Wrong Side of Hell (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 1)

by Sonya Bateman

  “Sublevel one, across from the elevator. Where is the Seelie, the one called Reun?”

  Cold, painful laughter in my head. I don’t know. Suck it.

  “He doesn’t know,” I said. This was really starting to hurt. Even my eyes throbbed with the pressure. “Where’s Daoin? Subject Seven, where do they keep him?”

  A long pause, and tugging that threatened to yank my brain out through my ears. The vault, Travis ground out. Sublevel six.

  “The vault. Sublevel six.”

  Taeral blanched at that one. I guessed part of him didn’t believe Daoin was still alive, but there was no denying this confirmation.

  “Ask him where the little ones are at,” Denei said.

  “He wouldn’t know.” My words slurred a bit. It was getting hard to concentrate. “He died before the rest of them went back.”

  “Ask him!”

  “All right,” I croaked. “Where are the Duchenes?”

  More frigid laughter. In hell.

  I looked at Denei. “You don’t want to know what he said.”

  She shivered and cut her gaze away.

  I closed my eyes for a minute. This wasn’t going to work much longer. “How many Milus Dei people are in the warehouse?” I said.

  Don’t know.

  The words stabbed deep, and something hot and wet ran from my nose. Blood, falling in fat drops on my splayed hand. “How many do you think?”

  Forty. Fifty. Doesn’t matter. More will come from the outside, all over.

  “Forty or fifty. More from the outside,” I gasped. The blood was gushing now. “How many more? Who are they?”

  “Gideon, stop!” Sadie said frantically.

  “No, I’ve got this. How many more?”

  Thousands more. Tens of thousands. I could feel his smug satisfaction. You’ll never win, freak.

  Thousands? That was impossible. I opened my mouth, intending to make him clarify.

  Then a huge, blinding flash went off in my head, and I knew nothing.

  CHAPTER 32

  I opened my eyes to a smeary blur that gradually resolved into Sadie. “Next time, stop when I tell you, idiot,” she said.

  “I’m fine.” I was lying on my back, with Sadie holding my head so I wouldn’t choke on the blood. Yep, totally fine. “Let me sit up,” I said.

  With a frown, she tucked an arm through mine and helped me ease off the ground. I managed to get semi-upright and closed my eyes, waiting for the world to stop spinning. My head still throbbed. But now it was like the world’s worst migraine, instead of barbed wire wrapped around my brain.

  Some gift. Whoever invented this DeathSpeaker ability was a sadist.

  Eventually I felt like my eyes wouldn’t squirt out of my head if I opened them. So I looked. We were in front of Taeral’s tent again—just Sadie and me.

  “Where is everybody?” I said. “How long was I out?”

  “About half an hour. Taeral’s inside taking inventory, to see if he’s got anything left we can use.” Her mouth twitched into a grimace. “The rest of them are looting corpses.”

  “Good. That’s what I would’ve told them to do.”

  “Yuck.” She sighed and sat back on her heels. “I don’t believe we’re doing this,” she said. “There’s what, six of us? Against Milus Dei. We must be crazy.”

  “Yeah, we probably are.” Crazy felt like an understatement. None of this had even existed for me a few days ago, and now I was going up against a huge, bloodthirsty cult with a werewolf, a fairy, and the bogeyman, plus whatever the Duchenes were. All to save a whole bunch of people who weren’t people—and one of them was my father. I still couldn’t get my head around that. “So, do they…have anybody you know?” I said.

  Sadie stared at the ground. “Not anymore.”

  “Oh.” That sounded like a nest she didn’t want to stir up, so I decided to let it drop.

  But she looked at me, and said, “It was my mother.”

  I knew right away what she meant. The woman Murdoch had turned into, down in the shelter. Her worst nightmare. “You don’t have to talk about it,” I said.

  “No, it’s okay. I think…I want to.” She let out a shaking breath. “My pack, my family, we’re all werewolves. Most of us born, a few turned. I left the pack years ago because of…something they did. And they must not want me back too bad. You know that pouch you found in the park?”

  I nodded. “The white one.”

