Demon Games [4]

by Steve Feasey

  Philippa shook her head, and for a moment Alexa thought that the girl was going to cry. Instead she took a deep breath, straightened up and turned to look at her friend.

  ‘It wasn’t me they really wanted,’ she said. ‘I was a means to an end. Just as ultimately you are.’

  ‘What are you talking about.’

  ‘We’re just bait.’

  ‘Bait? What’s going on, Philippa? What do you mean?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘What? Who told you what?’

  ‘Molok. He told me the real reason we’re here.’ Philippa nodded at her friend. ‘Sit down, Alexa, and I’ll tell you everything I know.’

  20

  A heavy door to the side flew open with a bang, and both Alexa and Philippa were instantly on their feet. The hulking shape of the Hell-Kraken Molok filled the doorway, and the demon lord eyed his latest acquisitions for a moment before bending forward and stepping into the room, closely followed by two Maug demons. Alexa watched them as they came in, the Hell-Kraken standing in the centre of the room with the two guards taking up positions either side. But it was the next person to enter the room that made Alexa cry out in surprise. Her heart leaped in her chest at the sight of Trey and she called out to him, all her pain and discomfort instantly banished as she quickly moved towards him.

  She forgot about the invisible wall that separated her from the rest of the room until it was too late. She crashed into the barrier, and for a second she was held in its grip, her body paralysed by what felt like thousands of volts of electricity passing through it. Her features were locked in a terrible grimace, and a high-pitched screeching sound filled her head. She wanted to scream, but was incapable of any movement or action of any kind. When she was thrown backwards through the air, her lower half caught the chaise longue, and she cartwheeled over it, landing in a painful heap on the cold stone floor.

  Trey shouted out and lunged towards the cell. The guards, remembering their orders, were quick to react. They seized the teenage boy by the arms, hauling him back.

  Trey morphed.

  The guards shouted out in alarm as the thin, wiry appendages of the fifteen-year-old boy that they were holding transformed into the great muscular arms of the werewolf. One arm swung in a wide arc, the forearm crunching into the face of the demon to Trey’s left, the creature simply falling to the floor in a heap beneath the force of the blow. The other guard tried to jump up on to the lycanthrope’s back, perhaps hoping to get a chokehold on Trey’s throat and wrestle him to the ground. Trey reached up over his shoulders with both hands and grabbed hold of the Maug. He bent at the waist, heaving with his arms at the same time, and hurled the heavy demon into the wall of energy that surrounded Alexa’s cell. The demon was already unconscious when it landed in a mangled heap on the floor.

  Two more guards who had been waiting outside rushed in through the open door of the jail, but Molok halted them with a hand gesture.

  There was a groan from the cell, and Trey’s head snapped up in the direction of the sound. Alexa was gingerly getting to her feet, her fingers exploring a bleeding wound on her forehead.

  Trey leaped forward and slashed at the invisible curtain with taloned hands, ignoring the searing pain that tore through him as a result. His enormous frame was propelled backwards, but he managed to stay on his feet, only to throw himself at the barrier again. The werewolf howled in agony and frustration, the sound filling the jail and reverberating around the walls. Allowing the rage he felt to take him over completely, Trey threw himself once more at the barrier, meeting the pain head on in his attempts to get through. He slowly became aware of Alexa’s screams as she pleaded for him to stop.

  Eventually the anger that consumed him was extinguished by exhaustion, and Trey hung his head, his long tongue lolling from his mouth as he sucked in great lungfuls of air.

  Molok’s deep bass laughter filled the room. The Hell-Kraken clapped his hands together slowly – a mocking salute to Trey’s efforts. ‘Very good. Very entertaining. Your strength and power are truly something to behold, lycanthrope. I would not have thought it possible to attack the field in the way that you did. Completely futile, of course, but impressive nonetheless.’

