The Deadliest Bite

by Jennifer Rardin

  I said, “Vayl. I keep getting nosebleeds just like the mutt on this gate.”

  He replied, “This is true.”

  “Brude is slamming my synapses like he’s found a damn drum set that he’s just learning to play. And I’ve had it.”

  Vayl turned me toward him. Looked deep into my eyes. And kissed me, gently, as if we had all the time in the universe. He whispered, “I suppose, then, that is a sign that it is time?”

  “I’m thinking so.”

  “I love you, Jasmine.” He’d said it before. A lot. And maybe someday I’d get used to the words. But, oh, how they sang off his tongue like a soul-felt melody, wrapping around my heart and pulling it so close to his that I was sure they beat with the same rhythm.

  I slid my hands around his waist, up his strong back, pulling his chest to mine until my breasts heaved into his. “I love you too, Vayl.” I rose to my tiptoes and touched my lips to his, savoring the everlasting dance of soft skin and wet tongues as we sealed our own bargain. When I realized I’d gone breathless I dropped my heels back to earth. “What do you say we summon that cowboy?” I asked, managing a smile despite the pain behind my eyes and the fear in my gut.

  “I like that plan.”

  I nodded, recalling the directions Kyphas had given me: Stand by the gate, give it your blood, knock three times, and shout his full name.

  I looked up at my lover. Cleared the sudden blockage from my throat. I said, “Are we ready?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at Lotus, Raoul, and Astral, who’d turned their backs to us to guard against attack. I was beginning to think it wasn’t likely, this side of the river. Then a howl, so far off we’d probably only heard the echo, made them swing in that direction. Raoul looked over his shoulder. “Hurry,” he whispered, as if the creature could hear us, even from that distance.

  I nodded, drew my bolo, and sliced into the soft skin above my wrist. I made sure I had a generous supply of blood on my fingers before I swung around to the gate, drew a double slash across the mastiff’s jaw, and then rubbed my offering into it. The metal trembled at my touch, soaking up the blood so quickly that within seconds I couldn’t tell where I’d left my mark. Which I thought was weird, considering the generous portions flooding its face. But, of course, that was probably coming from hell’s citizens. As an outsider’s, mine probably tasted a whole lot better.

  I knocked three times and yelled out, “Zell Culver! This is your summons! Come out and be questioned!”

  On the other side of the gate a man ran out of the mist. He was sprinting across the rock-strewn ground with that look of abject fear you often see on the faces of those who are at the front of a mob of Black Friday Walmart shoppers. He wore a tattered brown shirt that he still kept tucked into the waistband of his darker brown trousers. Which were held up with an empty gun belt. Hmmm.

  “Zell? Zell!” I yelled. He glanced my way. I peered into the fog behind him. I couldn’t see or hear anything huffing, spitting, or galloping within half a mile of him. Good. That meant I’d only called the cowboy, not whatever had been chasing him. “Dude! You’ve escaped! Get over here, will you? I don’t have that much blood to spare!”

  He shot a look over his shoulder. The expressions that crossed his face—confusion, then relief, then even deeper bewilderment—would’ve been comical in any other situation. But the howling on our side had been joined by a joyful sort of hooting. And they’d both gotten closer. I began wondering if their makers could swim.

  I said, “You’re Zell Culver, right? The guy who destroyed the earthbane with the Rocenz?”

  He jogged over to us, carefully wrapped his hands around the bars of the fence next to the gate, and said, “Only for a day.” He grinned, showing a dimple on each cheek and another on his chin. “Sometimes I still think it was worth it, though.” He tipped his hat to me, a wide-brimmed ancestor to the Stetson with a tall black band and battered flat top that looked like it had been used to beat off mosquitoes the size of his fists. However, perched back on his wellshaped head, setting off eyes that managed to twinkle even in these circumstances, it looked as comfortable as his scuffed old boots. “I don’t believe I’ve had the honor to make your acquaintance.”

