The Deadliest Bite (36 page)

It began to be entertaining. Until we got a whiff of them.

“Whew!” exclaimed Lotus as she pinched her nostrils together. “They’re in the frigging water!

How come they stil smel like rotting meat?”

“Because, in a way, they are,” Raoul explained. “Now herd them toward the gate. Raise your arms. Yel a little. You should know a lot about that, thril seeker.” She actual y looked hurt, which amazed me. I glanced at Vayl and caught him smiling. Then the expression changed to one of intense concentration as he looked first toward Astral and then to me.

“Be ready,” he said. “Let us get this right the first time so you do not have to suffer any longer.” Which was why I so loved the guy. I’d tried not to complain anymore, but it had begun to feel as if my head might literal y explode. Also, the rest of my body was now unaccountably sore, as if the nosebleed had reversed itself and spread, and now every organ had sprung a leak.

Astral cleared the water and ran to my side, where she paused long enough to shake al the water she hadn’t yet shed onto my jeans. Vayl pointed to the nearest field and said, “There. Beside that torso wearing the Raiders sweatshirt. Do you see it?”

I did. Spiderhounds are easy to spot, mainly because their heads are covered with eyes. Thirty-two of them to be exact. Not al of them work at the same time or in the same way, which is what makes them such a dangerous enemy. But then, they are a vulnerable area on the animal, and one it pays to target. Because the hounds are also big, fanged, clawed, and vicious. If you can even partial y blind them you radical y increase your odds of survival.

This one, a pure white giant that made Jack look like a dachshund, was wagging its spiked tail up and down like it was about to play fetch with one of the feet that stuck out of the ground at paw level. I was about to signal the hound’s location to Raoul when I realized one set of its eyes was the same shade of yel ow as those I’d seen in Vayl’s memories of Roldan. But in those visions his fur had also been covered with patches of black, proving this was just another coincidence. Like Zel finding Helena. I factored in the knowledge that Kyphas’s eyes turned yel ow when she was pissed off too, and decided that hel just preferred that color. So I shrugged it off and let Raoul know where the spiderhound was located. He quickly showed Lotus.

I leaned in to Vayl. “Do you see any other spiderhounds?” I asked.

He nodded. “The second is trotting at the back. I have only been able to see his eyes twice. They are glowing.” Raoul signaled that he’d heard. And wasn’t happy about it. Because it meant the alpha had come along for this hunt. Not unusual, but bad for us. Alpha spiderhounds, besides the obvious attribute of larger size, also carried sacs of poisonous spiders underneath their jowls. Not a threat from a distance, but if the alpha could put the bite on you, so could his little friends. By the tens of thousands. It was not a pretty way to die. I’d seen a couple of the corpses that had made it topside before succumbing. They’d al gone screaming.

Wel , that wasn’t how I planned to face my end. But if it happened here, while I was fighting beside the man I loved, nobody would hear me bitching when they found me looking up his address in the afterlife.

I tightened my hands on the Rocenz and wiped my nose on the hem of my shirt yet again. It wasn’t fancy, just a black pul over, but I’d liked it once. Now the sucker was going straight to the rag pile when I got back home.

“They’re coming,” Zel whispered. “Get your cat ready.” He and Helena were crouched beside the fence, their hands clutching the bars so tightly that the spikes had begun to cut into the edges of their fingers. To be free after al this time—I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it might mean to them. Or how our failure could crush them. So I didn’t try. I just crouched beside Astral, pointing out the durgoyles I wanted her to chase as soon as I gave the word.

I glanced up at Vayl, hoping for a little moral support. But his glance had crossed the Moat, where it was glued to the spiderhounds. They’d targeted an old cow that looked to be limping.

The squeals of the spiderhounds signaling their attack galvanized Zel as wel . “Now, Jaz!” he yel ed.

