The boy grabbed his head and wailed while Malcolm turned his attention to the girl. He couldn't see her or much of anything else—blood flowed freely from his forehead—but he felt one of her hair braids and tugged it as hard as he could. She screamed, but somehow stayed attached to him and lunged for the bottle above their heads. Malcolm grabbed a fistful of hair and jerked the girl backward, held her above the street with one hand and the bottle with the other.
“Stop it,” he gasped. “I said stop it.”
He almost laughed at the futility in his words as soon as they'd escaped his lips. They weren't children anymore, not any more than he was still a man. They were creatures of addiction. And Malcolm knew exactly what those creatures would do when cut off from their fix—the only thing giving their lives any significance—because he was one of them.
The boy charged at him again.
Malcolm kicked him square in the chest, and the kid ricocheted off his shoe like a soccer ball into the street. The girl squirmed in his grasp, not stopping even when he flipped her upside down and dangled her by her shoe inches from the street. She screamed…
And then she lunged at him.
Malcolm dropped her, and she landed on top of the boy in a heap.
But that wasn't the only thing he dropped.
The decanter slid through his sweaty fingers in slow motion. When he reached for it with his other hand, his bloody fingers only worsened the agony.
They watched the bottle tumble end over end, voices joined in a terrible scream.
Crash.
The bottle exploded in a thousand shards of glass. Golden liquid spewed in every direction, covering clothes and skin and concrete alike. Malcolm felt its warmth sticking to his arm hair, sloshing against his bloody legs. Down onto his knees he went to join the children. Their skirmish temporarily forgotten, they gathered together around the broken bottle like soldiers around a wounded friend.
The boy yelled, the girl sobbed, and Malcolm bit his lip and dove forward to try to put the glass pieces back together in a way that made sense. His fingers flew over the remains, picking up new cuts along the way. Then, after a futile attempt to align the mismatched edges, he let the glass pieces fall to the ground and screamed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The golden liquid was there, moving along the ground like an overturned bottle of honey. Malcolm pressed his lips to the ground and licked some of it up before it ran into a nearby storm drain.
“Get out of my way,” he told the vacant-eyed twins, shoving them aside so his mouth was waiting where the liquid funneled down the street. He collected as much of it as he could. Sucked it down his throat. Corralled the excess with his hands. Yet slowly and inevitably it escaped, running into the drain while the glass shards reflected rainbows to taunt him.
“Idiots!” A burst of adrenaline drove him to his feet. “How could…” His voice trailed off, conscious thought carried away by a growl. He peeled the children off the street by the scruffs of their necks. Lifting them both in the air now, he screamed into those dead eyes until his voice went hoarse.
But it was no use.
He wasn't even real to them. Their eyes lingered on the ground, and they filled with tears when the last of the liquid—the only thing that was real in their worlds—disappeared into the drain.
“No,” Malcolm said. “It wasn't supposed to—no. You're going to pay for this. Die for this.” He squeezed their necks tighter, preparing to wring them like a pair of chickens. It wasn't the same kind of high the golden liquid could provide, but it was what his body demanded.
He squeezed the life out of them slowly. He watched their eyes for the slightest change while he did it but he saw none. Those eyes were already dead, and so were the children behind them. Killed by a pair of demons hunting in this world.
Malcolm shook the children up and down. Their breaths came in short gasps, but they didn't try to resist. They just looked at the ground. At the exquisite life that could have been.
Malcolm let them fall to the ground. He watched them wiggle around and clutch their throats, desperately sucking in air. Trying to end their lives hadn't delivered the satisfaction he'd hoped for. And it definitely wouldn't make the bottle whole again. Maybe if he picked them up one at a time and slammed their heads against the wall. Maybe that would at least offer some primal, visceral satisfaction.
He leaned against the abandoned newsstand, breathless. All of his energy had left him. He grabbed an old newspaper and rubbed its pages all over himself to soak up some of the blood, smelling ink and rain while he watched the children. They sat up, breathing regularly now, and stared at the glass pieces where a bottle had been.
