by David Finn
Table of Contents
Interlude 1: First Kiss is the Last Kiss
Part 1
Chapter 1
Interlude 2: Everybody Loves Somebody
Interlude 3: The Beast
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Interlude 4: Replay the Level
Part 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Interlude 5: Country Songs
Part 3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part 4
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 5
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
A Reader’s Guide to the Asanti Series
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Demorn
City of Innocents
The Asanti Series: Book Two
David Finn
A Reader’s Guide to the Asanti Series
Copyright © 2016, David Finn.
All rights reserved.
Ebook Design by QA Productions
Cover design by Deranged Doctor Design
For my sister Sara, supporting me from the start, and much, much cooler than her geeky brother.
Love ya Sis!
Interlude 1
First Kiss is the Last Kiss
The blue portal light shone as she slid into the reality, lighting up the fancy looking courtyard garden as twilight turned to dusk. Demorn walked through the garden by herself, feelings safely tucked behind purple sunglasses. She felt a cool hand holding hers in a familiar, steady grip and she smiled automatically. But looking down, nobody was there.
She was wearing sleek black pants and a simple red collared shirt open slightly to reveal the locket nestled on her chest, the gem sparkling in the sharp sunlight.
She half-mingled with the funeral crowd, nodding demurely to the two attractive Sympaths that often travelled with her brother. They were dressed in sleek black parachute pants. They flashed through the gathering, locked in some intense private conversation.
It was a business crowd, people she knew at the most superficial level. Expensive suits. Serious, contained faces flickering in and out of electronic masks.
They were in a long, elegant park, scattered with blue and pink flowering trees. When she looked closely with her magic eyes, Demorn could see a long clear pool of water across the centre of the park. It was impossible to tell the depth. It flickered in and out of existence. Some of the crowd stood in the middle of the pool, oblivious.
The Sun sparkled above everything.
A smooth, familiar male voice spoke. ‘You aren’t wearing a mask.’
She smiled, keeping her voice low and neutral, watching some stunning blue flowers wave in the slight breeze.
‘I don’t, unless I’m working.’
‘Aren’t you worried you will be find out?’
‘No. A few contacts know who I am. They aren’t the kind of clients to give me jobs in public.’
‘But I’ve got a job for you. What kind of person does that make me?’
She glanced at him, sly. She felt a twinge of pain inside, to see his pasty face, mirrored blue glasses over his horrible, soulless eyes.
‘You’re Duke Pain. You don’t have a soul and I’m not even sure you’re real.’
He smiled and his teeth were yellow and rotten. The longer she looked, the more she could see the needles digging into his neck. He looked sicker and sicker, trapped between a miracle and a rotting corpse.
‘Oh, I’m real enough.’
An old song played, mournful through the air, but with a strange jauntiness locked somewhere inside.
She said, ‘I’ve heard this tune before. It was playing in a tomb.’
He chuckled. ‘Some things never change, down here amongst the dead.’
She watched as one by one the men and women in their expensive coats and dresses shuffled and moved. Most raised up a variety of symbols, glowing savagely in the diamond sun. There was a sense of ritual she found both comforting and stupid in this ceremony. Demorn saw chantric dragons, spiralling into the air; she saw old-school crucifixes with images of men and women bleeding on immense iron crosses; she saw an intricate wheel of thorns refracting and pounding with blood, hurting her head with its sharp, brutal cruelty.
The pool water shifted and moved of its own accord. There was no breeze to create the wild patterns in the water. Something dark and cold went across the Sun, sending a chill across the crowd. Many of the visual diagrams blanked out, collapsing like dominoes. One man screamed and screamed.
With sunglasses protecting her eyes, Demorn gazed up to the diamond sun. The sky phased and she saw it at last, for the first time in her life, dominating the entire sky. She read the mad truth, the same words in a thousand languages, both unknown and known, the remembered and the forgotten. It was all the same.
ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE ULTIMATE FATE
She jerked her eyes away, her head split with pain and nausea.
‘He’s so fucking ugly. It’s an unpleasant way to have your world end, looking at that.’
Duke Pain had his glasses off, his horrible yellow eyes spinning with the tumult above, a sick grin upon his decayed face. He seemed addicted to the haunting visage. She wondered silently if that was what happened when you lost everything — you grew to love and admire the very thing that had destroyed your life and very way of living.
She forced herself to speak. ‘Look at them.’
By the waters, now storming violently, the crowd gathered, tossed and torn by the churning waves, a few levitating above the water, their faces terrified, only a few symbols of power still faintly glowing. They were so small and doomed to defeat.
Duke Pain howled with some weird primal joy, his arms outstretched.
He’s a hurricane chaser, she thought.
Demorn ran toward the glassy lake.
She wondered about these small-time demigods, with their fragments of power. How could they all think and dream they had some sort of chance? How could they stand there, talking business, when Ultimate Fate was the Cosmic Bomb, a machine that did not know compassion.
