I rinsed off his switchblade and dried it with a dish towel, admiring it. Roy had never let me hold his weapon of choice. But he was right: it was an unusually fine blade, much sharper than the trench knife I’d been using for years, and it wasn’t nearly as bulky. Extended, the knife had an excellent balance, good for throwing and thrusting both, and folded, it fit well in my fist. I’d miss the brass knuckles built into the trench grip, but I could change my attack style a little and use the folded switchblade like a yawara on pressure points or to crush temples.
It had the weight of a trophy. And when I saw the weapon in my hand, I would know that I could do anything that I put my mind to. If I could kill my guardian, there wasn’t any mortal on the whole green Earth that I couldn’t destroy.
I tucked the switchblade into the pocket of my blue jeans and sat on the counter. Roy had never told me exactly what kind of devil or demigoddess his mother was; I didn’t know if what I’d done to him would put him down for good. So I sat there for a whole hour, staring down at his body, watching for signs of regeneration that never came.
When I was sure he was dead, I began to pack my most important belongings into my canvas rucksack. First in was a wooden cigar box containing five hundred dollars and my identities. I had three sets of birth certificates and driver’s licenses, which variously said I was Suzy Chen, nineteen, from San Francisco; Mary Redfeather, seventeen, from Shawnee, Oklahoma; and Rosa Dominguez, eighteen, from El Paso, Texas. Roy had made sure I learned to speak enough Chinese, Spanish, and Cherokee to pass locally if I had to. My Spanish was best, so Rosa’s license went into the pocket of my jeans. Then I packed my favorite clothes into the rucksack and laid my enameled steel mess kit on top.
I slipped on the black steer-hide Perfecto jacket I’d taken from a Highwayman biker outside Chicago then went into the living room to gather Roy’s expensive liquors from the wet bar, thinking hard. Just because Roy was gone now didn’t mean I wouldn’t feel an ever-increasing urge to murder. If I went much more than a month without taking a soul, I’d start to hallucinate, only a little at first, but soon enough I’d be fully reliving the personal horrors of my victims.
Roy once locked me in a basement for two whole months, just to see what would happen. Like everything else he did to me, he claimed it was for my own good: I needed to know my own limits. Needed to know them not just intellectually, not just as some theory of the flesh, but as a hard, physical certainty. After he finally let me out, it took me most of the rest of the year to recover my sanity. At least he’d been relatively gentle with me afterward; maybe he realized that Mother wouldn’t be pleased with him if he broke her best weapon.
But I knew full well that the more souls I took, the worse it would be when I stopped taking them. Mother was nothing if not a ruthless motivator.
There was a circus camped just outside the town; if I joined their crew, I’d be able to make quiet kills in every town we visited. And maybe I wouldn’t get stuck shoveling elephant dung or hammering tent stakes; maybe they could use a contortionist, or a sword swallower, or a strong woman. I could make my flesh do almost anything any human could do. And more than most, surely; I wasn’t burdened with a Christian’s moral terror of body violations.
I took an armload of whiskey, gin, and vodka bottles back into the kitchen and soaked Roy down with his favorites. If there was anything worthwhile to be had in the house or my uncle’s shriveled excuse of a spirit, my brother the fire god was welcome to it. I lit a match, dropped it onto Roy’s body, and left his remains to burn along with the rented bungalow.
I never looked back.
chapter
fifteen
Goad Hunt
I broke free of Miko’s memory at last. My lungs were burning for air. The cracked ice was inches from my face. I still gripped my sword and shield—thank God the cold water made my shivering muscles clench, my fingers slow to release—so I punched up with my left arm, the edge of the shield breaking a wide moon crescent out of the ice. I thrust my sword arm up, breaking the hole wider, and hauled myself to the surface.
The ice started crazing and crackling beneath me as I scrambled toward the rocky dam, but I reached the glazed stones and managed to throw myself onto them before the frozen shelf shattered. I lay there, clinging to the rocks, gasping for breath, the frigid air like a thousand needles in my lungs. My water-stringy hair was freezing into icicle dreadlocks, and I could see frost crystals spreading across the sleeve of my jacket. To top it all off, my eyelids froze over my damn ocularis again.