  Molok smiled at Trey, who had partially recovered and was standing up at his full height again, glaring back at the demon lord. ‘You’d like to kill me, wouldn’t you? But if you did that, your friend would never get free of that cell.’ Molok sniffed and shook his head. ‘No, the only hope for you is to adhere to the agreement we made in the Great Hall.’

  Molok bent forward and hooked up the torn remains of a tunic – the same kind that Philippa was wearing – with a taloned finger. He held the ruined mess out for the werewolf to take. ‘To cover your modesty,’ he said. ‘I will leave you for a moment to talk to your girlfriends while I make sure that everything is ready for you to join the fighting school.’ He looked the werewolf up and down. ‘You are a magnificent specimen, Mr Laporte, but you have much to learn about the Demon Games and how they work before you compete in two days’ time. For now, perhaps you would like to make yourself comfortable in here.’ He turned to the two remaining guards and instructed them to remove the chains that hung round the necks of their unconscious colleagues. There was a small black disk at the end of each chain, and Trey watched as the guards took these and placed them at the top of each of the rods on either side of a cell opposite Alexa and Philippa’s. The rods were placed far enough apart that the task had to be carried out by two guards working in tandem. The shimmering curtain disappeared, and as soon as it had Molok stepped forward, bowing theatrically and holding his arm out to shepherd the werewolf into the cell. Trey took his place on the black stone plinth, and as he did so he felt the air begin to crackle and fizz behind him. He turned to see the demon lord leave, followed by the two guards unceremoniously dragging their colleagues out behind them.

  Trey turned his back on the girls and morphed back into his human form, pulling the torn and ruined tunic on over his head.

  When he turned round again Alexa was at the edge of her plinth, and he moved forward to be as close to her as he could without crossing the boundary.

  She looked at him for a moment. A smile briefly touched her lips, but this quickly disappeared, replaced by a look of concern. ‘I think you’d better tell me what is going on, and what on earth that monster meant about a deal that the two of you have made.’

  21

  ‘Remember how we thought that the Necrotroph was the only mole in Lucien’s organization?’ Trey sat on the stone floor of his cell facing those of the two girls on the opposite side of the room. ‘Well, we were wrong. It’s true that it was the only nether-creature working for Caliban. But a Fire Imp called Dreck was feeding information about me back to Molok. I seem to have become an obsession with the Hell-Kraken.’ He shook his head, and let out a long sigh. ‘But it seems that Dreck wasn’t a particularly good spy. He was passing back intel that was at best ill informed, at worst completely wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Alexa asked.

  ‘Well, to start with, I wasn’t even in the country when he cooked up his grand plan to lure me into Molok’s clutches. And look at the cock-up with Philippa.’ Trey flicked his eyes in the direction of the sad-looking girl in the cell next to Alexa’s. Trey had never met her before – he was already in Canada trying to find his Uncle Frank when Lucien and Alexa had brought her back to the apartment in London, and it was only through what Tom had told him about the Necrotroph and their successful efforts to kill it that he knew anything about the girl at all.

  ‘The Fire Imp assumed that the girl put into hiding by the Ashnon was you, Alexa. It found out that Lucien was up to something and guessed that you must be in danger. It passed the information on to Molok, and together they cooked up a plan. An Incubus was to imitate Lucien to lure Alexa out. Dreck found out at the last minute that it was in fact Philippa in hiding. They captured her anyway. They knew by then that Lucien wasn’t around, and t
hey hoped that you –’ he pointed a finger at Alexa – ‘would be stupid enough to try to rescue her. And guess what? They were right. You really were stupid enough.’ He shook his head, annoyed with himself for raising his voice at her. He hadn’t seen her since before his trip to Canada, and things had happened to him there that had made him realize just how much he felt for her.

  ‘You should have waited for me, not just disappeared like that,’ he said.

  ‘Nobody knew where you were! You went to Canada and simply disappeared into the wilderness.’

  ‘Then you should have let Tom help!’ Trey’s voice had risen in volume again.

  ‘And what are you doing here, huh?’ Alexa shot back at Trey angrily. ‘Could it be that you too are on some stupid, hare-brained rescue mission yourself?’

