Arc, Jack, and Julie climbed out of the broken window of the supermarket and back into the alleyway they had entered from. As tempting as it had been, they had not taken any of the few remaining cans of food, fearing that they would need to run at a moment’s notice and the excess weight would be the different between life and death.

  Much to Arc’s relief, there had been no further sign of the eye fiends. He prayed that it was a lone actor, separated from whatever master it once had. Even though he knew that was a foolish nothing to entertain, he nonetheless hoped it to be true. As well as seeing no further fiends, the group hadn’t seen head nor tail of the Right Hand of Obsidian.

  Arc took the radio from his pocket and pressed the button on its side. “My name is Arc the Hawk and I’m looking for the Right Hand of Obsidian. Over.”

  He had repeated this message before entering the supermarket and again halfway through the search, once he was certain that he and the twins were alone in the sprawling shop. There had been no response, only the faint hum that said the radio was working. He couldn’t help but picture a radio lying beside a pile of bloody bodies in some dark hole somewhere he would never find. It was a grim thought, but it was one he could not shake. He hated cities, it brought out the morbidity in him.

  “Cross that off our checklist,” said Jack, looking across the car park. Through the metal fence stood yet more apartments and the young man couldn’t help but wonder about them. “Will we get to the point of searching through each of these one by one?”

  “If we remain undisturbed, sure,” said Arc.

  Jack folded his arms. “You told us about the dangers of cities like this the entire way here, yet we’ve seen nothing except that eye bat.”

  “Eye fiend.”

  “Sure. My point is that there’s been almost no sign of life here. Who’s to say that the monsters that might once have lived here haven’t left? If people are too scared to come here, they might have run out of food and ventured out into the Auriga, seeking a meal in the wasteland.”

  “While that is a possibility, I would say the odds of you being correct are less than one percent.”

  “Less than?” asked Julie, resting a hand on her hip. “I trust you, Arc. You’ve steered us well so far, but Jack’s right. We’ve seen nothing except for that lone eye.”

  “Have you forgotten why we’re here?” asked Arc. “A skilled group of scavengers like the Right Hand don’t just vanish. Their car doesn’t just wind up flipped over in the riverbed.”

  Jack and Julie looked to each other, trying to think of a counterargument. “What if the vehicle flip was an accident and they’re hot footing it back home?” asked Jack. “We didn’t see them on the road because they went cross-country.”

  Arc was growing frustrated with the pair. They meant well in trying to reassure themselves and Arc, but they were much too na?ve to the way of the world. “Just remember when something bad happens that I tried to warn you.”

  He walked away, not giving the two teens a chance to argue further. If their misplaced confidence kept them calm for a short while, he would permit it. He climbed through the hole in the chain link fence that granted him the easiest path back onto the street. Taking the route leading towards the city centre, Arc continually watched his surroundings. The twins were doing the same, knowing that it was common sense and not letting themselves slack too much.

  The three had a short discussion about where to go next and Arc decided that their first two guesses hadn’t paid off in the least, so they would start in the city centre and work their way outwards. It meant that rather than walking into danger as they searched, they would be continually moving to the edge of the city.

  After finding a collapsed building in their way, they took a staircase to the east. It was quite the climb and a slick oily substance that had pooled itself on a dozen of the steps greased their boots, leaving the three holding onto the handrail to avoid a nasty fall back down to the bottom. Once they reached the top, they spied a beautiful building waiting to greet them.

  The exterior was of weathered brown stone and although it was chipped and bore many cracks, it was holding together, showing much more strength than many of the other structures in the city. There were intricate carvings of gargoyles lining arched doorway and many more perched around the corners of the roof, which sloped high above them and ended in a broken spire. The doors were of a dark oak, embossed with many celestial beings that hailed from the heavens themselves. Simply looking upon this building filled the trio with a calmness.

  “A House of Anateer,” said Arc breathlessly. He was awestruck by its majesty. “I haven’t seen one so intact before, at least not a post-Arcanaclysm one.”

  Anateer was one of the revered gods, dedicated to the domain of justice. His followers, fewer than they were five decades prior, were dedicated to helping the needy and purging evil wherever it tried to take root. The clerics and paladins in service to him were granted holy magic that could heal wounds, purge poisons, and even turn many of the lesser undead to dust with a simple prayer spoken aloud. They were rare individuals to come across, feared as mages were, but Arc had met a couple of priests in his time and they were good men who he had the utmost respect for.

