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  Rites of Passage

  Copyright © 2015 by Annie Reed

  Published by Thunder Valley Press

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 Thunder Valley Press

  Cover design by Thunder Valley Press

  Cover art copyright © Netfalls/Bigstock.com

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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  1

  The creep sat crouched in the far corner of the abandoned processing plant smoking a cigarette. The tip flickered orange in the hulking dark, one small spot of smoldering warmth in the damp cold of a waterfront night.

  Finn had given up cigarettes decades ago, but the old longing stole over him like it always did.

  One more smoke for old time’s sake, what could it hurt? He wanted the comfort of a lit cigarette held loosely between his index and middle fingers. The taste as the smoke rolled across his tongue. Wanted to feel the kind of heat that would fill his lungs over and over again until it killed him. Eventually.

  The creep would give Finn a cigarette if he asked.

  Creeps would give him anything if they thought Finn would let them live.

  To his left, a wharf rat the size of an alley cat scuttled along the base of the plant’s rust-stained concrete wall. The rat disappeared beneath a drift of trash, and insistent squeaks erupted from the garbage.

  Finn could barely hear the rat’s babies over the passing thrum of a heavy bass beat. A car sped past the front of the processing plant, fleeing a neighborhood no one should be driving through at this time of night.

  The creep ignored the wharf rat. It sat on its scaly haunches, wings tucked in behind its back, blowing smoke out through its nostrils and making a show of ignoring Finn.

  So that’s the way the creep wanted to play it. Fine. Finn could play along.

  For now.

  He took a few more steps inside the processing plant, peering into the darkness for the first hints of eerie green light that would signal where the creep planned to bring its master into this world.

  On another long ago night Finn had tracked a different creep to this building. Back then the processing plant had still been in operation. During the daylight hours, trucks loaded down with fish from the docks disgorged their cargo near where Finn now stood. Conveyor belts had carried the fish down the processing line where they were gutted and beheaded before they were processed for sale.

  But once the sun set, the workers had gone home to their families. The few people left walking the street shivered when they passed the plant’s battered exterior, no doubt imagining that the darkened windows along its sides were malevolent eyes that watched them hungrily.

  They weren’t far from wrong.

  That night Finn had spotted a faint green light from outside the building. The creep had made no effort to hide what it was doing inside.

  Finn had been much younger then. Maybe the creep had thought he would turn tail and run.

  That was something Finn would never do. He knew what was at stake.

  The creeps didn’t belong to this world. They had been sent here to prepare the way for the invasion of Finn’s world by their masters, massive monsters who would devour everything and everyone in their path.

  The creeps had only one job—create a portal in this world, an anchor for one end of the passageway their masters used to invade new worlds.

  Finn’s job, and the job of others like him, was to stop them.

  The only way to stop them was to kill them. Killing them interrupted the flow of dark magic the creeps used to fuel the portal.

  And the only way to kill them was to cut off their heads.

  The green light Finn had seen from outside the building signaled a location where the border between worlds was the thinnest, but the green light was only visible once a creep had started working on the portal. Even then, only a select few could see it.

  Finn could. It was the first reason Finn had been chosen for this job.

  But it was only one reason.

  The creep that night had been crafty and more powerful than any creep Finn had encountered before. Instead of starting one portal, it was creating dozens.

  Dozens of possible entry points, each one nearly complete.

  Dozens of possible places where a monster could enter Finn’s world.

  The tactic had nearly worked.

  Distracted by the sheer number of portals, Finn hadn’t seen the creep dive at him from the pipework over his head.

  The creeps had the shape of men, but that was where the resemblance ended. Their thick bodies were covered with scales the color of bilge water. Their arms were heavily muscled, their fingers tipped in razor-sharp talons. Their leathery wings were tipped with barbs. Except for their angry yellow eyes, they were nearly impossible to see in the dark.

  The attack had come so fast, Finn had no chance to draw his blade. He had to dodge away from dive-bombing nightmare instead.

  He didn’t quite make it.

  The creep’s talons missed his neck but ripped into his shoulder.

  Finn went sprawling on the dirty concrete floor. Pain shot down his arm and raced along his spine, hot white and urgent.

  Before the creep could attack him again, Finn struggled to his feet and drew his katana in as smooth a move as he could manage.

  The creep propelled itself back to the ceiling, its heavy wings churning up a windstorm inside the plant. It taunted Finn with curses and promises of a long and painful death, but Finn focused on the creep’s movements, not its words.

  They had fought that night among the machines and the belts. Over the piles of entrails and fish heads, sending the scavenging wharf rats scurrying for safer ground.

  Finn had ignored the way his blood fell in thick splatters every time he swung his blade.

  Ignored the bone-rattling thrumming coming from the dozens of portals.

  Ignored the rumbling, grating laughter as the creep’s master shoved its bulk through a passageway that had no right to exist.

