Misery Happens

by Tracey Martin

  “What?”

  He pulled his hand away from his side, and I gasped. More blood drenched his skin and uniform. A lot of blood. Too much blood. “I hit a rock when I landed. A sharp one. I’m not going farther. But you and Mitch—you need to finish this, so go.”

  “But—”

  “Jess!” Lucen’s voice shattered my stupor.

  I turned in time to see him get off a shot right at the demon’s side. That damn tail swiped him, and he crashed into the ground, but the demon screamed in fury. Francisca’s voice joined it, and she ran straight at it with her blade, driving it deep into the demon’s left side. A scaly arm swept around, flinging her backward, and her head slammed into the rock.

  Tom fired. Mitch fired. Their shots hit their marks or close enough, but the demon was too large. It wasn’t bleeding out fast enough to give up the fight, and it charged our way. I raised my blade, but Tom shoved me toward the bridge.

  “Go!” he shouted again. “While you can. Let me handle this, and you do the rest.”

  I couldn’t argue against the intensity in his eyes. Overzealous though he might have been at times, Tom had never doubted nor wavered in our mission. He would sacrifice himself to see what needed doing was finished. So, sick to my stomach, I left him and ran. If I didn’t make the most of this opening, everyone was dying in vain.

  I tripped on the first step because I glanced over my shoulder for Lucen, and my knee slammed into rock. Sharp, throbbing pain shot up my leg. Tom was yelling at Lucen, waving him away.

  “Come on,” I heard Mitch yell.

  Clenching my jaw, I took off up the stairs. Footsteps pounded after me, not one set but two. Through the bond, I could sense Lucen was close by and unhappy. I couldn’t think about him though, nor about Tom fighting with the demon below. I could tell he was still alive because he fired twice more, but I didn’t dare look. The steps were sturdier than they appeared, but their heights and depth were uneven. If I didn’t watch where I placed my feet, I’d tumble again.

  I almost did anyway. The demon let out a laugh, and the entire cavern trembled. The bridge wobbled. You think you can lock us back in here? You think you’re stronger? You’re so weak, so vulnerable.

  Your insults are lame, I told it. A quality villain would have some better one-liners. But it was getting under my skin, regardless. The repeated taunts didn’t faze me. Its magic, however, was strengthening. When it spoke in my head, I could sense it, and I could feel the fear building once more in my blood.

  We were so close now. But to what? The bright light poured in from a crevice in the rock, and I couldn’t see beyond it. Fear nibbled at my mind, assuring me what was on the other side could be even worse, but I did my best to push it down. Whatever was there, it wasn’t this thing behind me. That was what counted.

  The bridge shook again, and the thunderous boom of the demon’s footsteps echoed in my ears. I grabbed the wall for balance, hoping Mitch and Lucen could do the same. Loose stones scattered and fell into the darkness below. Then I squeezed through the crack and into the light.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  After the dim cavern, the harsh light made my eyes tear. I stumbled a few steps forward, and my legs sloughed through some sort of fine powder that came halfway up my shins. Shielding my gaze with my free arm, I squinted at the silky, white dust.

  It couldn’t be.

  A gust of wind almost bowled me over, and I staggered to stay upright. Hair flew into my mouth, and powder peppered my cheeks. It wasn’t cold. Nor was it wet.

  “Why is there snow in here?” Mitch yelled to be heard over the whistling wind.

  “I don’t think it is snow.”

  Lucen reached down and cupped a handful. It slipped through his fingers like sand but dispersed in the breeze, far too lightly. “It would be good skiing snow if it were snow. It’s not sand either though.”

  My eyes were adjusting, and I wiped the bits of whatever it was off my face. “It’s more like a bad imitation of snow.”

  “Snow as imagined by creatures who never experienced it firsthand, perhaps.” Lucen tucked his gun in his holster, gazing into the distance.

