Demon Demon Burning Bright, Whisperings book four (14 page)

I inched away. “That? It’s disgusting.”

“I didn’t mean the food.”

Oh boy, talk about hot and heavy, and I
don’t mean just his demon heat on my back or breath in my hair. I
slued around him and made for the door.

The damn man barred my way again. He spread
his arms as if to embrace me. I stopped him with a stiff index
finger to the chest. He sighed.

“Good-bye, Mr. Plowman,” I said firmly.

Before I could move my hand, he trapped it
again. His heat flowed over my hand, up my arm and blossomed in my
breast. I wrenched my hand loose and tried to squelch the tingling
in places which should not tingle. Not for Chris Plowman,
anyhow.

“Au revoir, ma chere. Until we meet
again.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

He opened the door for me and I swept out,
chin in the air and a flutter in my chest.

Oops!
Almost forgot. I turned back.
“Do demons. . . .” I blushed -
out of the mouth, foot.
“I
mean, do
Gelpha
have their own language?”

Lounging on the door frame, he laughed.
“It’s quite all right.” His tone deepened. “It’s our sizzling
passion and our hot,
hot
bodies.”

My mouth dried. I couldn’t pull my gaze from
his. “What’s. . . ? What are you talking about?”

“Why you call us demons. Understandable,
given our hot - ”

“Ok!” I dragged my eyes down and focused on
his chin. “
Do
you have your own language?”

“Naturally. Many.”

“But the people in Bel-Athaer who spoke to
me used English.”

“No doubt they were being polite.”

“And writing?”

“As many as there are languages, although so
similar that apart from variations in spelling and local slang,
they might as well be one. Not surprising as they derived from a
single, archaic form of the written word.”

“Okay, thanks.” I turned on my heel and
started down the stair.

“Can you not linger a little longer?”

“Nope,” I said over my shoulder.

“But . . . how
does
one operate a
dishwasher?”

I grinned and kept going.

Lance’s tone could not have been drier. “You
don’t know your ancient Chaldean, Banks.”

“It’s Greek to me.”

“Don’t be facetious, I’m not in the
mood.”

“So it’s . . . Chaldean?”

“Yeah. Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar. Way back in
five-hundred-something BC. Chaldean.”

I made a face at my phone. “Oh,
that
Chaldean.”

“I suppose you can be forgiven your
ignorance.” Lance cleared his throat. “The single sheet. You want
my opinion? The girl wanted to give her teacher heartburn. It’s
homework.”

As my brain said,
it could be a sheet
torn from a notebook, homework or a class assignment
, my mouth
said, “She sure went to a lot of trouble to mess with her
teacher.”

A
scritch scritch scritch
. I decided
Lance was scratching his scalp. “I gotta admit, she’s a smart
girl.

“The book, though, that’s something else.
It’s a modern edition. Why does someone write sci-fi in Chaldean,
and what publisher prints the dang thing?”

“Did you say sci-fi?” Surely I misheard
him.

“See what you think. I’ll fax it right
over.”

I’d rather have a digital file I could save
on my Mac. “Can you e-mail it as an attachment?”

“Here she comes. Just so you know, the
Chaldeans used a full alphabet so it’s a verbatim translation,
words even you can understand. And Banks, don’t waste my time
again.”

“Sorry, Lance. Thanks, Lance. You’re a doll,
Lance.”

If he said anything more, I didn’t hear. I
snapped my phone shut and raced up the stairs.

I read Lance’s translation of the handwritten
sheet first.
Yeah, homework or some such, but you don’t know
your history, Lance.
This was demon history.

“
Who rules House Styl.
Who did
they succeed? With which Houses are they closely allied and
why?”

“
Lord Hesper is Lord of Styl. He took the
Seat after his sister Bellane died. Styl allies with House Pentmora
and House Kragh because they share a border.”

“
What name did Barack de Gabon’s troops
bestow upon him at the Battle of Whent?”

“
Barack de Gabon’s troops called him
Barack the Berserker.”

“
For what is Wyreth Crag
infamous?”

