by Sara Reinke
Jason shied, drawing his hands to his face, trying to see despite the staccato glare of the flashing lights. He stumbled into a length of velvet rope and fell through it, crashing to his knees, knocking over the brass rope stands along with him. Maniacal laughter screeched from the ceiling, and Jason closed his eyes, leaning heavily against a wax dummy as he staggered to his feet. It wasn’t until he was upright again, however wobbly, that he opened his eyes again and found himself face-to-face with one of the mummified creatures from the Netherworlde—a Hound.
Jason cried out, floundering backward, falling all over again, this time onto his ass. The Hound’s lips drew back along the slit of its mouth, the splits in its parchment-like skin ripping farther along the contours of its cheeks toward its ears as it bared its razor-sharp shark’s teeth and hissed audibly.
It was larger than the Hounds he remembered, much larger. Rather than waiflike, this creature was enormous. Barrel-chested and brawny, it towered over the props and wax dummies surrounding it, the shriveled sockets of its eyeless head fixed with unwavering attentiveness on him. Motion in one of the strobe flares caught his gaze and he whipped his eyes to the right in time to see another of the massive creatures, at least a dozen more, in fact, lumbering out from the shadows.
Jason limped to his feet. His hand fumbled against the base of his spine, the waistband of his jeans, for the Beretta, but his eyes widened when he realized it was missing. It must have fallen out of my pants, he thought. But where? The motel room? The dock? The restaurant? It could be anywhere!
He turned, meaning to bolt back the way he’d come, and backpedaled when he saw Sitri standing in the doorway, arms outstretched as if offering an embrace, his thin mouth unfurled in a smile.
“Jason,” he exclaimed, as from overhead, the tinny screams and wails continued. There was no sign of any of the injuries he’d suffered when the streetcar had struck him. “It’s so good to see you again. You never write. You never call. That hurts me, man. It hurts me real bad.”
As he advanced, so, too, did the Hounds, forcing Jason to stumble back toward the center of the room.
“We can do this the easy way”—Sitri reached beneath the flap of his long, black overcoat—“or the hard way. It’s your choice.”
Jason heard the hiss of metal and drew back again, his eyes widening, when Sitri pulled a sword out from a sheath beneath his coat. The strobe light flashed off the long silver blade as Sitri spun the hilt in his hand, turning the weapon in a deft, nearly lazy, sweeping circle.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, his voice deceptively gentle and sincere. Holding out his hand, he stepped toward Jason and smiled. “Please don’t make me.”
“Get away from him!” The loud, frightened cry from the threshold was abruptly drowned out by the sharp, booming report of gunfire. The bullet sailed wild, harmlessly past Sitri’s shoulder, and he and Jason turned nearly in unison, both caught by surprise.
Mei stood at the threshold, Jason’s missing Beretta clasped between shaking hands. “I said get away from him,” she said, but when Sitri bared his teeth and snarled with all the vicious bloodlust of a rabid dog, the sword still clutched in his hand, she shrank back, ashen with fright. Her gaze darted around the room, and she noticed the Hounds, really seeing them, for the first time. “Oh, God,” she whimpered, the gun tumbling from her fingers. “What are you? What the hell are you?”
When the Eidolon sensed Mei’s terror—and more specifically, Jason’s emotional response of panic and fright at her sudden and immediate peril—it surged within him like a runaway freight train, a glacial avalanche turned loose and roaring down the side of a mountain, rushing, raging, a massive and indomitable force of nature.
In an instant, his body dissolved into shadow form. Springing from the floor, still diaphanous shape, not substance, he materialized once more and drove his knuckles into Sitri’s face, snapping his cheek to his shoulder with the force of the blow. Caught by surprise, Sitri dropped his sword and Jason reached for it, catching the hilt in hand just as Sitri recovered.
Jason dissipated again, the Eidolon recoiling, and when he coalesced into physical form, he sent Sitri’s blade swinging in a wide, sharp arc. Sitri ducked around the blow, but the edge of the sword sliced through one of the Hounds’ thick necks. Its head fell backward and, with a grinding, ripping sound, fell loose from its shoulders. It staggered back, groping blindly at the open air above the stump.