Demorn had seen the tombstones on the world he had ravaged. She had seen charred cities and the weeping of the few who had survived. She had been in Chicago when the streets erupted with the skeletons.
They were so small and doomed to defeat. The terrifying visage now covered the whole sky. She saw bones in the air, inscribed with complicated runes of evil, flickering between this world and the next. Most of the crowd were screaming now, their spells overwhelmed by the oppressive sorcery in the air, as Fate tried to tear through and swallow them.
Demorn walked down to the pool’s edge. It was clear as glass again, shimmering, reflecting his horrendous face. The water was icy cool to her touch. Many of the crowd appeared stunned she would enter the water.
Pushing past them, she could feel Xalos clawing inside her, singing with an unsated hunger for the blood of the guilty surrounding her. Sh
e wanted to let it slide out of her breast, dispatch without mercy a score of these liars and monsters who pretended they were not monsters.
Some of them could read her glittering gaze; they fell back from the pool.
She said, ‘Do you fools even remember why we came here today?’ Demorn spoke in Asanti, ‘This is the Lake of Souls, and I bring a droplet from a friend.’
Demorn took the locket from around her neck and placed it in the water. Mictecaciuatl had been busy, as had her blade, it was filled to bursting with spirits. Demorn could feel the shuddering as the souls encased within freed themselves into the clear water, home at last.
Finally it was just a pretty stone again. She wound it back around her neck. Fate disappeared from the sky, the oppressive darkness lifting. The diamond sun shone. A few hollow cheers rang out.
Demorn heard somebody yell something about the greatness of their God. She felt nothing but sadness for them; they were so mistaken. How could these men, hiding in their suits, gazing at the terrifying sky, lie to themselves with such conviction, when they had seen the nightmare with their own eyes?
The crowd parted and an ancient Pale Sun tottered to the edge of the pool.
He wasn’t fully corporeal, skin thinly stretched over his dying body. Unlike the others he was not terrified of the water. His bleeding feet met the crystal lake with a melancholy sigh.
Xalos spawned into her hands. The Pale Sun hissed slightly, holding his palms out in a conciliatory gesture.
‘Peace, Vile Asanti Princess. Come, we shall not murder each other here. The Source Stone itself would forbid it!’
She sneered. ‘Perhaps, demon. I have not read it.’
He smiled viciously. ‘Ah, but I have, and the Iron Prison would be our Fate. You ask if I remember? I do, even if some of my companions do not. This is the resting place. This is the half-forgotten dreamland. Look upon them, Princess, some are not even fully awake, this is still the land of Nightmares to them.’
Even as he spoke, the purple flames on the sword ebbed away, leaving cold metal.
Demorn nodded, for what he said was true. The cemetery dimensions held rules deeper than any war they currently waged.
She sheathed the blade.
Behind him, a beautiful blonde woman wandered through the crowd, her eyes closed. Upon her hands lay a row of lidded eyes, but only one was open, and it was baleful red.
Demorn knew her from Babelzon, a courtier of the Tyrant. She was not the only dreamer. The more she looked, the more she saw of the walking sleepers.
People began flickering away from the cemetery, thinning the crowd around them. There was still a segment that circled the lake, exchanging details.
‘They are going back to their beds, Princess. To their loves and their lives,’ he murmured. ‘Perhaps this is all a dream, after all. Perhaps you should return, too, to your lovers and their sweet songs and their charms.’
She waved her fingers in a warding gesture. ‘Do not try to trick me, Pale Sun. I know this is no fantasy. My eyes see through your illusions and lies.’
He nodded gracefully. ‘I see that, Princess. There is something . . . special about you. You have been a legend to my people, a myth of death itself, as you hunted us like common criminals, as no human ever has.’
He dropped to his knees in front of her. ‘And why is that? What made you so special, as to challenge us, even here?’
Demorn was hyper alert, backing slightly deeper into the water, feeling the cold upon her legs.
‘Back off, demon. Or I will kill you, and the treaty and our fates be damned! I would welcome the Iron Prison to gut you.’
The Pale Sun laughed, chilling her spine, standing up. Her eyes flared all over him while he grew closer and closer to real, real skin, real decayed flesh, real bones strewn across his brittle neck.
She could feel the dark magic vibrating off his form, shuddering across her with its vileness.
‘You carry a portion of us, Asanti Princess. You’ve taken something from us, yet you’re barely more than human . . .’
Demorn breathed, ‘I carry a Bankers Key. I can get into your hiding places. Now back away!’
Xalos fed back into her hands, burning his eyes, and he jumped from the water.
‘As you say,’ he hissed, the red eyes in his white flesh peering at her with a mixture of fear and desire. ‘You are violent and stupid enough to do it.’
He seemed to sigh and change his mind. An anonymous assistant in a dark suit offered him a walking staff which the Sun leant upon heavily.
‘I am old and cynical and tired of quarrels that don’t matter. You have freed the trapped souls . . . let that be enough for today, Princess.’
