“Of course I will, if that’s what you really want,” he said. I could smell whiskey and sex on his breath. “But nothing makes you quite so crazy as an itch you’re not allowed to scratch, does it? Wouldn’t it be better to get it all out of your system in here where it’s safe?”
He leaned in and whispered in my ear, his words hot on my skin: “You might not survive Miko again. You could be dead tomorrow for all you know. You can’t have Cooper tonight, even if he makes it back in time. You can’t have anyone; you’re infected. Diseased. The viruses could kill you, too. But that doesn’t matter in here. You’re the goddess here. Do you really want to deny yourself this one last chance to experience something you might never have again?”
I closed my eyes, feeling as though I were teetering on the head of a pin. “I’m safe in here.” It came out half mantra, half question.
“You’re safe in here,” said a voice. It wasn’t the Warlock’s.
I opened my eyes. A doppelganger of Cooper was standing in front of me, blocking my way to the portal door. He was bare chested, wearing only his tight tuxedo pants, his jaw closely shaven and his goatee neatly trimmed. He smelled like gingerbread spice and clean healthy man.
“You can have whatever you want in here,” Cooper said, and what little willpower I had left crumbled like a child’s sand castle under a north shore wave.
Cooper leaned down and kissed me, and I kissed him in return, kissed him deeply, pulling his body to mine. With a thought, we were naked. The Warlock behind me was bared, too, and Cooper pressed me back into the hairy, muscular wall of his half brother’s body. My heart felt like a bird trying to flutter free from a cage of bone. The men rubbed against me, Cooper’s lips moving from my mouth down to my breasts, the Warlock kissing the back of my neck and gently biting my shoulders. The Warlock’s cock was hard against my hips, and Cooper was at warm, wet attention against my belly.
“Do you like this?” Cooper asked.
“Yes.” It was hard to speak.
“Do you want more?” the Warlock asked.
“Ohgodyes,” I breathed.
Cooper slipped his hands down the back of my thighs and lifted me up. I wrapped my legs around his narrow waist as I slid down onto his delicious cock, my swollen flesh grinding against the rough patch of his pubic hair. The Warlock ran his hands lightly down my back to my ass, where he began to do the most amazing things with his fingers and tongue.
The sensations were so strong and so hot that I came with a cry, clinging to Cooper’s sinewy body as he pushed himself into me, and the shudders had barely passed when the room tilted and I was lying back on the Warlock on the bed. He was filling me from behind, stretching my flesh in ways I’d never been stretched, my arms and legs wrapped by his strong limbs, and Cooper was kneeling on the mattress between my legs, sucking my clit, bringing me to the brink again—
—and I was standing, pressed between their straining bodies, both men filling me, thrusting into me, their hands and lips and tongues and teeth all over me—
—a sudden dizziness took me, and we were on the bed again, my nerves at their mercy as another orgasm rocked me, they weren’t giving me a chance to take a breath, weren’t giving me a chance to even think, the doppelganger I’d made before had been a passive thing who didn’t even speak, but these creatures had turned aggressive and relentless—
“No, wait,” I gasped, trying to get up.
“You’re safe here,” Cooper soothed, hard at work above me. “We have so much more for you; you just have to tell us what you want.”
“Tell us what you want,” the Warlock crooned behind me.
A chill washed through me as his words echoed in my memory. Miko’s mutinous lieutenant always said that to the people it parasitized: tell me what you want. And I’d dragged that shadow devil in here to kill it.
I remembered the sight of the disgusting jellylike creature melting into the floor as it perished … had some of the devil survived? Could it exist as a spirit fragment, a shade of the shadow?
Or had the nasty little thing gotten its hooks inside my head, planted seeds in my subconscious, and left me to reap them?
“I want to get out of here!”
But they weren’t letting me go. I looked to the dresser, seeking my enchanted sword and shield … and to my horror I realized they weren’t where I’d left them. They weren’t anywhere in sight. I felt my panic rise even as I came again under the doppelgangers’ sweaty pressure.
