bedeviled & beyond 01 - bedeviled & beguiled (21 page)

Strangely enough however, only Mx. Cooper had been killed. Her newly segmented body had been found behind the club, stuffed into the trash compactor, but not, as yet, compacted.

I asked Raoul, as carefully as I could since he was already pissed off at me, if he didn’t think it was strange that she’d been killed and stuffed in a trash compactor when everyone else had just been bloodied up a bit in the brawl.

His answer was to level those hard, brown cop’s eyes at me again and leave. I guess that meant the distinction had, at least, occurred to him.

~SC~

Myra shimmered in as I was placing the coffee cups into the flash cleaner in my food service area. She leaned against the counter as I worked and smiled at me. Having gotten used, over the years, to her scowling countenance, her jovial presentation made me distinctly uncomfortable.

I narrowed my green eyes at her and stepped back to give her the once over. “Been eatin’ those poor little canaries again, Myra?”

Myra’s laugh reminded me of the sound crystal makes when you run your fingertip around the rim of a half filled goblet. Coming from her it pulled the hairs on my arms to attention. “Ok, what’s up?”

My angel shrugged and raised her golden eyebrows, cocking her head toward the drink valet. I sighed and programmed in another cup of the black nectar. At this rate I was going to have to bill the Big Guy for refreshment costs.

As the coffee brewed, Myra lowered herself weightlessly into a chair at my well-used table. Looking at her, a thought penetrated my loggy brain and I had to smile. It had occurred to me that in the last twenty-four hours a royal devil, my best human friend, a death detective and an angel of God had all used that same chair. If wood-look, fire-proof, non-petroleum-based man-made furniture product could only talk, what a story that chair could tell its friends.

I handed Myra her coffee and sat down across from her.

She sipped noisily, closing her eyes in pleasure. Then, before she put me out of my misery she cocked her head and gave me that damned smile again.

“What?! You’re really roughin’ up my edges here, angel.”

She laughed. “I was just wondering what you were thinking when you woke up in your own bed this morning.”

I slapped an open hand against the tabletop. “It was you!”

She nodded, still grinning. I rarely saw her smile, it was a very pretty smile, but at the moment it was really pissing me off. “I should have known. Why didn’t you tell me? Do you know what a fool I made of myself with that...” Suddenly it occurred to me that I might want to put a clamp on it.

Myra’s grin faded, “With who, Astra? Or should I say what?”

It was my turn to shrug and grin. “Never mind. So tell me what happened. How’d you find me at the church? Was I dead?”

Myra wrinkled her brow the way she always does when I talk about dying. I guess she really does care—a little. “Of course not you stupid girl. You actually were beginning to heal yourself when we ran that evil woman off.” Her face changed, became more guarded. “Princess Rayanne really hates you, Astra. What have you done to her?”

I stood up and went over to the drink valet so she couldn’t see my face. How was I supposed to tell my angel that Rayanne thought I wanted to steal her man and take over her chair on the devil court? In fact, as much as it made me hate myself, I wasn’t even completely certain I wouldn’t mind doing the first one of those two things myself. “Hades if I know.” Avoiding her gaze, I programmed in a cup of coffee I didn’t really want.

Sitting back down, I suddenly realized what she’d said. “Did you say I was healing myself?”

She nodded, frowning. “Astra, these powers of yours seem to be growing rapidly. Do you have any idea why?”

I shook my head. “None.” A sudden thought occurred to me. “Myra. Have you ever heard of a halfling with these powers before?”

“Only once and she gained her powers very slowly, over time. She didn’t achieve your level of ability until she was very old, nearly two hundred years I think. I’ve known you since you were six years old. When your Aunt Diedre first tried to school you in your powers I thought the woman was crazy. At that point the only thing you could do was gentle frightened animals with your mind and move a few lightweight objects around. I guess she knew something I didn’t.”

“That’s one hell of an understatement.” I thought about the bit of information from my past for a minute and then had to ask.

“Angel?”

“Hmmm?”

“Is there any chance these powers came from my good side?”

