God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel (23 page)

They had stopped and put it in a safety deposit box Logan had opened days before, adding both AJ’s and Clover’s name to the list of people that were to be given access to it in his absence while he was there.

“Everything you need to know, you’ve been shown.”

“What about, remember? At the house? How it…vaporized those motherfuckers?”

“It doesn’t work on Daed,” Logan said. “It’s been tried, believe me.”

“I need some air,” AJ muttered, just loud enough for Logan to hear. The hunter stood and holstered his guns, pulled on his trench coat, and followed.

Just outside the door to their room, AJ was standing perfectly still, his head slightly cocked to the side as if he was listening to something no one else could hear. He looked across the parking lot in the fading daylight, taking a tentative step forward. He looked up at the slowly ascending crimson orb.

Bad moon a-risin’,
AJ thought and looked left, then right. He paused for a second and began walking. It was a very odd feeling, like he was sitting in the passenger seat of his body after twenty-two years behind the wheel. He wondered if he would be able to stop walking if he tried. But he didn’t try. If anything, he walked a little faster. With each step he felt a power within him surge and grow.

His entire being was fully awake and finely tuned. The colors of the world were more vivid, and though it was dark, he found he could see perfectly. He heard everything from the sound of Logan’s soft, even breathing from fifteen feet behind him, to a car being started six blocks away.

AJ had no idea where he was going or where he had been, he was navigating entirely on instinct. If he felt he needed to turn one way or another he did, and the traffic lights turned with him as if in confirmation. The sense of power and vitality grew steadily stronger. He came to an intersection and hooked a right without hesitation, crossing the street without even bothering to look for traffic. As he stepped off the curb the light turned green. After reaching the other side he cut across a vacant lot and went down an alley. Finally, he stopped. He felt no need to move any particular direction. He looked around. This couldn’t be it, could it? An alley? Then he looked down to see he was standing right in front of a manhole cover. He bent and stuck his fingers through the grated metal and lifted.

Logan watched, amazed, as AJ pulled the sixty-pound circle of steel one-handededly off the ground and flung it to his left like he was popping the top off a beer.

AJ descended the slick metal rungs of the ladder. He looked up at Logan and started, as if seeing him for the first time. “You coming?”

Logan nodded and AJ disappeared under ground.

Although the tunnel was completely devoid of light, AJ could still see just fine. Not that there was much to look at...

AJ stopped in his tracks, his body trembling and his testicles trying to crawl back home as the coffin chorus of laughter washed through the tunnel.

Him
, was all AJ thought, and resumed his pace as the laughter drowned out to nothing. It was silent but for the soft echo of their footsteps. They walked for what seemed like an eternity before they finally saw a pinpoint of light at the end of the tunnel, and it simultaneously filled AJ with dread and joy. Then there was something else.

“Logan?” AJ whispered in the darkness.

“I feel it too.”

The two slowed to a stop and AJ looked around. “What’s that shit on the walls?” he asked, noticing it for the first time. A grey substance was there, coating the entire mouth of the tunnel, lumping here and there, lazily swirling like a wall of smoke.

“Keep moving,” Logan said. AJ started walking again, slower now, his eyes not on the light in the distance but the walls. It was like an acid trip, seeing shapes and sensing a pattern he couldn’t quite catch. AJ saw movement in his peripheral vision and he snapped his head to the right before it sunk back into the turning nothingness. A hand stuck out, a groping, grey hand was there, and then it melted back into the wall.

AJ turned, wide eyed, to the left. A crude face protruded and receded, a silent scream on its lips.

“Get away from the wall!” Logan shouted, checking AJ out of the way as a spike shot out, eight feet long, and stuck itself through Logan’s side, then sunk back.

“Fuck!” Logan looked down at the new wound as blood began to seep. A feverish hand came out of the wall and grabbed AJ by the bicep, pulling him closer. He managed to break free but two more shot out, one grabbing his shirt and another clutching his leg. He was jerked into the grey matter and tried to scream when his mouth was covered. A head popped out of the wall and sank needle teeth into his shoulder. Logan was there, yanking him away, shredding the hands that held him. The torn remains hit the ground and were absorbed back up into the ever-moving wallpaper of decay.

Another spike shot from behind them and punched through Logan’s trench coat, barely missing his other side.

