Seeing me, he stopped. For the first time ever, I saw thinly veiled fear in his eyes. I pointed at the murdered couch. “Want to tell me about that?”
“You couldn’t get Heartbreak Hotel out of your mind. You said the couch was obviously possessed by Elvis.” Osamu shrugged with his good shoulder. “The couch no longer has that problem.”
“You’re saying I did this?”
He cocked his head, studying me closer. “Are you off your meds again? You know that’s not good.”
“Meds? The only medicating I do involves massive amounts of booze. You know that.”
“Alcohol on top of anti-depressants is dangerous.”
Okay, some kind of gag was in play here. Wondering how far the joke was going to go, I headed for the hallway door. “Whatever. I’m going to talk to the Old Man.”
“Visiting his grave? Dressed like that?” Osamu’s voice held a trace of disapproval.
I stopped, my hand on the knob. “Grave?”
“Ah, you’ve forgotten again. You did your best against the tidal wave that half-destroyed the city ... you both did.” He paused. “I guess even ancient demons can have bad hearts. His was strained to the breaking point. If only he’d had time to complete the protective barrier…”
I turned back. “We won that battle. He did finish the barrier. The city was saved.”
He bowed, carefully, as if everything hurt. “If you say so, Caine-sama.”
Obviously, there’s a conspiracy to make me believe I’ve gone soft in the head.
I turned back to the door and whipped it open, going through. The hall looked perfectly normal. I headed toward the Great Hall. A door opened and a housekeeping demon in maid’s uniform with green mountain goat horns and violet hair stepped out. She saw me. Her eyes went wide with fear. She stepped back and slammed the door shut between us.
Not the usual reaction I get from women.
I continued on. The only way to get to the bottom of this was to find the Old Man. I reached the foyer to the Great Hall. The front door was gone along with some of the wall. I saw the outside porch strewn with rubble. All of the heroic statues were broken off at the knees now, when only two had been destroyed and replaced before.
This is carrying things too far.
Hurrying, I went into the Great Hall—only it looked like an abandoned factory with pipes and rusting machinery. Shadows choked the space. I heard the scurrying of rats and saw their beady red eyes glaring hungrily. Garbage dominated by beer cans, banana peels, and used condoms littered the floor. The ceiling was gone, giving me a view of a bloated, monster moon in a star-strewn sky—which was really fucking weird since it had been daylight only moments before.
A ghost appeared in front of me, a transparent image of the Old Man. He clutched a can to his chest, glaring balefully at me with blue-star eyes. His hands trembled as did his voice. “I was god-awful strong. Now, I can’t even rip open a can of spam. And it’s all your fault! My own son let me die!”
“You’re on ghost-crack, Old Man. I’d never let that happen.”
He dropped the spam. “But you did! I stop breathing and you wouldn’t give me mouth to mouth, ‘Because it’s too gay,’ you said. I should never have taken you in, ungrateful runt.”
This was not Lauphram, and definitely not funny.
“Go fuck yourself, shit-dick,” I told him. I pushed on as if to walk right through him.
He vanished as ghosts do. I kicked a rat out of my way and continued on. Pipes dripped water. Gauges wagged needles at me. I heard the snarl of grinding gears and the serpentine hiss of venting steam. The mechanisms became more and more archaic in a steam punk kind of way.
I found the throne of the Great Hall. Vivian sprawled there, covered neck to knee in a poncho of black gauze that left little to the imagination, wearing only a black thong underneath. Her nipples poked the fine netting, begging to be clamped. She turned pink eyes my way. “So, you going to fuck me or what? The throne is the only place we haven’t done it yet.”
“I don’t do cheap imitations.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. It’s not like I can’t replace you with three dildos.”
It was past time to figure out what the hell was happening and to stop it. I was either insane, high on damn good drugs, or being influenced by dark magic.
One way to find out.
I warmed my Dragon Sight tattoo with a tingle of warm golden magic. The payment of pain left me feeling like two boulders had collided, with me in the middle, crunching my bones to powder, pulping my flesh. The sensation left as fast as it came. My enhanced vision noted areas glowing with color-coded mystic energies. Little descriptor tags pop up. One said, “Hella bad mojo here!” Another said, “Freddie Mercury is rising.” The place still looked like a post-apocalyptic movie set as envisioned by H. G. Wells.
