by James Hunter
I sailed sideways, twisting awkwardly, head spinning in confusion—what in the Hell just happened?—as I fought to turn my graceless fall into a nifty roll.
Now, let me go on the record here and say that falling sucks more than a Hoover vacuum. Period.
Seriously, over eight hundred thousand people wind up in the hospital each year because of slipping on ice—I shit you not, it’s the second leading cause of nonfatal injury in America. And from personal experience, let me further say getting blasted fifteen feet through the air is worse than slipping on ice by an order of magnitude that’s almost impossible to calculate. With that on the table, there’s a right way to fall and a wrong way. I fall a lot, sort of a professional hazard, so I know the ins and outs like the back of my hand.
This time, though, I just couldn’t get my rebellious body to cooperate. Twist and turn as I might, I just knew I was gonna eat shit hard.
Sure enough, I landed face-first on the steel floor, my lip busting open, my left rotator cuff shrieking in angry protest, my knees clanging and bouncing as I slid into one of the metal tables lining the wall. Naturally, my head collided with the table leg, which dumped a host of surgical operating tools right down on top of me. Still, I counted my lucky stars it hadn’t been the table of body parts. Getting a few minor nicks from razor-sharp scalpels and serrated saw blades wasn’t a walk in the park, but it sure beat having a bunch of amputated limbs raining down on my head.
I groaned, winced, then gritted my teeth as I rolled and gained my feet.
Levi was off to my left, beating the holy living crap out of Machoman Candy Savage with—I shit you not—someone else’s arm. Yep, the hulking gray monster was using a deeply tanned limb to bat away a wicked machete while he slowly circled his victim, backing her into a corner. Still no sign of Mama Murderwheels, which was disconcerting, but I had eyes on Tez. She was fifteen feet away, death and mayhem burning in her eyes as she muttered under her breath, her hands flicking through a complex series of conjuration patterns.
That kinda shit wasn’t necessary to work with the Vis, but Tez was old-school, from back when magic was steeped in ritual. It was distinctly possible she didn’t know how to sling power without all the trappings and silly hand waving.
A minor advantage in my favor, though she was still a friggin’ demon.
She spat out a demonic word of power, which reverberated in my chest like a bomb blast. Simultaneously, she thrust both hands forward, conjuring a flood of orange fire as thick as a telephone pole and laced with flickering strands of dirty purple. Yay. A powerful attack, capable of turning your average Rube into a pile of charred meat. Thankfully, I wasn’t just some Rube. I was Yancy Lazarus: mage, bluesman, Marine, and I had a demon of my very own riding shotgun in my noggin. Shit, I had two.
I snarled, and Nox—twisted, cold, profane—came to me unbidden, surging around me in a whirling cloud of violet.
I thrust one hand out, palm up, fingers splayed, channeling that power into a battering ram of blinding arctic light. A bubble of cold formed around me, the Nox sucking the heat from the air, as my construct zipped toward Tez like a lightning bolt. The opposing beams smashed together with a thunderclap that rattled the walls; fire and ice twirled and danced, pressing against one another for supremacy. A sheet of steam leaked away, filling the room with a wispy white cloud that made it damned near impossible to see. I paid it no mind though, pumping more energy into my frozen death-beam while Tez did the same.
I tuned out everything around me—the screams of injured Derby girls, Levi’s throaty growls, Tez’s quiet chanting—focusing entirely on the beam of ice and deadly Nox. Despite the pocket of cold swirling around me, perspiration broke out along my forehead and leaked down my face. I refused to so much as blink while I threw my will, my determination to survive, against the demon’s awful power. I wasn’t going to lose this fight, dammit. I wasn’t going to let her strap me down, break my mind, and set Azazel free.
She’d have to kill me first.
The tenuous balance between the warring constructs shifted a heartbeat later, and suddenly my beam lurched closer to Tez as her Hellfire javelin guttered, diminished by the intense cold of my working. As though to illustrate my impending victory, the steam froze, instantly turning to powdery snow, which coated the metal floor with white. Snow in Hell. Oh, the irony.
