Demon Squad 6 The Best of Enemies (20 page)

A few more steps took me through the open door where I nearly fell and busted my ass when my foot slipped in a pile of goo as I rounded the corner, the stuff slipping between my toes with a substantive
squish
. Images of dog shit filled my mind as I glanced down to see what I’d stepped on. Fortunately, it wasn’t poop, it was something much better. A hunk of dark, lumpen flesh spread wetly across the floor. Actually, it looked like two hunks of someone that was originally only meant to be one, a ragged tear splitting it down the middle of the body. I rolled it over with a quick kick.

Three mouths hung agape from its face, empty purple eyes staring at the ceiling.

“Alas, poor devourer, I knew thee too well.” It couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow. Another kick made sure he wasn’t getting up again. The four after that were all about spite.

Sadly, whatever killed the devourer had made quick work of it. My preference would have been for him to suffer, but beggars can’t be choosers. Dead was good enough for me, right then. I owed someone a steak dinner for kicking his ass, but he hadn’t been the only problem I’d been facing before he got fresh. Someone had been maneuvering Veronica to put the screws to me, and I needed to find that person before things went any further south than they already had. I stumbled down the hall, leaving the devourer behind.

Rala and Veronica might be in danger, and I needed to do something, but what exactly I didn’t know. How often do you see burnt toast cast in the role of the hero? This was a battle against stereotypes
and
whoever lurked in the shadows. There was no telling if I was up for both, but I wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice. I reached for my magic to make ready.

A cold emptiness was all I found.

My stomach lurched as I tried again, and again, again, each time coming up empty. The wall caught me as I stumbled into it, fingers clasping to hold me upright. I reached inside once more, desperately searching for an ember of magic to set alight. There wasn’t any.

The world swayed around me, trying to drag me to the ground. I stayed on my feet out of a sheer force of will. If I fell, I wouldn’t get up. There just wasn’t enough gas in the tank to get me started if I stopped. The wall was cool against my mangled skin, its soothing touch begging me to stay. I’d lost it all. I’d lost everything.

“No,” I shouted, or at least tried to. The word tumbled out of my mouth without force. It didn’t even raise an echo in the desolate hallway. “
No.
” I hadn’t brought Rala billions of miles across the universe only to get her caught up in my bullshit. Whatever she and Veronica were in was because of me. It was on me to get them out.

I felt sick as I forced myself to keep moving, my jaw clenched while I struggled to put one foot in front of the other, ignoring the pain that threatened to derail me. The hall crept by at a snail’s pace, the surgical theater even more slowly, but I managed to scale the wall and get through the broken window without losing more than a few layers of skin. By the time I’d hit the stairs, the thought of deep throating an acetylene torch to put myself out of my misery was a comforting one.

My skin felt two sizes too small, every simple movement tearing a new piece loose to make it happen, goo and pus filling in the gaps only to have them rip apart on the next step. It was a study in torment getting up to the lobby of Gailbraith. If I made it through alive, I would strong-arm Trump into donating billions to every burn ward in the nation. Each step was excruciating, but I was determined not to give in to it. Thunder cannonaded in the distance as I pushed on. The building trembled in its wake. A few moments later, my stubbornness paid off as I stumbled out the front door of the asylum, daylight damn near burning my eyes from their sockets, blinding me.

“Did you really think you’d get away with triggering such a powerful electrical surge and no one would notice?” The Barry White tone of Rahim’s question wormed inside my skull and nested.

I raised my hand to block out the sun so I could see him. “I didn’t—”was all I got out in a dry whisper before another voice answered instead, drowning me out.

“Of course not,” it said. “I had
every
intention of you finding out.”

Tracers of light blurred my vision, and I peered from beneath my palm to see Rahim in werebear form across the street. His massive, dark silhouette stood out clearly against the backdrop of the pale building at his back. His snout was furrowed with teeth bared, claws at the ready while shimmers of magical swirled about his monstrous paws. He was ready for war. Red eyes glistened.

A wild, homeless-looking man stood in the middle of the street, facing Rahim down, his back to me, short but wild hair running amok, his face turned away from me. He must have been the real mastermind behind Hobbs’ coup. Whatever he’d done while I was out must have been bad for Rahim to be so riled up.

