Thanks Old Man. I owe you one.
Old man’s hand came out of the glass. He held up four clips of ammo. I took them and reloaded my guns.
Owe you two.
The flapping books were diving again. Who needed gargoyles? I shielded my face with one arm, running to the ladder that serviced the next level up. As I put my weight on the bottom rung, it snapped like a Popsicle stick. I jumped higher. The next rung broke as well. I slid down, and ran for the door to the party room. I more than half expected the door to lock itself in my face, but it opened at my touch and I burst through.
The door slammed behind me, locking with a click. This was a room I’d never seen before. The Red Lady wasn’t here. Neither was the party I’d left, or Salem’s corpse. I stood in a hall that stretched on forever. The walls left and right were ten feet apart, and lined with old suits of armor. The helms were plumbed with red-dyed ostrich feathers. The suits each had unsheathed broadswords, their tips grounded between iron feet. Each warrior also had a triangular shield with the top edge scalloped. The design was simple; a full, red moon on a sable sky.
A gauntlet?
I stood still, watching carefully for any sign of motion. Nothing moved, but I knew better than to relax my guard. I also had a suspicion that the second I warmed up the lotus tattoo, I’d be in the midst of an all out melee with the armor.
I took a step.
Nothing.
I took another step and waited.
Nothing.
I took a third step, getting between the next set of armored figures. I heard steel sliding on steel. Turning, I saw the first two armored suits step off their stands, blocking my retreat, like I wanted to go back and be swarmed by books. The two suits did nothing besides block my path. I turned back to face the long gauntlet, and took a couple more steps. Once more, the suits I passed filled in the hall behind me, making no other aggressive move.
That made sense. The house didn’t want to hurt me. The Red Lady claimed to love me. The house would share that feeling. It had yet to actually do significant damage. Still, if provoked into more extreme measures, the house could always hurt me by accident. I shouldn’t take my safety for granted.
I holstered the PPK I held. There were too many suits. I needed to conserve my ammo. I stood there a moment, whistling a jaunty tune, lulling the hallway into complacency, and then sprinted at my top speed down the line of warriors. The suits to the side blurred past. The ones behind me became noisy, piling into the center of the hall, clattering into each other in their haste. From the sound of clomping metal feet, I knew they were giving chase.
What they’d do when they caught, I didn’t know.
The suits beside me stirred as I reached them. A few steps later, those up ahead began to move, as a wave of animation swept the hall. The suits at the end of the hall were stepping off their stands, plugging up my escape, and I still had half the hall to go.
No choice now. I warmed the tat for Vampire Speed and slammed full ahead. As I hoped, the house didn’t react to that spell, consumed with keeping me from using the lotus-dragon tat instead.
Four pairs of suits barred my way at the end of the hall. I was lucky; instead of thrusting swords at me, they formed a barricade, presenting shields toward me. Just before I would have collided with them, I leaped. This wasn’t much different from body-surfing a crowd at a concert—except their heads came off as I plowed through, skimming over their shoulders. I flew past the last pair, out of the hallway, and found myself above a rather dark, deep pit.
Surrounded by eight empty helmets with red-dyed plumes, I began to fall, feeling something like the coyote from the roadrunner cartoon. Wind whistled past my face. I fell … and fell … and fell … into a strand of something sticky and stretchy. I dropped like a yoyo and rode back up into the darkness. The second time descending, a strand caught my left boot. On the way up again, multiple cords swirled around me, wrapping up various parts of my combat suit. I couldn’t see the strands, but suffered the unpleasant sensation that I’d become a fly in a spider web.
I decided not to hang around for the spider. Pain shuddered through my body as electric current jazzed through my muscles, igniting the blood in my veins. Each nerve ending screamed —the price of the Dragon Fire tat I activated. My suit shimmered dull red. Flames curled around my limbs, seeking out the strands. They caught fire, burning with a sulfur color and rotten-egg stench. The flames raced along the strands, and soon gave form to a web such as I’d imagined.
