The Counterfeit City

by Jenna Lyn Wright

  I shake my head, as he knows I will. “The sooner we get this over with, the sooner demons stop trying to kill you.”

  “Fair point,” he says and throws the car into gear.

  As we race back down the dirt path toward the wrought iron gates of the cemetery, I glance into my side mirror and catch a glimpse of Baron, a grinning red skeleton in the fading taillights.

  He looks positively gleeful at the prospect of spending the rest of his evening burying bodies, and I am suddenly uneasy with the fact that I owe him a favor.

  20

  “Does that look odd to you?”

  We’ve pulled to a stop at the edge of Lilah’s property, and he’s pointing to the sky above her mansion. Across acres of impeccably-trimmed lawns and well-kept gardens, her estate looms like a gothic nightmare. Heavy stone and leaded glass windows. Turrets. A decorative gargoyle or two.

  But that’s not what has his attention. It’s the gathering of angry clouds that churn above her property. Bolts of lightning race through them and the wind begins to pick up.

  “Yes, but no stranger than that,” I say, pointing to the lawn. Small dark squares dot the ground, and with the strange clouds causing a deeper twilight, I can’t make out exactly what they are.

  Runner braces himself against the steering wheel, as if he’s preparing himself for something, and then turns to me with pleading eyes. “Please just take the Dagger to Lucifer. You don’t have to go up there. Just leave her. She can’t do whatever it is she was planning without that weapon. Her demons are dead. She’s got nothing. Just take the Dagger to Him and be done with this.”

  His gaze is so intense that I have to turn away. “I can’t do that. If I don’t kill her, I don’t get back to David.”

  “You aren’t going to get back to David!” He runs a hand through his hair and winces. I guess phantoms don’t heal as quickly as demons. “You never were. You made a deal with the Devil.” Runner puts a hand on my shoulder and turns me to him. “He is a walking broken promise.”

  There is a weight to his words and a sadness in his eyes that makes me believe this is more than the common knowledge we grow up with about Satan and evil. I think he was betrayed by Lucifer personally.

  I want to ask him about it. I want to know. And I want to help make it right if I can. But not now. Nothing can keep me from finishing what I started. Without thinking, I reach for the Dagger of the Fallen. As I brush it with my fingertips, a jolt of murderous glee rushes through me.

  Realization dawns on Runner’s face, and he takes his hand from my shoulder, shrinking back from me. “You… you want to go up there, don’t you?”

  “It’s already started anyway, Runner. Those clouds you pointed out? Those aren’t rain clouds. I’ve never seen anything like them before.” I nod toward the mansion. “She’s already begun something in there, and we have to stop her.”

  He looks up at the ever-darkening sky. “I know you’re right. I just don’t want you to be.”

  “If this is where you leave me, I understand. You’ve already done more than enough. I can handle myself.”

  “I don’t doubt that. I’ve seen you fight. It’s just…” He trails off, his attention caught by something outside. “Yeah, stopping her sooner rather than later would be good.”

  I follow his gaze and see smoke seeping out of the ground floor windows of Lilah’s mansion. It doesn’t rise, though. It slides over the stone and snakes down along the grass, pouring over the windowsill like water flows over falls. Tendrils weave over the gently rolling lawn and begin to wind around the dark shapes dotting the ground.

  “We have to go now. Either you’re coming with me or I’m going alone,” I say.

  The tension in his body, the expression on his face, every single bit of his existence silently screams that he does not want to go.

  He hits the gas anyway.

  As we get deeper onto her property, the smoke thickens.

  “I can’t… I can’t see where I’m going.”

  Pressing myself closer to the door, I peer out into the haze, squinting in an effort to determine what’s on the lawn. The smoke wafts as we pass, and the square closest to me becomes visible.

  It’s a tombstone, and the earth at its base has begun to tremble.

  “They’re graves,” I choke out, just as a hand shoots up from the dirt as the corpse buried below digs itself up out of the ground.

  I grab Runner’s arm in horror, yanking the wheel and scaring the hell out of him. “You have zombies here, too?!”

