Blood and Treasure_An Urban Fantasy Novel

by J. A. Cipriano

  “Sometimes our surroundings can be skewed by our preconceived notions,” she said, turning toward me. Her green eyes glowed brighter, and she motioned behind me. “Torture-like beauty- is in the eye of the beholder, Royce.”

  I followed her finger and saw the place I was standing in had completely transformed. The room was bright and open. A lush bed sat in the corner and the window sat open, looking out at a beautiful beach. The smell of the ocean water and fresh-cut coconut filled the air.

  “What happened to this place?” I asked, spinning around in disbelief.

  “You finally saw it for what it was, Royce. You finally saw beyond what you assumed your father would do to you,” she answered with a shrug.

  “That’s not true,” I said, my eyes widening as I let the idea sink into my brain. “This wasn’t always like this. I would have known.”

  “Would you?” she asked slyly.

  “Would you cut that shit out?” I asked and marched toward Sadie. “If I had preconceived notions, it’s because my bastard of a father earned them. I don’t know what crock he’s been feeding you, but none of it’s true. He’s a monster. All he wants to do is destroy.”

  “If that was true, my boy, you’d be dead already.” She smirked at me. “But you already knew that.” Then, before I could respond, she continued, “Bad things have to happen sometimes, Royce. It’s what brings about justice.” She looked me up and down. “Now clean yourself up, big boy.”

  The smile on her lips struck me as curious, and looking down at myself, I saw that I was as naked as the day I was born.

  “Goddammit,” I muttered, not bothering to cover myself with my hands. This chick was in Hell. She’d obviously already seen whatever I had to offer. Besides, I didn’t have anything to hide.

  She pointed to the left, where a suit now hung from a rack that absolutely wasn’t there ten seconds ago. Or was it, and I just hadn’t seen it?

  I hated the way this place seemed to work. It was bullshit.

  “Is this what he wants?” I asked, pulling pants over my waist and grabbing the shirt. “Does dad want his little man to dress for dinner? Is that what this is about, Sadie? Does he want us to get to know each other, because if that’s the case, locking me in a dark, dank room wasn’t the best first step.”

  “The room was dark and dank because you assumed it would be. And the door never locked, Royce. You were free to leave anytime you wished to. The fact that you didn’t only serves to prove how indoctrinated you’ve been by the people who raised you, people who taught you to be ashamed of who you are, of what you were capable of.” She smiled and shook her head gently.

  This woman was completely off the deep end. Still, just hearing someone tell me in a soothing voice that I didn’t have to blame myself for everything that had happened made me feel lighter somehow.

  “You don’t have to be ashamed anymore, Royce. Your father is going to save us all. The fact that you’re still alive is proof of his good intentions.” She stepped through the door and her skin glistened in the sun, the first sunlight I had seen in I didn’t even know how long. “And if you’d like to know what your father wants of you, why don’t you ask him. He’s waiting for you.”

  3

  The beach looked absolutely nothing like Hell. In fact, it sort of looked like the Keys down in Florida. Soft waves crashed against white sand, and a cool breeze danced across my cheek, making me feel physically better than I had since I got here.

  In the distance, a red-pink sun sank heavy in the sky, threatening to disappear into the peaceful waters.

  I blinked. After all this time in a dark cell, my eyes weren’t used to this sort of stimulation. It was making them water enough to be a bother.

  “Keep walking,” Sadie said, and her voice was siren song again, beckoning me forward with its sweet, silky soprano.

  “To where?” I asked, shaking off the fuzzy feeling I felt when she spoke to me. “Where the hell am I going, Sadie?”

  “The place you were always supposed to be,” she answered, and the flippant nature in which she spouted off yet another platitude sent a spike of anger through me.

  “Don’t you dare,” I said, grabbing her arm and spinning her around. Her eyes were neither wide nor surprised and her muscles didn’t tense as I turned her. She simply allowed me to do so with ease. “You’ve got me here. I’m trapped in this Hawaii Five-O nightmare already. The least you could do is stop talking like a fucking fortune cookie and be straight up with me. Otherwise, you might as well throw me back in that cell.”

  “You are your father’s son,” she answered. For the first time, her voice sounded like it was coming from a real person and not an overly sweet Disney princess. Her face lost the glow of kindness coloring it, and she rolled her eyes sarcastically. “If you know you’re trapped, then why not try to get out? You think I want to be here, Roy? I don’t. None of us do! We were put here because that’s the way the world works. Because, when you’re not the person in power, you have to bow to what they want, to what they think is right.”

  “We?” I asked, looking around and seeing no one but Sadie and myself on the beach. “Who else is here? Who’s in this place aside from my father?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she answered, pulling away from me. “There are more here than I care to count off to you at the moment, and now you’re among them, Royce. I know you think you’re better than us. I know you think you’re father’s worse than you. You probably think I’m worse than you too, that I did something to warrant being thrown in this pit for all eternity. Maybe you’re, right, but I’m not the one who was in chains, Royce. You’re here, in this place forever, just like us, just like me, just like your father.” A sly and terrifying smile fell across her face. “Unless you’re not.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, my stomach churning nervously. “What does my father have planned?”

