Demon Demon Burning Bright, Whisperings book four (18 page)

They had cows in Bel-Athaer?

The land both sides of the path rose in
increments until we drove between banks and I could not see much
beyond them, the sky and a treetop here and there. And bugs do
populate Bel-Athaer, nice big juicy ones. I wouldn’t be able to
contain my laughter if bug goop smeared Chris’ face when we
stopped.

Ahead, Gia had stopped on the brow of a hill
and sat on her bike looking onward. The Harley spluttered to a stop
beside her.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

We were above a greenish-brown, bowl-shaped
vale and a small community of perhaps three hundred densely
clustered buildings, with more fanning from the hub in a sparser
pattern. The road we followed led down, and another led away on the
other side of town. I spotted what could be a town square, except
on the outskirts, not in the center as they are normally.

“Are we going down there?”

Gia replied. “It’s market day. We can buy
food and ask about somewhere to spend the night.” She flipped up
her visor. “You are hungry, aren’t you?”

Now she mentioned it, I was starving.

We slowly puttered down the hill.

Buildings on three sides hemmed a
fifty-foot-square area of brown cobblestones, the fourth side open
to the small grass field into which we drove and parked behind four
poplar. A row of automobiles sat in the field, with more parked in
the square. Enticing aromas hung in the still air. Charred meat and
grilled onions mingled with the scent of flowers. Gelpha milled
about, dress as always eclectic, yet they moved sluggishly and
their faces were inanimate, even those who haggled at the
cloth-draped stalls with their red, white and yellow striped
awnings.

Houses and shops fronted the square,
whitewashed brick, black terra cotta shingles with deep eaves, wood
doors and wood-framed windows painted red or brown, dormer windows
upstairs; some had bay windows on ground floors. Flowers overflowed
pots which hung from the eaves or inside porches and mounded in
planters beneath ground floor windows.

Was what I saw in Bel-Athaer identical to
that on Earth, or a kind of facsimile.
Did
I smell beef and
onions? Were the buildings made of brick coated in whitewash?

When I focused on the nearest small house I
saw paint peeled from the window frames and doors, the whitewash
was wearing thin, showing shadowy brick beneath. Flowers were
wilted and flower borders overgrown. Cobwebs hung in porch corners
and the undersides of window sills.

I felt skittish as I stood at the outskirts
of the village and market. No accompanying burr of voices, no
children’s laughter. The village gave me a bad feeling.

Gia turned to Chris. “Go in there and
inquire about accommodation for the night. And get us something to
eat.”

So that’s why she agreed to let him come
with us. A human and Dark Cousin, we couldn’t be seen, we had to
keep the dratted helmets on, but Chris could openly move among the
Gelpha.

I wanted to explore the village and sit down
in a restaurant or café, but we would appear odd doing that with
our helmets in place. Anyway, we couldn’t eat with our visors down
unless we sucked liquid through a straw.

Chris gave Gia something between a grimace
and a small smile and walked into the square, wending between
stalls with long, smooth strides.

Right through a woman who stood on the edge
of the field.

She wore a pink ankle-length dress decorated
with cream lace and embroidery on the hem. A long black knitted
shawl draped her shoulders and folded over her breasts, baring long
white sleeves but hiding most of her red blouse. Her beautiful
primrose-yellow hair hung in two braids. She stood very still,
gazing at me, or past me to the countryside. Her face seemed
familiar, but I’d never seen her before.

Her frozen face. And the red on her blouse
was blood.

No, I had not seen this woman before, but
I’ve seen that expression too many times. I was thankful twilight
and the visor hid my face as I let my gaze wander over the square
and saw other Gelpha with red blouses, or red shirts. I saw men and
women with rope burns scoring their necks. I saw those with cut
throats and black powder burns where bullets had punched through
skin.

My hands went to the straps of my backpack
and clenched, hard. Hard as the fist which squeezed my heart. I
walked from beneath the poplar. Gia’s fingers pinched my wrist and
pulled me back.

“What do you think you’re doing?” She
noticed my expression. “You look like a ghost.”

“No,” I murmured. “But they are. More than
half of them are dead. What happened here?”

She didn’t answer, so I presumed she didn’t
know.