“We may have a serious fucking problem here,” Logan said, one hand pressed against his wound to stop the bleeding. AJ pulled the Zippo from his pocket and flicked it open, advancing toward the wall and spinning the wheel. A flame dutifully arose. AJ pressed the lighter into the wall.

At first, it looked as though the lighter went out. Then there was a soft
phwump!
and the flames spread, coating the tunnel with fire and a stink that could be matched by nothing else. A scream arose from nowhere, from everywhere, and a flaming hand shot out of the wall and pressed against AJ’s ribs, melting his shirt to his skin. He screamed and staggered back as the sizzling of his flesh continued. He stripped off his shirt, tearing off a large portion of the blister that had instantly formed in the perfect shape of a hand.

That’ll make a hell of a story, he thought wildly and stared down at the suppurating mess.

“What the hell is that stuff?” AJ yelled over the crackling of the fire and the heavy stench raping his nose.

“Decay!” Logan yelled back, steadying AJ on his feet, both ducking away from a chunk of it, flaming and falling from the ceiling. “Human decay! He still has power over their remains.” The decay had been a thin coating and burned quickly; the fire was beginning to dwindle, eating itself out of existence.

“Go!” Logan shouted. “Leave me, but stop him. For all your fathers, stop him for good!” Logan began slowly walking back the way they had come, waving AJ forward.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Daed had been listening closely, listening with his mind as Logan got stabbed in the side. He’d heard the fire, too. He’d felt it. As the decay went up in a funeral pyre, Daed screamed. His body had begun to smoke all over, a piece of his hair had burst into flame before he could pull back into himself and out of the flames. He now stared at the tunnel, its round walls and ceiling a half circle of fire. He stared through the center of it, and could sense him.

Then AJ Munroe, The Next, stepped out of the ring of fire that the tunnel had become, and into His chamber.

“Daed!” he screamed and walked forward with a deliberate stride. Sixxez stood and looked into AJ’s eyes for the first time. It was the eyes of all his forefathers, each one that Daed had faced, each one that had stopped Him, again and again, snatching what was rightfully His away from Him at the last instant.

But tonight, Daed thought, that ends tonight.

Clover had looked up when she heard the screams in the tunnel, and she had watched the fire grow and die. Then he was there, AJ was there, his shirt was gone and there was a hell of a burn on his side that looked like a hand. He was bleeding from a wound on his shoulder, but he was there. At the sight of him she began to struggle in her restraints; they automatically tightened to the point of pain.

“AJ,” she screamed, the tears freely running down her dirty cheeks, cutting clean paths through the grime. He looked over, seeing her for the first time, and despite everything that had happened and was about to, he smiled at her. She could live another hundred years and never forget that he had smiled at her.

That was when Daed Sixxez struck, charging forward and lifting AJ off the ground and slamming him back down.

AJ had time to look at Clover before the breath was knocked out of him and he found himself staring up at the ceiling through blurring eyes. He saw Daed in time to see His fist roping down and meeting his left eye. The pain exploded and more punches rained down. AJ lifted his leg and hooked it around Daed’s arm. Power coursed through him like a current and he knocked the god off him. Both stood, circling each other in the middle of the room. In unison they lunged forward and locked up, hands on each other’s shoulders, both trying to get an edge. The foreign strength seemed to consume AJ and the two of them were equally matched.

Daed dug His fingers into the bite wound on AJ’s shoulder, His sharpened fingernails cutting though the other shoulder as well. AJ’s fingers punched through Daed’s spongy flesh and a thick, green-black blood began to ooze.

“Enough!” Daed screamed and they both pushed back, drawing apart. “You move closer and she dies.” Sixxez pointed toward Clover as her chair began to shift, growing a hundred different spikes and barbs that were pointed at all her vital organs.

“Oh shit,” she said.

I’ve won! It’s happening just as I foresaw!
Daed thought, the success after all these centuries of failure reeling in His head. AJ froze where he was at, Daed grinned at the hatred in his eyes.

“If you harm her I’ll tear your fucking head off,” AJ said, one person stating a fact to another. Daed believed it was true, too. The little shit thought it was, at least.

“That may be, but that wouldn’t help her any would it?”

AJ stared back. “You can’t win.”