Shredded rags hung in blue strips from the guy’s waist, remnants of a leather belt keeping the last of his pants on. He wore no shirt, but blood and dirt stained his muscular torso. He wasn’t anywhere near as big as The Gray had been, but the guy put his time in at the gym, his body lean and defined. His hands were empty and swung casually at his side despite Rahim growling just yards away. There was confidence in his passive defiance, contempt even. The dude had balls of steel swinging somewhere in his ripped up jeans. If my ears hadn’t been ringing so badly, I might have heard them clacking together.

Katon prowled nearby, his sword loose of its sheath. His stance told me there was violence coming, and it would be coming soon. He was feeding off Rahim’s hostility. I staggered forward as he circled the homeless guy, choosing the best angle from which to approach. The Judas Priest look was in full effect, leather and spikes reflecting the sunshine. He looked ready to belt out “Screaming for Vengeance.”

A woman circled around the other side, and I didn’t need to see the brilliant blond hair to recognize her as my cousin. There was no mistaking that ass anywhere. God might have had His off days, creating shit like the devourer, but He had hit perfection the day He pieced Scarlett together.

Like Katon, she had her sword out, Everto Trucido, its sharpened edge thirsting for blood. The shimmering manifestation of her power splayed out behind her, fiery wings displaying her angelic authority. I couldn’t see her face, but her posture alone told me she was in a like mindset as Rahim and the enforcer.

DRAC had shown up in full force, but they weren’t the only ones. My pulse thrummed in my throat at seeing the DSI heavies lurking in the background. Jorn stood just inside the mouth of a nearby alley. At Big Mac plus, he wasn’t hiding so much as attempting to be inconspicuous, but points for pulling it off. No one but me seemed to notice he was there. Round ninja had skills.

There beside him stood Rebecca Shaw, the government’s resident wight and all around mean bitch. She’d been the one to order the
mock
assassination attempt on me, trying to prove a point. Well, she proved it all right. Her eyes were locked on the guy in the middle of the circle jerk, and she hadn’t so much as cast a glance my direction, which was fine with me. I couldn’t stand the woman.

A quick glance around the rooftops made it apparent her usual armada of snipers and cannon fodder hadn’t come along to back her up. That explained why her and the Muffin Man were playing it
covert
. My favorite butterface, Venai, wasn’t with them, so that probably meant she was circling around to the other side of the conflict, waiting for the right moment to get involved. They were working the strategic playbook like it was a porn magazine, racing to get to the good parts. You’d think by now they’d know how predictable it made them, but I was glad they didn’t. If things set off—and they certainly looked like they were getting ready to—predictable would be good for me. As a public service announcement for the dangers of toaster ovens, the last thing I needed was for the DSI to be on point. They’d put a beating on Scarlett when she was hurt, and I was nowhere near as healthy as she’d been then.

As quickly and as quietly as I could, I inched forward. There wasn’t much I could do to help DRAC given my condition, but if the DSI went for their backs, I could at least provide a warning and maybe run interference. No gun, no magic, and feeling like a reverse Human Torch, I could see my day getting worse before it got better.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Rahim told the man in the middle. “We can work this out.”

“There is nothing that needs resolving, wizard,” the man answered with a casual shrug. His voice seeped into my skull where my brain did a spit-take. I knew it, but it wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.

Venai didn’t give me the chance to figure it out. A blur of muscled flesh appeared out of nowhere, metal fist spikes gleaming. She leapt at the guy without a sound, flying through the air like a mutant shark, teeth bared. But before she struck, the ragged figure spun impossibly fast, sidestepping her. His hands smacked down onto her skull and back, blunting her momentum and slamming her straight down into the ground. The asphalt welcomed her with a shuddering embrace, the ground vibrating all the way under my feet.

A follow up kick sent her flying. Stunned, she didn’t even scream as she careened through empty air. I saw Rala and Veronica right then, the two smack dab in the path of Venai’s unscheduled flight. The alien clutched to the tome in one hand with dangling Chatterbox from the other while Veronica held onto her. They ducked and moved aside as one.

