Lilly was stunned. He’d dug into her mind discovering her greatest fear. “H-h-h-ow?” she stammered.
The slash of his mouth twisted with a kind of malevolent pleasure. “I was counting on it when I chose you. Oh, he’ll come, but I’ll never let him leave. And once I’ve stripped him of what I need to open the Gates, I’ll use him as bait for his brothers and string all their heads together on my chain.”
Lilly shuddered, her skin drenched in the icy realization of what she’d done. Without even knowing it, she’d unwittingly helped Rathe with his plan. An image of Colt flitted through her mind. His blue eyes imprinted in her vision like a sunspot—present no matter where her gaze moved. He’d never forgive her for this betrayal. Never.
Her legs began to shake and she collapsed to the ground when her knees gave way. Only now did the con come full circle. She’d never seen it coming and now dreaded knowing that Rathe had won and she’d forsaken the only man she’d ever come to care for.
There would be no chance of escaping now or ever. He’d win. The Gates would be opened and the world would fall to the Darkin with Rathe at the helm. It wouldn’t matter that Colt and his brothers were the Chosen. In an effort to grab at her own freedom, she’d doomed them all.
“So what happens now?” she asked, her voice sounding small and fragile to her own ears.
“We wait.”
Chapter 24
Colt wasn’t about to be beaten by an overgrown tin can, a snake-oil salesman, and a demon lord.
He hightailed it to Marley’s as fast as he could get Tempus to go. It wasn’t train speed, but it was a damn sight more direct, which made up for the difference.
Just seeing Marley’s strange house made his insides twist about with urgency. Who knew what Rathe was doing to her? He was a sadistic sonofabitch. Colt was already crazed with worry and fear. He honestly didn’t want to dwell on it until he had some form of game plan in place to free Lilly.
He hopped off Tempus, flicked the GGD switch, and turned to find Marley’s door ajar. A fizzle of wariness started at the back of his neck, making all the hairs on his head come to attention, but his gun hand didn’t itch.
He peered into the dark interior of Marley’s abode. “Marley? Marley, you there?” Colt called out. The door creaked open as he pushed it a bit with his shoulder and stepped inside. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Marley wasn’t much of a housekeeper, but he at least organized his things in piles and teetering stacks in some semblance of order, if only to his own eyes. But what Colt saw was chaos.
Twisted metal, fallen bookcases, smashed equipment, and broken glass littered the floor. Panic seized him by the throat and squeezed hard. He pulled his revolver out and cocked it in one lightning-fast motion. “Marley, dammit, answer me!”
Zzzot. An arc of electricity shot past him, setting the wall ablaze. Colt dove behind an upended table for cover.
“You shan’t fool me twice!” Marley called out. “Step one toe out in the open and I’ll have you torched to a crisp.”
Colt took off his Stetson and waved it above the level of the table. “Marley, it’s me, Colt.”
“That’s what you said last time,” Marley replied.
Zzzot. Colt pulled down his hat to find a smoking hole through the middle of it. “Dammit to blue blazes, Marley, I’m Colt Ambrose Jackson and you’re buying me a new goddamn hat!”
There was a rustling sound as Marley moved closer amid the fallen papers and debris, but Colt didn’t stick his head out to look.
“Who bought you the last one?” Marley asked, his voice tinged with suspicion.
“My pa.”
Marley’s cotton-tufted head and enormous goggled brown eyes, round with surprise, peered over the edge of the table and down at Colt. “Bloody hell. It is you!”
“That’s what I’ve been sayin’. What the hell happened?”
Marley slipped the goggles to his forehead, making the liquid in the lenses slosh around. The goggles left the part of his face that had been covered white against the rest of his soot-blackened skin, so he looked like a demented raccoon. “I was attacked by a shape-shifter.”
“That’s no reason to shoot my hat.”
“The shifter was disguised as you. I let that fiend in my home and the detection sensor in my utility belt went berserk. Then it attacked me.”
Colt glanced around at the destruction in Marley’s home, then back at his friend. “You all right?”
Marley stiffened his upper lip and nodded.
“And Balmora?”
“She’s intact.”