“
Geraldi Bon Hamun held Wyreth Crag
against House Lambeth for sixteen days with ten men to protect the
women and children who escaped when Bon Hamun was overcome during
the Battle of Clideth.

I scrolled down to the “sci-fi” and scanned
the page.

“
You must understand that Bel-Athaer is
one of many dimensions that occupy the same position or plane. How
can that be, you ask? You have risen from and looked down upon the
world. You see its shape, the oceans, the continents; the great
Black Sea, the blue cliffs of Bede, the Pandar peninsula. It is
solid. You harvest its bounty. Yet those of the plane they call
Earth also look down upon their world.

“
You may try to deny this impossibility.
You may ask, how can Earth exist? It is not above us in our sky. It
is not deep in the bowels of Bel-Athaer. But it is real, this land
which should not be.

“
If there is a scientific explanation, it
is beyond us at this stage of our development.

“
This we know. Nomadic tribes walked the
Ways between, dimension to dimension, adapting their bodies to
accommodate each environment. Unlike natural evolution, they
controlled their metamorphosis to quickly become acclimated and
flourish on the bounties of the dimension in which they dwelled. In
bands small and large, they bided in the Otherworlds until they
tired of the novelty and moved on. A clan lingered in this land
they named Bel-Athaer, pleased with its beauty. They were here when
the Ways between closed and separated them from their kin.

“
They discovered that one Way remained
open to them, and hypothesized this could be because the two planes
are similar. They investigated the second plane and therein found
life suitable for their purpose. They took this life and enslaved
it. They adapted their form so they could breed with it. They named
themselves Mothers. Thus were born the Gelpha, offspring of the
Mothers and the children of Earth.

“
The Gelpha grew in number and bred one
with another. These Gelpha evolved and eventually became what we
are today.

“
We are not ageless, age and disease take
us, and our ability to influence Men is a remnant of the Mothers’
power. We are altogether remnants of what the Mothers became when
they were trapped in Bel-Athaer.”

I’m glad my feet were on the floor or what I
saw would have blown my socks off. I stopped breathing and stared
at the paper till the words blurred and ran together.

Is this what I think it is?

My heart hammered. The skin on my arms
looked like a plucked goose. I blinked hard, went back to the
beginning and started again, this time reading slowly, absorbing
every word, then read on.

“
Over the ages we multiplied and were
slaves to the Mothers. But we rose and challenged their authority.
Although they do not die a natural death, they can be killed. When
we slew two Mothers, the tribe capitulated. They are few and we are
many. In time we could have killed them all. We made a pact. They
left Bel-Athaer to live in Earth and can return only with the
permission of the High House, a request granted only after lengthy
deliberation.

“
What follows is the accumulated lore of
our people, passed generation to generation by word of mouth. These
tales of the Mothers cannot be substantiated, some may be fallacy
or exaggeration, or have changed over time with the telling, but we
believe they represent what we suffered and how we gained our
freedom.”

Finally, I put the paper down and tried to
decide how to react. Laugh? Crumple the papers and toss them in the
trash? I couldn’t. I’ve seen too much strangeness in my lifetime to
pretend I read fantasy. And I knew the Mothers were still here.

No wonder demons refused to speak their
makers’ name, a name synonymous with everything the Mothers were
not. They used one they considered more appropriate: Dark
Cousins.

This
was
it, the answer to questions
which plagued me since I first met Gia Sabato and Daven Clare,
heard the name Dark Cousins and
knew
they must be related to
Gelpha.

I leaned back in the chair as I shook my
head in awe. Man, oh, man. Fantasy movies I’ve watched paled
compared to the reality of Otherworldly creatures
really
abducting, enslaving and breeding with human beings to populate
another dimension.

Yes, I should laugh. A rational person
would. Laugh, and agree with Lance’s conclusion this was a sci-fi
novel. But I see dead people and I love a man from another
dimension, and I’ve always known he’s not human. I’ve walked the
Ways between worlds.

