The Malavide - Complete Audio

Thonos had studied that as well - he knew that once a demon possessed a man, that man was as good as gone, was as dead as though the body was already dust. Once Thonos realized that, the killing became easier; much easier. He did not know what the Ourde were, but he knew that they were not human.

He had seen the actual process of the infestation, had seen someone change right before his eyes, and acquire the aura which he knew that he could feed upon. Any creature with the aura was a demon, a possessed human, taken and used by the Ourde like so much shell. It was such that he had been created to kill, but even ahk'Tabur had not really realized what it was about the humans with the auras - he just knew that they were evil, that they were prey.

The one question Thonos could never answer was where the Malavide had come from, where they had started. It had taken him long centuries to realize that they were designed too efficiently for killing the demons to be anything but a manufactured creature - but manufactured by whom? When had the demons first appeared? When had they discovered they could use the human soul as a conduit to this world? When had they decided to take this world from the humans?

For Thonos knew that was their intention. He was nearly among the last of his kind; as he walked along the barren streets, blending effortlessly with those around him, walking, always walking, shifting back and forth and going between buildings to double back yet again. He alone knew the world was under siege, and that the siege was at long last almost over. More of the demons, every year more of them, and only Thonos left, one last hunter, one last Malavide. As far as he knew that was true, and even if there were more there were not many. Years it had been since he had seen any of the kin, more years than he liked to think about.

The demons had found him somehow, they had ferreted him out, but he was sure no one was following him right now. How had they found him? Was it by accident, or design? He had escaped their attention for so long he had grown contemptuous of them - even as he had seen them multiplying he had grown contemptuous of them, but there was nothing contemptuous about those warriors they had sent against him tonight. They were the best he had seen in a long time, and managed to get bullets into him even after he was attacking.

It had been so close, that which he thirsted for, so close he could feel the tug of Death's scythe. But Death had been tricked again.

Thonos felt his soul singing, if he still possessed one. The energy from the Ourde he fed on had him buoyed almost to the point where he thought he would burst. He turned a last corner, into darkness; the shadow fell across him and seemed to absorb him, and a moment later a long winged, languorous shape rose above the dark outlines of the buildings, wings beating slowly, lifting it up into the night and away from the city lights; lifting it to the currents that drifted west with the fresh ocean wind, west and north into the black velvet of the night sky.

West and North, into the dying night.

West and North, into the oncoming winds of winter.

Well behind him another shape, this one sleek and silent also floated into the night sky.

The silent shape stayed far behind for a good hour - and then it caught up.

Section 4

Jon Pedderse studied the slim man sitting at the table from the other side of the two-way glass. The man was in his thirties, if Pedderse was to judge by looks. The man was much older if he was to believe what the science boys said.

Pedderse was not sure what to believe yet, but he had a job to do and he meant to do it. The fact that the man seemed so completely at ease was one of the things that was throwing Pedderse off. The man had to know what was happening - there was no way the government was going to let him go, ever, and the man had to know it or suspect it at any rate.

But he sat perfectly at ease, hands folded loosely on the table, his roman features relaxed, his dark eyes staring through the wall at something no one else could see. Pedderse shook his head, and looked at the heads up display on the sheet of glass; it would show him the same thing as the super-shades had shown, it would show the fact that the man's body temperature was nearly a hundred and two degrees; it showed the brainwaves of the man, completely relaxed, no sign of the tension he must be feeling.

That, or the man had perfect control over his subconscious emotions. That was something Pedderse was not able to believe in.

And the electromagnetic aura - everyone had one, and the man in the room did as well.

The computer turned the small fluctuations in the electromagnetic field into color variations, much as weather radar turned different weather patterns to different colors on the radar display.

