King of Hell (The Shadow Saga)

by Christopher Golden

  Phoenix set down her gas can and massaged her shoulder a moment before opening the door just a crack. The carnage in the corridors was worse than anything they had encountered. In the midst of it, a white-coated doctor had been hung upside down from the ceiling, suspended with bloody sheets and his own entrails. Despite the terror and agony that had made a gruesome mask of his face, Phoenix recognized Dr. Song.

  The hatred came back. Images barged into her mind, her father lying dead while that dreadful voice spoke through his open mouth. The talons that thrust up through his abdomen and chest. The crown of bones pushing up through him, an obscene, Hellish birth.

  She picked up the gas can and slipped open the door. Ronni said her name — Phoenix heard that over the alarms — but she had given up on her own fear. By some miracle they had made it this far and she wasn't about to stop now. There were no demons in the corridor, nothing in sight but ravage corpses and upended gurneys, and she navigated the bloody mess with her shoes squelching and smearing the blood. Ronni hurried to follow, glancing quickly through the open doors they passed. Phoenix did not bother. Hatred fueled her, and it seemed to her to have created a strange bubble around her, as if she weren't even really there in the hospital at all — as if she floated through some nightmare world, untouchable and unseen.

  Only the weight of the gas can seemed real.

  Behind her, Ronni muttered prayers, but Phoenix kept walking. She reached the open door to her father's hospital room and went in, stepping over the nurse who lay on the floor, legs spread so wide she had torn up the middle, pelvic bone broken and jutting sharply through the skin. Her face had been torn away and something had gnawed at the muscle beneath.

  When she let herself look at her father — at the pale, slack features and dead eyes of Professor Joe Cormier — the illusion shattered. Her breath hitched and she began to shake and something broke anew in her. Hot tears coursed down her face but she forced herself not to hesitate. She twisted the cap off of the plastic can and upended it, gasoline gurgling out. Phoenix poured it on his face first, as if to reassure herself that he was dead. If he were alive he would fight, now. He would wake up. She recognized the ridiculous fantasy of this notion — his chest and belly were torn and distended, stretched so wide that the lower half of his body no longer looked remotely human. Just meat, now. Just meat.

  She soaked the meat with gasoline and then dropped the plastic can, which clattered on the linoleum as she fished the lighter she'd bought at the same Shell station out of her pocket. The drilling noise of the fire alarm dug into her skull, made her brain hurt and fed into her desire to set it all on fire — not just her father's remains, but the whole goddamned place.

  She flicked the lighter, which sparked but did not ignite.

  Behind her, Ronni loosed an ear-splitting shriek so loud that it cut right through the alarm.

  Phoenix did not turn. She knew.

  She flicked the lighter again and the flame appeared, flickering as it danced into life. I love you, Daddy, she thought as she thrust her hand forward, the stink of gasoline filling the room.

  Something tangled in her hair and jerked her head backward. A dark shape darted past her, thick tendrils wrapped around her hand and wrist and smothered the flame. The lighter broke in her hand, plastic shards cutting into her palm, and she felt herself yanked backward off her feet. She hit the ground hard, thumped her head against the floor as the impact knocked the wind out of her.

  She tried to catch her breath as it dragged her through the bloody wreckage of the dead nurse and out into the hallway. Blinking, head ringing, she managed to clear her vision enough to see Ronni's legs dangling in the air, kicking hard. Alive, then. At least she was alive.

  Hunched and bloated, its green flesh made of scales and blisters, it stared at her with rheumy, piss-yellow eyes. Its four arms were long, fleshy tubes and its fingers the thin tentacles of a young octopus. In one hand — one set of those dripping tendrils — it held Ronni off the ground, fingers wrapped around her face as she gasped for air and tried to claw at its grip.

  With another hand, it hoisted Phoenix off the ground by the hair while a third released her right hand, which opened reflexively to release the shattered remnants of her lighter.

  It opened its mouth — a gaping maw at the center of its chest, full of hundreds of wavering cilia, like long reeds beneath the sea — and bent to push her head inside.

  Somehow, even over her own screams and the clamor of the fire alarm, Phoenix heard a single, spoken word.

