Demorn: City of Innocents (The Asanti Series Book 2)

by David Finn

‘Pretty generic. I think it’s a prequel for a TV show. What isn’t these days?’

  Demorn opened the book. The pictures filled out, drawn in a weird cartoonish style at odds with the violence and the bodies crushed by the savage, elegant staff.

  ‘Toxis the Huntress. Who does she hunt?’

  ‘The usual types. Murderers, rapists, thugs, etc. . . . She’s quite maladjusted.’

  Demorn grinned, putting it back on the shelf.

  ‘You sound like quite the fan, Sue. Considering how “pretty generic” she is.’

  Sue shrugged. ‘Well, they can’t all be high art. Let’s see if she lasts the quarter in this market.’

  Demorn kept looking at the image of the girl in the red cloak fighting against the anonymous swordsman in the dark wood. She could see strange carvings burning on the trees.

  ‘It sure rings a bell in me.’

  Sue looked over her slowly, floating back behind the desk.

  ‘The publisher ran a viral campaign that maybe five people cared about. Maybe you were one of the five?’

  A shiver ran up Demorn’s back.

  The longer she looked at the poster, the more power the image took, the more intense it was, the more real. The moon glowed red in the background. It seemed to bounce off the glass doors. She heard something, the murmur of distant chanting.

  Demorn forced herself to look away. Her green eyes were like fire.

  Behind Sue, a complex star burnt on the wall, savage purple on black, eerie and irresistibly cool, burning bright, then slowly fading.

  ‘No, I wasn’t one of the five.’ She paused. ‘Sue, do you ever feel you can reach and touch your past? Do you ever feel like it’s so near and perfect and sad?’

  Sue looked vague. ‘Yeah. I think we’re trapped here, y’know.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  But somehow I think the same, Demorn realised. The store letters glowed in neon on the glass, like a reverse mirror. It was called the lost labyrinth. Vague memories shifted through her like shadows in the rain.

  Sue gazed mournfully into her computer screen.

  ‘It’s like some weird spell. I can’t decide if it’s evil or not. The new books come in, they sell, I banter with faces I have trouble remembering a minute after they leave. Sometimes it feels like just the same face. The same face, again and again, forever.’

  Demorn looked away from the poster and the comic book.

  ‘It isn’t forever.’

  Sue looked at Demorn closely. ‘It feels like yesterday you were sixteen, young and so hungry. You barely knew who the X-Men were. We teased you.’

  Demorn smiled, embarrassed. It was all so true.

  ‘Then I turn around, a week later, maybe two, and here you are, with great hair and damn beautiful skin. You can talk about entire legendary comic runs, can’t you?’

  Demorn smiled, embarrassed. ‘It’s been a lot longer than two weeks, Sue. I read a ton in the Grave.’

  ‘What’s the Grave?’

  Demorn was so cold. She remembered something, reaching into her jacket, putting her soul mask on. ‘It’s where I’ve been.’

  Sue drawled, ‘That’s cool, you look badass. But no time has passed for me and I barely remember the world outside. Everybody on the internet is obsessed with zombies and surviving the end of the world, playing online games I don’t even care about . . .’

  The girl’s voice trailed off. Demorn realised how truly cold the store was, how lonely.

  Demorn knew that she hadn’t seen her friend in a very long time. She was glad she had come up here.

  Demorn span one of the computer screens her way. She saw a complex lattice of bones and blood, interlocking in random, circular, spiraling patterns.

  Demorn grabbed the girl’s arm. ‘What the fuck is that?’

  Sue smiled, embraced. ‘Counter-magic. I was left alone in the shop. I went deep.’

  ‘Jesus, Sue! Do you even know what you are doing?’

  Sue’s face became a true mask of pulsing dark power, and her voice reverberated with a deep, throaty power. Demorn’s eyes could see the complicated rhythms of high power spells flooding across her body and aura.

  Of course I know. I am caught in somebody’s spell. It is deep, dark magic, without innocence or regrets.

  Sue smiled, and suddenly her sweet smile was that of a disfigured clown, stitches and death, a corpulent, rotten, and very strange beauty, sagging, rotted skin, eyes vacant with true death shadows. Her body was disfigured and shaking, floating into the air.

  Demorn drew her pistol but didn’t shoot. She recognised this visage. This was no digital nightmare, no soul mask, this was a true curse, bending time and death and flesh. It stunk.

