King of Hell (The Shadow Saga)

by Christopher Golden

  "Charlotte," Octavian said, "go and stand watch. "He's going to scream bloody murder when I'm putting him into the bottle."

  "All right!" the imp said, lower lip quivering like a child's. "What do you want to know?"

  "Most of it I can guess easily enough. You're spying, and you're afraid to talk. Is it a Lord of Hell you answer to, or the king?"

  The imp sneered. "I am in service to His Majesty the Twice-Resurrected."

  Squire snorted. "Wow. I mean, Lazarus is seriously full of himself, ain't he?"

  "And you weren't alone up on that ledge, were you? There was another — at least one — and it's run off to snitch," Octavian said.

  With a nervous shudder the imp averted its eyes. Octavian whacked it in the skull with the now solid bottle and it cried out.

  "Yes!" it barked. "My brother! It was my brother."

  "And what is your brother's name?" Kazimir asked.

  Its pink eyes glared hatred at Octavian, though he had not been the one to speak.

  "Thresu," the imp said. "He is Thresu. And I am Teucer. And now you will do with me what you will, but I'll tell you no more." It shuddered and then whispered, as if to itself, "oh, my lovely tail."

  Octavian nodded. "That's all right. I don't have any other questions."

  "Wait, what?" Charlotte asked.

  Octavian held the bottle up in front of the imp's mistrustful eyes. "Take us to Lazarus. Show us the door he's used to get wherever he's gone."

  "What?" the demon asked. "But I don't know —"

  "Your brother's gone to tell him we're here. You were left to keep watch. If Thresu knew where to find your Twice-Resurrected bastard of a king, then you know as well," Octavian said. "He'll reward you, if you live, Teucer. You'll be a hero in the eyes of your king. What does he want? He wants Octavian. What better way to serve him than to bring me to him?"

  The imp had a terrible smile.

  Phoenix's World

  Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York, USA

  Kuromaku felt submerged inside his own body, floating weightless in the capsule that his flesh had become. And yet his will had not been completely subjugated. From the moment Lazarus had seized control of him, Kuromaku had found that if he focused he could extend his will out into his extremities and take temporary control of his arms or legs. The magic flowed around him like mercury and it could be shifted, just a little. He was a passenger inside his own body, but he had thought that with some effort, he might grab hold of the wheel — just for a moment.

  Now something had changed.

  Lazarus had set him after this girl with the green eyes and the blond bob as if he were a housecat and she a mouse in the sorcerer's kitchen. She and her friend, the lovely creature in the nurse's uniform, with such beautiful dark skin —

  Allison had murdered the nurse. Drained her blood. Broken her neck. Yet Kuromaku had not killed the blond. Somehow he had wrested control of his body. The magic still lingered, the impulses that he knew came from Lazarus instead of his own brain. That dark power caressed him, moving his limbs, and he let himself go with the flow.

  Let himself. That was the difference. He had a choice, now. He could feel the potential for control, that if he exerted himself he would be able to resume command not just his arms or his legs but his whole body, just as he had done on the basement stairs when he had come face to face with the young blond woman.

  The ground shook underfoot and dust rained down from the ceiling as he walked back down the corridor toward the atrium lobby. Allison sat against the wall just a few feet away from the nurse she had killed. She wiped furiously at her face with a bit of fabric she'd torn from the dead woman's sweatshirt, and at first Kuromaku thought she was just trying to clean off her victim's blood, which had drenched the front of her own shirt. Then he saw the blood in her eyes and the crimson tears that slipped down her cheeks as she dabbed at them anew.

  They were being used, but it was worse for Allison. Kuromaku had killed more than one innocent in the early years after his transformation. As far as he knew, she never had.

  "It's all right," he said quietly as he strode toward her.

  Her gaze locked on him and she frowned, understanding that something had changed — that he had regained control. She would ask him how, he thought, and he would have to tell her that he did not know, and guilt would tear her apart. If he had been able to fight the sorcerer's power, why had she been unable to do the same? What had he done differently?