My angel cocked her golden head and touched my hand. Her ocean-blue eyes turned sad. “No child. I’ve never heard of an angel with such powers. We only have the power to heal others and to protect the innocent from evil. Our powers would never let us destroy to protect ourselves. And I’ve never seen an angel heal itself. You can use your power to heal others as well as yourself, Astra.” She pushed the coffee mug around the tabletop thoughtfully and her frown deepened. “To tell you the truth, Astra, I’m not sure what the source of your power is. It scares me.”

My gaze jerked to hers. As she said the words I felt her fear as my own. Or maybe it
was
my own. I’d never seen Myra afraid before and I’d certainly never heard her express fear of any kind. Hearing it in that moment didn’t make me feel any better about my situation.

When Myra left I discovered that I was restless and filled with nervous energy. It may have been due to the five cups of coffee I’d had, or it might have been the result of an incredibly unsettling morning. I knew I should go into the office and prepare for a job I had to do later in the week, but somehow the idea of sitting behind my desk just didn’t appeal.

I quickly cleaned up my food service area and then remembered the cylinder I’d dropped into my coat pocket before DD Raoul arrived in Deaver’s office and interrupted me. Maybe I could make some sense of the whole Prince Nille thing if I went over Deaver’s diary again. There had to be something in there that would help me. Something I’d missed the first time through.

Retrieving the cylinder, I sat down in front of my information unit and slid it into the memory core. “Pull information and present.”

The unit gave a little chirping sound and the first file opened on the screen. Much to my surprise, the words that I’d copied from the screen in human English had been transformed somehow into a script I didn’t recognize. Squinting at the hieroglyphic type text brought me back to my years in school studying demonic phonics. I thought I could almost read a couple of the words. Just as I deciphered the word, “daemon” the file flashed off and another took its place. I had barely focused my eyes on the strange text before the file again flashed off and was replaced by another.

As the contents of the screen flashed by with increasing speed, the unit started to emit a low-pitched, monotonic hum, the sounds merging into words and then phrases and eventually coming out as some kind of chant. The voice that chanted from the unit was a gravelly screech. Not in the least human.

I tried to tear my eyes away from the screen, which had become a blur of whirring files that sped past my aching eyeballs at an intimidating speed. Not only could I
not
look away, but my brain was beginning to feel mushy and loggy. With a start I realized I’d entered a trance-like state and I didn’t seem to have any control over it.

The gravelly voice reverberated in my ear, still chanting in the strange language that I finally recognized as Hades. It tickled my eardrums with its thundering force. Like a drug-induced vision, I saw my inner spirit rise above my body and hang there, an innocent bystander watching me struggle with my non-responsive body. I saw myself sitting there, staring zombie-like at the whirring screen, completely and helplessly motionless. Somewhere inside the false, exterior calm my heart was pounding in fear. My eyes widened and teared up as they projected the mute terror of my complete helplessness. I fought the immobility of my body with everything I had, struggling to move even the tips of my fingers, which were locked on the keyboard of the information unit. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t break the psychic bond I’d somehow been locked into.

The voice in my head softened and began to alter, a few grooves at a time, like an old vinyl record that was being played backward in my aching head. I continued to fight to recapture the use of my hands, my legs, my head, but it was as if I’d been painted with six inches of cement and baked in hell.

Sweat poured down my face and under the reverberating audio playing in my head I could hear myself whimpering with the struggle to break out of the trance.

Then abruptly the audio stopped. The visual stopped almost immediately after, as the screen on my intelligence unit faded to black with a tiny, spark-like blip. Holding my breath, I waited in fear to see what would happen next.

That was when I realized I was no longer the only one in the room. In small but steady increments, the air around me began to thicken with cold, gelling around my static body in a clammy, tension filled embrace. My ears, which I realized had been ringing since the chanting stopped, gradually began to pick up the dark sound of something heavy and wetly dense shuffling across the floor behind me. I sat there, a small, sweaty statue in a fake leather desk chair and felt the small hairs on the back of my neck stand up in response to whatever was coming at me from behind. Goosebumps filled with horror popped up along the length of both of my immobile arms and down my useless legs.

With every newly awakened pore in my body I wished I could turn and see what was about to kill me, but I was hopelessly trapped in my cement hell. As the thing behind me stopped shuffling and sent out a shuddering breath that smelled like a garbage dump in Florida in August, I thought about whimpering but decided it wouldn’t be very manly of me and might even give the thing behind me an excuse to torture me a while before eating me. Nothing turns a bully on like whimpering, slobbering fear.

