Burned (6 page)

“You got my brother out and didn’t fucking mention it?” Ricky snapped, glaring at me. Her bloody hands balled into white-knuckled fists as she took a menacing step toward me. “Do you know how bad I’ve felt about not having rescued him? I was worried he was still trapped in here the entire time I’ve been waiting for you to recover. My guilt is half the reason I let you drag me back in here.”

“Good to know,” I said as the white wolf started getting to its feet. I put another bullet into its face, but it didn’t slow the creature’s movement as much as I had hoped. That was bad because I really didn’t want to leave her alone with the creature, but I was out of options. “But I’m checking. With or without you.”

Before she could stop me, I turned the corner, and as I did so, a chill rippled down my spine. There was a wall of bodies, some human, some not, stacked in neat rows along the far wall where the door had led to the security room. Sitting cross-legged in front of it was a bald boy no older than ten.

“Have you come to play with me?” he asked, looking up as I approached. His eyes were dark and empty. The boy’s face twisted into a grin. His skin rippled, and as it did so, beetles pulled themselves from his flesh. It happened so quickly, I barely had time to scream like a little girl before a black mass of seething insects swarmed over the bodies in the wall.

The bugs wormed their way into the corpses behind the crazy kid in the hospital gown, and as they did so, the bodies jerked themselves free and staggered toward me. I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on, but it was too disturbing to possibly be real. I fired my pistol, aiming at the kid, but before my shot struck him, a creepy smile spread across his face. The bullet passed straight through his chest before burying itself in a corpse.

“That’s no fair,” he said, and the force of his voice struck me like a wrecking ball, throwing me backward into the wall. I hit hard enough for my teeth to snap painfully together. He stood and pointed at me. The bodies surged forward as I raised the pistol, not sure if it would help, but damned if I was going to go down without a fight.

I fired, putting a bullet into the kneecap of the closest corpse, causing it to stumble and hit the ground. As those behind it trampled over the struggling, crawling body, Ricky and Danton careened through the air in front of me and smacked into the wall to my right.

The white werewolf I’d shot earlier sauntered around the corner and held his hand out palm up. “Bring it.” He curled his fingers toward his body. “I double dog dare you.”

Chapter 8

I whirled, unloading the CZ into the white werewolf as it stood there, grinning at me like a condescending god. The tight cluster of bullets blew apart its chest in an explosion of gore that barely seemed to concern the creature. It looked down at the holes perforating its torso and slowly touched one of the wounds with its index finger. Its white fingertip came away crimson, and it showed it to me before lifting the finger to its mouth and sucking the blood off of it.

“I hope you can do more than fill me full of bits of lead,” the harbinger said. The sound of his voice was muffled by the clang of bullets hitting the ground as they were pushed from his flesh. “If not, this won’t be much fun.”

“Oh, you might find I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve,” I said, pulling my right hand off of my gun and brandishing it in front of me. I’d seen werewolves shrug off bullets, but so far, none of them had been able to withstand my magic. Hopefully, this guy played by the same rules.

I concentrated, trying to ignore the mass of beetle-infested bodies coming down the long corridor toward me. Hellfire sprang to life in my palm. It danced in my palm, casting shadows across the hallway. The werewolf Ricky had called harbinger began to laugh.

“So you’re Cursed,” it said as the tight muscles in its legs coiled like a cat about to pounce. “It’s been ages.”

The werewolf came at me, leaping through the air like a huge white cat. I threw my hand forward, unleashing a blast of Hellfire while crying, “Ignis!” at the top of my lungs. The fireball struck the harbinger in the chest, but instead of blowing the creature apart or burning a hole through it, my Hellfire dissipated into steam without so much as singeing the harbinger’s pristine white fur.

Its shoulder crashed into me a second later. I toppled backward and fell onto my butt as it stood there looming over me. My chest felt like I’d been hit by a semi-truck. Worse still, the corpses were nearly to us. I had maybe three seconds before things got really bad really quickly.