“I already have, boy.”

“You
know
I can kill you. You’re just delaying the fact.”

“That’s neither here nor there. I have a deal to offer you.”

Do you remember?
Enopac asked in AJ’s head.

I do
, AJ thought, and looked from Clover to Daed. “What kind of deal?”

“One that will benefit all of us,” Sixxez began. “It will allow the two lovebirds to be together and live a long and meaningful life. It will allow me to rule the world.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” AJ said.

“Don’t do it!” Clover shouted. “Kill him!” AJ ignored her for the first and last time in his life.

“Give me your soul, your life force, and I’ll leave, I’ll rip out my own core in front of you if you want. Back to the Nexus, for another hundred years. When I return, you two will be dead and gone, and even if you breed, your life force will not be passed on. The responsibility of your clan shall be lifted from your shoulders.” Daed grinned.

AJ looked at Clover, back to Daed. “If I refuse?”

“I promise you she won’t live to see the sun again, no matter what else happens.”

AJ fell quiet, putting on his poker face and pretending to contemplate. The battle was finally over, except for the formalities.

“I’ll do it,” AJ said.

“NO!” Clover screamed. She meant to throw herself into the spikes, to kill herself and take the choice out of the equation, but the spikes had receded and there was nothing. She slumped as much as her bindings would allow and began to cry.

A black, macabre joy leapt up inside Daed Sixxez at AJ’s agreement. From far away, Jha’ask and Enopac watched, everything else in existence slowing to a stop no one would ever notice, and they watched.

It is almost time
, Enopac said.

Sixxez pulled a long dagger from his side. “You’ll have to cut yourself, offer it to me. I will drink your blood and your soul will come with it.”

AJ took a small step back as Daed’s skin begin to bulge in places. It was if there were bugs and worms and everything nasty crawling around just beneath the surface of His skin, His true form wanting eagerly to be born into His kingdom.

AJ took the knife. “How much of a cut?”

“Just enough for it to bleed,” Sixxez said and AJ was revolted as he watched Him lick His lips, a long, forked tongue flicking in and out. AJ looked into the god’s black, empty eyes, something very bad in them beginning to spin. AJ cut open his palm and held out his arm as his own softly glowing blood began to drip onto the floor.

THE CIRCLE IS CLOSED I’VE WON I’VE FINALLY WON
Daed screamed in His head with a maniacal joy. Sixxez took hold of AJ’s wrist, admiring the iridescent, red streams before plastering His mouth to AJ’s palm, tasting the blood.

AJ began to feel cold and empty, little by little the strength he’d been filled with began to drain away.

Daed also began to weaken, His godpower being diluted with the blood of a mortal.

AJ stared into Daed’s eyes, waiting, growing colder. He turned and looked Clover, who was staring through her tears.

“I love you,” AJ said and tightened his grip on the knife he still held.

He looked back into Daed’s eyes, watching as they flickered, watching them turn from the dead, empty black of all pain and all loss to the light grey color he saw in his own eyes every time he looked into the mirror. He knew his eyes would be flickering in the same way, but instead grey to black…

Clover could feel the bonds of her throne begin to loosen. She was able to move her wrists and actually kicked one of her legs free.

He plunged the knife into Daed Sixxez’s stomach. Daed screamed, His mouth painted red with AJ’s blood. Both stared down at the wound, watching a surge of green-black gore come splashing out. AJ had time to think he’d failed, the timing was off and he’d waited too long or not long enough, when the sludge ran a little thinner, and a little redder. Daed watched in horror, His hands going to His stomach and trying to hold it in, screaming, all the while screaming, until AJ shoved his hand into Daed Sixxez’s mouth.

AJ grabbed a fistful of greasy, black hair and pulled Daed’s head back, leaning over Him and shoving his hand in deeper.

Clover retched, having nothing in her stomach to vomit, when she realized she could see the shape of AJ’s hand as it stretched out the strange flesh of Daed’s throat. She watched as the fist-shape flexed and relaxed, then she turned to the left and retched again, coughing up a bitter stream of stomach bile. As she leaned, her right arm pulled free of the restraint. Her chair was shaking, beginning to fall apart, and she stood before it dropped her on her ass. She stumbled and fell over as it was, her legs not used to standing yet. She lay there and watched as AJ’s arm disappeared at the elbow.