“Good.” Colt rubbed the back of his neck. “Marley, I know this isn’t a good time for you and all, but I need a favor.”
Marley shook his head. “I couldn’t possibly—” He gestured to his home, falling silent, then fiddled with his lip between his fingers, curiosity making his brown eyes bright. “Oh, bother. What is it?”
“I need you to send me to Hell.”
Marley spluttered. “Are you bloody well mad? Why on earth would I do that? Don’t I work myself to the bone creating inventions to ensure that you don’t end up there?”
“Pa’s part of the Book is there. And so is Lilly.”
Marley’s dark brows bent together forming a bushy V beneath the edge of his goggles. “That does present a conundrum. I’m not at all certain how to get you there.”
“I bet that book you let me borrow could tell us.”
“The one you used to summon that succubus?”
For a second he pictured Lilly the first time he’d seen her—her hair licking like red flames against her alabaster skin, her womanly curves accented by the black silk sheath she’d worn. But what made him twinge was the memory of her subtle smile, her light lilting laughter, and the twinkle in her eye. “Yep.”
“Well, I suppose. I mean, I hadn’t consider—” Marley was starting to ramble. Which meant he was thinking hard, but Colt needed more concrete results, and fast.
“Dang it, Marley, I don’t got time to shilly-shally around with this. You gonna send me to Hell or do I got to summon another demon to get me there?”
“No, no. I’ll do it.” He climbed around the remains of a bookcase and over to the desk littered with broken glassware and the marble bust of President Lincoln, now cracked in half down the forehead like an egg.
Marley reached into a drawer and pulled out the familiar heavy, musty book. He pulled his goggles down, which magnified his eyes like a wise old owl, and flipped through the pages, muttering to himself. “Hell, Hell, Hell, how to send oneself to Hell. Ah!” He pointed at the page and grinned up at Colt. “Here it is, although it says it’s performed on a lingering soul of bad repute.”
“You mean a bad ghost.”
“Precisely.”
Colt holstered his gun. “Is this like an exorcism?”
“No. That’s for demons inhabiting a body.”
“So, what do you need?”
“Well a body, for one thing—”
“Marley ...”
“Oh, ah, let’s see.”
Colt grabbed a piece of paper and scrounged up a pencil and began writing things down as Marley rattled off a half-dozen herbs, candles, a silver knife, and some salt. Colt shrugged out of his duster, stripped off his jacket, and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. Together they made their way around the dismantled portion of Marley’s home and into the kitchen, where Marley fiddled with his assortment of brown and green bottles.
Colt couldn’t read Marley’s indecipherable handwriting on the labels, so he didn’t even try to help. Instead he searched through the drawers and found a salt cellar and a silver bowie knife. He let out a long, low whistle as he rubbed his thumb up along the lethal, flattened edge of the foot-long blade. “That’s some knife, Marley.”
“A gift.”
“From a friend or an enemy?”
Marley gave him a crooked smile. “Neither. An old flame, I’m afraid.”
Colt gave the blade a
wary gaze. “She didn’t use it to try to cut out your heart, did she?”
“No, nothing so dramatic, old chap. Left it wedged in my door with a note.”
“A woman Hunter?” Colt guessed.
“Precisely.” Marley dusted the salt off his hands. “There now, we have a proper circle. Just place the candles as you did before, light them, and we can begin.”
“Before you send me back, I got to ask you for one more favor.”
Marley simply stared at him.
“I need you to find out what happened to Lilly’s sister Amelia Arliss and tell her. Can you do that for me?”
“Anything else, or shall I fetch Her Majesty for tea as well?”
Colt chuckled. “Nah, I wouldn’t advise it. She’d take a fancy to Balmora, seein’ as what a fine job you did with her.”
Marley actually blushed. “Are you ready, then?”
“As I’ll ever be.” Colt did as instructed and stood back at the edge of the circle. In the center of the circle surrounding the five-pointed star, Marley placed a bowl containing absinthe, balsam wood, juniper berry, thistle, skullcap, and cloves. He lit the mixture on fire and beckoned Colt closer. “Your hand, please,” he said as he picked up the bowie knife.
Colt cautiously held out his hand, palm up. “What are you planning on?”