And then they came at me from every side. Flying-fucking-monkeys in red velvet vests and caps, their wings beating furiously as the dropped from the sky, chittering like cockroach demons sniffing Raid. They spiraled, orbiting each other, blurring, kicking up a stiff wind, becoming a thin tornado of darkness. Fading in like another ghost, I saw Old Man’s gigantic head. Only his head, doing a bad Wizard of Oz impression. The head bobbed and rotated, it voice distorted like when you talk into an oscillating fan. Lauphram’s blue features turned green—and white, morphing into the head of an alligator.
He said, “I am the great and glorious Gizzard of Odd. Tremble before me!”
Vivian whined, “I just finished cleaning up all the monkey shit from last time. If they start fling feces again I’ll kill them!”
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” the Gizzard said.
I saw a mint green curtain materializing. It was brushed aside as a copy of me walked up. He wore a black suit and reading glasses. There was a phonebook in his hands. He flipped past a couple pages. “Damn, I just can’t find my ass with both hands. Where the hell did I leave it?”
Another copy of me came from around the throne. He wore long hair tied into a ponytail and had a rolled blunt in his mouth. It was lit, filling the air with the scent of top grade pot. “I’ve almost got it! A new Unified Field Theory. I’ve covered all natural laws and cosmic forces. I just can’t account for Twinkies.”
“I think they qualify as a synthetic life form,” another me said.
“Or perhaps a fifth state of matter!” I commented.
“Damn it all!” Vivian screamed. “There are three of you and I still can’t get fucked!”
The tornado exploded. A wave of flying monkeys swept past me, on the way to help Vivian out. Passing, they slowed, faces distorting, as if hitting an unseen barrier of plastic wrap. Their muffled screeches turned into the whistles of steam locomotives.
A column of darkness stood where the tornado had been. The alligator face sank into that darkness. It expanded, chasing after the flying monkeys. The darkness took on a midnight-green cast and filled the space, cold and absolute like the moldy touch of death.
After tasting me, the darkness retreated, and the newly revealed floor was a sheet of glass with more darkness underneath. And I finally figured it out. I was still in bed, dreaming I was awake. This was the work of the Nightmare Court; a long range magical attack. They hadn’t been able to kill my body with assassins, so now they were coming after my sanity.
TWENTY
“I am the envy of all I kill.”
—Caine Deathwalker
I moved like a koi in maple syrup. Time was out of joint, or just being difficult. Or my thoughts were racing faster than normal, outstripping everything else. The blackness had a faint green cast. The green glass flooring was glossy, a layer between me and a sublevel that ignited with eerie emerald-white flames.
Now I could see people under the floor, skin burnt away, raw muscles exposed. They screamed, beating skeletal fists, trying to break through the “oven window” to where I was.
This will teach me to fall asleep thinking about hell-dimen
sions. I wonder where the demonic overfiend of this place is.
A female voice shrieked at me. “How dare you kill me; don’t you know I’m too beautiful to die?”
I turned toward the voice and saw the fey woman from my keep’s kitchen. She wore the bullet hole I’d put in her head. Her eyes were empty sockets. Eye fluid had dribbled down her face. There were a few crow feathers in her hair. In place of a dress, she was wound up in thorny vines.
I mused, “Now, why the hell would I waste time dreaming about a skank like you?”
“You will pay for what you did to me. You will suffer and beg for death.” She stood a dozen feet away, bare feet a few inches above the glass floor. She reached for me, her arms stretching like rubber to close the distance and grab my throat. I couldn’t breathe. She was choking me and laughing like a damned, demented soul.
I reached with my thoughts, calling my demon sword to me. Something felt off about the grip of the sword, but I slashed anyway—with a push broom. The handle bounced off her left arm, doing no damage.
What the Hell!
I dropped the broom and reached for my armory again. A pistol grip fit my palms. I raised my handguns and squeezed the triggers—on plastic water guns congested with strawberry jam. The dream was corrupted beyond my control. I struggled to focus, to get the reins back. I mentally added the detail that the guns were full of holy water blessed by a priest.
