A Darker Crimson

by Carolyn Jewel

  Thank God. She felt a nice even pulse thump slowly against her fingers, but then Jaise was fit. Forty bpm wouldn’t surprise her in the least. There was no need for CPR.

  She did the same to the other man. To her surprise, a pulse fluttered against her fingertips. His skin was warm. She shoved her Glock into her boot-top and ripped through her P.D. pack for the epiStart.

  The first dose, administered cutaneously by a patch two finger-breadths above his mid-sternum had no effect. She used her teeth to rip open the second pack. In reaching to apply the patch, her bare hand brushed his skin. Static electricity zipped through her. The fuzziness in her head cleared. She felt like she’d been sucked down to the very bottom of a well and thrown out the other side.

  The epiStart fell from her mouth and landed on the floor. Claudia stared at the body. It hadn’t moved, not one atom, but sure as flies buzz, this guy wasn’t anything like dead. She had her fingers around the butt of her Glock, but before she could get a solid grip, an arm shot out, and had her by the throat. His eyes opened. Blue eyes. Brilliant, boiling blue. Her head felt full, her heart was a lump in her chest. A presence leapt into being in her mind, dark, malevolent and unmistakably alien. Shit. She was a complete loser. A genuine moron. The beast had been there the entire time, and she had never even realized that fuzzy cotton-wool feeling in her head was it.

  The demon laughed with velvet delight.

  “You want to possess me,” she said, “or do any of that weird-ass demon crap, you gotta kill me first.” She’d said it before and she meant every word; she’d rather die than be anything but human.

  She didn’t doubt her captor one bit when he replied in a voice full of malefic laughter, “I’m more than happy to kill you, human.”

  Chapter Five

  The demon laughed then said something low and soft that wasn’t any language she recognized. The sounds were a series of syllables that made no sense to Claudia. The room flickered. The white walls disappeared, wooden furniture vanished and the window frame just wasn’t there anymore. Instead of a hotel room, she saw gilded pillars and flashes of gold, bronze, cobalt, ruby, topaz and citrine against sandy stone walls. And then she saw nothing but boiling blue eyes.

  Desperate, she lifted a hand and reached to strike her captor’s chun gun, the pressure point at the middle of his nose. His head snapped back. The room flickered, and Claudia’s head pounded. Images flashed behind her eyes: hotel, stone columns, hotel, stone columns. She shook her head and tried to wait it out.

  At last her vision stabilized, and when it did, the columned-room was gone and the hotel remained. The demon still gripped her throat, but he wasn’t in her head anymore. He grinned. “We’ll kill you if we must. Is it necessary?”

  Claudia shook her head. The demon let go of her throat. She fell back in agony, but the pressure on her windpipe was abruptly eased. She let air fill her lungs, a huge, grateful inhalation, and then realized she couldn’t move from the shoulders down. She could breathe, which was good, and despite not being able to move her limbs, she could feel them. That was a reason to be optimistic. Then, movement caught the edge of her attention, and when she looked, her blood turned to ice.

  The dead werewolf. Brad.

  First an arm twitched, then a leg. Like some sort of macabre puppet show, the werewolf corpse lifted its head from the floor. The upper body still sprawled, still looked grotesquely dead, on a patterned rug with fringe on the short sides. The vamp, thank God, wasn’t moving; his body continued slowly turning to ash. But the werewolf got to its feet, wavered and then took a step. The chest wound gaped wider. Pink lung tissue flapped on one side. The beast lurched toward her and rather than squared-off doorways and the flat ceilings of the hotel behind him she saw arched doorways and a vaulted ceiling. Tapestries draped the walls and rippled in an unfelt wind. Then the hotel was back.

  “There is no time to waste, Faullk,” the naked demon said without taking his eyes from Claudia. “That body is useless now. Prepare.”

  The dead werewolf shuddered, and the air around it turned to mist. Then before Claudia’s disbelieving eyes, the mist solidified. The werewolf’s body collapsed, falling to the floor as the mist took on human shape, shimmered, flexed and became the form of a man. He bowed to the naked demon, covering a clenched fist with his hand. He wasn’t a giant but was tall enough to be impressive. “En-Aslet,” he said.

