He leaned down to kiss my cheek after I pulled the portal open for him. “Are you sure you’ll be okay out here by yourself?”
“I’ll be fine. Go help your brothers. And, hey … maybe it’s something that won’t take much time, and you can get back here before I have to go into the swamp.”
I waved to him as he stepped through the hole in the air, and then I went back to the house. Madame Devereaux met me on the front porch; she held a half-bushel basket full of whole pecans.
“Where’s that Cooper feller?”
“He had to go home,” I replied. “Family emergency.”
She grunted noncommittally, frowning. “Gonna make a pie for dessert.” She thrust the basket into my hands. “Make yourself useful and shell these out back.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
chapter
twenty-six
The Promise
My brother’s energy potion had well and thoroughly worn off by the time dinner was over, but I dared not drink my second one since I knew I’d need it for my encounter with the bayou beast. So I took some diphenhydramine I found in the bathroom and lay down on the cot in the guest room, sweating and itching, trying to still the waves of nausea churning through my stomach.
C’mon, Benadryl, I thought. Do your thing.
Fifteen minutes passed, and nothing happened. The capsules were either too old, or my infections had changed my body chemistry enough that antihistamines wouldn’t make me drowsy. Dammit. I briefly considered a second trip to raid the medicine cabinet for something stronger, but then I remembered what happened to Heath Ledger, Keith Moon, and Jimi Hendrix. Two pills might not put you to sleep, but a cocktail of five or six can put you in the ground.
I’d been resisting going back into my hellement on general principle—it hadn’t been the scene of my best moments. But if I couldn’t drug myself into a stupor, it seemed like it was the only place I was going to get any decent rest. So I closed my eyes and focused on the flames hidden beneath my enchanted glove, and soon I felt myself slipping down into my private dimension.
The vertigo passed, and I opened my eyes in my hellement, expecting to see either the familiar walls of my childhood bedroom or the broad lawn in my old neighborhood. But what was there gave me the same disorienting lurch of fear I’d have felt if I got home late at night to discover my apartment door ajar and my living room ransacked. The first thing I saw was my favorite childhood teddy bear impaled to a wall of moisture-darkened dungeon stone with a rusty spike. The bear’s plush acrylic fur was damply red around the piercing iron.
Alarmed, I looked around the room. The rest of the wall was set with rusty rings for manacles and ropes, and every so often, I saw one of my childhood toys or photos staked into the slimy granite. The overhead light was the dim yellow of half-remembered nightmares; it gleamed dully on the shards of my shattered vanity mirror scattered across the concrete floor. Splintered pieces of the wooden frame lay among the glass. Beside me sat an antique electrocution chair made from scorched, bloodstained oak, the worn leather straps open and awaiting a new occupant. A few yards away, a scarlet velvet curtain hung from the rough stone ceiling to the glass-strewn floor, blocking my view of whatever lurked beyond.
But I could hear a muffled moan. Something was here. Something had taken over. The place couldn’t have screamed “Get out!” any louder if the walls had been covered in flies and dripping ichor. My heart thudding, I turned back to the portal door and grabbed the handle … but it wouldn’t budge. I looked down and saw a shiny new deadbolt lock set into the steel.
Oh hell no, I thought, shoving down on the handle with as much force as I could muster. I was strong in here, this was my place, and I could will all this away … couldn’t I?
I shoved until my shoulders popped. I yanked until my fingers went numb. I willed with every cell in my brain. The damn thing wouldn’t open.
I heard a soft laugh behind me. Miko’s laugh. My guts went to jelly.
“You shouldn’t have brought me here, Jessie. But you did. And now you’re not leaving until I’m done with you tonight.”
I tried to swallow my terror and turned to face her. She was naked except for the switchblade she was flicking open and closed in her left hand. Something far beyond hate burned in her green eyes. Her skin was flushed, sheened with perspiration, but her nipples were as hard as if we were in a meat freezer. She smiled at me.