It’s not really cold in here, I told myself. It’s not really anything in here. This is all the Goad’s illusion. See through it.
My pep talk wasn’t working, not even a little bit, and I could feel the knees of my leather pants freezing to the stones beneath me. I started crawling forward toward the bank, still gripping my shield and weapon. My gloves were turning hard as iron, but at least they were keeping the rocks from skinning my knuckles. The land surrounding the pond was a huge, beautifully landscaped garden that had suffered a fierce ice storm; tulips and roses were bent nearly double, their ice-sheathed heads touching the ground. The limbs of flowering bushes and small cherry trees were also burdened, dragging low, twigs and branches threatening to break at any moment.
I collapsed again as I reached solid ground. The paving stones below me felt as though they were sucking every last joule of heat from my core. I wasn’t sure what it would be like to freeze to death, whether it would hurt as tiny razors of ice seeded in my flesh and sliced open my cells, or if it would simply be a numb drifting away, but I was pretty sure I was within just a few minutes of finding that out.
In Cooper’s hell, when I’d switched to a different ocularis view, my entire perception of the dimension had changed, not just my vision. Roughly the same things were happening, but the people were different, the scenery had changed, even the air was different. Could it work here, too? I prayed that it would.
My whole body was shivering and my flesh was so numb I could barely feel any of what I was doing. I cracked the ice sealing leather to leather and slipped my leaden arm out of the straps so I could set my shield down on the stones. With effort, I got to my knees and sat in the padded concave interior. I dared not let go of my sword, and I dared not let my shield get far from me. For all I knew, the Goad was lurking just out of sight, waiting to snatch away my protection.
I dearly wished I could summon my fire to my left hand. Seeing Miko bring her switchblade into my hellement made me wonder if it was possible, but sitting there with the freeze seeping into my brain I couldn’t figure out the trick. I pressed the chilly palm of my left hand to the eyelids frozen over my cold ocularis, hoping it would warm, willing it to warm.
Finally, finally, the frost melted and my torpid eye muscles started working again, and I was able to blink. Once. Nothing. Twice. Nothing. Thrice. Nothing.
Not a goddamned thing. I couldn’t see anything through my ocularis. Had the cold broken it?
Oh God oh God, c’mon, I’m dying here. I took a deep, lung-torturing breath and blinked again.
The garden around me changed, and I felt warmth flow back into my body. What had been trees and bushes and flower beds I now saw were people—tens of thousands of people—standing, crouching, lying on the ground. They were all immobilized in glassy chrysalises, their souls red and orange and purple lights burning within, tiny factories generating energy for the devil that’d trapped them. I could see the expressions of the dozen closest to me; they weren’t having pleasant dreams inside their prisons.
Okay, then. I quietly moved off my shield and slung it back on my arm, staring past the souls into the darkness between them, trying to see what might lie there. When Miko had tried to take my soul, she’d mistakenly absorbed the one surviving larval Goad that had still been lurking in my hellement. What did the little devil look like now? Its mother was a vast, flaccid creature in my boyfriend’s hell, a genuine monster that had grown fat on decades of angst,
forcing her prey to relive their personal horrors over and over. But her child had only been in Miko’s hell for a couple of days. It hadn’t had much time to mature to an adult form, but it had over a thousand times more souls to feed from.
So was the young Goad still the small, quick sponge-like larva that had slipped past my blade in Cooper’s hell? Or had it gotten huge and sedentary like its mother? I kept creeping along the path, watching the dark places for movement.
And then as I was scanning a small rocky hill … the whole thing shifted and undulated toward me. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. Crap. My stone eye focused more closely on the “hill,” and I saw it was pocked with hollows and burrows. In some holes, I saw fluttering tentacles I knew it used to taste and smell. In others, I saw circular grinding orifices like the toothy maws of hagfish. And in others shone glossy, deep-black eyes the size of basketballs.
