by Rowan Casey
I started by kicking off my shoes and unbuckling my belt. One button at a time I loosened my jeans, deliberately leaving the shirt til last. I wanted to delay the moment for as long as possible. It gave me something to look forward to. After all, the look on his face when he realized I’d destroyed his precious sigil would be priceless.
The Colt fell to the plushily carpeted floor.
We both looked at it as though it were a snake that might suddenly lash out and sink its fangs into one of us. My bare ankles looked far too tempting.
"And the rest," he said.
"How about a little bit of music?" His brow furrowed as I wiggled my hips in a parody of seduction. "If I’m going to strip it would at least make things a little fun," I said. Again, it was all about trying to slow things down so I kept my shirt on a little longer. Not that I had a lot of say in the matter, given his mind was in control of my hands.
I swayed a little more, this time because of the drugs in my system. I felt myself slipping properly and assumed it was ketamine or some other date rape drug. Not great.
I pitched face first to the floor, and didn’t waste time putting my hands out to break my fall because they were still trying to get me out of my boxers.
I lay on my stomach, hands under the elastic of my shorts, one eye open with a view of Holm’s feet. He had rather ridiculous crocodile shoes on. I hadn’t noticed them before. The scales were polished to an ironic gleam. What sort of man wore crocodile shoes?
He pushed himself up out of the chair and stood over me. And was still standing over me when someone knocked at the door.
"Ummm iihhh" I mumbled into the shagpile.
The visitor took that as an invitation and opened the door.
I couldn’t see who it was, but they had great legs. Probably not the most pc thing to be noticing, all things considered, but I couldn’t exactly look up and see who had come to play.
"We had a deal!"
Definitely a woman. I knew the voice but couldn’t place it. Four words weren’t enough. She stopped talking. I could imagine what was going through her mind: the dead man in lingerie on the bed, me out of my skull on the floor, and Holm standing over me. It must have made quite the picture.
"Ell…" I mumbled. I really couldn’t get the hang of this talking thing.
I could see the Colt. It was within easy reach assuming I could actually get my hands to obey me, which was looking less and less likely. I struggled to stay there, in the moment.
"You started without me," the newcomer said, and I really didn’t like the way that sounded.
"Just warming things up. Thought I would save a little time, my sweet. Remember, we don’t need him, just his seed, so have as much fun as you like, and if you break him, well, try not to do it until after he’s shot his wad."
"Purr dee mow fuh," I said. It’s hard to be wry and wise cracking when you’ve lost control of your lips. I tried to reach for the gun as she flipped me over, but my hand was not doing anything I wanted it to.
Mercifully, I blacked out.
15
You ever get the feeling everyone in your life wants you dead?
My brain refused to function.
I couldn’t open my eyes. I could feel weight pressing down on me but had no idea if they were done or not.
So far as I could tell, Evienne had engineered everything to get me into this room, the incubus and his new-found friend intended to drain me, literally for whatever magic he was about to draw, and the ketamine meant I couldn’t offer even token resistance. "Am go nah kill you," I promised, but I don’t think it sounded very convincing.
You certainly learn who your friends are when you are in this kind of mess.
"He wanted music," the incubus said.
The weight moved off me. I tried to look, but all I saw was a pink mess, sweating, and then she crossed the room to Evienne’s stereo system. After a couple of seconds, and obviously knowing her way around the set-up she was piping in the same acid house jazz from outside.
It lent the entire thing a hallucinatory quality.
I still had the knife strapped under my shirt, and the gun was no more than six inches from my right hand, but as the incubus came to squat over my chest I gave up all hope of reaching for it and blowing his brains out.
That wasn’t how it was going to go. I still had time. But it wasn’t going to help much if I wasted it unconscious.
The woman came back and straddled me while the incubus paced the room impatiently. It was obviously taking longer than they’d budgeted for. I was going to need a little love resurrection, so to speak.
She lowered her face to mine and kissed me, and believe me there was absolutely nothing erotic about it. I felt my soul being sucked out of my mouth, I swear to God.
I tried to fight back, to push her off, but I couldn’t because that damned thing was inside me, pinning my arms down as effectively as if he was on top of me. I couldn’t even open my eyes properly because the demon was in control of the reins. All I could do was try and hide inside myself and hope I got a chance to kill the pair on the other side.
He put me under—at least I assume it was him and not the lingering effects of the ketamine. Not that it mattered beyond the fact that I was out of it. My world was reduced to sensations that should have been pleasurable, but which felt like my body and soul were being stretched and twisted and torn apart.
16
And for a while there was nothing.
I ceased to be. The room disappeared. The people in it were no more. I was reduced to atoms. Energy. Returned to the stuff of the universe. And the universe gasped, "His stomach!" which was as close as I would come to experiencing victory. Whatever they had planned for me I’d fucked up. I felt myself smile.
In the beginning there was the word, and the word was whoops.
