Biting the Bullet

by Jennifer Rardin

  Dave gave his okay-whatever shrug. I got the feeling he and Raoul weren’t quite on speaking terms. I believed the difference in our relationships with him had something to do with the fact that Vayl had twice taken my blood and left some of his power in its place. Those acts had left me with extra abilities Raoul found valuable. Plus, Dave didn’t appreciate outside interference in his missions, no matter who assigned them. If not for the mole, I doubted Vayl and I would be here at all.

  “Go ahead, Jasmine,” Vayl said, “tell us what happened when Raoul arrived.”

  I cleared my throat. Looked around the room. “Well, he showed up during my bubble bath dream.”

  I love that one. It’s always so warm and cozy and I wake up feeling practically boneless. Raoul had stepped into my little white bathroom, his green and black camo and impossibly broad shoulders making it seem more like a Chinese takeout box than a lavatory as he said in his Spanish-flavored accent, “I’m sorry, Jasmine, but there’s no other way to do this. I’ve got to take you to hell.”

  Chapter Two

  The trip from my rest room to what Granny May’s minister used to refer to as Satan’s Playground so closely resembled the blackouts I’d experienced after losing Matt and my Helsinger crew that I came to with a strong desire to run straight to my sister’s attic, dive into the trunk she stored for me there, and resurrect Buttons, my old teddy bear. But since spineless wimps don’t survive long in my business, I decided to go with Plan B.

  I opened my eyes.

  And that’s when I started to swear.

  “Hell is massive,” I told my audience, who’d gathered around me like a bunch of kids at their library story hour. “Imagine looking through a telescope. Think of all the black space between the stars. It’s like all that got sucked into an observable area that you somehow know is also an endless, infinite tract. But it’s not empty.

  “The ground is covered with rocks. Some sharp, some rounded. Most covered with mold, blood, or vomit. Raoul and I stood on a huge boulder just flat enough on top to hold the two of us. In the distance I could see a chain of mountains. Did I mention the rocks? The point is, you have to watch every step. Citizens of hell don’t look up. Not unless they want to drag around a broken ankle or two. Some do.

  “As a visitor, I felt free to explore. So I glanced up.”

  “Shit, Raoul, the sky’s on fire!” I ducked, nearly pulling my hand from his as I moved. His grip tightened, pressing Cirilai into the adjoining fingers until they throbbed.

  “Whatever you do, don’t let go,” he warned me. “Hungry eyes are on us, waiting for us to break the rules.”

  “All you told me was that we couldn’t be late and we had to leave when we were done!” I snapped. “If you’re going to risk my life —”

  “Soul,” he amended.

  “Oh, that’s better.”

  Raoul fixed me with a drop-and-give-me-twenty look. Through clenched teeth he said, “We are allowed only a brief amount of time here. If they can separate us, they will. If we use our time trying to find each other, we have wasted the sacrifice it took to come here. Worse, if we’re separated and can’t find each other in time, one or both of us could be stuck here for eternity.”

  “Sacrifice?”

  “You did agree.”

  “When?”

  He grimaced at me, reached into the chest pocket of his jacket, and handed me a note, written in my own hand:

  You had a meeting with the uppity-ups during your blackout. Someday you might remember, but there’s no time to explain, and this is too important to screw up. In the end you’ll agree this was worth the sacrifice. So shut up and listen to Raoul.

  J

  “So your hair,” interrupted Bergman, “is that the sacrifice?”

  “I doubt it,” said the wounded guy who’d had to be stitched. He’d shed his turban to reveal a shiny bald pate that somehow made him resemble a rhinoceros, whereas any other white man would’ve looked like a cancer patient. I learned later his name was Otto “Boom” Perle, and before he’d become a munitions expert he’d been a wildass teenager who’d burned his eyebrows and half his hair off in a fireworks accident. After hearing that story, bald seemed brilliant. Otto motioned to his wound. “Seems like hell would want something more like this.”

  I agreed. In which case the sacrifice had yet to be made.