“Stay with us.…” Cooper whispered.
“Just stay with us.…” the Warlock echoed.
Cursing, I surged up beneath them, throwing off their grasping hands, and lurched toward the red portal door. My fingers touched the brushed steel handle just as I felt claws closing on my ankles—
chapter
six
Retribution
I came back to the living world, thrashing in the tepid water, fighting for breath. Jesus Christ. I lay back in the tub, shivering with fear and fever, trying to get my bearings. Jesus Jesus Jesus …
I stared up at a crack in the beige ceiling. The shadow of my own pulse darkened my vision with every beat. My stomach churned, and I felt hot tears begin to spill down my cheeks.
Trembling, I crawled out of the tub and stumbled wet and naked and weeping into the bedroom. I felt poisoned, violated, debased, and I wanted to be near someone who could make me feel safe.
“Pal, help.” My voice was a weak croak, too faint to hear.
He was curled up sound asleep on the pulled-out sofa-bed mattress. In his exhausted slumber, he looked both terrifying and fragile. My clean clothes were in a neat pile at the foot of the queen-size bed. Pal yawned and shifted, a stray ray of light from the gap in the blackout curtains shining on his gleaming, curved canine fang the size of a fighting knife. My loyal monster.
My opera glove was slipping down, and I could see my purple flames flickering above the cuff. Flames that were inextricably linked to my hellement … and the nasty little devil that was apparently trying to use it against me.
I felt anger begin to surface in the churn of my emotions. The cold, hard rage dried my tears like a wind from Valhalla. How dare the shadow try to trick me in my own domain? How dare it invade my most private thoughts? How fucking dare it?
“You’re going to wish you’d never been spawned,” I whispered to the flames, then reached down to jerk my glove back into place.
Pal needed his sleep, and I needed to cowgirl up. I didn’t need a hug, I didn’t need a shoulder to cry on; I needed to take my goddamned hell back and kill the little slime before it got any stronger.
I marched into the bathroom to grab a towel. After I’d scrubbed the water off my body, I put my clothes back on. Being naked or dressed in the living world didn’t really matter once I went into the hellement, but I didn’t like the feeling of being exposed when I was getting ready for a fight. I’d take any psychological boost I could get.
I sat down on the toilet to pull my boots back on: dark gray knee-high dragonhide with English fire-drakes embossed on the vamps and shafts. They, along with my brown dragonskin pants, were loaners from the Warlock, although if I kept getting demon ichor and other random yuck splattered on them he probably wouldn’t want them back.
Thinking of the Warlock sent my mood plummeting again, but I sat up and mentally gave myself a shake. Dragonskins were warrior’s gear, expensive warrior’s gear, and the Warlock wouldn’t have lent them to me if he didn’t think I deserved them. He wouldn’t have lent them to me if he hadn’t been my friend. He would have just given me a pair of Opal’s castoff engineer’s boots along with a cheerful “Good luck in hell!”
I stripped my opera glove off and stared into the flames, willing myself back into my hellement. I felt a strange vertigo, a sudden blindness, and when I came to I was standing beside the red portal door in my bedroom. My sword and shield were still nowhere in sight.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I sang to the seemingly
empty room.
No response, no sound but the faint rush of the breeze in the oaks outside.
“If you make me come after you, I’m not gonna be gentle,” I said.
Well, I wasn’t going to be gentle, regardless, but I was anxious to get this over with. I paused, giving it a moment to reply. Still no sound. I’d have almost believed it wasn’t there at all, that my creepy threesome had just been a figment of my battle-stressed subconscious … if it weren’t for my missing sword and shield. When I was alone in here, my weapons had remained in plain view no matter what form I’d put the hellement in.
So, obviously I was no longer alone.
“Have it your way.” I closed my right eye and started blinking my left to switch to a different view with my stone eye, one that would show me the architecture of my hellement. Dimensions like this could easily trick flesh eyes, but not my ocularis; my father had enchanted the stone with care, ensuring that once it was connected to my flesh and nerves it continued to work when I was a spiritual projection. Clearly his prophecy spells had told him I’d be spending a lot of time in diabolic places once I grew up.