  “Well, we haven’t before!” he says, and there’s an edge of hysteria to his voice, “but remind me to thank Lilah if I see her for bringing some nightmares to life for me.”

  “She’s raising her army,” I say.

  “I thought she needed the Dagger for that!”

  Once again, my fingers drift toward the weapon. “Maybe this is just the beginning. I don’t know. What I do know is that you’re going to need to go faster.”

  The dead man outside has his torso free, and in moments he’ll be standing. In the swirling smoke, I can see more dark shapes contorting themselves as they pull themselves free of their graves.

  CRACK!

  A decayed fist slams into the driver’s side door, and a face that’s half-flesh, half-bone stares at us from just outside the glass. The walking corpse snarls at us, revealing blackened teeth.

  Runner punches the gas and the tires squeal as we lurch forward. I scramble through the space between the passenger and driver’s seats and into the back of the hearse where the bodies should go.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Keeping tabs on our new friends,” I call over my shoulder, and peer out the back window. The dead are swarming toward us, and my stomach sinks as I realize these aren’t the shambling kind of zombies. They can run.

  I make it back to my seat just as Runner pulls into a roundabout in front of the mansion. “Just don’t stop,” I say, and he looks over in shock as I open the passenger side door and leap out of the moving hearse, tucking into a roll. I hit the asphalt hard and slam into the stone stairs that lead up to Lilah’s massive wooden front doors.

  “Shit!” I hear Runner yelp as he swings around the gaudy fountain that bubbles in the center of the roundabout and heads back down the drive, plowing through dozens of the dead. Some follow the vehicle off into the night. The rest split around him like river water past a rock and race toward me, snapping their jaws and moaning.

  The dead are too fast. By the time I’ve pulled myself to my feet they’re only feet away, and some have tumbled over themselves, blocking my way up to the doors.

  I race away, making a hard left around the side of the mansion.

  There.

  An ivy-covered trellis runs from the ground up to the third story. Leaping, I snag my fingers around the wood and pull myself up just as the dead reach my feet. Their cold, bony fingers claw at my legs, and I kick them off as I ascend.

  The trellis shakes as they try to rip it free, doing their best to send me tumbling down and into the horde. Wood splinters and breaks and it’s about to pull away from the stone wall when I get my fingertips around the cold stone wall of a balcony that juts out just above me. I scramble up and over as the trellis comes free, tipping back onto the teeming pile of the dead and crashing to the ground.

  I can’t look away from the mass of limbs, the tattered, dirt-smeared clothing, the sunken eyes and clumps of stringy, matted hair. They are not even allowed a final rest. Sadness and revulsion slice through me. “What has she done to you?” I murmur.

  An angry snarl drags my attention to a handful of zombies in a thick patch of smoke. It swirls and dissipates, and that’s when I see him.

  Trench Coat.

  The last man I killed before I became one of the dead myself.

  His skull is caved in at the back, and his eyes are blood red and burning with hatred, and I swear it’s not mindless. He sees me, and he knows who I am, and he remembers what I d
id to him.

  Headlights spear through the haze and Runner rockets up the drive again, sucking zombies underneath the wheels of his hearse. He mows a path through Lilah’s decayed and rotting army, and Trench Coat never takes his eyes from me, not even when Runner plows into him, cutting him in half.

  This horror clawing and growling below me, fresh from their graves, is only a fraction of what Lilah has planned. I can feel the sick energy coming off of her hellish army in waves, and I’m certain that if I fail in my mission to stop her, it would be the end of Counterfeit City as I’ve come to know it, and the beginning of the end of the earth as well.

  This is bigger than revenge. Bigger than me. Bigger than David.

  I move to the double doors across the balcony, turn my face away, and smash my elbow through the leaded glass, Careful to avoid jagged edges, I reach inside, unlock the doors, and head inside to say a final goodbye to my old boss.