These colors that originated from humans varied somewhat depending on whether you were alert or sleepy, in a state of relaxation or filled with adrenaline, whether you were thinking about something with all your concentration or letting the mind drift - all these things, the scientists had discovered, made slight variations in the blue or green field that surrounded all humans. They had not been able to determine what caused the slight variation between humans which had the blue aura compared to those of the green. None of that mattered to the man sitting in the small room, for his aura was for the most part red, a pulsing, deep red shot with shades of blue, the blue so slight as to be almost unnoticeable.

The man had been noticed on a routine test of the portable super-shades, the technology that the science boys had been perfecting. They had followed this unique specimen, followed him and watched him very carefully, to see if there was anything else that would set him apart.

As indeed there had been. Pedderse shook his head. He had seen some of the video, and had seen the video of the capture. He was glad - more than glad - that the man was constrained to the table and chair by slim yet super strong links of thin metal.

Pedderse drank the last of the cup of coffee, and then poured another - he liked it black and hot as hell, and this coffee fit the bill.

Pedderse stepped into the room to do battle with the strange, magical creature sitting so calmly at the table.

"Good afternoon."

A silent nod, the dark eyes not yet focusing.

"I don't know if I would want to talk either, you know - it's not every day you're caught flying around in midair after all."

No reaction to that, literally none at all. But the eyes had shifted in some way, Pedderse realized. He did not know exactly when it had happened but he was quite suddenly aware that those dark, impenetrable eyes were concentrating on nothing but his own gaze.

Focusing like a laser, and no flicker of emotion on that pale, gaunt haunted face. In age, the man looked thirty five, maybe a well fit forty, but in that moment, in the pale light of the interrogation room the face looked more than forty - more than forty by about a thousand years.

The features held a strange stillness, though - one that Pedderse described in later senate hearings as being the same stillness as that before a sudden clap of thunder, before the earthquake strikes, before the wave sweeps to shore.

Pedderse allowed himself a small smile - no matter how silent and obstinate the man was, Pedderse had the advantage for all that. He just wished he didn't have to repeat that to himself again and again.

"So, who were the people that tried to kill you? Samuel Arkin, that's the name you were going by, so I can call you that - or I can call you by your real name. Ha!" Pedderse barked a sudden laugh at the abrupt tilt of an eyebrow.

"Call me Samuel," the voice smooth like silk, but with a strange roughness to it. Pedderse could not figure out whether it was the voice itself or the accent the man spoke in - rather, almost a total lack of accent. They already had linguists listening, trying to figure where this guy was from.

"Seven dead," Pedderse said softly, and shook his head "I could see how you would want to run away from that. Believe me, if we had known they were coming we would have intercepted them. Hell, though, you did a better job than we ever could," Pedderse shook his head again. "That flying, though, that really took us by surprise. And you know, it was the same stuff that allowed us to catch you flying that allowed us to see you in the first place."

"Electromagnetic fields," the Malavide said softly, and Pedderse blinked. Why had he said that? He thought with a chill that there was no reason - why had he said it? But he had obviously given something away for the still man to make such an accurate guess. "That's how you spotted me, isn't it? My electromagnetic aura was different - obviously, different enough for you to take notice of me. How many different fields are there? Eh?"

Pedderse clenched his jaw - he had to get control of this interview back, but Samuel, as he called himself, was still talking. His words came quick, and the accent had intensified a bit.

"I'll bet there are two different variations in your findings, my dear man." The black eyes bored into Pedderse until the cop thought he could see nothing else. "What color are you, I wonder?" the Malavide whispered, but his voice was much too loud, and when Pedderse spoke he surprised even himself.

"I'm blue," he said before he could stop himself, and Samuel nodded as a voice in Pedderse' earpiece said suddenly, "What the fuck are you doing? Get the fuck out of there, Pedderse, we need to regroup, you're blowing it," the voice said in his ear.

And at the same time he saw Samuel mouth the words behind a hand scratching at his nose, "Don't trust the others!"

Pedderse stepped out of the room, into the hallway, and then into the now cramped room behind the length of glass. Phillips, the regional director was there; he was the one whose voice had come through Pedderse' earpiece.