“Just a bit of your blood.”
Colt snatched his hand back. “Now hold on a second.”
Irritation flashed in Marley’s eyes. “Do stop being such an infant. I’m not going to cut off your fingers or anything drastic.”
Colt eyed the long, deadly sharp blade, not nearly as sure as Marley about that assertion.
True to his word, Marley left his hand intact and only sliced a thin line across the fleshy pad beneath Colt’s thumb. He held Colt’s hand above the smoking mixture in the bowl as he continued to read from the book. A thin rivulet of scarlet dripped down the length of Colt’s thumb. He watched it well up into tear-shaped drops before they fell. One. Two. Three.
The smoking mixture in the bowl flared into a small greenish fire. Marley pulled a vial of something black and viscous out of his belt and shook it hard, then put a drop in the fire, where it sizzled and smoked even more. The plume of noxious smoke smelled strongly of sulfur.
“What’s that?”
“Vampire blood. Gives the blighter something to hold fast to instead of you.”
Then Marley pulled a large gun-like apparatus with enormous glass bulbs enmeshed in a fine net of copper wire.
“And that?”
Marley’s smile widened, almost reaching his ears. “This is my Aether Particulate Enhancer. Should give the whole process a little boost. It uses revolving magnets at a high velocity to amplify—”
“Later, Marley.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” He picked up the bowl and poured the entire flaming mixture into the glass bulb at the back end of the gun. Snapped it shut and flipped a switch. The entire apparatus began to hum loudly.
Colt eyed the gun nervously. “Ever tested it?”
“Not yet. But there’s nothing a little applied science can’t improve.” He leveled the barrel of the device at Colt, squeezed his eyes shut, and pulled the trigger. Out shot a bolt of green electricity.
Colt’s skin began to dissolve into dark particles, ripping apart tiny bit by tiny bit until he looked like smoke and felt as insubstantial. Marley muttered a final line of Latin, and with it Colt disappeared completely.
The sensation was worse than drowning. Not only could Colt not draw a breath, he had that peculiar sensation of being buoyant, like he was floating suspended in water. Particle by particle his form knit itself back together. And it was excruciating. Every bit of him burned, and he prayed that as his body reassembled everything would go back in its proper place.
The minute he could, he sucked in a gulp of air, coughed and wheezed. His lungs burned. The floor beneath his hands was highly polished cold black marble that gleamed with the reddish glow that seemed to emanate from the edges of the room. Colt lifted his head to see he was in an enormous audience chamber hewn from the rock. At the far end on an upraised marble dais was a throne of glittering black obsidian, occupied by a well-dressed, gruesome gentleman.
Even from where he knelt on the floor, Colt could see the menacing yellow of the demon’s eyes and the way the vertical pupil flexed with interest at his arrival.
“Welcome to Hell,” Rathe said by way of a greeting. The pale, waxy skin of his face stretched tight over high cheekbones and a blade of a nose and was a shade more gray than the pristine white of his cravat, shirt, and vest, and accentuated by his black formal dress. His hair was slicked back, and red rubies glittered in the cuffs at his wrists and in the snowy folds of his cravat.
Great. The Demon of the Opera. Just what he didn’t need. Colt swallowed hard against the dust-dry sensation in his mouth and staggered to his feet. “Where is she?” he rasped, quickly feeling for his gun holster only to find it, and his special Colt revolver, were missing. They hadn’t made it along with him in the transport. Damn. Double damn. A defenseless Hunter in Hell.
The demon leaned forward, balancing an arm on his knee. “Come, come, Mr. Jackson, you’ll have to be more specific than that. There are literally millions of souls under my control.”
Colt ached, but he was also angrier and more determined than a wet cat. “Lilly.”
The vertical pupils grew thicker. A predator scenting its prey. Rathe gave an absent tug to one of his cuffs. “Oh, you mean my servant, Lillith Marie Arliss? She’s been waiting for you right over there.”
