Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel (22 page)

“Mine to keep—or destroy.” He spread apart his fingers, letting Nathaniel’s will rest in his open palm. “Without this, what are you?” The Devil smiled. “What is anyone?”

Unable to move or speak, Nathaniel watched as the Devil threw the glittering vapor into the nearest pit. It sparked, then burst into blue flames, like an igniting gas—

At the same time, a fiery, annihilating wind seemed to scour through all the chambers of Nathaniel’s mind. Within the limits of his skull, there was no escape from what was happening to him. He felt something inside, the core of his being, dwindle and weaken, as though bits of his flesh were being carved away by the point of a scalpel-like blade.

His gaze turned toward his own hand, lying flaccid upon the ashen rock. He tried to lift it, merely bring it up an inch into the air—nothing more than that. As he watched, he saw his fingers tremble, as though straining against unseen wisps of spider silk strong enough to bind them in place. He summoned all his determination into the tendons of his hand, ordering them to curl the pale flesh into a fist, fingertips scrabbling through the dust and cinders …

Nothing happened. He might as well have been looking at a corpse’s hand. A thing that life and desire had abandoned.

The Devil bent down and searched Nathaniel’s eyes, then straightened again.

“There, that’s better.” He nodded, turned, and strode away among the fiery pits.

I can’t stay here
 … Nathaniel’s will might have been extinguished, but his thoughts continued. He could picture the world above, the storm clouds rolling above the city’s darkened streets.
That’s where I should be. With them
 …
the others
 …
fighting
 …

But it was no use. Words and images flitted by, with no connection to each other, like moths captured inside his emptied skull. He knew what he should do, but could no more accomplish it than he could move his limbs. As though he were an unstrung marionette, he sprawled on the ground, motionless.

This is eternity,
he realized. Fear gripped him, though it couldn’t move him.
I’ll be here like this, forever
 …

Something moved, at the limit of his vision. A human form, crawling through the flames toward him.

One of the sinners,
thought Nathaniel.
Another poor bastard trapped here
. But what could it want from him?

He couldn’t raise his head to look. All he could do was wait until the burning, blistered figure was directly above him, its reddened eyes gazing down into his.

The sinner’s eyes widened in amazement, as though it were somehow able to recognize Nathaniel from that other world, the one above. In which, long ago, it had been a living thing, a human being like others, not yet damned to eternal pain.

“Nat…” The sinner’s voice was a harsh, parched croak. “Nat … is that you?”

It can’t be,
thought Nathaniel.
It’s impossible
.

One of the sinner’s hands, a shriveled relic of blackened bone and skin, trembled as it reached toward Nathaniel’s face, stopping a few inches away from touching him. He wanted to close his eyes, to block out the sight of the charred creature above him, but couldn’t.

He gazed up into the sinner’s ruined face—

And recognized it. Even through all the charnel years that had passed, something remained there. A dark, golden fleck at the pupil of one eye that he remembered from when he had been a child. A child looking up into the face of a drunk who gripped him in his trembling hands—

A flood of memories surged through his brain.

He could see a man, a living one, sending out a boy to buy his booze. He knew the boy he saw was himself—and the man was his father.

As was the burning sinner here, reaching down to stroke his hair—but stopping an inch away from that faint contact. What was left of his father pulled his hand away, knowing that he could no longer even touch his son. The son he had sold to Death, to buy himself a few more years on the surface of the earth. And who, by that cold transaction, had condemned his soul to eternal torment in the fires of Hell.

18.

The smoke hung low over the garden square, thick and choking.

Blake gazed across the mounds of demon corpses. The only thing recognizable from before the battle had begun was the peach tree in the center of the garden, the space around it transformed into a hilly deathscape of fanged and clawed creatures, stacked one on top of another, all dead or expiring in their broken armor. But even now, more were coming to the battle, their cries ringing as they climbed out of the abandoned town house’s wreckage. The night sky thickened with the tumult of their batlike wings, bright glints flashing from the blades of their weapons, just like on the mural in the labyrinth below.

