"Oh, my, they were right," Annelise said in a light, Germanic accent. "You really are here."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Phoenix's World
Manhattan, New York, USA
Phoenix hesitated.
"You're talking about the spirits," Ronni said. "They knew we were coming?"
Distinguished and elegant, Annelise frowned as she looked at Ronni. "Strange that they didn't mention you would have company."
A chill went through Ronni, then, a ripple of unease that caused a twist of dread in her gut.
"What do you . . . I mean, why wouldn't they —"
Phoenix slipped her arms around Annelise and began to cry, shaking with grief. "He's dead," she said. "My dad's gone."
Wrapped in that comforting embrace, Phoenix could not have seen it, but Ronni noticed a dark shadow passing across the older woman's eyes. As a nurse, she had seen a similar shadow in the eyes of a hundred doctors; it came whenever they had difficult news to share.
"You'd better come in," Annelise said, stepping back to allow them entry into the foyer of her apartment.
The medium occupied the entire narrow building. Ronni expected old fashioned tastes — antiques and delicate furnishings — but despite her dignified airs, Annelise seemed a thoroughly modern woman. Her front parlor seemed to be still recovering from a shabby chic stage, with comfortable chairs and lots of earth tones and framed art pages from The Adventures of Tintin books, which Ronni assumed had been a childhood pleasure for the Austrian woman, though they had originated in Belgium.
"I would offer you tea . . ." Annelise began.
"But if you've been consulting the spirit world, you know there's a crisis going on," Phoenix said.
"Just so," Annelise agreed, then she glanced at Ronni.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Phoenix said. "This is Veronica Snow. She's a nurse at the hospital where . . . where it's all happening."
"Nice to meet you, Veronica," Annelise said. "Despite the circumstances."
"Ronni. People call me Ronni," she replied, and immediately felt stupid. They didn't have time for tea or for small talk and pleasantries. "What have the spirits been saying?"
"What aren't you telling me?" Phoenix asked.
Brows knitted, Annelise reached out to touch Phoenix on the arm. "Please, both of you, sit down. Perhaps it's best if you hear it directly from them."
Ronni perched on the edge of a loveseat while Phoenix took a plush chair whose wine-dark upholstery was the only splash of real color in the room. It made Ronni shudder, thinking of blood, but she said nothing as Annelise turned on a small, frosted-glass-and-nickel-plate lamp in the corner and then went to switch off the fixture overhead. Diffuse yellow light, soft and warm, bathed the parlor and Annelise sat in a plush beige chair.
She lit no candles, played no music, burned no incense. Ronni found herself slightly disappointed to discover that Annelise was a thoroughly modern medium.
"All right, my friends," Annelise said quietly, glancing about the room. "She's here."
"What about Taki?" Phoenix asked. "I thought he was your spirit guide now?"
Annelise closed her eyes and lowered her head, her voice becoming little more than a wisp. "Oh, he's here. But others have been waiting to speak . . ."
The gray-haired woman fell silent. Head hung, her wrinkles seemed to deepen and she looked much older. Ronni watched her as the seconds ticked by and then glanced at Phoenix, confused. If she spirits had been waiting —
"Please," Annelise said in a tremulous voice that was not her own.
Ice ran through Ronni's veins. All the breath went out of her lungs as fear engulfed her. She had romanticized the work of a medium, but that single word had brought the truth home to her — the voice belonged to someone dead, speaking to them from after death, wherever that might be.
"Oh, God," she whispered, and she saw her own breath fogging the air in front of her. The temperature in the room had dropped forty or fifty degrees in a matter of seconds.
She shivered, alone there on the loveseat, and wanted to run. The thought made her sit up and rub her arms to keep warm. Ronni Snow wasn't going to run.
"Please what?" Phoenix asked, staring at the drooping head of the aging medium. "I'm here. Talk to me. If you know what's going on up north, you've got to tell me what to do. How can we —"
"We're frightened," another voice said, a rasping male voice. "They're coming through our world to get to you, in here with us, and they don't belong. They can hurt us. Destroy us."