"Christ, Pedderse, what the fuck was going on in there?" Phillips said, his voice quieter than usual. That was not a good sign with the director.

"I'm not sure, he . . ." Pedderse trailed off as he glanced through the glass. The man, Samuel Arkin as Pedderse knew him, was once again sitting as still as a statue, hands folded loosely on the table, not moving by so much as a millimeter. Not even trying to appear normal, not demanding his release. Pedderse wondered what the man knew, to be so sanguine about his own fate.

"There were no fluctuations in either of them," one of the techs said, and Pedderse shook his head suddenly, clearing the cobwebs out of it.

"No, he didn't do anything to me, I just got spooked is all," Pedderse said.

"Perhaps we should not resume until tomorrow. I don't want anyone else to interrogate him for now, let him cool his heels in that fucking room all night. Pedderse, get the fuck out of here and get some fucking rest. Be back in at first light tomorrow."

The regional director always knew exactly when sunrise was, and delighted in telling people to be in at first light, thus making them look up when sunrise was. Pedderse had learned that early in working with the man, and whenever he was going to be in theater he made sure he knew when first light was. He told himself it was the kind of thing a good leader did, but he didn't believe himself.

"Don't trust the others," the man had said, as though they were sharing some type of secret. Pedderse tried to forget the words as he drove to work the next morning. He had on a pair of the super-shades. The contractor had given him a pair in a different style than the others because Pedderse was an evaluator of the technology. No one at the agency knew about it, and he was still not sure why he had slipped them on this morning.

The name of the thing was extremely stupid, Pedderse thought, but he had not yet come up with a better one himself. He had never been good at naming things, and that went with the feeling this whole case was giving him. Unease - something was wrong.

It was not yet first light, but the super-shades took care of that too, changing everything to a washed out grayish green image that nevertheless kept its three dimensional perspective, unlike other night vision goggles.

He guided his car through the streets, barely thinking about the act of driving. There was virtually no traffic at the moment - that would not hit heavy for another twenty to thirty minutes, and by then Pedderse would be safely ensconced inside the agency's headquarters.

Normally, one out of eighteen people possessed a green aura; looked at in smaller populations it was easy to see that sometimes green auras gained a larger percentage, sometimes inhabiting an area almost exclusively.

The government and the contractor that built the super-shades had looked for anything different than the auras about the people that were green or blue, but so far as either could tell they were just normal people, perhaps no different, the scientists theorized, than a left-handed person and a right-handed person.

One of the science geeks had tried to explain it to him - "The colors are arbitrary, they could have been anything, but the guy who designed the system had a sense of symmetry, so he matched the frequencies as well as he was able to the light frequencies that result in our perception of color. The machine is just reading the magnetic signatures we all possess. Think of them as large groupings, more like blood types than fingerprints. All the frequencies are very close together, just as human blood, no matter what type, is human blood and not at all like dog blood."

Pedderse guided his car through the gate, flashing his ID at the guard, who was a blue. The guard at the car garage was also a blue, the tinge of the aura overlaying faces he knew and had worked with for years.

He stepped into the large foyer - it took him a long moment to notice, and he did not think his step had faltered. His chest was suddenly extremely tight. "They're like a blood type in other ways as well - as near as we can tell, they never change, just like the color of your eyes. Our equipment can't measure to a fine enough point to distinguish individuals from other individuals, but we can easily distinguish the types."

The receptionist was a green. He had known the woman for more than twelve years; she reminded him of his mother, slim and elegant no matter what she was wearing. And he was sure that her aura the week before had been blue. He was more than sure. "The director is waiting upstairs," she said. "Have a great day, Jon."

"Yes, I shall, you too Rose," Jon said, barely looking at her as he headed for the stairs. On the second floor he caught the elevator. There were two uniformed men, gold badges gleaming and guns fat on their hips.

They were both green.

Pedderse' heart started beating faster and his stomach started quivering. Something was going to happen, something that he did not like.