He looked over to where the giant hit man Hank was visible, towering over the bodies heaped around him. The two of them had been separated during the fight, each slashing and hacking at the demons who came surging straight into their faces, backing up to draw one into a position where its head could be lopped off, diving to the side to avoid a battle-axe swinging down like a crescent guillotine, then lunging upward to spear the attacker through its guts. The action had grown so furious that there’d been no way that either man could keep track of the other; all they could do was keep fighting, trusting that his companion was doing the same somewhere else.

Catching his breath, Blake watched as Hank twisted a demon’s head from its neck, tossing the armored head to the side while it still grimaced and snarled at him. If anything, the big guy had an even harder job: his size made him a more obvious target for the demons to attack, plus he had to fight while shielding the infant strapped to his chest. Blake wondered what Ren-Lei’s reaction was to all the mayhem happening around her. Snugged inside the helmet they had strapped over her, she might well have simply curled up and gone to sleep, secure in the warmth from her protector’s laboring heart.

Blake’s exhausted thoughts were interrupted by another shape swooping over his head. Without even seeing what it was, he jabbed up into the air the point of one of the spear’s blades, sheathed in white-hot flames. A shrieking curse struck his ear as a many-armed demon dodged the weapon. A half-dozen scimitars, one in each of the creature’s fists, swept windmill-like at his head. He managed to parry them with quick, darting thrusts of the spear, but there were too many, coming too fast, for him to get a shot at the breastplate behind them. Blake found himself retreating step-by-step, the spear’s staff growing slick with the sweat of his palms.

He heard the heavy impact of Hank’s boots through the ground before he glimpsed the other man running toward him, flaming axe upraised. But before Hank could reach the spot, a knot of demons swarmed around him. The foul odor emanating from the exposed intestines that linked all five together, each one’s innards looping into the next one’s gaping abdomen, filled Blake’s nostrils. Through the scimitars that he continued blocking, he could see the demons circling around Hank, the wet mesh of their guts forming a tangled net on all sides.

The demons tightened upon their prey, intestines binding around Hank’s ribs. One of them scented more tender prey under the magnesium helmet on the human’s chest. The points of its dagger teeth snapped off as it futilely tried to gnaw through the metal.

The damp fecal contents of the demon’s guts sizzled as Hank’s white-hot axe sliced through them. Each swipe of his weapon left more writhing lengths upon the ground. With the demons now separated from each other, Hank was able to bring the axe straight down upon their heads, splitting each in half, one after the other. In less than a minute, ten bifurcated forms sprawled before him, their guts the only parts still moving, whipping back and forth like blinded worms.

One of the scimitars wielded by Blake’s assailant dug its edge into the stone bank at the garden square’s edge. He dove on his side to escape the other blades, completing the roll and springing to his feet, out of the demon’s reach. Snarling, it struggled to free the caught scimitar; that gave Blake a moment to catch his breath, pulse hammering inside his chest.

At the same moment, he spotted another a pair of winged demons swooping down at Hank. Before they could even swing the swords in their fists, the hit man had scrambled on top of the demons he had just killed. Added to his own height, it gave him the reach he needed to take off the heads of the ones attacking from above, the axe cutting through their necks in one flashing arc.

“Look!” Blake caught the other man’s eye. He pointed through the smoke filling the square. “There, behind you!”

Chest spattered with the flying demons’ gore, Hank turned and looked over his shoulder. The battle-axe slowly lowered in his grip as he spotted the next apparition to join battle with them.

Striding past the smoke-shrouded branches of the peach tree came the Devil.

The earth shook with each strike of his cloven hoof, now exposed. Its crescent edge shattered the skulls of his fallen soldiers as he strode, heedless of their prostrate forms beneath him. His forelegs were drenched to the knees with their blood. His nails had sharpened to talons as they dug into the front of his shirt. He tore open the white cloth, throwing the tattered rags to either side. Seared across his bared chest, back, and arms were the same emblems that had seethed alight from the desk in his private office, in the tower looming far above the square. The symbols protruded from his skin, like the welts singed in place by a white-hot branding iron. Largest of all was the eight-pointed star in the middle of his chest, above his heart.