  “Yeah. It’s a ketani, a spirit bag. We use them to communicate with the pack. But since I left, no one’s contacted me—except Mom. She kept trying to badger me back in.” Her features twisted in disgust. “Because I’m weak. She was determined to make me stronger, but I didn’t want anything to do with them.”

  “You’re not weak, Sadie.”

  “You don’t know what weak means, to a werewolf.” Her lips thinned to a slash. “Anyway, Mom was in town to argue with me again. They captured us both separately. I didn’t know until they put me in a room with her—she was chained with silver, poisoned, so she couldn’t change. And they…”

  Her face shut down.

  I reached out and took her hand. It was cold, trembling. “It’s all right,” I said. “You can stop, if you want to.”

  She shivered and met my gaze. “They injected me with some kind of genetic manipulation drug they’re working on. It suppresses human genes, so there’s nothing left in a were but the animal. Then they flooded the room with artificial moonlight, and…” Her eyes closed. “I killed her. I killed my mother.”

  My heart twisted sharply at the pain in her voice. I went to her and put an arm around her shuddering frame. “Maybe it was a trick,” I said carefully. “They did it to Taeral somehow. Convinced him that he’d watched his father die.”

  “No. It was her. I know her scent, and there’s no way to fake that.” Tears slipped from her eyes, and she swiped them away like they’d offended her. “Besides, they didn’t know she was my mother. They just wanted to pit werewolf against werewolf, to see if we could kill each other.” She breathed out, and the shaking stopped. “Well, we can.”

  I gave her a gentle squeeze. “I am so sorry.”

  “As am I, a’ghreal.” Taeral emerged slowly from the shadows of the tent with a pained expression. “I’d no idea what they’d done to you, in such a short time. I should not have made light of your capture.” He moved to her other side and hunkered down. “But my brother is right. You are not weak…you’ve never been.”

  The look she gave him kind of made me jealous. Especially since I was the one with my arm around her.

  “Well, lookie here. You lot want me to start a campfire so you can sing Kumbaya?”

  Murdoch stood at the edge of the clearing, grinning. Next to him, Denei looked considerably less amused, and Zoba just looked like Zoba. He carried a big canvas sack, presumably full of corpse treasure.

  “Can we skip the love-fest?” Denei huffed, striding into the clearing with Zoba at her heels. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Unfortunately, I had to agree.

  Murdoch and the Duchenes had come back with quite the haul.

  Denei had emptied the bag on the ground. There were passcards, keys, knives, guns and ammo, various Tasers, cuffs and chains, handheld units with throat mikes, belts and boots, body armor and balaclavas, a few random objects I couldn’t identify—and for some reason, a severed hand.

  Zoba snatched the hand and made it disappear. I really didn’t want to know how or where.

  “This is good,” I said, sorting slowly through the pile. “Everyone gets an outfit, and a radio and mike. Whatever channel they’re set on, we’ll use a different one to communicate, and we should be able to switch back and listen in on them once we’re in. We’ll divide the weapons.”

  “I get this one.” Denei reached in and grabbed a six-inch switchblade. “I like my killings up close and personal.”

  I suppressed a shudder. “Right. Anyone else have a preference?”

  Taeral
frowned. “None of these will be effective against Reun,” he said. “Do not engage him. I’ll handle that traitorous snake.”

  “Hold on, there. I call dibs on the Seelie.” Murdoch gave an unpleasant grin. “I haven’t tasted Seelie fear in years. You can’t imagine anything sweeter. And a noble to boot—that’s what I call a gourmet meal.”

  “You’re not nearly powerful enough to stop Reun, vermin.”

  “Oh, really.”

  He changed into something else.

  It was sort of a man. The same height as Taeral, with waist-length black hair and glittering silver eyes set into a face like a vengeful god. Deep scars curved outward from the corners of his eyes to just above his mouth.

  The man-god advanced.

  Taeral stood rooted in place, visibly shaking, his face a mask of terror. A strangled cry escaped him, and he squeezed his eyes shut. “All right!” he gasped. “The Seelie is yours.”