  21

  Oddly-shaped structures reach up toward the glass ceiling, where moonlight filters in to cast crooked shadows on the ground. Some are thin and spindly, some thick and solid, and it takes my eyes a few seconds of adjustment to realize that I’m in some sort of greenhouse.

  Plants, some familiar, some not, dominate the room. Long tables stretch along the center of the space, and they are covered with burners, beakers, wooden bowls, mortars and pestles, and jars of pastes and dried leaves.

  I hadn’t pictured Lilah as having a green thumb, but the pit in my stomach tells me that she doesn’t grow these plants for their beauty, for the joy of it, or for the therapeutic meditation that occurs when you get dirty working the earth. She grows them for their usefulness. For their poisons.

  Careful not to touch anything, I skirt around the tables and make my way out into a hallway paneled with rich wood, where gas lamps burn and tapestries hang. Thick carpeting muffles my movement. Or, at least I think it does until I hear a voice float up from somewhere on the first floor.

  “Down here,” Lilah calls, and she sounds almost bored.

  Glad to have saved my ammunition, I pull the copper gun from my waistband and creep down a wide, ornate staircase that twists around to deposit me into a large foyer.

  The front door is bolted shut, and a dull thumping emanates from the other side. The sound of the dead trying to get in sets my teeth on edge and a shiver down my spine. Dead functioning adults are one thing. Mindless corpses are another.

  “Quickly, now. We don’t have all night, Gray.” Yup, she’s definitely bored. And why wouldn’t she be? I was a surprisingly easy kill for her minion Kira the first time. Now that she’s in the driver’s seat I’m sure I qualify as only a mere annoyance, a temporary bump in the road before she can finally finish raising her undead demon army.

  Flickering firelight glows from an open doorway at the end of the hallway. I head toward the sound of her voice, not bothering to muffle my approach. She knows I’m here and what I plan to do.

  So I stride inside, my gun raised and my finger on the trigger, shut the door quietly behind me, and flip the lock. Just in case. This is between me and her now. Master and student. I don’t need any second-rate demons sneaking up behind me and stealing my moment.

  She’s waiting for me, legs crossed and lowball glass in hand, in an overstuffed armchair. The liquid in the glass is wrong, though. Not the amber of liquor. It’s black and red, and the mixture doesn’t combine. The two colors slide and slip around each other like oil and water, and tiny flecks of silver inside glitter like stars in the night sky.

  Her free hand drips blood onto the floor from a quickly-healing slice on her palm. My gaze flicks from the wound to the hearth behind her, where an open glass vial, a bloody knife, and a small bowl all sit next to the book I procured for her on my last job. Off to the side, glass case after glass case displays items that I stole for her.

  Two of them are empty.

  “Guess what I had in there?” she says, and I can hear the smile in her voice.

  Mina’s words come back to me. Lilah needed three things to raise a demon army. “Water from the River Styx and the Codex Malum.”

  “Ooh, someone’s been hitting the books.” She swirls the liquid in the glass.

  I’m in no mood for her.

  “You could have let me go,” I say, my teeth clenched and my jaw aching.

  “Nobody leaves me. Especially not for…” She cuts herself off before her voice can rise further. She’s actually angry. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Lilah express an emotion. It’s gone now, though. She has gathered herself. “You are a betrayer.”

  “Funny, I heard the same about you.”

  “From the Father of Lies.” She rises from the chair. Setting the glass on the mantle, she checks her wounded palm as she turns to me. The cut has healed. It’s as if she didn’t just bleed herself in some ritual to raise the dead. She tucks the hand into her pocket as she saunters toward me.

  “You killed David.”

  At that, she laughs, and I have never wanted to harm another so badly in my life. Or afterlife. Not Kira. Not Lucifer. No one.

  “You can’t possibly still be telling yourself that lie, can you?” She fixes me with an appraising gaze. “You don’t get to pass that off onto me, or Kira. He was dead the day you decided you loved him.” A smile spreads over her cruel, beautiful face. “His death, and everything that’s about to transpire? It doesn’t happen without you.”

  Quick as a snakebite, she pulls her hand from her pocket and flings a green powder into my face. I stumble back, hacking and coughing, my lungs burning like fire.