Tez screamed, throwing her fury and might into her attack—one last-ditch effort to bring me to heel. The world shook as an explosion rocked the room, and blinding light bled out, accompanied by a wave of blistering heat that smacked into me like a giant pillow, searing my eyebrows and leaving my skin red, raw, and tender.
I blinked in a futile attempt to clear away the purple afterimage burned across my vision while lashing out with a barrage of frozen spikes. A dozen dagger-sharp spits of gleaming ice streaked toward the last place I’d seen Tez. A blind shot in the dark, true, but better than just standing around, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for someone to eviscerate me. Hell, maybe I’d get lucky and pin her ass to the wall, which would be poetic justice considering what she’d done to the Skinless slaves. Sadly, though, no shriek of agony or rage followed.
Just the clatter of ice smashing uselessly against stone.
By the time I could see again, Tez was damn near on me, a manic grin on her face and her great sword—blazing with purple flame—in her hands. Tezrian was a warrior, I reminded myself, so she was probably far more comfortable duking things out up close and personal than she was in slinging raw power. Azazel was unique in that regard. He wasn’t just a warrior, he was the Lord of Dark Magicks. Only a handful of demons who could go toe to toe with him when it came to arcane power.
I frantically backpedaled as her weapon whistled through the air like an incoming scud missile.
“Gladium Potestatis,” I screamed, conjuring up my Vis-wrought sword with a whisper of will and a trickle of arcane power.
A thin single-edged azure blade about three feet in length exploded into existence, radiating cool power as it appeared in my outstretched hand. It wasn’t a real sword, just a construct of air, no different from any of the other workings I could conjure, but it was plenty sharp enough to slice and dice with the best of ’em. I dropped back another step, my hip scraping against the edge of the steel table as I swung my blade up into a hasty overhand block, uke-nagashi.
Violet sparks flew in a shower as my sloppy counter caught the incoming blow, shedding the attack like water rolling from an umbrella. “You wanna dance,” I grunted, whipping the sword around in a wicked arc, canting the blade to one side and driving it toward her exposed ribs. “Then let’s dance.” Contrary to what movies would have you believe, sword fights are usually quick, brutal, and nasty. Nine times out of ten, they end in less than a handful of moves. I needed to make my move, and I needed to make it quick.
But Tez was fast. Too fast. Impossibly fast.
She sidestepped the diagonal slash, dipping the tip of her sword down and swatting away my strike with the flat of her blade. Her sword was big, a real monster known as a Zweihänder, and functioned more like a poleaxe from the Middle Ages than a traditional sword. She shouldn’t have been able to maneuver like that, but she wielded her oversized two-hander as if it were a featherweight rapier. She shifted her weight and darted in, driving the pommel into my chest, then rocketing her knee straight into my gut.
I doubled over, painfully exposed, and caught an elbow across my face for the trouble.
The blow sent me stumbling, stars dancing across my vision as blood dripped from my mouth. If she’d wanted to, she could’ve ended me with that last attack. Instead of an elbow, it could’ve just as easily been the edge of her sword. It dawned on me that she wasn’t trying to kill me—that wouldn’t serve her purposes. It wouldn’t free Azazel; as far as I understood, if I kicked the bucket, the Seal would pass on to my nearest kin. The absolute shittiest inheritance on the planet.
So more likely, she just wanted to beat me into submission. And th
at?
That I might be able to use against her.
“You’ll pay for what you did to my girls,” she intoned solemnly, gliding forward. “I’ll have some fun with you before we set things right.” She shot in again, her sword zigzagging and twirling as she flowed from move to move. The attacks rained down in an unceasing curtain. Slash, twist, thrust, parry, pivot. Rinse. Wash. Repeat. I narrowly dodged and blocked each blow—she was obviously head and shoulders better than me with a blade—before finally spotting the opening I’d been waiting for. She shifted her body just so, and I made my move.
I dropped my sword to waist level, elbows bent, blade tilted to the right side of my body, the set up for yoko-giri-—a nasty bastard of an attack, meant to carve through an opponent’s guts. To disembowel ’em in a blink. I feinted left, ducking another elbow, then bolted right, whipping my blade out in a horizontal arc of flashing azure light. Against anyone else, this was a smart play, but against someone like Tez, it was damn near suicidal. As expected, the edge of her blade diverted my slash with a shriek and a shower of violet sparks.