  I couldn’t be too upset over the lousy-imitation part. Given the landscape in here, it should have been freezing, and yet the temperature wasn’t much colder than it had been in the cavern. The juxtaposition was mildly unsettling, but after what I’d just been through, unsettling was easy to ignore. Hell, anything that didn’t scream extremely poisonous snakes wasn’t worth my time. I worried worse things than strong winds waited for us, and I had no idea where to begin to search for the key.

  Since there seemed to be only one way to go, however, I started the tiresome job of trudging through the non-snow. High cliff walls rose on either side of us, even taller than the walls in the cavern had been. They weren’t blue, but dark rock that gleamed like polished obsidian.

  Please don’t let there be salamanders in here. The rest of our supplies, including nets, had been lost in the cavern. I should have grabbed the bag, but when Tom yelled at me to leave, I’d been too distraught to think things through so well. It hadn’t seemed like it at the time, but I supposed my inability to keep my head on straight was an indication of panic.

  I had to stop panicking. Stop feeding my enemies.

  The sky was a deep, blood red. As we had in the cavern, we hiked on and on. Exhaustion, both mental and physical, ate away at me. Although I was attached to Lucen and drawing energy from him, he didn’t have much to feed on either. We were down half our team, and it occurred to me that using Lucen’s power might be draining him too much. I hoped the fact that he hadn’t asked me to stop meant he was okay and that any drop in his energy by being bonded with me was better than the distraction of too much lust magic.

  After a while it became clear that our surroundings were changing. We’d walked straight because we had no choice, but now the cliff walls were farther apart. Each time the wind gusted, blinding us with white, features moved. New cliffs and mountains would seem to spring from the not-snow. Behind us was no longer an open trail but a maze of rock formations. How were we ever going to find our way out of here?

  It was a stupid question when I had no clue where the key was.

  I lifted the weak magic-detecting charm from under my shirt and checked it again, but it still glowed irksomely pink. Maybe it was a shade or two darker than before, but I couldn’t be certain. The red sky could be enhancing the color or a thousand other possibilities could be affecting it. I should have just been thankful nothing had attacked us yet.

  Mitch glanced at his own charm, then at me, and we both shrugged. This was beyond pointless. The longer we traipsed on, the more convinced I became that we were on a fool’s mission. We’d never find the key, never find our way out, and were doomed to slowly die an agonizing death of dehydration. That was, assuming exhaustion or something evil didn’t get to us first.

  Fuck it. I should give up. The two words repeated in my head with every painful footstep. Why did I care about saving the world anyway? What nice things had the world ever given me?

  Exactly, whispered a cruel voice. Why sacrifice yourself for the people who’d hate you? They deserve everything coming to them. You could even say they brought this on themselves.

  Not all of them. Not my family, not Steph, not Devon, not… Why was I arguing with myself? I didn’t have the energy for this.

  Because it wasn’t myself I was arguing with. With a silent scream, I recognized that first voice as other. Another demon had crawled into my head.

  The scream climbed up my throat and burst through my lips. As it did, the wind roared. I hunkered down and covered my head, and my cry lifted on the air current and was carried away. Lucen was yelling too, and so was Mitch, but their voices were distant. The wind continued to beat me with the powder, sharp grains stinging my face and hands. I couldn’t open my eyes.

&
nbsp; I was resigned to die this way when the wind calmed, and cautiously, I uncovered my head. The white stuff clung to my face, weighing down my eyelids. Freaked out, I rubbed it away and blinked as I observed my surroundings. The cliffs had shifted again. The powder had blown against the sides, leaving smooth black stone beneath my feet. Once more I was bound on both sides by high walls.

  And I was alone.

  “Lucen! Mitch!” I yelled my voice hoarse, and my echoes were deafening.

  “Jess!” One, then both of them, returned my cries, but I was no closer to identifying where they were or getting to them. It sounded as though they’d been trapped, each on one side of the cliffs.

  Wetting my lips, I yanked my sword from the sheath. Sure, getting angry was playing into the demons’ games, but I was sick of being toyed with. “You want to mess with my head? You want to feed on me? You can at least have the guts to show your ugly face while you do it.”

