Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (51 page)

He watched as the sword in Moon's hand dance away from her neck and plunged into Lissandra's back. Lissandra spasmed and let out a scream. Moon still had hold of Lissandra's hair and pulled the girl by it onto the sword. Billy couldn't look away fast enough as the tip of the weapon pierced all the way through the gypsy and pointed right at him.

Moon tossed her backwards like a broken doll at the railing around the open bay doors of the ship. Lissandra spit blood over the railing to sail down to the black dome rock far below. Moon walked to her and took hold of the sword in her back once more, as many guns pressed into Billy and many arms grabbed at him. Moon held Lissandra close once again as she twisted the blade.

“Why?” Lissandra cried out and Billy couldn't tell if there were more tears than blood being spilled. “Moon, what about the spiral? You need me to read the spirals.”

“I have Morta for that. I also have Broom's notes again. You've served your purpose to me and The Five. Such a pretty, nostalgic distraction.” Moon looked back to Billy as she spoke the words.

Billy looked to the goddess Artemis from the crowd of thugs that surrounded him. She watched with no hint of remorse as Moon held the sword in Lissandra's back. The blood that spilled from the gypsy's body was of no consequence to her.

“You play with gods here, Lissandra, old and new. What we build is not for you to understand, and was never for you to truly manipulate. What use have any of us for a gypsy who is too bedazzled with power that she cannot foresee her own death?”

Moon pulled her sword from Lissandra's back and kicked the gypsy with her boot. Lissandra's hand slipped from the railing, and the girl fell out the opening at the bottom of the airship.

Billy was composed of nothing but pain. He had no voice to cry out as she fell.

Moon turned to Billy and pointed her sword painted with Lissandra's blood back at him. She tossed the Tarot cards over her shoulder to crash with Lissandra far below.

“Throw me the trash.” Moon pointed her sword to the metal floor at the railing where Lissandra had just fallen.

There were more hands on Billy's body than he could count. They hoisted him up and over them, crowd surfing his torn and blood soaked body. Then they tossed him into the air, past where Moon had just been standing. She was walking away as Billy slammed into the grated floor at the great bay doors that overlooked the rock of black fortunes below.

Billy could barely focus on her boots crossing the floor. She opened her arms wide into the air and began herding the troops that had not fallen at Billy's hands down the steps.

“Open the eye!” Her voice boomed, but it wasn't a scream. It was a military command. It was a victory cry.

Billy looked up the steps to see the great eye of the sphere open and the darkness contained within. The force of the opening of the eye pulled him from the floor and into the air like someone had just turned on a vacuum and he was an ant hiding in the carpet. Billy grasped for the railing but missed. He sailed over the open doors of the ship's deck and slammed into the steps that led to the opening iris.

Billy's hands latched desperately onto the metal steps.

He had never felt a pull as he did from the great eye in the center of Moon's ship. He looked away from the swirling darkness contained within the eye to find Moon's gleeful decadence, laughing at him.

“What is that thing?” Billy gripped the steps and felt his body lifted from them as he held on for all he was worth.

“It's the power-core of my ship, Billy. Your scientists call it a black hole.”

“You've got a black hole in the center of this thing?” Billy could barely hear the words leave his mouth. The eye pulled and took the words from him and cast them back up into it. It pulled at his flesh, and he felt as if the hairs were about to be ripped from his head.

Moon and those on the lower deck were unaffected by its pull. How this was so, Billy couldn't say. Moon, the goddess Artemis, and the assembled army all looked on in intrigued wonder as they all backed away.

“It's going to tear you to nothing. Anything left of you will be banished to the other side of the darkness.”

Billy strained to look across the room. He could see Anastasia's face on the big viewscreen, and her eyes opened lazily and her mouth formed the words, “Kill them all.” He reached his hand out for her. He reached for her tears and her pleading face, filled with pain and regret.

“This is not the plan.”