“We need to get in closer. Come on.”

“I cannot. Gelpha sense one another – you
know that - but I am a blank slate to them. If they don’t see me,
they don’t know I am here. But if they focus on me and feel
nothing, that in itself will tell them what I am.”

Mel and Jack went berserk when Gia came to
my house to talk about Rio’s disappearance. Thinking she was a dead
person encroaching on their territory, they tried to attack her.
Later, thoroughly embarrassed, they said she had no
essence
,
she seemed lifeless. I forgot about that till now.

When Dagka Shan went to the High House, the
Gelpha knew someone broke through their security and guess he was a
Dark Cousin because they
sensed
neither Gelpha nor
human.

“But you go ahead if you must,” she
continued. “Just be careful, don’t draw attention to yourself.”

I fumbled at my helmet’s straps.

Gia pinched me again. “No. Keep it on.”

I swallowed a yelp and glared at her hand.
“Why? Nobody hassled me when I went to the High House.”

“And I’m sure the High House will be
interested to know you’re wandering around Bel-Athaer.”

She was right.

I took in the perimeter, trying to find a
dead person I could speak to covertly.

I walked the short distance to the edge of
the square and stopped beside a brown sedan. Chris stood at a
stall, talking to the stallholder as he pointed at this and
that.

A woman with brown threading her short
scarlet hair approached me. Through the visor, I met her big brown
eyes.

Figures in tight-fitting, all-enveloping
black clothing walked through a cluster of maybe twenty men and
women who stood in the middle of the square. Off to one side, a
man-shape covered in blue-white flames stood in the open back of a
car very like a Jeep. One of the figures pulled a woman from the
crowd by her upper arm and pushed her toward the Jeep with a hand
on her back. She stumbled several times and kept glancing around at
the fifty or so spectators who lined the square.

They stopped at the Jeep. She looked up at
the towering flame-washed specter, speaking and violently shaking
her head. A moment after she stopped speaking, the black figure
behind her tangled its fingers in her long black hair and forced
her head back. Its other hand came up, silver flashed, and she fell
away, a crimson torrent pulsing from the seam in her smooth throat
in time to her heart’s last beats.

Minutes passed. The ghoul in black stood
motionless, as did the blazing apparition. I stopped breathing.
Then a flurry of movement as the black-clad figure bent, seized the
dead woman by her ankles and quickly pulled her away to the edge of
the square.

I watched the same scene repeated. Garrotes
slipped over heads and around throats. Blunt-barreled pistols were
put to foreheads and fired. The villagers waited, motionless, for
their turn to speak. Some sobbed, or stood with eyes closed. None
ran. Spectators on the perimeter watched with dull eyes. The bodies
piled up.

People toppled, slumped to the ground,
graceless, boneless, lives snuffed out in an instant. And not one
watcher protested or tried to stop the carnage.

The vision left me as abruptly as it came. I
gasped, drew in a huge gulping breath as I slumped on the car’s
trunk.

It had to be Orcus, the Burning Man.

Dear god. This creature ordered the death of
so many I couldn’t count them. Why? Was he even a man?

I swallowed what surged up my throat.
Swallowed again. I couldn’t keep it down. Another second and I’d
throw up. I pressed the back of my hand to my lips and breathed
deeply through my nose.

I rushed back to Gia. When she eyed me
inquiringly, I only managed to say, “Yep, dead people, a lot of
them.”

She nodded her chin in Chris’ direction.
“Hush. Tell me later.”

Holding two small brown paper sacks, Chris
was in animated conversation with another stallholder. At least he
was animated; the stallholder merely watched him and seemed to
reply in monosyllables.

So this was what threatened Lawrence, an
apparition, a man of flame who ordered an army of faceless killers.
I had to find Royal before Orcus made his move on Lawrence.

Did the monster watch my house those months
ago?

“I can’t stay here,” I whispered.

Gia nodded as Chris joined us. “Change of
plan. We go on.”

“Just as well.” He frowned. “This is not a
happy place and as far as I can discover, the accommodation is
primitive.”

“Damn right it’s not a happy place,” I all
but spat.

“The merchant was surly and remained so when
I exerted my considerable charm.” Chris’ mouth pulled into a taut
grimace. “I have never worked so hard for a smile.”

