Full Boar

Chapter 11: Signs of the Apocalypse and Other Everyday Things

The call still echoed in Mason's ears, even after two hours.

Something about the rawness of the voice struck him, the vulnerability, the bare emotion making the words linger in Mason's mind. It reminded him of an older time, when he had been turned. He still remembered those days, filled with confusion and aimless rage, days of blood and gunpowder.

Everyone knew what it was like. The first few months, grappling with the curse, you thought you could manage it. Run out to the woods when the moon was right, find your way back home, pretend like the last night never happened. It has to get easier, right? Doesn't it?

And then it doesn't. The urges that assaulted you at first, the lust, the anger... they become part of you. You find yourself aching to give in, and then, one night, you do. Maybe you seduce a woman, take her back to your room, get carried away with a night of debauchery. Or maybe it's violence, and you find yourself again after you've beaten some people to a bloody pulp for daring to insult your shoes. You look at your bloody knuckles and think... am I a monster?

The answer, of course, was yes. Mason had figured that out a century ago. And then he figured out that the curse didn't make one a monster. It just... intensified the monster that existed within, lurking behind a cage of fear and empathy. Now the monster was out of the cage.

He shook such thoughts out of his head, pushing open a diner door. Normally, he ate breakfast at home, seeing as most people would balk at him ordering a dozen scrambled eggs and two bagels and then scarfing it down. But this place... he had been here enough times that they knew him and didn't glance at him twice when he ordered five different meals.

Mason scanned the diner. Two older women sat in one booth, a guy and a girl in another, and two old men sat at the bar. He looked again, and spotted his target, a dark-haired man, head bent in prayer, sitting at a booth.

He was a thin, angular man with wiry black hair and a permanent tired smile on his face. At the moment, as Mason walked up to him, the man had a pocket Bible out and was fastidiously praying above it. Mason didn't say anything to interrupt it, merely sat down across from him.

The man finished his prayer and looked up at Mason. "Glad you could join me," he said.

"Of course, Tim. This is our little routine."

Tim Hershberger was probably the unlikeliest of friends Mason had made over the years. He was everything Mason was not; he was quiet where Mason was loud, he was patient where Mason was impulsiv, he was polite where Mason was rude. While Mason approached everything with the grace of a sledgehammer, Tim had a more subtle approach. Where Mason vented his problems with God, Tim was devoutly religious.

But Tim had done something few could ever boast. He had saved Mason Slate's life.

He was a braucher, a Pennsylvanian-Dutch folk magician from what Mason understood, though he never referred to himself as such, and the Tribunal didn't count his practice as one of the Thirteen Licit Orders. But he carried in his little messenger bag a well-worn Bible and a book on folk remedies, three letters that he claimed were from Heaven, an amulet to ward off witchcraft, and three nails. Pried from a coffin, he could use them to drive a thief to return stolen property.

The waitress arrived so the two men ordered, and minutes later the booth table was filled with food. "So," Tim said, "I've been having dreams lately."

"Prophetic dreams?" Mason asked.

"I'm not a prophet, but I've a cousin who has Joseph and Daniel's gift." Mason blinked and racked his brain. Ah, right. Both from the Bible, the former interpreted the Pharaoh's dreams while the latter interpreted the king of Babylon's dreams, and later the king of Persia. The Tribunal had mandatory Biblical Knowledge certifications, and after nearly losing his certification, he'd been keen on keeping up. And just because Mason had some issues with how the Man Upstairs was running things, that didn't mean he was gonna skimp on research. Knowing Mason's luck, the day he skipped studying the Bible was the day he had to deal with an Antediluvian nephil.