Again and again, the Eidolon shifted into its spectral form, jerking Jason from one side of the room to the next within a blink of an eye. Again and again as he rematerialized, Jason drove the blade of Sitri’s sword into the Hounds, ramming it through mummified heads and chests, skewering through abdomens and spines. He cleaved through their ranks in a violent frenzy, his mind nearly in a fugue state, his body and the Eidolon moving together, acting and reacting in complete, instinctive tandem.
When he was finished, the chamber of horrors looked like a war zone, the set pieces toppled, crushed and broken, wax dummies lying in dismembered ruins. Everywhere, the bodies of Hounds lay sprawled. One was crumpled at his feet, a Hound still moaning, its fingertips scrabbling weakly against the ground, the top half of its head sheared away by a sword strike. They didn’t bleed; their insides were as withered as the rest, and instead of blood, a fine, dark powder spilled out of their veins.
Gasping for breath, his body sweat-soaked and trembling with exertion, Jason swung the heavy sword between his hands, shifting his grip on the hilt so that the blade pointed down at the floor. Gritting his teeth, uttering a low, hoarse cry, he reared the sword back, then thrust it down again, punching clean through the Hound’s desiccated torso, splintering the floor underneath it with the point of the blade.
He leaned heavily against the hilt, using the sword to prop himself upright momentarily as he struggled to catch his breath. He felt light-headed with fatigue, disoriented and exhausted. For a long, dazed moment, he couldn’t even remember exactly where he was or what he was doing there. It was as if he’d blacked out, or browned out, as the case may be, because he had dim recollection of hacking his way through the Hounds. It felt to him now as if he’d watched someone else swinging the sword, as if he’d been an observer of the attacks instead of an active participant in them.
The Eidolon, he thought, pressing the heel of his hand to his brow. It took over me.
“Very nice,” he heard Sitri say, and he looked up in surprise, having all but forgotten about him. “You see? All that time, all those years spent whipping you into gladiatorial shape have paid off. Look at you now, magnificent.”
The tall man stood across the room in the doorway. With one hand, he held Mei pinned in a choke hold, his forearm shoved beneath her chin, his hand craned so that he could press his palm against her cheek in a strangely tender gesture. In the other, he held Jason’s pistol, the business end of the nine-millimeter shoved against her temple.
“Jason.” Mei hiccupped, her eyes wide and frightened, her hands pawing feebly, futilely against the strangling press of Sitri’s arm. He was taller than her, so much so that she danced now on her tiptoes, trapped and nearly throttled by him.
“Let her go,” Jason said, grunting as he wrenched the sword loose of the floorboards and fallen Hound, hefting it again in his hands. It seemed heavier now, impossibly so, as if forged from lead. He had no recollection of its weight in his grasp at all when the Eidolon had overpowered him. It had felt weightless to him, nearly an extension of his body, something he was able to maneuver easily, gracefully even. Now it was like trying to lug a full-grown elephant riding piggyback on a sperm whale.
“Would that I could.” Sitri’s brows lifted in mock sympathy. He shifted his grip on Mei, releasing her neck, but still holding her fast, clamping his hand over her mouth. “But I told you, we could do this the hard way or the easy one. You’ve made your choice.”
Mei cried out in muffled fear as he thumbed off the safety with an audible click. She struggled in S
itri’s grasp, her eyes wide and terrified, pinned on Jason.
“No,” Jason cried. “Stop! Don’t hurt her!”
Sitri met his gaze evenly, his brow arched somewhat, almost expectantly.
“Take me,” he said, letting the sword fall with a heavy clang to the floor. “I’m what you want. Here. I won’t fight you anymore. Just let her go.”
Mei shook her head and mewled while Sitri smiled. “There’s a good boy,” he purred. “I thought we’d be able to reach an understanding.”
