Demon Squad 6 The Best of Enemies (19 page)

“
Ding, ding, ding.
” She laughed, imitating ringing a bell. “Give that man a prize.”

My rectum tightened as the portal expanded further. In another few seconds the shadowy figure would have enough room to step into our world, and there was no doubt I was gonna regret that. Rala read on, voice soaring.

“You don’t have to do this, Veronica,” I told her. “I can protect you.”

A riotous chuckle burst from her, the sound damn near drowning the little alien out. “You’re going to protect me, Frank?” The laughter went on. “You’re so cute when you’re oblivious.”

Which was pretty much all the time, but it didn’t sound like a compliment. “I can. I have power now. I can—”

She shook her head. “You can’t do anything you haven’t already done, Frank. Now shut your mouth so we can get this over with.”

The laughter fell away to be replaced by a tired sigh. She suddenly looked…afraid. It was as though a thousand years fell on her face at once, the raw sensualism that so naturally radiated from her was gone. A frightened little girl stood in place of Veronica.

The devourer didn’t give me the opportunity for further contemplation. The portal had widened and the dark shape drifted forward without hurry. My chest tightened. He must have been related to Alfred Hitchcock because it understood the mechanics of fright.

Its eyes were the first to pierce the gloom. The size of plums, the purple bled through the empty space between us. The devourer’s will spilled over me in brutal waves, a tidal insistence that left no room to breathe. My blood grew still in my veins, and my brain throbbed, threatening to explode from my ass and run for its life. Tears spilled loose from my eyes. I could taste their salty bitterness as I choked back a scream. Darkness oozed into our world.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Veronica fade back, moving alongside Rala, her tattooed arm slipping about the girl’s shoulder protectively. The little alien had stopped her chanting, the tome limp in her lap. All eyes were on the devourer, including Hobbs’. The snide arrogance he’d put off was long gone, that attitude assholes and elbows and miles down the road. There was nothing but fear left. It was a feeling I could completely relate to.

The devourer emerged from the portal, the entirety of its essence impressed upon me, a meteor shower slamming to earth. I pulled my stare from his eyes and took a better look at what was coming to kill me, regretting every moment of clarity.

Much like a revenant, he floated above the ground with a sense of indistinctness. A Long, ratty cloak was draped over his back, his head buried in a hood, a blackness so deep as to shimmer blue. It swayed in the nonexistent breeze between worlds, his figure vaguely humanoid as all of God’s creations seemed to be. Two arms jutted from his sides, cloaked in the wispy material that surrounded him, ivory, skeletal hands protruded from the ends like knotted spears. A half dozen swollen knuckles jointed each finger.

I swallowed against the bulge growing in my throat. As I had way too many times in recent memory, I grasped a sense of familiarity coming off the thing creeping toward me. A gnashing sound, like rusty steel gates grinding shut over and over, pulled my gaze to its face. I spied three mouths there, angled to form an upside down triangle. Each had what looked like jagged shards of glass for teeth, the misshapen things scraping against each other each time he closed his mouth. A sibilant breath steamed from his mouths, each exhalation casting frost into the air. He drew closer, bony hands rising to reach for me.

I can’t count the number of times in my life where I’d been under the gun or in deep shit, but never had I felt so helpless as I did then. Every ounce of my terror pleaded with my magic to well up and blast me free of my cage, but there was no power to be had. Like it had with Gorath for so long, the case effectively neutered my magic. Not even sparks tickled my fingertips. The devourer kept coming. Just us inside the pentagram, it was as if no one else existed. Wisps of his darkness fondled the far end of the case. I struggled to shrink, to squirrel up inside my prison but there was simply nowhere to go.

Then I remembered my gun. My heart sputtered as I squirmed, pressing my back against the case wall. Hope took a runny dump right then. Veronica had taken my pistol away from me. My back squeezed against the case, I couldn’t feel its familiar lump anywhere. It wasn’t there. The devourer set his hands upon the edge of the case, purple eyes no more than a foot away.

“
Mine,
” he said, the word dragging on for seconds. His voice was little more than a whisper, but goosebumps erupted across my flesh at the sound. If ever there was a being designed to spread terror, this was him. I couldn’t help but wonder why God would make such a thing.