“I can tell from your scent you’re the one who freed me. You might think that means I’ll let you live.” The harbinger stepped closer to me, one huge toenail clicking on the floor as it moved. “But, here’s the thing. I hate everyone.” Its lips curled into a smile as it glanced from me toward the boy. There must have been something in its pink eyes because the boy frowned, and the corpses stopped moving.

“No fair,” the boy said, chewing anxiously on his lips. “This is my hallway. I called dibs.”

“You make an excellent point,” the harbinger said as I got slowly to my feet. “But I tagged them first.” I had half a mind to scream at them for fighting over who got to kill us, but mostly, I just wanted them to hurry up and get in each other’s faces so I could slip past them and go after Baal.

Beside me, Danton was starting to move, but Ricky still looked like she was unconscious. I wasn’t sure what had transpired between her and the harbinger, but it had to have been pretty bad for Ricky to get her lights put out. Rage and guilt swelled up inside me. If I hadn’t run down this corridor would she have been taken out?

“My hallway, my kill,” the boy growled, and the corpses started moving again, only now they were heading toward the harbinger too. Well, that was certainly interesting.

“Really?” the harbinger said, narrowing its eyes at the boy. “Really?”

I didn’t wait for them to continue their conversation as I leapt to my feet and called upon my magic. My tattoos flared to life, filling the tiny hallway with crimson light. Before the harbinger could knock me aside like a rag doll, I buried my flaming fist into the creature’s stomach.

The smell of burning flesh and hair filled my nose as the blow cleaved a hole through the werewolf’s abdomen. It staggered backward, eyes wide in shock as I drove my right heel into the side of its knee. A horrific crack filled the air as the creature tried to grab onto me. Unfortunately, it was no match for the laws of physics. The harbinger’s leg buckled beneath it, and it crashed to the ground with a meaty thud.

That didn’t stop it from attacking, and I stepped back just in time for one of its claws to pass right by me. The strike was close enough for me to feel the wind slash across my face. Instead of cringing away from the attack, I sheathed my pistol and drew my silver hunting knives while mentally smacking myself for not using them first. I guess I was more of a gun guy than I thought.

The creature was already starting to rise, the cartilage and bone of its broken knee snapping back into place. Well, I’d have to do something a lot more permanent. I drove the silver blades into its shoulders, slicing through the tendons in one smooth motion. The harbinger’s arms fell limply to its sides as silver light exploded from the wound and superheated the knives.

Agony rippled across my hands like wildfire, blotting out everything but unending, soul-consuming pain. I let go of the weapons and stumbled backward, my own flesh practically on fire and tried to bat them out on my pants. The silver flames dancing across my palms didn’t go out no matter how hard I tried.

“Mac, stop!” Danton cried, grabbing my wrists and muttering a few words I couldn’t understand. White light spread from his hands, dousing the silver flames as he pulled me back toward Ricky. “This is where it gets tricky. Hold on.” He released one of my hands and grabbed Ricky by her mop of red hair. “This is going to get worse before it gets better.”

“What?” I cried, still trying to think around the residual agony of my throbbing hands. As the word left my lips, the harbinger came barreling toward us because the loss of both arms wasn’t a thing worth considering. Its fang-filled jaws were stretched impossible wide. That was a mouth that could swallow the sun and the moon.

“Ouranós,” Danton whispered, and his voice was so quiet, I almost didn’t hear him. Not that it mattered because I had no idea what he’d said. I just hoped whatever his plan was actually worked. If it didn’t, we were going to be dead before I could draw another breath. The harbinger was so close now, I could smell the stink of fetid meat and blood on its breath.

As the werewolf came at us, the entire world burst into a twist of starlight. The scenery around us spun and twisted together like a horrific kaleidoscope. My stomach leapt into my throat, and my temples throbbed in agony. I tried to reach out for something to ground myself, but as I tried, it felt like I was swept up in a hurricane of snake venom and thorns. As it pulled me into its vortex of agony, my ears popped and a stab of pain exploded behind my eyes.

