Sell you a Bridge chapter 249

June 3rd 2016 Prospero and Michael Scott Memorial Library, The Nightside 2:00 PM EDT

John  hissed in shock at Taylors words. "What? But I thought the Harrowing  track you through your gift? You only tapped into it for a second or two  there. How the hell did they track us down so quickly?" His voice was  shaking with unease, and it struck me as a profoundly bad sign that  people like John and Taylor were this worried about these things. I  couldn't even confirm any information about them because I still had the  horrible feeling that I shouldn't open my aura sight here under any  circumstances.

Taylor frowned. "I don't know. It usually  takes longer than this to track me down, not to mention they've never  sent so many of them. I didn't even know they had this many. The last  time I ran into them Razor Eddie saved me, but he isn't around right  now. I have no idea how to handle this many." His voice was tight and  angry, the tension in his tone showing  that he was more worried than  I'd ever seen him, though to be fair I obviously hadn't known him for  very long. Still, he didn't strike me as the panicky type.

The  Harrowing spread out, circling around us to hem us in. I swallowed  hard. "Ok, for those of us who don't understand what the hell you're  talking about how about giving us the cliff notes. What are Harrowing?  Who sent them? And most importantly how the fuck do we get rid of them?"  I kind of wanted to just tear into them, but some part of me was pretty  sure that wouldn't be the right call. I could hang with basically  anything, but I wasn't here alone. There were a bunch of these things,  and if I didn't know what they could do one of my friends could get  hurt.

Taylor snarled in frustration. "My enemies sent  them. Don't ask who they are, I couldn't tell you. They've been hunting  me for as long as I could remember, sending the Harrowing to kill me  every time I used my gift. It usually takes them a bit to lock on  though, so I can get away with quick peaks at the world beneath. They  must have been watching this place for some reason. A tip off maybe?  Regardless the Harrowing are...bad news."

His eyes were  focused on the blank, smooth faces, burning with the kind of existential  horror you can only really feel for something that scared you as a  child. The kind of fear you never grow out of, the kind that leaves a  mark on you that never fades. "The Harrowing can't die. They aren't even  really alive. They're just...meat, and bone, and terrible implacable  purpose fueled by a single minded desire to carry out the will of their  masters. There's no way to stop them, no way to slow them down, and only  the most powerful beings can eve-"

The was a pop and he  jumped, scared out of his reverie by the sound of my jun going off as I  put a bullet in one of their heads. It didn't go down, which was a shock  considering what my gun could do, but it did sway, so I shot it again.  Then again, and finally, on the third bullet, the thing collapsed,  limply, to the ground. I turned to look at the shocked PI and gave him a  wolfish grin. "Sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to see what that would  do. Pretty sure my gun can kill them, which means they can, in fact,  die." I looked over at the corpse. "Pretty terrifying that it takes so  many bullets though."

He just stared at me, his jaw slack.  "How? How did you kill it? The only thing I've seen manage anything  close was Eddie's razor, and he's a literal god. Not a weak one either,  gods are a dime a dozen in the Nightside, but even here Eddie is  something special. What the bloody hell IS that?" He was staring at my  gun with a kind of horrified fascination. I raised it and shot two more  of them before putting my last two rounds into a third. My fun clicked  empty and I snarled in annoyance before putting it away.

Once  they were dead I responded. "It's a conceptual weapon...sort of. It's  complicated, but regardless it's out of bullets so it doesn't matter.  Still, if they can die from that they can die from other things." I  reached out and called my keyblade, Tartarus swirling into existence in  my hand in a surge of dark energy. "I've got all sort of interesting  weapons, and I'm definitely not going to let these assholes get in the  way of me helping my cousin." I stepped forward, trying to put myself in  front of my girls, but we were surrounded so it didn't work too well.

I  reached out to my torc and called my armor, feeling the liquid metal  roll across my skin and enclose me completely. The feeling of my senses  expanding as they were swallowed by the armor was like nothing else I'd  ever experienced, and I felt my resolve firm as it happened. Something  about the armor just gave an unshakeable confidence that things would be  alright. I wasn't sure if using it was a great idea, given where we  currently were, but at the very least the color might throw them off a  bit.

The armor was definitely noted, and Taylor scowled  suspiciously when he saw it, but he shook that off quickly. Either the  armor or the sight of the dead Harrowing had chased away the ghosts of  all the times these things had tried to hunt him down. His eyes  hardened. "Right. Not sure what I can really do. But this is my mess. So  I'll see it through best as I can." Despite the fear I could tell the  idea of finally doing away with his childhood boogeymen was an enticing  one to the tough as nails detective. He reached into a pocket of his  coat and pulled out a bulky brass set of weighted knuckles, etched with  dangerous looking runes.

