She stood up and went to the window.
“Do I have a choice?” I stammered.
“You have all the choice in the world. Your soul’s no good to me if I have to take it by force. If you want to give me and everybody else a chance at a normal life, you’ll meet me tomorrow at midnight on top of Mount Nebo. Otherwise, you can just stay here, and I won’t bother you again. By the taste of you, I’d say you’ll live to an even riper old age, maybe even see a whole century.”
She swung a leg over the windowsill. “I guess it all depends on whether you’re still willing to die for your country or not.”
And then she was gone.
The memory ended, but another curled around its tail; I followed the new thread:
I opened the top drawer of the bureau, took out the tray that held all my old medals and ribbons, and stared down at them. The tray told me that I’d been a hero once, and like my daddy always told me, heroes took care of business, never shied away from what had to be done.
I felt cold deep in my bones. If Miko had been telling me the truth, I had to deal with her, had to stop her from killing anyone else. But how could I stop a demon?
I went downstairs and reread the Japanese mythology book, pored over the entries on Izanami’s other deadly child, the god of fire. If the gods truly feuded as Miko claimed they did, then Kagu-tsuchi wouldn’t want his little sister to complete her task, would he? If all this was real, then I ought to be able to contact the god of fire, somehow.
I went to my bedroom and arranged my medals in a big glass ashtray. I carried it down to the kitchen, set it on the counter, cracked open a bottle of brandy I’d been saving for company, and sloshed the liquor over the decorations. Part of my brain hollered at me for wasting good booze and ruining family heirlooms, but the rest reminded me that I had no real blood relatives left to inherit my treasures … except Miko, if she was telling the truth. And if she was, then contacting the god was a hell of a lot more important than a few medals.
“Okay, Kagu-tsuchi, if you’re out there, tell me what to do,” I muttered, then lit a match and threw it in the ashtray.
It blazed bright, and I stared into the flames. The Silver Star and Purple Heart began to blacken, and the ribbons crackled as they caught fire. The crackling got louder, and suddenly I heard a hissing voice inside my head:
“While the mother survived, the daughter shall die.”
The fire grew hotter, brighter, and suddenly the ashtray exploded. I stumbled back, momentarily blinded, eyebrows singed.
When the gray afterimage finally faded, I saw that the ashtray and medals were scorched slag, a black, bubbled mess melting into the countertop.
The memory faded into another one:
That night, I stood before the mirror, dressed in my old army uniform. The seat of my pants sagged and my belly bulged around the waistband, but the fit wasn’t that bad, considering.
I slipped the shiny Smith & Wesson and a road flare into the left pocket of my jacket. Then I carefully slid a Mason jar filled with home-brew napalm into my right pocket. I’d made the jellied gasoline that afternoon by soaking packing peanuts in gas; I hoped I’d made enough, hoped the jar wouldn’t leak.
I headed downstairs to my old Buick. It was a hot night, so I turned the AC up high as I drove. Mount Nebo was fifteen minutes outside town, hardly a mountain but certainly the largest bump in the flatland for miles. A local rancher had lived on Mount Nebo for a few decades, but five years ago his house had been hit by lightning and burned down, killing him and his family. Somebody back East had inherited the land, but nobody ever came out to do anything with it.
As I turned up the farm road toward Nebo, I saw the ruined chimney and walls silhouetted against the full moon. Below, I saw a flickering light, maybe a campfire? I parked the car off the road, clicked on my flashlight, and began to hike up the hill.
I had to pause midway to massage the rusty ache in my knees, and was wheezing badly by the time I reached the top. My dress shirt was sodden with sweat underneath my uniform jacket. When the blood stopped roaring in my ears, I realized I could hear Miko singing nearby, too softly for me to make out any words, but the sound sent an electric buzz through my chest and loins.
No. She was my enemy, and I had to stop her. I pulled out the Mason jar, unscrewed the lid with shaking hands, then hobbled around the weathered hunks of burned wood and cinder blocks to find Miko.
