The Brimstone Deception

by Lisa Shearin

  That would be Rake.

  Back then we’d thought that Rake would capture the leprechaun prince and torture him to force him to grant three wishes, and use those wishes to bring destruction on the city and the entire supernatural world.

  That same dark mage was now fumbling with an absurdly large bunch of keys trying to find the right one to get us into Bacchanalia. To his credit, he’d only dropped them once.

  “Fuck it!” he snarled, slamming his hand flat against the center of the massive steel fire door.

  It vanished.

  The entire door. Gone.

  No smoke around the edges, no tingle of magic, no boom.

  Just gone.

  As if it’d never been there.

  “I didn’t know those two words were an incantation,” Martin said.

  I think Rake was finished fumbling, and if Isidor Silvanus was somewhere inside with Kitty, he might want to consider leaving her and then leaving Rake’s property. Now.

  * * *

  I’d only ever been in Bacchanalia through the front door during business hours.

  The décor had been black. Completely, totally black. The floor was marble, the walls were black glass, and the ceiling appeared as a star-covered sky far from any city lights. There’d been constellations, stars, and even the Milky Way.

  On the other side of the door that Rake had made go bye-bye, I heard the rapid click, click, click of three wall light switches.

  Nothing.

  Even the emergency lights weren’t working.

  Now the décor was really black.

  Dammit.

  The power was out, and I knew Con Ed didn’t have a thing to do with it.

  Ian and I reached into our coat pockets and pulled out our night-vision goggles. Sandra’s team already had theirs ready to go.

  Fred had a flashlight big enough to double as a battering ram. “We waiting on an engraved invitation?”

  “Wait,” Rake told us all.

  How did he see—

  Oh yeah, goblins could see in the dark.

  Rake’s low whispered incantation was like a warm breath against my ear, even though he was standing at least five feet away.

  The words weren’t for me.

  They were for the soft glow that began around the edges of the floor and ceiling, a glow that grew brighter until even us humans could see.

  “I never trust mortal lighting in an emergen—”

  We all stared at what the lights revealed.

  Bacchanalia’s interior had gone from Arabian Nights to Dante’s Inferno.

  It looked like my baby demon-infested bedroom times ten thousand.

  Clear slime ran down the walls, and dripped from the ceiling, pooling on tables and the floor. The bar area was covered in slickly glistening webs, punctuated by what looked like cocoons. A few were pulsing with movement from inside.

  I couldn’t see any demons, but I knew they were here, watching and waiting.

  * * *

  Sandra got word that Roy’s team had gotten inside the police perimeter just before it’d been closed off. We weren’t going to wait for them. They knew where we were going. Bacchanalia didn’t have a basement, but Rake had what I’d heard was considered one of the finest wine cellars of any club in the city. From the dimensions Rake had provided, there’d be only so much room to maneuver down there, and when dealing with a pit of demons, backup would be needed. I wanted to know that Roy’s commandos were at our back, not more demons.

  I wasn’t much for wine. Actually, I wasn’t much for alcohol, aside from an occasional dark ale. And forget any kind of liquor. It didn’t matter how long it’d been fermented in whatever fancy distillery, it all tasted like cough syrup to me. I could safely say I had an unsophisticated palette. Back home when I was growing up, we didn’t bother with store-bought cough syrup. Moonshine, honey, and lemon juice worked just fine.

  I prepared myself to make impressed noises if it was still intact; sympathetic sounds if it was all over the floor—or if the demons had drunk it all. What I knew about wine would fit on the top of a cork, but I’d heard that Rake had a small—or maybe not so small—fortune invested in the room and its contents. Now Isidor Silvanus had opened a Hellpit in the middle of it.

  And Isidor Silvanus had Kitty.

  We had no way of knowing which way Alastor Malvolia’s soul had gone when Bert had guided him to the other side. But wherever he was, I knew he’d approve of there being a long line of people who wanted to help make his last wish in life come true.