“Look who I found.” Miko stepped back across the floor toward the scarlet curtain, either unaware or unconcerned that the shattered glass of my mirror was cutting the soles of her feet. She grabbed the edge of the velvet with her right hand and pulled it aside for her big reveal.
Cooper was shackled to a rough wooden Saint Andrew’s cross in the corner, his arms and legs spread in a wide X. He was sweating, breathing hard against the blue silk rag she’d stuffed into his mouth. His white cotton dress shirt was soaked, plastered against the tight muscles of his abdomen. The knees of his jeans were stained with dirt and what looked like blood, but I couldn’t see any cuts or bruises on him. I wondered if my brother and the Warlock were okay. Behind him, the jarred memories were stacked in a neat pyramid.
He met my gaze and shook his head furiously at me, grunting against his gag. His eyes said Get out, get out, save yourself.
I wondered for a moment if he could be a doppelganger she’d conjured to trick me, but I could smell his sweat. And instead of gingerbread spice, he smelled like garlic. I smelled the real man, not my fantasy of him.
“Let him go!” I stepped toward Miko, my fist raised, wishing once again that I knew how to bring my fire into the hellement. I blinked through several gemviews, trying to see where she’d hidden my sword and shield, but the stones of the dungeon stayed solid no matter how I looked at them.
“Sit down.” She made a little shooing motion with her hand, and an invisible force swept me off my feet and dropped me down to the electric chair, the straps snapping up and binding me to the wood at my ankles, thighs, chest, upper arms, and wrists. I felt helpless and terrified.
“It’s time for us to play,” she said.
I strained against the leather, unable to break free, unable to take my eyes off the keen blade she kept flicking open and closed in her hand. It was a restless, angry motion, like that of a caged jaguar lashing its tail.
“Miko … you don’t have to do this.” I blinked to the architectural view with my ocularis and concentrated as hard as I could, but the walls around me remained solid and black; I couldn’t see my weapons anywhere.
She stopped flicking the switchblade and gave me a withering smile. “Oh, but I do. I promised you I’d take a trophy tonight, and I will. I can’t break a blood oath, Jessie. It’s not in my nature.”
Miko turned back to Cooper, opened the stiletto again, and began to pick the buttons off his shirt with the point of the blade. I heard them ping against the concrete floor and roll away into darkness. Once she’d exposed his torso, Miko drew the blade down the center of his chest in a single quick motion, bright red spilling down his damp flesh as his skin split. His eyes rolled white as he shuddered, but he didn’t make a sound.
“No! Don’t!” I begged. “Please.”
To my surprise, she stopped. And then she turned and stepped toward me, my lover’s blood dripping from the tip of her weapon. Her bare feet crunched on the broken glass littering the floor, turning the shards to glossy rubies.
“I must take a trophy,” she repeated. “Will you take his place, then?”
“W-what?” I stammered.
“You or him; it doesn’t matter to me.” She paused, tilting her head thoughtfully to the side as she stared at me. Appraising me. “You might even survive it. I don’t know about him, though. Sometimes the wiry ones can go the distance … and sometimes they’re done in five minutes.”
I scanned the grim walls, looking for something, anything that would give me an idea of how to get us out of this. Jesus. There didn’t seem to be any escape except to s
ubmit to whatever twisted vivisection she had planned. My magic felt distant, diminished. Useless.
“It’s up to you.” Miko turned and slowly walked back to Cooper. “I won’t touch you without your consent.”
“What about him? You … you’ve got him gagged, he can’t consent to this.” I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking.
She smiled and patted his stubbled cheek. “Oh, he made me certain promises when we were alone together. I have all the consent from him I’ll ever need.”
Cooper’s stared at me, his eyes pleading: Don’t do it.
I squeezed my eyes shut, took a deep breath, opened them again. “Leave him alone. Take me instead.”
My lover gave an anguished groan and hit his head back against the stones in frustration. Miko grinned like a kid at Christmas.