You won’t get one here.
I could not
wait to get away.

We stopped a few miles on and sat on the
grass next the road beneath a tree’s spreading branches. I removed
my helmet with relief, enjoying the air. Warm, humid, it was air
and I had not felt it on my face for hours.

“What was that place?”

Chris shrugged.

“Dun Falmor,” Gia replied.

Goggles around his neck, Chris sat with me
and Gia. He took five small, white paper packages tied with brown
twine from a sack. Tutting to himself, he picked at the twine until
he had it untied, unwrapped the parcels and flattened the paper
away from what they contained. I waited for my portion with
interest. Although no longer hungry after what I saw in the
village, I’d not tasted Gelpha food before.

“This,” he said, pointing a long, strong
forefinger with manicured nails, “is the local specialty.”

I squinted. Round pastries? He also bought
tiny pink-frosted cakes and the other sack held three black glass
bottles.

I took two bites of a warm, flakey pastry
filled with a spicy mixture of dark, shredded meat and vegetables
in a red sauce. It was good, and so were the cakes which tasted
similar to Red Velvet cakes. The drink. . . .

I hacked, coughed, spluttered. “What the Sam
Hill?”

“Sip it,” Chris instructed.

“Not on your life!” I corked the bottle and
dropped it on the grass. The lukewarm amber contents
looked
inviting, but tasted like something I keep under my kitchen sink
with the other cleaning supplies.

Gia rose up, went to her bike and came back
with a flask, which she presented to me. “Here.”

I gratefully slugged back a few gulps of
water, tepid, but at least it didn’t take a layer off the inside of
my mouth. “Thanks. What
is
that stuff?”

Chris lounged back on one elbow. “Griffin’s
Ale, a fine vintage.”

“Huh!” I scoffed. “If griffins piss, I bet
one shot it in that bottle.”

“You are so refreshing, my dear.”

“Which can’t be said about that
garbage.”

He smiled as he let his head hang back, hair
a wide, glistening ribbon down his back, and looked up at the tree
branches. “G, R, Y, P, H, O, N,” he spelled out. “Gryphon, not
griffin. The High Lord’s father. I believe it was first brewed to
celebrate his birth.”

The High Lord’s father? Lawrence’s dad, the
missing heir. One of the missing heirs, because both Lawrence’s
father and grandfather disappeared. From what Royal told me,
Gryphon was a child when his parents took him into hiding in my
world. Why they never reemerged to claim the High House, and why
Gryphon fathered Lawrence and vanished again was a mystery the
Gelpha would dearly love to solve.

I lay back, hands beneath my head and
watched leaves spiral down from the tree, drifting back and forth
before settling. One landed on my waist. I pulled one hand from
under my neck to pick up the leaf and gently rubbed my fingers over
it, then saw Chris watched the motion of my fingers with the tip of
his tongue protruding from his lips. I dropped the leaf.

He stared intently from eyes gone
smoke-gray.

Cut it out!
I told my disloyal
libido. I rolled on my stomach, angry with myself. I should be
thinking of Royal, not going all gooey at a look from another
demon’s eyes.

I rolled to my knees and up on my feet, went
to the tree and spread my hand on the corrugated bark. It felt no
different from bark back home. Apart from the manmade features and
inhabitants, and the damn elusive sun, this world was little
different from mine. How could that be?

Speaking to Gia in a low voice, Chris
indolently lounged on the grass. Their voices murmured. He laughed
lightly. He seemed relaxed around Gia, but that was his persona;
the charming gentleman, always at ease.

When Royal and I, Gia and Daven went to the
High House, the Gelpha bristled with indignation and what I
perceived as hatred. I thought we had a fight on our hands. But
Gia’s black gaze settled on them and they backed down, intimidated.
Now I knew why.

Mothers
.

Gia jerked me from my reverie. “Come, we
should find lodging before night falls.”

Lights already twinkled from Dun Falmor
behind us. Gia and I donned our helmets, Chris his goggles, we
mounted the bikes and rode on. I twisted my head to watch the town
disappear, wishing I had been able to speak to one of the
townspeople and ask why Orcus killed them.