Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (2 page)

When her parents had died, she’d been left a trust account worth in excess of thirteen and a half million dollars. Sam had never flaunted her money or lorded it over him. She was likely the least pretentious person he’d ever met, but it was no great secret that many of Sam’s friends disapproved of her relationship with him, felt he wasn’t good enough for her.
And they’re right,
he thought.
I’m not.

“I must have left them in the car,” Sam was saying. Reaching for her coat, she began to scoot toward the end of the bench again. “Hang on a second. I’ll run out and get them.”

“No, wait.” He drew his hand from his pocket, leaving the ring tucked and hidden inside. “Give me your keys. Bear was right, it’s pouring. I’ll go get them.”

“You’ll get all wet,” she started to protest.

“Don’t worry,” he replied. “Like Bear said, shit…I mean,
pupus
…floats
.
”

She pretended to frown but couldn’t hold it for more than a half second. Bursting into laughter, she slapped him. “You’re such an ass!”

He held his jacket up over his head as he took the side fire-exit door out into the adjacent alley, where Sam had parked her Jeep. Even with this rudimentary shield, though, he was soaked by the torrential downpour in less than a second. His feet slapped heavily through deep puddles as he darted across the alley. The security light was out overhead and the only illumination came from the same distant street lamps that had swallowed Bear whole in their dim glow less than ten minutes earlier.

He hadn’t even reached the Jeep when he heard the unexpected scuffle behind him, a soft splash, like footsteps on the rain-soaked concrete, and started to look over his shoulder. He saw a hint of movement, a silhouetted figure coming up on him fast. Against the backdrop of pale light coming from a street lamp just beyond the mouth of the alley, he saw the wink of something metallic in the figure’s outstretched hand.

Is that a gun…?

Then a sudden blinding flash of light and a deafening roar rocked him simultaneously, and it felt for all the world like he’d been struck headlong by a charging bull on the rampage. Careening in a clumsy pirouette, he stumbled backward, then crashed to the ground, landing on his belly, facedown and stunned.

The pain was immediate and overwhelming, like the entire left side of his body had been doused with gasoline and then set brutally alight. When he sucked in a hurting breath to cry out, to his frightened surprise, his throat immediately filled with a rush of blood. He choked, feeling it spew from his mouth in a thick, hot splash, gagging at its metallic bitterness against his tongue.

I’ve been shot,
he realized dimly.
Jesus Christ, I’ve been shot!

It felt like an eternity that he lay there, his ears ringing from the thunderous blast, unable to breathe, drowning on his own blood, watching dazedly as it pooled around the front of his face in a dark, glistening pool. He could hear a soggy, gurgling sound—his own frantic attempts to breathe—and the soft scrabble of his fingertips against the wet, cold ground as he tried to move.

Then he heard something else—footsteps again, closer this time, coming directly toward him.

No,
he thought in stark terror as he felt the hot muzzle of the gun shove against his temple, searing his skin.
No, no, oh, God, please, don’t…!

Another resounding boom, another flash of light.

Then darkness.

****

“Get up, Wraith.”

Jason had no idea how long he was out. All he knew was that he gasped in choked surprise as a large, strong hand clamped firmly in his hair, wrenching his head back and forcing his mind from the murky shadows of unconsciousness. As he was dragged to his feet, he struggled to clear his mind, terrified and bewildered.

What the fuck?

He yelped as the hand holding him fast shifted its grasp, catching him now beneath his chin.

“I said get up,” a man’s voice seethed.

Shoved backward against the nearest wall, Jason hit his head with enough force to dazzle him, leaving him momentarily blinking against bright, dancing pinpoints of light. As the lights faded from view, he saw his assailant—a man standing nearly nose to nose with him as he pinned Jason to the wall in a furious stranglehold. The man’s dark, rain-soaked hair clung to his face. He looked Indian maybe, the dot-not-feather variety, as Bear might have not so tactfully noted, or Middle Eastern, maybe. His brows were furrowed deeply, his large, dark eyes spearing into Jason’s with inexplicably murderous ferocity. His face was battered, his nose crusted with blood, his lip busted, his cheeks scraped and bruised. He looked like he’d been caught in the wrong end of a pub brawl, which might have made sense considering they were outside Sully’s, except there hadn’t been a bar fight that night.

