One of my greatest regrets was that I was too late to save Duma’s mate, the harlequinade’s Columbine. Perhaps the last female Peri, she was presented, injured but alive, to Lord Rubezahl’s vicious Cu Sith attendants. Those shaggy green dogs were the size of cows and significantly more brutal in a pack. After that day, Duma never spoke of her.
I didn’t call on the pair very often because using them always led to death, destruction, and chaos. But together, we’d survived against overwhelming odds on more occasions than I could count. While our relationship was originally based on the oaths they swore, over the centuries it had developed into one of mutual respect and even trust. They had never let me down, nor I them. With all the creatures I’d dealt with chasing the damned Cup to this point, I knew I was going to need their kind of help if the trail indeed led me to either Medea or Lilith.
I finally fell into bed around two thirty—after I completed the incantation to send the messages and burned the papyrus with my blood on it—and got some fitful sleep that was more like passing out for short periods of time.
CHAPTER 22
After I dragged my gear back through the Ways to the outskirts of San Diego and was crossing the casino parking lot toward my truck, I couldn’t help but notice someone hunched over in my passenger seat. It was around five in the morning on the West Coast, and the sun was just breaking over the mountains to the east, but the lot was surprisingly full. I ducked behind a car, set down my bags, and pulled out my Glock. At this time of day, I assumed most of the cars belonged to casino hotel guests, and I didn’t see anyone moving around the parking lot. I began circling around my truck, remaining several rows away, trying to get a better view of whoever was in it.
A dark-haired young girl lay against the passenger-side door of my truck at an odd angle. I started to approach the truck with a steady bead on the person inside, but rapid and furtive movements near the front of the vehicle caught my attention.
I stopped and listened, but I heard nothing. I dropped to the ground to look under the cars, causing me to bite back a groan from the pain that had returned to my legs since leaving Brooklyn, and noticed the feet and legs of someone straddling a prostrate form near my bumper. I pulled myself back to a crouching position and began moving to flank them. For all I knew, it was a robber mugging a lucky casino patron, but after yesterday, I wasn’t about to take any chances.
When I was one row back but still several cars to the left of them, a soft gurgling sound escaped from the prone form on the ground. It was one I’d heard many times before: air escaping from someone’s lungs without passing over vocal cords. Someone had been stabbed, and whoever had done it was a professional.
I still had the element of surprise on my side, so I watched for several seconds, trying to get a feel for what the killer was doing and which way he was facing. When I was sure his back was to me, I came out from around the car in a combat-ready firing stance.
“Freeze,” I said calmly and quietly.
The killer was on one knee, stooped over the dying naked figure. He froze, dead still—too still, in fact, to be a human. “Can I at least scratch my ass? My underwear is riding up my butt.” The voice was immediately familiar.
“What the hell? What are you doing? You know how close to death you just came?” I said, still aiming the gun. I was simultaneously relieved and irritated.
It was Duma, and as usual, he was dressed in some custom Savile Row tailored suit that cost more than my truck, his pale skin and bright-blond, shoulder-length hair a stark contrast to his black clothes and sunglasses, which he wore even though the sun wasn’t up yet. He stood up and flashed a wide smile with a short, vicious, curved knife—reminiscent of a claw—in his left hand. The blade, a karambit with its hilt heavily bound in leather to protect him from the metal, was one of his favorite weapons, and it was dripping with green goo. At just over six feet tall, his clothes and seriously chiseled features would have made models jealous, despite the weapon.
“Not as close as this guy,” he replied, gesturing at the corpse at his feet. The figure on the ground was not human at all. “How you been, D?” He smiled broadly and spread his arms like he was going to hug me.
I lowered the gun and laughed. As a rule, Peri were beautiful creatures, which was why they were originally thought to be the offspring of fallen angels. They were as varied in their appearances as people were with one exception: their eyes lacked all pigmentation. Like their Elven and Sidhe brethren, they were fair-skinned and tall and always slightly built. They were so fast that they were often thought to possess the ability to disappear at will.
“What’s going on?” I jerked my head at the body in my car and the one on the ground as I put my gun away.
Having worked with him for so long, I just assumed Duma had the situation under control, including whoever was in my truck. The bizarre figure on the ground was humanoid in size and shape, but it was bestial, and its skin was grayish and sickly. It had no mouth or ears, only eyes, and slits for nostrils. It reminded me of a six-foot-tall, hunchbacked football player with long arms and nothing but eyes on his bald, wan head. Its fingers were misshapen claws at least ten inches long.
“Was that one of the Phonoi?” I asked, tapping its claws with the toe of my shoe.
“Yep.”
That meant that the set of claws was only one of the many implements it might possess to inflict carnage. The Phonoi were the male embodiments of murder and violent death, and each one was different. It took one of the Old Ones to call them into being—or a damn powerful witch or wizard. The situation had Medea written all over it, and she obviously had a veritable Swiss army knife of Parans at her beck and call.
“This one was hiding over there behind that car,” Duma said, pointing with his knife to a nondescript black sedan down the row. “But I don’t think they were here just for you.” Duma placed his knife into a pocket in his jacket and jerked his head toward the figure in my truck.