“
Ssshhhiiiittttt,
”CB muttered as Venai hurtled toward them.

It wasn’t until Venai crashed into the wall near the women that she made a sound. It was a pitiful, wet grunt. Blood spilled from her mouth as she slid down the spiderwebbed bricks and crumpled into a fetal heap. Rala stared at her with wide eyes.

I was grateful to see that both were alive and seemingly unhurt, but that thought was a fleeting one in the jumble of the others falling over each other to comprehend what my eyes were seeing. My gaze was locked on the man in the middle, uncertainty a razored ball in my throat I couldn’t swallow. The man stood with a smile on his face, facing down the rest of the supernaturals, and I could suddenly feel the power wafting off him. It washed over me like hurricane tides, each wave buffeting me, making it hard to stay on my feet. But it wasn’t so much the power that threatened to bowl me over as it was the realization of who he was.

I knew him, but I couldn’t possibly.

His grin widened as he spread his arms in a challenge, wisps of magic dancing at his fingertips. “This world is mine,” he said, and there was no mistaking his identity as his gaze lighted on mine. I toppled to my knees, my legs unable to hold me any longer.

There, staring at me with irrationally familiar eyes…

…was
me
.

Twenty

I choked back my surprise, the world spinning around me as I swayed on my knees.

“Ah, Triggaltheron,” the other me said, the voice I’d heard in my head my entire life now coming from someone else’s mouth. No, that wasn’t quite right. He was me. Then who was I?

Coldness came over me as I stared at me. The same face I’d seen in the mirror stared back. Nearly naked, he stood with the confidence of a runway model, strolling down the catwalk despite the audience circling him, wishing he’d trip and fall on his face. He, of course, didn’t. Dark eyes pierced me and the dislocated sense of perception made my head swim. The other me laughed, my patented chuckle slipping from his lips as if to mock me. He headed my direction with broad, easy steps.

“Come now, Triggaltheron, do you not recognize me?” Again, my voice sounded in my ears, the effect disorienting.

I saw Rahim inching closer, but there was no mistaking the confusion that marred his ursine face. A hound dog looked had replaced his snarl. Rahim and Scarlett closed the circle with cautious steps, still following his lead, their own uncertainty obvious.

That made four of us. “How?” It was the only question I could get my tongue to form.

“Do you not remember Limbo?”

That’s when it hit, a baseball of memory thudding into my skull. The clues had been right there, out in the open so blatantly I could have tripped over them. “But you…you’re…”

“Dead?” Azrael answered. “Of course I am, but then again, I always was.” A smile creased his too-familiar lips. “You didn’t actually think a couple of bullets and bad intentions could rid me from this world, did you?”

My gaze fell on the charred husk I inhabited, my stomach twisting into hard knots as the pieces of the puzzle slid into place. No wonder I couldn’t find Hobbs’ body amidst the wreckage. I was wearing it. My shoulders slumped as reality settled onto them like a dump truck full of bricks. I had, actually. How could I have been so foolish?

“Do not blame yourself, Triggaltheron,” he said as though he were in my head, which, up until a few short minutes ago, he actually had been. “You could not have known I was not the same as God’s other creations. I was born to a purpose, and you cannot kill
death
.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Katon dart in low, swords at the ready.

“No,” I screamed, but it was too late.

The enforcer was swept aside by a sharpened trail of crimson energy, little more than a casual backhand by Azrael, the angel of death; the Grim Reaper himself. Katon screamed and flew away in a shower of thick, black blood. He crashed to earth without a sound, immediately scrambling to get back to his feet, a warrior born.

“I’ll kill you, Frank,” Scarlett shrieked as she raced for Azrael. Rahim’s energy welled at his furred fists behind her back.

I shouted again, forcing my legs to obey. They did so reluctantly, bunching up beneath me until I was standing. My warning fell on deaf ears. Scarlett feinted left and shifted right, Everto Trucido scything the air with precision. Azrael caught her wrist as though she were moving in slow motion. He grinned and slammed his fist into her face. A loud
snap
signaled her nose breaking, and blood gushed out in a waterfall. Azrael tugged her in front of himself, using her as a shield and smirked at Rahim as the werebear growled his fury. His magic held fast.