A shadow passed over them and darkened the street, but they didn't seem to notice.
“Go on,” a man said. “I thought I told you to beat it.” When the children didn't respond, he tried another style of motivation. He prodded them along with his shoe until they got up and shuffled down the street back toward downtown. The man watched them slink away until they finally disappeared around the corner. He sighed. “Kids don't listen much nowadays.” He wore an olive uniform, which Malcolm recognized immediately as an old air force flight suit. Dark sunglasses covered the man's eyes and reflected off his perfectly polished dress shoes. He shrugged at Malcolm like he was sorry he had to see such a display. “I already told them to leave, but here they are getting into it right on master and mistress's doorstep.”
Malcolm blinked, leaned against the wall while his vision tunneled. “What did you just say?”
The airman ignored him. He sniffed the concrete, knelt down and wiped a finger across a wet spot. The movement pulled up the sleeve of his flight suit. Pieces of his forearm were missing, and red and black boils covered the strips of skin that remained. He leaned over the wet spot and sniffed some more. The man's neck, cheeks, ears—everything not covered by the flight suit—had been seared and hideously mangled. He brought his finger to his lips and sniffed it. “Hmm. You know anything about this?”
Malcolm shook his head. He didn't have the energy to lie out loud. It was hard enough just to keep his body upright. He could still smell the sweetness from the golden liquid, except now it had mixed with the sewage clogging a nearby storm drain. It made his stomach churn.
The airman sprang to his feet. “Wrong answer.” He lunged for Malcolm and stopped inches away from his face. His breath reeked of tobacco when he spoke. “How'd you get a hold of this...” He looked up and down the street and lowered his voice. “This... stuff. Did you steal it from master and mistress's supply?” A glob of his saliva splashed across Malcolm's cheek. “Speak up, thief.”
“No,” Malcolm said. He shook his head and tried to raise his hands, but only succeeded in collapsing against the abandoned newsstand. The airman grabbed him before he crumpled to the ground. He dragged him deeper into the alley across the glass shards of Malcolm's broken dreams.
Malcolm flailed and struggled, but the airman was strong. He whistled when they approached a little intersection where two alleys met. Men and women came around the corner to greet them. Uniformed soldiers walked side by side with business tycoons wearing top hats. Hunchbacked washing women joined debutantes in long dresses. Old and young they came, their bodies twisted and disfigured in a montage of violence and death.
Maybe they had been dead once. But now they were perfectly alive, united under their matching spade marks. The airman had one too. Malcolm saw it pulsing on the back of his neck—just before he handed him over to his friends.
He screamed when their hands found him. But none of them said a word. They just lifted him into the air and paraded him through the alley like a human sacrifice. Deeper and deeper they went, walking in perfect unison. Malcolm looked up as they passed rows of apartment windows. A few faces peered out from gaps between the blinds and quickly disappeared.
Finally the procession stopped.
The debutante opened a metal grate along the alley wall—the kind businesses used to
shutter their storefronts for the night. She produced a key and put it in the locked door behind it.
It swung open, and they dragged Malcolm into the strangest store he'd ever seen.
* * * *
Malcolm's captors backed away once they'd locked the door behind him. That's when he saw exactly what kind of store this was:
A human store.
The ceiling was low, its panels water-stained and sagging so much he wondered how it hadn't already collapsed. A row of hospital beds filled a cramped corridor beneath it. Across the room, industrial freezers lined the walls with stray shelves and broken-down cardboard boxes scattered between them. The place had been a convenience store in a past life—before someone hollowed it out and turned it into a house of horror.
The airman stepped forward and motioned for Malcolm to follow. The captors standing behind him didn't give him any other choice. They crossed the room quickly, but not before Malcolm saw that three of the beds were occupied. Children lay there—not moving, eyelids closed—with needles in their arms. A nurse shuffled between them. She watched intravenous bags fill and made marks on a clipboard like she'd been plucked out of a hospital mid-shift and was none the wiser.