  There were two ways down to Bacchanalia’s wine cellar: an elevator and stairs.

  We took the stairs.

  Elevators were death traps on steel cables.

  Rake took the lead, with two of Sandra’s commandos far enough behind to give him space. They’d wanted to go first, but one scowl from the goblin who’d made a steel fire door vanish into thin air, and the boys backed off. Rake could take care of himself. Ian and I followed.

  There wasn’t that much information available on Hellpits, but Martin DiMatteo knew all of it. I was the lucky one who could see portals.

  If Rake opened the wine cellar door and the floor had been turned into a bubbling hellfire-and-brimstone pit, Martin was officially in charge. If it looked to everyone else like a perfectly normal and intact wine cellar stocked with obscenely overpriced bottles of fermented grape juice, and only I saw the bubbling pit, it’d be my turn for Show & Tell.

  Rake opened the door.

  Ian and I were still on the stairs, so I couldn’t see inside.

  Martin stepped up and looked in, then both he and Rake turned and looked at me.

  Crap.

  Ian stepped in front of me to go down the last few steps first. While my partner turning himself into an immovable object between me and a Hellpit was chivalrous, it wasn’t going to do anyone any good, or change what lay beyond that door.

  As far as anyone else was concerned, everything beyond that threshold looked perfectly normal. I didn’t want to see a Hellpit, but I hoped I did. Because if I didn’t, we had no idea where else Isidor could have opened the thing. He would be there—with Kitty—and we had to find her.

  Rake stepped aside and I looked into the room.

  I could see what Rake and Martin saw, and it was unexpected, at least to me. Rake had originally come from a Renaissance type of society, and I expected a wine cellar built to look like it came out of a European castle. Bacchanalia’s wine cellar was a circular room, with pale woods and sleek brushed steel. The shelves and niches that held the bottles were glass, though it probably just looked like glass, and in reality was something more durable. Lighting radiated out like muted sunbeams from a circular central orb mounted in the ceiling. From the looks of the panel set into the wall with the gauges and flickering lights, it appeared Rake’s cellar had the latest in wine storage technology. The room looked more like the bridge of a spaceship than a place to store wine. Rake was a techie. Who knew?

  The room also had a portal slicing like an open wound down a narrow section of wall.

  It wasn’t like the portals at the scene of Sar Gedeon’s murder and in the parking garage. For one, this thing stretched from floor to ceiling. The other two had been roughly man height. But the big difference was that this portal was red and it looked angry—or at least like anyone stupid enough to get close to it would get themselves chewed up and spit out on the other side. Knowing what was on the other side, that was a chow line I wasn’t about to get in.

  Though I didn’t think I’d be risking life, limb, and soul just by crossing the threshold of the wine cellar.

  I stepped into the room and Ian, Rake, Fred, and Martin followed. Sandra stayed by the door.

  Time to break the bad news, but first I had a question. “Director DiMatteo, you said that the Hellpit would be a hole in the ground, not a portal.”

  “That is correct.”

  I nodded in the direction of the bloody and raw-looking gash in the wall. “Then at two
o’clock we have a portal that will presumably take us to the Hellpit.”

  “What’s on the other side of that wall?” Ian asked Rake.

  “I had assumed it to be solid rock,” the goblin replied. “This room was already here when I bought the property. Since it naturally maintained a steady temperature of fifty-eight degrees, I assumed it to be enclosed on all sides by more or less solid rock, like a cave. My wines have been quite comfortable here.” He glared at the wall with the portal that only I could see. “At least they were.”

  “Apparently it’s less solid than you thought,” my partner noted.

  Rake made a sound that under better circumstances would have been a chuckle. “My insurance will never cover this.”

  “What, no Hellpit portal policy?”

  “It’s one of those things you’re sure will never happen to you. Like living in the desert and not getting flood insurance.”

  “At least this portal doesn’t go into another dimension,” I told them both. “It’s just a way to disguise the entrance to a Hellpit.”