This dream will give me what I want.
The water hitting the fey woman burned like acid, washing off skin, fuming her features. She screamed. Her grip loosened. I could breathe again. I let the water guns go back into nowhere and visualized a new tattoo I’d never had inked. It appeared on the back of my right hand: a ring with a lightning bolt X. I imagined that the new spell would let me tap into the electrical potential of my inner dragon. The spell would fade when I awoke, but it should work, here and now.
I grabbed her wrists and warmed my new brand with raw magic. It tingled as golden fire appeared, wreathing my hands, pouring into her arms. Her skin blackened, the muscles blasted apart. Her head rolled back as her scream deepened to a gurgle. Then she was down, moaning, twitching a little, oblivious as a huge, shambling creature came out of the darkness behind her, a bear burning with green fire. It was the thing I’d killed in Sacramento, another of my memories being thrown at me.
Understanding hit me. Asleep, I’d been pulled into nightmare, into the clutches of the Nightmare Court. This was payback for those I’d killed in my keep. Fear and terror were going to try and break me. My only true weapons were my imagination well-deserved confidence.
The fire bear sniffed the crumpled fey. And bit her head off. It crunched into pieces and was swallowed. I stared at the glass-brick floor between us, visualizing little crack growing, spreading, webbing the entire area.
The bear swallowed the last of the woman, and lifted its head to look at me. “It’s your fault I’m here. You just had to go and kill me when all I wanted was to eat you.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” I said. “The Hell of Green Flame Assassins really suits you.”
The bear growled and came on. As all of its paws pressed onto the cracked glass, the barrier collapsed. Splintered bricks dropped into the green-white flames as they surged up through the breach. Floating on that fiery sea, the dead souls latched onto the struggling bear. Clambering for freedom, the dead grasped green fur, their weight, spinning the beast as it sank. Losing their ride, the dead swam for the edges of the hole I’d made. Several of the dead made it to my edge of the floor.
I pointed a palm at them. Golden jags of electrical fire forked across the gap, blasting the dead back into the embrace of the whooshing flames. New glass bricks faded in as the hell-dimension repaired itself, walling in the dead once more. I turned, scanning the darkness to every side, and called out to the Nightmare fey who were playing with me, “That’s all you’ve got? Pathetic.”
The darkness came for me, breaking apart into a storm of crows. They cawed, wings pumping, little red eyes burning with hate.
Fuck! I really need to wake up now.
Wishing for it didn’t help. There must have been a large number of nightmare fey pooling their power to keep me here.
Alright. Time for the big guns. Since this was a dark dream, I could dispense with logic to some degree. I knelt and touched the glass floor. Spikes of glass shot up, spearing many of the crows. I lashed the air with golden lightning, killing the rest.
“For my final act,” I announced, “something you fey have never encountered: a tactical nuclear warhead going off in your face!”
Hah! Fey Society hadn’t suffered through a nuclear age and they thought they knew what fear was.
In the distance, a light came with the strength of a thousand suns. Expecting this, I looked away. Chasing after the flash, a concussive wave hit, gouging up the floor, creating a tsunami of shattered glass. My dragon wings were out and flapping, the transformation coming easier because I wanted it that way. I ripped across the sky, climbing higher and higher. I imagined the returning darkness taking on weight and substance, letting it entomb me. My claws slashed at soil as I dug toward a surface firmly fixed in my imagination.
The “ground” shuddered, rippled, and bucked me up into fresh air with a new world around me.
I tumbled end over end, fighting to right myself. And felt a hand pressing on my chest. I was being bounced on my bed by Gumbo. He rumbled at me, “C’mon, we gotta go eat. Wake-up already.”
“I am awake. You can stop bouncing me now.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” The gator demon backed off.
I swung my feet off the bed and switched on the nightstand lamp. The sheet around my lower body was damp with sweat. I needed a quick jump in the shower. But first…
“Hey, Gumbo?”
Pausing on the threshold, he looked back. “Yeah?”