The devourer pressed his face against the glass, all three mouths smirking, hacksaw teeth chawing down. His blue-black lips blew a mist across the glass, frosted the face with a sparkling sheen of ice. He hung there a moment, staring at me as though debating what to do, fingers
skreeing
across the outside of the case. Purple swirled and cast a glimmering bruise across my vision.

“
Too long have I been denied my righteous prey,
” he said, a wormy tongue stretching from his lowest mouth and smearing gray spit across the glass. Steam wafted from the glistening trail.

I shrunk into myself, hoping the case would keep him out the same way it kept me in, but my brain betrayed me. Out of its depths, the sharpened memory of Mihheer freeing Gorath hit the bullseye with unfortunate precision. The devourer wasn’t hesitating because he couldn’t reach me, he was hesitating because he was all about the horror he inspired. I was the mouse and he was the cat, waiting for the right moment to pounce, the adrenaline spewing through my veins a marinade.

“Damn it, Veronica!” I screamed. “Do something!” She did the opposite, pulling Rala tighter against her. That bridge was well and truly burned.

The devourer grinned, and his face appeared to melt through the glass. The case filled with a musty, stale scent. My eyes went wide with recognition. It was the smell of the grave, the lurking stink that met you at the door of the Rest Land mausoleum. Against my wishes, my lungs drew in a deep breath of it. The devourer leaned in closer.

His huge eyes narrowed. “
I know you,
” he said, the words echoing inside my soon-to-be tomb. He sniffed at me, the tiny holes of his flat nose wiggling. His smiles returned, each mouth stretching his cheeks. “
My freedom comes with a gift, it seems,
” he said, his nose inching closer to smell me. “
Justice.
”

His statement made no sense, but I seized on it. Any turd in storm. “I’m not who you think I am,” I said, the words spilling from me. I had no clue who the devourer thought I was, but whoever that person was, I wanted to be the furthest possible candidate from that guy. “I’m not him,” I screamed.

The devourer laughed. The sound of a million panes of glass shattering sounded in my ears. “
Foolish to think I would not have my revenge, young one. Long have I waited for this moment, dreamed of it while I rotted in His infernal prison.
” The trio of grins grew impossibly wider.
“
Reckoning is at hand. Your soul will taste divine.
”

Pretty strange thing to say to the son of the Devil, but he didn’t actually leave me any room to argue semantics.

The devourer surged inside the case as though it weren’t even there, razored maws ripping into my face. Trapped as I was, there was nothing to do but suffer. Suffer and scream.

I did both in spades.

Nineteen

I came to at the sound of a guttural, savage shriek tearing at the sky with a pitiful fierceness. Turned out, that was me making all that noise.

I don’t care what anyone says. Death
fucking
hurts. There’s no going gentle into that good night when some alien shit is chewing your face off. Everything hurt in ways I couldn’t describe. There were no individual points of agony that stood out for recognition, but rather an overwhelming pain that seared every nerve as a whole. It was the complete and total package Pinhead promised in
Hellraiser
. Clive had it right, but I wanted none of it.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t been given a choice. Admittedly though, most folks didn’t wake up dead like the Megadeth song implied, so I had to presume I was still alive or had come back for a second round. That was hardly a comfort. My brain felt like gangbanged mashed potatoes, gravy running through the cracks. Sludgy memories ran through my head, picking up pieces of debris along the way. It was as though the last few days of my life had its salad tossed. Left was up and down was northwest. At least I remembered where I was.

On my back still, the case apparently no longer around me, it felt as though I were lying on a bed of nails. My eyes wandered. Curiosity and fear mingled to spur them on. The portal was nowhere to be seen, but the ceiling was scored black where it had been. Wisps of smoke roiled from the bubbled paint, which rippled and oozed and fell in hissing drips. The acrid stink of razed flesh clung thick in the air, mingling alongside a dozen other scents no less disturbing.

As much as I wanted to lie there and die for good, it was pretty clear something had happened while I was trying it out the first time. Unable to move my head, I couldn’t see the devourer anywhere, but I could still smell his stinky ass. Panic awoke in me as I pictured him coming for my face. I couldn’t go through that again.

