King of Hell (The Shadow Saga)

by Christopher Golden

  Phoenix studied the pain in her eyes. "That your real name? Ronni Snow?"

  "Short for Veronica, yeah."

  "So what can I do for you, Veronica? Or, wait, let me guess: you want to talk about the Uprising? You want to give me your opinion on whether or not I was justified in killing Eric Honen, even though the cops and the FBI and the goddamn President of the United States confirmed that shooting him ended it faster and saved who-knows-how-many lives? Some people thank me and others tell me I'm going to Hell because I'm a murderer. Usually I can tell right away, but I'm not sure with you, Ronni, so let me ask you, if the dead were rising from their graves right now, today, hunting and killing and eating the people they loved the most when they were alive and you knew you could stop it with a single bullet, what would you —"

  Ronni's eyes were cold. "I'd shoot him."

  Phoenix blinked. "What?"

  "Right here, right now? Same circumstances, some guy I knew but not that well sitting in front of me, a gun in my hand, and one bullet would solve it all? I'd put the motherfucker in his grave."

  All the breath went out of Phoenix. Grief strangled her and she glanced away.

  "Jesus," she whispered. "If only I could see it as clearly as you do."

  Seven years had passed and she still had nightmares about that moment. Not the day, really. Zombies were the stuff of nightmares, but it wasn't them that she dreamt about. Her father had been one of the preeminent psychic mediums in the world. To promote his latest book on the subject, he'd arranged a séance to be held on Sunrise, the number-one rated morning show. Professor Joe Cormier and two other mediums, working in concert, would conduct a séance that would allow everyone within a certain distance of the studio to communicate with their dearly departed, all at once. They had intended to make television history, but what actually happened was so much more than they had ever imagined.

  A circuit formed. The cruelest and most vengeful of lost souls caught the professor and the other two mediums — Annelise Hirsch and Eric Honen, who was a little younger than Phoenix — in a kind of psychic feedback loop. They had held hands around the table with the two hosts of the morning show and all five of them had been frozen, paralyzed with a catatonia so severe that their hands could not be separated. When those in the studio realized that it was this connection that was allowing the dead to continue to rise, it became clear that one of the mediums would have to die to close the circuit. An argument ensued, and Phoenix settled the argument with a bullet and the death of Eric Honen.

  "Listen, I'm sorry I bothered you," Ronni said, getting up.

  "You wanted a cigarette," Phoenix reminded her.

  Ronni hesitated, then turned to her. "You don't mind?"

  "That we're probably both going to get cancer? Not if you don't."

  "Gallows humor," Ronni said. She reached into the pocket of her sweatshirt and pulled out lighter and a crumpled pack of Parliaments. "The smoker's best defense."

  Ronni tapped out a cigarette, put it to her lips and fired it up.

  "So, what did you want to ask me?" Phoenix said.

  "You sure?" Ronni arched an eyebrow.

  "Yeah," Phoenix said. "I was a bitch. It's a reflex."

  Ronni drew in a lungful of smoke and plumed it out through her nostrils. She had a confident air about her when she smoked, but it vanished the second she started to speak again, and the pain returned to her eyes.

  "My grandmother's dying. Fluid in her lungs and around her heart — everything's just shutting down. She's in a nice hospice in Chappaqua."

  "You're worried she's going to come back from the dead?" Phoenix asked.

  Ronni gave a soft, humorless laugh. "No. I mean, not any more than we're always worried that it's gonna happen again." She paused, smoked, and hesitated further before going on. "I was living with my dad in California when it happened. I saw it on TV, like everyone else who wasn't in the northeast at the time. But you — man, you saw it up close, and with your dad being who he is, I figure you understand it better than anybody."

  Phoenix took a final drag and then stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. From somewhere far off there came the sound of an ambulance siren, rising as it drew nearer.

  "I guess," she said. It was the best she could do.

  "Okay, so I'm asking," Ronni said, sitting beside her again. "Those things weren't just corpses, right? I mean, it wasn't some kind of meteor going by or some voodoo bullshit. Their souls came back?"