He clicked his fingers and the waters shifted. They were on top of a small hill overlooking the lake, which now seemed to fill a vast valley. The Pale Sun seemed old and haggard.
But when Demorn looked, the park was still below them, just as it had been.
‘I would not come here too often, if I was you, Asanti. This is a place of old, deep magic. When the diamond sun dies out and night comes, treaties are forgotten and those crystal waters are stained with so much blood, so much savagery . . .’
Demorn was grim at the almost sexual growl in his voice. ‘I hate coming here. I hate the way you and all your friends glamorise being psychotic murderers. I only came for a friend.’
She held up the empty pain locket around her neck. The Pale Sun reached out with an addict’s hunger, but his hand did not get far.
‘Fuck your savage parties or whatever you do in the dark. I won’t be back anytime soon.’
The Pale Sun laughed. ‘You haven’t seen everything, just enough to scare you. You haven’t seen what we have seen. That is why you still have some hope.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Hope?’ He sighed, his sick eyes looking upward to the now tranquil sky. ‘There is no hope, Demorn. No hope except in the lies we croon to the sheep. Ultimate Fate is pressed against the thin membrane of this universe. He will tear and gnash through the thin fabric, and he will gorge upon it all until he is DONE.’
Demorn looked past him. She could see the cemetery gates not far away. She left the water, her clothes drying instantly.
‘Well, I guess that’s what happens when you hang out in cemeteries too much. You get real depressing.’
He sneered as she walked away, dipping his rotted finger in the water.
‘I am the king of this place, you know. I am one of the oldest of the Lords.’
She smiled. ‘Does that mean you will wither away and die before I get a chance to run a sword through you?’
He put the finger in his mouth. ‘It means I drink from the lake first.’ He paused, savouring it. ‘She isn’t here. How disappointing. You haven’t fed the blade with her guilty soul.’
Demorn’s blood ran a little cold. She kept her voice light. ‘Whose soul?’
‘Kate. Your only love.’
Her voice was controlled but her heart was tight. ‘What do you know about Kate?’
‘I know she wasn’t in the locket, Princess. Didn’t you kill her yourself once?’
Demorn didn’t respond; she kept walking away, her head filled with images of the Grave and what she had been forced to do.
He chuckled in a cruel way, calling out to her. ‘Perhaps she’s still in Paris. Fucking famous boys.’
Demorn sat in her car. The portal entrance was in a zoo overlooking the city, way up high. She could see the blue ocean, all that freedom so alluring and close. The engine was running. An old Fleetwood Mac song was playing. Her purple sunglasses were on the seat beside her and there were tears in her green eyes.
‘Nice ride,’ murmured the Duke, appearing in the passenger seat. ‘Good song.’
She almost started, but wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. ‘Jesus, I don’t see you for months and now it’s twice in one day and you’re in my car and everything.’
Duke Pain looked at her slowly. He took his glas
ses off too, put them on the dashboard.
‘Crying? Because the Treasure of the Damned was mean?’
She laughed. ‘Is that his actual title? The Treasure of the fucking Damned?’
Duke Pain was droll. ‘He was an accountant in his last life. Before he changed.’
She turned the radio up, talking quietly. ‘The worst always seem to be like that. So dull. Then they become such monsters. So robotic. So able to embrace the change.’
‘Well, they pray for it, Demorn. Stupid little shrines and everything.’
‘They do, don’t they . . .’ Her voice choked and her laugh was brittle. ‘No wonder I hate them all. I would have hated them before they turned.’
She looked at Duke Pain. He looked sick, sicker than in years. She had to blink twice before the needles faded away. ‘Are you turning into one, Duke? A Pale Sun?’
His hand trembled. She heard him breathe almost in shock, his form flickering in the seat. ‘Is that what you think will happen to me?’
She caught his hand and he solidified. She could feel her arm burn, where the golden armband had been when the huntress had ridden with her. ‘I don’t know what will happen to any of us, Pain.’
He shrugged. ‘Everything is vague for me.’ He touched the windshield with his fingers. She saw blood on them. It dried and vanished from the glass.
‘What was solid is gone. I go between lives, lingering in my slow dying. But no, I don’t pray to the Pale Suns.’ He looked at her with his yellow eyes. ‘I don’t pray to anything.’
She exhaled. ‘This is a fucking deep trip. I kind of just want to kill some bad guys.’
He smiled his horrible smile. ‘Why do you come to these graveyards, Demorn? Why do you honour all these strangers and sycophants? These people pay you to kill, but they won’t even say hello? Do you even care what happens to any of them?’
She smiled, and revved the Jag. ‘It reminds me, Duke. Reminds me of having friends.’
‘But they aren’t friends.’
She gunned out of the car park. ‘Exactly. You see those people up close, it’s easy to remember how few people last. It’s only ever gonna be one or two. It’s never gonna be the crowd.’
