticks?
Yeah. That. Those f*cking things. Like cracking open a glowstick.
A hot, fleshy glowstick.
“You know the difference between you and me, son?” Judah rattled, his cheeks and nostrils flared and contracting with the force of heavy, infuriated breathing. His pupils, shrunken to imperceptible slits in a sea of red with a solar core of yellow-orange. Foam accumulated at the edges of his mouth, cloying grossly into his facial hair, dribbling down his chin and pointed tip of his beard. “When you f*ck things up, you pray to your usurping, bastard God to fix it. But when I f*ck things up? I gotta fix it.”
The man was an incoherent, wailing pile of meat by now. Judah could smell the hot waves of his fear, the distracting bouquet of aromas of his gushing blood, bursting from broken skin and damaged blood vessels everywhere. He ground his teeth, his eyelids twitching. Couldn’t get side-tracked. Nope. No distractions. Tears ran down his victims face – tears of anger.
“Jesus said,” the paladin croaked, blood trickling out of his mouth. “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you. Amen. Amen.”
Something inside Judah’s gut snapped.
With a shuddering bellow, Judah’s jaw popped fully out of its socket. He reared his head back, and swung it downwards like a blunted executioner’s axe. Thick fangs punched through the top of the man’s skull, and Judah chomped down, cleaving through the forehead, caving in the orbits and bursting eyeballs. He bit off the entire upper half of the fellow’s head. Hair, skin, eyeballs, cranium, brain, grey matter, and all. The nigh-org*smic rush of delicious copper flooded Judah’s senses at once, and he released a low groan from deep within his chest. Like purring, like a cat. Like an untamed animal.
Tearing backwards with sticky strands of fleshy detritus clinging to his lips and facial hair, spurts of scarlet gurgling up from the twitching corpse’s exposed windpipe, Judah chewed up and swallowed the gory payload, feeling that cold ache that tormented him day in and day out abate at last – if only for a few tantalizing moments. Like a fiending heroin addict finally caving and shooting up on the cheapest, dirtiest substance available.
Hating every second of euphoria.
Judah closed his eyes, allowing the dead human’s memories to rush through him – an ethereal gag-reel of a human’s life. He saw a tiny flower garden on a windowsill with cracked glass, felt the sting of a scolding hand on the back of his head. He saw rows and rows of hand-carved pews, the opulent visage of sculpted crucifixes embedded in high-flung Catholic church architecture. Exchanging of jokes with a black-haired woman with a close-cropped buzzcut; the woman Judah had throttled and dispatched in the hallways minutes prior.
And Judah sensed the shock and surprise when the Countess’s goons broke down the doors, savaging men’s throats and ripping out hearts.
His eyes shot open.
He swung a fist at nothing. “f*ck!”
This man hadn’t known anything Judah could’ve inferred.
The stinking aftertaste of copper, with its cloying sweetness that ought to have been intolerably bitter, sank deeper into his taste buds, into every inch of his undead body, slithering up into his head and behind his eyes, like the dried hands of an unseen mummy fingering its way through his entire nervous system.
Snapping his gaze back to the rest of the warehouse, littered with similarly brutalized Iscariots, Judah felt his sense of self recede to the back of his head, as that loathsome animal instinct seized him, stole his body, appropriated his faculties, and bade him stand.
“Well,” he growled, wiping the viscera from his bloodied mouth with one hand, dislodging a loose piece of brain tissue. “One of you f*ckers will have to talk, now, won’t you? Guess there weren’t anything else for it to begin with.”
He took one step forward.
“A man’s gotta do,” he breathed.
Then another.
And then another.
“What a man’s gotta do.”
And then, he lunged forth onto the floor, tearing open the chest cavity of the nearest body.
Judah flew into a sloppy feeding frenzy – the end result of months of repressed ravenous impetus. The suffocating blanket of shame would no doubt smother him after the fact, for his indulgence of such a decadent act. His skin would crawl and he would rip out his hair in chunks. But right now? Right now, he was too pissed to give a sh*t. And as Judah tore arms from corpses and crunched down whole limbs in frantic, hurried bites that cut through flesh like butter and snapped radius and ulna like baby carrots, gulping down unchewed wads of gore like a starved hyena, that rare and elusive sense of absolute ecstasy came alight behind his old ribs once more, radiating outwards in a baleful, comforting wave that settled deep into his tired bones.
“Choneini Elohim ke’chasdekha,” Judah spluttered, his voice cracking in between gluttonous mouthfuls of hateful, delectable sustenance. A droplet of bone dropped from his lips as he fought to form the words in Hebrew. His eyes watered. Might’ve been with tears. Hard to say. Harder still to care. “Kerov rachamekha mecheh fesha’ai.”
Judah blacked out.