"Eat us," another voice said, and tears ran down Annelise's face as the ghost spoke through her. "Some of them eat us."
Ronni raised a shaking hand to her mouth to make sure she would not speak out of turn. She had never heard such despair before. All her life she had pretended that death did not scare her, but she would never be able to persuade anyone of that lie again.
"What are they?" Phoenix asked. "Demons?"
"Evil," the first voice said, quavering. "Devils. Cruel beasts. The first one through . . . he is letting the others pass into the world of the flesh."
"Your father . . ." rasped the male voice.
Phoenix jerked upright, staring, her chest rising and falling with shuddering breaths. "What about my father? Is he there with you? Can I speak to him?"
"He is the door," the ghost rasped. "Dark magic has made him their doorway, and all of the other dead who have been taken and used . . . they are only windows. If you destroy his flesh, it's possible they will all be closed. No more devils will pass through."
"No," Phoenix said, cringing. "I can't —"
"What about the others?" Ronni asked. "If all of the . . . the doors and windows are closed, what happens to the demons that are already here?"
"We suspect they would remain," the trembling girl's voice said. "But at least there would be no more."
"No way," Phoenix said, shaking her head. She shot Ronni a hard look, perhaps angry that Ronni had so readily agreed. "Hasn't my father been used enough?"
Annelise's head whipped up. Her eyes had rolled back to white and she darted a hand out to grip Phoenix's wrist.
"Don't be stupid, Fee," yet another voice said, the voice of a young man.
Phoenix's jaw dropped. "Eric?"
"He's being used right now . . . his body's been torn up, contorted, and tainted by demons. If you can burn up what's left of him, don't you think he'd prefer that?"
"Eric, I . . ."
Annelise jerked in her chair, blinked several times, and then moaned as she slumped back. Her eyes were aware of them — she had control of herself again, no longer possessed.
"Are you all right?" Ronni asked. "Do you want some water or something?"
Annelise ignored her. Her hand still gripped Phoenix's wrist. "They're right, you know. It's what he would want."
Phoenix ran her hands over her face and through her hair, sighing deeply. Then she nodded and stood up. "Okay. You're right. They're right. Shit, I can't believe I'm going to go back there."
"Now?" Ronni blurted. "I mean, right now, you're getting in the car and driving back up there?"
Phoenix gave her a blank look. "You saw demons today. You just listened to the wandering spirits of the dead speak through Annelise. These things . . . they made my father a part of this, and that makes me a part of it. They're right, he's tainted. There's only one way to fix that."
Annelise rose and put a maternal hand on Phoenix's shoulder. "I wish I could tell you not to go. I think of you caught up in such evil —"
"Tell me about it," Phoenix interrupted. "I wish I could tell myself not to go."
Ronni leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and stared at the hardwood floor. She felt like she might puke. This girl had been her inspiration, but what she planned to do now . . . this was totally batshit crazy. The screams of the people in the hospital were so fresh in her memory that she could still hear them echo off the tile walls. And the image of the body she had seen being wheeled toward the morgue on a gurn
ey — the hands that had burst up through its abdomen — she couldn't get that out of her mind.
"You be careful, too," she heard Phoenix say. "If they used my dad that way, you're not safe. Don't try to channel the dead, at least until this is over."
"I can't help it," Annelise said quietly. "They're here with me now. Always with me."
"Hey," Phoenix said. "Ronni Snow. You take care of yourself."
"We're the only ones," Ronni whispered.
"What's that, dear?" Annelise asked.
She looked up at them, trying to keep her breathing steady. A dreadful chill had settled into her flesh, sinking to the bone.
"If this thing can really be stopped, we're the only ones who know how."
Ronni stood, shook her head with a little laugh of disbelief, wondering if good sense would kick in and stop her, but then she heard the words coming out of her mouth.
"Let's go," she said, as she started toward the front door. "Before I change my mind."