“Well then.” She made a small gesture, and the straps on my wrists unbuckled themselves and slithered away. I still couldn’t move my arms because of the leather binding me across my biceps. She walked over to my chair, wiping her blade off on her naked thigh, and reached down to take hold of my left hand with her right.
“Blood promises must be kept.” In a quick, practiced motion, she carved the blade around my forearm in a perfect circle. The knife was sharper than I imagined, and it took a moment for the pain to register. I gasped as my blood rose around the sharp steel. She dragged the edge down the underside of my arm from the cut to the base of my palm, not deep enough to slit the veins, just enough to slice through every layer of my skin.
“W-what are you doing?” I stammered as she made the same cuts on my right forearm.
“All will be revealed soon enough.” She dropped her blade to the floor, put her hands gently on mine, as though she were a lover. She slid her hands up the tops of my forearms and dug her fingers deep into the cuts she’d made.
I twitched and gasped, biting back a cry.
“Make a wish, Jessie.” Her face was just inches from mine. Suddenly she jerked her hands down like a magician doing a parlor trick with a tablecloth, ripping the skin cleanly from my wrists and hands.
For a half heartbeat, I stared down in shock at my raw scarlet fingers gleaming in the dim light, the sights of yellow tendons, filmy ligaments, sliding muscles, and pulsing bluish veins burning themselves into my memory. And then the agony slammed into me, strong and bright as a nuclear explosion, and I was screaming out every particle of air in my lungs, my vision going black at the edges, blood roaring in my ears. All the other assaults I’d suffered—my arm bitten off, my eye melted from my skull, my flesh burned away with fire and acid—seemed like paper cuts compared to this.
“Isn’t the pain just amazing?” Miko whispered, sounding envious. “You’ll never feel it like you’re feeling it now. There’s nothing like your first flaying.”
She shook my damp hand skins out by the fingers, admiring them. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not, but I thought I could faintly feel the movement of my severed flesh.
“Nice strong dermis,” she remarked, “not much fat to scrape away—I think I can make some rather fashionable accessories out of these. Can’t use them in the living world, but I have the feeling I’ll be spending a lot of playtime in here with you and your little friend.”
I tried to curse her but all that came out was garbled blubbering. Bile rose in my throat, and my eyes stung with sweat and tears. I could dimly see Cooper weeping on his cross, his head drooping forward on his chest as if his heart was broken.
Smiling, Miko hung my skins on one of the iron rings set in the wall.
“I’ll have you know I’m being merciful.” She paused to lick my blood off her fingers. “In my moment of anger, I did swear to skin you alive, and there’s nothing to do about that but to skin you. But most anyone else who is bound to fulfill such a promise would this very minute be peeling the rest of your pretty hide from your flesh. And I’m not doing that, am I? You’ve still got your face. You’ve still got your feet. And I won’t do anything else to you tonight unless you give me a reason.”
She reached far into the back of her mouth and pulled out a shiny silver key. And then she let it fall to the floor with a soft clink amid the glass shards and splinters and droplets of blood.
“You can go now. I’m sure you can figure out how to get the door open.” She retrieved her knife and made another shooing motion. The straps binding me began to unbuckle themselves. “But unless you want me to pay a real-life visit to you and your ailing familiar, don’t try to interfere with the man.”
I sat there, breathing hard, trying to get past the crippling pain. Trying to keep from screaming again. Trying to keep from throwing up. I tried to imagine fresh skin flowing over my hands, tried to speak a word for “heal,” but the words were blocked, my powers still dim.
My hands were trembling red claws in the unforgiving air. I couldn’t bear to look at Cooper. Whatever happened next, I was helpless to save him from our captor. She leaned against the slick stone wall, watching me impassively. Curiously, as though I were a lab mouse she’d set down in a maze.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” she asked. “Don’t bore me; I’ll find ways of entertaining myself. You probably won’t like them.”