  I will only admit this because if I didn’t Vayl would probably take out an ad in The New York Times calling me out. Zell’s old-fashioned gallantry went straight to my head. My hand went all floppy like I’d suddenly been airlifted into the 1850s, where women routinely lost all muscle tension in their extremities. My limp fingertips raised to my neck, where they brushed my collarbone in an I-do-declare reaction to his chivalrous manners. And I said (yes, dammit, in a slight Southern accent), “Mah name is Jayaz.”

  Then I heard myself. Also Raoul snickering behind my back and Lotus muttering, “What the fuck?” while Vayl literally bit his lip to keep from laughing. I dropped my hand, thumping my fist into my thigh as I added, “I called you here for a reason. You’re the only one we know of, besides an unhelpful demon, who’s ever managed to separate the pieces of this tool.” I pulled the Rocenz out of my belt. “It’s imperative that you teach us how to do that.” I jerked my head around as the sounds of hunting animals grew louder.

  Zell shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, I can’t remember.” He slowly rolled up his left shirtsleeve. What I saw crawled my fingers right around my neck. The place where his captors had carved away his tattoo had never healed. His entire forearm from inner elbow to wrist was covered with oozing sores and stank of gangrene.

  Schooling my expression into carelessness, I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the piece of skin that had been cut from him. I unfolded it and showed it to him. “We recovered this recently,” I said. “If we give it back to you, do you think you’ll remember how the separation spell works then?”

  He nodded. “There could be no other reason for them skinning me. It should work. Yes. I’m sure of it.” He was still nodding when he said, “But first you have to promise to get me out.”

  “I promise,” I said quickly before anybody else in the party could think of any objections.

  He nodded. “Give me that knife.”

  Without question I handed him the hilt. He sliced into his bicep, grabbed the blood, smacked it into the back of the gate. Vayl and I barely had time to trade looks of dread before he’d knocked three times and yelled a name we both knew. She appeared as he had, running for her life, her ragged white dress flying out behind her like last decade’s kite.

  I stared as she went through the same emotions Zell had as she realized she’d been miraculously saved. It gave me time to gather my wits as well. Then I finally found the words I needed to say. “Vayl. Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Sunday, June 17, 9:00 p.m.

  If people hang around me long enough, they learn that I don’t appreciate surprises. Because in my case they rarely turn out to be pleasant ones. Take the time my darling sister decided to pay me a surprise visit in college. She walked in on a huge breakup scene and caught a flying vase in the middle of the forehead. I had to haul the poor kid to the emergency room and explain to the doctor why he was stitching up a wound meant for my “Sorry, Jaz, I just realized that I like guys” boyfriend.

  So when I turned to my lover, he knew immediately that I was prepared to hurl objects large and small, probably starting with the robokitty, if he didn’t come up with a reasonable explanation as to why a woman who looked exactly like my mother had joined Zell Culver on the opposite side of Satan’s fence.

  He cleared his throat. It was the first time I could remember seeing him sweat. And so he should. Because that wasn’t the only problem I had with this amazing coincidence. The name Zell had uttered was Helena. The same name Bergman had labored under during our mission to Marrakech, when Vayl had been convinced we were all members of his household from 1777. Bergman had argued that he suffered the most, because Vayl had thought he was a girl—his adopted daughter. Which had all been fin
e and good then. When I didn’t know what she looked like.

  But I’d seen her before. Right here in hell. At the time I’d actually believed she was my mother, Stella. Mainly because she looked and talked just like her. But she’d helped save me from a bunch of howling demons, something Stella never would have done. At the time I’d convinced myself even a mother like mine would sometimes find a small store of generosity and love to act upon. Now I knew better.

  You shoulda figured it out back then, scoffed my Inner Bimbo. She spoke to me from a tub full of steaming water and white bubbles. Stretching one long white leg out of the bathwater and idly watching her red-painted toenails point toward the showerhead she said, Stella would never have helped you escape from hell. Shit, Jaz, she’d have clapped you in irons and arranged for some rank torture if it would’ve meant freeing that first husband of hers.

