King of Hell (The Shadow Saga)

by Christopher Golden

  "You blame me," Octavian said. "And you have just cause. But I think you want revenge on me because you can't seek vengeance upon the one you truly blame, in your heart. The one who really abandoned you."

  "Kuromaku!" Lazarus shouted.

  The samurai rose from the slaughtered dead. He had retrieved his sword, and now he rushed at Octavian. Lazarus had made Kuromaku his puppet. Whatever spell he'd used, no verbal commands were necessary for the sorcerer to pull the Shadow's strings. Kuromaku's purple eyes grew more brightly and Octavian knew Lazarus had tightened his hold. Kuromaku could have shapeshifted but did not; he ran directly at Octavian, sword raised and fangs bared.

  "Go on, then," Lazarus said. "Kill your friend. Kill your brother."

  Octavian did not know if this exhortation was meant for Kuromaku or for himself — the sorcerer would have received as much pleasure with either result — but he knew his options were few. His heart thundered and his hold on his own magic slipped just a fraction. Even clumsy and not in control of his own reflexes, Kuromaku was one of the greatest fighters Octavian had ever seen. Shapeshifting, attacking swiftly, he might be able to kill Octavian, or distract him enough that Lazarus could do the job.

  He could take no chances.

  I'm sorry, 'Maku, he thought as he unleashed a pair of hexes simultaneously. Kuromaku froze and crumbled to the floor as his flesh turned to gray stone. A clock began ticking inside Octavian's mind — he had used two spells inspired by Lazarus, one to transform Kuromaku to stone and another to slow time around him. If he could stop Lazarus quickly enough, he could free Kuromaku.

  If.

  A hissing filled the air and Octavian glanced beyond Lazarus to see a vertical silver pool forming not far from where the portal of corpses had stood. The pool grew to the size of a mirror, and then continued to grow, all in the space of moments.

  "Say hello, Peter," Lazarus said.

  Octavian stared as the portal rippled with some disturbance from beyond.

  "What is this?" he demanded.

  "I made a deal with the devil," Lazarus replied, that black energy crackling and misting around his hands as if with a mind of its own. "Well, not one devil, but all of them. I'm their king, you see. They all kneel before me, now, and in return for their loyalty — and their help in finding and destroying you and the world where we were both born — I'm going to lead them in tearing this one apart. And the next and the next. It thrilled me to have you come to me, to save me the trouble of hunting you any longer, but even your death is just one step. The door you came through is closed . . ."

  With a flourish, Lazarus gestured to the portal.

  " . . . so we needed another."

  As Octavian looked on, a crimson-black demon with a jack o'lantern mouth stepped through the portal. A gateway demon, Octavian thought, staring at the circle of bone shards that jutted up through its scalp like a crown. It carried a woman over its shoulder.

  "Welcome back, Naberus," Lazarus said. "I see you've brought us Plan B."

  With a dead imp in her hands, Phoenix stood frozen, staring at Naberus as he emerged from the silver mirror that had appeared inside the hospital atrium. A huge section of the outer lobby wall had been destroyed, turning the scene inside into a surreal sort of stage production, lit by the flickering bulbs and the bright searing glow of the magic Octavian and Lazarus kept hurling at each other. Naberus had a woman slung over one shoulder . . . but she didn't focus on the woman until the doorway demon shrugged her onto the floor and then reached down to haul her up by her hair. The woman might have been unconscious coming through the portal, but pain woke her. Her eyes were wide and bright with shock as she opened her mouth to scream.

  Phoenix knew her.

  "Annelise," she whispered. "No."

  She had left the aging medium back in Manhattan. Had Naberus tracked her somehow? Had she led the demons right to Annelise? The question made her shudder, but then a cold certainty stole through her. No. The spirits had warned Annelise of disturbances on the ethereal plane, dark powers that did not belong there. The demons had been moving through the spirit world on their way to this one, and Naberus had found her father to use as a doorway, had chosen Professor Joe Cormier because the sensitivity of a medium made the perfect anchor . . .

  Oh, my God, she thought.