I looked through my windshield at the person inside. She was indeed a young girl no older than thirteen, and she was suddenly staring at me with wide eyes, her mouth agape. The moment I made eye contact, she began clawing at the door to get out, screaming something I couldn’t quite understand through the closed cab. I stared at Duma in surprise to see if he had any idea about what was going on. He just shrugged and shook his head.
Before I could make it around to open it, the girl managed to get the door open, tumbled out onto the ground, picked herself up, and lunged at me—hugging me around the waist as if I were her long-lost father. She sobbed so hard that her shoulders heaved, and she mumbled unintelligible words.
Awkwardly, I patted her back and just kept glaring at Duma, who was doing his best not to laugh hysterically. I had no idea what this was about.
“Something I should know, D?”
He broke into laughter.
I pried the girl loose and bent down, enduring a great deal of pain to get a better look at her. She was dark complexioned, had short brown hair and light-brown eyes. She was covered in dirt and reeked as if she hadn’t bathed in years. She could have been Hispanic, but the way she was dressed said otherwise. She wore a filthy red smock with a heavily stained white shirt under it, reminiscent of a uniform, and she held some sort of dingy scarf or kerchief in her hand.
She began talking again, rattling on like a freight train with no brakes, and it took me a second to realize she was speaking Farsi.
“Aroom bash,” I said in Farsi, telling her to calm down.
“Diomedes, I found you, I found you,” she replied in her native tongue, repeating the words over and over. She pronounced my name Dee-oh-me-dese.
Finally, after a minute, she stopped, and her eyes widened with fear, and her entire body stiffened. She saw the dead creature on the ground behind me, and she screamed and began to run. Duma reacted before I could and caugh
t her before she made it a full step.
I walked back over to her and knelt down again, fighting through the pain of the movement. I grabbed her gently by the shoulders. “Negaranesh nabash,” I said, telling her not to worry.
“It’s dead,” Duma said in perfect Farsi. He walked over and kicked at the creature a few times to prove it.
Still, the girl’s wide eyes remained fixed on the dead creature. It took some effort, but I stood and walked her back to the door of my truck and helped her in. I closed the door, walked around to the driver’s side, and climbed in with her, hoping she’d feel more secure. “See, we’re safe in here now,” I said, again speaking Farsi. “How do you know who I am?”
“She hates you,” she said, tears drying on her face as she calmed down. Her whole body relaxed.
“Who hates me?”
“Medea. Medea. Medea…” she mumbled before she finally passed out.
I had assumed Medea was behind this, but now I knew. The revelation still caught me off guard. Leaving the girl to sleep, I climbed out of the truck and walked back over to Duma. “We need to get her someplace safe.”
“Yeah, yeah. First, there’s another one of these around here somewhere. Ab went after him.” He came over to me and held out his hand, smiling. “Meantime, it’s damn good to see you, my friend.”
I took his hand, and it became a brief hug. I hadn’t seen Duma in a while.
“How long’s it been? A year?” I asked, recalling our scavenger hunt across half of Russia for the egg that held the soul of Koschei the Deathless.
He bobbed his head with a broad grin on his face and returned to the Phonoi to pull a wicked-looking kukri knife from its upper chest. The creature began shaking violently, and a horrible shriek erupted from the gash left by the blade and was followed by a thick green slime. The howl was the sound of the spirit tearing itself from the body it had been given and being pulled back into the nothingness it was drawn from. A violent feeling surged through my own body: I wanted to reach across and strangle Duma. The feeling was gone as quickly as it had come. It didn’t affect Duma because he wasn’t human.
Phonoi were made when the ill will and malicious sentiments that humans displayed were gathered and concentrated by those capable of summoning them. They were given a human form that was then perverted by the evil it contained. As they died, that energy got released back into the world. Their demise could easily cause nearby humans to enter into a killing rampage. I’d dealt with those abominations before, and I could resist the effects of one or two dying around me—but any more than that, and all bets were off.
“Beats me, but it sounds about right,” Duma finally responded, trying to wipe green goo from his suit. “You know I have no concept of time. Sun comes up, goes down, the Earth spins around, whatever. Too long is all I know. What kinda crap you get yourself into?” He kicked the once-human shell the murderous spirit had left behind. “This was a twelve-thousand-dollar suit.”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Supernatural bombers, wizards, Jinn, magic cups, assassins, Strixes,” I said with a shiver, trying to shake the last of the murderous feelings.
I walked back to get my bags, and Duma followed without concern, as if I’d just mentioned a grocery list and not a litany of nasty creatures. The problem with him was I couldn’t tell if his lack of reaction was because he was used to this kind of situation with me, or he just didn’t view the creatures as all that nasty. I got the bags to my truck and threw them into the bed.
“What are we going to do with that?” I asked, hooking a thumb toward the body on the ground.
“Dumpster?” Duma asked with an unconcerned shrug.
Something heavy landed in the bed of my truck with a thud. I drew my gun and spun around to the truck’s tailgate to see Duma’s brother Abraxos grinning from ear to ear.
