by Bryan Smith
Lucien snarled. Steam puffed out of his huge, ridged nostrils. He turned to look at the man who’d spoken. His voice was a guttural growl as he said: “She was wrong.”
Lucien’s right arm slashed through the desert air. His claws extended and turned the man’s throat into ribbons of bloody flesh. The man seized his throat with both hands and dropped to his knees. Blood rushed through his fingers as he looked up at the hellhound with wide, terrified eyes. Lucien gripped the man’s head and twisted it off. Blood jumped from the stump of the man’s neck like an oil gusher. Someone screamed. The surviving men were going for their guns, but Lucien moved with calm and deadly precision. He tossed the decapitated head at Hank, who, being a former ballplayer, snatched it instinctively from the air--then shrieked and dropped the head as if it were radioactive.
Hank raised a Magnum with a shaky hand and got off a single shot that went well astray. The gun fell from his hand before he could squeeze the trigger again. Lucien snatched the forgotten bat from the man’s other hand and broke it over his knee. He gripped the fat man by the neck and prepared to drive the jagged end of the bat’s handle through his chest.
Then there was an explosion behind him and a bullet nicked his ear. The sting of it elicited an annoyed growl from the hellhound. He let go of Hank and whirled on the other man. The man, who’d expected to see Lucien’s brains leap through an opening in his forehead, wilted at the sight of the beast’s glowering eyes. Moving backward, he stumbled in the direction of Hank’s Chevy Caprice. He fell against the driver’s side door and fumbled for the handle.
The man pointed his Glock in Lucien’s direction and squeezed off three rapid shots that didn’t get anywhere near the intended target. Lucien lunged across desert sand and was upon him in a nanosecond. He ripped the Glock from the terrified man’s hand and snarled at him. Severe tremors wracked the man’s sweat-soaked body and babbled pleas of mercy streamed from his mouth. Lucien shut him up by shoving the barrel of the Glock into his mouth. He meant to pull the trigger and empty the man’s brainpan, but his hellspawn senses alerted him to something strange happening nearby. It began as a subtle change in the atmosphere. The desert air seemed charged with electricity. Then there was a sound like a thousand mosquitoes buzzing in his ears. Lucien turned to look at a spot in the desert beyond where Hank was struggling to catch his breath and get to his feet. A warm pink glow penetrated the darkness some twenty yards away.
By now, Hank had recovered enough to become aware of the strange disturbance, too. Up on his knees now, he gaped at the phenomenon for a moment before turning a haggard gaze toward Lucien.
“You’ve had it now, hellbeast. The big boss is comin’ for you.”
A low growl rumbled through the hellhound’s clenched teeth. He squeezed the gun’s trigger and the bullet did its work. He let the dead man’s twitching body fall to the ground.
Hank’s grin faded as he watched Lucien begin to move cautiously in his direction. “Stay away from me!”
On his hands and knees, he searched the dark desert floor frantically for his cast-aside gun. A pathetic mewling sound came from him as his frustration grew. He frowned as he closed a groping hand on something unexpected. He held his hand up to his face to examine his find. Lucien sensed what it was and laughed. Hank’s face became a study in undiluted primitive fear. His jaw dropped open and his bulging eyes looked ready to pop out of his head. He screamed when the scorpion stung his palm, then flung the thing away.
The wedge of pink light was about the size of a door. Lucien watched as the light changed to a deeper shade of pink, followed by orange, then a bright red. The annoying buzzing sound changed pitch, becoming a steady hum not much louder than the noise generated by a refrigerator.
There was something moving within it.
Lucien’s finger tensed around the Glock’s trigger. It was only instinct--if Hank was right, the gun would not save him, nor was there any chance now of running to safety. So he stayed where he was and watched the figure inside the light grow more distinct. It was a humanoid figure, but that meant little--the big boss of hell could take any form he damn well pleased.
Hank was curled into a fetal ball on the desert floor. He clutched his injured hand and whimpered like a sick baby. But he managed to shoot a ferocious look at the hellhound. “You’re going to pay for this.” He moaned. “Oh, God, it hurts!” He glanced at the emerging form and a sound that was a deranged cross between a laugh and a wail of agony emanated from him. “You’re a dead motherfucker, beast. You’ll see.”