  Phoenix realized what would happen an instant before Naberus punched a taloned fist through Annelise's back. His hand burst from her chest in a spray of blood. Phoenix screamed, even as she heard Octavian shout in fury. The mage hurled green fire at Naberus, only to have it deflected by Lazarus. From this distance, Phoenix could only imagine the sound of flesh tearing and bone splitting as Annelise's blood began to form a new portal in the gaping hole the demon had torn in her chest.

  " . . . no no no . . ." Phoenix said, shaking her head in horror. She had sacrificed so much in order to burn her father's remains, to purify him and to close the portals from Hell into this world — Ronni had died in the attempt — and now Naberus had begun anew, with poor Annelise.

  She tried not to remember the woman's kind eyes or her gentle voice, but instead they were all she could think about, and cold rage built within her. A stinking, chattering demon stalked toward her on legs that shook with gelatinous fat. Its belly hung nearly to its knees in thick folds and huge tusks jutted from the layers of fat at its neck.

  "Pretty," it said, turning the word into a hiss.

  Phoenix felt the strength in her limbs, but more than that, she felt the possibility in her flesh. In the midst of this bloody battle she had seen Allison and Charlotte become beasts and monsters and even mist, but Phoenix didn't want to stop there. Focusing on just one hand to begin with, she found that it obeyed her mental commands. The flesh began to change, just a ripple at first and then a flood, until she had become a devil in her own right, massive and powerful and savage. The gluttonous demon never stood a chance. Screaming in fury at the murder of Annelise and at the way her world had been violated, she beat the demon to the ground and stomped on its head with heavy, powerful hooves.

  Turning toward the hospital, she began to run in long strides, hooves cracking pavement.

  Octavian and Lazarus crashed out through the broken lattice of the atrium's window frames in a flying melee of brutal magic, multi-hued energies clashing and searing the air around them.

  A fresh wave of demons marched out through the portal Naberus had made of Annelise's flesh. He pulled and stretched her until no one could have identified her remains, widening the bloody window into Hell, and more and more demons were sliding and crawling and striding from that rift in reality.

  Phoenix screamed as she crashed through into the atrium. A dozen demons turned toward her but she plowed past them. Naberus looked up at her with those arachnoid eyes and she saw herself reflected a thousand times — not Phoenix Cormier at all, but a demon like any other. Repulsed, she willed herself to change again, and as she crossed the last few yards toward Naberus and his new portal, she wore her own body. Her own face. The face of Joe Cormier's daughter.

  Startled, the crowned demon took a step back from the portal. "You . . ."

  Phoenix bared her fangs. By pure instinct, she hooked her fingers into claws and they lengthened into hardened talons of bone, and then she struck, slashing at Naberus and tearing him open. She drove him to the floor amongst the hospital's dead and grabbed hold of the longest of the broken horns on his head and broke it off, shattered it so deeply that she heard his skull crack.

  Naberus roared in fury and bucked against her, slammed the back of a huge hand into her face and knocked her off him. Phoenix crashed to the floor, slid, and scrambled to her feet in an instant, hissing and thirsting not for blood, but for his death.

  Stumbling, one hand over the largest of the wounds she had given him, dark blood streaming down his face from the hole where she'd ripped out a horn, Naberus turned toward her.

  "How?" the crowned demon asked.

  "You killed my father," Phoenix replied.r />
  "I have killed many fathers," Naberus said, almost as if he thought he was reasoning with her. "I'm a demon."

  Weeping tears of blood, Phoenix lunged for him again. Naberus raised his hands to defend himself and she turned to mist. Finding herself abruptly without flesh disoriented her for a moment, but her senses had opened up to an extraordinary degree and she became aware of everything around her — the demons, the vampires, the sorcerers, the hospital and its slaughtered dead — and then she coalesced in the air above Naberus. As she dropped toward the floor, she reached down and grabbed hold of two of his horns — one in either hand — and twisted with every ounce of her unnatural strength. The snap as she broke all of the bones in his neck was the most satisfying sound she had ever heard.

  The crowned demon fell to the ground and lay still, dull eyes vacant and staring. Phoenix stood over the Naberus's corpse, numb and full of grief, as the battle raged on out in the parking lot. She had taken her revenge . . . but it would not bring her father back to life.