  ‘What are you?’

  Sue spoke, her voice perfectly clear.

  I’M SUICIDE SUE — TRAPPED IN THE PAST — I DANCE IN THE ETHER — I CAN BURN THRU THE STRINGS, BUT I HAVE TO DANCE BECAUSE THE PUPPETS ARE SUPPOSED TO NEVER KNOW SUCH THINGS.

  Her voice echoed and bounced off the distant walls of the shop.

  Demorn said gently, ‘I’m nobody’s puppet, Sue.’

  Suicide Sue looked at her, leering with her twisted, wide mouth, destruction and hurt in haunted dark eyes. A thick series of webs wrapped around Sue, through her fingers, across her arms, around her throat, gossamer burning brilliantly in the pink fire.

  Her voodoo voice echoed in the store and through Demorn’s mind.

  That’s only because you have magic bullets and no heart.

  Sue sprinkled dead flowers across the floor. A light pink fire lit the air around them.

  You lost what was left of it in the Grave.

  Suicide Sue wrapped a sticky web across Demorn’s neck. Demorn pushed it away.

  No, don’t run. It is a most illuminating light. Look, Demorn, LOOK!

  The web tightened on her skin.

  Demorn saw herself and Sue, dancing with a violent passion in a club of sweaty, glowing bodies. Both their faces were lit up and laughing with a savage joy.

  She was looking at a vast amphitheatre filled with screens. A hundred monsters of horrific forms filled the screens, while the crowd danced. Sue’s voice echoed through her head, discordant. Then deep, reverberating with truth.

  Games and HIT movies tell us death is evil, but we are all eaten by worms or fire anyway. ARE WE ALL EVIL? They talk about the >END OF THE WORLD but show us huddled around a TV, crying for DEAD GOD dreams — OR praying to the blank, grey concrete eyes in the sky—

  Sue sprinkled dead flowers from her black fingertips, burning in the fire, feeding an unpleasant heat through the room.

  THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE END OF THE WORLD IS — IT IS NONE OF THESE THINGS IT IS NONE OF THESE THINGS—

  Demorn watched the swirling web tendrils, burning in the air. Her single web fell away, blown away into the fire, totally spent.

  ‘I can go out the storm doors, Sue. I can leave this place. I can take you. I want to take you.’

  Suicide Sue came close, her limbs jerking spasmodically in the air.

  Gods of war and vengeance kiss and love you. Your astral shadow wears a golden crown and you have a cruel face. I know why you’re not trapped.

  Sue’s shaking white hand touched Demorn’s mask.

  YOU ARE ONE OF OUR JAILERS.

  Demorn took her shaking, undead hand. Her green eyes glowed as she spoke in soft Asanti.

  ‘Enough, lost soul. Your spells have been perverted by the curse.’

  Her voice carried a raw note of desperation. ‘Please come back with me. Please, Sue.’

  Sue’s manic, dead face looked away. She floated through the shop, toward the glistening posters.

  The crowd guess in their private nightmares they are trapped. They haven’t been home in so long. The puppets aren’t as stupid as the puppet master thinks.

  ‘I don’t know if the puppet master had much choice in this,’ Demorn said.

  She thought of Dead Gareth, rotting in his limo. Gareth at the c
ard table, how silent he would go, how dead his eyes were. She thought of the strange sick spells that led to calling his number. Knowing where it would lead.

  Sue’s laugh was sad and strangely sane.

  Oh, Demorn. In the beginning we all had a choice.

  ‘I didn’t cause this,’ Demorn said.

  Sue’s laughter was a howl. The store disappeared, reality falling away. She stood on a battlement, watching a great ocean crashing against the castle walls, the purple burning sword in her hands.

  She saw the night sky shining with the true faces of gods and demons. Her heart ran with a cold horror because she saw the thorns on every aura, she saw them on her arms, in her strong heart.

  And she was screaming a spell of true power to end it all, as the earth shook. She heard the mighty voice of the Dead King, bellowing his defiance to her from the battlements.

  Reality flashed back. Demorn was on her knees. The soul mask had fallen off. Sue was in front of her, almost normal again.

  ‘Was that Firethorn?’ Sue offered her a cold, white hand. A part of her face flicked back and forth between the nightmare and the cold store. ‘Do you remember meeting Gareth the first time?’