  ‘Well, somebody had to try to get you out of this mess!’

  Alexa bit her lip and stared at the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lex. I didn’t mean to shout at you. I’ve no right to talk to you like that. Not when it’s my fault that both of you are here at all.’

  Nobody said anything for a while. Alexa was the first to break the silence. ‘What happened to this … Dreck?’

  When he didn’t answer, Alexa looked up at Trey. He had a strange, unreadable look on his face. ‘The Fae took care of him.’

  ‘But they didn’t take care of you?’

  Trey glanced towards the door, still not certain that they were not being listened to. When he spoke again it was in a hushed voice. ‘No, I managed to acquire some … insurance against that happening.’

  ‘Insurance?’

  ‘A ring that he had to protect him against the Fae. I took it from him.’

  ‘And where is this ring now?’

  ‘Ah, that’s where there’s a slight problem.’ He looked across at her sheepishly. ‘I had to swallow it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, I had to morph inside the Fae gate to get the ring off Dreck. My clothes, or what’s left of them, are still in there somewhere. I then had to change back into my human form to get the bloody thing on my finger. Then I had to take it off to morph back into a werewolf again when I faced Molok because, you know, I didn’t really fancy facing down the demon lord as a naked teenager, so I had to swallow the ring.’

  ‘So this ring … the ring that can get us out of here … is in your stomach?’

  Trey didn’t like the way Alexa was looking at him as if he was the world’s biggest idiot. ‘In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t exactly have a surfeit of pockets when I’m a seven-foot werewolf! And it’s not like it’s gone for good. It’ll come out … eventually.’ He rubbed his stomach, grimacing at the thought.

  Despite herself, Alexa couldn’t help but smile, but this quickly turned into a frown as another thought crossed her mind. ‘What’s all this about the Demon Games? What did Molok mean when he said that you have a lot to learn?’

  Trey took a deep breath. ‘Dreck admitted why they’d gone to all this trouble to get me here: Molok wants me to be his new champion at the Demon Games. He thinks that by showing Caliban that he can make me fight for him in the Games he’ll give the vampire enough pause for thought to stop him attacking Molok’s fiefdom at all.’

  ‘That’s preposterous! If anything, it’ll make Caliban all the more determined to try to get to you!’

  Trey shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’ve explained all that, Lex. It’s no use. Molok’s made his mind up – he wants me to fight for him.’

  ‘Trey, you can’t. You can’t go into those Games. They’re barbaric. You’ll be killed.’

  ‘I don’t have much choice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He held her eyes with his own. ‘He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’

  Alexa stared back at him, and the look that passed between them said more than any thought-transfer spell ever could.

  ‘He’ll release us if you fight,’ she said in a small voice. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? You fight for him, and he releases us.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘What do you mean, not quite?’

  ‘Only one of you.’ Trey looked at the red floor in the centre of the room. ‘He’ll only release one of you.’

  There was a long silence, and then Philippa spoke for the first time. Trey had been so wrapped up in what he’d been saying to Alexa that he’d almost forgotten the other girl was there. ‘I’ll stay behind.’ She held a hand up to stop Alexa interrupting. ‘Despite what Trey might think, it’s my fault that you’re all here in this mess. Besides –’ she smiled at them each in turn, and there was no sign of resentment or self-pity in her voice – ‘I don’t think that Trey came all the way here to rescue me, did you? Why would you? You don’t know me from Adam.’

  ‘That will not be necessary.’ The voice came from somewhere in Trey’s cell, and the teenage boy whirled round, ready to transform and fight, only to find the space utterly empty.

  ‘Who said that? Who’s there?’

  ‘I am responsible for Philippa being in this predicament.’ The voice moved ahead of Trey now. It seemed to pass clean through the magic that walled the cell, and when it spoke again it was from somewhere in the centre of the room. ‘And I will see to it that she gets out of here.’ It was a flat, dull voice, bereft of all emotion and inflection.