  “Prepare for what?” Claudia turned her head back to the demon. Whatever was going to happen here wasn’t going to be good. Odds were, she’d end up as dead as the vamp. If she was lucky. If not, the werewolf’s gaping chest might be closer to her fate.

  The blue-eyed demon regarded her with an icy stare. She felt a vibration through her body and a resonance that built in her head. His features were Nordic. Delicate, fine-boned. Cold and pale as snow. She felt a weird twitch inside her.

  “Well?” she asked, pathetically proud she didn’t sound as frightened as she felt.

  “It does not matter to you, human female.”

  She tried to move her arms again, but it was still no go. It was the same for her legs. The Police Academy’s four hour course on sexual assaults by paranormal creatures focused on the citizen-victim, but the blunt reality was that the officers on the street were just as vulnerable to assault; a statistic everyone knew and no one publicly admitted. Male and female both could be victims, but overwhelmingly, as with similar human-on-human assaults, male paranormals assaulted female humans. Claudia wracked her mind for anything that might help her in this situation and came up blank. She just hoped to hell she lived through it.

  She turned her head toward Jaise and got the shock of her life. The commander’s eyes were open and aware. He blinked once. “You okay?” she whispered.

  Jaise blinked again.

  “I can’t move,” she said. “Can you?”

  His pale grey eyes stayed steady. “No,” he replied. But he could say no more as Faullk, the second demon, the one who’d emerged from the werewolf corpse, joined them.

  The demon knelt to one side of the Nordic-beauty he’d called en-Aslet, though Claudia suspected from the way he’d pronounced en that the word was a sort of honorific prefix to a name. Faullk motioned with his hands, and a box of chased gold, about a cubic foot all told, appeared on the floor.

  “It’ll be all right,” Jaise said.

  Claudia appreciated his attempt to reassure her, but she didn’t see how things could be all right. Not unless B-Ops came crashing through the door right about now. Nothing like that happened. The demon Aslet moved between her and Jaise. He bent over her. Close, and then closer yet he moved. A lock of white blonde hair fell over his shoulder. This is it, she thought. The end. The vibration in her head increased, and her stomach pitched and rolled. The resonance came from Aslet, the blue-eyed demon: a low hum, syllables, louder in her head until the noise was unbearable.

  “en-Aslet.” The other demon sounded worried, urgent.

  Aslet nodded, breathing hard.

  Faullk, the smaller demon, sat on his haunches on the other side of Jaise, hands on his thighs, eyes closed, concentrating. The resonance in Claudia’s head became unbearable. The sensation spread from her head to the rest of her body. She closed her eyes and saw red behind the lids, bright as new blood, cold as the demon’s icy beauty. Aslet touched her upper chest with the tips of two fingers. When she looked at him, she saw his mouth moving and knew he must be speaking, but the words made no sense. Not English, not Spanish, not Chinese or Russian or Hmong, Tagalog or Vietnamese or any of the hundreds of languages spoken in Crimson City. She heard a thud and forced herself to look. Thank God she didn’t see anything threatening. Jaise watched her calmly.

  “You all right?” she whispered again. Slowly, he nodded.

  The demon Faullk held the box he’d summoned, opened it reverently and took out a small, curved knife. The blade glittered gold, a brilliant, deep gold, a color you just didn’t see outside of a museum. Absurdly, Claudia thought that a gold k
nife, however beautiful, wasn’t going to be a very effective weapon. All the same, she didn’t fancy being stabbed with it. Better a quick death from a sharp knife. She swallowed hard, remembering the dead werewolf’s gaping chest.

  From the box, Faullk also produced a golden cup, the color of very old gold, soft and mellow, rich in tone, in shade and material a match for his blade. He set the cup at Aslet’s knees. Figures carved in the bowl of the chalice danced in a chain, hands linked. Claudia wanted to look more closely at the vessel, but when she tried to move, she couldn’t. Her heart pounded and her stomach threatened to turn inside out. Certainty grew. The demons intended to kill her and Jaise. One look into the blue-eyed Aslet’s face confirmed that the outcome of this wasn’t going to be pleasant. Well, she wasn’t ready to die just yet.

  “Let us go,” Claudia said. She was prepared to tell whatever lie seemed like it would work. “There’s no point in killing us. We’ll do whatever you want. Isn’t that right, Commander?”