  “And its exit,” Martin told us.

  Like we needed reminding. Kitty wasn’t here to close it, and as every minute passed, the Hellpit was opening wider, and the things inside were closer to being able to get out—as in out here with us and the rest of the world.

  “So . . . how do we get inside?” I asked anyone who might have the answer. “Not that I’m eager to do it, but—”

  “Isidor wants the contract,” Rake said. “Since he has taken Kitty Poertner, apparently he knows that I have the only copy of the contract not in his possession.”

  “If he’s as powerful as he would have to be to open a Hellpit,” Martin began, “couldn’t he simply kill you and take it?”

  Rake smiled slowly. “I welcome and eagerly anticipate his efforts. I would be most disappointed should he not try.”

  Even Martin didn’t know what to say to that. Rake was homicidal and suicidal at the same time. Must be a goblin thing.

  “There has to be another entrance.” Fred was standing off to the side, studying the rest of the room.

  “Detective Ash raises a logical point,” Rake said. “Isidor Silvanus could hardly stroll into my establishment unnoticed. Not to mention access to the elevator and stairs down to this cellar is controlled by a coded keypad.”

  “Then why put a ‘back door’ here?” Ian asked.

  “For the same reason he has been staging most of his murders in buildings that I own,” Rake said. “Embarrass the goblin intelligence agency—and me in particular. And for the coup de grace, should we fail to secure the Hellpit, the demons will emerge from here. It seems that Isidor now knows that the center of my web—as Makenna so astutely described it—is here at Bacchanalia. He wants it destroyed.”

  “You must have really pissed him off to get all this special attention,” I said.

  One side of Rake’s lips curled upward. “Many times and on numerous occasions.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you to stop pissing people off? Or at least be more discreet about it?”

  His crooked grin grew. “I am the very soul of discretion, lovely Makenna. I was merely doing my job. It is no fault of mine that my job is a source of great annoyance for Isidor. Besides, to obtain a source of brimstone, he simply would have opened his Hellpit somewhere else in the city. The danger would be the same, and we would not have had the trail of bread crumbs that led us here. When you look at it that way, it was a good thing I did piss him off. It made him predictable.”

  Ian snorted. “We haven’t found him yet.”

  I stood perfectly still as the sides of the portal slowly peeled apart.

  Ian tensed. “What is it?”

  “The portal’s opening.” Then I saw what lay beyond. “And I think Isidor Silvanus just sent someone to let us in.”

  A red-skinned and horned demon, no more than two feet tall, leisurely strolled toward the opening from the other side, swinging what looked like an old-fashioned key that was nearly as big as he was.

  That was surreal. Like Alice in Wonderland surreal.

  “Any of you see the demon lord mini-me walking toward us from the other side?” I asked.

  “No,” Ian and Rake said.

  With a smile revealing a mouth entirely too full of jagged teeth, the little demon embedded the key like a spear into the right side of the portal wall—or whatever it was that a portal had—and stepped right through into the wine cellar with us.

  Ian and Fred reached for their guns.

  Rake reached for his magic.

  Martin reached for his camera.

  Still smiling, the little demon stopped in front of Rake and held out a folded piece of parchment complete with a red wax seal.

  Rake took the parchment and instead of breaking the seal, he put his thumb in the middle and the wax vanished in a poof of rotten egg stink—disarming whatever nastiness Silvanus had intended when the seal was broken.

  He read it, then passed it to me and Ian.

  The words began burning the paper as soon as it left Rake’s hand.

  We read fast then dropped the smoking parchment.

  The instant it touched the floor, the demon disappeared, reappearing on the other side of the portal, and strolled away in the direction from which he’d come.

  Silvanus wrote that he had Kitty and was willing to release her in exchange for the contract. He wanted Rake to deliver the contract in person. He also wanted “the seer, the human SPI agent, the half-elf law officer, and the demonologist.”