  Suddenly he knew.

  The sword.

  Kuromaku frowned and reached down to grasp the handle of his katana, which manifested with a mere thought, an act of pure will. He had not altered his entire body, but forging that sword from the fabric of the world around him had been a form of shapeshifting. The Shadows controlled their bodies on a molecular level. Somehow, altering himself had disrupted Lazarus's control.

  "Allison, listen," he said, hurrying toward her.

  She stood abruptly and turned from him, walking toward the lobby. Confused, Kuromaku wanted to call out to her, but then the flow of dark magic increased around him and he understood. They were being summoned.

  He could have fought Lazarus's power, but there were hundreds of demons already and more coming through all the time. He had no plan, and if he struggled now he might give himself away and be killed. Kuromaku had lived many centuries, long enough that the idea of dying in battle did not frighten him, but he had no intention of dying for nothing.

  A fresh tremor swept through the hospital. The sounds of breaking glass and quaking earth grew louder and when he entered the atrium, he saw that a new phase of destruction had gotten under way. Most of the demons had already gone outside, but there were perhaps a dozen remaining to guard the portal in the center of the lobby, and more were emerging in ones and twos — devils and putrid slitherers and imps. They paid no attention to him or to Allison, their focus riveted on the parking lot beyond the shattered glass. October air blew through the atrium, but it had grown warmer now, and Kuromaku could see why.

  A chasm had opened just outside the hospital, and a demon the size of a blue whale began to rise from the fires within. Liquid flame spilled from the plates of its armored skin and burned in its five oval eyes. Kuromaku had seen many demons in Hell but his senses had been overwhelmed there and the presence of the monstrosities had a rightness about it. Here, in this ordinary world of grass and pavement and human construction, the thing seemed more abominable. Unimaginable. It had the thorax of an insect and the spear-shaped head of a squid, with both tentacles and the spindly front legs of a mantis. His senses could barely take it all in and he tore his gaze from the Hell being born outside and stared at the floor.

  Too many disparate pieces of information filled his head and, like trying to hold a complete image in his mind of the Demon Lord in the parking lot, he could not put them all together. Lazarus sought Octavian and the gatekeeper Naberus had made an error, brought them to the wrong world. That much was plain.

  But what of the women? The blond and her dead friend, whom Allison had murdered.

  Kuromaku whipped his head up and sought out Allison, grateful to find that she had paused to watch the Demon Lord rise. Lazarus is distracted, Kuromaku thought. His grip has loosened.

  If he intended to do something, Kuromaku knew he might not get a better opportunity. Once they were outside, Lazarus would not be so careless with how tightly he held the reins on his pet Shadows.

  Puzzle pieces jumbled in his brain, but the ones that didn't fit were those two women. He and Allison had been in this world only minutes, but it seemed very clear that most if not all of the patients and staff in the hospital must be dead or have fled when the incursion had begun. Yet he had looked into the eyes of the young woman to whom he had just shown mercy, and now that he pictured those eyes again, he understood something vital. She wasn't going anywhere. Her expression had been fearful but determined.

  She has a plan, Kuromaku thought.

  The idea brought
him up short. He frowned, staring at Allison's back, feeling the low-level current of Lazarus's magic. Naberus had brought the two women as tribute, but had he captured them when he had first opened a door into this world, or only recently? Kuromaku couldn't be sure the question was significant, but it felt as if the answer mattered.

  If she's not going to run, he thought, what's she up to? Whatever it might be, it seemed clear that she knew something Kuromaku did not. Had she discovered some way to fight Lazarus, to stop the incursion? It seemed unlikely, but the grim purpose in her eyes made him think there must be some truth to that.

  He would have to find out, but he couldn't leave Allison in Lazarus's thrall, and he could think of only one way to snap her out of it.

  With a single swift thrust, Kuromaku drove the blade of his katana through her back. She let out a grunt but he clapped his hand over her mouth even as she tried to twist around to fight him. Her eyes were full of rage and he felt her fangs tear the flesh of his palm.

  "That's right," he whispered. "Change."