  "Daddy," she whispered, and she sank to her knees and wished that she could still cry human tears.

  Octavian swept his sword around in an arc that cleaved the head from a leather-skinned devil and hacked through the abdomen of a ten foot insectoid hellion. Heart hammering, thoughts racing, he sketched a sigil with his left hand and a wave of deep blue magic rippled across the parking lot and turned a quartet of attacking demons to ice that glittered in the moonlight.

  "Where'd you go, you bastard?" Octavian shouted.

  A scaly, eight-foot worm rushed at him and a pair of wraiths covered in jutting spikes, with tongues like scorpion tails, skittered on top of overturned cars, ready to leap. Octavian needed a shield, and if it came to that he would summon one, but before he worried about defending himself he had to find Lazarus — to end this, before the sorcerer killed more people he loved.

  He hit the worm with a hex that made it burn from within. The fires of Hell might not have been able to kill it, but he lit it aflame at its core, and the worm began to scream. Octavian took two quick steps toward it as the worm reared up, and he cut its belly open with a single swipe of the two-edged sword. The ebon side of the blade cut the demon with remarkable ease, as if the sword had a desire and a strength all its own.

  He whipped around, seeking Lazarus. When the gateway demon had created a new portal in the hospital's atrium, the fresh influx of demons had been too much for Octavian. He'd been surrounded and couldn't afford the distraction they presented. Killing them would have been simple enough for a mage of his skills, but not while Lazarus was there trying to destroy him, so Octavian had moved the fight out into the parking lot. Charlotte and the others had killed a lot of demons and others had fled. There were still fifty or more, the towering squid-thing included, but the Shadows had thinned the enemy ranks . . . they had bought Octavian time, and room to fight.

  But he couldn't fight if Lazarus wanted to hide amongst the wave of demons flowing through the portal. This new incursion had changed the odds dramatically. Octavian and his allies could kill a lot of demons, but if the collected hordes of Hell itself poured out of that portal —

  The ground shook, hard enough that Octavian lost his footing and went down on one knee. Sword in hand, he began to rise and turn, but too late. A huge webbed hand closed around his head and lifted him off the ground. Through the thin skin of the webbing he could see the flaming orange light coming from the eyes of his attacker. Its grasp muffled him, though he struggled to utter a spell. The demon's other hand clamped on his, crushing the fingers that held the sword, and he cried out in sudden pain. Octavian expected it to tear the sword from his grip, but instead it twisted his arm to change the blade's direction, then guided his hand and forced him to stab himself in the abdomen. The sword punched through his belly and the tip pushed out through his back, and the demon dropped him to the broken pavement. For the first time, he saw its hideously leering face, saw that jack o'lantern orange glow in its eyes, and knew it was silently laughing at him.

  Sprawled on his side, he roared in pain as he ripped the sword from his belly.

  Seconds, he thought. He just needed a few seconds to use magic to heal himself, and then another second to manifest a protective sphere.

  But Lazarus was there.

  The sorcerer stepped between the two scorpion-tongued wraiths and shot out a hand, sickly yellow light lancing from his fingers. Octavian closed his eyes and summoned the magic from his core, manifesting a defensive shield, but when he opened his eyes he saw that Lazarus had trapped him. Bleeding profusely, clutching at his gut, Octavian lay inside his own protective sphere, with a second — putrescent yellow — surrounding it, and contracting. As he fought that pressure, he felt something tearing inside him. Weakened, disoriented, he could heal his wound or he could protect himself from Lazarus and the demons that now began to surround him. Given a few seconds to catch his breath, he might be able to focus, but Lazarus would not give him those precious seconds.

  The powerful frisson of magic made his hair stand on end as he tried to concentrate. Rage fueled him. He and his allies had left Lazarus for dead, left him behind in Hell, but the Shadows had done the same to Octavian himself. They had chosen the known over the unknown, thought him lost, and he had understood it. Lazarus had not.

