Burned (17 page)

Maya’s hand stopped, stuttering across the concrete. “I don’t expect him to pay me, at least not right away.” Her voice was so quiet, I wouldn’t have heard her if there’d been other sounds in the room.

“Wait, I’m confused,” I said, twisting my head so I could watch her work.

She looked up at me, and her lips trembled uncertainly. Now that the symbols were almost done, her demeanor had changed. Drastically. Fear clouded her dark eyes so much, I could practically taste it on the air around her.

“Baal probably won’t pay me. I’m taking a chance on this because it’s a million dollars.” She looked down at the ground. “You don’t know what that would mean for me. Hell, I could even pay off my student loans with the interest alone.”

“Money won’t do you any good if you’re dead.” I let the words hang in the air. A thick, uncomfortable silence descended between us.

“Well, what would you have me do?” She shook her head and began marking up the walls. “Money like that doesn’t grow on trees.”

“It’s non-existent money, Maya. You won’t see a single cent of it,” I said in my most reasonable voice. Admittedly, it was a lot like my flea market haggling voice. “But, if you let me go, I’ll make it up to you.”

Maya looked at me for a long time, and for a second I almost thought she was going to go for it. Right up until she burst out laughing in my face.

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” she said, backing up toward the door. As she stepped through the threshold, there was a distinct slamming sound. The air in front of her solidified into a nearly translucent barrier so it was like looking at her through a sheet of oily Jell-O. Well, time for plan B then. I just wish I knew what that was. “Now, I hoped you packed your sunscreen. You’ll need it where you’re going.”

Chapter 25

Maya flicked her wrist and the symbols drawn on the floor of my cell came alive with seething flame. The screams of the damned, the broken, and the wretched shattered my eardrums. The smell of sulfur and rotten eggs filled my nose. Icy spiders of fear crawled over my skin before nesting in my gut and dancing a frozen jig. The ground beneath me boiled into a pit of molten stone that engulfed the corpse of the parakeet.

I screamed. I couldn’t help it. Everything in me rebelled with the sudden, soul-bending urge to flee. Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t even move. Slowly, a hand the color of a bog in summer reached up through the magma and grabbed onto the floor. Black insects buzzed around it and bright, bloody worms writhed in its maggot-infested flesh as its yellowed nails gouged furrows into the melted rock.

Maya fell onto her butt and stared at the creature wide-eyed from her safe space on the other side of the door. Only, I wasn’t sure it was safe at all. There was no way to be safe from that thing.

The top of a bleached skull broke through the surface a moment later, pale blue fire burning in its hollowed eye sockets. It sat there, hoisted up on its fetid elbows like a pool goer surfacing near the bar and waiting to catch the bartender’s eye.

“Lord Baal wishes to know why you have summoned him, priestess. He has sent me in his stead because you did not use the required number of parakeets, and has thus determined your plea unworthy of his presence,” the creature cackled in a voice that was like the wind blowing through a graveyard at night. It shifted resting its chin on the palm of one hand and stared at her through the barrier. A gob of rotten flesh fell off the back of its hand and hit the lava with the sound like a fried egg thrown in hot oil.

“Lord Baal has requested Mac Brennan,” Maya said, her voice barely above a whisper as she sat there, eyes wide with fear. “I would like to present him his prize.” She pointed at me with one trembling finger.

The thing below me craned its head upward until it was staring at me with its flaming, sightless eyes. “Lord Baal will be pleased.” It reached out toward me with one skeletal hand, and I could actually see maggots writhing in its rotten flesh.

“There’s just the little matter of payment,” Maya said, her voice a little louder this time. “Of the million dollars Lord Baal has promised to exchange for him.”

The hand stopped. “I know not of this payment.” It turned its gaze back to Maya. “Is this not a gift for Lord Baal?” It cocked its head to the side. “Do you wish me to go back to Lord Baal and tell him that you do not think his good will is enough?”

“Told you he wouldn’t pay,” I said as the sweat dripped off my body and splattered into the pool below. “He’s a goddamned cheapskate.”

“Yeah,” Maya replied, all traces of fear gone from her. “I’d hoped, just once, his reputation would be wrong.” She snapped her fingers, and like magic, the symbols she’d drawn upon the walls flared to life, filling the cell with vibrant golden light.

