Table of Contents
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
Copyright © 2014 by J.L. Murray
http://www.jlmurraywriter.com/
All Rights Reserved
Kindle Edition published by Hellzapoppin Press, Honolulu, Hawaii.
Cover by Joe Martin, Nine Worlds Media.
http://www.nineworldsmedia.com/
CHAPTER ONE
“What the hell?” My boot heel sank into the snow accumulated on the ground. During the summer. In Florida. I frowned at the sky. The snow had stopped falling for the most part and tiny ice particles swirled on the air. The pull in my chest shook me from my wonder. I looked toward the place that was pulling me: A small one-story house nestled in the shadows, far back from the road. I could hear screaming that no living person would be able to hear. I was Death, and the screaming was coming from the one who had brought me here. The one who had just died.
I braced myself as I opened the door and a wind of blistering cold nearly knocked me over, so loud it almost drowned out the screaming. I stepped into the house, my face numbing in the frigid air. Snow swirled about the room, covering a couch and a television in crystalline, white fluff. Ice hit me in the face as I pulled myself inside. A flash of color caught my eye; bright red footprints, vivid against the blinding white, led through the house. I crouched down to look. Someone had left in bare feet, and they must have been hurt badly, because I was fairly certain that the red color was blood. Fresh snow settled into the footprints, but instead of disappearing, they tainted the new snow just as red as the old. I touched one and felt my finger stiffen. Veins of brilliant blue ice wrapped around my fingertip and started to spread, enveloping my entire finger. With a gasp I pulled away, shaking my hand and flexing my fingers. The blue disappeared almost immediately.
“What the hell is this?” I repeated. I moved through the living room, following the footprints. Ducking through a low doorway, I entered the kitchen. And stared.
The body on the floor was already blue from the cold, but that was not how she died. Frozen blood spattered the walls and the floor around her. Her throat had been cut, and even from a distance the wound looked jagged and raw. The unseeing eyes of the corpse seemed to be staring at a perfect, watery version of herself. Her ghost stopped screaming when she saw me. She had her brown hair drawn back in a loose ponytail, the glasses on the corpse perfectly straight on the ghost.
“You have to help me,” she said frantically, shaking her head. “You can’t let this happen.”
“Can we talk about what else is happening here?” I said. “Like maybe the hole in the universe behind you?”
She glanced behind her, then shook her head. “No, you don’t understand,” she said. “It’s not important.”
“A hole in the world in the middle of your kitchen isn’t important?” I said.
“It’s not his fault,” she said, her lip trembling. “They took him and he was upset.”
“A person did this?” I said. I peered into the shimmering hole that pulsed and gyrated behind the kitchen table. The closer I approached, the more it changed. A freezing wind whistled as it sped through the opening. As I looked into it, I could make out the shapes of trees, black silhouettes against a night sky, streaked with curious smears of pink and green and red, rising above a thick blanket of snow, twinkling in the light from the kitchen. The red footprints passed from the kitchen into the hole and were swallowed by darkness.
I frowned. This couldn’t be good. The ghost was crying again, and my chest ached. She shouldn’t be here, but she would have to wait another minute.
I reached a hand toward the throbbing hole and felt the static in the air, raising the hairs on my arm. The hole was growing smaller by the second, its edges like melted wax where the world should have been. I pushed my arm through and felt like it was dunked in ice water. I wiggled my fingers on the other side. It felt strange. The shimmering air at the opening was like a dry liquid, but on the other side fat snowflakes melted on my skin. I pulled my arm back and stared at it. Goosebumps, but nothing strange. The hole was shrinking faster now, seeming to remake the world around it as it closed. Finally, with a final burst of frozen air and a smell of sulfur, it closed. The only sound was coming from the ghost.
I looked at her now. She was trying to pull at her hair, panic in her empty eyes.
“What was that?” I said.
“I’m dead,” she said. “I’m dead.”
“Yes.”
“So I can’t save him.” She looked at me, deflated, silver tears flowing down her cheeks. “Can you help him?”
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Katy. Please tell me you’ll help him. I think they’re going to kill him.”
“Katy, what was that thing? The hole.” The snow was melting now, leaving puddles on every surface. Water dripped from the table onto the floor, splashing on my boots. “You said someone made it, but didn’t mean to.”
“Matthew,” she said, the act of saying his name seeming to break something inside of her. “He doesn’t deserve this.”
“He’s an Abby,” I said.
She nodded. “We kept it a secret so long. But he was so scared when they came. And when he saw what they did to me…I’ve never seen him like that. He just exploded.” Panic filled her eyes. “He exploded. I thought he was dead. He was just lying there.”
“Katy, this is very important. What came out of that hole?”
She shook her head again, seeming to grow more feverish in her movements. “Tell me you’re going to save my son,” she said, her voice rising. “Tell me!” She lunged at me and grabbed my arm, the touch separating her into millions of floating molecules, spinning in the air, and then she turned to dust and was gone.