The foul odor of its breath hit the back of my neck and poured around me. The smell was so putrid and thick that it was difficult to breathe through it. It painted the inside of my nostrils and formed a nearly impenetrable plug in my airways. My eyes watered with it but I couldn’t blink. I really wanted to blink.

The air temperature in my living quarters had dropped to the point that it could probably preserve my mangled body for weeks once I was dead, like a self-contained cooling drawer at the morgue. My body shivered mentally, but outwardly remained completely still. It was a weird sensation but it made me realize that only my outward movements were locked up, I could still use my will and my spirit.

The thought was almost enough to make me feel better. Almost. But then the thing behind me leaned close enough to touch my back and, breathing its garbage dump breath into the side of my cement face, extended a long, rough, purple tongue and licked my ear, leaving behind a cold, slimy trail that dripped, green and oily, onto my right arm. I thought that was really bad. I mean, it was
really
bad. But then I heard the heavy shuffling sound again and the thing moved slowly and clumsily to stand in front of me, where I could see its whole disgusting self with my immobile eyes. It was then that I really knew what bad was. I realized I’d never really done bad before. I was doing it in
that
moment. All of the blood in my body fell to my feet, where I had no doubt it would be found, still pooling, when the Strange Death Detectives found my mangled, green-slimed body.

The thing had arms but no legs. Its head merged with its “body” if you could call it that, without an apparent break in the line of horror that was its physical make-up. Except, I decided as I peered at it more carefully from inside my flesh and blood prison, although it had the appearance of being a very large pulsating snake with tiny, waving arms that ended in claws which were ridged at the edges like deadly, curved hacksaws, it wasn’t really a physical creature. It had no real physical density or form.

As I watched, the thing’s shape kept slipping away from it, morphing into something that jutted out here and dipped in there, like it wasn’t really sure what it was supposed to look like but was trying really hard to hold it together nonetheless. Watching its wide, rippling face I noted that its expression and features were constantly changing, like the screen of an endlessly running bad movie with a single, repeating theme.
I’m gonna eat you, I’m gonna eat you, I’m gonna eat you.

The monster’s eyes were particularly disturbing. They flashed at me from within the morphing face, changing color and shape constantly as if they were the gateway for a collection of lost spirits who were trying to find a way out of that horrible body. A jolt of electrical power emerged from the carpet under the thing’s base and trailed upward in curving arcs that caressed its moldering shape. The lights in the house flickered and weakened and I recognized that it was somehow draining the power from my living quarters and using it to stay in one piece. For several, whole seconds after I saw the jolt of electrical lightning leave the floor and enter the thing in front of me, I noticed that it took on a more substantial quality, as if the electrical power it had sucked from my quarters had given it the juice it needed to appear real.

I threw out my sensing power and discovered that there was nothing to sense. No soul. No spirit. Nothing there but a nightmare on trolley tracks. Driven by electrical power. I also realized that I was looking at the thing that had been in my office. The thing that had thrown me out of my window. The thing that had dragged the Viper and me to the devil-filled warehouse. Dialle’s lovely pet. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!

The monster moved suddenly and, at least internally, I jumped. It had been watching me as I was watching it and, immersed in fascination, I had almost forgotten for a few seconds that I was in danger. The super-charged nightmare was on the move again, doing that heavy, wet, sliding and thumping thing in my direction. Something in its face was opening. As the long, slime painted tongue slipped out I realized with a jolt that it was the mouth. The monstrous conglomeration slithered and bumped toward my helpless, rigid self, leaving a trail of slime on my rug like a slug. I watched the thing that was its mouth open and keep opening, to an impossibly huge size that looked wide enough to swallow me whole. My heart jumped into overdrive as I realized it was going to lower that graveyard of a mouth over me and swallow me like a huge jungle dwelling snake. I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut on the mental picture of that long, wavering column of electrically charged matter undulating and bulging as my helpless body moved down its length and then, lodged like a large marble in the neck of a balloon, waited to be sucked dry in its tomblike innards.