A few days feeding off tens of thousands of souls’ agonies had sped its growth beyond anything I’d imagined. It wasn’t as huge as its momma, but it could still move around, and that made it more dangerous. At least it wasn’t either old enough or big enough to spawn yet. I watched its black eyes, and realized that of course they were all focused on me.
Great. I really did have to slay a mountain. Pity I didn’t have a dragon to climb. Or any other allies in here, for that matter.
I sidestepped to the nearest trapped soul. She was curled like a fetus within her prison, naked. Her features were blurred, distorted further by her agonized expression. She looked to be maybe eighteen or nineteen. Could she be awakened? I rapped on her chrysalis. The glassy surface was granite-solid, unyielding. I hit it again, harder, and she stirred and moaned, but did not open her eyes.
“Hey, wake up!” I called to her, sounding stupidly desperate even to myself. She was a stranger; if I knew anything about her, knew her name at the very least, maybe I could pull her out of the trauma she was reliving. But otherwise? I might as well have tried to awaken a marble statue.
The mountainous Goad made another ground-shaking lurch in my direction. Was it genuinely slow, or just trying to trick me into thinking it was too heavy to fly? Its mother was only able to work the illusions of the hell to try to trap me, relying on her swarming children for protection. While most of the brood had been as bright as angry hornets, this particular offspring had already proved it was fairly clever.
I looked around at the trapped souls again, trying to think of a workable attack plan as I searched for anyone familiar. But nobody was recognizable. I didn’t know the faces of the people on Sara’s list; I’d glimpsed her husband once, but he’d been wearing a blindfold, and what I’d seen of his face was pretty ordinary. A lot of guys looked like him; there was little chance of me being able to pick him out through a chrysalis blur. There were maybe a handful of men I’d actually talked to before they fell to Miko. How could I find any of them in here among these thousands? And what good could any of them do even if I somehow found one of them and freed him before the Goad devoured me or did any of a thousand other horrible things that dangled from the gallows of my imagination?
The Goad made a low rumbling noise. “I sssseeee you, mongrellll.”
Well, it knew about as much English as its mother. I met its dark, hundred-eyed gaze, raising my sword and shield. “Great. You see me. What now?”
“Now you run!”
The Goad flattened itself, its spongy blob of a body rippling, and then it released, springing high into the air, sailing fast toward me, fifty tons of oily, ink-black flesh ready to squash me like a blueberry under a rancid side of beef.
Christ on a cracker. Yeah, I ran. Fast as I could, and I’d barely cleared its crush zone when I heard and felt it slamming down to the ground right behind me. I felt a moment of relief, slowed a little, and chanced a glance backward.
Black tentacles were shooting out of the sides of the goad like cannon-fired harpoons from a pirate ship. I tried to run faster, but a tentacle whipped into the back of my thigh, knocking me down. I tried to get some purchase on the damp grass to crawl away but the tentacle slithered tight around my leg and began to drag me back toward the monster.
“Fuckdamnfuck!” I managed to flip myself over as it hauled me over the damp ground, reeling me in like a sport fish. One of those horrible grinding mouths spasmed just above the pore the tentacle was retreating into. Snack time, and I was the chef’s special. I tucked my shield close to my body and held my sword ready.
There were only seconds left before the tentacle would yank me into the Goad’s maw. I would have only one chance at this. My shield was maybe a little bigger than the circumference of the mouth, maybe—
—a sudden jerk and I was there, the tentacle whipping me up at that looming garbage disposal orifice. I rammed the shield against the undulating teeth. As the mouth twitched, scraping the metal, seeming unsure of what to do with this unexpected resistance, I drove the point of my sword deep into the oily, gritty flesh. Dark ichor that stank of diesel spurted from the wound. It was like cutting into oil-field mud. I carved my blade down hard in an arc around the outer lip of the mouth, trying to sever the muscles controlling the grinding jaws.