Sometimes I hate being right.
The webbing burned, but wasn’t consumed. The web bounced. Dark figures scuttled closer, taking on more detail. They were shadow people, eyes red as coals, female from the waist up, with arachnid lower bodies. Their hairy, spider legs were quite secure on the strands despite the swaying and bobbing.
They ringed me, using their weight to accelerate the bouncing I was going through. I recognized the tactic; they were doing their best to disorient, to break my concentration so I couldn’t do magic. I had fought more evil opponents, more powerful ones as well, but nothing so unrelenting.
The webbing was tough. I could pour more energy into my spell, but maybe there was a better way. I felt as if a linebacker had stomped on my stomach as I activated the Demon Wings tattoo on my upper back. I expected the tattoo to cloud the house’s perception of me, making it lose interest, maybe assuming I’d already escaped. I should have remembered that this reality caused my magic tats to function erratically.
My back felt an acid burn, as if skin were blackening and splashing away. My shoulder blades flowed like wax. The sharpness of the pain was a new high, suspending my breath as strobing agony filled my synaptic gaps. And then new impulses came, trying to convince my brain I’d acquired extra limbs. I flexed them, and tore free of the webbing, onyx wings slicing me free. My demon wing tat had become true demon wings, hauling me into the yawning darkness above.
The wind stream cooled my face as I plunged past the ground level, up to a third floor level where a plaster ceiling loomed closer. The ceiling used foreshortening and painted shadows to create a three-dimensional image of a dome where there was no dome. I discovered this the hard way by ramming straight into it. Blood dripping down my face, neck nearly broken, I fell, stunned beyond thought as darkness closed in.
Red light filtered through my eyelids. I groaned as I started to move, and sharp pain jagged through my skull. It wasn’t as bad as a tattoo activating, but worse than a hangover—most of my hangovers anyway.
A familiar ache in my legs told me I’d paid the price for using Vampire Speed while unconscious.
My eyes opened. Amber tiles slid underneath me. I lay on my side. Two shadow women—fully human, dressed in toga-like wraps—dragged me by my right arm, draining my life force for the strength they needed.
I looked ahead of them to see where we were going. An arch. A kitchen lay beyond. A damn big kitchen. This was the kind of kitchen a castle would have that might need to feed hundreds. I was pulled over the threshold, past a wall of shelves stacked with pots, pans, skillets, and kettles. There were tables where food could be prepped, sinks for dishes, where vegetables could be cleaned, and a number of ovens. I smelled assorted spices and the scent of wood smoke and grease.
They jerked me through another turn and I saw a brick oven large enough to stick a whole cow on a spit. Our destination seemed to be a big wooden block, old and stained. A butcher’s block. There was a large ax embedded in the block. It looked familiar. I tried to remember where I’d seen it before, but my brains still felt scrambled. Thinking was slow, hard.
It came to me in a rush that put the copper taste of fear in my mouth. This was the ax that the court executioner had carried, the one he’d wanted to use to lop off Salem’s head.
The ladies pulled me right up to the block, dragging my arm across its top. I smelled the stale iron scent of dried blood as they held my arm in place. A third shadow woman walked past me. She joined the others, reached out, and
placed her hand on the handle of the ax. With a sudden backward lunge, she freed the blade. Her gaze fell on my arm as she raised the ax, preparing to bring it slicing down.
They’d found a helluva way to keep me from using my tattoo. They were removing it—and the whole arm while they were at it. The building probably figured the Red Lady could grow me another. I was not about to put her to that kind of trouble.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“When all else fails, tell the truth.”
—Caine Deathwalker
I swung my right boot against the wood block and shoved. I didn’t break their grip. Instead we had a tug of war going on with my arm as the rope. My protective shield activated, creating a shell of red light that stopped the ax. Undeterred, Ax Girl hauled back and swung again, her shadow-face oddly bland, untouched by any violent emotions. My barrier stood up to the blows, turning them aside.