  “It’s magnificent,” said Jack.

  “It is,” said Julie. “Can we go inside?”

  “On the way back,” said Arc, also curious as to why the church was left standing while many other buildings had crumbled. “We stick to the plan.”

  He walked along, holding a hand over his shoulder and flicking his palm up to make the twins follow. Once they tore their eyes away from the House of Anateer, they scrambled after him, not wanting to be left too far behind. They did not think they were in much danger, but they were more comfortable in Arc’s immediate presence than they were at a distance.

  Heading on their westward detour, the three found a zigzagging road leading back down to the main street. The sand was piled in much larger mounds, almost dunes, and Jack ascended one of them to get a better look at the surrounding area. He let out an unwilling yelp and stumbled backwards, falling down the hill. Before Arc could ask his friend what was wrong, an eye fiend flew over the hill and darted downwards.

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  Arc whipped up his gun and fired a shot at the creature, piercing its eyeball and sending a cascade of purple blood onto the sand. The creature dropped and rolled down after Jack, thumping into his back as he tried to crawl away. With another yelp, Jack leapt to his feet and then brushed the sand off himself.

  “We are not alone,” said Arc, pointing at the twins in turn. “Got it?”

  “Got it,” they said, their confidence melting away and giving way to fear once more.

  There came a beating from behind one of the towering buildings and a dark cloud of bat-like creatures bearing a single large eye within their core flew into sight. They soared up high, dozens of them, and then descended upon the humans.

  Arc immediately raised his gun and started firing round after round into them. He reloaded as Jack and Julie finally took their first shots in the city. Thud after thud came as the eye fiends dropped one by one to the sand, soaking it with their spewing blood. They made not a single screech or scream, for they had no mouths from which to cry out in pain.

  As all three stopped to reload together, one of the fiends sank its talons into Julie’s shoulders and gazed deep into her eyes. She tried to shove it away, but it dug deeper. Arc leapt to her aid and thudded his unloaded gun into its back, but it still would not release her. He hurriedly drew his knife from his belt and placed a hand atop the creature, pulling it back. He thrust the blade deep down, piercing the pupil with a gruesome pop. Without no strength left, Arc pulled the eye fiend away and flung it into the air, where it smacked another of its kin out of the sky.

  Jack had finished reloading his gun and with rapidly successive bangs, felled another ten of the creatures, leaving their numbers massively thinned. Arc spun around, placed six bullets into his gun and clicked the cylinder back into place. With the silvery revolver catching the light of the overhead sun, he shot the final four flyers, adding their corpses to the pile.

  “Keep watch,” said Arc, pointing a firm finger at Jack. He turned to Julie who was standing there with her eyes vacant as though in a daze. “Julie? Talk to me, are you alright?”

  Julie said nothing, simply staring through him as though he was not even there. Her mouth was slightly ajar and her arms slacked by her sides, barely holding onto her gun. Arc reached down and flicked it from her hand before shoving it in his pocket, fearing that whatever had taken hold of her would use it for its nefarious purposes.

  “What’s wrong with her?” asked Jack, the anguish seeping out in his voice. “Is she…dead?”

  “No,” said Arc, tapping Julie on the face to try and snap her back to awareness. “It’s like she’s been hypnotised; enthralled by the eye fiend.”

  “But it’s dead!”

  “But who does it serve?”

  Jack dragged a hand across his face and shook his head. “An Eye of Gra’shiya,” he said. The young man ran to the top of the mound of sand and surveyed the broken city before him. “Where this hell is it? Come out you piece of shit! You’re going to die for harming my sister!”

  “Get down!” barked Arc, exploding to the top of the hill and pulling Jack down by the corner. “When Julie’s in this state, the last thing we need is something we can’t kill hunting us. I know you’re emotional right now, but use your damn brain, boy.”

  “She’s my sister!”

  “And when Colt was beating the living daylights out of you, she kept her cool. She helped how she had to and didn’t fly off the handle, drawing in more foes.”

  Jack’s chest was heaving up and down. The young man’s face was red and there was a fury in his eyes that Arc had never seen before. His jaw was clenched tightly, but his breathing started to slow and he gave a subtle nod. He knew Arc was right and, had he listened before, they may have been better prepared to deal with the swarm of eye fiends.