Jason had a bewildered half second to realize that even though he’d never seen this man before in his life, he knew him somehow, knew his name, something archaic and tongue-twisting…

Nemamiah

…and then he realized that the man

Nemamiah

had done more than just shove Jason backward into the wall. He’d been holding something in his hand at the time, a sword that he’d simultaneously thrust into Jason’s chest. The point of the blade had caught Jason just below the collarbone at the vertex of his shoulder. When Nemamiah had put his full weight against Jason, pinning him, he’d likewise forced the blade deep into Jason’s torso, impaling him.

But I thought he shot me,
Jason thought, blinking at the hilt of the sword, the pommel adorned with an engraved three-pronged Celtic knot design. Though he’d barely had time to catch his breath since his rude awakening, never mind figure out what the hell was going on, he had fleeting recollection of this.
He came up behind me in the alley. He shot me. I remember.

His brows knitted deeply, his teeth gritted in a fierce and fearsome snarl, Nemamiah wrenched the sword from Jason’s chest and released him from his choke hold at the same time. Jason collapsed in a heap to the ground.

Oh, God,
he thought, panicked and terrified.
He’s going to kill me. Oh, Christ, and I was going to ask Sam to marry me tonight.

“Get up,” Nemamiah said again. His hand closed fiercely in Jason’s hair, wrenching a cry from him as he first craned his head violently back, then jerked him in stumbling tow to his feet. “I’m not finished with you yet. Not by a long shot.”

As he slammed Jason into the wall again, he felt something inside his ear, slender and damp, limp like a dead night crawler, sliding out. In reflexive surprise and revulsion, he tried to shake his head.

What is that?
he thought in confusion and alarm. Nemamiah had shifted his grip, catching him by the throat again, so when Jason tried to cry out in frightened disgust, all that came out was a choked mewl. He caught a glimpse of the thing in the streetlight as it tumbled to the ground beside him, maybe five inches long, its pale gray body no bigger in circumference than his little finger.

It looks like some kind of worm.

With a disgusted shout, Nemamiah stomped the heel of his shoe heavily down onto the creature, crushing it in a quick splatter.

Was that thing inside my ear?
Jason thought wildly.
What the hell was it? What’s going on?

Nemamiah shoved the point of his sword against Jason’s sternum, digging into his flesh, the blade poised to punch through him. “That’s one of you down,” he said. “Now to send this meat sack of yours and that misbegotten demon back where you both belong.”

Demon? Did he say something about a demon?

Jason thought he was hallucinating, that Nemamiah had rapped his head hard enough against the bricks to leave him hearing things—and seeing them, too, because the other man now appeared to be on fire, surrounded with a corona of light, pale but bright, his skin and clothes suddenly brilliantly aglow. As if statically charged, the air around him crackled and hissed. His irises had vanished and his pupils too. There was nothing left distinguishable of his corneas, nothing between his eyelids but that dazzling, blinding fire.

This can’t be real,
Jason thought.
This can’t be happening! What the fuck is going on?

“Please,” he begged, pawing helplessly at the blade. “Please don’t kill me.”

The illusion of Nemamiah being on fire, of his eyes having dissolved into white light, abruptly vanished, and he blinked at Jason, looking surprised.

“Please…” Jason croaked again. “Take my wallet, whatever you want…please.”

Nemamiah reached up, shoving Jason’s hair back out of his face, or more specifically, away from his forehead. Then, grasping Jason firmly by the jaw, he tilted his head this way and that, turning him toward the light, as if trying to see him better.