“Maybe you’re right, fat man.”
The figure within the field of light solidified and began to move forward like a man walking through fog. Lucien felt relief as the man--who his senses told him was a real man and not a facsimile of a man--came into view. There was just the slightest hint of swagger in the man’s gait as he strolled toward them. The man was of medium height, maybe a couple inches beneath six feet, and he had slicked-back reddish-blond hair knotted into a small ponytail at the back of his head. He wore jeans, boots, and a black leather jacket open over a plain t-shirt. In his right hand he held a foamy pint glass filled with what Lucien supposed was Guinness.
Lucien reverted to human form. “You must be a friend of Jack’s.”
The man smiled. “How’d you guess?” He raised his glass before taking a sip from it. “Cheers, mate.”
Lucien shook his head. “Who are you?”
“Andy O’Day.” He held out a hand. Lucien gave it a quick, not-quite-friendly-yet shake. He was anxious to know why this man had come to this place in so unorthodox a manner. “I’ve known Jack since we were wee little ones. I’ve communicated with you through intermediaries on a number of occasions. You must be Lucien.”
Lucien nodded. “Okay. Why are you here?”
Andy drank some more Guinness. “Well, I was all set for a relaxing night of quaffing stout at the Sherlock Holmes Pub in Nashvegas when I learned my boy Jack had gotten his balls in the wringer again.”
Lucien frowned. “How did--”
Andy laughed. “How did I know that?” He shrugged. His mouth formed a small, inscrutable smile, the kind that said, ‘I have secrets I won’t divulge any time soon.’ “I have ways. But there’s no time to go into it. We’ve got to get our asses over to Hell’s headquarters in Las Vegas and pull Jack’s drunk ass out of the fire.”
Lucien’s frown deepened. “Okay, but--”
An explosion obliterated the rest of Lucien’s intended query.
Andy frowned--in his hand was a fragment of the now empty beer glass. He shot a look of dismay at the puddle of spilled stout on the desert floor before shifting his attention to Lucien’s lone surviving captor.
Hank sneered at them from his position on the ground. He was still in tremendous pain, but he’d nonetheless managed to retrieve his gun during Lucien’s conversation with Andy. “Thought you was done with me, huh?” He paused to spit. “Ignorant hellbeast. Scorpion sting ain’t no worse than gettin’ stung by a bee, most times.” He laughed. “I advise you boys to start makin’ peace with your--”
But he didn’t say anything else, because by then Andy O’Day was on him. Lucien had never seen a human move so quickly. Jack’s friend snapped the man’s wrist and tossed the gun aside. He pinned the howling man to the ground and shoved the broken fragment of glass against his throat.
A savage grin flashed across Andy’s face. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you never to touch another man’s drink?”
The man’s only reply was an unintelligible gurgle--which was the only sound he could produce now that Andy had ripped his throat apart with the bit of broken glass. Andy was on his feet again in an eye-blink, fast enough to avoid being touched by the blood spraying from the man’s severed jugular vein.
Lucien’s brow furrowed as he watched the dying man convulse. Andy swatted at the front of his shirt, brushing off sand. There was more to this man than met the eye. That he was human was beyond question--Lucien’s extraordi
narily sharp senses did not lie--but a select few humans were gifted with special abilities and rare talents. Theodore Grimm, a formidable wizard since his teens, was a prime example. He was a member of a tiny percentage of the race that was more evolved than the rest of its kind. Obviously, Andy was also a member of this exclusive club.
Andy clapped his hands together. “Time, as they say, is of the essence. Let’s go get Jack before the bastards roast him.” He removed a whiskey flask from an inner pocket of his jacket. He drank deeply from it, then offered it to Lucien. “For luck.”
Lucien took the flask. “The hell with luck. I need a drink.”
He drained the flask.
Then he extracted the keys to the Chevy Caprice from the dead fat man, got behind the wheel of the car, and waited while Andy slid into the shotgun seat. Lucien turned the key in the ignition and the engine sputtered to throaty life.
They drove away from the dead men.
4.