“Go get ’em, Astral!” I gave her a slight push and she took off, squealing irritably at the durgoyles as she waded into them, deftly weaving in and out of their paths, jumping clear of an irately jerked horn or kicked hoof. At first it seemed like al she was going to accomplish was to piss them off so much that they’d either find a way to stomp her into scrap or massacre each other trying. And then she sprang up and bit a big old bul in the butt. When she landed she began singing a Bloodhound Gang hit at top volume: “You and me, baby, ain’t nothin’ but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”

The bul had felt the double insult like it was a pitchfork thrown by the Great Taker himself. He jumped into the air so high that al four hooves cleared the ground at once, his eyes rol ing whitely as he shrieked in panicked protest. Every durgoyle gate-side flinched as if it had been struck, and the air suddenly fil ed with high-pitched what-the-hel squeaks. Chaos broke out as mothers tried to protect their young, the young trotted in circles trying to figure out where the hel safety had gone to, older males each decided it lay in five different directions, and the biggest bul of them al trumpeted for the herd to get their heads out of their asses and fol ow him.

He came charging straight for Vayl. Who stood his ground like a Neanderthal determined to skewer some fresh protein for his starving tribe. My
sverhamin
, so ful y channeling his inner Wraith that the tips of his curls had gathered frost, raised both hands over his head, his sword pointing straight at the fiery sky like it was a match he needed to light. The sudden gust of arctic wind whacked the bul on his brown nose, turning him directly toward the gate. His herd hesitated. Tried to turn. But Raoul and Lotus were on the other side, yel ing, singing, and trying out their own version of pig squeals.

And then Vayl opened his mouth. From it issued a stream of tiny red crystals that blew off his tongue like frozen fire. And I knew it was the hel spawn’s blood that he’d taken upon entering this realm, transformed into his own personal weapon, pelting the durgoyles into action. They fol owed the bul at a jump, thirty squeaking, flank-bashing, panicked lemmings headed straight off the cliff.

Or, in this case, into the gate.

They crashed into Satan’s doorway with the jaw-clenching sound of breaking bones, screaming wounded, and trampling hooves. Metal groaned. Hinges screeched. On the other side of the river the remnants of the herd mil ed and fought, as if they were irritated that their neighbors were making them wait to move on. The spiderhounds howled in triumph as their prey made a fatal mistake and wandered too far from her sisters. They pounced, each of them taking her at a different angle. The rest of the herd distanced themselves from her, ignoring her dying screams in the I’m-glad-it-wasn’t-me way of the future victim.

On our side of the river the pile of dead and broken durgoyles grew as the herd continued its mindless assault on the gate. It didn’t give in the middle, where the two doors met. Instead the bottom set of hinges on our side splintered so badly that they fel to pieces at our feet. The durgoyle who’d made the break shoved the gate aside. It swung back and smashed into the bul behind it, tangling in its horns, forcing it to its knees, where it formed a living door prop for the rest of the herd.

I eyed the spiderhounds feasting noisily on their kil . “Should we take them out next, while they’re distracted?” I glanced at Raoul, then at Lotus, not sure which of them could come up with the most dastardly game plan for this particular creature.

Raoul shook his head. “If you can finish your business before they’re done eating, we should be able to slip past them. In this case I agree with Zel . It’s better to avoid a fight than to force one.” I glanced at Zel , momentarily forgetting that he couldn’t hear our Party Line conversation. He’d been busy glancing over his shoulder. Now he had Helena by the hand and they were moving to cross over. He said, “Whatever you have to do, rush it. They’l know the gate is breached. People wil come to escape. Demons wil come to stop them. We’re out of time now.”

“I’m on it.” Without wasting another second I turned one of the dying durgoyles. Feeling like an old-school biblical figure I whispered over it, “Uh, so you’re the sacrifice. If you promise not to gore me, I’l make this quick and painless.” It fulfil ed its side of the bargain, so I did too, watching the relief flit through its brown-onbrown eyes as its blood coated the Rocenz and what remained of its hel ish life slipped away.

The two parts of the tool shivered in my hands as indentations appeared beneath my fingers, giving me a better grip for the job ahead of me. I waited for Zel and Helena to slip through the opening in hel ’s gate. And then I set the chisel onto its surface.

Less than three weeks before I’d watched Kyphas use this same tool to mark Cole’s name onto her heartstone. Until now I’d never wondered what it had felt like for her to raise the shining silver hammer and bring it down,
clang!
onto its brother. Now I understood the look of ecstasy I’d seen on her face. Though our motives were as different as heaven and hel , our feelings, as they often had, ran paral el. Power, baby. Fiery energy running up my arms and into my body until I felt like I could touch a dead heart with a single finger and jolt it into action again.