  At my core I knew that. But I’d wanted her, just once, to be a real mom so badly that I’d bought my own fairy tale. And I’d even had evidence to make me believe Helena was my mother. Because only someone of my bloodline could’ve left her mark on me, the curl of white hair that proved I’d been touched by a family member in hell. Which meant—

  I grabbed Vayl’s arm, as if he wasn’t already tuning in to me so completely that the only reflection I could see in his eyes was my own. I said, “Your adopted daughter, Helena, is my ancestress.” I didn’t mean to sound accusing, but it sure came out that way. “You’ve been following my family’s line since 1770!”

  His eyes, a distant, steely blue, gave nothing away. “Yes, I have,” was all he said.

  Helena, smiling gently at us through the bars, said, “It’s good to see you again, Jasmine, although I would choose happier circumstances.” She looked up at Vayl. “And you, Father? Has Lucifer finally caught you?” Her voice broke a little, tears filling her eyes at the question, though she still kept hold of that angelic smile.

  His brows crunched together as he turned to the girl he’d raised from the age of eleven. “My darling. What happened? How did you end up here?”

  Helena had been standing in the circle of Zell’s good arm. Now she slipped her slender fingers through the cracks in the fence. “Life was so good in America, just as you had promised us it would be,” she began. I remembered, then, how Vayl had told me that she’d married a man named John Litton. That they’d moved to the States and that, a couple of years later, she’d died after giving birth to twins.

  She continued. “We thought we had escaped Roldan. But we were wrong. He came into my room after my daughters were born. He and that monstrous gorgon that rides him killed me and tossed my soul into the pit. But I remembered everything you taught me,” she told him proudly. “I fight here. Zell and I have organized a little pocket of resistance. It isn’t much, I suppose. But it is what we need to survive.”

  Zell and I, I thought. What a strange coincidence that you two found each other. I looked at Vayl, waiting for him to find it odd as well, but he’d stopped thinking straight as soon as he saw his daughter behind the bars that he was now trying to shake with white-knuckled fingers. “We are getting you out. Both of you. Now!” he said, his voice as hard as the metal that stood between us and them.

  “You already promised,” Zell reminded him, the practical cowboy in him finding this display a little overwhelming and somewhat unnecessary.

  “Yes, we did.” Vayl spun to face me. “Jasmine, get that infernal demon out of your head. We have innocent souls to save.”

  I glanced at Raoul, wondering what his reaction might be, but he and Lotus were still scanning the horizon. Okay, mostly him. She was starting to jump every time the water bubbled or the wind sighed. So far she’d stepped on Astral’s tail and nicked Raoul. I thought if she managed not to faint before a demon cut her to bits we’d be doing very well for ourselves.

  I looked back at Vayl, who certainly hadn’t included my soul among the innocents. Huh. Well, okay, it might have a few black streaks. But I suddenly felt relegated to the bottom shelf with last season’s shoes and that old pile of National Geographics that subscribers always feel too guilty to dump. Then he grabbed me by both arms and planted the most passionate kiss on my lips that either of us had experienced in at least an hour. When he was done I stood blinking at him, my mouth gaping like one of those fat goldfish at the botanical gardens that just keeps begging for food pellets despite the fact that one more will probably instantly transform it into eight boxes of McNuggets. His smile, scary enough to give kids nightmares, made me feel warm all under as he said, “My avhar, we are almost home.”

  I nodded as I worked my hand through the bars and offered the missing part of Zell’s arm to him. He gave it to Helena, who unfolded it like it was no more problematic than a lace-trimmed hanky. Vayl and I traded intense looks. I could see his thoughts as clearly as he could read mine.

  My darling Helena! What has she seen here? What has she been through these past 220 and more years? He didn’t want to ask more than that, but I’d already given him the answer.

  Your adopted daughter has walked through horror the same way you and I hike through your woods at night. Torture, maiming, pain, and battle are her life. She’s not the girl you knew. But she’s managed to survive this awful existence without losing the ability to love a cowboy or help a descendant being chased by demons. And that was because of what you taught her all those years ago. So you were a good father after all.