Was I still pissed at him for not letting me know I was going to lose my eye in the first place? Hells yes—having my eye melted out of my skull by flaming demon ichor didn’t make for a fun evening. And I got a reminder of it every time I looked in the mirror and saw the scars on my face. But I couldn’t deny that the ocularis had been crucial when it came time to rescue Cooper.
I blinked through a half dozen views and finally found one that showed the hellement as a strange darkness at first, but the vision soon cleared so that I was seeing inside the insubstantial geometries that formed the dimension. And there, inside the smoke-like wall, I saw my sword and shield, solid and real, the only truly authentic objects in here.
“Nice try.” I stepped forward to retrieve my weapons. Once I’d slung my shield onto my arm and gripped my sword, I turned on my heel and scanned the room, seeking the shadow devil’s hiding place.
And there it was, under the bed, puddled like clotted blood between the jarred traumas, holding its breath, if it had breath to hold. It had an air of exhaustion, as if its previous attempt to trap me had wiped out its reserves.
“I should’ve guessed you’d be hiding under there, little monster.” I laughed, willing the bed away.
The devil gave a start when the sheltering mattress and box spring disappeared, and I raised my sword, preparing to spear it to the floorboards. Too late I realized it was clutching one of the jars, ready to fling the contents at me. I took a step back, but the shadow’s aim was good and silver memory like liquid mercury splashed into my face—
I was Cooper’s father, Corvus, down in the bottom of the pit in the basement, staring up at Lake Jordan, my beloved Siobhan’s husband. My eyes were swollen and red, my hands and back aching, and my palms blistered from digging this hole I was trapped in. My testicles ached from a hundred kinds of abuse. I wanted to throw up, but there hadn’t been anything in my stomach for nearly a week.
“You crazy fuck,” I choked. I couldn’t make any tears. I was so dehydrated I should have been dead, and my heart kept seizing up as it struggled to pump thick blood through my veins. But Lake had enough magic to keep me alive and suffering. When would this hell end?
“Can’t have you trying to run away again.” Lake impassively threw down a hacksaw and two lengths of rubber hose. “I want those legs off above the knee. And trust me, you don’t want me to come down there and do it myself.”
Cursing, I swiped the bitter memory out of my face with my shield hand, pulled myself back to the present. My eyes just had enough time to register that the slimy little devil had unscrewed another jar, and I braced myself—
I was a child, Cooper as a young boy of seven. I sobbed into my pillow, feeling so scared and miserable I wished the earth would open and swallow me whole. I lay on a single bed inside an eight-by-eight-foot chain-link dog pen in the corner of the basement. The cinder-block walls were bare beneath the harsh light from a single hanging bulb.
“It’s not right; I don’t want to hurt them,” I wept.
“You’ll do as I tell you, or I’ll have to kill your mother,” my stepfather, Lake, replied, standing somewhere in the shadows beyond my locked pen door. “And you don’t want that, do you?”
With all the effort I could muster, I pulled myself out of Cooper’s lost memory and furiously wiped my face clean, the heavy liquid falling from my fingers to the floor. The devil had its foul little pseudopods around the lid of another jar, trying to open it, but the jelly trembled with fatigue and was having trouble unscrewing the old trauma.
Whether it was truly exhausted or not, there wasn’t a second to lose. I swung my weapon down in a sweeping arc, hitting the devil with the flat of my blade. It couldn’t keep its grip on the jar and hurtled through the air, splatting into the far wall.
Before it had a chance to recover I was on top of it, pounding it over and over with my bronze shield, unleashing my anger with every blow, until the jelly had been utterly crushed flat. Panting, I straightened up, staring down at the devil. It certainly looked dead. But I’d torn its heart out in our previous battle, so clearly I couldn’t count on it not regenerating itself even after heavy damage. I had to figure out some way to contain it until I could dispose of it for good.