AJ clenched his teeth against the pain as Daed bit down like a rabid pitbull, breaking the skin of his bicep. In theory, he knew what he was looking for, he flexed his fingers out and then he felt it: a hot, quivering sphere about the size of a baseball, right in the center of what was supposed to be Daed’s chest, It was the center of a dying god, a dying god that hadn’t known that to consume the life force of a mortal was to become
as
a mortal, and every mortal thing must pass.

Daed hadn’t known, because that knowledge was in the book.

Clover stumbled to her feet, looking down at the bricks of the floor. She hadn’t realized until now that the throne that had effectively been her prison cell hadn’t fallen apart because Daed was weakening, but rather, because He’d wanted it to move.

The grey matter had sifted itself across the floor of the tunnel, working its way around and over AJ’s feet without him noticing. She saw what was going to happen and before she had a chance to so much as scream his name, the grey matter shot up in a spike, punching through AJ’s body. The tip entered him just beneath and to the left of his belly button, traveling straight up through him, through his
insides
and punching back out the back of his neck, just to the right of his spine. The spike kept growing, thickening at the base, pulling him upward as it went, his arm snaking out of Daed’s mouth like the world’s most disgusting circus trick in reverse. When the spike stopped growing, his dangling sneakers looked to be about three-and-a-half feet from the floor. At the base, the spike was thick enough that Clover didn’t think she would have been able to wrap her hands all the way around it. At the point where it entered AJ’s stomach—

—
his stomach
, she thought frantically.
I’ve kissed that stomach
!—

—the spike was maybe the diameter of her wrist, if not even a little thinner. It came out the back of his neck no thicker than a pencil, tapering to a sharp and perfect point. His hand, though streaked red with blood and clots of green and black gore, was empty.

Her eyes were wide in her head and for a moment she could see everything, could see the way Daed was slowly getting Himself back under control, how His eyes were flickering back to that empty, solid black. She could see the steady stream of blood like from the gutter on the side of your house during a rainstorm as it ran out of the hole in his belly, down the spike, pooling on the floor. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears, could hear the fucking
blood in her own veins
and then, in her head, a small, still voice:

Help us
, the voice said.

Jha’ask, she thought.

You can stop this,
said a second.

Enopac.

Save it, save it all,
said the first.
Take his burden.

Still she stood as though locked into place, her heart breaking, in so much pain she couldn’t even scream, the world the roar of all the oceans in her ears and she watched the wound in Daed’s stomach slowly begin to knit itself back together, though He was still stunned and finishing whatever transformation He had been angling for and the second small, still voice was back, the voice of Enopac, the voice of all the darkness in all of creation, and it appealed to something else in her, something perhaps not as noble as what the first voice had asked, but all the more effective for that.

Vengeance.
That was all it said, a quick pulse almost like an electric current in her head and in her heart, there and gone, and she looked up at AJ, his eyes wide and glazed, his chin a mask of blood and she knew that this,
this
was how she would see him from now on, for a while at least, and maybe forever. She would see his fragile body punctured through like meat on a skewer, his soft, kind, grey eyes milky and dull, his face covered in his own blood. She would no longer, at least for a while, and maybe never, think of the moment he was standing in her doorway, smiling at her, about to bring her breakfast in bed when she first she thought of him. That had been taken from her.

For a while.

Maybe forever.

She ran forward and picked the knife up off the floor. She looked up before she used it and had just enough time to stare into His eyes. They flickered black and she waited.

Black and grey and black.

And grey.

She slashed out with the knife, cutting His throat to the strange black bone of His spine, the blade actually chipping against it.

His eyes--still grey--widened and his lips--once dead and black– were now flushed, for the moment, with color. With blood, his blood, AJ’s blood. His lips smiled even as they blushed from grey to pink.

Then the second mouth, this one with no lips, opened across His throat, and blood-red blood--his blood, AJ’s blood—sprayed out, splattering her face and neck and chest and arms.

Daed staggered back a step and, even as His dirty, clown-like, makeup-colored skin began to flush toward something resembling human life, it began to pale, too. Not back toward what it had been before, but something wholly new and unthinkable for Him, towards the pale color of a mortal, bleeding to death.