  “Let’s get ourselves to the church,” said Arc, walking over to Julie. He threw her over his arm and switched out his revolver for his spellcaster. If the Eye of Gra’shiya or any of its stronger minions were to rear their eyeballs, he would need something much more versatile than metal and gunpowder.

  Arc hurried away with Jack following him. Julie bounced limply as the spellslinger ran, her eyes looking through the sand and seeing to the centre of the world, her awareness of her surroundings non-existent. Jack looked to her, wishing he could do something but he put his trust in Arc, knowing that the bounty hunter would find a way to bring her mind back from where it was locked deep inside her.

  With their legs burning from the climb, the two ran through the open gates and up to the door of the House of Anateer. Arc shoved the door, only to find that it was locked.

  “Not now,” he sighed, looking over his shoulder to make sure nothing was following them. “We’ll see if there’s a back door somewhere. There must be.”

  Arc led the way around the church, trying to find another way inside.

  “How many more of them are out there?” asked Jack nervously.

  “Who knows. But I suspect they’ve been watching us for much longer than we first realised. They didn’t strike until we were deep in the city. I reckon if we tried to flee, we’d have a much harder time getting out of New Carlington than we did waltzing in.”

  “The Eye of Gra’shiya wanted our guard lowered, didn’t it?”

  “There’s no doubt in my mind now.”

  At the back of the church, the sand was piled high, blocking a small protruding wing that likely held the second doorway. There would be no easy way of clearing it, at least not without spending hours trying. The two ran back around to the front of the church and Arc spied another eye fiend sitting on the upper floor of a six-storey carpark. So raised were they that the fiend was sitting level with them as it watched the trio.

  “It knows we’re here,” groaned Jack, wishing he was anywhere else. Now that he knew he was being watched constantly, he felt this overbearing weight that made him sick to his stomach. He was a rat in a cage being toyed with and he loathed it.

  Arc’s ears pricked up at a low drone from behind the thick doors. “Did you hear that?” he asked Jack and the droning stopped.

  “No,” said Jack, looking around to try and see what Arc was talking about.

  “There’s someone inside,” he said. He held up a fist and thumped the oak. “Open up!”

  No response came, not even in the form of the low drone he had heard. For all he knew, it was a trapped animal or monster that someone had locked inside.

  “I think we should leave,” said Jack, looking at the eye fiend. He averted his gaze, fearing that he too would be enthralled by its intruding stare. He tugged on Arc’s jacket. “Please, let’s get out of here. If anybody is inside, they’re not going to help us.”

  “Sorry, Jacky Boy, but we’re going inside even if he was to blow the door up.”

  Arc raised the Golden Hawk and called aloud. “Three. Two. One. Fi—”

  A muffled static ceased the bend of his finger. It was coming from his pocket.

  “If you blow up our door, I’ll blow you up in retaliation,” came a man’s voice from Arc’s pocket.

  He carefully set Julie down and pulled out the radio. “Who am I speaking to?” asked Arc. “Charlemagne? Alfonso? Logain? You certainly don’t sound like an Isabella.”

  “You know the names of my crew, do you?”

  “If you heard my earlier messages, you know why I’m here. King Obsidian sent me. Now open up or I swear to Anateer, I’m going to blow this door to smithereens.”

  There came the grinding of something heavy being shifted away from the door. There were several things being moved out of the way. A clicking followed and the door swung open. From inside the church emerged a man. He was short, standing no more than five feet and six inches tall. He had red hair shaved into a floppy mohawk and wore a sleeveless leather jacket. Strapped to his waist was a belt with holsters containing six handguns, all of which were the same model.

  “You must be Charlemagne,” said Arc, scooping Julie into his arms. There was not a lick of doubt, the man was one of the Right Hand. He fit Lancelot’s description perfectly and was not a man easily impersonated.

  “Don’t just stand there,” he said, sidestepping Arc and shoving the roaming trio inside. “The last place you want to be is outside.”

  He whipped out one of his many guns and unleashed a bullet that flew through the air and ran straight through the eye fiend watching the church. He walked backwards as his eyes drew an arc across the land. Once inside, he closed the door of the church and turned the key.