  Finn’s injury had sapped his strength, but at last his blade found its mark. He’d put every spare ounce of strength he had left into the swing of his katana, and the creep’s mottled head had separated cleanly from it shoulders.

  When the creep died, the portals faded from existence—each and every one—as if they’d never existed at all.

  Finn had allowed himself a grim smile when the creep’s master screamed, the sound of its fury fading to a distant echo.

  Stuck in the passageway with no place to go.

  “Take that, monster,” Finn had said, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper.

  The scars on his shoulder from that long-ago encounter had faded. He had new ones to replace them, and when those faded, more would take their place.

  He was a Guardian. Scars came with the job.

  Ever since that night, Finn had checked the processing plant just in case another creep decided to try creating a portal there. Tonight was the first time he’d seen another creep inside.

  The belts and machines and shipping crates that had cluttered the floor of the processing plant were gone now. The place was nothing more than a deserted building in a long row of deserted buildings in a part of town the city fathers didn’t like to acknowledge existed. It still smelled of fish guts and seaweed and the oily murk that dripped off the overhead pipes.
r />   Street gangs had claimed this place as their own. Graffiti marking their territory covered the walls. Only in this part of town—the rough part of town—goblins ran the gangs. Finn had recognized the ruins they’d mixed in with the graffiti. Simple threshold wards, most of them.

  Thresholds wards didn’t work on someone like him. He’d broken through just by stepping inside.

  Enough faint streetlight filtered through the filthy windows that Finn could see the creep still crouched in the corner. Its mottled, brackish face was surrounded by a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, but Finn caught no hint of green light.

  The creep hadn’t started a portal yet.

  “Nice place you got here,” Finn said. “Love what you’ve done with the décor.”

  The cigarette flared brighter, then the creep chuckled, a deep, throaty sound. “Only for you, asshole.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  The creep nodded its head. If it had been wearing a hat, it might have tipped it in Finn’s direction.

  Creeps never acted so nonchalant, not around him.

  Another car drove by, its bass-heavy music rattling the windows. Different song, same beat. Finn preferred classic rock.

  He moved closer, his katana a comforting weight in the sheath against his back.

  “Got one of those for me?” he asked, pantomiming taking a drag off a cigarette.

  The creep studied him for a moment before it shrugged and reached down beside itself toward the floor.

  Finn tensed. He didn’t draw his blade, not yet, but he had a feeling the creep had noticed his reaction.

  He also had a feeling the creep was enjoying this.

  Instead of drawing a weapon, the creep merely tossed a pack of cigarettes in Finn’s direction. “Knock yourself out,” it said.

  The cigarettes landed on the floor a few inches in front of Finn. He didn’t bend to pick them up, just arched an eyebrow at the creep.

  “That’s not very hospitable.”

  “My aim sucks,” the creep said. “So sue me.”

  Finn ignored the cigarettes. He still didn’t see any hint of green light, not even in the windows. Eyes might be the windows to the soul, as the old saying went, but real windows made for easy places to frame a portal to another world.

  Or dozens of portals.

  This whole thing was downright weird.

  “So what’s the deal?” Finn asked. “You’re just hanging out, having a smoke?”

  “No law against it,” the creep said.

  That wasn’t quite true. While no laws prevented this world’s magic folk from moving freely about the city—provided they didn’t practice magic without the proper licenses and permits—the creeps weren’t from this world.

  The creeps were basically illegal aliens, and hostile ones at that. Finn was within his rights to kill them. He even had a license to prove it.

  Take that, 007.

  “No law against me taking your head,” Finn said.

  The creep went very still, the cigarette still in its mouth. Smoke swirled around its head. “You see a portal here?” it asked.

  “You’re here. That’s all I need.”

  “Not very sporting of you. Guardian.”

  Outside another car drove past the plant. More window-rattling music. Finn was starting to yearn for a good Aerosmith song to break up the monotony.

  He’d had enough of the creep, too. It was sparring with him. It might not have opened a portal yet, but it would. Finn had never met a creep who lived for anything else.

  “Who said this is a sport?” Finn asked.

  He started to draw his katana from its sheath when something popped behind him, and an unseen fist slammed into his left shoulder.

  The impact nearly knocked him to his knees.

  “We do, asshole.”

  The new voice came from a broken window in the back of the plant. The voice was grating and guttural and unmistakable.

  A goblin.

  Not only a goblin. A goblin with a gun.

  How was that even possible?

  The creep laughed as more guttural voices took up the words and turned them into a chant.

  “We do, asshole!”

  Another pop.

  Finn felt more than heard a bullet speed past his head.

  He dove toward the closest wall, trying to make himself as small a target as possible. His injured shoulder was on fire.

  In an instant he’d gone from hunter to hunted, being shot at by goblins with guns, his katana his only weapon.

  Goblins who could see better in the dark than he could.