  Phoenix took a breath, tempted to tell the nurse to buy her father's book and read about the difference between the soul and the spirit. Instead she shrugged.

  "More or less."

  "We're talking ghosts," Ronni went on. "Our souls . . ."

  "Hey," Phoenix said, leaning toward her. "If you're asking me if there's an afterlife, just ask."

  "You were there, eye to eye, right up close, so yeah . . . I'm asking."

  Phoenix managed a smile. "I don't know what it is or where we go, but this," she said, gesturing at the industrial-looking hospital and the parking lot around them. "This isn't all there is. I can't tell you anything more than that."

  Ronni nodded. "That's okay," she said, tapping ash from her Parliament. "It's something to hold on to. A comfort."

  "I'm glad," Phoenix said. She gave Ronni's leg a pat as she stood, and shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. "I've got to go back upstairs. I don't want my dad to think I've gone home."

  "Of course," Ronni replied. "Thanks so much."

  "You're welcome."

  Phoenix left her there on the bench. I'm glad, she'd said, but she had been biting back the reply that had first occurred to her. Is it a comfort, knowing your soul lives on without knowing where it goes? Because that scares the shit out of me.

  She went inside the hospital and it felt like stepping into a prison, leaving freedom and the cool October air outside. The door swished shut behind her, cutting off the world, and she crossed the sunlit atrium lobby toward the elevator banks, giving a wide berth to the damp area around the yellow caution standee in the middle of the floor. Someone had thrown up or something, she figured.

  There's a job I'd never want. Bless people who clean hospital floors.

  It reminded her of a silly joke her father had made when he had taken her to the circus. She might have been ten or eleven years old and the professor had pointed out the man following the elephants around with a shovel and a wheelbarrow.

  "What do you do for a living?" he had whispered to her. "I shovel shit at the circus. The pay isn't great, but the tips are enormous!"

  He'd cracked himself up that day and Phoenix had laughed along. The joke hadn't struck her as very funny, really, but it had been so rare for him to spend time with her and she didn't want to discourage him. Professor Joe Cormier didn't know how to deal with children — not even his own. It had gotten easier for him once she had reached adulthood, and easier for her as well. She would never really forgive him, but at least she understood him and knew that it had been his failing, not her own. Despite the horror that had brought them together, Phoenix felt grateful for the closeness they'd achieved in the past seven years. It didn't make up for the time they had lost before that, but it was something.

  It's all the time you're going to get. The thought struck her as she tapped the elevator's call button and she felt a sick twist in her belly. Her eyes began to well with tears.

  The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. Only when she stepped inside did she notice the heavyset middle-aged woman who had come up to wait behind her. Short and gray-haired with wiry eyebrows and the sort of overcoat she associated with the old Italian ladies at the farmer's market, she followed Phoenix onto the elevator. When Phoenix pressed the button for the fourth floor, the old woman chose five.

  "It's okay, dear," she said with a slight accent. "No need to feel embarrassed. If there's a place for tears, this is it."

  Phoenix couldn't look at her. Only when the elevator stopped on the fourth floor and she had ste
pped off did she glance back.

  "Thank you," she said.

  The woman nodded as the doors slid closed. Phoenix took a deep breath, there on the linoleum near the nurses' station. Machines beeped softly up and down the corridor. She had always hated the smell of a hospital ward, that unique combination of dirty mop water, antiseptics, and the powdery rot-stink of dying people. But she wouldn't leave her father alone. She could not.

  The nurses didn't take any notice of her, as if she were a ghost wandering the halls. If she glanced into any of the patients' rooms and someone — patient or visitor — happened to catch sight of her, she would get that familiar nod. That we're-all-here-for-the-same-reason-and-boy-does-it-suck nod. Phoenix had given that nod herself more times than she could count.

  At the door to room 427, she turned and went in, putting on a smile the way she would her makeup. Her father lay in his hospital bed, a little pitcher of water and a cup on the overtable that she had slid into place before she went out for a smoke. Frail and gray, he looked seventy instead of fifty.

