bedeviled & beyond 01 - bedeviled & beguiled (33 page)

Dialle glanced my way. “We must go.”

I stood. “I can’t. I have to stay with Emo.”

Dialle was suddenly standing in front of me, mere inches away. “No. Emo will die or not, you cannot affect that now. Nille and Nerul have been found. We must attack immediately while they are unprepared.”

I stared into the ocean blue of his gaze and, although I noted the change, I wasn’t even surprised. Impatience colored the forced calm of his expression and I couldn’t help wondering why he bothered. He and I both knew he could just grab me and shift me away. But I guessed he wanted my cooperation more than he wanted my mere presence. He was right. Together we had a chance to win the battle. A slight chance, but a chance. If we didn’t present a united front we were toast. I don’t particularly like toast. Especially if it’s me.

Finally I sighed and laid my hand over his. As the world faded to neutral again it occurred to me that we would not truly be partners if I couldn’t learn to mobilize on my own. I tucked that thought away as a lesson for another day. If there was another day.

Amazingly we shimmered into the blood and gore splattered loft of the Church of the Twined Hands. As soon as we took physical form, Dialle and the three guards that had been in the room with us when we left joined us. Still holding my hand, Dialle headed straight for the center of the room, where the remains of the cross prison lay in a broken heap. Suddenly a lot of things made sense to me. The church had apparently been built on the channel between the light and the dark worlds. A perfect conduit for evil as well as good to enter the physical world. Poor Deaver probably had no idea what he’d signed up for when he’d established his church in that building. His initial message to me about having stepped on some devil toes when he’d moved into the church probably hadn’t been too far off the mark.

Reaching the barricade of collapsed crosses, Dialle simply swung one hand and pieces of cross flew away to crash into splinters against the stone walls. I gasped. The wood of the crosses was incredibly hard and heavy. It would take a staggering amount of power to move it, let alone fling it with apparently no effort. What had I attached myself to? Shit.

As Dialle cleared away the cross debris, I became aware that we were being joined, a few at a time, by several more guards. They shimmered into the room and stood in formation behind Gerch and his two handpicked guards. Apparently Gerch had managed to find some who were still loyal to their Prince.

While Dialle did his dark world version of spring-cleaning, I watched the lesser devils and demons that would stand at our backs in the coming battle. Although I wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea of turning my back on the motley and dangerous looking crew gathered together in that room, their demeanor was not suspect under the circumstances. And, I had to face it, if any of them had any thoughts about betraying Dialle once the battle began, their ambitions were undoubtedly quenched as they watched him treat the thousand-year-old, petrified into iron and at least as heavy, crosses like matchsticks. I personally wasn’t planning on pissing him off again any time soon.

Once Dialle had cleared a space large enough for all of us to squeeze into, he stepped over the power barrier that had held the cross prison together and pulled me with him. As my feet touched the floor within the barrier I experienced a sudden and intense dizziness and found that I had to lean on Dialle to keep from passing out. I hate feeling helpless and weak, it really pisses me off. I turned an angry gaze to Dialle.

“It will pass. You are not used to the power of the Shadows. It runs counter to yours.”

Although the confusion was not in any way cleared up by that cryptic reassurance, the dizziness did indeed start to subside almost immediately. As soon as I could trust my legs to hold me up I let go of Dialle. It wouldn’t do to appear weak around his crew.

As I’d been working on pulling my senses back together, the area within the power barrier had become very crowded. I currently found myself elbow to elbow and butt to...whatever, with the entire dangerous looking “army”. My nose wrinkled at the combined, very pungent smell of demon and lesser devil, but I closed my eyes and forced myself to remain calm. I had to keep reminding myself that they were on my side. Well...at least they were on Dialle’s side and I thought he was on my side. Shit. I really don’t like to share the sandbox with others, it’s just too confusing. You never know who you can trust with your favorite shovel.

Conversation thrummed around me as Dialle’s power began to throb in barely visible waves away from his body. Expecting the waves to ping off my own power shields, imagine my surprise when I instead absorbed them. As his power flowed into mine, my mental drawers shifted and he was there.