A World of Ruin
Danny led the way through what he had quickly come to think of as the melted city, and every block seemed haunted. Octavian and Squire had started out by asking him a billion questions about what he felt, trying to get him to describe the tug inside his chest that drew him toward what he felt sure must be some passage to Hell, but he had done a poor job of it. A fish hook, he'd said, but attached to some part of him so deep it wasn't bone or muscle or organ — it was in him, and though he fought, it felt like Hell kept trying to reel him in.
But that had been only half true, a metaphor they could understand. What he didn't say, what he could never admit to anyone, least of all himself, was that the lure of Hell was a kind of pied piper's song that made him want to follow. Temptation filled him with self-loathing and the closer they drew to a place where he would be able to cross over, the more repulsed he became with himself. He wanted to find a small, warm corner and curl himself into a fetal ball and wait until his mother came home. The trouble, of course, sprang from the fact that his mother was dead.
Danny breathed in the humid air of the melted city and reminded himself that even if his mother had still been among the living, she would never have found him here. He could scream all he wanted, weep and pray, but nobody would come looking for him. He had no proper home, but as long as he stayed in Mr. Doyle's house he could persuade himself otherwise. There, at least, he could look at the rooms and corridors and see the echoes of friends who had accepted him for himself. Who had loved him and cared for him as best and for as long as they could . . . until they could no longer care even for themselves.
"Kid, you sleepwalking or something?" Squire asked.
"Daydreaming," Danny said.
The hobgoblin sighed. "Well, pay attention, would you? Are we getting any closer?"
"Not far to go, now."
Danny gestured vaguely ahead, but he didn't like to look too closely at their surroundings. The city had been beautiful once, with the shimmering colors in the elegant, translucent material used to construct nearly all of the buildings and the peculiar, ropy growths that functioned like trees, placed along the sides of the streets to provide shade. He had stopped to run his fingers along the surface of one of the intact structures and found them to be contoured and textured, not as smooth as they appeared. This world's glass reminded him of amber, and he'd had the momentary thought that the buildings seemed almost to have been grown instead of constructed, that they might be organic.
Whatever beauty remained in this city — in this world — it had been wounded and scarred by the evil that had come here. Piles of the scorched dead were everywhere. Remains had been hung from the trees and on the blocks where the buildings had melted and run like wax, the wind seemed to shriek, although it blew no harder than elsewhere. A glance inside one building had revealed a honeycomb structure inside and he thought the shrieking might be the wind blowing through it, but another part of him felt sure it was the screaming of the dead.
Hell seemed as if it might be a relief.
"How far?" Squire asked.
Danny shot him a withering glance and bared his teeth. "You think I want to be here?" He reached up and scratched the dry skin at the base of his horns. "We're almost there. It feels . . . down, somehow."
"Down?" Squire repeated. "That's helpful, thanks."
"Maybe it is helpful," Danny growled. He turned on Squire and felt his fingers hook into claws. "I think it's underground."
Squire raised a stubby finger and pointed at him. "Listen, kid, don't get —"
"Cut him some slack," Octavian said. "He's doing his best. And if his thoughts are drifting, well, who wouldn't rather daydream than take in what's happened here?"
Danny frowned. He had made up his mind not to like or trust Octavian, but the mage made it difficult when he spoke kindly. Danny had begun to feel that Octavian might be on his side, that he might be a friend, and it confused him. He had decided months ago that he would never have the opportunity to make another friend. He was a ghost in his own house, a gargoyle on the roof, a monster in the attic.
A demon. You're a goddamn demon.
But inside, he was still the same Danny Ferrick, who'd always loved football and skateboarding and hipster indie rock and girls with ginger hair. The same little kid who'd gone from Thomas the Tank Engine to Godzilla with hardly a stop in between. At the core of him, his emotions were simple — they were, he imagined, just like everyone else's. But when he allowed himself to feel the strength in his limbs and the heat in his gut or when he ran his tongue over his mouthful of wicked sharp teeth — things became complicated again. There were no mirrors left in Mr. Doyle's house; Danny had covered or destroyed them all. He did not want to look at himself. Did not, if he was being completely honest, even want to live.