  Seventy. Hell, he looks a hundred.

  The professor lay with his head lolled to the left, staring out the window.

  "I'm back," she announced.

  He replied so quietly that it took her a moment to make out the words. She frowned as she sorted them out.

  "Something's coming," he rasped. "Something other."

  "Dad?"

  He turned his head to gaze at her. "Something terrible."

  Joe Cormier looked at his daughter with someone else's eyes. Phoenix stared at those wide, dull, frightened eyes and she knew that her father had gone away. She had seen this phenomenon many times. As a medium, he often allowed the dead to speak through him. But she had the awful feeling that this ghost had not asked for permission. Those were the eyes of a frightened animal, as if this lost soul had fled into her father's body in search of somewhere to hide.

  This spirit had no flesh and blood, and yet it was terrified.

  The thought sent ice through her veins.

  "Get out," she said, moving toward him. "Leave him alone!"

  The lost soul's eyes went even wider, as if seeing her for the first time and registering her fury. Her father bucked twice against the hospital bed, knocked over the pitcher and the water cup and sent the overtable rolling away on its little black wheels. That unfamiliar light vanished from his eyes and then he went still. He lay sprawled there, one hand dangling over the edge of the bed, and the remote control slipped off of the sheets and struck the floor with a clack.

  "Daddy?" Phoenix said, her voice very small.

  The intruding spirit had departed, but not alone. The medium could no longer channel spirits into the land of the living, for he was no longer among them. She thought of shouting for help, but he had given instructions that he not be resuscitated and as riddled as he was with cancer, she would not betray his wishes. He'd had enough pain for one lifetime. All that remained on that hospital bed was a husk, so thin and hollow and gray that it barely resembled the distant, absent-minded man she had worked so hard to love.

  Phoenix sat on the edge of the bed and held his hand as it grew cold.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Westminster, London, U.K.

  "Am I wrong," Squire asked, "or are you slightly less dead than the last time we met?"

  Octavian smiled. He could always count on Squire to boil complex issues down to something simple. The hobgoblin had waited patiently while Octavian had gone downstairs and persuaded the bartender at the Black Hart to sell him the best bottle of scotch in the place, though the man had extracted a generous tariff in exchange for looking the other way while Octavian walked out of the pub with the bottle. Shortly, he and Squire were safely ensconced in the two chairs in the flat's living room. The creatures who had come through the shadows — the magic-eaters he and Squire had killed — were gone by the time he returned. Octavian assumed that Squire had disposed of them, dumped them into the shadows somehow, but didn't bother to ask. If he had his way, they weren't going to be here long, so a couple of dead monsters more or less mattered very little to him.

  "I'm surprised it took you this long to mention it," Octavian said.

  Squire shrugged, wrinkling his leathery nose. "I was waiting for you to bring it up. Seemed rude to inquire."

  "You just did."

  "Come on, Pete," Squire replied, draining the last swallow of scotch from his glass. "You know me and polite ain't the best of friends. We start off okay, and then we just go off the fuckin' rails."

  Octavian smiled and poured him another, mouth of the bottle clinking against Squire's glass. "You don't give yourself enough credit. Sure, you lack a filter —"

  "I say what's on my mind."

  "Exactly. But you mean well. You're never rude out of malice."

  "That's me. I'm a frickin' prince." Squire smiled and sat up a bit straighter in his chair, his feet dangling like he was a little boy instead of an ugly, shriveled little hobgoblin. He leaned forward to clink his glass against Octavian's. "A toast to me."

  "I'll drink to that," Octavian agreed.

  After they'd both drained the glasses, Squire met his gaze. The hobgoblin's eyes were lit with a dark intelligence that belied his outward persona and appearance.

  "All right, Pete. Enough buttering me up. What do you want?"

  "A favor."

  Squire sat back in his chair, cradling the empty scotch glass in his hands. "Well, I didn't figure you called me here just to ply with me scotch and take advantage of me. You want to spell it out?"