We enter the shadows, Astra. Do not show any weakness there or you will die.

I frowned.
Gee thanks for the pep talk. Remind me not to come to you for grief counseling if someone I love dies. I can see it now...Dialle, I’m so sad, someone I love has died...you’ll say, death stalks us all, Astra, no one is immune.

Dialle laughed and squeezed my hand. Then the world shimmered into neutral again and I emerged into every child’s nightmare.

~SC~

The world was nothing but varying shades of black. There was no light at all in the shadows. No geographic forms, no rounded outlines, no trees, grass, or flowers, no buildings, nothing at all but a gray mist, melting into darker gray, flowing into black.

As disconcerting as the lack of light, was the fact that the shadows were not dead. They lived and breathed around me, flowing alternately toward me and then shifting away as I turned to look at them. They throbbed and scurried and changed shades until my skin crawled with the feeling that it was only a matter of time until the shadows flowed over me and melted me away.

The fogginess around me seemed to beat against my brain until it sounded suspiciously like a heart beating in an open chest. With each thunderous beat my breath became a little shorter and my own heart ceased to work its solitary magic. My own rhythm slowed and merged with the rhythm of the shadows. I tried to take deep breaths to calm myself and nearly choked on the thick, slightly sulfuric air. I coughed and closed my eyes, fighting to remain calm and pull breath into my lungs. When I opened them a moment later I tried to find Dialle and the guards but couldn’t see them. Fighting panic, my lungs struggling to stay inflated, my chest screaming for air and my heart trying to leave my chest, I threw my sensing power out and scanned the immediate area with it. I could sense other life forms nearby, but I couldn’t tell if they were friend or foe. Come to think of it, they were pretty much all foes, even the ones who’d entered the shadows at my back.

I opened my mouth to call out to Dialle but my voice clenched in my throat. Dizziness swamped me and I realized I was having a full-blown panic attack. Suddenly Dialle’s words came back to me and I wasn’t sure if he was in my mental drawers or just a figment of my memory.
Do not show any weakness, Astra.

Much easier said than done. I initiated a field trip, looking for my devil.
Dialle, you out there
?

The silence in my head was deafening. Suddenly the shadows wavered and split and a familiar form appeared in front of me. The shadows wreaked havoc on depth perception so that, at any given moment it looked like the demon king was standing several yards away from me, or just inches from my face. All I knew for sure was that he nearly glowed in the deep gray of the shadows around him. As usual Abrine was dressed entirely in bright white, to match his tint-free skin.

Seeing Abrine pushed my feelings of panic to the back of my mind. At last I had a visible, physical enemy to deal with. Things were looking up.

His glowing, white face stared at me for a long moment. I would have tried to come up with some kind of smart-ass remark but I wasn’t sure my voice would work and I didn’t think, “Frunk you.” would be very effective if it came out in a mouse-like squeak.

Finally the colorless lips opened and he spoke. “I have to admit I’m a little surprised to see you here in the shadows lovely halfling. Your kind generally doesn’t fare well here.”

It took only a couple of throat clearings and a few croaked syllables to get my response out. “Now you tell me.”

I guess he laughed. I heard laughing sounds and his chest jerked, but it was hard to see the individual features within his blank, white face.

The shadows wavered and split behind him and several figures emerged to stand beside and just behind the demon king. I recognized a few of the demons from Demonica in the thick, shadowy fog. I was particularly displeased to see Mx. Wormhead among the disreputable crew. “I see you’ve brought your friends. You don’t by any chance know where
my
friends are do you?”

Abrine’s snowy shoulders rose a fraction of an inch. “It appears they’ve deserted you. I guess you’ll need to come with us.”

It was my turn to shrug. “No chance in Hades of that, Abrine.”

His instruction to his guards was more a twitch than a movement, but suddenly they were moving toward me. I didn’t have much time to decide what I would do, or whether my powers would even work in the shadows, I simply reacted and prayed.