Suddenly, she was inside my guard.
She took advantage of the opening, her weapon slashing at my exposed head. I flinched, bracing for the impact and praying I was right.
The flat of the blade slammed into the side of my head like a fastball. The world jittered at the edges and my legs threatened to give way beneath me, but through sheer force of will, I stayed upright. I wasn’t in any position to hit her with my sword, but that had never been the plan. Now she was open on her right side, and I was less than a foot away. Drunkenly, I shuffled forward, dismissing the conjured sword and thrusting my left hand into her side. I pressed my palm against her blood-caked black armor and unleashed a gout of Nox-laced flame.
In an instant, the beam carved straight through her center, cauterizing a basketball-sized hole in her stomach.
She staggered back, her sword clattering to the floor as she probed at the edges of the wound with talon-tipped fingers.
No way was she done for, but it was a helluva opening and high time to beat feet. I turned on my heel, searching the room for Levi.
He was near the torture chamber door, ripping his meat-cleaver hand from Machoman Candy Savage’s brutalized torso, and at this point, she was just a torso. “Let’s move it,” I hollered at him, waving madly toward the exit.
He nodded, but as he did, his eyes went wide in alarm. “Heads up!” he roared, one hand straining uselessly toward me as the air to my right shimmered.
A veil fell away in a flash, revealing Mama Murderwheels with a black Beretta nearly identical to the one stashed in the back of my trousers. “I don’t think so, sugga,” she said, pressing the barrel of the gun into the meat of my left thigh then pulling the trigger. The gun barked in her hand, and agony filled me up as though someone had just jabbed a friggin’ cherry-red fire iron into my leg. She hadn’t hesitated, and she hadn’t wasted time monologuing like a moron, which was something I could respect on a professional level.
On a purely personal level, however, I wanted to drop kick her ass into a vat of acid.
Instead, I toppled, landing near one of the Skinless nailed sacrilegiously to the floor like a frog waiting to be dissected.
EIGHTEEN:
Escape and Evade
I lay there, moaning and groaning near the Skinless slave, my leg bleeding freely, one hand pinned beneath me, the other laying limply at my side. Everything hurt. My head pounded, on the verge of splitting open like an overripe melon. My ankle, injured from my tumble into the room, throbbed with dull fire. Several ribs felt bruised at the least, maybe broken, and made every lungful of air an experiment in pain management. And my left leg—holy shit did getting shot hurt like a son of a bitch.
I pressed my eye shut and took a long shuddering breath, trying to calm my nerves.
When I finally opened my eye, Tez loomed above me, smug satisfaction on her face, her hands placed on her hips. Mama Murderwheels stood nearby, her Beretta trained on my head. I couldn’t see Levi, but I knew he had to be nearby. What could he do though? One wrong move and Mama Murderwheels could plant one in my skull. I didn’t think she would do it, but she could, and that was all that mattered.
“You’re clever for a sack of blood and bones,” Tez said, glowering down at me, then glancing to the hole in her gut. “But not clever enough, you slimy little shit. Murderwheels,” she said, looking away, her voice a whip crack of command. “I want that thing”—she nodded toward Levi—“chained up and taken to the deep dungeon and prepped for examination. And then get a Flesh Tailor up here, ASAP.
“If the rest of the crew isn’t patched up and back on their feet in an hour,” she continued, “it’s your ass. Once that’s done, I want someone to scour the servants’ quarters. Our prodigal son here”—she reached down and patted me affectionately on the cheek—“used the vents to get in. I want to know where else he’s been, what he’s done, and who helped him do it. Someone knows something, and I want them.”
I turned my head away, feeling defeated to the core, not wanting to look at the war goddess for another second. Which is when I saw the Skinless lying next to me—the poor bastard looked about as shitty as I felt. His arms and legs quivered, and his breathing was harsh and labored thanks to the knife poking from his ribs like a hitchhiker’s curved thumb. It was the collar snapped tight around his throat that caught my attention, though. In an instant, inspiration hit me like a sock full of quarters.