  Murdoch turned back into himself. “Good. Because I plan to drain that son of a bitch dry as a bone.”

  Something told me I’d just seen Daoin. And here I was thinking my real father couldn’t possibly be scarier than the one I’d grown up with.

  That thing made Orville Valentine look like puppies and rainbows.

  Taeral caught his breath and stepped back from the group. “We rest until nightfall,” he said. “We’ll need to be at full strength. And Gideon, you must recharge the moonstone before we strike.”

  Not even Denei protested waiting. Everyone was probably thinking along the same lines as me—that despite my blustering about hope and a stronger position to fight from, this was never going to work.

  CHAPTER 33

  It was around ten at night when we mobilized for Milus Dei.

  Everyone wore black and body armor. It’d give us a few extra minutes of blending-in time and cut down on bullet wounds without having to rely on glamour. We all carried guns, knives, and radios. Taeral had given Sadie a fresh luna-ball and a new change of clothes, and me the curved, serrated knife with runes on it—one of a matched set. He carried the other.

  I was kind of touched. No one had ever gifted me a weapon before.

  Murdoch had the cold iron cuffs and the bullets I’d dug out of Taeral, to help him slow down Reun. He’d been disappointed when Taeral told him Fae magic couldn’t influence cold iron, since he wanted them restored to their original shape—but happy enough with the slingshot he’d dug out of somewhere.

  Besides the weapons, Denei and Zoba brought a bunch of pouches, vials and sticks. No one knew what they planned to do with them.

  Our mismatched crew hadn’t gotten far when we ran into something unfortunate. In the corridor at the top of the stairs, we found Grygg—more or less. Most of the massive golem was sprawled on the floor, clothes torn and gray skin cracked like long-neglected pavement.

  The rest of him, namely his head and left arm, were a few feet further down the hall.

  Denei moved toward him with a thoughtful frown. “The big boy’d be useful to have,” she said, walking slowly around the body. “I bet he’d come with, too. He’s gonna want some heads to roll, after they got his. Let’s bring ’im along.”

  “Er,” I said. “But he’s…dead. He’s extremely dead, with prejudice. He doesn’t have a head anymore.”

  She laughed. The sound was actually pleasant, like throaty bells. “Big boy ain’t nothin’ but stone and sorcery. Still got all the stone, so we just take what’s already here and draw it back together, good as new.” She glanced at Zoba and tilted her head. With a grunt, he trotted over to retrieve the gatekeeper’s severed parts.

  “Wait,” Taeral said. “Voodoo and sorcery are not the same.”

  Denei gave him a fiery look. “Are you sayin’ we can’t do it? You think what we got’s inferior to you, is that it?” Her eyes challenged him to call her on it.

  He actually looked a little nervous. “No, I suppose not.”

  “Good. You ain’t the only one with magic, Fae,” she said. “Now hush, and let us work.”

  She knelt next to the massive body and fussed over her pouches and vials, picking out a few to set aside, as Zoba tried to place the missing parts. The head kept rolling back every time he let go to try the arm. He made a sound in the general direction of his sister.

  Denei looked over her shoulder at me. “Come on down here, handsome.”

  I hesitated, and then approached reluctantly. “What?”

  “You gonna hold his head. Zoba can’t do both—he needs a hand free.”

  “Fine. If I have to.”

  She gave me a look. “You got a problem with bodies now? Didn’t have any with that human filth you shook down.”

  I shrugged and tried to look casual as I moved to where his head should be. Dead bodies were no problem. Dead, headless bodies that were about to be brought back to life—that was something different.

  I never thought I’d see anything death-related that creeped me out, but this qualified.

  Zoba watched me like a hawk, holding Grygg’s head upside down in front of him. When I sat, he brought his wrist to his mouth and bit hard with his pointed teeth. Blood pattered onto the severed stub of Grygg’s neck.

  He grinned as he handed me the head.

  “Um. Thanks.”

  It was cold and heavy, and it really did feel like stone. I tried to put the golem’s head back in place as close to the right position as possible. The blood made it slippery work. I couldn’t let go, or it would slide out of place.