Malcolm squinted at the bags in the dim room. There weren't any windows in here, but the faint overhead light showed him everything he needed to see:
It wasn't blood coming out of those children's veins.
It was that precious golden liquid—liquid he'd loved and lost.
The children lay there unconscious while the nurse sucked it out of them. They stayed still even when Malcolm lunged for one of the intravenous bags, unable to control his twitching arms. He crashed into a hospital bed and almost pulled the needle from a little girl's vein, but she still slept soundly. Her face was peaceful… and familiar.
“Nora?”
The nurse slapped him with a gloved hand. “What do you think you're doing?”
Malcolm reeled. He held the side of his face and studied her uniform. She wore a button-down shirt with sleeves and a collar. An apron too, draped over her clothes with a big red cross on the front. It looked like a Halloween costume—a relic from wars past.
He reached for the bag again.
This time she clocked Malcolm in the jaw. He fell backward into a sea of hands. They wrapped all around him. Then he was airborne again, forced to watch the bags of gold disappear as they carried him up a flight of wooden stairs which led straight into the ceiling. They stopped at the top for the airman to pop open a trapdoor, and then they lifted Malcolm through into light and laughter.
He was in a furnished apartment. Plush carpet and sunlight replaced the shelves and sterile hospital beds. The place looked like it had been lifted right out of a home improvement magazine and stacked on top of the abandoned store below. Everywhere he turned, decorations and animated voices welcomed him deeper into the insanity.
“Owen,” a man called, “what have I told you about interrupting my card games?”
“I'm sorry,” the airman said. “But this is urgent. I found this man snooping in the alley. He was tangling with two of the children you sent away. And he had some of the golden stuff, master. I can smell it on his breath.” They climbed into what looked like a living room, carrying Malcolm between them like a prize pig after a hunt.
Chairs shuffled around him. “Well, I'll be damned. Put him down over here. Clarice, grab this man a chair. Looks like we have a new buy-in ready for some action.” Finally Malcolm's feet touched the ground. The men and women with the spade marks shoved him forward before he got his bearings, almost sent him sprawling across a Persian rug.
Malcolm staggered forward, but everything else moved backward. With every step he took the more convinced he became that he'd somehow slipped through the cracks of time and fallen into a different era. Frantic piano music filled the dining room, a fitting soundtrack for the hotel-like atmosphere. Something about the way the notes jumbled together—something about the freight train tempo...
No. Malcolm's eyes flew around the room. He could almost see the fat man he'd met in the underworld pounding away at his piano again. Hear the terror in his voice when Malcolm and Paul had pulled him away from his practice. Smell the stinky clothes and the sweat dripping off of him. And now that man was up here in this world, just out of sight—just a few rooms away.
Another man was closer. He wore a seersucker suit—white with tiny blue pinstripes—and stood next to a poker table to greet him. On his head perched a felt bowler hat, round and the same shade of white as his suit. A close-cropped brown goatee framed his lips and chin. His eyes burned blue fire. Calculating. Bristling with intelligence.
He flashed Malcolm a charming smile. “What a pleasant surprise!” The man shook his hand and pulled away to wipe off some blood with a handkerchief.
Malcolm stumbled backward when his knees buckled. A washing woman caught him just before he hit the ground, held him up with calloused hands. Malcolm hardly noticed her. All of his attention was on the man in front of him. His was one of the faces he'd seen in that strange bedchamber just before they'd escaped the underworld. That face had haunted his dreams ever since. The eyes were different—blue instead of fiery red—but the man behind them was the same. Here he was in the living flesh.
The suited man smiled wider. “Hey. Easy there, fella. You're scared. I don't blame you. You and your friends ruined our home pretty good. That was... unfortunate. But why don't we just let bygones be bygones? Let's play some cards. What do you say?”