I tried to laugh.
I wanted them to know I had won, despite everything they had done to me, through the drugs and the mind control, all of it, I’d still managed to screw up their twisted schemes. I could die tonight, a winner.
I felt my body spasm, coming down hard. I didn’t want to return to the flesh. I wanted to hide here. I didn’t belong back there.
"Let me die," I begged.
17
"What is it?" Anger in the voice at the disturbance.
I tried to open my eyes.
It was Bendy Dick Merchant and he was happy to see me, confused about everything else he was seeing in the room, but at that moment at least, not so confused as to lose his erection.
He wasn’t alone. He had brought a black bird with him, flapping into the room in his wake.
No, that didn’t make any sense. The bird was giant. Larger than him. Not a bird. A mask. A woman in black, in a feathered mask.
In that moment, for the first time since entering the room, my mind was my own. I don’t know how I could tell, but I knew. Holm had left, perhaps because of his own joy, or because he had won, it didn’t matter why, only that he was gone. And in that moment, I bucked beneath him, trying desperately to dislodge the incubus as it leaned down to kiss me like the woman had. His hungry tongue sought out my lifetime of sexual indiscretions to feast upon.
I looked at him, seeing all the way in and finding the demon lurking back in the darkness.
I heard a woman’s voice–Evienne Nemi’s– say one word, "Now," and reacted. I couldn’t get to the knife without some serious contortion, but as Holm’s demon sank his nails into my chest, burrowing down deep into the ruined sigil I knew she was right, this was my one chance. I arched my spine and got my right hand underneath me and closed my fingers around the white hilt of Carnwenhau.
It felt good. Right. Powerful. Alive. And all of those feelings pulsed through my veins, feeding on the blade’s otherworldly strengths. I was one with Carnwenhau, steel and skin, and its strength filled me. I tore the dagger away from the curve of my spine, bringing the electrical tape with it as I ripped the blade clear of its hiding place on my body, and d
idn’t hesitate. I rammed the blade that had sliced through Arthur’s witch into the incubus that had taken up residence within Jonas Holm’s chest and with one savage twist cut the demon’s heart out. The blade went easily through the bone. Too easily. Muscle parted. Holm convulsed, just once, like an electric shock surging through his corpse as blood went everywhere. It covered my hands and face. It was a hot sticky mess, but without the heart to pump it out the arterial spray quickly failed to nothing as the ancient beast slumped forward, his demonic erection still hard on my stomach.
I still held onto Carnwenhau’s hilt as it pressed into me. The music spiraled around me and the two dead men in the room. It took all of my slowly returning strength to push Holm off. I saw Evienne looking down at me, smiling. "Good," she said. "I was worried I would get the dosage wrong. It needed to be enough to make you pliable, to encourage him to make a mistake, but not so much as to render you dead to the world. I was worried you wouldn’t come back to us soon enough."
Like I said, I knew she was playing both ends against the middle and operating very much to her own agenda. Thankfully, for a moment at least, our needs had crossed and she’d intervened just enough for me to save my own skin.
"Thanks," I managed, my first full word in a while.
I turned to look at Merchant, who unsurprisingly was a blubbering mess in the corner. It was about to get a whole lot worse for him, as Evienne rolled Holm over, and seeing the heart still impaled on the dagger’s blade, took it from me.
I had no idea what she was going to do until she’d done it. She took a bite out of the demon’s heart. Holm’s blood dribbled down her chin.
I understood in the most primitive way; she wanted the demon’s magic for her own, and that meant consuming his flesh, just as he had consumed the flesh of his hollowed-out victims. It was the circle of life. Or, well, kinda like she was eating a power-up. By the time she chewed and swallowed down the last mouthful she was more powerful than I could ever imagine. I could see the charge rippling beneath her skin, barely contained by something as mundane as flesh.
And I recognized her then, all glamor stripped away. I was in the presence of the fay creature, Theomacha, one of the deadliest enchantresses of this or any other time, and in many ways the instrument of Arthur’s death. She was one of the nine queens of the otherworld. I relived in that moment our last together as she along with the other magical sisters, took my friend’s body to Avalon on his final journey, understanding in yet another way that things were seldom as they first appeared when she was involved. The fay sorceress was not of this world any more than Grimm was, and now, with this final layer of illusion stripped away I understood that like Grimm she had somehow remained aware all through this repeated day of just how I would die, and where, and had been instrumental in getting me to this place because it benefitted her cause, and because this was never where I would die.
"We must act now," she said, ignoring the pathetic Merchant as he slumped down against the far wall, and helped me up. "The veil is failing. The incubus gathered considerable strength from ritual sacrifice, and by claiming your life force had hoped to tear the wall asunder."
"Grimm is a cambion," I said. "I’m right, aren’t I? He is part this world and part a creature of the Demimonde."