  Demorn looked back. She could glimpse Dead Gareth, flicking in and out of the glass. She ran her hand through her hair, her mind was clouded.

  ‘I called him. Were you there?’

  Sue sent a thin tendril around Demorn’s neck. Demorn didn’t resist.

  We picked him up on the roadside. We were friendly, we talked comics, we drove through the rain and through time and beyond night and day and night and day. I remember it like yesterday. His calls were funny at first, turning bitter and sad as the night got longer and we kept driving and we kept picking him up and we kept leaving him by the truck stop his calls were funny at first—

  Demorn tried to clear her head. She was getting flashes of the road at night.

  ‘We were on the highway, weren’t we?’

  You said we needed a country song. You said you wanted life to be a movie. You wanted to be lost in the wreckage of our lives.

  Demorn blinked. ‘This must have been a long drive, if I was coming up with lines like that.’

  Sue laughed, briefly becoming her old self. ‘It was.’

  Demorn looked at the store window. Dead Gareth patrolled the empty corridor, manically flicking in and out of existence.

  Demorn’s phone was buzzing on her wrist. She knew who it was. She ignored it.

  ‘He’s a witch isn’t he?’ Demorn said, sighing.

  ‘I think he’s something worse. He’s a dead witch stuck in a loop.’

  Suicide Sue blazed into being, an old song filled the store, playing from every machine as her voice echoed through Demorn’s mind.

  WE ENTERED THE COVEN WE PLAYED THE SONG ABOUT THE FIRE AND THE RING ENCIRCLED US — WE SAW THE SPELLS EAT THRU THE ROAD AND TIME AND HIM AND US — RUNNING SCREAMING INTO THE DAY AND I SAID TO YOU IS THIS A DREAM IS THIS A DREAM YOU WERE SHOOTING BUT WE WERE SURROUNDED BY PHANTOMS I’M STILL SURROUNDED BY PHANTOMS

  Sue hung in the air. Her voice stopped shouting.

  Demorn softly held her body, speaking an old counter-spell, her hand against Sue’s shifting eyelids. The body stopped shuddering, reality aligning.

  Sue slumped into her arms, an exhausted, thin girl. Her body and face seemed ravaged. Her heart beat lightly.

  Demorn’s phone kept buzzing on her wrist. She had been ignoring it but to keep pretending she didn’t need to answer was impossible.

  Sue’s eyes opened, blank and soulless. ‘I need a favour.’

  Demorn said, ‘It’s not a favour to get you out. We have been friends for ages. Why didn’t you call me before?’

  Sue’s voice was intense. ‘Not me. I have the shop, it keeps me safe from him. It’s my sister, Rachel.’

  ‘Is she in here, too?’

  Sue grasped Demorn’s arm. Her fingers felt skeletal and cold.

  ‘No, she’s outside, in the real world . . . you saved her from a Pale Sun, years ago. But he left his mark.’

  A great sadness filled Demorn. Flashes of years ago in the ice cavern, an echo of a name she barely remembered. Her arm burnt with a phantom pain. Spirit chained to a dark path.

  Demorn cleared her head. ‘What has she done?’

  ‘Wild things. Bad things. I need you to take her into the Innocents. I need you to make her one of you.’

  ‘You don’t know what you ask. It’s not an easy way.’

  Sue looked at her with desperation. ‘I know what I’m asking. She is already a creature of the street and the Portals.’

  Sue’s face became the voodoo doll. ‘And I can see what she becomes if you do not take her . . .’

  The voice was a whisper and Demorn did not ask Sue what she knew or saw. She didn’t need to. She had seen what the Portals did. It was a gruesome scene.

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ Demorn said. ‘If she makes the cut, she makes the cut.’

  Sue passed her notes scrawled on paper. ‘Rachel writes me from here.’

  Demorn took the papers. They were handwritten. Random words, nonsensical, perhaps in code. Then passages of perfectly written text.

  ‘How does this get through the curse?’

  Sue looked sad. ‘They come in with the comic shipments. She’s almost the only real memory I have.’

  Demorn laughed her scary laugh. ‘I came back from a tomb. I can get you out of this trap.’

  ‘How? Don’t you have to fight a huge dragon or something?’