“Dammit, Katy,” I said. I looked down at her body. Close up, the wound on her neck looked like hamburger, chopped over and over with a dull cleaver. The blood under the body spread over the floor as it thawed, and the spatter on the walls started to drip. The snow and its red footprints disappeared. If there were a monster roaming the World and kidnapping boys, I had no idea how to find it. I walked outside into humid, balmy air. The snow was melted and the road was wet. When the neighbors awoke in a few hours, they wouldn’t even know anything had happened. I tried to feel for souls, but there weren’t any, at least not nearby. For once, the dead were quiet.
“Well, shit,” I said. “Where the hell did you go?”
* * *
I went back into the house, my steps squishing on the carpet. I ignored the smell of blood from the kitchen and went the other way, down a dark hallway with four doors. A small, tidy bathroom; a bland bedroom with stacks of books on either side of the bed; a closet crammed with towels and sheets; and the one room I wanted to see, at the end of the hall. The door was plastered with stickers for brands of skateboards. A hand-scrawled note was taped right to the middle read, “KEEP OUT!” Obviously, Matthew was a teenager. I turned the knob and switched on the light.
The room was hot and musty and reeked of sul
fur. There was a small, unmade bed pushed into the corner, a desk piled with school books, and a bedside table holding a dusty lamp. The walls were pinned with what looked like drawings and the floor was littered with the same. I stepped into the room and picked up one of the papers.
The drawing was crude, as if done by someone not used to drawing, though still better than anything I could do. It depicted a hole, dark and black, with a large hand reaching out from its center. I picked up another. This rough sketch showed a boy caught in a whirlwind or tornado. I picked up a pile of the sketches. Most were of monsters escaping from holes in the air. Some were reptilian, others walking on two legs, but looking anything but human. How many holes had Matthew opened up? I walked around the room looking at the pictures on the walls, trying not to step on other drawings covering the floor. The pictures on the wall were higher quality, drawn by a hand that had sketched hundreds of pictures.
“Oh, Matthew,” I said, peering at them. “You poor thing.”
The scenes were strange and dark. One depicted stark trees against a charcoal-streaked sky, an angular creature with dripping teeth running toward a young boy. Another showed a desolate field with a thousand eyes peering out of the darkness. If Matthew had been an Abby since he was a small child, as I had been, he had likely been opening holes in the world for years. I knew how alone he must have felt. I had felt the same loneliness myself, even though I had Sofi, my godmother and an Abby herself, to help me. My father had been an Abby too, which at least had offered a shaky sense of normalcy: Everyone around me had been just as strange as me. But Matthew’s mother, from what I could tell, had been a Normal. Had Matthew known any Abbies at all?
I gazed around the room at the stark charcoal drawings. Some pages on the floor were just angry blackness; no picture, just starbursts of darkness. My strangeness had come from being able to see ghosts, which at Matthew’s age had been terrifying enough. But his ability seemed much more strange and horrifying than anything I had to endure at such a young age. I needed to find him.
I glanced back up at the wall. A group of sketches, slightly different than the others, caught my eye. These were grouped in a circle, each showing a different part of the same scene. I frowned as I took them in. A sharp and craggy mountain range that looked like teeth. A circle of stones with odd markings. A group of women in dark dresses, long hair blowing out behind them as they held hands in a semicircle. The center drawing showed a close-up of one of the women. She was middle-aged, but still beautiful. Her black hair had streaks of gray. Her eyes seemed to burn through the page. I stared for a long time, wondering what bothered me about these particular sketches, before it occurred to me: These figures appeared human. All the other drawings depicted fantastic creatures, monsters that the artist seemed to fear. These had a different, hypnotic quality. The pencil strokes were lighter, less angry. I reached out and pulled the pictures off the wall. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew that if I was going to find Matthew, these pictures would be helpful. Perhaps these women had left the bloody footprints in the snow.
As I pulled the last picture off the wall, I froze. Choppy angular letters had been scratched into the paint. I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. “What the hell is going on?” I said, my voice a whisper.
The words carved into the wall said, “WHAT DOES DEATH FEAR?”
CHAPTER TWO
As I let the pull of the souls guide me, I thought about Lucifer and my chest ached. He had been gone for nearly two weeks now, and I had never felt so alone. It was stupid, really. I never felt lonely when I lived with Eli Cooper and his job took him out of town. I never felt lonely even when Eli revealed he was a half-demon and was going off to Erebos to live with his father. It was easy to be alone back then. It was easy to walk away. With Lucifer it was different. I thought about him when we were apart. And he was the first person I wished for when I got into trouble.
I blanched, remembering the last words he spoke to me.
“Nothing to say? Nothing at all?”