  Her left hand reached back over her shoulder and grabbed a fistful of his hair and with her right she managed to claw at his cheek, talons slashing down to the bone. His blood spilled onto the blade between them, sticky and warm on his fingers where the gripped the handle.

  "Your name is Allison Vigeant," he said quietly.

  "I know my name, you bastard," she growled. "Can you take the fucking sword out of my back?"

  Kuromaku gave a single, curt nod and slid the blade out of her flesh. Allison turned toward him and for a second or two they only stood there, wounds healing as they stared at one another.

  "That hurt," she rasped.

  Beyond her, a new wave of demons crept through the shimmering crimson portal in the atrium. One of them glanced their way and its eyes narrowed, but then the ground shook again and a chant arose outside, and it turned and followed the others out through the broken windows to show fealty to its king.

  "You feeling yourself again?" Kuromaku asked.

  Allison reached up to press her temples. "More or less. But he's still in my head . . . and not just my head."

  "If you feel like he's trying to get control again, change form. Don't give him an anchor."

  She nodded. "So what now?"

  Kuromaku took one more look at the portal and then started to slip out of the atrium, back into the corridor, beckoning for Allison to follow.

  "Now," he said quietly, "there's a cute blond I need to track down."

  Allison frowned, opened her mouth and then closed it again.

  "Screw it," she said. "I'm not even going to ask. Just lead the way."

  Lazarus stood on the cracked pavement in front of the hospital and watched as Haagenti rose from the fiery passage that had appeared in the middle of the parking lot. Of all of the Lords of Hell, Haagenti had been the most supportive of his plans to expand the influence of the Realm Infernal. It reproduced in massive broods every few months and desired a place where its spawn could run rampant instead of being eaten or slain for sport by other hellions.

  As Haagenti crawled and slithered from the flames, front legs breaking through the pavement as its tentacles drew it forward, Lazarus watched the Demon Lord with a mixture of pride and revulsion. Once, the sorcerer had gazed upon the face of God. The Son of Man had called him friend. Later, he had become an immortal, with the soul of an angel and the heart of a devil, and he had indulged both sides of his nature before he at last understood what his kind could become. He had ventured into Hell to retrieve Octavian because it needed to be done, and he had always believed that heroes were simply people who did what needed doing, and did not require any reason other than that necessity.

  For his trouble, he had been abandoned.

  He wasn't a Shadow anymore — not a vampire. Both the angel and devil parts of him had left him, but he had been in Hell so long that the only thing he still knew how to do was survive. For the first few centuries, he had held on — held out hope of rescue — and when hope had died, he had gone mad.

  Lazarus embraced his madness, cherished and nurtured it the way one might shield a candle flame from the wind. Like that candle, madness had been the only light sustaining him in the dark heart of Hell. It had been born of regret and resentment, and in time it had grown into a bright fire of vengeance.

  "Isn't it glorious?" a voice said at his side.

  The sorcerer flinched, unhappy to be shaken from his reverie. He grinned because anger and amusement were close cousins in his soul, and turned to see Naberus standing beside him. Spite roiled in him.

  "You ought to be hiding from me," Lazarus said.

  Naberus twitched and took a step away, lowering his gaze. Was it possible he had not expected recrimination? Demons were self-involved and could be blinded by their own arrogance, but surely . . .

  "I hoped you would be pleased with Lord Haagenti's arrival, Majesty," the demon of thresholds said. Naberus scratched at a place on his forehead where a fresh shard of bone had broken through the skin. "A portal of this size is not easy, and I have opened several on this world, and dozens that are smaller."

  Lazarus's grin widened. He twisted his fingers, muttered in a language older than the Lords of Hell, and tendrils of black smoke billowed from the pores of his left hand. Naberus staggered backward, eyes widening at the sight of that smoke, and it was all Lazarus could do not to kill him. When he'd uttered the spell, that had been his intention, but a cold splinter of sanity stabbed his brain and he reminded himself that if he killed Naberus, he would have to summon another gateway demon from Hell and that would take time.