  No one else.

  And if all of us didn’t step through that portal, the deal was off.

  “I don’t like it,” Ian said.

  “We’ve just been invited to Hell by an evil wizard,” Fred said. “And if we don’t slam a Hellpit, demons invade and everyone dies. You’ll have to be more specific, buddy.”

  My partner’s face was set on perma-frown. “You, Mac, and Martin don’t need to be anywhere near here when this goes down.”

  “You go, I go,” Fred told him. “No arguments.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “None of us want to be here, but we’re on the guest list. Without Kitty, we don’t stand a chance in hell . . .” I stopped. “If we live through this, that phrase is gonna have a whole new meaning.”

  “I have been to Hell,” Martin told us. “The rest of you have not—with the possible exception of Magus Danescu. I must go as a guide, if nothing else.”

  Rake actually did roll his eyes. “The Hellpit isn’t getting any smaller while you argue. Once the demons of Hell pass into this world, every living thing will become food—or worse. We can’t help Miss Poertner, or close the Hellpit, if we don’t get inside.”

  Rake Danescu had become the voice of reason. We didn’t need Kitty to close the Hellpit. Hell itself had just frozen over.

  “There were two more lines I couldn’t read before it burned up,” I said to Rake. “What did they say?”

  “Isidor claims he cannot—or more likely, will not—guarantee our safety once we’re inside. He claims to have limited influence over his hosts.”

  “He didn’t say anything about weapons,” Ian noted with grim satisfaction.

  “It is likely that weapons from our dimension will not work there,” Martin told us. “Particularly automatic weapons.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “The closer we get to the Hellpit—and therefore to Hell itself—the less effective the technology from our world will be.” Martin almost looked embarrassed. “I discovered this through unpleasant personal experience during one of my excursions.”

  “What about your camera?”

  The demonologist actually smiled. “Older technology such as this will not be affected.”

  “Since the Hellpit was opened by Isidor,” Rake said, “and presumably that portal was his creation as well, the very air on the other side will be filled with the influence of his magic. Different rul
es will most definitely apply.”

  Ian snorted. “Silvanus’s rules.”

  Rake shook his head. “Dark magic rules.” His eyes glittered in what I could swear was anticipation. “I know this game.”

  “I don’t know of any rules that would keep cold steel from doing its job,” Ian said. “You got knives?” he asked me.

  “Many,” I assured him.

  “Get more. Sandy?”

  Sandra turned to her closest commandos and then started passing me blades in sheaths, and I put them anywhere they’d comfortably go.

  “Got an extra revolver?” Ian asked the commander.

  Sandra didn’t say a word, just unclipped the old-fashioned six-shooter from her belt and passed it to him, along with a pouch of ammo.

  Rake shook his head when Sandra offered him what I couldn’t carry.

  If dark magic would work, Rake should be armed for a demonic T-Rex. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to find out.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Martin said when one of the commandos offered him a wicked curved knife with a jagged blade.

  The demonologist was smiling in gleeful anticipation.

  Marty was about to see his very first Hellpit.

  31

  THE five of us stepped over the threshold of Bacchanalia’s wine cellar and into a nightmare landscape, and we all got a good look at Isidor Silvanus’s handiwork.

  I had to give him credit for creativity. The other side of the portal looked like a tunnel in a prehistoric cavern complete with stalagmites and stalactites. Along one side of the rock-strewn floor was a stream of what must have been molten brimstone flowing away from us and around a curve in the cave wall. I couldn’t see what was around the corner, but I could sure see the bright orange glow.

  There was no way all this was on the other side of the wall from Rake’s wine cellar. You couldn’t fling a dead rat below street level in New York without hitting subway tunnels and/or water and sewer lines. There were a lot of things under the city streets, but a monstrous cavern complete with a brimstone creek shouldn’t be one of them.

  “This isn’t right,” was what I managed to say. “This can’t be here. It’s too big.”