The army began to back defensively down the stairs and away from the power of the great eye of the black hole. Billy was holding on with one hand to the metal stairs. His body was aloft, his feet pointed straight into the open mouth that led into the power of darkness incarnate.

Billy strained to keep his eyes open. He felt a finger slip. He had been pulled many strange places in his life, but none any stranger than this. Never had he been pulled anywhere with such unbridled force and awe-inspired intensity.

Getting to Moon and to Anastasia had become many more steps than he thought he could take. When he felt he could hold on for no longer, he saw it move. His bag slid across the floor towards the steps.

“Do you know what's on the other side of my black hole, Billy Purgatory?” Moon screamed it straight into his face, and her words trickled over him and were sucked into the eye.

“Hell is on the other side.”

Billy watched Lissandra's blood pulled from Moon's sword and fly past his face to be sucked into the black hole at his feet. Billy's pack hit the steps and he could see the wheels spinning.

He looked into the face of Anastasia on the video screen one last time. Another finger slipped as his skateboard flew into the air from his bag and headed right towards him.

“It's better than murdering you.”

Billy let go of the step and he flew up and into the air. He caught his skateboard squarely in his chest and wrapped his arms around it.

He watched the smile on Moon's face turn to a scowl as he flew backwards into the great oculus of the event horizon. All that Billy Purgatory would know from that instant on would be the unyielding caress of the darkness as the great eye closed.

~42~

E
PILOGUE

THE GODDESS ARTEMIS SAILED DOWN from the opening at the bottom of Moon's airship, over the black dome rock, as the sun was just beginning to break the horizon. She cast her eyes down on the broken body of Lissandra, her former disciple. The fall had not done her human body well, yet even the goddess herself could not say whether or not the girl had already been dead before she crashed into the rock.

Artemis didn't spend much time looking over the spiral glyphs of the fortunes of the people of the world. This place, and the affairs of those who lived here, were no longer hers. Truthfully, they hadn't been concerns of hers for a very long time. Lissandra's Tarot blew about her body in the wind that cascaded over the dome of fortunes. Floating atop a pool of her blood there was a card.

The Lovers.

The goddess let her sandals touch lightly to the sand and found the soldiers that Moon had dispatched to oversee the torture of Anastasia. The demon girl, Morta, rose from Anastasia's near lifeless form and took hold of the hilt of the sword Moon had sent flying into her.

With a stout pull and a labored scream from Anastasia, the sword was retrieved by the girl. As Artemis passed Morta, the girl said to her simply and without emotion, “She is all yours, goddess.”

Anastasia was bleeding, shivering, and weeping as the goddess scooped her up from the sand and began walking with her towards
the jungle, away from the first rays of the morning sun. Anastasia held tightly to her and wept against her divine shoulder.

“There, child. You've already lost so many blood-soaked tears. Why cry for him? He is gone, and not coming back.”

The fight seemed to be gone and not coming back to Anastasia either. “Leave me in the sun and let me die.”

“Never. I'll not have one with such promise as you for a sacrifice.” The goddess touched Anastasia's cheek with a mother's love and did not strain at all in carrying her towards the exotic trees of the island. “We are leaving this place behind for all time. There will be nothing left for you to mourn soon. You will forget that loud-mouthed boy, and I will teach you the ways of the old country.”

Anastasia looked over the shoulder of the goddess and her eyes burned as the sun rose. She could see the outline of the black stone and the horrible ship that belonged to the most cursed woman alive.

Not a woman at all, though. For she had no compassion in her soul to be able to have done the things she had done with such revelry. The thing that paraded itself about as a woman was nothing of the sort.

She was an it, and it was a monster.

“Did you love her?”

The goddess looked down, doing her best to shield Anastasia's face from the encroaching sun. “Did I love Lissandra?”

“Yes.” Anastasia said this quietly and distantly.

“I did love her, as I have loved many. For a time, and in my own way.”