Colt swiveled and saw Lilly clothed in nothing but a bloodstained corset and thin cotton bloomers, suspended from huge rusted hooks impaled in the flesh of her chest. The hooks linked to great thick lengths of chain that disappeared into the darkness of the cavern above them. She hung like a side of beef in a butcher shop window, her dead weight swaying slightly, her skin a spiderweb of newly healed pink scars where she’d been sliced repeatedly. Bile rose up hot and thick in the back of his throat. Colt thought he was gonna puke right there on the demon’s highly polished floor.
He locked his narrowed gaze on Rathe. “Is she alive?”
Rathe sighed, toying with the red ruby stickpin in his immaculate white cravat. “You Hunters are so tiresome,” he muttered. He slowly withdrew six inches of long gleaming silver, topped with a glittering teardrop-cut ruby, from the cloth and flung it in Lilly’s direction. Rathe’s aim was true—
Suddenly unable to move anything but his head, Colt followed the trajectory with his gaze, his feet stuck to the floor, as the silver picked up glints of red light in its path toward Lilly. His heart almost stopped. What cruel trick was the sonofabitch—
Ah, hell.
The long pin, sharp as a needle, pierced her soft breast over her heart like a hot knife through butter, causing a trickle of blood. It stuck in her chest, and her eyes opened wide and she let out a bloodcurdling scream.
“Stop!” Colt yelled. He’d never felt more helpless in his life as he did at that moment.
“Her predicament is your fault, Hunter. She never would have been dragged into this if she hadn’t been sent out to follow you.”
She bucked and thrashed against the pain, the stickpin jiggling violently with her movements. Colt couldn’t stand it. He would rather have been flayed alive than watch her torment. Colt struggled and pulled at the invisible bonds encasing his limbs, leaving him frozen to the floor. “Enough!”
Finally her body went rigid, her eyes wide, her mouth open in a silent scream. And suddenly she went pliant and heavy, like a wet burlap sack.
Rathe curled his fingers in a come-hither fashion, and the pin pulled slowly from her chest and reappeared in his cravat. “You could easily stop her pain. Just give me what I want.”
“Let her down and we’ll talk.”
Rathe snapped his fingers and the hooks and chains disappeared into smoke, dumping Lilly into a broken heap on the cold black marb
le floor. A cool breeze brushed past him, releasing him from his frozen state. Colt ran to her. He knelt and lifted her, holding her against his chest, supporting her body with his thighs, anything he could do to offer her comfort and ease her suffering.
She moaned quietly. Relief washed over Colt. At least she was still alive. The gaping holes the hooks had left in the skin around each collarbone and the pinhole in her breast from the stickpin began to heal before Colt’s eyes. It had to be her demon powers. Whatever it was, he was profoundly grateful.
She shivered and he gathered her closer, stroking her hair, murmuring words of comfort that had no meaning, whispering words of hope that he couldn’t back up. Dark circles marred the fine porcelain skin beneath her eyes, and beneath his fingers her red hair was dull and brittle. Seeing her like this affected him worse than the day Winn had nearly died. His brother had been a man. He’d been older. Colt loved him, but Winn hadn’t been his to protect, his to care for. Lilly was. The dark fan of her lashes fluttered as her eyes opened slightly. Her lips were cracked and bleeding, and she swiped them with the tip of her pink tongue, trying to speak.
“Save your breath,” he said to her softly. “I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere.”
She grew stronger by the moment, absorbing the strength he offered her willingly. “Y-you know the only thing h-harder than breaking into Hell is—is breaking out.”
She was killing him. He stroked her matted hair off her face. “I kind of figured that.”
“Then why did you do it? You shouldn’t have come. Rathe is never going to let you or the Book leave.”
Colt gazed at her. “I had to. I promised. And I always keep my promises.”
“What do you have to prove? Just get the Book and get out of here!” Colt could feel Rathe’s malicious gaze, cold and piercing, on his back as he entertained himself by watching their struggles. He glanced at the demon lord, ensconced on his obsidian throne. On his lap was Pa’s part of the Book. Rathe’s fingers flipped the edges of the pages with a thrip, thrip, thrip sound that was driving Colt insane with the thought that the demon was touching it at all. He wanted to go punch Rathe straight in the face and take the damn thing. But Lilly was nearly broken and in his arms.
The Hunter Page 29
