Fighting the building had been bad. Fighting Salem was going to be worse. I couldn’t do that if I had to divide my attention, also keeping Osamu alive. Besides, what would I do for a combat butler if he died?
I drew both swords from the back of my harness, filled my lungs, and let the breath escape slowly. I stepped out onto the roof. Air-conditioning units edged one side of the roof, hugging a wall. I barely registered them, my gaze drawn to the well-lit helipad where Salem waited, wide-legged, baring the weight of the sky on his shoulders, fists on his hips in jaunty defiance. Behind him, Vivian knelt as I’d last seen her, except her head hung, hiding her face, and the black leather had been
peeled down to her waist, hanging in clean-cut strips. Herbreasts and stomach were drenched in red.
Friggin’ warlock has been busy.
A tingle raced across my skin, followed by a feeling as if something heavy and wet had wrapped around me. I tried to awaken my Dragon Vision but the tat stayed cold. Salem was doing something that cut me off from my magic. He seemed to have better control over the necklace he’d stolen than Sarah ever had, or maybe he simply knew better spells.
Only the lotus and dragon tat on my arm felt alive—with anticipation. The thing had too much power to be suppressed. That scared me into saving it as a last resort, so I only had my short swords and Old Man’s training left to draw upon.
Have to be enough.
In the absence of cover, I walked straight toward him. Nothing came; no gunshots, mystic bolts of bedevilment, he didn’t even throw a rock—I’d never have wasted such an opportunity.
His voice came, thin and sharp as the knife he held. “Caine, she’s not so pretty now, but if you want her, you can have her. All you’ve got to do is go through me. Do you really think you can do that?” He gestured with his empty hand. A spectral green light lit up the helipad, and in that glow, he became weightless, floating into the air. His midnight-blue long coat whipped in the cool night breeze as he looked down on me.
So theatrical...
About twenty feet still separated us.
Using my wrists, I spun both swords in lazy circles, weaving a web of death in front of me. “You’re above us all, aren’t you?” I said.
“Well, above you, certainly. I told them you’d be no challenge.”
“Told who? Who set you and the succubus on me?”
He shook his head. “Ah, that would be telling.”
“Think of it as a condemned man’s last wish.” I kept the swords in motion. “Who’s trying to start a war in my territory?”
“It’s not about your precious city. It’s about the crime committed by your parents in giving birth to a half-breed like you. It’s about the reward I’ve been offered for taking you down.”
Ten feet left to go.
I stepped onto the helipad, into the watery zone of light. I felt nothing new. Gravity did me no favors. I stayed earthbound.
Half breed. He was saying one of my parents hadn’t been human. The idea didn’t distress me. In fact, it might actually explain a few things I knew about myself.
I stopped, with him hovering just above my head. I stilled the swinging swords, and offered him the one in my left hand, hilt first. “You said you wanted to play. What’s wrong? Scared?”
“Of you? No. I attended a military academy in Europe. Fencing was part of my daily regimen. I’m quite good, actually.” He sank until his feet were only a few inches above the concrete. He reached for the sword I offered. “I hope you’re fond of scars, not that you’ll live long enough to enjoy them.”
His hand closed on the hilt.
I went from utterly relaxed, to an explosive movement of my entire body. My right hand shot straight out, driving my sword forward. Though he wheeled sideways—never moving his legs—my edge managed to slice across his chest, through the left lapel of his long coat.
Like an action figure moved by an unseen hand, he orbited me, extending the sword I’d given him. He kept its point centered on my torso. “Nice,” he said. “You just might last long enough to amuse me.”
I turned with him, not giving him access to my back. “One can only hope.”
He stopped in front of me, angling his body the way European fencers do. Western swordplay is all about what’s in front of you.