  He reached for my hand, and I grasped his as tightly as I could manage while we peered through the bars at the two people who mattered most to us at this moment. “Look, Jasmine,” he whispered. “It is as if Zell’s skin was spelled to return to its former position!”

  And, of course, it probably was. That’s what happens when you tattoo a rune onto your forearm. Zell, being an English speaker, had translated it for himself. Slowly, as the edges of his existing tattoo melded with the severed portion and the dying tissue underneath began to heal, the words revealed themselves until I could read the entire phrase.

  I pulled the Rocenz clear of my belt and held it in front of me as I repeated the words now glowing a vivid red on Zell Culver’s arm. “The soul splits, pairs and destroys, until it is one again.”

  The silver tool heated so quickly I was afraid I’d have to drop it. I was about to grab the hem of my shirt to use as a buffer when it reached maximum temperature and began to separate, a crack appearing right up the side of the handle of the hammer where it met the chisel. I grabbed the edges with both hands, not pulling, just holding each side firmly as a sound as loud as a rifle shot came from the tool and it tried to jump out of my hands. Again with the popping sound, four more times as the two parts of the Rocenz released one another. And, finally, I stood before the gates of hell holding Cryrise’s hammer in my right hand and Frempreyn’s chisel in my left.

  I laughed out loud as Brude screamed inside my head and blood poured out of both my nostrils. “Go ahead, you fucker,” I whispered to the domytr. “Throw the biggest tantrum you can manage. At the end of the day I’m still gonna rip you out of my head and smash you against this gate until there’s nothing left of you but a moaning pile of mud.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Sunday, June 17, 9:45 p.m.

  I set the chisel that had been carved from the rail who’d failed to beat Lucifer at his own game against the bloody maw of the mastiff and hauled the hammer back for my first true blow against Brude since he’d invaded my head four weeks before.

  “Wait!” Raoul’s warning, bellowed from three feet away, nearly put me on my knees. “Remember the warning on the map that led us to the Rocenz in the first place!”

  I turned to look at him, my eyes scanning the horizon for the source of the howls that still split the air intermittently as he pulled the rolled leather out of his pocket and unfolded it. Zell cleared his throat. In fact, he seemed to be on the verge of saying something a couple of times, but then he pressed his lips together and stared at the toes of his boots.

>   As soon as Raoul held the map so we could see it, he said, “The message at the bottom. It’s clear, yes? ��Who holds the hammer still must find the keys to the triple-locked door.’ That has to refer to Zell. We needed him. We needed his skin. And we needed the spell on his skin.”

  I didn’t mention that the first key to Zell had been my Granny May. Or that the last key had been a demon. Neither one seemed like a comfortable subject to bring up at the moment. And since they had worked, it seemed doubly unnecessary.

  Zell opened his mouth, but Helena put a hand on his newly healed arm and murmured something. Since her lips were partially hidden by the fence, I could only read the last part, which was, “for themselves.” What did we need for ourselves? Before I could waste time guessing Vayl said, “I will agree with that assumption.”

  Raoul went on. “But the phrase at the top of the map must be just as important. More so, because it’s mentioned first. ‘Cursed and thrice cursed be ye who raise the Rocenz without offering proper dues or sacrifice. For Cryrise’s hammer and Frempreyn’s chisel may spell your salvation, or your doom,’” he read. He stared hard at us. “I hate to ask for theories on that meaning, because I know what kinds of ideas I’m having. I’ve only known demons’ minds to track one way when they start talking sacrifice.” His eyes went from Lotus to Astral to Vayl to me. Then he included Helena and Zell in his concern before he said, “I think this tool has to have blood before it will work properly. In fact”—he stopped, shook his head, forced himself to go on—“I think it needs death.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Back in Marrakech, Kyphas only had to rub her blood on it and chant a few words before she separated the parts. She was already working her heartstone when I found her.”