  "No."

  Ronni still kicked and fought, but the demon flopped Phoenix to the floor, jarring her bones, but did not release its hold on her hair. She could sense its irritation as they both turned to see the figure that now approached them along the corridor, its hooves clacking and splashing in the drying, sticky blood.

  "Naberus," the tentacled demon said, its voice thick with phlegm.

  Fucker, Phoenix thought. So that's your name.

  Crimson-black flesh. Spider eyes. That crown of bone shards, now stained with blood and strung with viscera. This was the demon that had defiled her father, the one that had chosen him to use as its doorway. Fear and rage waged a battle in her heart, and her rage won. She wanted so badly to see the crowned demon dead.

  "Bring them," Naberus said. "He arrives momentarily and he may want tribute. Let him decide what to do with them."

  The tentacled demon snuffled and spit onto the floor in frustration, but he dropped Ronni to the ground, tendril-fingers wrapping around her body, and then began to drag both women toward the stairs.

  Him? Phoenix thought. Naberus had created the doorway that brought them here, but apparently he answered to someone else.

  Ronni kept screaming, kept fighting, but Phoenix let herself be dragged, biding her time.

  Hoping for a chance, not to live, but to kill.

  Hell

  Octavian swept down across the Pit with rage in his heart. Perhaps, he would later think, a little bit of Hell had crept inside of him since he and Squire had descended, or perhaps it had never left him after his imprisonment here. The skeletal sentries sensed him at once and turned to face him, red eyes gleaming in those strange, jagged skulls. The damned screamed all the louder and the flesh of the Pit dragged at them covetously, as if sensing that he wanted to take away its playthings.

  The sentries roared and shook their heads like beasts. Nine feet tall, they began to leap at him, talons raking the air. Their hooves split the flesh underfoot when they landed, forcing fresh gouts of flame from the fissures that split the soft quagmire. Octavian reached a hand out to the nearest of them as he lowered himself nearly to their level, and he felt all his fury boil out of him in that single gesture. The demon blew apart, bony limbs shattered, torso exploding. Its skull split in two and one half of it, horn intact, speared through the eye of another sentry nearby.

  Pink-gray tendrils reached up for him and jerked back in burning pain at the touch of the magic that surrounded him. Some of the damned had seen him and were crying out in hope — and he would help them if he could, but not until he had secured the freedom of his friends. The sentries who had savaged Charlotte had turned from her, focused on Octavian, and he knew he had given her a few moments' reprieve. Kazimir was nearer — only twenty yards away — and Octavian saw his huge fists reaching up from beneath the suffocating flesh of the Pit.

  How many times had he turned enemies to stone or ice?

  This required a different transformation. As Octavian swept toward Kazimir in a crackling sphere, the hue of that magic turned bright white and he searched his memory. He had no spell for this, but the magic in him went to the roots of his consciousness and when he consulted all that he had learned, he was able to make adjustments, to create intuitive magic. The Pit was a place of punishment, and these evil creatures deserved nothing less.

  His fingers contorted even as he spoke the words — not in Latin or old German or any other language of Earth, but in the guttural
tongue of the Demon Lords — and he felt the spell tear from him with such force that he roared in pain. It struck half a dozen of the sentries at once, all those who stood near Kazimir, and then began to tremble and cry out as a change came over them. Yellow bone turned to soft pink skin. Their horns withered and slid from their foreheads and the demons stared at one another, horrified by what they saw. What they felt.

  They were flesh and blood, now, and the tendrils of the Pit reached up and grabbed hold of them and dragged them down, screaming and burning.

  But Octavian fell as well. The spell had hurt him. Weakened him.

  "Son of a bitch," he muttered as he landed on his hands and knees in the slick flesh of the Pit and it began to suck him down, swallowing him like quicksand.

  "No!" he snapped, and green flame burst from his hands, igniting the flesh around him and causing it to recede, retreating from his touch.