  “So the whole place was just rocks?” asked another hurt guy whose rosy cheeks and light brown beard made him look a lot younger than he was. He introduced himself as Terrence Casey, father of five, grandfather of one, and biggest Giants fan of all time. I shook my head. No, there was more. The plants that grew between the rocks were vicious. The vines tripped. The bushes stabbed. Only the trees seemed harmless. Then a sharp wind blew, and I realized the trunks weren’t extra thick like I’d thought. Those were blackened bodies hanging from their limbs that now rocked and jiggled in hell’s breeze. And the awful thing was, they were aware.

  So were the walkers. Nobody within range of my sight sat and rested. They all moved among one another, never conversing, but often talking to themselves. It reminded me a little bit of a busy New York sidewalk, except everyone was looking down, watching the rocks. Then I began focusing on the individuals and the sense of community dropped away. Right in front of us a woman continuously combed her fingers through her long blond hair. When she got to the tips she yanked hard enough to jerk her head sideways. Every few seconds she took the hair she’d pulled out of her skull and stuffed it into her mouth.

  “Why’s she doing that?” I whispered to Raoul.

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “It’s not like their sins are tattooed on their foreheads.”

  “Look at her. She’s crazed. They all are.” To our right a thin, black-bearded man bent down, picked up a rock, and began shredding his shirt with it. When the material fell from his shoulders in tatters he began again, this time on his skin. I tried to swallow, but nothing went down. My eyes moved to another man, the first I’d seen who’d paused in his forward motion. He looked straight ahead. For half a second his eyes cleared.

  Everyone within a hundred yards stopped. Crouched. Let out a collective groan that knifed straight into my gut and twisted.

  Flames shot from the sky, engulfing the man. As soon as he began screaming, the fire spread to the people surrounding him, as if a large demonic fist had reached down with a red plastic can and sprayed them all with kerosene.

  I’ve seen more horror than I care to remember in my twenty-five years. But nothing had ever come close to this. Maybe I could’ve stood just the screaming. Or just the sight of fifty people burning. But not —

  “Raoul, the smell . . . ”

  He reached into a pack at his waist and pulled out two white ovular tabs that resembled smelling salts.

  “Stick these in your nose.”

  I did, and they helped. I wondered what else Raoul had packed in his Let’s Go to Hell kit. Better not to ask.

  Around the burning people, everyone else continued with their business. A woman bit steadily on her middle finger. I noticed she’d already chewed her thumb and forefinger off at the first joint.

  A man fell to his knees every few steps, leaving a bloody trail on the rocks behind him. Two teens, identical twins, took turns lashing each other with branches they’d torn off one of those not-so-innocent trees.

  Though I’d just come from a bath, I wanted to go home and shower. And watch Pollyanna . And cuddle with my infant niece. Anything to be reminded that good still existed somewhere in my world.

  “I knew hell was like this,” I told Raoul bitterly. “Insanity’s last stop. Where there’s no help. No relief. Just unrelenting madness.”

  “For you and these people, yes. For others, it’s something entirely different.”

  “But everybody’s in physical form here?”

  “It’s part of the punishment,” Raoul replied.

  As Vayl had mentioned, I’d traveled outsi
de my body a few times. What a rush. But once I’d stayed away a little too long. Nearly all my ties to the physical world had faded. I remembered how hard it was to rejoin my flesh, how constrained I’d felt, almost trapped. I could see how, having once broken all earthly boundaries, being forced back into a body could make it seem like a prison. Even holding tight to my Get Out of Jail Free card, I was ready to leave.

  “Can you tell me what we have to do here?”

  “Our scouts have reported rumors of a conclave to be held there, beneath that guard tower.” He pointed at the nearest hanging tree. Wait a minute.

  “Raoul, what is hell to you? What are you seeing?”

  Things I never wanted to witness again, his eyes told me as they met mine. “A POW camp,” he told me hoarsely. “Torture, starvation, and deprivation all the way to the horizon.” Big reaction from Dave’s people. Not surprise though. Maybe they’d suspected it all along. I searched their faces as I spoke.