I changed my tactics, suddenly yielding to the tugging, and skidded over the block, landing between the women who had my arm.
Ax Girl shifted her attack, chasing me with her weapon’s edge. She swung, slicing through another woman, doing no damage to her shadow substance. The blade found my shield’s new location, slapping off it.
I stood, as the ax came around again. Reaching past my own barrier, I grabbed the shaft of the weapon. It jarred my palm, but was now in my control.
I stared Ax Girl in the face and sneered. “What now, bitch?”
The floor shuddered underfoot. The ceiling and walls cracked. Dust drifted down into the air. Pots and pans rattled. A bottle fell off a counter and shattered, splashing wine like blood on the tiles. A wooden beam crashed down from the ceiling, booming as it crashed through a table, breaking plates, scattering chairs in fear.
An earthquake?
The floor buckled. Tiled blocks turned edge up, showing the stone underneath. The maw of a basement yawned to swallow me. I leaped from the chopping block to the sink counter which was still attached to an outside wall. In the process, I lost the ax I’d just fought over. Turning, squatting in the big sink, I slammed my left elbow through diamond-paned glass, letting the suit protect me as I cleared the window and slid out.
I fell into a rose garden, glad that the whole massive structure wasn’t going to bury me alive. The wall beside me began a slow topple, forcing me to roll. The wall smacked the grass where I’d just been. The level of violence had become dangerous. I think the palace had forgotten I wasn’t supposed to be hurt.
The rose bushes unfurled long thorny whips. The lashes slashed across my suit. I used a forearm to cover my face, and ran across emerald grass that tried to entwine around my feet. I escaped the roses, only to become close-lined by two plum trees locking branches together in my path. My feet flew up. I slapped the grass as my back came down, spreading out the impact of the fall.
A living carpet of grass and sod curled over me like a wave, and rolled me into tight layers, without any wiggle room. Bagged up, breath crushed from my lungs, I heard cold terror whispering in the shadows of my mind; buried alive … buried alive ... buried alive… Despair chimed in, telling me that even if the attack ended here, I could well suffocate. And of course, the attack wouldn’t end here. If I were to escape the house, the grounds, there remained an entire moon roused against me, ready to strike me down for shunning the love of the Red Lady.
Enough is enough.
My spine felt like it was kinking, as I fired up every tat on my upper torso. I hoped this would disguise the fact that my dragon-lotus tat was also awakening. I tried to keep my regular tats to as slow a build as the dragon-lotus tat, which wasn’t fast-acting, being a more complex and powerful spell.
One of two things was going to happen: either the gate back to my world would open, and I could dampen out the other tats, or the joint effect of every tats going off would produce Dragon Breath. This last spell was one I seldom used. Dragon Breath was much more intense than my basic fire spell, and more exhausting. Its cost usually left me wrung out, weak, and too drained for further magic until hours had passed. This vulnerability was not good, not with the number of enemies I had.
So … damn hard … to breathe.
I coughed, my throat stung by smoke. Sweat dripped down my face. My lungs filled with lava and I screamed with what little air I had.
Oh, crap! The Dragon Breath is peaking, and the gate’s not open yet.
Fire licked my body, searing the sod carpet, burning it. Pressure built until every atom felt like they were vibrating loose, as if a vast corona of sun-fire were funneling down my throat and exploding my stomach. Like a water balloon, I felt stretched to bursting. I screamed in silence, my bones igniting like phosphorous. Even the darkness of my soul lost its shadows, for a moment.
Then everything ripped loose, and my dragon wings fanned from my back as I expanded to fill the sky, riding the center of a blazing vortex up to where I could grasp the stars with agonized fingers. As a phantom, the stars slid through the pale mist of my incandescent hands. And then I was falling back to the surface of the red moon, toward a blasted crater of fused red glass. Steaming magma pooled where a palace had once loomed proudly from the cliffs.
The roiling mists of my body pulled together once more; cooling, hardening, materializing as true flesh once more.