  “Dozens of missions,” Lilah says, but her voice is muffled and distorted, as if I’m hearing it from underwater, and the room around me shimmers and fades as I sink into my own memories…

  It is night, and I am chasing a woman in black down an alleyway. Her boots click on the cobblestones as she runs, and the sound echoes up and off of the brick buildings on either side of us. She glances back at me, fear on her face, and hugs her coat tightly to her.

  I leap at her, snagging her around the neck, and drag her down to the damp street. Easily flip her over. She claws at me. Opens her mouth to protest. To bargain. It is irrelevant. I slice her throat in one quick movement. Her blood spatters on the stone. As her eyes go lifeless and her arms go limp, I pull her coat open and remove the vial of water from the River Styx from inside.

  Lilah’s voice floats into my consciousness. “Financing my venture…”

  I watch four men play cards in the back room of an illegal gambling den. I have snuck inside behind a scantily-clad cocktail waitress, and they’re too busy harassing her and tossing odd golden coins onto the green felt of the table to notice me. One of them grabs her ass as she walks by, and I resolve to kill him last. She moves toward the door, her tray empty, and I let her see me. This will be the one and only time she does, so it doesn’t matter. Her eyes widen as I hold up a finger, signaling for her to wait. She nods.

  I emerge from the shadows, but it takes the men at the table a moment to see me through the thick smoke of their cigars. Moving behind the man closest to me, I snap his neck, pull his gun from his poorly-hidden holster, and pop the men on either side of him between their eyes. The last one pushes back from the table, but there’s nowhere for him to run.

  I vault over the table, pinch a pressure point on his shoulder, and drive him to his knees. I tell him to apologize to the waitress, and he does. Then I drive the heel of my hand into his nose, driving bits of bone into his brain.

  I fill a bag with the coins on the table and the coins in their pockets, leaving a short stack next to the blood-spattered cards. It’ll be worth more to the waitress than that man’s empty apology.

  “Gathering what I needed…” Lilah is practically purring.

  I am in the warehouse by the docks. Bodies litter the cement. Trench Coat lies in a pool of his own blood. I have the box in my hand, and as I step outside, a van pulls up to my left. Lilah’s cleaning crew.

 
I come back to myself in a rush as the breath slams back into my body and my eyes clear. A horrible realization washes over me, turning my blood to ice. “The people I’ve killed for you…”

  “Are about to become my army,” she finishes. “I told you I had the bodies taken care of. And I did.” She nods to the window, where outside, the front lawn stretches away from the mansion and all the graves sit empty.

  “I’m sure you made a deal with the Devil. That will go poorly for you, no matter if you succeed in his mission or not. Trust me,” she says, and I’m certain that she knows what she’s talking about. Runner said the same. I’m the only one being naive here because that thin hope is the only thing keeping me from falling apart.

  I’m in this situation because of the choices I’ve made, yes, but it all truly started when Lilah brought me under her wing. Despair washes over me at the thought that none of this had to happen. “You had Kira. The others. Why bother with me? You had demons…”

  “You were the best, human or otherwise. In your case, otherwise.”

  I still at her words. Otherwise. Somewhere buried deep within me I know there is at least some truth to her words. Since Lucifer tossed me into Counterfeit City, a faint recognition has been tugging at the corners of my mind, beckoning to me. She must see it written all over my face because she says, “Stop pretending that this all doesn’t thrill you just a bit, the revelation of a world running parallel to your own. Is it jogging any memories?”

  “Tell me,” I say, and my grip on the gun tightens.

  “You’ve been cutting a path of death and destruction through Counterfeit City since Lucifer sent you to kill me. You think because you’ve gone from killing humans to killing Counterfeits that somehow means you’ve gone good? The only difference now is that you’re killing your own kind.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “I can be forgiving, Gray. Give me the Dagger and we will rule the army you delivered me together.” She steps toward me, and I fight the urge to step back. “Join me, and we’ll have all the time in the world to discuss your past.”