But Squire had asked for help, and Danny did not have enough friends that he could afford to refuse, even if the hobgoblin had begun to fray his nerves.
So he walked through the melted city, crunched charred bones underfoot and breathed in the burning embers that floated on the air, and he led them toward a doorway that his gut told him he ought to enter. Some primal voice inside his head told him that beyond that door was the place he belonged — his true home — but he refused to acknowledge it.
Someday, somehow, Mr. Doyle and Eve and Clay would come back, and only then would he be home. With his friends.
They passed through a block of buildings that seemed untouched by the savagery that had swept the streets, but a closer look showed many places where dark blood and viscera were smeared on the inside of the glass. Smoke rose from the roof of a spire across the street, and Danny wondered how many demons had been a part of the massacre and how long it had taken them to slaughter an entire city.
"This is nuts," Squire said.
Octavian glanced at him. "It's not crazy. It's evil."
"Yeah, no shit," Squire replied. "I meant it's just . . . it's frickin' amazing to me that we haven't seen even one survivor."
They walked the rest of the block in silence, glancing around, and Danny knew that each of them sought some evidence of life. The question seemed to have gotten under Octavian's skin, because he did not reply.
At the corner, Danny turned to the right and they found themselves facing a structure unlike any they'd seen thus far. A massive, sprawling thing, its spire fell short of the height of many others on the cityscape, but it seemed to go on for an entire block. The translucent exterior, that blown glass substance, hung on some kind of internal skeleton so that the whole thing reminded him of nothing so much as a circus Big Top. Its surface had a rainbow of faint hues, like oil on a pool of water.
"What do you think?" Octavian asked. "Some kind of cathedral?"
Squire grunted. "Church or concert hall or something."
"Whatever it was, this is where they first came through," Danny said.
Octavian started toward the building, moving around a hole in the smoothness of the street that appeared blackly bottomless.
Squire followed but Danny hung back.
"Why do you say that?" Octavian asked, not noticing his reluctance.
Squire studied him. "Danny? What is it, kid? Trouble ahead?"
Danny stared at him, a sick feeling roiling in his gut. God, how he wanted to go on. The lure of Hell had grown more powerful with every step and now it felt as if he were in a swift, deep river current. He wanted to cry.
Instead, he laughed. "Trouble? You're going to Hell."
He gave in and let the current carry him along, though at this point Octavian and Squire would not have needed a guide. The glass cathedral had an enormous hole in one side and as they drew closer the details became unnerving. Long strings and spikes of smooth glass jutted from the edges of the hole, as if it had melted and then been pushed and twisted and teased outward only to harden again. Whatever had destroyed this city had come from inside the cathedral and forced its way out like some infernal birth. That blown glass wall was a melted caul.
Octavian could find no door and the hole was too high for Squire to climb up to it. The mage lifted a hand and a wave of golden light burst forth. An opening appeared in the cathedral wall like a curtain being drawn back and Octavian entered. Squire followed, both of them silent. The tide of hell swept Danny after them. His horns banged off the upper edge of the opening and he bared his fangs in disgust. How often would he forget his size, forget his horns, forget what he had become?
Reaching into the pocket of the jeans he had forced himself into, he clutched at the object within — a small emerald ring that had belonged to his mother. After her husband had left her, the ring was the only gift he had ever given her that she had kept; it was her birthstone, and she had loved that ring, its style and setting. Before they'd left Mr. Doyle's house, Octavian had cast a spell upon it that would act as a sort of homing beacon — once Danny made it back to the Shadowpaths it would lead him home, with or without Squire to guide the way. Squire had shown him how to get back into the paths, how to feel for them, and Octavian had assured him that if he went in at precisely the point where they had emerged, he should be able to pass through, but Danny wasn't sure.
King of Hell (The Shadow Saga) Page 12