  Trey looked across at Alexa, his eyes wide with fear. ‘There’s something in here with us. Something invisible is moving around.’

  ‘I heard it,’Alexa said.

  Trey was surprised at her unflustered tone. He looked across at her and saw that she seemed totally calm. She was scanning the space outside her own cell as if looking for something. ‘Where are you?’ she said.

  ‘I am here.’ A translucent humanoid form took shape in the air before Alexa’s cell. It was indistinct – the room could clearly be made out through it – but as soon as she spotted the dull metallic eyes Alexa knew that her hunch was right, and that the Ashnon had kept its promise to find her.

  Trey was pointing at the thing, his mouth hanging open. ‘A ghost? Is that a ghost, Alexa?’

  ‘No, it’s not a ghost.’ She rolled her eyes, and again Trey was made to feel like the village idiot. He glanced across at the Tipsbury girl and was even more surprised to see that she too seemed completely calm in the presence of the spectre.

  ‘What happened to the body?’ Alexa asked.

  ‘The Fae,’ the creature said. ‘Tiny pieces of Philippa’s duplicate body now reside in the bellies of those terrible creatures.’

  There was a noise outside the door. Trey, Alexa and Philippa all turned to see a viewing hatch slide back for a second. A Maug eye peered in at them. After a moment the guard drew back from the opening and the hatch slid shut again.

  Turning back to the room, Trey noticed that the ghost had disappeared again.

  ‘Unfortunately in this current form I am unable to survive for very long outside of my protective ward,’ the voice continued, although the creature did not reveal itself again. ‘I believe that I might be able to get Philippa out of this place by reproducing her one more time. But I cannot do that now. I am too weak. I must first return to the place I come from to recover. It will not be easy to do what I propose, but I have a contract with Philippa, and I will do everything I can to get her back to the human realm.’

  ‘How long were you in here before you revealed yourself?’ Alexa asked.

  ‘I have been here from the moment Molok brought Trey in.’

  ‘Then you heard what Trey said about agreeing to fight for him in the Demon Games?’ She pointed across at Trey. ‘Tell him what you told me about the Games.’ She spoke to the Ashnon, but her eyes were glued to Trey’s. ‘Tell him how they’re cruel and barbaric, and little more than an excuse for nether-creatures to watch other nether-creatures tear each other apart!’

  ‘I suspect our lycanthrope friend knows exactly what he is getting himself into.’ The Ashnon’s voice, with its lack of any emotion, was a stark contra
st to Alexa’s. ‘Besides, he has entered into an agreement with the demon lord, a contract much like the one I have with Philippa. The Netherworld is built upon such deals. Agreements and pacts and contracts are inviolable here, and the punishments for breaking one of these covenants are terrible. Trey cannot back out now. If he did, both your life and his own would become forfeit.’

  There was a terrible silence.

  ‘I must go now,’ the Ashnon said. ‘I will return in two days, maybe less.’

  Trey felt the presence of the demon near him. He spun round, trying to see anything that might reveal where the creature was. He hated to admit it, but the ghost thing spooked him. When the nether-creature spoke, its voice was quiet, whispering into Trey’s right ear, making the boy jump and shout out in fright.

  ‘When I return I will need the ring that you took from the Fire Imp. You must leave it somewhere outside the cells so that I can retrieve it.’

  ‘You know,’ Trey said, taking a deep breath and trying to slow down his hammering heart, ‘if you keep scaring me like that, you might get it back a lot faster than you think!’

  22

  ‘A vampire and an angel? Now that’s something you don’t see every day.’ Hag gestured for the two of them to enter, shuffling back and opening the door fully. She looked up at Moriel as the Arel passed, nodding her head in acknowledgement. ‘Moriel. I was sad to learn thenewsof Jenos’s murder. He was a great warrior and will be missed.’

  Moriel nodded back. ‘Yes, he will.’

  The old woman shut the door, and turned back to face Lucien. ‘So, to what do I owe the pleasure so soon after our last meeting?’