I turned a corner into what might have been a bedroom, and my breath caught in my throat. Miko was dancing naked on a red blanket surrounded by dozens of candles, from tiny white votives to slim tapers to enormous three-wick cylinders. The thin flames curled and flickered in the hot night breeze, and Miko’s dance mimicked them, her body twisting and rippling, the light gleaming on her hair, her breasts, her taut arms and legs. Maybe she had more muscles than I’d been brought up to think a woman ought to have, but she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The words to her serpentine melody were Japanese, but I understood the message: Come to me.
I wanted more than anything to go to her, to touch that wonderful body, but I knew what I had to do. She was the enemy. Swallowing nervously, I pulled out the road flare and sparked it against a piece of cinder block.
Miko stopped singing and turned to me, eyes wide.
“No! Put that stuff down, you don’t know what—” she began, rushing toward me.
Heart hammering, I slung the Mason jar at her. She knocked it away, but jellied gasoline splattered on her arm, her breasts, her face. She started screaming even before I threw the flare.
She virtually exploded. Her flesh seemed eager to burn. I watched, transfixed in horror, as her hair ignited like flash paper, her skin crisping and peeling, fat and muscle sizzling and popping under the burning napalm. Howling, she frantically beat at the flames spreading across her body. She stumbled backward into the candles and collapsed.
The air was thick with the smoke from her burning flesh. Bile rose in my throat as I watched her thrashing, scattering her candles, fighting the flames that had already destroyed her lovely eyes, her skin, her fingers. I wanted to turn away, but found I could not even shut my eyes.
Finally, her howling fell to a whimper, and then the whimper faded into the crackling of the dying flames. I realized I was crying, realized I could move again. I turned and staggered away, wishing I’d brought a handkerchief to cover my mouth and nose, wondering if I’d be able to keep from blowing out my brains when I got back to my empty house.
“Father, please don’t leave me like this …”
Oh dear God.
I turned, and saw Miko’s corpse stir in the ashes and congealing candle wax. Her face was that of Death, eyes and nose black holes, charred scalp peeling away from red bone. I wondered how she could still speak, how she could still be alive.
“Where are you?” She tried to raise herself up on an elbow, but couldn’t. “Please, not like this … Kagut-suchi won’t take me. Neither will my mother. No one will come for me. When my bones rot away I will still be trapped here.”
She made a choking noise, and her whole body started to spasm. It took me a moment to realize she was sobbing.
Dear God, what had I done? Not even Satan himself deserved what I’d done to Miko. To my own daughter. Heroes didn’t burn beautiful women alive, didn’t damn them to an eternity of agony in a wasteland. I squeezed my eyes shut against the hot tears streaming down my face.
“Father, please …”
Heart hammering madly, I turned and made my way through the wreckage to Miko.
“What can I do?” I stammered.
“Take me in your arms.”
Swallowing against a wave of nausea, knees creaking, I got down on the ground and lay down beside her. She slid a hand across my chest and wriggled close to me, her skin crackling with every movement.
I stared at the full moon overhead, my vision twitching with every beat of my heart.
She kissed my cheek, her lips dry and hard. A cold th
rill coursed through my body. I felt my heart stutter, then cramp down. The pain was exquisite.
As my vision began to fade, I turned my head and saw fresh skin spreading across her face and body, new eyes blooming open in her sockets.
Before the cold blackness engulfed me, I felt her gently kiss my forehead. Her lips were soft as funeral roses.
“Thank you,” was all she said.
I came out of the vision and released Henry’s bones. Clammy sweat drenched my clothing. The sun coming through the blinds was low and golden; I’d been reliving the old man’s memories for hours.
Pal blinked at me expectantly. “Did you discover anything we can use against Miko?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “We can kill her with fire. Or at least hurt her really damn bad with it.”
chapter
twenty-eight
Shadowland
My journey into Henry’s memories left me exhausted and shaky, and none of us thought that trying to stage an attack on either David or Miko after dark would be a good idea. So we decided to get up early and head out at dawn to try to cut off Miko’s meat puppet supply.