  Instead of killing Naberus, Lazarus took an eye. The smoke shot toward the gateway demon's face, touched his left eye, and it too became smoke.

  Naberus clapped a massive hand to his face and fell to his knees, screaming.

  Lazarus knelt beside him as a dozen black-hoofed demons, his personal guard, rushed to surround them both.

  "It is the wrong world, you imbecile," Lazarus snarled.

  Naberus cursed him profusely, but quietly.

  "What was that?"

  "I am heartily sorry, Majesty. Once I can identify your source world, I will begin again. Though I'll have to start with one portal, an anchor point, just as I did here, I swear to you that I will bring your whole army through. It's only that we used cells from your body as a base for the search for your world, and there have been versions of you on so many worlds."

  "You'll have to be more precise, then, won't you?" Lazarus replied.

  Haagenti let out a cry that shook the sky and shattered every window at the front of the hospital, as well as the glass in all of the cars in the lot that had not already tumbled into the flaming hole in the ground. It was a joyous cry of celebration, and Lazarus stood, brushing grit from his knees. So magnificent was Haagenti, so enormous, that Lazarus would have to use magic just to communicate with it, but he gaze upon it now with wonder and anticipation.

  Most of the Lords of Hell despised him, but paid obeisance out of fear or practicality. Haagenti may have felt the same, though Lazarus was confident in their alliance. Their goals were the same, though their purposes divergent.

  "If you don't find the way into my world by dawn," Lazarus said, not even glancing at Naberus, "I will offer you to Haagenti as host for its next brood and I will use all the magic at my disposal to make sure you don't die as his spawn begin to hatch inside you."

  Naberus stood much taller than Lazarus, but now he seemed to shrink.

  Black hooves clacked against pavement as his personal guard shuffled aside and a scaly, yellow devil pushed through, leading a crimson-fleshed, spiny-tailed imp behind him.

  "Majesty!" the imp said breathlessly, glancing up at the much larger demons in fear of being crushed beneath their hooves.

  "Thresu," Lazarus said, frowning in surprise. He had left the imp and his twin to stand watch over the Shadows he had left to suffer in the Pit, to warn him in case they managed to escape or oth
ers of their kind arrived. He felt sure he had not discovered all of the vampires who had been flushed into Hell by Gaea. "Don't tell me they've actually escaped."

  The imp wrapped himself in his own tail, spines piercing his flesh and drawing beads of thick black blood. Thresu did not even flinch. Such pain was a comfort to his kind, like his own mother's caress.

  "Not escape," the imp replied, eager to share the news. "They were rescued, Majesty." He bowed his head, bobbed it twice, and his tail unfurled from around him before he straightened to meet Lazarus's gaze.

  "Octavian is in Hell, tracking down his friends," Thresu said. "Teucer is keeping an eye on them."

  A wave of ecstasy went through Lazarus and this time his smile was one of joy. The imp had spoken the sweetest words imaginable.

  Lazarus turned to Qennes, the captain of his personal guard.

  "If you have Thresu's scent, you can find his brother. Track Teucer until you find Octavian. You won't have to capture him to lure him here. He's looking for his friends. Just tell him Allison and Kuromaku are with me."

  Qennes bowed and rushed off, taking two of the other black hoofs with him.

  As the captain went, Lazarus frowned and glanced at the hospital. He reached within himself and took up the magical tethers he had used to bind the two Shadows and tried to summon them. Only then did he realized that he could barely feel their presence, and when he attempted to exert control over them, his magic could not grasp them. They were still here, somewhere inside.

  But the Shadows had slipped their leash.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Phoenix's World

  Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York, USA

  The metal door felt cool to the touch. Phoenix pressed her hand flat against it and then leaned her whole body onto its smooth surface and put her cheek to the painted steel, appreciating its solidity. Its ordinariness and reliability. If not for the tremors that vibrated the whole building around her, she might have been able to pretend that nothing had changed, that she had come here to visit her father and gotten turned around enough to end up in the employee-only stairwell.