Out of the elevator, his cell phone rang as he walked down the long hallway towards the interrogation room. Phillips was standing at the door, and Pedderse almost cried out when he saw that Phillips had assumed a green aura, when Pedderse knew as plain as day that Phillips had been blue the day before.

His hands were itching, and the hairs on the back of his neck were standing straight up. "Watch out for the others," the sly voice said, tickling in the back of his head as it had been all night. "Watch out for the others."

He studied Phillips, but could see no difference in the man other than the aura which was shown by the smart shades. He thought idly that he liked that name better. He quickly took them off; there was only so far he could go before someone drew attention to them.

Before he did he looked into the meeting room; five people standing in the same room as the Malavide, and four of them were green.

"Are you ready?" Philips said, and drew Pedderse inside the room, bringing one of the armed guards in with him. Pedderse frowned at the number of people in the room, and the fact that most were wearing guns, but found himself soon forgetting that as he stared at the man seated alone at the long table.

For all intents and purposes, the man sitting at the table looked as though he had not moved, not a muscle all night long. For all that, he looked as fresh and alert as a daisy while Pedderse felt as though he had been wrung through the ringer.

The captives' eyes, dark and compelling, found his, and that dry voice whispered its silent message once again in his head, "Watch out for the others." Pedderse tried to maintain his concentration, but it was increasingly difficult. One of the other men was talking, the only other blue aura in the room if Pedderse could remember right, and he realized now that the man was not even on their team - he must be a lawyer.

How had the others turned green? That had not yet been recorded. Greens were greens and blues were blues, but even Pedderse had to admit the devices had not really been tested thoroughly.

Who had tried to kill the captive, before they had scooped him out of midair? Seven, and from the look of them nothing but professional killers and yet the slim man sitting before them had taken them apparently without trouble or injury. At least, there had been no injury in the initial physical examination. The doctor had theorized, Pedderse knew, that the man could have extremely high regeneration capabilities.

"Like a werewolf," Pedderse had said, and the doctor looked at him blankly. Pedderse had thought about explaining the movie about mutant superheroes and decided instead to give up while he was ahead.

Regenerative powers, the ability to fly - how many other things could this man do? How had he known top secret data when Pedderse had barely alluded to the technology that had enabled them to seek him out?

Pedderse had answers for none of it. God, his head felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

The man was saying something, about some town in the mid eighteen hundreds that had gone belly up, describing a storm - lowering clouds, stark against the sharp outlines of some unidentified desert mountains. His dark eyes bore into Pedderse', and in the small room the walls fell away, revealing dry dusty ground.

The grit struck his legs and face, the wind whipped at Pedderse' short hair. He was barely aware of putting his glasses back on.

He was standing in a small ravine; the ravine was about twenty feet wide at the mouth and twelve feet deep; over the right shoulder of the ravine he could see the jagged edges of close by mountains.

The ravine opened up into a small valley and nestled in this valley was a town, just a few scattered buildings and a false front or two.

Sitting before the town, high up on one shoulder of the valley there rested a church. Even as he watched, a thick fork of lightning slipped from the sky, and Pedderse could actually feel the rumble of the thunder deep in his chest. Lightning licked again, striking near the church but not hitting it.

Pedderse realized he was moving towards the church. He tried with no avail to stop himself and the terror that had been waiting in his chest all morning sprang outwards. His palms were sweating in the super-hot, dry air and he felt the adrenaline rushing through his system.

He entered through the dark portal of the church's door, eyes wide with fright, but his hands were calmly fixing glasses to his eyes.

The bodies hung from the rafters. At first Pedderse thought they were decorations of some sort, and then he thought it was perhaps a sick joke. But there is something about an actual body that looks like nothing else. It has a certain . . . weight . . . upon the rope that can be seen. Perhaps it is the residual motion of that last kicking struggle for life, struggle denied and told so cruelly by the writhing features of the damned as they hung in that silent edifice.