I grabbed my power and space shifted, ending up somewhere in the deep gray shadows beyond the demons. Turning my head to the right and then left, I saw Abrine’s glowing form several feet away at my back. I moved quickly away from them as quietly as I could, trusting the thick, dense air to muffle the sound of my movements. I wasn’t sure if the demons could see better than I was able to in the gray murk but I suspected that they could. Creatures of the dark world are truly in their element in the shadows. They move freely among the shades of gray and black with little concern for the thickness of the air or the low visibility. In fact those things strengthened them, providing food for their very existence. Although I have a dark side as do all halflings, my light side was definitely not happy being in that murky, soulless land and I was finding it increasingly hard to breathe and concentrate as I plowed through the lighter shades of gray and moved into the charcoal gray around the edges.

I forced myself to plod along, although my calves had begun to ache as if I were walking through thick, wet sand and my eyes stung from the torture of trying to see through the constantly flexing, low light environment.

After a period of time that felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes, I thought I sensed movement from the darker shadows on my left and stopped. My heart had begun to beat wildly in my chest and my body was suddenly drenched in a cold sweat. After a moment of peering uselessly into the deeper shadows, I took a deep breath and forced myself to move toward the black abyss at the outer edges of my vision. If there was something out there it would be better to meet it head on than to have it sneak up on me. But as I drew nearer to the dense, black shadows, I descended into a full-blown panic attack that had me panting and nearly buckling over from the sharp pains in my bowels. I stopped, stepping away from the dense blackness in an attempt to regain calm. My pulse and breathing slowed.

In the lighter shadows, I was able to think more clearly and I realized I needed to use my powers. Closing my eyes, I threw out my sensing net and cast it in a three hundred and sixty degree arc around me. At first I didn’t sense any life. But after a moment I discovered a flicker of life at the furthest reaches of the net.

Unfortunately I couldn’t tell if the life was friendly or hostile and, since it had come from approximately where I thought I’d left Abrine and his demon guard, I had to assume it was them that I’d sensed. The good news was that they were apparently still some distance away. The bad news was that so, apparently, were Dialle and the rest of my support structure. That just sucked.

I retracted my sensing power and tried again to reach Dialle. The silence that met my foray into the mental arena was very disconcerting. There I was, in a strange, very unaccommodating land, alone, with no way to return to the physical world. I had no way of knowing at that point if I’d been ditched deliberately, or if something had happened to Dialle and his crew as we’d crossed into the shadows. I didn’t even know at that point if they
had
crossed over. All I knew was that my powers still seemed to work in the shadows and that I still needed to find the evil duo. The good news, if you’re bad at making hard decisions like I am, was that my options were extremely limited. The bad news was that my options were extremely limited.

Sighing, I initiated another foray into the mental arena.
Nille. I know you’re out there. We need to talk.

At first I didn’t think he was going to respond. But then his voice filled my head. Even in my head his voice was larger than life, like his power and the core of his evil.
Astra? Imagine my surprise. What are you doing in the Lion’s lair?

Good question. I think it had something to do with kicking your ass.

My head filled with the rich full bass of his laugh and a tingling sensation moved through my body. The air had begun to swirl visibly around me, throwing off a back draft as it morphed into a kind of tunnel in the midst of the shadows. Incredibly, there was a pinpoint of light in the distance. My feet started to move toward the light. Even while my head told me I was a frunkin’ idiot. I mean...how clichéd is that? Moving toward the light at the end of the tunnel? That’s only a good thing if you’re on the other side. And I was definitely not on the good side of the tracks.

Something was compelling me to move toward that light and I didn’t seem to have the strength to stop it. I tried to grab my power but found that it had been walled off somehow and to make matters worse, I was starting to get that panicky feeling again. My legs screamed with the effort of trying to stop their forward movement and my heart felt like it would explode.

Do not show any weakness, Astra
...

“That’s pretty frunkin’ easy for you to say, Dialle...where are you when I need you?”