When I had the time, I’d take Lance a big
box of donuts. Hell, I’d take him out to supper, get him drunk,
then
ask him to translate the rest of the book. Whatever it
took. I’d even pay him.

I smoothed the paper with my palm. Chaldean.
Chris said Gelpha writing derived from an archaic form; was this
it? Did the Cousins come to my world back in BC and adopt early
Chaldean as their written word?

So much came together, I wonder my brain
didn’t implode.

“
We heal at a rate your mind cannot
encompass,”
Gia said as we sat in the High House’s infirmary.
Healing your body must be easy when you control the process.

Gorge, when we talked in his apartment:
“
Tradition has a depth of meaning only those who were slaves
could understand
.”

The reason demons, Dark Cousins and humans
were so similar, at least externally. Internally was anyone’s
guess. Why Gelpha hated, fought and banished Dark Cousins, and
still feared them.

“
We are altogether remnants of what the
Mothers were
.”

Remnants. Gelpha are fast, but not as fast
as Mothers.
Almost
as strong. Both have heightened senses. I
pictured their differences, minor differences, really. I would not
be surprised if Cousins glittered way back in the beginning.
Perhaps they had bright metallic hair and pointed teeth.

Dagka Shan and Teo-Papek had very sharp
teeth. I thought Jacob’s teeth were filed into shape, but they
weren’t. They were a vestige of a heritage he chose to keep.

I heard Gia: “
We change with the times,
Miss Banks.”
But Dagka Shan and Jacob existed in the depths of
primitive Burma. They did not change to blend with modern
society.

Memory swept me back to the infirmary again.
“We heal. It is a natural biological function. We do not die
easily.”

Holding up the paper, I found the sentence:
“Unlike natural evolution, they control their
metamorphosis.”

This is why Shan did not die when he was
buried beneath Nagka. They controlled their bodies as I control my
car. Extraordinarily accelerated healing - they
morphed
their damaged organs into healthy ones.

And Jacob wasn’t
stuck
as an
adolescent boy, he
wanted
to be one.

I think I took it all calmly. The revelation
was little more bizarre than being kidnapped and taken to another
world, killing a demon assassin in my backyard, defeating a
psychotic Cousin in the High House.

But the information was useless. It
contained no clue to what happened to Royal. It didn’t tell me why
Orcus wanted to kill Lawrence.

No, Lawrence didn’t deliberately give me
that piece of paper. Like his people, he would not want me to know
what Dark Cousins actually are. He didn’t realize he gave me the
connection which linked the symbols I saw in the Gelpha city to
this book, and woke a memory. I imagined him bent over a notebook
as he painstakingly penned the questions and his answers in Gelpha.
He hears I’m coming to the High House, he wants to get a message to
me, so scribbles his little note and rips out the page. He’d tell
his tutor he ruined the page, tore it out and threw it away.

Another flash of enlightenment hit me.
He
wants a bedtime story
. Gorge didn’t read Lawrence a fairy tale,
he gave him a history lesson.

Oh, Gorge, what have you done.
Unknowingly broken a major Gelpha taboo, that’s what.

I created a new folder: Demon 101. What I
knew about the Dark Cousins until then, all I’d obsessed over, was
locked in my brain, but I could save this on my computer. After
all, anyone would think they read fantasy if they saw it.

Not that anyone
would
see it, unless
I didn’t return from Bel-Athaer. Clarion PD would eventually go
through my possessions if I disappeared.

I saw Mike, head sunk in his hands.
“What
has she gotten herself into this time?”

I slapped the desktop. I refused to sink
into morbidity. I
would
come home. But, not surprisingly, I
had misgivings.

I was going into Bel-Athaer with the mutha
of all Mothers.

God help me.

CHAPTER NINE

Royal smiled wryly.
What was I
thinking?

Commonsense and logic became obsolete when
he fell in love with Tiff. Little else mattered. When he had to
obey the High House, knowing he risked his relationship with her,
it chafed like an inflamed wound.

He made a grave mistake. He should have told
Tiff and let her decide for herself. If she left him, so be it, but
she
should make the choice, not let Orcus decide for her,
for them.