I realized I was grinning as the B took shape on Satan’s gate. The
domytr
inside my head beat his fists against the wal s of his cel so relentlessly that the pain behind my right eye final y shut it down. Half-blind, bleeding from my nose and both my ears now, I laughed aloud as I chiseled the R

and then the U. I could feel Brude draw the tattoos that covered his arms and chest together into the armor that had protected him so wel against Raoul’s attack back in Scotland. Now I thought of it more as a shroud as I tapped the letter D into hel ’s doorway.

Behind me I heard Lotus yel , “Something strange is—watch out! The spiderhounds are…

changing! Goddammit, you should never have let them get this close! Why don’t any of you people have guns? Oh my God, they’re not what we thought they were at al !” Vayl said, “Lotus is right, Jasmine. The spiderhounds are slipping their skins. They may be some other form of spawn we have never seen. Whatever they are, I believe they have tricked us into taking this path in order to regain the Rocenz. Right now they are raising some sort of bridge from the bottom of the Moat.”

I couldn’t have spoken if I wanted to. Al my inner girls were running around like disaster victims, some screaming mindlessly, some weeping. Even Granny May was pacing frantical y while she bit her fingernails like she hadn’t eaten for a week. I felt Vayl, Zel , Raoul, and Astral arrange themselves behind me, readying themselves for the fight, protecting me from yet another attack. Lotus was just pacing, muttering, swearing at anyone who seemed easily blamed. I didn’t want her to distract me.

But when she fel over the cat, I was suddenly grateful, because it reminded me of what Astral had said to me before our descent.

“Don’t look!” I yel ed as I continued the work. “They’re not real y spiderhounds. I was right! The one with yel ow eyes
is
Roldan! Which means the alpha is his gorgon. So whatever you do, don’t meet her eyes. If you do, you’l be destroyed!”

“Turn around!” Vayl cal ed as Raoul bel owed, “Face the gate! The alpha’s eyes are transforming into snakes!”

Believe it or not, I was relieved to hear that I was right. Gorgons have this odd code of honor.

They’l kil you, oh yeah, in about three hundred different ways, starting with the whole paralyze-you-withtheir-steely-vision trick. But they wil not attack unless you’re facing them. So I knew that as long as my people kept their nerve I could continue cutting the cords that had connected the
domytr
to me.

Only a few remained, and my inner girls—having received at least a short reprieve from certain death—hacked those free like a bunch of slayers out for a midnight run. When the final connection snapped they cheered as the locks fel from the cel that Teen Me and I had trapped Brude in. The door creaked open to reveal his ghostly form standing in the middle, head down in defeat, arms hanging loose at his sides as he faded into mist. The moment the final droplet disappeared from my mind, a shimmering form began to take shape just on the other side of the gate.

It wasn’t a clean transition, like a beam-me-up-Scotty moment in which the traveler arrives even cleaner and tidier than when he left. As I worked on the E, Brude began to convulse. Wounds appeared on his chest, arms, legs, even his face.
Funny. The more he bleeds, the better I feel
.

My sight came back first. Then my headache disappeared, along with the bleeding from my ears and nostrils. As I put the final cut into the gate, I felt a satisfaction like an actual weight leaving me, though no physical burden could’ve been as hard or heavy to bear. On the other side of the twisted metal dog, the last image of Brude fel to his knees, so roundly defeated I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him beg for mercy. But he just knelt quietly and waited the three beats it took for his fate to catch up to him.

I pul ed the Rocenz away from the gate. Staring proudly at me, he said, “You could have been my queen,” as his skin, his hair, even his eyebal s began to leak fluid like a faulty radiator. As the thick pink liquid flowed into the ground, smal beetle-like creatures with barbed tongues and pincers at the ends of their tails scuttled out of their holes to slurp it up, and then to explore the source of their unexpected snack. They swarmed up Brude’s legs while his body steadily shriveled, melting into their mouths like a finely cooked pork roast.