  “This,” she said, pointing to the left. “For starters.”

  As I glanced toward the object she’d just referred to as ‘starters,’ my jaw dropped.

  A giant bull monster stood there on two feet like some sort of ancient Greek horror show. It was massive, complete with horns, pointed ears, and a gold hoop pierced through its huge flared nostrils. Its hooves dug into the beach as it huffed, staring at me. “What the fuck is this?” I asked, my entire body tensing. “If my father wanted to kill me, why not do it with his own hands like a man would? Why use some punk beast to do his dirty work?”

  “This isn’t about death, Royce,” Sadie answered as the bull thing locked eyes with me. “It’s about life. It’s about what kind of life you want to have, what kind of life you want the people you care about to have.”

  She was talking like a fortune cookie again, but I didn’t have time to chastise her for it because, well, there was a minotaur. The monster charged at me, ducking forward and pointing its massive horns right at my chest. Worse, it was faster than it had any right to be given the size and weight of the thing. My body froze, but only for a moment. As the damned thing barreled toward me, I snapped out of my daze, jumping to the side as the monster stampeded through the space I’d just occupied.

  My heart was racing and my head pounding as I scrambled back to my feet.

  “Have you ever been to Spain, Roy?” my father’s voice echoed in my mind as I gathered myself. “Pamplona, more precisely.”

  I didn’t have time to look over my shoulder or behind my back. This thing had already turned around, and it was advancing on me again. Somehow, someway, it had gotten even bigger, even meaner. Wherever my father was, he’d have to stay there until I got finished with this thing.

  Or, you know, until it got finished with me.

  I gathered as much of my depleted strength as I could into my gut and hands and transformed it into magic.

  The monster bore down on me, heat rushing off of it in waves as it neared. My mind raced through my internal list of spells. What could I do? What sort of magical ace could I pull out my
ass to get me out of this situation?

  This thing was a bull, more or less. Bulls were animals, mammals. They lived on the same sort of stuff that I did. Food, water, air.

  That was it.

  Twisting my hands in front of me, I spoke a few choice words in Latin, the tongue of my adoptive family’s preferred style of magic. The spell was direct, with one clear intention: to thicken the air around this monster’s head until it formed a helmet of dense, unbreathable oxygen.

  The bull gauged this change instantly not surprising given the large, unadulterated huffs it had been taking just seconds before. Oxygen or not, it kept coming anyway. Maybe it figured that if it skewered me on one of its horns, my spell would lose its potency.

  That was actually a pretty decent plan, as far as plans go. Because it’d totally work.

  Spinning on my heels, I took off running, darting back and forth through the sands.

  “You did, didn’t you?” my father’s voice pounded against the inside of my temples once more. “You went to the running of the bulls in Pamplona.” He chuckled hard, sending loud shockwaves through my already aching head. “And now you’re back at it again, back running from the damn bulls.”

  “Not for long,” I muttered, hearing the monster closing the gap between us, but I didn’t dare look back. That was the trick with bulls. The second you turned to look at them was when you hesitated, and then you got gored. No, my plan was simple. Keep running until it passed out. It was sure as hell exerting itself enough to do so.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” my father’s voice answered. “Just when you think you know what’s going on, things are very likely to take a drastic turn.”

  The noise coming from the bull monster disappeared. I could no longer feel the heat, no longer feel the world shaking from behind as the thing lumbered after me.

  Breaking my own rule, I turned to see the thing had disappeared, and honestly, I sort of wished it hadn’t.

  My mouth went dry as I looked at the horrible sight before me. My heart skipped at least two beats, and my eyes started to water again, though this time it had nothing to do with the sun.

  My mother’s body lay strewn across the sand. It was pale and still. Wet hair, open eyes, a mouth twisted in agony. She was right there, looking right at me.

  Oh, God. Had she been brought here too? Had my father found a way to grab ahold of my mother’s errant soul and pull it toward him? Had he been torturing her all this time? Was this what had become of her, what I had helped do to her?

  I couldn’t stop myself. Before I knew it, I was on my knees in front of her, brushing damp tendrils of hair out of her still face.

  “What did you do?” I asked, tears hot in my eyes. “Where did you find her, you son of a bitch?”

  “Your mother?” my father scoffed. “You’re seeing your mother? That’s so cliché, son. I had hoped there was something a bit more complex in there other than mommy issues.”

  Before I could answer, my mother’s body caught fire. As the flames engulfed her, it took everything in me to throw myself away before the fire consumed me too.

  My heart skidded to a stop. If her soul was here, if that’s what I was looking at, then she was in agony, and that put me in agony too.

  Then, before I could scream or even gather up my words, the fiery body started to stand.

  Looking up at it, I swallowed hard. Whatever was going on, I was through with it. If my mother wanted to punish me for the part I’d played in what happened to her, then so be it. I probably deserved it. I should have left her in the coffin where I found her. At least she’d have been safe there.

  My mother reached for me, her hand a torch. I reached back for her, instinctively wanting to grab her and make it okay, feeling the heat as it threatened to jump from her body to mine.

  I had given up. It was over.