The sight so transfixed Blake that the six-armed demon was almost driven from his thoughts. He suddenly heard the whisper of a scimitar blade slicing through the air; he dove to one side, the blade missing his head by a fraction of an inch. Jabbing one of the glaive’s points toward the demon, he drove it back.

A light fiercer and harsher than a noonday sun flooded the garden square. Hard-edged shadows sprang around the corpses where they lay. Turning his gaze from his attacker, Blake saw that the Devil had halted in the middle of the square, scanning about for his enemies. It should have been easy for him to spot Hank’s massive figure, but his furiously slitted gaze had fallen upon Blake instead. Unable to move, he watched as the Devil gathered a sphere of fiery plasma between his outstretched hands. A single thrusting motion and the fireball shot toward Blake, a glowing trail stretching behind it to the Devil’s fingertips.

Hank was able to react. He snatched up one of the creatures he had just killed, and threw the corpse straight at Blake. Its impact knocked him to the ground; sprawled on his back, he saw the fireball streak directly above him, hitting the scimitar-bearing demon instead. Its torso vaporized in a blinding flash of light, the six arms spiraling loose across the corpses mounded nearby.

More demons, weapons clashing overhead, were already rushing toward the spot, as though their commander’s appearance in their midst had reignited their fury. Blake got to his feet; dazed, he leaned his weight on the staff of the spear and gazed at the onslaught. They would be on top of him in seconds.

“There’s too many of them!” he managed to shout across the corpses to Hank. “We can’t fight them all—”

The hit man glanced over at him for only a moment, then turned and braced himself, one hand laid on top of the helmet strapped to his chest, the other raising the axe back behind his shoulder. Ready to swing and slash apart the first demon to reach him, and the one after that, and all the others, for as long as he could. Until he would be buried beneath the mass of their stabbing, clawing fury.

Blake turned away from the grim sight. There was only one person he could think of, one who might be able to save them. A last ally they could call upon. If Death’s apprentice was even still alive …

19.

“There’s so much … I need … to tell you…”

The red eyes gazing down at Nathaniel looked as if they had been boiled in pitch. The fires of Hell had charred away the face’s skin, leaving a few black, ribbonlike scraps dangling from the exposed muscles and tendons.

“I’m sorry,” continued Nathaniel’s father. The words came haltingly, past the dry, swollen tongue in what had been his mouth and what was now a cracked, lipless wound. “That’s what … I wanted to tell you.” A tear mingled with the blood seeping from the raw flesh. “I always … wanted to tell you.”

He heard what his father was saying; he heard the scraped, croaking words. And he even knew what they meant. As he lay motionless on the hot, fissured ground of the Devil’s kingdom, he saw past his father kneeling above him, to the surrounding rock-fanged pits. From them, he could hear the mingled whimpers and cries of other tortured souls. Those wordless sounds, human as they were, meant as much to him as what his own father had just said.

Maybe
 … His disconnected thoughts inched slowly through his skull.
Maybe I would’ve cared
 …
a long time ago
. Before the Devil had stolen his will from him. Maybe what his dead and eternally damned father had just told him, those few words, would have meant everything to him. But it took will to listen, to care. To connect. Now, words—even these—were just noise, with no more meaning than that of the fiery winds rolling across Hell’s terrain.

“Son…” The blackened figure peered more closely at him. “What’s happened … to you?” Fingers of deracinated bone reached toward Nathaniel’s shoulders, halting and trembling a few inches away from him. “Why don’t you … get up?… Why not … escape?”

“I…” He spoke without emotion, blank as empty air. “I don’t know.”

A terrible thought seemed to rise up into his father’s face. “Nat … The Devil … Did he … touch you?… Did he … take anything out of you … Out of your heart?”

Nathaniel nodded silently.

“Did it look … like smoke? Did it … sparkle? Like diamonds?”

An even slower nod. “Yes … I think so … Maybe…”