But as Pal snoozed on the other bed, I lay awake, thinking of everything I’d seen that day. At least now I knew what we were dealing with. I hadn’t thought a demon could become a devil by winning the soul of one of its unwilling creators, but clearly Miko had neatly exploited that particular supernatural loophole. And in the decade since, she’d managed to put herself on the road to becoming a brand-new death goddess.
Obviously she hadn’t given up on taking souls, and twisting people into committing spiritual suicide wasn’t any better than murder in my book. Then I reconsidered: perhaps she had stopped soul harvesting for a time, but returned to it with a vengeance a year ago. But why? How much of what she’d told Henry was actually true? It was impossible to tell.
After a few hours of sleep, Pal and I met Charlie at the cafeteria at 6 A.M. for a quick breakfast, and then we gathered our gear and weapons and the black kittens and flew out toward the Civic League Park near the center of town.
“The water lily garden is back behind those trees,” Charlie said from her seat behind me, a little too loudly in my ear. She pointed toward a thicket of oaks beyond the sun-browned remains of a municipal golf course. “We should land before they see us.”
“Okay,” I replied. “How far can the shadow see and hear?”
“It can see people who are in the water with it, but if it’s hunting on land it needs David’s eyes and ears,” she said. “It felt like it needed mine, anyway.”
I scanned the ground beneath us; at the intersection beside the entrance to the golf course, there was an abandoned Sonic drive-in. Pal, land us over there.
Pal settled gently in the shade of the Sonic’s covered parking area. Someone had long ago smashed most of the plastic menus at the individual order stations. I slid down to the weed-ridden pavement, and Charlie followed.
“So if we blind David, we’ve partly blinded the shadow?” I asked her as I pulled my black kitten off its climb up my brown dragonskin jacket. I tucked the little creature back into the sling I’d borrowed from the dorm’s front desk. Even unbuttoned, the jacket was stiflingly hot, but the sun was strong and I didn’t want to burn. The kitten seemed to sense that massive carnage was on the agenda, and it kept trying to crawl up around my neck.
Charlie looked startled, then distressed. “I guess so.”
“Look, I know he’s your friend, or used to be,” I said gently. “I know you don’t really want to hurt him. Pal or I can temporarily blind him with a spell. But we have to take him out somehow, or we’ll have a hard time here.”
“I know,” she said. She pulled the clip on her AK-47, checked her ammunition, then shoved it back into the receiver. “The shadow picked me because it knew I had evil in me. Maybe I didn’t do much of a job fighting it, but I tried. I really did. But David … I don’t think he’s tried to get rid of it, ever. He’s not at all bothered by what it tells him to do.”
Charlie paused, looking furious, as if she might start crying. “He totally hid that side of himself from me. How … how can you be friends with somebody for years, hang out with them all the time, and not realize they have that kind of evil in them? The … the things he’s doing now, they’re nasty.”
“You weren’t a bad kid. David didn’t sound like he was a bad kid, either,” I told her, hoping my words would help. I sympathized with her and wanted her to feel better, but more important, I needed her focused for what was ahead. “Everyone has a nasty side. Devils find the kernels of evil in a person, turn on the heat, and pop them until the good’s buried. But it can be found again.”
I hoped what I was telling her was true, for the Warlock’s and my own sake as much as hers and David’s. “If we can destroy the shadow, I bet he’ll come around.”
“I brought this on him. On everyone,” she said quietly. “I need to see this finished.”
She wiped her eyes, adjusted her gun strap, and shook the tension out of her shoulders. “Okay. We got to do this. Listen: the shadow can move from puddle to pond to river if the waters are near each other. There’s a half-dozen lily ponds down there in the garden—the shadow’s in one of them, I think—but there’s another natural pond nearby and past that, the river. The shadow will stick around if it thinks it’s gonna get something to eat, but it can bug out of there in a hurry if it thinks it’s threatened. It can probably use the meat puppets to transport itself—they’re mostly water, and they can’t say no. If the shadow goes to the river we’ve lost it for good, probably.”