I slid diagonally back. I wasn’t about to let him pull me in into his kind of fight. Now I was the one circling, forcing him to continually adjust his stance. I thrust at his hip, testing him. His blade clattered against mine. I rode the energy of the blow, and spun, slapping the flat of my blade against my ribs so that as I came around, I could shove my point straight out in a blinding flash of speed.
The tight turn and strike forced him back a step. Blood dripped from his badly slashed hand. He stopped smiling. Even the little blond spikes of his over-styled hair seemed to quiver in rage. He looked at his hand while putting distance between us. The wound took a second to heal. Apparently, I was going to have to cut his heart out, or lop his evil head clean off. No problem.
“Interesting,” the warlock said.
“Oh,” I said, “there’s a lot more hell to come.”
The warlock flew forward, his sword aimed at my heart.
I dipped my sword tip and turned my body at the last second, stepping inside his guard. I slammed my right elbow at his neck. He caught the blow with his left hand, redirecting it to the side. I went with the motion, riding his energy while conserving mine. Slashing, I tried to take his head. The amulet sparked red-violet and he shot high into the air faster than humanly possible. His shirt was slashed, the material wet and red with a growing stain of blood. His face took on a grim cast.
“You have a nasty fighting style there, Caine.”
I smiled, “What can I say? Sometimes I even scare myself.”
He floated back down, drifting backwards toward Vivian. I don’t think he realized that, or that she was awake now, head lifted, eyes ablaze with unconquerable fury. If looks could kill, she’d have finished Salem off in that second. But maybe I could help her out.
I ran at him headfirst, my sword held in a relaxed grip, dragging on the concrete, trailing sparks. I leaped, my sword sweeping up before me to clear my way. Aloft, I reversed the blade and brought it down full force. He blocked, but I drove him down. His feet skidded on the helipad. This brought him crowding against Vivian.
Fangs yawning, she struck at his neck.
He screamed like a drop-kicked poodle.
I laughed.
At least he seemed to know he’d tear out his own throat before he pried her jaws apart; his strength was only human. He stabbed at me with his sword to keep me off while his free hand clutched the necklace. Its edges whirled as it clattered through rapid-fire changes like a Rubik’s cube with rabies.
Salem’s whole body went spectral green like the weird light generated by the helipad underfoot. Like glass he could be seen through, actually filtering the light. Every artery, vein, bone, ligament, tendon, organ, muscle, and webbing of nerve fiber were on display in way too much detail for clarity, especially as he thrashed, keeping only his neck still where
Vivian had attached herself.
The necklace clattered a little more, fine-tuning its form, then grew silent and still.
Vivian’s teeth gnashed.
The sword Salem had been wagging didn’t slip from his fingers—it fell through them. He’d shifted his molecular structure slightly out of phase, becoming a living ghost.
He straightened and moved effortlessly away from Vivian, as if picked up by the wind. Since this wasn’t possible, I figured there was a ghost wind in whatever side pocket of reality he’d shoved his density.
Vivian thrashed in rage as her prey escaped, coming loose from the effect that had bound her limbs, making her a prisoner. Apparently, his necklace was less effective reaching us from an altered space.
I staggered as my tats warmed, reconnecting their magic to me in a violent rush, as if I’d been drinking cleaning fluid. A
gain. I went to one knee, and kept my eyes on Salem.
The green glow of the helipad thinned and died, allowing shadows to rush in. The main light now came from the lights mounted over the stairwell entrance, and the city surrounding us.
With a smirk in place, he waved goodbye. Drifting off the darkened helipad, he rose a little higher, sliding sideways against the black face of the moon.
Bastard’s running. No way am I losing him after all this.
There was only one way I might still reach him.
I focused my life force on the lotus-dragon tat on my right forearm. The new tattoo began a slow burn, taking its sweet time waking up. I ran toward the edge of the building, trying to stay close to the warlock. I growled at the lotus. “Come on, how much time are you going to take?”
My stare slid past Salem to the moon, and I stopped running. The moon was changing. A wet layer of blood dripped from its top, soaking the whole thing as it spread downward. The dark orb became an infernal crimson, bleeding red light into the night sky.