  As he rose and ran toward Kazimir, it flowed away from him. Tendrils wavered but did not attack for fear of his magic, and as he approached, it pulled away from his friend as well. Kazimir lay naked on a stony surface — whatever the true floor of the Pit was, beneath that demonic flesh — and he dragged himself to his hands and knees as Octavian reached him.

  "Peter," the bearded giant said in his Slavic accent. "We meet in the strangest places."

  The mountain of a man rose to his feet, nearly seven feet of muscle and flab, and glanced around at the sentries who had begun to surround them. Despite his flippancy, Octavian saw a hatred in his eyes that seemed to verge upon madness.

  "Let us kill them, shall we?" Kazimir asked.

  "By all means," Octavian replied. Drawing his sword, he handed it to the Shadow warrior, and Kazimir smiled, and his smile was death for the sentries.

  "Charlotte —" Kazimir began.

  "I know," Octavian said. "Stay with me."

  They turned together, Octavian thinking of the others who had been dragged into this damned dimension. Kuromaku and Allison, Santiago and Taweret. There had been more, but these were his friends, the ones he had come to save.

  With Octavian's magic keeping the flesh of the Pit at bay, they started toward Charlotte. Kazimir held the sword with both hands and cleaved a sentry in two, hacking at it a second time to split its skull. Octavian felt weakened by the spell he had created and tasted blood in the back of his throat, and thought better of trying it again. But still he had sorcery at his command that they had no hope of defeating. He turned two to stone and drove one mad with a muttered hex that caused it to pluck out its own eyes. His magic was rarely so brutal, but the image of what they had done to Charlotte would haunt him always, and he needed them to feel at least some of that.

  Something screamed in the air above them and Octavian looked up. In the darkness of the caverns overhead, something winged through the shadows. Its talons were enormous and its wingspan breathtaking, but he could make out little else before Kazimir let loose a battle cry and ran at the sentries that separated them from Charlotte. There were fewer than thirty left. Octavian saw several of them turn and flee, realizing that they had better chance of surviving the wrath of their masters than the magic he wielded and the madness behind Kazimir's sword.

  Across the Pit, forty yards or more, Charlotte struggled to rise. Her body was contorted, face caved in, one arm broken. The tendrils wrapped around her legs and waist but she lunged at one of the sentries who had assaulted her and used him as an anchor. She could not shapeshift — not until Octavian reached her and forced the flesh of the Pit to retreat — but still she was a vampire with all the strength and ferocity that entailed. Charlotte sank her fangs into the sentry's throat with a crack of bone, and Octavian realized that while they might not be beings of flesh and blood, they at least had marrow at their core.

  He unleashed a bolt of concussive force that blew another sentry apart —

  And then he let out another cry of pain and clamped his hands over his ears. Kazimir did the same, nearly dropping the sword. Octavian looked up and saw the giant beast swooping down upon them, some demonic bird of prey that looked more pterodactyl than falcon. He snarled, fought the pain in his ears, and brought up one hand to burn it from the air, but the bird snatched a pair of sentries from the Pit and dashed them against the walls with enough force to shatter them, cave in their chests and crush their skulls.

  The bird turned and descended again, changing as it fell, diminishing in size until it took a familiar shape and alighted on the ground, its wings the last to vanish.

  Alexandra Nueva shattered the chest of a sentry with a single punch and then stood beside Charlotte as the tendrils of the Pit attacked them both. Octavian and Kazimir hurried toward them, killing more sentries as they did, and the rest of them fled in terror, recognizing their defeat.

  Kazimir threw his arms around Alex. "Oh, my friend, I am so happy to see you alive. We have thought you dead for many years."

  Alex pushed him back and gestured at his nakedness. "Happy to see you, too, Kaz. But not that happy. Find some pants."

  Kazimir laughed and clapped Octavian amiably on the back.

  "I didn't expect —" Octavian began.

  Alex put up a hand. "Don't. I was a bitch. Doesn't mean you don't have things to answer for, but we've all lost too much to fight about it now. We've got to save whatever's left of our blood before we spill any more of each other's."