  A feeling like tentacles probed my brain, and I got the sense whatever was doing it was amused by my outburst. Asshole. Probe this.

  I closed my eyes and sought out the invisible source of the sensation. Magic was in there—in my head—somewhere. If only one of these bastards would try harder and give me some power to grab on to, maybe I’d finally get somewhere.

  Then the feeling stopped, and the magic retreated. “Scared, are you?” I doubted it, but I could taunt them too.

  No response came, but out of the misty white in the distance, shapes began materializing. Dark blobs initially, they grew and took on humanoid form. I brushed more powder from my eyes with one hand and pushed hair out of my face. Adopting a defensive stance, I waited.

  The forms continued to darken. Shadows became substantial, and hints of color began to appear. Painfully slowly, the shapes emerged from the mist. Shadow became flesh. And as I struggled to make out what they were, their faces came into focus.

  My arms fell in disbelief, and my blade clattered against the stone. I was going to retch, I was positive. Or I would have if I could breathe, but my breaths stuck to my lungs. Hundreds of figures were materializing and shuffling forward, the ones farthest in the back just faceless shadows still. But it was the figure in front, leading the mob, that horrified me the most.

  It was Tom.

  I took a step backward, trying to reconcile what my eyes were seeing with what my brain knew. He limped with each step, and even from this distance I could tell the side of his uniform was drenched with blood. More blood had splattered across his face, and one side of his head…

  My stomach rebelled, and I clamped my lips shut tightly. One side of Tom’s head appeared dented, as though something had crushed it. More blood, dark red and thick, stained his blond hair. But his eyes were open and staring right at me.

  No. No, no. NO!

  I took another step away, and Tom stopped. More figures congregated around him. Most didn’t look as horrible as he did. They were simply strangers, though all bore the marks of various injuries. A boy with a missing arm. An older woman with a dirt-streaked face and bloody hair. A man with a ghastly green tint to his skin. Something about all of them was familiar, yet none of them had recognizable faces. And they all had the same dead expression in their eyes, the same clumsiness to their movements. A desperation and emptiness that I’d seen many times before.

  They were ghouls. Every one of them, including Tom.

  How they were here was another question, but stories of half-dead ghouls propelled to obey a pred’s whims were well known. They were the sorts of stories you told around a campfire, stories meant to frighten. They weren’t taken seriously except in studies of folklore and legend.

  Preds could feed power to injured or dying addicts, sometimes enough power to keep them alive beyond what they could have survived on their own. But not this much. Not enough to overcome the injuries Tom appeared to have sustained. Preds didn’t have that much power.

  But I wasn’t dealing with preds, was I? I was dealing with their far scarier, more powerful ancestors. Where they were getting the energy from, I didn’t know. I was way out my depth, and I could only fall back on the bits of magic that made sense to me. One of those bits told me that somewhere buried inside that brain, some part of Tom existed.

  I swallowed. “Tom? Tom, can you hear me?”

  Tom cocked his head from side to side, but his face showed no recognition. His expression didn’t even change at hearing his name.

  I tried again, taking a cautious step closer and searching for a spark of life inside his pale blue eyes. Instead of showing one, Tom raised his knife and pointed the blade at me.

  Dragon shit on toast. That couldn’t be good.

  The ghouls surrounding him lurched forward en masse. I held up my sword to block my body, but it was no shield. Cold fear spread throughout my limbs. Though I tried to fight it, the sight of hundreds of demon-controlled ghouls closing in was too much for my logical brain to handle. The fact that some of those ghouls looked more like corpses than living beings didn’t help.

  I hazarded a glance over my shoulder and discovered the cliff walls had moved again. I’d been blocked in on three sides. Fewer than twenty steps remained between me and the rock face, and the ghouls crept forward with frightening purpose.

  “That’s enough!” I yelled to the missing demons that were controlling them. I swung my sword around, grateful the closest ghouls were too far away to be hit. “I asked for you to show yourselves. Not for you to enslave a bunch of ghouls. Leave Tom alone and face me.”