What could I do with the monster? Putting it in the wall where it had hidden my weapons surely wouldn’t work. As I set my sword and shield aside, my gaze fell on the silver puddles of spilled horrors and their discarded containers.
“You seem to like my trophies,” I said, reaching down to grab an empty jar. “Maybe you’d like a closer look?”
I scraped the remains of the jelly into the glass, leaving not even a speck of it behind on the floorboards. And then I scooped Cooper’s father’s memory in on top of it and screwed the lid on tight.
“There!” I said brightly. “You can be Corvus for a while. That’ll be fun, right?”
I held the jar up to the light, watching the red jelly shudder weakly as the heavy memory sank down into it, drowning it in unrelenting pain. A hell within a hell. I’d have almost felt sorry for it if I hadn’t seen the horrors it had wrought on the people in Cuchillo. Perhaps smallpox viruses suffered in their locked vials, too.
I set the jar down with the others, then put Cooper’s worst childhood memory back into its container and straightened the pile. Housecleaning finished, I stared down at the softly glowing jars, grimly admiring my handiwork.
And then, for just a moment, I caught the smell of clove cigarettes and gingerbread, and then a sudden warmth like a man standing close behind me. I snatched up my sword and whirled around … but nothing was there. I was alone in my domain.
It had just been my imagination. Surely. Feeling uneasy, I willed the bed back into place, leaned my weapons against the dresser, and went to the portal door so I could return to the living world.
chapter
seven
The Sisters Jackson
After I came out of my hellement, I woke Pal and we ventured downstairs to see if we could find some food. If anything I was even more achy and feverish, but putting the devil in its proper place made me feel darkly cheerful; my appetite had returned with a vengeance.
A few culinarily inclined Talents had opened up the hotel kitchen and set up a makeshift buffet supper of whatever they could find left in the pantry: rice, canned peas and mushrooms, tuna patties, mac and cheese, vanilla pudding. It wasn’t fancy, but they had enough for everyone, and I could eat everything but the tuna. Well, actually I could eat the fish; I just didn’t feel like reliving being speared in the gut or suffocated in an icy ship’s hold or however it was that the albacore died once it got hauled up in the net. As side effects of performing necromancy went, this definitely wasn’t the worst I could have suffered—I could have become unfashionably undead, for instance, and would be watching my extremities rot off in the heat—but tasting death was f
rustrating.
After I filled my plate and got some silverware out of the basket beside the buffet line, I surveyed the strangers sitting at the round tables, feeling like the new kid at school who didn’t know anyone and who had already gotten a reputation for being a dangerous weirdo.
My anxiety returned, the weight of the ticking minutes pressing down on my mind, and for a moment, I thought about just dumping my tray on the conveyor belt, turning, and leaving to get my shotgun and go find Miko. But … how? I didn’t have so much as a fingernail clipping to use to track her. My body was trembling from fever and hunger. I doubted I had the strength to walk around the block, much less chase anyone through the desert. I knew I should just get some food and sleep, take my medicine, and wait until morning for the guys to come back. I promised I’d wait.
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down. I’d wait. It was the best thing to do.
“Are you okay?” Pal peered at me with concern.
Yeah, I’m fine, I thought back to him. So where do you think we should sit?
“How about over there?” He nodded toward a table occupied by two fifty-something women. “They look pleasant.”
And they did. Both of the ladies had gray Afros and orange-and-black cotton mudcloth dresses and matching hair wraps; if they weren’t actual twins, they certainly seemed to be playing up their resemblance to each other. Caramel-spotted rats perched on their shoulders, eating tidbits their mistresses fed to them. I didn’t see any rat droppings, so I suspected they were familiars and not pets; nobody wants a familiar that randomly craps all over everything.
Well, probably nobody. Talents can be a strange bunch.
“Hello,” I said, approaching their table. “May we sit with you?”
“Sure thing,” the lady to the left said. “Long as he doesn’t—”
“—try to eat our ratties,” the lady to the right said.
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