  “I wondered if that was how he’d died. But I hadn’t known him long enough to ask. I had other, more palatable questions. Like who would be qualified to scout the activities of hell’s minions? And what did any of this have to do with me? But according to my note, we didn’t have time for chitchat.”

  “You said he was wearing camo when he came to get you,” said a short, wiry man with a full black beard who introduced himself as Ricardo Vasquez. “Was that all?”

  I knew what he was getting at. “No, he had a black beret with a Ranger tab on it.”

  Murmurs around the room. My savior solider, who’d taken watch at the window, said, “You want to find the gates of hell? Walk into any POW camp and you’re there.”

  “Damn right, Natch,” the amazon agreed with a sharp nod of her head. Rage, that’s what these people were feeling. I realized if I ever decided to storm the place, maybe stage a massive rescue, I could count on these folks to back me up.

  I went on. “Raoul assured me the citizens of hell couldn’t see us since we weren’t of the place, only in it. And it sure seemed that way as we picked our way to a ring of footstool-sized rocks that surrounded a three-foot pit of golden-orange bubbling magma. The walkers kept away from the pit and the ring. Could they sense what was coming? No. They just didn’t want to get hit by the streams of lava that came shooting out of the pit at random intervals. But it seemed to have some sort of rudimentary intelligence that allowed it to strike with agonizing accuracy every time.”

  “Remind me that these people are bad guys,” I begged Raoul. “They deserve what’s happening to them, right?”

  He shrugged. “Most do. But remember the reaver, Desmond Yale.”

  “Who’s that?” asked a guy I’d been trying not to stare at, just because he was that pretty. His name, he told me the first second he had a chance, was Ashley St. Perru. He came from Old Money, meaning his mom was a bitch, his dad was an asshole, and his sister couldn’t leave a store without dropping three grand first. He’d left home in search of a family and found one in the middle of nowhere. Go figure.

  “Cole’s first official kill,” I said, nodding toward our interpreter. Even without looking at him I could see the shadow that experience had left behind his eyes. It wasn’t an overwhelming force anymore. Just a part of his past that made him older and wiser and, somehow, easier to be with. “But he wasn’t a cinch for us to take down. He was a soul-stealer, like the ones we fought just now, only a savvy old pro. His job had been to nab the innocents and shove them into hell to suffer right alongside the deserving. Ultimately he and his buddies had come to help start a war.”

  “You know a lot about reavers, huh?” commented Dave, his eyes narrowing. Are you putting my people in unnecessary danger? that look demanded.

  I decided it would be best to ignore him for now. I went on. “Just as Raoul mentioned Yale, the first of the attendees crawled out of the pit. As soon as I saw those clawed, skeletal fingers I knew this creature was the same one that had pulled the reaver’s body through the doorway he’d created from the heart of a dead woman. When the creature had fully emerged my stomach lurched, she looked so much like pictures I’d seen of concentration camp survivors. Except her skin was the bright red of a poison ivy rash and a hump of flesh stood in place of her nose, as if her Maker had seriously considered endowing her with a trunk and then changed his mind very last minute. And then there was that third eye. Except when the lid opened, the socket glared red and empty. She moved to one of the rocks. More creatures emerged from the pit after that, one after another, so quickly I lost count until they finally all sat down.”

  “A dozen demons,” I whispered to Raoul, “and not far removed from the artist’s drawings I’ve seen looks-wise. How did they know?”

  “Are you so sure of what you see?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I see a military court. It looks to me as if there’s about to be some sort of formal proceeding.”

  “So you’re telling me my mind is supplying me with these pictures? That none of this is real?” Raoul met my gaze straight on. “One thing I know about this place, this meeting, and your mission . . . nothing is as it seems. Remember that on everything you hold dear, Jasmine. Nothing is as it seems.”

  “Okay,” I said as we turned our attention back to the conclave, “but if that’s the case, how do I know what to believe?”