What the friggin’ hell! Did I do that?
THIRTY-TWO
“It never fails; put on an apocalypse
suit, and an apocalypse happens.”
—Caine Deathwalker
Something about my expression compelled Salem to cancel his drifting and turn. He went rigid with shock. A heartbeat later, a spinning ring of red plasma enclosed us both, ghosting up from the roof, reaching my knees. The writhing fire was colder than the night. Salem’s head tilted downward. He turned my way once more, gaze following the ring, then sliding to me. There was a look on his face as if I’d profoundly surprised him.
Hand touching the amulet, Salem darted away, but only made it as far as the ring. An unseen wall in the air stopped him, bouncing him back. He returned to my reality, losing the green glow, and was tinted red by the moon, and the blood ring around us.
“So, what now?” he asked.
“Now the fun starts, Salem.”
“How did you do this? This is not your kind of magic.”
I moved the sword, rolling my arm in a what-can-I-say gesture.
His eyes followed the motion. They widened, as if he could see the new tat under my sleeve. “What is that…?”
The concrete inside the ring turned blood red, spilling crimson radiance into the air. It was like a piece of the blood moon had materialized under us. Why now? I think I knew. Salem had just shed his altered state. The ring could now sense two souls. That was the key. My mind flashed to Mad Max at Thunder Dome.: Two men enter. One leaves.
The blood light hardened. We were bugs in red amber, but the wind-blown grit had no trouble reaching us. Soon, the glow was so thick we were only shadows to each other, haunting a private hell. He screamed something I couldn’t understand as gravity flickered. Finally, I was seized and thrown by a monstrous force.
Blinded by dust, whirled madly by hurricane winds, I lost the sword. Wrapping my arms over my face, I protected my eyes, and filtered the clogged air so I could breathe.
Something that felt like a sand dune caught me, whacking my breath out of me. I rolled up the bank and then back down, as the wind slacked from killing force to just pissed off. Squinting, I shook myself and put my back to the wind, feeling for the mirror on my chest.
Good, still there.
Something else felt wrong. My right forearm felt cold. I unzipped the suit enough to pull my arm out and take a look. The tattoo was gone. I stuffed the arm back into the suit, and looked round. I found the lotus I’d stolen from the fey treasure room, it was restored, a hunk of crystal half buried in the dust. Coming to this dimension had broken the bonding.
It will probably happen every time I come here. The crystal needs to be functional to catch a soul and fuel my return. I picked up the crystal lotus and stuffed it inside my suit. With the relic there, I wasn’t able to zip back up, and would gather dust in my clothes, but I needed to keep my hands free, the downside of survival.
I noticed I wasn’t staying put. My knees were digging shallow furrows in the dust; a weird kind of sideways gravity pulled me. I rolled to my feet, and the soles of my feet cut the furrows then. My weight felt low as I moved with no effort on my part, like a passenger in an invisible car.
I’d lost Salem in the murk of grit. He might be miles away or on the other side of any of these dunes. His feet could be sliding nearby like mine and I’d never know, with the sibilance playing games with my senses.
I heated a tat, striving to activate my heightened senses, and a spike of pleasure went through me better than any sex I’d ever had. My feet became heavy, digging grooves in the crimson dust, dirtying the air even more. My whole body expanded, lifting my upper torso out of the billows. My magic worked in this pocket dimension, but not as expected. I needed to be careful about any spell I used.
Above the dust, I found a bloody bowl of sky with a few bright red stars gleaming through. In the middle of the sky, as seen in NASA photos taken by astronauts on the moon, I saw the bright blaze of the Earth, a blue white swirl of cloud and ocean, and brown-green continents, hanging out of reach. Only the moon I was on was not the same Luna. This was the moon of a parallel universe, or maybe the sub-space dream of a god. This moon had atmosphere and—ruins.