Maybe there was still a way out of this colossal shitpickle, and the Skinless slave was my ticket.
Well, the fancy hardware clamped around his neck, but potato, potahto, and all that jazz.
With a groan, I wriggled my body, fishing the Beretta from the waist of my pants. Carefully, I popped the safety and maneuvered the pistol so no one would be able to see it until I was ready to move. With my other hand, I groped around until my palm landed on the ceremonial dagger protruding from the Skinless slave’s side. The thing was lodged deep, just below the floating rib, but it came away with a tug.
As Tez jawed with Mama Murderwheels—already certain of her victory—I reversed my grip on the handle, then lashed out with every ounce of strength I had left in me.
I slammed the blade down through the top of Tez’s boot, driving through thick black leather into the yielding flesh below. Next, I rolled, bringing up the Beretta in a single fluid movement, firing six shots in quick succession into Mama Murderwheels’ neck and face. The gun bucked in my hand as Murderwheels fell back, her pistol dropping, blood spurting out in a crimson arc. I tossed the Berretta aside as Levi lumbered into action with a guttural roar, his feet pounding like a war drum as he smashed into the last remaining Derby girl.
Some small, petty part of me wanted to watch the hurtin’ Levi was gonna lay on her. She had an aircraft carrier worth of comeuppance coming her way for shooting me, but Tez still needed to be dealt with. So, despite my desire for gory vengeance, I turned back to the slave, and fumbled at the collar around his neck, funneling in a trickle of power. The metal fizzled and clicked open beneath my fingers. The Skinless, now awake, alert, and aware of what I was doing, craned his head upward with a grimace of pain, fighting against the nails holding him down.
The collar came free with a soft click.
Tez was a handful of feet away, down on one knee, her hands scrambling to pull the ceremonial dagger free from her foot. The blade was lodged in there good and proper, though—what can I say, I know how to shank someone—and she was so absorbed with the knife she didn’t even see me move. Ignoring the pain rampaging through my body like Godzilla in Tokyo, I lunged toward the demon, grabbing ahold of her flowing black hair and yanking her toward me. Hatred flashed across her stone-cold face, but before she knew what was happening, I slapped the collar around her neck, reactivating it with a thin trickle of energy.
The ember script flared to life, responding to my power, and Tez gasped, her fingers clawing at the band in
a mixture of horror and utter disbelief. Her eyes, wide with pale violet irises, said everything. How? How did this happen? How is this possible? How can I fix this?
I offered her a malicious grin, then spit a fat wad of blood right into her face. The red phlegm was more insult than anything else, but it caught her off guard.
She blinked frantically, one hand darting toward her face, which is when I pivoted, brought my good leg up, and mule-kicked her in the chest. Down she went, flat onto her back.
I flipped onto my belly and fought my way upright. It was tough going, I won’t lie, and my left leg was about as useful as a toothpick to a toothless hobo. But I gained my feet all the same and promptly hobbled over to the downed godling, looming over her on unsteady feet, my skin pale, sweat rolling down my face in sheets. “Tell me where the scythe is!” I screamed at her, the throbbing pain in my leg fueling a white-hot rage. “Where the fuck is it?!”
She gagged and gasped, all bug-eyed as she fought against the influence of the compulsion collar around her throat. “I don’t want to ask again,” I said, my voice a low, cold, guttural threat as I pulled my hand cannon and pressed the muzzle against her forehead. At last she seemed to deflate, but instead of answering my question, she simply started laughing. A harsh, grating noise like an ice pick being jabbed repeatedly into a block of stone.
“You really are a bug. An ignorant worm,” she coughed out, the script on the collar flaring brighter and brighter until the black metal seemed nearly red with heat. “I don’t have it, and it’s not here. Azazel would never entrust something so precious. Not to me. Not to anyone. You’ll never find it, not without his help. You’ve come all this way for nothing.” She laughed again even as plumes of black smoke drifted up from her neck accompanied by the stink of burning meat.