  “Your instincts are excellent. Some of the best I’ve ever seen. Trust them.” One more creature had stepped out of the pit. Unlike the others, he didn’t stagger under the weight of immense curved horns or inspire shudders with multiple sores oozing pockets of pus and slime. He had the fierce, lethal beauty of a wildfire. Stunning sweep of white-gold hair. Deep red skin drawn taut against an I-oughtta-be-a-god body. This stud yanked the Oooh baby right out of the girl in me. Until I looked deeper. He came with his own special Fallen Angel vibe. I felt it because, as a Sensitive, I can pick up on certain otherworldly powers. For instance, vamps and reavers stick out in a crowd for me now that I’ve spent some time on the wrong side of life. So I was familiar with creepy, freaky, rot-scented types of beings. Had hunted a few and killed a bunch in my career. This guy gave off a psychic stench that made me want to scuttle into the nearest bomb shelter and play like a hermit crab. Somehow I knew the first time he’d pulled the wings off a fly he’d giggled like a schoolgirl. Serial killers tickled the crap out of him and mass executions left him rolling. The bastard loved to laugh.

  Like the other demons he went naked, except for a belt, from which dangled a coiled black whip. He couldn’t keep his hands off it either. Played with it during the entire assembly. I didn’t understand the talk, so Raoul translated for me. Since he thought he was watching a court proceeding, the words hardly ever matched the actions, but it ended up making an odd sort of sense. Especially when their most animated conversation conjured strong mental images that needed no translation.

  Whip dude sauntered over to the last empty rock, which stood taller and flatter than the rest, and took a seat. “Who summons the court and its Magistrate?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest, although he still kept one hand on the whip.

  Up jumped Skeletal Woman, the one who’d been the first to emerge from the pit. “I do,” she said.

  “State your name and case.”

  She wrung those bright red claws and blinked her eyes. The third one was out of sync with the rest, and the lack of an eyeball flipped my stomach sideways. Which surprised me. I’ve seen splatted brains, headless torsos, and spines glistening through the fronts of bodies. I really thought I’d reached my gross-out limit. Now I understood hell was going to slam those boundaries till they shattered. The realization made me want to curl up into a ball and tuck myself into Raoul’s pocket until it was time to go home.

  “I am Uldin Beit. My mate was murdered. I wish to Mark his killer.”

  “For the record, what was your mate’s name?”

  “Desmond Yale.” Her voice cracked as she spoke. I could see his loss had devastated h
er. I shook my head, amazed that even evil soul-snatching scumbags could find somebody to love.

  “And what was the nature of his death?” The Magistrate kept throwing out the professional questions, but he smiled gleefully as she forked over the gory details.

  “He was shot through the soul-eye at the direction of a woman named Jasmine.” Her words were accompanied by a visual of Yale with a gaping wound in the middle of his forehead. Several of the demons tittered. Uldin Beit resolutely ignored them. She said, “I witnessed this. The rest is information Sian-Hichan was able to gather when I brought him Desmond’s body.” She gestured to one of the seated beasts, who was covered with yellow, fist-sized warts.

  At a nod from the Magistrate, she sat down and Sian-Hichan stood. “As you would expect in cases like this, I followed protocol and immediately probed Yale’s mind to see if I could retrieve any vital information.” That’s sure not what Sian-Hichan’s facial expressions and hand gestures were conveying, and his audience found his description damn entertaining. The reason, I gathered from the mental images he projected, was that he’d also put the corpse through a series of calisthenics in order to win a bet. Something having to do with rigor mortis. Geee-ross. Uldin didn’t seem to appreciate it much either. I wished I could trade hells with Raoul. His seemed so much more precise and refined. Then I thought better of it. He was still crouched in a bottomless pit of doom and despair. His was just better organized than mine.

  Sian-Hichan went on. “Jasmine seems to be a code name for a reaver hunter named Lucille Robinson. Yale lost two apprentices to her and fought her himself twice before being killed by her student. Yale’s gravest concern was that Lucille Robinson had gained the Spirit Eye.” His speech brought forth an image of me. Not as myself — an underweight redhead helping a legendary vamp assassin eliminate threats to national security despite my mind-bending past. This me was bigger than life. A windblown supermodel standing on a summit surrounded by a crackling crimson aura, tricked-out gun in one hand, great-great-granddad’s blade in the other.