  Goblins who knew as well as he did that in this empty shell of a building, he had nowhere to hide.

  2

  “I still don’t know why we can’t just shoot them,” Finn said.

  He’d been practicing with a katana for hours. The weapon was elegant, the blade incredibly sharp, but it seemed like such an old-fashioned, dangerous way to kill anything. With a katana, he had to get up close. A bullet could kill from a distance. The creeps weren’t fairies, so why couldn’t he shoot them?

  Finn’s master gave him an indulgent look. “You telling me your lily-white ass is too good to learn the blade?”

  Movies always portrayed martial arts masters as tiny, wizened old Asian men. Finn’s master was a powerful black man who’d been born in the Deep South. He was well over six feet tall. His shoulders were massive, his legs heavily muscled, and his tattooed skin deeply scarred from battles with the things Finn was training to kill.

  “I’m saying there’s got to be a better way to do it,” Finn said.

  His master laughed. “Maybe someday you’ll find it. You live long enough, that is.”

  He made a circular movement with one hand.

  Finn had seen the gesture often enough. Keep going.

  His shoulders ached, but he went back to practicing the latest kata his master had given him. At least it wasn’t “wax on, wax off.”

  Finn used to spend his time doing things normal seventeen-year-olds did. Hanging out with friends at the mall. Going to movies. Convincing some girl to let him feel her up in the back seat of a friend’s car. Finn especially liked that one.

  Now he spent all his free time learning how to kill monsters.

  With a katana.

  Sometimes life was just surreal.

  His life had turned into a never-ending episode of The Twilight Zone the moment he’d seen his master kill one of those monsters.

  He’d been out past curfew with one of his buddies. They’d been drinking beer and lost track of time. His buddy’s car had the kind of muffler you could hear a mile away. The last thing Finn had wanted was to get caught coming home late with beer on his breath, so his buddy had dropped Finn off on the other side of the field behind his neighborhood.

  A twenty minute walk and Finn would be able to climb through his bedroom window with his parents none the wiser. He’d done it before. He had no doubt he’d be doing it again before he got out of high school and left his parents and this boring-ass neighborhood behind.

  The field was empty except for a few cows and a weathered old lean-to that had definitely seen better days. A quarter moon hung high overhead in the cloudless midnight sky. Finn could see just well enough to avoid stepping in cow shit, another thing he needed to avoid in order to successfully sneak into his own room.

  The lean-to sat almost precisely in the center of the field. Walled in on three sides, it had to be at least twice as big as the garage at home and nearly two stories tall. Finn had no idea what it had been built for. Whenever he cut through the field, the lean-to was always empty. It sure made a good landmark, though. His street dead-ended almost directly behind the lean-to’s back wall.

  Finn always thought the lean-to might be a good place to hang out with his buddies when they wanted someplace private to drink since it was always empty.

  Except that night the lean-to wasn’t empty.

  An unearthly glow filled the lean-to. The glow w
asn’t bright like neon signs, but more like what the glow-in-the-dark stars he had on the ceiling of his bedroom looked like once he turned out the lights at night.

  And bathed by that eerie light, a tall black man was fighting a creature that looked like it had crawled out of someone’s nightmare.

  The creature was shaped like a man, but it was taller than any man Finn had ever seen. It had huge leathery wings and rough-looking skin, and the fingers on its hands were long and came to sharp points.

  The man’s only weapon against this thing was a sword. An honest-to-God sword!

  Finn was fascinated. Maybe he was still just drunk enough to forget this wasn’t a movie, or maybe something else drew him in, but he didn’t run away.

  Instead, he moved toward the battle.

  Everyone knew magical creatures existed in the world. How magical beings finally integrated with the human world after centuries of remaining deliberately hidden was a part of both his history and government classes.

  It was a whole different thing to actually see one.

  Finn had never seen a magical creature. None of the fairies or elves or gnomes he read about lived in Finn’s neighborhood. None went to his school. He’d never even seen one at the mall. One of his buddies said his dad worked for an elf, but that was it.

  Finn and his buddies and everyone else he knew was human. Plain old regular people without an ounce of magical ability.

  Not like the man fighting the monster.

  This guy jumped higher and faster than Finn thought a regular person could. Each sweep of his sword looked effortless. He did the kind of martial arts moves Finn had only seen in the movies. He wouldn’t have even seemed human except for the sheen of sweat on his bald head.

  The creature didn’t sweat. Instead it puffed out huge clouds of breath in the chill night air. It didn’t look like a dragon exactly, even though Finn was pretty sure what he’d thought was rough skin was really scales, but those steamy breaths reminded him of smoke.

  Could this creature breathe fire?

  If it could, how cool was that!

  Finn forgot all about how he needed to get home before his parents noticed he wasn’t there. He forgot about his buddies. He even forgot about the girl he’d been thinking about asking out.