I tried to stand up on rubbery legs and immediately fell to my knees on the floor, the broken glass jabbing right through my jeans. The new pain was actually a welcome distraction from my hands. I stared down at the key, now just a few feet away from my right knee, then at my bony fingers. Even if I could bear the thought of trying to pick something up with them, they were thoroughly greased in clotting blood and weeping lymph. I couldn’t hold so much as a thought with them.
So I leaned forward, painfully, carefully, onto my elbows in the glass until my face was over the key. I tried a few times to pick it up with my lips, then finally got it into my mouth with my tongue.
“Well done!” Miko golf-clapped behind me.
Rolling back onto my heels, I slowly stood up, my head swimming from the pain. I tottered over to the portal door and shifted the gritty key in my mouth until I had it clenched between my front teeth.
“Careful, now; the next part may be a little tricky,” she said.
Ignoring her, I leaned down and pushed the key into the lock. Tried to turn it. The lock was stiff. I bit down, twisting the key as hard as I could, teeth aching, threatening to crack. Finally, I felt the mechanism turn and click, the bolt retracting.
“See you tomorrow!” Miko called as I pushed the portal door open with my head and fell through.
chapter
twenty-seven
Meat
When I found myself back on the guest room cot, my flesh intact—well, as intact as it had ever been since my encounter with Blue’s demon—all I could do was lie there, breathing hard and shuddering. Yet my hands still ached as if they had truly been flayed.
Sleep was lost to me, and I was desperate to talk to Cooper. I’d left him to Miko’s mercy—was he okay in the living world? Did any of the others know he was in trouble? I went into the bathroom and tried and tried to make the mundane mirror open with ancient words and my own blood, but nothing worked.
I was reluctant to awaken Madame Devereaux, but when I heard her go into the kitchen to make her morning chicory, I anxiously approached her.
“Something’s happened,” I said. “Can I borrow your mirror?”
“Mirror?” she replied. “I don’t keep them things around; never know who might be trying to listen in.”
I almost swore. “How did you talk to my father, then?”
“I didn’t talk to him; he dropped a letter straight into my mailbox.”
“Do you at least have a phone?” I did my damnedest to not sound impatient. I didn’t succeed.
She frowned at my tone. “There’s one in the living room. Help y’self; long distance don’t cost me none extra.”
“Thank you.”
I found an old-fashioned black Bakelite rotary dial phone on a lace doily on the reading
table beside the sofa. Cooper had lost his cellphone the night he got dragged into his hell, so I tried the numbers at the Warlock’s bar.
“Lingham Liquors Lounge, whaddaya want?” answered an impatient twenty-something guy with a Brooklyn accent. A new bartender? I didn’t recognize his voice. Somewhere behind him, I could hear angry drunken shouting.
“Are Opal or the Warlock there?” I asked.
“Nope. Call back later.”
Click.
I stared down at the disconnected phone, then redialed the number.
“Lingham Liquors Lounge, whaddaya want?”
“Dude, did you just hang up on me? Seriously?” I asked.
“They ain’t here.” He enunciated each word as if he thought I was brain damaged.
“Well, do you know where they are? It’s kind of an emergency.”
“No, I don’t, and if it’s an emergency, call 911.”
Click.
Shanique was in earshot, and I only barely managed to keep from dropping a dozen F-bombs. I made a mental note to find out who the bartender was, and to soundly kick his ass when I finally met him in person. But calling him back to chew him out wasn’t going to get me what I needed. So I dialed Mother Karen’s house.
Her eldest foster son answered after two rings: “Sebastián residence, this is Jimmy.”
“Hey, this is Jessie … is Mother Karen around?”
“No, she’s mostly been in Clintonville the past two days,” he replied. “I guess something bad happened there yesterday? She called in some emergency babysitters to help me with the little kids while she’s away.”
“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“No, sorry, I really don’t. Probably tonight, though.”
“Does she have a cell with her?”
“Maybe …” I heard the sound of papers rustling. “No, sorry, she forgot it here under the mail. Can I take a message or have her call you back?”
“Sure.” I gave him the number printed on the front of the phone.
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