Malcolm shrugged and stared. The situation was too surreal to do anything else. And the way the man looked at him brooked no argument.
“Sit down,” he said, sweeping an arm toward a chair that had just been added to the end of the table.
Malcolm wobbled past the green felt and collapsed into his seat. Only then did he get a look at the other players sitting at the table. Over a neat stack of poker chips, he glimpsed Charlotte and Paul, the old man Atlas. They were all looking at him, poisoning him with venomous stares.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Nice of you to join us,” Paul said, shuffling a pair of chips between his fingers.
“What happened to you last night?” said Charlotte.
“I know exactly what happened,” Atlas said. He studied the cards in his hands, not bothering to look over his spectacles. “It was a mistake. A huge mistake. One that cost us our freedom and probably our lives.” His face was white and clammy. He shuddered like he was trying to shake a fever.
“Wait,” Malcolm said. “You're the most powerful—you can do something, can't you? You and Charlotte.”
Charlotte laughed.
There wasn't an ounce of mirth in it.
That's when Malcolm noticed the strangers standing behind her and Atlas. Two young women, rail thin with their dark hair up in buns. Twins. Their heads barely reached above the table. They stood with their faces fixed in perfect concentration. Each held a pole with fibers attached to it—so thin Malcolm could hardly see them under the chandelier light. He squinted. The fibers came together in an elaborate weave, formed nets which the waif women held over Charlotte and Atlas. They gave off a pale green glow.
“I'm a gambler,” said the man in the white suit, “but I'm not stupid. Those are soul nets. The lovely women holding them are Octavia and Anabella.”
Malcolm looked at the women. “Do they hurt?”
The man in the suit laughed. “Don't bother. They're deaf to the world.” He tapped his temple. “We talk in here. Your friends will be fine, Malcolm. It's a catch and release operation, but I'm sure you can understand my need for precautions.”
“How do you know my—”
“Your name?” The man clapped his hands together and smiled. “You and your friends destroyed my lovely chamber, remember? I already know you like I know my way around these cards.” He raised a glass and took a sip of dark liquor. “Maybe it's time you know a little about me. Fair?”
Malcolm shrugged.
“You've already met some of my faithful servants,” Maurice continued. He pointed to the players at the table who hadn't said a word. “Meet Felicia, Aldous, and Hicks. They're lucky enough to have today off, so they get to join our little game.” He took another drink and laughed. “No one can say I'm too harsh on the help.”
“No, master,” murmured the crowd. “Not at all.”
“Where's your wife?” Malcolm said.
Maurice laughed again, so loudly he had to hold his stomach to keep it from bursting out of his suit coat. “Oh, Mr. Morris. I do wish you would have saved that question until she gets back. She'd love to hear you ask it that way.”
“So you aren't married?”
Maurice shuffled a deck of cards with one hand, studying the wave of movement. “Shrewd, Mr. Morris. Very shrewd. No better way to size a man up than asking lots of questions. But I'm afraid we'll have to continue this conversation later. Lady luck is calling. It's time to get this game started. Josephine!” He clapped his hands, and a woman wearing an apron and a hair net came scurrying into the dining room.
“Yes, master?”
“A fresh round of cocktails. It's going to be a long night.”
Malcolm looked across the table after the serving woman disappeared. Paul's face was tight, mouth set in a perfectly straight line that gave nothing away. Charlotte and Atlas looked uncomfortable fidgeting under their nets—uncomfortable and pissed. Not a single one of them looked like they had a plan.
Then the aproned woman came back and plopped a whiskey concoction on the felt next to him. Malcolm smelled it. He watched it quiver in the glass and felt the urge to be sick. It wasn't the right color: perverse brown where it should have been gold. He forced it to his lips anyway.
Heretic (Demon Marked Book 2) (Demon Marked Saga) Page 8