It was working. I felt part of the mouth go slack, but tentacles grabbed both my booted feet, pulling them in opposite directions like I was a wishbone the monster wanted to snap. I jerked my blade free from the sucking flesh and slashed the tentacles constricting my feet. They were tough as tire rubber, but I hacked them away.
The Goad was shuddering, shifting, corpulent muscles bunching beneath its foul skin. It was going to try for another jump. Or maybe it was just going to flop over. Either way, it would crush me. I had to find its heart, had to kill it as quickly as possible before it could do the same to me.
I slipped my arm out of the shield still jamming its mouth, took a rib-straining breath, shut my eyes, then plunged into the cut I’d made, slicing deeper with my sword while I tore at the greasy flesh with my left hand and the toes of my boots. The monster’s inner tissues had a loose, pulpy feel, like the inside of a huge citrus fruit, as if it had been growing so quickly that its meat hadn’t had a chance to fill in and harden. But that lax texture made my task easier. I burrowed into its body, ignoring the stinging ichor, relying on touch and my instincts to tell me how far to go.
The beast roared and writhed. The flesh around me contracted as if it were trying to push me out. But after everything the Goad had done to me, after it had turned me into a cannibal, infected me, tried to kill me, I wasn’t about to stop. Oh hell no. And I was close. I could feel the pulse and heat of its heart, see the red glow of it even through my closed eyelids.
I plunged my left hand through the last membrane into the burning magma auricle, connecting myself to the source of its diabolic power, and the current ran through me, a dark electricity that lit up my every synapse and nerve ending with sparks and shadows of the trapped multitudes’ personal torments. My hand was in flaming agony, but I knew I could bear it. I had been through worse. The Goad’s roar turned to a terrified shriek as I pulled its vile life energy into the reservoir in my hellement.
The beast shuddered in seizures, and its flesh began to fall apart from the inside out, a rotting house of loose meat. The current disconnected as the devil died, and I fell back among the oily charnel rubble, gasping for air, spitting out the Goad’s foul fluids, wiping my eyes clear on my sleeves. My left hand was a charcoaled mess, but I was too high on adrenaline to feel much pain.
It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever done, but I was overjoyed: I’d won. And now Miko had to hold up her end of our bargain. Grinning, I began kicking through the stink to find my shield.
chapter
sixteen
Afterlives
The darkness around me lifted as a bright yellow sun swung into the sky. The frozen garden thawed in an instant, and the chrysalises disappeared; in the distance, I saw people appearing on the hills and in the woods. The land around me—well, at least the par
ts that weren’t covered in rotting Goad—was breathtakingly lovely. Seeing all that beauty drained my adrenaline away, and along with it most of my energy. My body suddenly felt as though it weighed four hundred pounds.
I slung my greasy shield onto my back, staggered out of the devil’s carcass, and stepped onto lush, springy grass. The ground shook, and a rectangular metal box erupted from the soil just a few feet away from me. At first I thought it was some kind of phone booth, but the steely outer skin fell away and I realized it was a shower stall.
“Do what you have to do,” Miko said, giving me a start as she appeared in front of me, “but don’t track ichor all over the place. It kills the flowers.”
She was wearing clothing for a change: a flowing, sleeveless silk gown patterned after darkly veined jade. With the sunlight shining behind her, the dress didn’t leave a whole lot of her anatomy to the imagination, but it was a passable nod to human modesty.
“There are some families with young children in here,” she said, apparently either catching my thought or reading it in my face, “who objected to my nudity. I am always concerned about my subjects’ comfort.”
I snorted. “Yeah, right.”
She smiled at me. “You, my little killer, aren’t one of my subjects. Nor are your friends in the living world. You don’t get to feel the warmth of my compassion until you’ve given yourself to me. Completely. All the souls in here surrendered themselves, body and soul, and now they can reap the everlasting sweet fruits of their most wise choices.”
“Everlasting, yeah … I could tell it’s been just the most awesome place ever around here lately,” I shot back.
“My interruption in spiritual service was entirely your fault.” She waved a finger at me in mock admonishment. “Though you do have my thanks for cleaning up your own mess like a good girl.”
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