The thing inside the room with me howled like the damned and shrank back as the floor hardened around it. The newly solid cement sliced through its torso, leaving the top half of it writhing on the concrete. Viscous black blood spilled out of it as its hands grasped at its ruined body. It lay there thrashing for a few minutes. As its struggles slowed, its shrieks grew quieter one earsplitting scream at a time.

Ten minutes after that, Maya stepped back into the room and walked over to the demon with a battery operated Milwaukee Sawzall in one hand and a large industrial-strength black hefty bag in the other. Had they been in the backpack too? It didn't seem likely, but I wasn’t sure where else she could have hidden them since she was wearing a T-shirt and a blue vinyl miniskirt.

“I’m starting to think you used me as bait for whatever that thing is,” I said as she knelt down beside the thing and mumbled a word, causing the saw to glow with golden light.

“No. I was going to totally sell you, which is why I called Baal’s bargainer.” She put the blade against a joint and snorted. “As if I wouldn’t know the proper number of parakeets. This is my job.” She hit the button on the saw. The sound of cutting bone filled the air and foul smelling goop sprayed across the ground. “This was my contingency plan.” She tossed the bargainer’s fetid, severed arm into the bag. “Next time, he’ll take me seriously.”

“What about me?” I asked as she went back to cutting. She was working fast. Too fast for her to not have done this many times before. It made me wonder what would have happened if Baal had shown up himself. Would he be going into the bag in pieces too?

“I don’t know. What about you?” she asked, glancing at me before putting the blade down on the thing’s neck and letting it rip. “What do you have to offer me?”

I writhed away, but it didn’t keep the slime from splattering into my hair. It was warm, sticky, and felt sort of like runny snot. A shudder ran through me as she tossed the head in the bag.

“I don’t know if you know this, but I’m also good at my job. I might be able to turn those skills to your advantage if you let me go,” I said before she could start chopping up the demon again.

“God, you’re such a sap,” she said, standing up and putting her face next to mine. She held out a black phone and snapped a picture of the two of us and paused to send it to someone. It buzzed with a response I couldn’t read, and she nodded.

“What’s going on?” I asked, confusion filling me as she revved up the Sawzall and aimed it at me.

“Ricky paid me to save you after numb nuts over there,” she jerked a thumb toward the guy she’d poisoned, “contacted me to keep you from doing what you did to the cops to him and his boys.” She snorted before slicing open my straitjacket with one quick swipe of the Sawzall. “Good luck rescuing your family, and no, I don’t know what happened to them.” She went back to her work while I hung there trying to process what she’d told me.

Ricky had paid her to save me from them? How long had I been unconscious for that to have happened? I swallowed hard. Hopefully, my family was still okay, assuming of course, nothing else bad had happened to them while I’d been away.

“How am I supposed to get down?” I asked, staring up at my feet. My arms were free, but I was still shackled to the roof.

Maya glanced at me and shrugged. “Do a sit-up, grab the chain, pull yourself up, and unlock it?” She shrugged a second time. “I don’t know. You were up there when I got here, and I get paid the same amount whether or not I help you more. Surely, you see my dilemma.”

“Demon magic it is,” I growled, and not because I couldn’t do a vertical sit-up. I totally could have, but I just didn’t want to right then. Instead, I pointed my right hand at the chain. “Ignis!”

This time a teeny, tiny burst of Hellfire spat from my palm and incinerated the chain. If Maya had been the one blocking me before, she wasn’t doing it now. Well, not as much. Unfortunately, my plan was not without one crucial flaw. I fell the three feet to the ground and smashed into the bloody floor with a loud crack. I lay there dazed and confused while Maya stood, hoisted her trash bag, and waved to me.

“Bye, Mac.” She smirked and sashayed out of the room in her too short vinyl skirt. “Wait a few minutes before following me, okay? I don’t want people to get the wrong impression.”

Trying my best to ignore the headache the size of Kansas throbbing between my ears, I got slowly to my feet and made my way out of the cell. Maya stood a few feet away, calmly waiting for an elevator. I glanced down at the guy Maya had gassed, and was completely unsurprised to find him no longer breathing. The stink of death clung to him.