  “That’s enough,” my father’s voice said again. This time though, it wasn’t in my head. It was right in front of me. And so was he. “Good job.”

  My mother transformed yet again, morphing into a black cloud which sifted off into the sky before disappearing out of view.

  I stared up at the spot anyway, my mouth agape. Now that the thing had reverted to its cloud form, I was reasonably sure that hadn’t been my actual mother, but what if it was? What if it fucking was, and she was suffering down here with these monsters? I felt entirely useless, entirely helpless.

  “Look at me,” my father said, moving so he took up the whole of my vision. Light cascaded off him in electric shimmers as he stared down at me, his dark eyes fierce. “I need you to go back to Earth, Royce. I need you to finish what I started up there, what you stopped when you saved the Cypress girl.”

  “I won’t,” I replied, not looking at him as I shook my head. “I won’t-”

  “Kill her?” he finished. “I wouldn’t expect you to kill her. I know you couldn’t hurt her. You have too much of your mother in you for that. Fortunately, I have another way to fix this mess, and I’ll even throw in an incentive too.”

  “Incentive?” I asked, looking up at him as I tried to figure out what his game was. Surely, he was up to something, but, like always, his thoughts were hidden beneath a veneer of self-satisfaction and annoyance.

  “What you just fought is called a Tantibus. It’s Latin for-”

  “Nightmare,” I finished, cutting him off. “That was never a bull. It was never my mother. That thing was rooting around in my mind. It was finding the things I’m afraid of and becoming them.”

  “I knew you were smart. After all, you’re half mine.” My father grinned, and for a moment, I almost thought he was pleased with me. It was a little weird because I almost kind of liked it. “Those things were quite deadly once. They killed without hesitation, ripping apart king and country alike. Nowadays, the world you come from only has one of them who calls it home.” He shook his head. “And I just sent it on a beeline right to the people you love.” His grin widened. “So stay, or go. It’s your choice, son.”

  4

  “I’m going to make you pay for this,” I growled, looking over at my father and squinting as the red-orange sun finished ducking into the water. It was almost dark here in Hell, and if my father had his way, this would be my last day here. I wanted to get out of here more than anything, but the fact that my father was using me like a lap dog and putting the people I loved in jeopardy to force my hand was enough to bring out my primal side.

  “I’m counting on it,” my father answered, grinning at me. He knew he had my ass over a barrel. That nightmare creature was after Gary. It was after Renee. It might even be after Scott. I couldn’t stay here, not with it out there.

  My father knew it. The bastard.

  “The portal’s in the water,” my father added with a sort of insane glee as he looked out at waves that grew taller and angrier with each passing second. It was like they knew I was going to have to brave them and wanted to make sure it wasn’t too easy for me. “I’m not sure where exactly. It likes to move. The last time we tracked it, it was in the dead center. So I’d start there if I were you.”

  I grimaced. Something about the flippant nature of his words ‘if I were you’ angered me even more than I already was. He was cocky, so sure of himself and of the fact that I was going to do exactly what he asked of me.

  “What if I say no?” I asked, turning to him and playing devil’s advocate. It seemed fitting, given our setting and all. “You going to throw me in there and have your nightmare monster guard the shores until I find your precious portal?”

  “Of course not,” he answered with a dismissive wave. “First of all, he’s not my nightmare monster, Roy. I don’t gather slaves, if that’s what you’re thinking. Everyone here is free to do and choose whatever they’d like. They work with me because they believe in the cause, because they believe what I’m doing is right.”

  “Right?” I balked. “You just sent the worst thing in the world after a bunch of innocent people just to force
me to head back to earth.” The words felt wrong and a little ridiculous as they left my mouth. Why would I need to be forced back to earth? If given the choice, I’d run through broken glass and over hot coals to get back to that smelly, awful, beautiful place.

  There was more to it than that though. If my father was so intent on forcing me back there, it was for a reason. He needed me to be there so I could continue to play a role in his horrific plans. Those plans couldn’t be good. He was ruthless. He was selfish. He wanted what he wanted and was willing to destroy everything in his path to get it. If I allowed myself to be part of that, I would be responsible for the destruction he wrought upon the place I loved, upon the people I loved.

  So, cue the nightmare monster.

  “This has to be your choice, Royce. You can’t be forced through that portal, not by force of hand anyway. It will only respond to you if the choice is yours.” He grinned at me. “Regardless of the circumstances surrounding it.”

  “So why not you?” I asked, looking at the way the now evident moonlight made his jawline look far too much like my own. “If there’s a traveling portal to a place you want to be out there in the ocean that responds to wishes and personal choices like some shooting star in a goddamned Cinderella movie, why not just cut out the middle man and use it yourself?”

  He laughed hard, way harder than he should have. His eyes were nearly watering when he finally managed to respond. “Don’t you think I would if I could, son? If it were that easy to get out of here, if all it took was finding the damn thing, what do you think the point of this place would be?” I bristled. I didn’t know the answer to that and, what was more, I didn’t give a damn. He reached forward, attempting to put a hand on my shoulder. I pulled backward, inadvertently letting my eyes go red as anger flared up through me.