He glanced down at his chest just something emerged from beneath the collar of his shirt, one of the tattoos that had come to life and ripped free of his flesh. It was a Wyrm. Larger than the one that had been in Jason’s head, this was at least a foot long, the width of his index finger, like the gray, flaccid member of an aged corpse awaiting embalming. Using the whiskerlike tentacles around its head to grip and pull itself along, it wriggled from Sitri’s body over to Mei’s. She moaned, muffled, in wide-eyed terror as it slid against her, following the contours of her breast, belly, hips, then thighs, toward the floor. When it reached the ground, it moved swiftly toward Jason.
“You remember how this works, don’t you?” Sitri asked. He jammed the gun muzzle roughly into Mei’s cheek again. “You fight the Wyrm, you fight me. I’ll blow her skull open. Then I’ll fuck whatever’s left of her on the floor right in front of you.”
As the Wyrm began crawling up his pants leg, tugging against the denim, Jason’s first instinct was to recoil, to knock it away from him, to kick it to the floor and stomp it into a smear, but he forced himself to remain still. Mei began to cry as it reached Jason’s neck, her whimpering sobs stifled by Sitri’s heavy palm. “No,” she pleaded, garbled, shaking her head. “No, Jason. Please!”
Jason felt the Wyrm’s tentacles slip, then grip, against the contours of his ear lobe, anchoring itself to his head. Its bulbous tail twitched eagerly, restlessly beneath the shelf of his chin as it prodded against his ear, ducking into the narrow confines of his ear canal. He could hear it, its gruesome teeth gnashing and chittering in anticipation as it forced itself forward. Mei cried out to him again and he met her desperate, terrified gaze. He gritted his teeth against a scream as the Wyrm began to burrow, wriggling into his ear, and heard Sitri chuckle.
“Relax,” he said to Jason. “This won’t take a minute.”
A sharp bang! ripped through the room, accompanied by a sudden flash of light that Jason mistook at first for another flare from the overhead strobe. At this, Mei shrieked and the Wyrm burst, a mess of blood and something black, ichor-like, splashing against Jason’s face, splattering back against the wall. Startled, Jason looked toward the door and saw a man standing just behind Sitri, a pistol clasped in his hands. It took a long, bewildered moment before recognition dawned on him. Jason had seen the man before, the black clothes and clerical collar: Gabriel Darrow, the young priest who had visited with Sam.
“Are you kidding me?” Sitri asked, pivoting slightly and dragging Mei in tow, keeping the gun shoved to her forehead. “A priest? They put you here as a priest, gatekeeper?”
He threw his head back and laughed, shoving Mei forward, then clubbing her in the back of the head with the pistol butt. He swung the gun around, leveled it at Gabriel and squeezed off a round, no warning, no hesitation. The bullet slammed into the priest’s chest with enough force to knock him backward, off his feet, crashing into the door frame and sprawling against the ground.
“Mei!” Jason cried as her knees buckled and she collapsed to the floor in a limp, lifeless heap. In an instant, he shifted into the shadowy form of the Eidolon. Almost as quickly, he crossed across the room, hovering over Mei in an indistinct, smoke-like cloud.
Sitri saw him and his brows furrowed deeply as he brought the gun around again, taking aim right through Jason’s diaphanous form, straight for the back of Mei’s head.
No, Jason thought and when Sitri fired, when the pistol discharged, he rematerialized again, his body crouched protectively over Mei’s, his shoulders and spine hunched to cover her head. The moment he physically touched her, he again dissipated into shadow, this time taking her with him, just as he had from J-Dog’s apartment.
They vanished before the bullet reached them, leaving it to punch into the floorboards, sinking deep and leaving a splintered wake. They reappeared in another of the museum galleries, with Jason cradling Mei in his arms, clutching her against his chest.
Momentarily disoriented, stumbling dizzily, Jason fell to his knees, struggling not to drop her in the process. He laid her gently against the floor and pushed her hair back from her face as he leaned over her. “Mei? Mei, can you hear me?”
She groaned softly but didn’t stir. At the sound of more gunshots in loud, rapid-fire succession, his gaze whipped to over his shoulder, his eyes wide in alarm. He knew he needed to get Mei out of there, to someplace safe.