  Images of Nikki filled Octavian's thoughts. In his mind's eye he could still see the way she had looked on the stage of a club in New Orleans the first time they had met, guitar in hand and full of the effortless grace of music. He could hear her laugh, remember her scent and the warmth of her in bed beside him, recall how easily she had made him believe that being human again was a blessing instead of a curse.

  He still loved her.

  Octavian calmed his own heart. He turned to glare at Lazarus through the hissing static veil of their combined magic and he felt the wound in his stomach healing . . . and understood. The sword had been made by Squire. For all of his eccentricities, he truly was a master weaponsmith. The two-edged blade had not only cut through his flesh . . . it had slashed through the magic at his core. If he hadn't pulled the blade out, Octavian wasn't sure what it would have done. That was why the blade cut so smoothly through the dark magic-infused flesh of demons. But now his magic knitted its wounds together even as his flesh did the same. Octavian tightened his grip on the sword and rolled onto his knees, still surrounded by his own protective ward and by the spell with which Lazarus had hoped to kill him. Octavian lifted his head to glare hatefully at the sorcerer.

  But Lazarus was no longer looking at him. Frowning worriedly, the sorcerer had turned his attention upon the hospital atrium, and Octavian glanced over to see that — though the portal remained — the flow of reinforcements had ceased. No more demons were coming through.

  "Naberus," Lazarus said quietly, and Octavian realized that the gateway demon was nowhere in sight.

  A Shadow — a young blond woman Octavian didn't know — ran out of the atrium, shifted into a fox and raced into the parking lot to join in the fight against the demons.

  For a moment, Octavian felt a spark of hope, the promise of triumph.

  Then a pair of huge hands pushed through blood-red portal and stretched it even wider. The demon who stepped through had to have been twenty feet tall, and when he slithered into this world as if from some putrid, malevolent birth canal, he stood up inside the atrium. Illuminated by the bright lights of the hospital lobby, the massive demon was on full display. Its sides and chest and thighs had slits that pouted for air like gills or the mouths of fish.

  Another Demon Lord, Octavian thought, and he stared in growing horror as something else pushed itself into the world, coated with blood from the portal as if it were smeared with birth fluids. Its wrinkled, folded skin had a pale translucence that displayed its interior workings, and a smattering of stray hairs that made it look sickly. Its front teeth were long and flat like a mole's, and beneath its tiny eyes — where a nose might have been — it had a nest of wavering c
ilia better suited to a sea creature.

  This one, Octavian knew. Lord Malephar.

  Lazarus strode toward the atrium, dragging Octavian behind him as if the spell he'd cast were a kind of magical net.

  "My Lords!" the sorcerer called, as Lord Malephar stood up to his full height and shattered much of the remaining framework of the atrium.

  The other lord with him, whom Octavian thought might be Xezbeth, lay back his head and let loose a cry that shook both heaven and earth. In the parking lot, Lord Haagenti had begun to move away from the hospital, headed toward the river, but now the largest of the Demon Lords halted and turned. Haagenti's tentacles hung loosely and the towering squid-thing bent its head as if to watch the proceedings on the ground, mantis legs clacking on the broken pavement near the hole through which it had emerged.

  "Welcome!" Lazarus called, but Octavian could hear the uncertainty in his voice. They weren't supposed to be here, these demons.

  Octavian breathed. Calmed his heart. Let his wounds — both of flesh and of magic — heal.

  Something smaller moved behind Xezbeth and Malephar. Gazing up at their hideousness, bathed in the malignance and malice that radiated from them, Lazarus had not noticed before now, and neither had Octavian. Compared to the Demon Lords, this third figure was tiny, though he stood perhaps eight feet tall.

  Danny Ferrick.

  The Demon Lords stood aside as Danny strode between them. The young demon seemed taller than before, and somehow more demonic, as if his passage through Hell had made him even more his father's son than ever. Beyond Danny, Octavian spotted an even smaller figure, moving just behind the massive bulk of Lord Xezbeth. In the shadows, of course, Octavian thought, as he watched Squire hurry to keep after Danny.

  "Where is this self-proclaimed King of Hell?" Danny Ferrick shouted, and his words had a timbre Octavian had not heard from him before. Imperious and cruel, his voice resonated across the lot.