“Whatever you do, make room for another,” Abraxos said. The pale hulk was wiping his hands as he stood at the rear bumper of my truck. He was monstrous, nearly seven feet tall, and dressed like his brother in clothes that had to be custom-made to fit his massive frame. Ab wore his pale hair close-cropped the way I did. While Duma pretended he never spent any time on his hair, Ab and I both knew he took an inordinate amount of time to achieve his disheveled style.
I walked around to see what Ab had thrown in the bed of my truck. In some respects, it almost resembled a human, but it was somewhat crushed, so some body parts were indistinguishable.
“Did you have to hit him so hard, Ab?” I asked, trying to identify the pulpy mush. This wasn’t a Phonoi.
“It ain’t a him,” Ab said then grabbed me from the side in a bear hug that made me feel as though I’d just descended fifteen hundred feet underwater in two seconds. “Good to see you, D!”
It took me a few seconds to catch my breath after he released me and a few more to let the pain in my arms and back subside. I bent over to breathe, resting one hand on the fender of my truck, and eventually managed to sputter out, “Good… to… see… you… too, Ab.”
The hulking Peri walked back behind my truck and bent down to pick up his massive war hammer. That explained the crushed critter in the bed of my truck. He lifted it to his shoulder, walked around to the rear of a boxy black Mercedes SUV a couple of parking spaces down, and frowned impatiently at Duma, who promptly punched a button on a key fob.
“I think it’s one of the Androktasiai, the bitch.” Ab said, looking down at his pants, which were torn over his massive right thigh. A pale yellow liquid stained the black material down to his foot.
Androktasiai were the female counterparts of the Phonoi, the very personification of manslaughter. Unlike their male brethren, they were as beautiful as they were deadly—except for this one. Hell, I couldn’t even identify a head anymore.
“Jeez, bud, how far did she fly?” I asked, laughing a bit.
“Nah, it wasn’t a broad stroke; it was pure overhand,” Ab said, demonstrating the maneuver by lowering his hand in an arc from high overhead. “All I had, too. I had to pull her out of a two-foot-deep hole. She sank her damned claws into my leg before I finally nailed her, though.” He pointed at the wound in his leg.
I craned my neck to get a look at the gash, but it didn’t appear to be that bad. Besides, fae healed quickly, and they didn’t scar.
“Awwwww… did itty bitty Abby get a boo-boo? Want big bruver to come kiss it and make it better?” laughed Duma.
“You can kiss my ass, Duma,” replied Abraxos, pointing across the truck at his brother. “I ain’t complaining, just telling you what happened, prick.”
“Whoa, boys. Let’s play nice. And let’s get these things”—I pointed to the mess in the truck bed—“cleaned up before anyone comes around. And we gotta get this girl somewhere safe so we can talk to her. She knows who I am, and I think she knows who’s behind all this.” I focused on the mystery girl in the cab of my truck.
“Yeah, let’s move before any more of these things show up, or your pinky police for that matter,” Duma suggested. “I’ll go get that one.”
Duma and Ab referred to humans as “pinkies” because of the skin color. I didn’t think they intended it to be derogatory, but it was hard not to take it that way sometimes. I’d learned to deal with it a long time ago.
He ran to the front of my truck to retrieve the Phonoi. He was a blur in motion, but we could hear him grunting as he moved the body. Ab and I couldn’t help but laugh as we listened.
Duma, like most of his race, was faster than me but not nearly as strong. Ab was extremely odd for a Peri because of his strength and relative lack of speed. While he was stronger than me, he was nowhere near as fast, though he was still faster than any mortal human.
Once we had the remains of the two murderous beings covered with a tarp in the back of my truck and all my gear stowed, I hopped into the cab and watched the g
irl in the passenger seat next to me for a moment, listening to her quietly snore. She was clearly exhausted, and I couldn’t fathom how she had found me. Duma and Ab climbed into their ugly black SUV that probably cost more than my boat and truck combined and pulled out to follow me. Cars were one of Duma’s weaknesses. The other weakness was females—human ones in particular. The only thing that ever interested Ab, on the other hand, was combat.
I drove home, keeping an eye on Duma’s SUV in my rearview mirror, feeling better that they were there. During the three-quarters-of-an-hour trip home, the kid twitched and mumbled occasionally as if having a bad dream, and I wondered where she came from and why she was so unkempt.
At home, I pulled my truck into the garage and closed the door then let Duma and Ab in through the front door. I asked Ab to put the remains of the two creatures in my truck bed into a couple of fifty-five-gallon drums I kept in my garage for just such a purpose while I carried the girl into my house and laid her on the couch.
CHAPTER 23
While the girl slept, I called Athena to inform her about what had happened and to confirm my suspicions about Medea. She had very little information about Medea’s current whereabouts, but even so, she wanted a full debriefing. That meant she was coming over. Given her dislike and distrust of Duma and Ab, a family reunion was the last thing I needed.
While I waited for Athena to arrive and the girl to wake up, Duma, Ab, and I sat in my living room, quietly talking about the last time we’d run into the Phonoi together. They were drinking the two-hundred-year-old cognac I kept just for them—I hated the taste and burning sensation of alcohol.
Havoc Rising Page 18