  Demorn smiled, looking at the muted TV where the huge cartoon monster silently howled, fighting a series of colourful heroes, dancing and flying about the creature. They cast energy bolts and powerful spells against its defiant rampage.

  ‘Not this time, Sue. His spell is slipping and I’ve grown up a lot since the last time I called. So have you. You can follow me right out the front door.’

  She pulled out her white-handled Athena pistol, checking the chamber. ‘Of course, if all else fails, we switch to non-diplomatic methods.’

  Sue drawled with a dryness. ‘Do you finally want your Wolverine comics then? I’ve got like ten trades back there.’

  Demorn smiled. ‘Hell yes. Ring them up.’

  She finally answered the call buzzing on her wrist. It wasn’t Smile. ‘What do you want?’

  Dead Gareth opened the door and walked into the store. ‘Can I get a lift to the Mall, ladies?’

  His face was that of a fresh corpse. His suit looked older, moth-eaten. His smile and voice carried an awful smoothness.

  Sue backed against the counter, the box of comics in her arms. Demorn’s magic eyes could see him change, back to that of a teenager, long wavy hair, dreamy eyes. She could see the roadside, and the blue sky behind him, the way it had been on the day they had picked him up.

  ‘Calm down, Sue, he isn’t going to do anything to hurt you.’ Demorn looked at him with cold eyes. ‘He can’t. He’s already done everything his power allows. More than he should have. Haven’t you, Gareth?’

  Dead Gareth clenched his fist tightly. His voice wasn’t smooth. ‘I don’t know why you can’t let me out. Why can’t I come with you? That’s all I wanted. That’s why I called you!’

  ‘It’s your soul being eaten up by the curse, Gareth. Not mine, not Sue’s. Not the people out there. You’re your own Repeater Monster. The vampires howling at the door are you. I never realised until now, although I suspected.’

  Demorn pointed out to the wider Mall beyond the comic store.

  ‘All these other people are just renting your horror show. The dream comic store, the one I could never find again. The song that sums up how they feel. The perfect set of sheets at just the right price. It’s so pathetically clever. All these little wishes bound to whatever curse is destroying you.’

  Gareth shook his head, distraught.

  He said, ‘You could leave. You were never trapped. My limo always took you out.’

  Demorn smile wa
s a thin line. ‘Well, your driver did all that. He brought us in, he took us out.’

  She glanced at her invisible blue watch. Smile’s message lit up.

  Dead Gareth was withering. ‘My driver? He’s little more than an automated shell.’

  Demorn held her fingers up, leaving a tiny gap between them. ‘But he is just a little more, isn’t he? And while I’ve been here with Sue, bouncing around dimensions, Smile made friends with him. Another digitally displaced person, after all. I mean, you even obliterated his name. I bet you don’t pay overtime or offer any kind of health plan, Gareth.’

  Dead Gareth smashed his hands against the comic racks. They started to crumble and vanish. Sue gasped aloud, and Demorn held her hand tightly.

  ‘You can stay in here, Gareth, see what happens, let the code eat up what’s left of you.’

  Dead Gareth went to speak, but Demorn rolled her eyes.

  ‘Don’t bother. You were just an episode, Gareth, not the movie.’ She patted him softly on the shoulder. ‘I’ve moved on.’

  He was frozen, his face flickering between youth and death, hope and decay. As the mall lost substance, time pressed upon Gareth and it all became something worse.

  ‘See you at the table. I hear you can play as long as you have some skin in the game.’

  Gareth started screaming inside his freeze-framed body, but then that stopped, too. She wondered what would happen to him, but she didn’t really care.

  Demorn took the small package of comic books under her arm and together they left the store.

  ‘Are we free?’ Sue asked. As she crossed the door, Sue changed, becoming the woman who ran her bar in the future. Demorn brushed her lips against the woman’s head.

  ‘I don’t know about free, but we aren’t in mall jail anymore, we can definitely say that.’

  Sue caught her mouth and kissed Demorn violently. The high walls of the huge Mall became illusory and shallow, most of the people fading out, too.

  Before too long it all was gone, and they stood on some short-cut grass, with the Ki City mist around them. It was still dawn. Cars were howling down the freeway.

  The Mall collapsed in a shimmer of unreality. Suicide Sue floated beside her.

  ‘You’re going to wake up in my parlour and be happy,’ Sue whispered. ‘I remember now.’