She took a deep breath. “So I guess that’s a long way of saying, I think we probably have just one shot at it. And I’m kinda worried that if the first thing we do is blind David, the shadow will know something’s up and just hightail it for the river.”
I hadn’t thought of that; I was still feeling pretty feverish, the heat and sun weren’t helping, and my brain was more than a little addled.
“Well, that changes things,” I replied. “Does David keep a lot of the meat puppets around?”
“I think so, yeah. I think he uses them as … toys.” She loaded the word with a variety of unsavory implications. “And when he’s done with them, he feeds them to the shadow.”
“Hm.” I pondered the problem.
“Might I suggest,” Pal said to me, “that going in spells and guns ablaze might not be our best strategy? If we could find some way of catching the shadow off guard, that would give us a greater likelihood of succeeding here.”
“Right,” I replied, shrugging out of my backpack. “Okay. Change of plan. Pal, shrink yourself down as much as possible.” I started to pull the saddle pad and saddlebags off his back.
He blinked at me. “How small, exactly?”
I stacked his tack in a pile against the drive-in’s pale brick wall and laid my shotgun and pack on top. “I want you to look like nothing more than a common wolf spider and ride on Charlie’s shoulder. Can you do that?”
“I suppose so.” He sang himself down until he was the size of a small tarantula. “Is this good?”
“Good enough, I think.” I scooped him up and set him on Charlie’s shoulder. He blended in reasonably well with her gray T-shirt; I doubted anyone would be able to spot him at a distance.
Charlie didn’t look entirely happy to have Pal sitting on her. “What now?”
“Now we walk over to the gardens.” I pulled my kitten out of my sling and handed it to her, then took the sling off and threw it onto the pile of gear. “You’re going to tell David that I’m your prisoner, a gift for the shadow. You’ve changed your mind and you want to join them in their merry life of murder and plunder and zombie raising.”
The girl stood there holding the kitten, staring at me as if I’d sprouted a second head that was reciting French existentialist poetry. “You … want me to hand you over to the shadow? Are you nuts?”
“Yes, I do, and no, I’m not crazy. I have a pla
n.” I gave her my best Cooper-style, everything’s-gonna-be-okay smile. “Convince them that you’re serious about joining Team Shadow, and then follow my lead. Oh, and one other thing: if all of a sudden I look like I’m not myself? I’m probably not. Get away from me as fast as possible.”
She stowed the kitten in her sling with its twin, and we followed the sidewalk to the Civic League Park. The front gates were rusted open. The path inside the park led us through displays of long-dead rosebushes down to a ravine shaded with hemlocks and live oaks. Once we’d crossed a limestone footbridge over a small natural pond filled with koi, we came out of the trees into the big bowl-shaped water lily garden. The air stank of human filth and rotting flesh. I put my hands on top of my head.
“Put your gun at my back,” I whispered. Charlie did as I asked.
On the opposite rim, a small cottage shaded by oaks and pecan trees overlooked the garden, which was roughly the size of a couple of Olympic swimming pools set side by side. In it were eight rectangular, raised concrete water lily ponds with wide limestone rims. Most of the ponds were in varying stages of decay and algae-choked neglect with a few lilies bravely blooming here and there; one pond, however, was nothing but foul-looking sludge, black as crude oil.
A skinny young man of maybe nineteen or twenty with a shaved head was dragging something down the path from the cottage. He was wearing just a pair of muddy canvas sneakers and a ragged blue Superman T-shirt.
He heaved once more on his burden, and then I heard him snarl, “Get up, dammit!”
The burden twitched, and laboriously stood. It was another thin young man, completely naked but for a huge American eagle tattoo on his chest. His mouth hanging slackly open, he took three tottering, marionette-like steps and then collapsed onto his knees.
Shotgun Sorceress Page 24