“It didn't help her much in the end.”

“Lissandra made her own choices; ultimately they were weak choices, and wrong ones.”

Walking into the palms, Anastasia marveled as the colors began to change. There was light in this place, yet it was not of the sun — or no sun that Anastasia had ever known. She was feeling as she had when she had let herself go natively human and walk among them in their world.

Everything about her was suddenly new and different. She felt the goddess set her right and Anastasia's cowboy boots were upon the ground. She turned her face from the goddess and stared at the scene before her.

Anastasia was not on an island, nor in a jungle. She was on the high cliffs of a great mountain. The space she occupied fought the clouds themselves for relevance. Ahead, on the high peaks, there was a great city of ancient stone. Palaces that were once grand and trimmed in gold were now crumbling ruins — but the majesty of the height and the grandeur of what had once been upon these peaks still remained, in their own special way.

Doric columns rose from the cliffsides and temples that had held the fires of divine countenance. Anastasia's body no longer hungered for blood, and her wounds no longer plagued her. She stared at her flesh in the golden light and looked back to the goddess.

“How am I whole? Why don't I burn in the light?”

“This place is not powered by the sun you knew on Earth. It is the place of the old gods, and the power that remains here only answers to their whims.”

Anastasia looked back to the many steps that led to the palaces on high. The marble was cracked and dated, yet it was still impressive. There had been great power here once, and Anastasia felt that there might be once more.

“This is Olympus?”

Artemis smiled. “It is time that the ways of the old gods returned.” Artemis pointed to one of the temples on the high steps and the plume of white smoke that rose to merge with clouds from it.

“Come, my new disciple. It seems we are not alone. Surely one of my ancient brothers or sisters raises fire to welcome us home.”

Anastasia walked with the goddess up the steps and towards the temple of the white smoke.

“How long has it been, Artemis? Since you've been to this place?”

“Ages.” Artemis gained a spring to her step; she seemed excited to traverse the great steps. Anastasia followed as best she could and her eyes took in the wonder of it all.

Artemis walked into the temple with her arms spread wide. She was a gleeful as a schoolgirl. Anastasia took in the visage of the golden statue at the temple's entryway. A great warrior woman: cast in gold, wielding a spear, a hundred feet or more in height.

The woman at the fire pit who tended the smoke was dressed in a white cloak and hood, her back to the Goddess. Anastasia
could hear the great echoes of Artemis's sandals on the stone floor of the temple.

“Athena?” Artemis was making a big show, as a long lost sister should. “It has been lifetimes, sister.”

Anastasia saw the woman rise from the fire and turn to face Artemis's open arms. “Sister. I have so missed being called that, Artemis,” sang the woman back to the goddess.

Anastasia could just make out the woman's delicate hands and the movement of her white dress. The fingers taking hold of the hood of her cloak and letting it fall off her tresses.

Anastasia shielded her eyes from the great flash that came from the woman toward the goddess Artemis. Anastasia wasn't lucky enough to be able to shield her ears from the scream the goddess let slip from her lips.

The woman raised the cloak back over her hair and stepped around the stone statue that Artemis had become. Anastasia was hiding behind a column, watching the woman step around the stone goddess.

When Anastasia looked away, she turned to her left and found the woman in the white cloak standing beside her. The vampire looked quietly into what could be seen of her face. Her tiny nose and pleasant lips.

“Hello?” said the woman cautiously.

“You've turned Artemis to stone?” Anastasia looked away from the woman's face.

“Of course I have.” The woman was speaking right into Anastasia's ear. “Just as you would have drained the blood from her neck, given the chance.”

“Why?” Anastasia already knew the answer.

Medusa said it just the same. “Because being monsters is all we truly know how to be.”

T
HE ADVENTURE CONTINUES IN BOOK 3…

B
ILLY
P
URGATORY:

T
ACOS
B
EFORE

A
RMAGEDDON

…C
OMING SOON!

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