“What was it that got you kicked out of the Gator-Demon Clan?”
“Ah, I don’t really like to talk about that. I was young and foolish, and thought drawing to an inside straight was a good thing.”
“Gambling? What did you lose?”
He sighed and scratched his head. My family headed the clan. We had a big chunk of South Louisiana Bayou. The land developers were after it. I got sucked into a rigged game and, well, here I am. Exiled. Anyone else would have been killed.”
“What would happen if you went back and told them you had a way of making it all up to them?”
He turned in the doorway. “Seriously?”
“Sure. I’ve got some river property in Fairy that they can use indefinitely. All I ask is that they kill any intruding fey on the river that don’t have my permission to be there. After the coronation, I’ll even build them a bar to drink in.”
“I think I can swing this,” Gumbo said, “but there is a deal-breaker.”
“What?”
“Spicy chicken wings. The bar will have to have them.”
I nodded. “Deal. Go get things moving. I need that river protected.”
He grinned and turned away. “On it.”
Now I just needed to have Izumi and her mom help me out by forming a permanent portal near my keep so the shape-shifter clans can come and go, maybe another version of my magic mirror. I’ll dump the project on Izumi. She’ll know who to talk to.”
I got up and went into the bathroom. It was well lit. I lifted a hand reflexively to shield my eyes. They adjusted quickly, and then I noticed a smudge of shadow on the back of one hand: a circle crossed with lightning bolts. This was shadow, not ink, a bubbling up of shadow magic. Weird. I held my hand out and flushed the hand with raw magic. The skin cleared. The blemish went away. As the raw magic died, the shadow pattern returned. On a hunch, I flushed the pattern with even more shadow magic.
A black web of lightning crackled around my hand. I pointed at the toilet paper dispenser. The roll exploded making flurry of confetti.
Well now, that’s interesting.
Whist
ling a happy tune, I started the shower, sure that I was now one trick up on the Old Man.
I concentrated harder. The black fire crackled and thickened. My whole hand vanished in a ball of darkness. I willed the fire to be still, a field of force, and touched the mirror over the sink with the flat of my palm. Withdrawing my hand left a big hole in the glass giving me a view of the contents inside the medicine cabinet. Where the glass went, I didn’t know. This opened up a world of possibilities. Crazy thoughts danced through my head and I smiled.
TWENTY-ONE
“Uninvited guests should be
used for target practice.”
—Caine Deathwalker
Over the last month, the Old Man had taken advantage of the dwarf workmen making repairs on the property. He’d swung a side deal. Tonight, we were seeing the unveiling of a new banquet room. Knowing his tastes, I braced myself for The Hell of Endless Tackiness. On the second floor, gathered at closed, ivory doors covered with gilded scrollwork, Julia, Tera, and the Old Man loitered patiently. I figured we were right above the War Room and the main kitchen.
“You make being fashionably late a lifestyle,” the Old Man said. “You’d miss your own funeral, even if they chained you in a coffin.”
“What’s this bullshit, Old Man? You know I don’t intend to die, ever.” I ducked my head and felt a wind go by. The Old man doesn’t like cussing. He’d used a shadow-magic hand for years to smack my head, and it hasn’t fixed me yet. I smiled at him. “You’re getting old, predictable.”
He glared. “You think so?” He turned and seized the door handles, giving them a twist and push. The doors glided open. He walked in with the girls trailing along. I went along and stopped a few feet inside to look around. The carpet was Mediterranean blue. The walls of the banquet hall were a shade of blue so pale it might as well have been white. Faux Greek columns formed a ring at the center of the space, surrounding a pool of crystal water—a lobster tank of sorts. Sand dollar tables were space out randomly. The chairs were open clamshells lined with claret-colored cushions. I looked up at a frosted glass ceiling etched with the exploits of ancient Greek gods and heroes. Wait-staff stood ranked off to the side in togas. In one corner, I saw a pneumatic tube, a vacuum-powered elevator to bring food up from the first floor. The far wall contained three sets of French doors, all opening to the same wide balcony that overlooked the Clan House garage and the forest beyond.
Demon Lord 5: Silver Crown King Page 16