I shook my head as I felt my feet touch solid pavement. I couldn’t think of this right now. Lucifer was gone and there was only one other person who could help. I looked around to get my bearings. It was the old neighborhood. The apartment building where Sofi and I had lived loomed in front of me, slightly off-kilter since Bobby Gage magicked it across the country during the war. After Sofi died and I had taken her soul—the hardest thing I have ever done---I gave the building to Bobby to run and he lived here now. He kept our old apartment just as we left it, though I rarely came here. It was too sad. Besides, what did Death need with an apartment? Mostly I’d been sleeping in Erebos with Lucifer. It was far easier to sleep where I couldn’t feel the souls than to be awakened every hour with the increasingly painful pull of their restless spirits.
Bobby’s apartment was on the first floor, but no one answered when I knocked. I stepped back out onto the sidewalk and started towards the place I knew he would be. It was the only other place he went these days besides home. Only a few buildings were still standing in the old neighborhood. After the attack by Michael and his angels, this had been the epicenter for riots against New Government that spread across the globe. Now, democratic rights were slowly being given back to citizens. Elections had been held for the first time in years. It was legal for Abbies to work, though the stigma was still there and most businesses still wouldn’t hire them. And reconstruction was making progress. Brand new and shiny buildings rose next to wrecked lots straight out of an end-of-the-world apocalypse movie.
Of course, no one really understood that it very nearly was the end of the world.
I stopped in front of the shimmering storefront. Normals passed by, unaware it was even there. A wooden sign with the words Happy’s Tavern swayed gently on the hot summer breeze. I walked through the door, the casting field around the bar whooshing as I crossed through.
Blinking in the smoky darkness, I let my eyes adjust. If I didn’t know better I’d say that this was just another seedy bar. Old guitar rock blasted from a jukebox, three old men laughed at the bar while two women downed shots next to them, a group of friends sat around a table. But if you looked deeper, you could see the haunted darkness behind the eyes, the look of people who had seen and done things unimaginable to Normals. One of the women drinking shots at the bar gave me a sidelong glance and I saw flames welling up behind her eyes, and then being quickly extinguished. Tendrils of smoke trailed out of her nose.
I nodded at the owner, Happy, behind the bar. He frowned when he saw me. I made most people uncomfortable. Made them sense their own mortality, even if they didn’t know why. Happy nodded his head toward a dark corner, where Bobby Gage was sitting alone, casting books strewn across his small table.
“Hey, Bobby,” I said, sitting across from him.
He looked up from his books and blinked at me. He had more gray in his hair than the last time I’d seen him. He looked old. Leaning back in his chair, he crossed his arms over his chest.
“Well, ain’t this an honor,” he said. “Niki goddamn Slobodian.”
“Come on, it hasn’t been that long,” I said. I took a drink of his beer.
“It’s been six months.”
“No it hasn’t,” I said. Gage stared at me stonily. “Really? Six?”
“Yep,” he said. “Not a single word in all that time. For all I knew you were dead.”
“Well, we both know that’s a lie,” I said, smiling. Gage didn’t smile back.
“You know, you still got people here, Niki. In the World. I know you’re busy and all, but we all still worry.”
I thought about visiting Lou Craig several months ago. The fear in his eyes. How he backed away when I reached out to him. I remembered standing outside Ron Smithy's house, watching him washing dishes. A woman came up next to him and kissed his cheek. He looked so happy. I knew that if he saw me, that happiness would instantly disappear. I didn't blame them. It made sense. I was Death. Everything about me troubled the living. But it hurt
all the same. Gage was the only one who had always seen me as Niki. To him, being Death was just a job.
“I’m sorry, Bobby,” I said. “Things have been weird. I should have visited you.”
“Damn straight.” He grabbed his beer mug and drained the glass. “Guess you can buy me a drink and all will be forgiven.”
I motioned to Happy and he brought a beer for Bobby and a large tumbler of whiskey for me.
“What’s with him?” said Gage after Happy left.
“He doesn’t like me much,” I said.
“He’s a seer, you know,” said Bobby, all anger gone from him. “A damn good one, too, from what I hear. Maybe he sees something about you he doesn’t like.”
“Join the club,” I said with a smile. This time Gage smiled back.
“So how’s Mr. Wonderful?” said Gage.
“You do realize he’s the devil,” I said.
“So?” he said. “He’s better than any other boyfriend you’ve had. Been keeping busy, huh?” He waggled his eyebrows. His face went serious when he saw my expression. “What? What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“Spill, Slobodian. I know that look. It means you’re keeping something to yourself.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“It’s the same look you had when you were trying not to tell me my wife was a ghost haunting my own house. Oh, don’t feel bad, I’m over it. But I’m just saying, sis, you do have a look, and you’re wearing it right goddamn now.”
I sighed. “Fine. He’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
I took a deep drink of Jameson. “Lucifer’s missing,” I said. “He’s been gone for a few weeks now.”
“Oh, shit, not again,” said Gage.
“Again?”
“Well, it’s the same old shit, ain’t it? When you were going with that poor excuse of demon spawn he pulled the same thing.”
The Devil's Backbone (A Niki Slobodian Novel: Book Five) Page 1
