Crossed (35 page)

I looked at the head more closely.
His brain?

“Guy looks like he was designed by H. R. Giger . . .”

Who?

And then it moved.

The noses sneezed in unison, sending puffs of dust out from under the head and out of its nostrils and mouths. The eyelids of each face opened with the sound of squeaky shoes on tile to reveal empty sockets. People moved around me, but Beatrice and I stared openmouthed at the head as the cat lips closed and opened in unison. The withered pink tongues became moist and supple again.

“Does my nose deceive me”—each word seemed to come from all three mouths—”or do I smell a Courtney?”

    33    

ERIC:

SMELLS LIKE COURTNEY SPIRIT

Great,” I said as I tried to pop my claws and went uber vamp instead, “the fucking decap-a-Muppet is talking to me.” Once again the transformation from human-sized to extra-large felt good, natural, like slipping on a favorite jacket. But that’s not how it’s supposed to work. My body should have felt like it was expanding, like an overfilled balloon, and that fundamental wrongness worried me as much as the talking head.

My wings knocked Luc down, taking him in the chest and hurling him back into the wall. He’d been standing too close. Immortals shifted left, right, and sideways, donning their combat armor. Weapons appeared, flowing out of the coalesced energy I’d seen surrounding them all. The Asian kid stood out the most, going from punked-out anime clothes to a Hello Kitty
gi
and a yellow headband. I can’t say which got me more, the
gi
or the fact that his hair was dyed a vibrant shade of blue.

“You’ve got to be shitting me.” I was talking about the kid, but it was the demon who commented.

“Quite unlikely, as I’m currently unaware of the location of my anus.” The inner row of teeth moved independently of the
outer row; it made my flesh crawl to see it. The immortals were frozen in place. Of course they were. They swore oaths on a demon head. “Now . . . I’ve taken the liberty of halting our—”

“I’m not talking to you,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

Tabitha backed away from the table, claws out. She took a position in front of Beatrice, instinctively protective of her. “Eric, what’s going on?”

I wondered if she guarded Beatrice because she was my thrall, because she was human, or because she was a possible food source.

“Eric?”

How do you explain to your twentysomething wife (vampire or otherwise) that you’re sober for the first time since you met her and nothing makes sense the way it used to? That you’re still you, but you’re also something that went to sleep a long time ago, something that woke up when the magic went away. That you’re a vampire, but you’re also a boy who went to war, a man who went back for more, and a guy who just married the wrong woman, because the right one died? That you have a piece of a demon in your chest? That the magic castles and the immortals don’t feel like magic—they just make you tired? Is there any good way? I looked for the words and the only thing that came was this: I could have told Marilyn.

Oh, boo-frickin’-hoo,
I told myself.
Why don’t you go cry all over Scrythax?

“Eric, are you okay?”

“Yes, Mr. Courtney”—double jaws clicked and clacked, flashing as the demon spoke—”are you feeling well?”

My heart beat twice.

“You felt that quite well, I would imagine.”

So my theory about the thing in my chest being the Eye of Scrythax seemed pretty likely if he could use the damn thing to make my heart beat.

“Stop it.” A leap and a series of wingbeats brought me to the center of the room. Despite the pedestal, my uber vamp form towered over Scrythax. “You want your eye back? If you tricked me into bringing it to you, then fine. Tell me how to get it out and you can have it.”

“Tricked?” The demon’s eyelids narrowed, a glimmer of light visible between the slits. “No. I have tricked no one. Nor do I desire the return of either eye at this time.”

“You have one of this thing’s eyes?” Tabitha continued backing away from the head, making sure I was between it and her.

“Then what do you want?”

“I want many things, but mostly I desire a conversation with one of my champions.”

“Who the hell are your champions?”

“Why, you are, Eric; you and one other from Void City.” Its horns skritched on the stone pedestal, skittering like the legs of a centipede, moving it back as if it wanted a better look at me.

“I’m not your champion, Scrythax.”

“Of course you are. You’re a Courtney. You are all my champions. Did you not stop the plot in El Segundo and save the world?”

“I barely remember that.”

“You could always turn into a revenant. Your noncorporeal form is not possessed of the same ailment your physical body possesses.”

“What ailment? I’ve got a bad memory. I was embalmed and—”

“Embalming had nothing to do with it, Eric. True, Lord Phillip’s counter-enchantment, the one that hid you from Lisette, also played merry hell with your powers, but surely we both know full well your problem is altogether different—or do you truly not recall that even in your last few years of life,
you’d begun to have difficulty recalling your personal history, keeping facts straight, remembering little details?”

No, I didn’t remember that either—which didn’t exactly prove anything. “So what’s your diagnosis, if you know so damned much?”

“You have what humans refer to as early-onset Alzheimer’s, Mr. Courtney, or something very much resembling it.” I must have looked stricken, because the demon frowned as much as its features would allow. “I apologize if it comes as something of a shock, but I thought you knew.”

“That’s bullshit. I was embalmed. I—”

“Embalming stops the resurrection process. Having survived it, a vampire of your stature shouldn’t have had any further side effects.”

“I don’t have Alzheimer’s.” I shrank to human size; the transformation hurt, like cramming your feet into a pair of shoes that don’t fit. “Tabitha”—I looked back at her—“you don’t think I have Alzheimer’s, do you?”