  “Silence, human,” Aslet snapped. He lifted Jaise’s arm and stretched it out, palm upward. Faullk extended his knife and put the blade in Aslet’s other hand. The demon spoke in a low, soft voice: a chant, almost. None of the words made sense. He lifted the knife and held it crossways to Matthew Jaise’s arm. He turned the blade perpendicular to the skin of Jaise’s forearm. A red line appeared. Jaise didn’t even flinch. Maybe, like her, he couldn’t. The B-Ops Commander’s grey eyes held hers and never once wavered. Crimson trickled down his arm and dripped into the chalice, a thin stream of blood. The demon finally released his arm.

  Next, Aslet reached for her. The noise in her head increased, buzzed painfully. Aslet’s blue eyes shimmered. He held her arm as he had Jaise’s, upward, palm out. A curious satisfaction settled over face. Faullk moved close, the chalice in his hand. Aslet put the point of his knife to Claudia’s arm and cut. A pinprick of pain swelled and intensified until she wanted to scream.

  Something warm trickled down her arm. From the corner of her eye, she saw Jaise’s motionless body. His eyes were closed. She knew the moment her blood hit the chalice and mixed with his. Lost. She felt lost. Tears welled up behind her eyes. They were going to die, and she had no reason to think they would die quickly.

  She watched as the demon’s golden knife reappeared in her line of sight. Aslet dipped the dagger into the chalice. When he drew it out, the blade shone crimson wet. He pressed the hilt to his forehead and then handed the knife to Faullk. Jaise’s eyes snapped open when Faullk unfastened the commander’s pants, clumsily, as if he weren’t good with zippers and snaps. Faullk exposed Jaise’s hip and about half his belly. A gut wound, said a clinical voice in the back of her head, was a painful and slow way to die. The two demons could keep her and Jaise alive for hours that way.

  Claudia met Jaise’s gaze. He was awake. It must be true he had ice in his veins, because he didn’t look afraid. Claudia wished she had even a quarter of his courage.

  The resonance in her brain set off again, a hum of darkness and utter black. She twisted her head, eyes following the dagger. With a deftness that suggested practice, Faullk cut the skin just above Jaise’s hip bone, tracing a swirling line that spiraled and interlocked inward and outward in infinite dimensions. Aslet drew in a sharp breath when at last Faullk finally lifted the knife away. Faullk dipped the blade into the chalice again, and Claudia swore she felt her body react; a weird kind of leap toward Jaise.

  Her eyes met Aslet’s. The demon said her name with a gravity that scared the hell out of her. He took the knife from Faulk and bowed his head. The blood on the dagger flowed down the blade and into the cut on Jaise’s hip. Aslet transferred the knife to his other hand and dipped the blade into the chalice. When he withdrew it, he touched the tip, not the hilt, to a spot just above the bridge of his nose. A dot of red remained on his skin. He knelt at Claudia’s side and deftly unfastened the belt of her pants. His fingers exposed her hip and slipped beneath her underwear. Her belly flip-flopped, but all the demon did was expose her hip, nothing more. She tensed, expecting the worst.

  The moment the blade touched her skin, she felt cold as ice and hot as fire. The knife cut, but even though she reacted to the pain, her body’s reflexive flinch existed only in her head. She couldn’t move. Aslet worked precisely. She could feel the care he took with an inward, circular interlinking motion. Something cold flowed into her, entering from her hip. Aslet’s face appeared in her line of sight. Close. His white-blond hair fell forward, framing his face.

  “Claudia Donovan,” The demon said. “I am called en-Aslet of the Elismal demons.” The words echoed in her head. He touched the tip of the dagger to a spot above the bridge of her nose, then did the same to the B-Ops commander. “Nir-Jaise.” He bowed. “I am called Aslet of the Elismal demons.”

  Then the other demon, Faullk, knelt. Both chanted, and Claudia didn’t understand a word of it, except that it sounded increasingly dark, something from a nightmare. Faullk sat straight.

  Aslet stretched out his arm until the fingertips of his left hand rested beneath Faullk’s sternum. Claudia saw the smaller demon tense. Aslet’s pale blue eyes flashed. And then, so fast that she could hardly follow what happened, his hand plunged inward, upward and to the left. In the blink of an eye, he held Faullk’s heart in his clenched hand. Faullk stayed upright for two breaths. A cloud of crimson mist dissipated in the air above them as his body toppled forward.