I snapped my head off the ground through sheer force of will, realizing too late I probably should have been a little more circumspect. It was like someone took a blowtorch to my scalp, a symphony of zippers serenading my misery. I screamed and rolled to my side, reaching for my head, the feeling spreading across my neck and back, down the lengths of my arm and across my hip. My screams were jettisoned from my throat with no way to hold them back. Shadowy shapes covered my eyes as I cowered from the pain roaring over me like I’d been dipped in an acid bath. My lungs seized in my chest, and I couldn’t draw a breath. Something warm and wet gushed from my mouth, choking off my screams and turning them into a wet, hacking cough. Crimson splattered the floor beneath me.

I laid there, my cheek resting in a pool of my blood until enough of the pain subsided that I could gather my thoughts. Not that there were many of them. The smartest of them had abandoned me long before this. Those that were left seemed to be in agreement that I needed to get up off my ass and figure out what happened and why I was still alive. Masochistic little bastards, but they had a point. I just didn’t like it. To the determined cracks of their whips, I slid my elbows under me so I could prop myself up. Two crispy twigs appeared, pushing me up. The sight stopped me mid-motion.

Those were my arms.

I tumbled back the ground in a panic, my eyes staring at the torched remnants of what had been perfectly formed limbs a little while ago. More pain shot through my legs and heels when I moved, but the cold realization of its cause sunk in quicker than the agony could. My eyes trailed down my body. Black and red swirls of melted flesh were all I saw. It had been my skin ripping loose from the ground that had hurt so badly. Every inch of my flesh had been toasted like I’d been the main attraction at Burning Man. My hands went to my face, grateful fingers finding my nose, lips, and eyes where they should be despite them all feeling like a Colonel Sander’s recipe.

Terror hit me as I examined my face. My hands abandoned my cheeks and scrambled to my crotch, eyes too afraid to follow. A crispy handful filled my palms, and I let out a relieved sigh despite the pain that accompanied the movement. The twig and berries were way overdone, but at least they were still there. Thank Starbucks for small miracles.

Assured that I hadn’t lost my manhood, I rolled over and crawled to my knees, remembering that Rala and Veronica had been there before I went out. It took me a second to get my bearings, as I had somehow ended up on the far side of the room, but a quick glance told me they were no longer there, which was good given the ruins that surrounded me. The place had been through a blender. The bodies of the dread fiends were piled in the corner, a morbid game of Twister that none were winning. I looked away from the mutilated corpses, grateful the women weren’t among them.

The concrete flooring where the pentagram had been drawn was now a layer of broken rubble. The glass case I’d been trapped in sparkled on the floor where it had shattered, bits and pieces of the symbols still visible in the wreckage. The gurney that Hobbs had been tied to was a smoldering lump a few feet from where I knelt. There was no sign of the vampire, but given the torch that had been lit off in the place, I figured he’d gone on to visit the great bloodsucker in the sky. I could only hope.

Against my better judgment, I climbed to my feet. The world danced around me, dots of white assailing my vision as my brain did jumping jacks inside my skull. It took a moment before everything settled and I could stand without swaying; sort of. I blamed it on the room.

Able to take a better accounting of the place, I let my eyes wander. The view wasn’t much better upright. I expected to see a house with little witch feet sticking out from underneath seeing how destroyed the room was. Oz was fucked. I started across the rubble, my feet stumbling, still unsure of what they were doing. Crisp as I was, it would be a while before everything worked the way it was supposed to I imagined, which sucked to think about. Every step hurt, sparks shooting up my legs, waxen skin tugging at every tiny motion, wounds ripping open. Pus coated my body with a gray sheen. Even Joan Rivers would think I’d taken body modification too far.

I made my way across the room with slow and deliberate steps. It wasn’t getting easier as I went, my body not pulling itself together as it should. It had taken a hell of a beating and wasn’t responding well, but there wasn’t time to worry about it. The devourer hadn’t actually killed me, which meant that Rala or Veronica likely came to their sense at the last minute or something unexpected had occurred, which was always a possibility when dealing between dimensions. Regardless, I needed to find them and make sure they were okay.