Her face told me everything I needed to know. It was the oh-poor-baby look. “What’s my maiden name, Eric?”

“Smith.”

“Sims,” she corrected.

“That doesn’t prove—”

“What was Marilyn’s last name?”

“Robinson.”

“Perfect.” She winced. “Hers you remember. What about this one? How did Kyle die?”

“Who the fuck is Kyle?”

Tabitha touched my cheek. “Your son? You made him at the same time you made Greta.”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t make any—” A sound on a telephone, a rush of air, like a vampire being dusted. I remembered that sound and attached it to a name. “Kyle. Damn. Was he the one who died out front of the Pollux, the one who set me up?”

“No, that was Roger.”

“No, Roger was my best friend . . .” Roger yelling at me outside of the Pollux, so bitter and angry that it was easy to let it wash away once he was gone.

My face must have said it all, or maybe Scrythax was using his eye to read my mind. “Now you remember.”

I dug around in my pocket for my cell phone. “Beatrice, how do I call the States?”

“Talbot programmed it into your phone.” She stepped out from behind Tabitha. Her heat hit me like the opening of an oven that’s kicked up to baking temperature. “Why?”

“I need him to fly out here and eat this asshole.”

The demon’s laugh was clear and brilliant. “And the other Infernatti wonder why I find live humans to be so wonderful.”

“I ain’t alive.”

“Yes, you are.” Scrythax’s eyelid closed, the eyebrow ridges rising on the left side and flattening on the right like overexpressive eyebrows expressing sly thoughts. “A tiny little light of life, to be sure, but it’s there. It had to be there for you to be an Emperor, and it will remain until you undergo postmortem stress and surrender to undeath completely. You are two kinds of undead at once, which can only happen when the soul is in flux at the point of death but not wholly beyond. This is why you’ve continued to age, albeit slowly, and why . . . What does he answer to now? Talbot did you say?”

He clucked that putrid tongue of his and sighed a happy sigh, sending more dust pouring off the pedestal. “This is why Talbot has gone to such lengths to ensure that you do not undergo true postmortem stress. He’s afraid it would ruin you. I know better, of course, but it’s very sweet.”

“What do you want?” I brushed an errant dust bunny off my shirt.

“From you?”

“No, from the fucking Easter Bunny.” I uber vamped again
without meaning to, and it felt so nice I almost hit a knee. “Yes, from me.”

“Nothing.” I opened my mouth to refute that, but he kept talking. “Or rather, nothing that you aren’t already intending to do. You see, I would never dream of giving orders to my champions. I choose beings who will already do my bidding whether they know it is my bidding or not. Your great-great-grandfather John Paul served me against the shifters.”

I expected JPC to pop up and call bullshit on that play, but he didn’t, which made me wonder if he was barred from Scrythax’s Vales or if he was still too pissed off about me shooting the Apostles with
El Alma Perdida
to pay attention to what was going down in the material world.

“When he was active, lycanthropes in America were on the verge of a return to the old ways. Some hunted humans. Others merely preyed upon them in other fashions, but John Paul provided a unifying threat—a boogeyman, if you will, who would only kill the naughty little shifters, only the ones who didn’t . . . say their prayers at night.”

“And me?”

Scrythax opened its mouth to speak and coughed instead, showering me with more dust bunnies. Wiping at them angrily, I took two steps back.

“My apologies.” He hacked for a moment before continuing. “I was attempting to evade that question by answering questions you hadn’t asked.”

“Well, that didn’t work.”

We waited in silence, and Tabitha went out like a light. Dawn. I caught her reflexively and shifted her over to Beatrice’s care for a minute.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Excuse me?”

“I can’t tell you, because if I told you what I wanted you to do, you might refuse to do it simply because I wanted it done,
even if you might otherwise have done exactly as I wished had you simply not known I wished it.”

“That almost made sense.” My nostrils flared, the light from my eyes growing brighter. “So why talk to me at all?”

He laughed again and, if he’d had fingers I imagined he would have put his index finger to his lips before answering. The pause was there, but it lacked something without the gesture. You could tell he was a being who spoke with his hands. Big expansive gestures and tiny ones providing nuance for every sentence.

“How could I resist? You are a Courtney. The only human family I have directly influenced in four centuries. The instant you landed, I felt it and just as certainly as I knew they would bring you here, I knew I had to say hello.”

“What do you mean, influenced?”

“Oh, come now, Eric, do you really think that God would return a man’s humanity and hold it over the heads of the next seven generations of his kin? Do you actually believe he would part a bat horde and let the sun shine down in such a grandiose fashion, proclaiming what he had done so that all could hear?”

I bumped into Beatrice, only then realizing I’d been backing away from the demon.

“But why?”

“Because I love humans.” Scrythax’s lips quivered, the slits of its nostrils flexing wider for a brief instant. “Why else would I have let the supernatural community unite against me, disembowel me, scatter my parts . . . ? Because in doing so, I brought them under control. The vampires accepted population control. The therianthropes agreed to hunting limitations. All so that they could band together with the immortals against me. And with the big three working together, how could the other beings hold against the proposed treaty? The Fae had already been reined in by the spread of metal tools. All they needed was a common threat, one that could wipe them all out.”

“If you love the humans so much,” Beatrice asked, “why didn’t you wipe out the supernaturals?”