She nodded. "He is, and so much more beside. He is one of the few beings in this place with the sheer elemental power raging away within his blood to actually be enough to tear down the veil once and for all. That was Holm’s end game. He intended to use you to lure his child to Avalon where, if he had his way, the world would end." She fell silent. I looked at her. I looked down at the demon’s corpse. It didn’t look like much.
"Is it truly dead?"
She nodded. "That blade you used, it’s as close to divine as this world has ever seen. A gift from the gods. It is too dangerous to stay in this realm. It always was. That is why Myrddin hid it away out of time. I will see that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands." I was in no position to object. I could barely stand. I needed to lean on the bed as I stooped to recover the Colt. I felt much happier with it in my hand than I did with the dagger, anyway. "We have the power to heal the wound between us. We can seal the Demimonde away beyond the veil for all eternity." She looked at me then, and I felt the full force of her will in that stare. "Do you trust me?"
"Not in the slightest," I said, standing with my boxers down around my ankles and my shirt open to reveal the ruined sigil.
And still she looked at me, and I remembered the many other times in my other life her hungry gaze had feasted on me similarly, and how I had found the strength to resist her. The history books called it unrequited love. It was far more sinister than that. The woman had sought to possess me and it was all I could do to resist her. Without Guinevere…that didn’t bear thinking about…
Now she had me.
I felt far more vulnerable than simply being half-naked ought to have left me.
She looked me up and down, lingering as she wiped the blood from her chin. It was the least arousing sight I’ve ever seen, or right up among them, that’s for sure.
"We have a world to save," she said, like it was the most natural thing to say to a half-naked man who’d just escaped death by the foreskin of his pecker. I wasn’t ready to go anywhere with her. Not yet. The demon was dead, his incantation incomplete.
But I was missing something.
My brain was too fried to work out what, but this wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.
"There was a woman’s voice. Did you see her?"
Evienne shook her head. "You were alone in here with him when we found you."
My mind raced. "I remember something he said…They needed my semen."
"I can only think of one good reason for that," she said. "And that’s the same reason anyone needs seed. To make a child."
Which didn’t bear thinking about.
"What do you know about these demons?"
"The incubus? It is an ancient predator. As long as man has dreamed he has been here to feed upon them."
"Do they hunt in pairs?"
"I have never—"
"Incubus and succubus? The woman’s voice? Holm couldn’t give birth, but everything he’s been doing has been about preparing all of these bodies for inhabitation by fellow demons from the shadow realm, so when the veil comes down they can move among us like they belong…but what if there’s someone else…someone he’s nurtured to take my boys and make little Lancelot babies?" It wasn’t the most eloquent way of putting it, but I knew exactly who he had been grooming. "Could he have made a succubus? I don’t know… ike a vampire…feeding on a virgin three times or something?"
I knew the answer, because it was the only one that made sense. They’d used my seed to make themselves a new cambion. A new Merlin child. It would be years before it was ready, but I’d given them a weapon to match anything we’d ever known. And our Merlin had sacrificed his magic to save me.
I’d fucked up, quite literally.
I needed to find the succubus, and I needed to find some way to get Dante Grimm his magic back. Oh, yeah, and I needed to stop the Veil from tearing itself apart.
And all in about an hour, because that was all I had left.
18
I wasn’t feeling good about my choices. Was that how destiny worked? You simply wandered blindly towards a fate right up there with death? How much of this was all preordained? How much was down to freewill?
Dante Grimm was coming here to save me, fully aware of what had happened the last time he’d done so, like a man afflicted with visions of the future who believed wholeheartedly in our inability to change it, ready to do it all over again. Isn’t that the definition of madness? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome?
But they weren’t the same, were they? I had killed the incubus with the blade, and he’d lost his magic. So, in one way we were stronger, in another so very much weaker.
"There is strength in numbers," Evienne s
aid, which was undeniably true. "But we do not have the luxury of time. If Holm’s partner in crime is close, we need to find her and stop her before she disappears into the countryside and we have no hope of finding her." She didn’t ask me if I was sure, or how I could know that Holm’s PA had been groomed to the role or was anything but an innocent victim in all of this. I’d seen her downstairs, but I’d been too busy thinking about him to realize that they hunted in pairs, yin to each other’s yang. They’d been in it together from that first moment on the sound stage where she’d pretended to be his greatest creation when of course that was exactly what she was, just not in the way I had thought.
I’m an idiot, but of course that was why I had died the first time around, because I hadn’t taken a minute to get things straight in my head and had just gone charging after the incubus and died before the final showdown in Avalon. That wasn’t happening this time.
I had a plan.
It was a shit plan, but it was a plan just the same.
I’d watched Evienne consume the heart of the dead incubus and absorb his residual magic. All I had to do was kill the succubus and force feed Grimm her heart. Yeah that wasn’t fucked up at all, was it? Told you it was a shitty plan. There was no way the old man was going to go along with it. And, to be honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to telling him I’d killed daddy dearest, either.