“Seriously, is that all you’ve got?”
Jack maintained the grin on his face through a supreme effort of will. His body was in agony, but he was determined to project an air of implacability as long as he could. Beyond that first, attention-getting application of the lit end of a Lucky Strike to his scrotum, the burn torture wasn’t anything he couldn’t endure. Sure, he’d screamed a few times, but who wouldn’t? At least she’d applied all subsequent lit cigarettes to relatively less sensitive areas of his body.
A smirk tugged at a corner of Mona’s mouth. “You don’t fool me, Jack. Inside you is a momentous scream straining to get out.”
Jack hissed through gritted teeth. The false grin faltered a bit. He had no comeback this time--what she said was true.
“Let it out, Jack.”
“Fuck you.”
Mona smiled. “This is mild stuff so far, Jack.” She extracted the last cigarette from the depleted pack of Lucky Strikes--she lit it and sat on the edge of the bed next to Jack. She exhaled smoke. “A warm-up for the main event, you could say.”
Jack grimaced. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me, Mona. I’m sure you can make me scream and beg for mercy. Every man has his breaking point, even a prime stud like yours truly. But that’s all the satisfaction you’ll get--I won’t tell you what you want to know.”
Mona shifted her body and leaned over him. Jack briefly thought she would kiss him, and despite the torture and humiliation he’d endured at her hands, there remained a part of him that yearned for it. A very, very hopelessly sick part of his damaged psyche, sure, but knowing that failed to suppress the shameful desire.
But she didn’t kiss him. With the thumb and forefinger of one hand she held open one of his eyelids--and her right hand brought the cigarette close enough to his unprotected eye to singe lashes. “What’s the matter, Jack? You’re shaking like a leaf.”
It was true. Jack tried to still the involuntary spasms triggered by the prospect of impending agony, but he was only marginally successful. He managed to suppress a whimper--barely.
The glowing tip of the cigarette moved a tiny, almost microscopic increment closer to the jittering orb. A piece of ash fell and dropped into his eye, making Jack flinch and gasp. The restrained eyelid spasmed in a desperate bid to blink away the bit of ash. Jack opened his mouth to say something, to perhaps utter his first plea of the evening, but then the glowing fireball retreated.
Mona was sitting upright again, smiling down at him in a smug way and exhaling smoke from the Lucky Strike. “Tell me, my darling prime stud--how close did we come to your breaking point just then?”
Jack looked at her broadening smile and averted his gaze.
He didn’t say anything.
“It’s not too late to switch sides, you know.”
The absurd comment brought Jack’s gaze helplessly back toward her. “What? Why the hell would I do that?”
Mona shrugged. “Because you’ll never be the good man you wish you could be. You’re too deeply flawed in too many ways.” She smiled. “You’re damned, Jack. Hell will be your home soon enough, anyway. Why not come over to the home team? Imagine how much easier your existence would become.”
“It’ll never happen.”
Mona arched an eyebrow at him. “Won’t it?”
Jack seethed. “You’re so fucking smug.”
“I’m smug for good reason.” Mona flipped away the butt end of the Lucky Strike and leaned closer to Jack. “I’m well aware of my power over you. I can feel your desire for me radiating off you like fever off a dying man. I’ll make you a deal, Jack.” The tip of a forefinger glided lightly up his inner thigh. “Tell me everything. Renounce your father and swear your loyalty to our side in a sacred rite. You’ll never be a free man again, but you could live forever as my slave.” Her hand closed around his scrotum, eliciting a jolt of pain from the tiny patch of flesh burned by the cigarette. “There must be much worse fates than that, right?”
Jack cursed his helpless libido as he became aroused again. This was just goddamn ridiculous. As a heterosexual male, the intimate touch of a beautiful woman tended to have the predictable effect on him. As long as he wasn’t too drunk, of course. But this was beyond silly. His life was in danger. Lucien was either dead or about to be dead. There was no cavalry on the way to rescue either of them. Yet here he was, as turned on as a virgin on his first trip to a whorehouse.
He thought of bodies piled in mass graves in third world countries, summoned images of fresh road-kill baking beneath midday sun. He remembered the starving children he’d seen in countless gimme-your-money commercials on late night television. And he thought of vomit and shit and of toxic waste dumps near superficially idyllic middle-class neighborhoods.