  While Zoba bled on the arm, Denei opened one of the pouches and started sprinkling bright red powder on the golem. She produced two of the sticks and laid them out in an X on his chest.

  On closer inspection, I realized they weren’t sticks—they were polished, sharpened bone, and too big for most animals. Except the human kind.

  She grabbed a vial full of black liquid. “Hold him tight, now,” she said to me.

  “Yeah. I’m holding.”

  She reached over and pried his mouth open, then poured the contents of the vial in. The black stuff didn’t go down his throat—I assumed because his throat wasn’t attached to the rest of him. It just sat there in his mouth, an ominous, glistening pool.

  “All right. We ready.” She nodded to Zoba.

  He drew out a bone stick topped with feathers and a round, shriveled leathery something that was painted black and white. I didn’t want to guess what the round thing was. Still holding Grygg’s arm in place, he shook the stick into a rhythmic rattle. A moaning note rose from his throat, low and steady and unending.

  Denei rose fully to her knees, spreading her arms and holding both hands palms-down above the golem. She closed her eyes and began to chant. There were no words in it. Just shapes of sound and suggestions of syllables, forming and breaking like crashing waves.

  Almost immediately, Grygg’s body started vibrating.

  The cracks in the golem’s skin sealed themselves in a meandering, random pattern. Zoba’s blood bubbled and hissed in the seams of his head and arms, spilling a black, tar-like substance over the breaks. The stuff in his mouth drained slowly, and his head warmed against my hands.

  Grygg’s eyes opened.

  Even though I really wanted to, I didn’t dare let go. The chanting and rattling died down, and Denei gave a full-body shudder just before they both fell silent. Zoba released his grip on the gatekeeper’s arm.

  I decided that was a good enough sign for me, and took my hands away.

  “Hey there, big boy,” Denei said, slightly breathless as she collected her bones and powders. “Don’t worry about that headache you got. It’ll go away soon enough.”

  Grygg blinked slowly. “You restored me.” His voice was grindier than before, and black seams remained around his neck and arm. But he definitely wasn’t dead.

  “Yeah, we did. But that don’t mean we like you.” She smiled a bit. “Just thought you might wanna come along on the vengeance party.”

  “Milus Dei,” he rumbled, and s
at up just as slowly as he’d blinked. All five thousand or so pounds of him. There was no way we’d fit him into body armor.

  Fortunately, I didn’t think he’d need it.

  “That’s right,” Denei said, and gestured at me. “Handsome here seems to think we can send those devils straight to hell, and get our folks back while we’re at it. He’s got big plans, that one.”

  Grygg turned his head to stare at me. He looked less than convinced.

  “Let me give you the short version,” I said. “I’m the DeathSpeaker. We’ve got inside info on Milus Dei headquarters, keys to all their locks, and a shitload of weapons. Also, a bogeyman.”

  “Bogeyperson,” Murdoch called. “And Poobah, don’t forget that.”

  “The DeathSpeaker.” Though Grygg’s expression didn’t change, he managed to look intrigued, and a little bit…hungry. “I’ll come,” he said. “Just tell me who to crush.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” Denei said. “Right, Zoba?”

  The dark promise in Zoba’s wicked laughter spoke for all of us.

  CHAPTER 34

  We couldn’t risk going into the subway level. Even with New Yorkers’ high tolerance for weird, they’d definitely notice an eight-foot-tall stone man walking around with a SWAT team whose various members had a metal arm, a face-skull or mouths full of pointed teeth, or were Murdoch.

  Taeral knew the subtunnels better than anyone in our unlikely group. He led us to a bolthole that opened into the basement of a long-abandoned theater, about halfway between the Hive and Milus Dei headquarters. It was a little tricky getting Grygg up the ladder, but we managed.

  As soon as we hit the surface, my phone exploded.

  For a minute it felt unreal, like I was getting messages for someone else. I’d almost forgotten about the real world. But I had missed calls and texts from Abe, Viv, Rufus, and even one from the CosmoFit gym. Maybe I’d missed a payment or something. But I wasn’t going to worry about that one right now, and possibly not ever.

  No time to work out when I was fighting for my life.