  Charlotte had her arms crossed across her chest, covering up the tatters of her clothes. But now that her ability to shapeshift had returned, both her body and her garments repaired themselves. Her red hair and green eyes were vivid colors in the grimness of Hell. Nineteen when Cortez had made her a vampire, she seemed young and fresh and beautiful, all of the things that Hell abhorred, but her eyes revealed that her innocence had been stripped from her long ago.

  But perhaps not all of it. She hurled herself at Octavian and he thought she might hit him. Instead she embraced him, held him so tightly that it hurt, and then she rose on her toes and kissed him once on the cheek.

  "Kazimir said you'd come, that you'd find a way," she said, and her eyes were rimmed with bloody tears. "I'm sorry I didn't believe him."

  "I could never have made it myself," Octavian replied. "A friend brought me. You'll meet him soon."

  Kazimir tapped his shoulder and Octavian turned to see the massive Shadow gesturing toward the damned who were still trapped in the Pit. Those nearby had stood, since Octavian's presence made the flesh and its tendrils shy away from him, but the others were still held fast.

  "What about them?" Kazimir asked. "Any way to get them out of here?"

  Octavian frowned. If there were any way —

  "Not a fucking chance," Charlotte said. "We're alive, Kaz. We were dragged here, bodily, and these people are all dead. I pity them, but there's no way we're going to be able to get them all out of Hell. Where would we bring them even if we could? They're dead souls. Let's focus on finding our friends who are still alive and getting our asses out of here."

  Alex ruffled Charlotte's hair and glanced at Octavian.

  "Y'know," she said, "I think I'm going to like the new kid."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Phoenix's World

  Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York City, New York

  Naberus — whom Phoenix found herself thinking of as the doorway demon — led the way down the stairs. The sticky, tentacled demon followed, and dragged Phoenix and Ronni along. Had the thing wrapped its tendril fingers around their ankles or legs instead of their heads and chests, they would likely have broken their skulls open on the steps. Instead, Phoenix tried to keep her feet in the air, pedaling and pushing off to avoid having her spine and tailbone smash on each step. Her chest burned and her head ached from oxygen deprivation — she could breathe, but not well.

  Ronni kept screaming the whole way down to the first floor.

  When they left the stairwell and entered the corridor that led to the lobby, Naberus paused and lifted a finger to his lips, that slashed grima
ce turning into a mocking jack o' lantern grin.

  "Sssshhhhh," the crowned demon said. His jagged, broken teeth were stained with blood.

  Phoenix hocked up a gob of spittle, but before she could loose it at him, the tentacled demon slammed her against the wall hard enough to make her teeth clack together. She tasted her own blood and the image of Naberus's broken, crimson-tinted fangs swam into her head again. The comparison made her retch. Tendrils wrapped more tightly around her chest and thumped her against the wall again and it was all she could do to try to breathe.

  Ronni would not be silenced, even when it slammed her against the opposite wall. The impact caused a little hitch in her breath, but that was all.

  Naberus grunted in apparent disdain, though his spider-eyes were impossible to read. With a sound like a clogged drain, the tentacled demon gave a mucous-filled laugh, and commenced to dragging them again. Phoenix's head rang and dark spots flashed in her mind as she tried to get a full breath of air, but still a single clear thought kept repeating in her head. Naberus had prevented the tentacled demon from killing them so their fate could be decided by him. If she only knew who him might be, she reasoned, she might be able to guess the odds of them living to see the morning.

  They approached the lobby, an enormous atrium with a glass-paneled ceiling and tall potted plants all around. When the tentacled demon dragged them around the corner, it twisted them about and dangled them like marionettes, facing into the atrium.

  Only then did Ronni stop her screaming.

  "Oh, my God," Phoenix whispered.

  Hundreds of demons congregated in the vast atrium lobby. Huge things hunched in the corners, thirty foot horrors more like gigantic insects than any image of the devil, although there were plenty of those as well. She saw hooves and horns, tails and whipping tongues, damp scales and dry leather, crimson-black and putrid green and urine yellow. The stink of them struck her all at once, a wave of nauseating rot and offal that made her stomach lurch again. They were twisted nightmares with too many eyes, some with bodies so contorted and stretched or so geometrically wrong that Phoenix could barely make sense of what her eyes beheld.