Saving my magic, I released the heightened senses I’d invoked, and sank into the billows, my normal size once more.
Lumbering along in a jet stream, without effort, I drifted past half shattered buildings made of octagonal, obsidian bricks. The wind swelled, moaning as it grated across the dark surfaces. I passed a tower resembling a pig-pong ball on a skewer. Then a divided pyramid occupied two sides of a courtyard where the dust clouds flattened the appearance of gargantuan statues into amorphous shadows. These frozen warriors awaited the thaw of battles that would never come. I went on to where slanting obelisks stabbed the sky like accusing fingers.
Curious, I tried an experiment, angling myself, pushing against the dust to add a bit of resistance to the relentless drag of the horizontal gravity. I was still pulled with the billows across the ruins, but I was able to tell there was a local source to the attraction.
I’m being taken somewhere on purpose.
I wanted to resist on general principle, but I figured Salem would eventually show up where I was going, and if I wanted to get there first—to get the lay of the land and prepare an ambush—I needed to run. I started moving my legs. The dust made footing treacherous, but running into the drag made it easier to breath.
I crossed an expanse of dunes and reached the hard red face of a bluff. I jumped against it and ran up what my eyes insisted was now ground, not wall. At the top, it felt like falling when I reoriented. The filter of hissing grit almost hid the sound of grating stone as a slab swung up in front of me. What poked its head in my path was more mantis than trapdoor spider, with its long, green chitin, oversized eyes, and meat-hook claws. The size of a German shepherd, it tilted its head to study me as if humans were a fabulous, mythical thing it had never expected to meet.
I wondered what its usual prey was.
Making the best of things, it leaped to meet me, pushing off the upright door, against the sideways gravity. I had an impression of a grasshopper’s oversized hind legs, as I fell flat to the ground, I hit the releases that popped the bayonets from my forearm sheathes. I slid feet first into the drag until I stood on the raised trap door. The bug’s claws missed, but my bayonets didn’t. I grooved the entire length of it, head to pelvis, but I don’t think the injuries were fatal.
It screamed, thrashing in shock. Before the weird gravity could bring it back on top of me, I threw myself to the side and rolled into the drag. Bumping up a dune, I went a little airborne and managed to get my feet under me so I no longer felt like I was dropping. I knew I was still falling, if sideways, but the normal orientation was a psychological comfort.
Keeping an eye out for more opening trapdoors, I continued. The pull increased, as if whatever caused it was getting impatient to see
me. The thickening gruel of air acquired a diagonal motion that tugged me out of line with the drag. I activated my magical senses once more and nearly came in my pants as the pleasure center of my brain was tickled. It was a hell of a cost I was paying for magic. This reality—to use the term loosely—could become addictive.
Expanding, I almost didn’t fit the giant gate that appeared before me, set between two fanglike pillars. Resisting winds that now moved in from the side, I realized that I’d reached the edge of a vortex that would only get harder, more impenetrable with every step. However, if I could punch through to the eye of the storm, I should find tranquility and maybe normal gravity once more.
I charged all out, feeling a delicious thrill as I activated the tat on my leg that amplified my speed. I got ahead of the jet stream, but my course went diagonal. Still, progress was progress. The air was a red smear now. I ran blind, until bursting through a curtain, I found crystal clarity and a return of gravity from the ground.
The suddenness of it tripped me up. I sprawled face down, my heightened senses peeling away like layers off an onion. Spitting, I lifted my face from the dust and looked a few yards ahead at delicate bare feet with petite ankles. I raised my head and followed the view up milky legs to a diaphanous wrap hugging a woman’s full, sweet curves. My gaze slid past thinly veiled breasts to a heart-shaped face framed by blood red hair. Her lips were stained the same color, and her eyes continued the motif, deep crystal red pools where shadows swam like sharks, ever in motion.
Red Moon Demon (Demon Lord) Page 24