Fuck!
Mr. Stupid was still standing at attention.
Jack looked at Mona, who’d been studying his face with an amused smile. “Why don’t you do me a favor and cut that fucking thing off?”
Mona tilted her head and smiled again. “Don’t give me ideas, Jack. I’m nearly done playing nice, anyway.” There was a deeper level of coldness in her voice now. “Soon enough we will move on to cutting off pieces of you and cauterizing the open wounds with a blowtorch. But I’ll be doing that for fun, because I have a suspicion I’ll have broken you long before then.”
Jack reiterated what he’d said from the beginning: “You won’t break me. Not now. Not ever.”
But was that really true? The first inklings of doubt invaded Jack’s mind. He intended to withstand whatever was in her no-doubt-formidable arsenal of psychological and physical weaponry. He loved his father. He would not betray him. And there was the matter of redeeming his own Damned soul. Nothing meant more to him than that. It was the only way he would see Theodore Grimm again. The only way to avoid a literal eternity of torment. Yet, Mona clearly intended to take him to realms of agony beyond anything most men ever experienced. He knew her threats were not empty ones.
I’ll break. I will. I won’t be able to help it.
This was the voice of weakness and despair speaking. Jack rebelled against it, but it was insidious. The voice taunted him, whispering like a malevolent stranger in his head, telling him over and over to surrender. To just give up.
NO!
Mona seemed to sense his inner struggle. “I don’t think you believe that, Jack. Not really. Not deep down in your stinking, booze-poisoned gut. But no matter.” Her shoulders lifted in a little shrug. “What you think isn’t important. Before we resume the ruination of your body, I have another trial for you to endure.”
Jack frowned. Something in her tone bothered him. It was too light, too airy. It was...disingenuous. But he again feigned nonchalance: “Whatever.”
Mona raised her voice to say, “Bring in the subject.”
Jack’s eyes crinkled. “Who’re you talking to, you fucking whack-job?”
Mona only smiled.
The question was answered within moments. A door opened somewhere to the left of the bed and two burly men clad only
in loincloths and black hoods entered the room. The hooded men dragged a nude teenage girl into the room with them. The girl was very pretty. Slim and blond, but with full hips and breasts.
But that wasn’t the worst element in this new wrinkle. Because he recognized the girl. She was the one Andy O’Day had sent him to hell to find. Ostensibly sent him to find, anyway. The last time Jack had seen her she’d been tied to a torture wheel in the cellar of a nightclub in hell. She looked at him now with vacant eyes and the emptiest smile he’d ever seen.
The two men pushed her to her knees. Mona walked to the table where Jack’s clothes and meager personal effects were arranged in a neat pile. But there was something else on the table, something he hadn’t noticed before.
A very large--and very sharp--knife.
She smiled brightly at Jack as she came back toward the bed. The hooded men stepped away from the girl as Mona moved in behind her. She gripped a handful of the girl’s hair, tugged her head back, and placed the blade against her narrow, tender neck.
Jack tensed. “Please don’t. She’s just a kid, Mona.”
The girl’s lips parted and her soft, lilting voice emerged as a deceptively ethereal whisper from a cave: “But I want this. More than anything.”
Mona stroked the girl’s cheek with the edge of the knife blade. “She tells the truth, Jack. This pretty young thing is willing to give up her precious life in exchange for a place of honor and power in hell. It’s what she wants more than anything else...but you have the power to deprive her of it.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Do I?”
Mona nodded. “You do. All you have to do is tell me where to find your father. And what his plans are, of course.”
“You evil, evil bitch. You demonic she-cunt from hell.”
Mona chuckled. “Such creative profanity. Pay attention, Jack. This is the part you need to really think about. You can keep saying what you’ve been saying and consign her to her fate. You see, what the little one doesn’t know is that her place in hell’s upper echelon will only be granted if you tell us what we want to know. If you refuse, her time there will instead be an eternity of torment. Of never-ending agony and regret. Either way, she dies. But her quality-of-afterlife depends on you.”