I did something I totally wasn’t proud of. I searched the dead man and pocketed his gun, burner cell phone, and eight bucks in ones. Cheapskate. As Maya stepped into the elevator, I sprinted over to her and shoved my way inside before the doors could close.

“You’re supposed to be making your own way,” she said, glancing at me as the elevator lurched downward. “Not following me. If you keep it up, I might think you like me.” She leaned in close to me. “I like it on top.”

“You should be worried I’m going to kill you,” I said, giving her my best, blank-faced assassin stare.

She snapped her fingers and indescribable agony rippled along my right arm. I fell to the ground clutching my arm and writhing like an invalid as fireworks exploded in my skull.

“No, you should be worried I decide not to keep the fifty thousand Ricky paid me to help you and instead try to sell you to someone else. There are lots of people who would buy someone like you, and most of them aren’t half as nice as Baal.” She clucked her tongue and knelt down next to me as the elevator doors opened to reveal what looked like a perfectly normal mechanics shop. “Wait a few minutes before coming outside, or I swear to God, I will come back with a pair of jumper cables and see if we really can get to know each other.”

Chapter 26

I wasn’t sure how long it took for me to do more than curl into a ball on the floor of the elevator locked in the exquisite torment of overwhelming agony, but it was long enough for the elevator doors to close and leave me sealed inside the stainless steel box. Thankfully, the elevator never started to move and the Muzak stopped playing. Small victories.

“You know, a simple ‘wait here, jackass’ would have sufficed,” I mumbled as I lurched to my feet and leaned against the cold steel wall. It felt surprisingly good against my face. “Then again, I’d have just ignored you.” I shook my head against the metal. “And now I’m talking to myself.”

It was hard to be mad at Maya for laying me out as a matter of principle, especially since she’d asked me to wait twice. I’d have probably done the same thing in her situation. Actually, I’d have done worse. Even still, the next time I saw her, I was going to deck her in the face. It was a matter of principle. I might not like hurting women, but I wasn’t afraid to slap a bitch.

I stumbled forward and pressed my blackened thumb against the “open doors” button. As the elevator doors shuddered open, itching unlike I’d ever experienced before rippled across the flesh of my right arm. Without thinking, I began to scratch at it, ignoring the “nails shearing off flesh” sound as sweet relief filled me. By the time the doors finally opened, greeting me with the view of a tiny well-kept hallway, my fingers were bloody.

A quick glance at my arm made me suck in a breath. My tattoos were completely scabbed over except for where my nails had raked bloody, oozing furrows across my flesh. Well, that settled it. I wasn’t sure what Maya had done, but there would definitely be consequences.

I pulled myself into the hallway and was surprised to find it rather decadent. The floors were white marble with streaks of gold spreading through it like spider’s webs. Wood paneled walls with expensive artwork spaced about three feet apart for the entirety of the way filled my vision. As I moved forward, I was suddenly very aware of how out of place I looked.

My outfit, a gore-streaked trench coat over a bloody Rage Against the Machine T-shirt would probably look out of place anywhere, but here, I’d stand out like a hooker at a Christmas party. My arm was a bloody, tattooed mess, and my hair? Let’s not even bring that up. Look, I wasn’t exactly concerned with my appearance in most cases, especially after being rescued from an almost certainly horrible death, but the second anyone here saw me, they’d know I was out of place.

The lobby reminded me of an expensive law firm way more than somewhere with an overhead padded room. For all I knew, the red-shirted kidnapper was just renting out space in the swanky part of town. After all, Ricky had owned buildings.

The likelihood that a cubicle cowboy would try to stop me on the way out was nil, unless of course, the whole place was crawling with supernatural whoziwhatzits. While I didn’t relish the idea of punching out someone who tried to stop me, I was leaving one way or another. Maybe no one would hassle me. I snorted. Yeah, if that happened, my name wasn’t Mac Brennan, otherwise known as Murphy’s bitch.

I made my way down the hallway and turned left because sunlight streamed through a huge glass door in that direction, painting the room in soft light that made the gold in the tile glimmer like a leprechaun’s wet dream. I’d barely made it three steps out of the hallway when a security guard behind a desk to my right glanced at me and narrowed his eyes. He was a big guy with a military-style buzz cut, a tattoo of a Japanese symbol on his neck, and a demeanor that said, “I kick puppies for fun.”