I screamed, but my words were lost in the raging winds around me. I tried to suck in a breath, to do anything at all, but even something as simple as breathing seemed impossible. Danton’s hand slipped off of me, and as I turned to try and grab onto him, the flesh sloughed off my fingers before evaporating into a stream of particles that bounced and swayed through the universe at light speed. The rest of my body followed suit, dissolving as the world continued to distort until everything around us was reduced to pinpricks of light hurtling through an all-consuming darkness.

Reality snapped back into place like a rubber band, and I fell to my knees on the gold-flecked marble floor gasping for breath. I wasn’t sure where we were, mostly because I was still trying to recover from being torn asunder and put back together with molten glass and flame mixed in for good measure. Nausea swelled up inside me, and I was pretty sure I’d have retched all over that nice floor if a booming voice hadn’t resounded in my ears like a million trumpet calls.

“Danton, why have you brought
him
here?” It took me a minute to sort out each word because it was sort of like my mind wasn’t quite designed to handle such a voice, but even before I worked out the words, I could tell from the speaker’s tone that he didn’t like me very much. “We told you to help him, not bring him before us.”

“It’s okay, Gabe. We just needed to get out of there quick. We’ll be on our way in a minute. Just let me catch my breath.” Danton huffed through gasps of air. He was on the ground next to me, face gaunt and pale. Whatever he’d done had taken a lot out of him.

“Look, I don’t mean you any trouble,” I said, surprised my voice even worked after our trip. To be honest, I couldn’t quite tell you why I felt compelled to try and work things out with Gabe, but that absolute last thing I wanted was to get killed now. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to save my family.

I looked up to see a face so perfect I couldn’t bear to look at it for more than a second. Even trying to reconcile it in my mind after I’d looked away seemed impossible. He was a being made of white light and sharp angles and wearing a black suit with a black tie, black dress shirt, and a black fedora.

As I tried to look up again anyway, I found my forehead forced down into the cold marble. From what I’d gathered, the platform was only twenty or so meters wide with a golden gate on one side baring entry to a white escalator. Every other direction contained nothing but the vast, endless blue of a cloudless sky.

“Of course you don’t. I can see every thought in your head and taste every feeling in your heart. If I thought you meant us harm, I’d have already dashed you from this earth.” A hand touched my shoulder and my pain and disorientation vanished. “But that does not mean I can allow a Cursed to stand upon Heaven’s doorstep.” With those words, Gabe flung me backward off the platform.

Chapter 9

I hit the ground.

Chapter 10

I woke up in a dumpster, which was starting to become an altogether too familiar situation since this was how my little adventure had begun. Still, awakening in a dumpster was much better than being splattered across the pavement like a sack full of raspberry jam. I wasn’t even sure how I’d survived the fall. I remembered hitting the ground after I’d been flung from the steps of Heaven, but everything between that moment and now was a bit of a blur.

Sunlight poured into the alley from the sky above, and the smell of rotting meat and rancid beer baking in the sun filled my nostrils. As I grabbed onto the metal edge of the dumpster and hauled myself into a sitting position, I found myself staring into the face of a half-blind calico cat with one torn ear.

“You shouldn’t consort with angels, Mac,” she said, surprising the crap out of me because real life cats weren’t supposed to talk nor were they supposed to have the voice of the demon who had cursed me. “For one, angels are kind of dicks. For two, they
cannot
find out about me.” The way she said the words made me shudder. I didn’t know what would have happened if the angels found out who she was, but the way she said it made me hope it never ever happened.

The cat proceeded to lick her paw, dragging her tongue along her fur several times until it was glistening and wet before wiping away a smudge on her face. Was this my demonic contract holder in the flesh or was she merely possessing some poor kitty? After our last meeting, I wasn’t sure how I felt about either of those things, especially since she’d never actually come into our world to talk to me before. She was getting bolder, and that probably wasn’t good. Okay, that was probably just this side of horrible.

“You’ve been awfully talkative the last few hours,” I replied, hoisting myself to my feet and sinking in between the mounds of trash spilling from the huge black Hefty bags. Wetness seeped into my jeans, and I tried my best to ignore it as best I could because I didn’t want to show weakness in front of her. Something about the way she watched me made me think of a predator waiting to pounce on unsuspecting prey.