  Octavian sipped his own scotch. "We haven't seen each other in a long time."

  Squire nodded. "Not since that thing with the naked Irish witch —"

  "She wasn't a witch. She was a —"

  "The important thing is that she was naked."

  Octavian laughed, surrendering. "Of course. It's only just occurring to me, but I missed you."

  "Of course you did. More scotch?"

  "I'm set for now," Octavian replied, raising his glass to show that it remained half full.

  "Not you, Pete," Squire said, rolling his eyes dramatically. He thrust out his empty glass. "I meant, 'pour me another scotch.'"

  Octavian complied, but as he did so his smile faded. It would have been a real pleasure to be able to sit there and reminisce and watch Squire get drunk enough to tell his favorite bawdy jokes, but there would be no scotch for Kuromaku or Allison. As he drank, Charlotte might be suffering the torments of Hell.

  "Listen, Squire . . ."

  The hobgoblin swirled amber liquid around in his tumbler, then lifted his gaze to stare at Octavian.

  "Back with the naked witch?" Squire said. "You saved my ass that night. As far as I'm concerned, I'm in your debt forever. Well, as long as you don't become a total asshole. Whatever this favor is, you know I'm on board."

  Octavian studied him a moment, then slid back in his seat, scotch glass resting on the arm of the chair.

  "I need you to get me into Hell."

  The hobgoblin's golden eyes narrowed. His usual profane humor seemed to have abandoned him and in that moment his ugliness seemed almost frightening. He took a long breath, seemed to scowl, and then sat up straighter in his chair.

  "Can you say that again? I want to take a mouthful of scotch so I can get a good spit-take —"

  "I'm not kidding."

  "I know you're not kidding. You went to a lot of trouble to call me here, and I can tell from the look on your face that it's no joke. I just don't know how to react to that without makin' wisecracks about it. What the hell . . . I mean, what do you expect me to say?"

  The sound of glass shattering reached them; someone down on the street had broken a beer bottle or something. The floor thumped with music playing down in the Black Hart. The mage and the hobgoblin stared at each other for several long beats and then Octavian nodded.

  "You haven't asked me how it is that I'm not a Shadow anymore," Octavian said.

  "Shadow? You
mean 'vampire.'"

  "We favor the word 'Shadow.' The vampires here are very different from those in your dimension."

  "Semantics," Squire said. "But go on."

  "Have another drink," Octavian said. "It's a long story."

  Squire listened patiently as the story unfolded. Octavian started at the very beginning, being approached by Karl von Reinman during the siege of Constantinople and being made a vampire, but skirted only briefly over the centuries he had spent as a part of von Reinman's coven, engaging in warfare so that he could kill and drink the blood of his enemies. The coven had been less discriminating in their victims and for a time Octavian had gone along with their predatory habits, until at last his conscience would no longer allow it. He had spent most of the twentieth century living amongst humans, acquiring blood through cooperation instead of murder, moving from city to city so that his eternal youth did not give his secrets away. Then an aging Cardinal had stolen the Gospel of Shadows at a time when the Vatican's sorcerers were launching a final pogrom against the vampires and Octavian had helped to defeat them and ended up trapped in Hell himself, along with that dreadful grimoire.

  "Five years passed in this world," Octavian said. "In Hell, a thousand years went by —"

  Squire choked on a mouthful of scotch. "You were in Hell for a thousand years? That's not an exaggeration?"

  "It's not an exact count. Plus or minus a few years, but near enough," Octavian explained. "I lost my mind for a while, but I was there so long that I healed. I apprenticed myself to the dead souls of mages and to power-hungry demons, accumulated all the magic I could, thinking all along that I would be able to use that knowledge and power to escape. When the Lords of Hell caught wind of what I had been up to, they captured me and imprisoned me in a sort of crystal megalith in a field of such things that must have measured miles in every direction. At some point, the Gospel of Shadows became lost in Hell as well, and they put the book inside with me, taunting me with its nearness, because I was trapped like a fly in amber. Not a damn thing I could do about it until some friends came to —"