And there under me, a circular hole widened in the fabric of space, glowing a bloody crimson. The gate to my world.
By the time I reached it, I was back to proper scale, threading a spinning ring, rising from a spinning ring on the same skyscraper I’d left from. I looked up at the stars and moon. The moon was still red, but an edge of black showed that the red was slowly fading. From the position of the moon,
I judged that only a half hour of local time had passed in my absence.
The roof top solidified under me, as the ring of fire vanished away. Beyond weariness, I collapsed to my knees, my hands catching me so my face didn’t smack the concrete. I felt the onyx wings jutting from my back dissolve, spreading a fine black dust into the wind. I wanted to collapse and sleep for a week or two. I didn’t need a hero’s parade.
Maybe a case of scotch… Uh, why is there a small army gathered around me?
I lifted my head and recognition set in. Black leather and attitude. These were the slayers from the Aes Sídhe night club. The red moon light gave their clothes a rusty sheen as they moved. Vivian pushed through their ranks. Someone had loaned her a jacket to cover up the damage she’d taken from Salem and his knife. By now, her flesh would have knitted, but the blood would still be there, and her previous clothing would still be slashed to ribbons.
She came to me at the center of the circle, and stopped so I had a close up view of her knees. I lifted my head, but not much higher. I spoke into her crotch. “Hey, nice to see you. Come here often?”
“Caine, you look like shit, but we need to have words. First, where’s Salem and our necklace?”
I leaned back, putting my arms behind me for support. “Sad news there. He caught a bullet to the brain and didn’t suffer as much as I would have liked.”
She squatted down, presenting me with a disappointing view of her tits. The jacket she’d borrowed was way too large on her for proper definition. Still, I made a point not to look her in the eyes. It wasn’t like I was interested in her as a person, or anything.
“And the necklace?” she asked.
“I lost it,” I lifted my head to gesture at the red moon, “up there.” I smiled. It was true, as far as it went. I knew that Vivian’s dhampyr hearing could tell from my heartbeat that I wasn’t lying.
She spoke over her shoulder to Carson, the slayer leader who walked up behind her. “He’s telling the truth.”
I pressed on, “Of course if you want to trigger the next zombie apocalypse, I may be able to get it back for you. How’d you guys get so potent a demon charm anyway?”
Carson moved beside Vivian for a better view of me. He said, “It’s supposed to be the creation of Mordred Pendragon, founder of our orde
r, despite his half-fey blood.”
“Hell, no,” I said. “That thing was forged by a coven of necromancers. It has too much dark power for anything else.”
Vivian nodded at Carson. “He’s telling the truth.”
Whispers of discontent went around the group as their historical beliefs were proven to be less trust-worthy than they’d thought.
Carson cleared his throat in a threatening manner, glaring around. In the following silence, his precise, clipped words were clearly audible, “Order in the ranks.” He looked back to me, then up at the red moon. The fire was washing away. It was back to half-black already. Soon, the moon would be normal. He began to quote from the Bible, from Revelations, one of my favorite passages. “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, and the moon became as blood.”
I said, “Do you really want to know how close we came to the end of the world?”
He shook his head. “Probably not. Caine, we’re going to be setting up a permanent presence in L.A. You have a problem with that?”
“The fey certainly will. You owe them for a night club, and they never forget a slight.”
“I’ve an answer for that.” He smiled coldly. “Cold iron and genocide. You’re human, and you’ve done the world a favor, taking out the succubus and Salem.” He looked at Vivian. “And you’ve protected one of our own.”
Vivian glared at me. “I didn’t need your help, but … thanks.”
That had to have hurt.
Flushing, she spun around and stomped off, pushing out of the ring of slayers.
Carson’s thumb and first finger made an L, forming a make-believe gun. He pointed it at me. “We’re giving you a pass, this time, but the next time you get in our way…” He let the hammer fall, jerking his hand back as if with recoil.
Red Moon Demon (Demon Lord) Page 28