I could tell from his expression  he wasn't confident in his ability to take care of them. I could  understand that. Some kinds of fear wasn't so easy to shake off. If he  had really been running from these things since he was a kid then just  seeing me put a few of them down with a cheap trick wouldn't be enough  to remove that fear. After all, he said he'd seen them killed before,  and he didn't know me. If anything, the armor might have made it even  less likely to reassure him, since the Droods seemed to be an exception  to lots of rules.

But the flipside of the fear he felt was  that he'd felt it for a long time. He was familiar with it, and I could  tell Taylor wasn't the kind of person to let being afraid stop him from  doing what he needed to do. Some people liked to pretend that only  cowards felt fear, but those people were idiots. Not being scared of  something that could hurt you wasn't bravery, it was stupidity. Taylor  seemed like he was anything but stupid.

I wondered how I  was able to tell all this without my aura sight. Most of my insights  into others usually came from my vision, but I wasn't using it now. I  could see things about Taylor though, things I shouldn't have been able  to pick up. It wasn't everything, I wasn't reading his mind or anything,  and it took me a minute to figure out what I was detecting. Lies.  Taylor was telling himself that he could do this, and he wasn't sure it  was true. That was new. Sadly I didn't have time to pay any attention to  it though, because it was time to fight.

Before  I stepped out, Tommy grabbed my arm. "I have a way to get rid of them.  It'll help you learn a bit more about what you can do, but you'll need  to buy me some time." I nodded to him, and the existential detective  closed his eyes, focusing on his gift. I felt the world shift as he  began persuading it in a way mere words could never manage, slowly  changing the reality around us, but I didn't have time to watch. I  needed to grab some focus.

I  stepped through the darkness that was so abundant around us, arriving  behind the Harrowing in front of me and brought Tartarus down on its  shoulder, abyssal alloy teeth already spinning up into the chainsaw  blade I preferred against tougher opponents. I had options for handling  these things, but I needed to see exactly how strong they were and what  they could do before I figured out how to handle the issue. Zee, who had  picked up my intentions through out bond, conjured a thick shield in  front of the others as I vanished, leaving me outside and vulnerable to  draw them in, or as vulnerable as my armor could leave me.

As  my keyblade smashed down into the Harrowing, I started to understand  what Taylor meant about them not being able to die because they were  alive. While the gun had enforced mortality on them and basically taken  them out by cheating, Tartarus wasn't a conceptual weapon, even if it  was a powerful one. Instead of bisecting the thing like I intended, it  felt like I had tried to use an electric craving knife to hack through a  human sized block of silly putty. The flesh of the Harrowing gave and  twisted under the impact of my attack, seeming to almost absorb most of  the force.

Zee's shield was  permeable to the others, even if it wasn't to the Harrowing, which meany  Artemis was able to draw her bow and start putting purple lightning  bolts into the things. When the bolts didn't do anything serious despite  her heavenly punishment elf lightning, I saw Wally place his hands on  her shoulders. He closed his eyes and made a strange strained face as  this body started sparking with golden lightning. Rather than harm  Artemis the lightning, which I was pretty sure was what he called the  speed force, seemed to mingle with the lightning from her bloodline.

Her  eyes flickered with purple gold light and the arrows started actually  effecting the Harrowing. Each bolt caused the thing to writhe with pain  and start to drastically slow down. Taylor stepped out of the shield  purposefully and stepped up to the first writhing Harrowingm driving it  to the ground as he fell on it, smashing his heavy knuckled fist into  its lack of a face. Dreamer closed her eyes, placing her hands on either  side of Zee's head, and her violet pink power cascaded over our  girlfriend, amplifying the strength of the shield.

Artemis  didn't bother trying to take down any of them singular, just putting a  single bolt into each one and letting the rest of us deal with them. I  wasn't sure what the hell that purple gold lightning was, but it  definitely had an effect, because when it hit the one I was trying to  bisect its flesh started to congeal. Jim had summoned his cold power,  and the sound of tolling graveyard bells rank through the room as a  series of bone hands shot up from below the dirt to grasp at the ankles  of the Harrowing, holding them in place.

John  had pulled out some kind of weird gold gun that was firing bursts of  fire that on their own didn't do much, but seemed to interact with the  purple gold lightning like fucking kerosene, sparking the two or three  he hit up like bonfires. The burning ones slammed into the shield,  clearly in agony but making no noise as the clawed at the blazing light  with fingers tipped with rusty syringes. I hadn't actually noticed that  before. It was super creepy. And then, it was all suddenly over.

I  felt whatever Tommy was doing finally take hold, snapping into focus,  and I realized what had happened as his gift persuaded the world that  these things had never found us and they all just...vanished. Tommy fell  to his hands and knees, and I saw his form flicker slightly, like an  image losing focus, before snapping back to clarity as he vomited on the  grass. I just stared. That had been an application of power I had never  even considered. I walked over and helped the flamboyant detective up  and grinned at him. "Ok, can you teach me to do that?"