  “It is done,” Aslet said. His dagger clattered to the ground, and his face appeared above hers. The fingers of his hand touched the mark incised on her hip. Burning cold spread from her hip, inward. Inside her. “Claudia Donovan. It is done.” Instantly, the vise that had immobilized her vanished.

  The demon Aslet continued to sit without moving. Claudia sat, grabbing her pants and gyrating to get them fastened. Her head felt filled with cotton, woozy, and she was sick to her stomach and fighting it hard. Her hip hurt where he’d cut her. What the hell had he done to her? Jaise sat up, too, head bent between his upraised knees. Like her, he was probably fighting off nausea and dizziness. “You okay, Jaise?” she asked.

  Jaise raised his head and looked at her with his freaky pale grey eyes. “I am now.”

  Aslet was a block of granite. He sat with his head cocked as if he was listening. But to what?

  Chapter Six

  Claudia couldn’t hear anything, but she felt Aslet’s interest become cautious anxiety. Next to her, Jaise flexed his arm and let out a low sound of pain. Aslet flowed to his feet in a motion so smooth she almost couldn’t follow it. She watched him dress quickly in loose black clothes. When he was done, but for the fire flickering in his eyes, the demon could have passed for human.

  Strange, doubled sensations in her head made it hard for her to ground herself. Claudia wobbled, still woozy and sick to her stomach. Somewhere, people were moving. A soft stealthy shuffle whooshed in and out of her head. One minute she felt it, the next, nothing. Underneath her own emotions was a sense of urgency that didn’t belong to her. We must leave. Now. Danger.

  A gun cocked, a sound she knew well enough to cause her some fear. Aslet barked a word she couldn’t understand and signaled with one hand. The shatterproof glass vanished from one of the windows. Cold air rushed in. Anxious, the demon was anxious, but he wasn’t afraid. In the meantime, Jaise lurched to his feet. His pants gaped open and Claudia caught a flash of abs and bare belly before he zipped his pants.

  She jumped as something outside whacked the hotel room door, once, twice and one more time. The butt-end of a police baton made a sound an awful lot like that.

  From the other side of the door, a voice boomed a familiar warning: “Open up! This is Internal Operations. You are under investigation. Failure to open this door may result in severe criminal and civil penalties, up to and including imprisonment in a Federal Detainment Center.”

  Aslet made another motion with his hand. The door vanished in a flash of blinding blue light, leaving an astonished commando with his bat
on lifted to strike a door that no longer existed. Claudia broke for the doorway, but her legs refused to cooperate. Her head objected to the attempt, too, and what the hell was with that?

  The commando with the baton gestured to the soldiers behind him and took the point, weapon drawn, sweeping the room; a textbook entry. Behind him, three operatives moved in. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to cover only one entrance; no doubt the entire building was under surveillance. Claudia was pretty sure one of the men was a werewolf and having trouble holding back the transformation. A woman spoke into her comm unit while her eyes flicked around the room, stopping on the bodies.

  Schick-tak. The sound of a clip loading into a semi-automatic weapon sent Claudia’s heart pounding. Someone shouted. She smelled their fear and felt Aslet’s disdain and, underneath that, his elation. He savored the mayhem, and sneered at them all. A red dot appeared on Claudia’s chest. A sniper’s dot. The dot moved and then disappeared. No doubt because it was focused on the demon’s head. Or maybe hers.

  “Got him,” someone said.

  “You’re too far away, asshole!” someone else shouted. “Get in range. Get in range!”

  The demon spoke another word. Heat flashed all around, and the bedroom door blew off its hinges. The heat about melted Claudia’s eyebrows. The red dot reappeared on a side wall and then winked out. Shit. Plainly, they really didn’t know the correct range. Not a good indication that they could handle this situation.

  Claudia kicked out and connected with the back of the demon’s knee. He anticipated her, though, and shifted just enough that she missed her target. The kick would have collapsed his left leg. Instead, her head flashed with pain. Aslet’s emotions remained constant. There was no increase in his anxiety, no fear.