  Predictably, I got no answer, and still the mass of people closed in. The back of my heel hit rock. I had nowhere left to go. Hands shaking, I held my sword in front of me and swung it in a light arc, but it didn’t deter anyone—neither ghoul nor demon puppet master.

  Worried that I was going to kill someone, I steadied my arm and stopped moving the sword, though I continued to hold it out, poised in front of me. The ghouls paused when I did, and I let out the smallest of breaths. Then the swarm parted down the center, and Tom inched toward me. He was flanked on either side by Peter and Francisca, neither of whom was in better condition.

  “Tom?” My hand wavered. “Are you in there?”

  My heart nagged me to lower the sword before Tom or any other innocents got hurt, but the rest of me screamed no. I was having a hard time breathing, and I feared if I lowered my blade, the crush of people would drown me.

  “Tom, stop.”

  He was right in front of me. In front of the blade tip.

  “Tom!”

  I tried to move, to drop my arm before it was too late, but I couldn’t. Tom walked right into the blade, and it pierced his chest with a creepy ease. Frozen in horror, I watched him take another step, driving the steel deeper into his body. He grinned as blood dribbled from his mouth.

  The awful sight of it broke my stupor. Hurling a curse to the wind, I withdrew the blade from his torso, but before I could lower it, the mob was on the move once more. A hand grasped me from behind. Then two hands. Then four. Knobby fingers dug into my back and my legs. Hair ripped from my scalp. When I yelled, foul fingers were stuffed into my mouth, pulling my jaw open farther.

  A cry burst through me, and though I hated myself for it, I swung out with the blade, hacking whatever was nearest to me. Clothing, flesh and bone parted like wet clay against the steel’s edge. I swung and I sliced in a wild, unthinking daze. Body after body, arms and legs and anything that dared invade my personal space fell to my sword.

  The taste of ghoul fingers lingered on my tongue, and I gagged. Blood clouded my vision. I could feel it dotting my skin, and my lungs begged for fresher air. Yet the ghouls continued to come until the powder-covered rock ran with red. Someone was screaming, and it sounded like me, but I wasn’t aware of making noise. I was as mindless and relentless as the ghouls.

  Laughter rang in my head, deep and decidedly feminine. I cr
inged through it but couldn’t stop. Tears pricked at my eyes. Fingers, gray and smoky, seemed to wrap around my chest.

  My arms were exhausted. I’d cut a wide swath through the teeming crowd, and bodies had piled up on all sides of me. Severed legs dripping blood, torsos gashed and raw—I stood in the center of a graveyard of ghouls and carnage. It was nauseating, but not yet over. New ones plowed ahead, trampling the bodies of the dead without care. I could hear the squish of their soles as they stepped on flesh and organs.

  I covered my mouth with a gore-coated hand, tasting vomit. “Haven’t you had enough fun? Are you still too scared of me to show yourselves?”

  The ghouls marched on, splashing puddles of blood and occasionally losing balance and falling atop the dead and dying. But that’s what they got for wearing three-inch heels.

  Oh, gods. I dropped my sword and sank to my knees as I gazed into the face of the one that fell. A soulless Steph looked back at me. Her arms waved to the side as she made futile attempts to stand. But how could that be? Her being here was impossible.

  I spit out blood and took a good look at the newest round of bodies heading my way. The shock and horror of seeing Steph had rattled me, but now confusion crept into my head. It wasn’t just Steph. I saw Bridget and Andre, Mitch and Grace. I saw my mother and my stepbrothers. There were more Gryphons who I didn’t know as well, and Steph’s cousins who I knew only a little better.

  But they couldn’t be here. None of these people could be here. I was being screwed with again, and if these people weren’t here, then this was a lie. This was all some sort of magic.

  I squeezed my eyes shut then opened them, trying to peer through the spell. For a second I thought I had it, everything flickered, then the moment was gone. And the ghouls inched in.

  Andre’s hand covered my face, and I cried out. More probing, more groping and clawing followed. Fingernails scraped my scalp, and powerful hands shoved me into the slick ground.