But that priest, he thought. Gabriel Darrow. He’s still back there. He saved me.
He had no idea where in the museum he was, or how to get back to the chamber of horrors, but when gunshots rang out again, sharp and loud, coming from his right, he got to his feet and headed in that direction, leaving Mei behind. As he rounded a corner along the way, he plowed nearly headlong into Gabriel, who had been limping down the corridor from the opposite direction.
The two men scrambled back from each other in wide-eyed surprise, and Gabriel swung his gun arm up, his pistol still clasped in his fingers, the barrel leveled at Jason’s chest. He’d been stumbling along, nearly doubled over, his free hand clasped against his gut, and Jason could see blood streaming through his fingers, soaking into the dark fabric of his shirt.
“You’re hurt,” he exclaimed, reaching for Gabriel.
He froze when Gabriel jerked the gun in warning, not lowering his arm or his aim. “Get out of here,” he seethed through pain-clenched teeth. “Sitri’s still back there. You can’t let him find you again. Go someplace safe and stay there until tomorrow. Then get to Saint Stephen Martyr, the parish house. Come and find me.”
“What about Sitri?”
“I can hold him off, but not for long,” Gabriel said grimly. “He’s stronger than me.” He moved his hand from his gut long enough to give Jason a surprisingly firm shove, leaving a bloody handprint on his clothes. “Go, goddamn it, before I shoot you myself.”
Jason ran back to the gallery where he’d left Mei. He stooped, gathering her in his arms again. She moaned at this, her eyelids fluttering open.
“Wh-what…?” she murmured. “What’s going on?”
“No time to explain. Can you stand up?” he asked, setting her on her feet when she nodded, letting her lean unsteadily against him. She reached for the back of her head, grimacing, and when she drew her fingertips away, they were spotted with blood.
“What the hell happened?” she croaked.
From behind him, more gunshots rang out, and she jerked against him, crying out softly in frightened surprise. “I’ll tell you later. Can you walk?” Jason asked and she nodded again. He slipped his arm around her waist. “Come on. We have to hurry.”
They stumbled together down winding corridors and through dimly lit exhibits, trying to find the exit. When they staggered out into the lobby, bursting through a pair of heavy drapes marking the doorway, Jason laughed out loud in hoarse, shuddering relief.
“I called the police,” the cashier bleated from behind the ticket booth, peeping up from over the edge of the counter, her eyes enormous, her voice quavering with fright. “They’re on their way. I don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re in big trouble!”
Jason ignored her, catching the door against his hip and shoving it open, squinting against the sudden bright glare. He led Mei outside, blinking in the sunshine and momentarily blinded. When he could see again, he saw a loose cluster of teens standing nearby, watching them with wide-eyed apprehension—Mei’s friends, the ones who had given him the drugged wine.
“Uh, hey, Mei,”
Liang said as Jason hobbled toward them, leading Mei in clumsy tow. “What’s going on in there, huh? We thought we heard gunshots. You okay?”
Mei paused long enough to give him a withering glare. She pulled away from Jason, balled her hand into a fist and knocked the boy on his ass, landing a fierce right hook square in his nose.
“Fuck you, Liang,” she said, spitting at him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I was clubbed in the back of the head once,” Jason told Mei, kneeling in front of her as she sat against the edge of the bed in their hotel room. He’d filled a small trash can liner with ice, then wrapped it in a towel and leaned forward, reaching behind her to press it gently against the base of her skull. A nasty goose egg was forming here, and blood had dried, crusting in her hair.
“A guy hit me with a beer bottle, just like in the movies. Sorry,” he said when she jerked, sucking in a sharp, pained gasp.
“It’s okay,” she mumbled, but her eyes were glossy with tears. He’d set another ice pack against her hand, resting against her bruised and swollen knuckles, and she held it lightly in place with her free hand.
It seemed surreal that they were sitting there making small talk when less than an hour ago, he’d been hacking his way through a swarm of demons. Mei hadn’t stopped trembling since they’d entered the room, and her eyes were somewhat dazed and distant with shock. When she spoke, her voice was small and quiet. “Why’d he hit you?”