“You’re unmarked,” he said at length, his voice quiet, incredulous, as the sword point moved away from Jason’s chest.

Jason fell to the ground, clutching at his shoulder. For the first time, he realized he was inexplicably naked, as if he’d somehow come to lose his clothing in between being shot and being stabbed. His mind was swimming, the world around him spinning, and he could feel his consciousness waning, his body growing cold and weightless. As he watched, his hands began to melt, dissolving into rivulets like molasses, seeping into cracks in the pavement.

Oh, good,
he thought dimly as he blacked out, finding peculiar comfort in the notion that his body was disappearing right before his eyes.
I’m dreaming, then. That’s why none of this makes any sense. I’m only dreaming.

****

When he came to again, he found himself lying in a puddle, his body pelted with an icy downpour. His eyes fluttered open to a bleary half-mast and he groaned softly.

Wincing, he managed to lift his head from the ground. Sharp pain lanced through his left side, and he twisted with a breathless cry, clutching at his shoulder. Though he was cold, almost deathly so, beneath his hand he felt raw warmth. He glanced down and saw his shoulder ripped open with a gory, gaping wound.

“Oh, God,” he gasped, bleeding profusely, the dark stain of blood smeared down the length of his torso, standing out momentarily in stark and gruesome contrast to his ashen skin before being washed away by the rain. He shoved his hand over the wound as firmly as he could manage and staggered to his feet. Stumbling dizzily, he looked around, bewildered, trying to get his bearings.

I went to get something out of Sam’s car,
he remembered dimly.
I was going to propose to her when I went back inside. There was someone out here in the alley…a man, waiting.

He remembered the man’s face vaguely and his name—
Nemamiah—
the sound of his voice:
Now to send this meat sack of yours and that misbegotten demon back where you both belong.

He was still outside the bar, but Sam’s car was gone and so were any signs of his clothes. Everything around him was dark and empty and silent, save for the pelting cadence of rainfall against the pavement, the heavy patter as it struck the top of the nearby Dumpster.

He stole her car,
Jason thought, shambling toward the back door of the tavern.
That son of a bitch stabbed me, stole my clothes, then took Sam’s car.

He’d left the back door unlocked when he’d ducked outside and it opened easily for him now, and he stumbled across the threshold and into the dark corridor beyond. The bar had been closed when he’d left, but his staff had still been there cleaning up. There had been lights on overhead and a discernablediscernible din as they’d moved furniture, swept floors and washed dishes. But now there was silence, eerie and heavy. He pawed blindly in the blackness for the light switch, but when he flipped it up and down, nothing happened.

“Hey,” he called out hoarsely, leaning heavily against the wall. How long had he been lying in the alley? There was no way to know, no way to gauge how much blood he’d lost. He felt light-headed and weak and used the wall as much to support as guide him as he limped forward. “Hey, anyone there?”

Surely to God someone would have come looking for me,
he thought.
They would have seen me.

“Sam?” he called, his voice strained. “Eddie? Somebody, please, I…I need…”

He reached the end of the hallway, his eyes somewhat adjusted to the gloom, and his voice abruptly faded into stunned, surprised silence.

What the…?

The bar was empty. Not just of patrons or staff, not just closed for the night—it was literally empty, stripped to the bare walls of furniture and furnishings. The tables, chairs and bar stools were all gone. The booths and benches were missing and the pool tables and cue racks had all disappeared without a trace. The shelves behind the bar were empty and cobwebs draped in dimly lit diaphanous strands where rows of Maker’s Mark, Grey Goose, Captain Morgan and Bloodhorse bourbon had once stood. The overhead racks, where phalanxes of beer steins and pint glasses had once been stored, were conspicuously vacant. The enormous diamond-dust mirror was missing too. More than a hundred years old and original to the building, it was, as Jason’s father had liked to say, “worth more than the entire place and everything in it, all put together.” The wall it had once graced was now dark and bare. Dust blanketed the floor, thick enough in places so that as he limped across the room in stupefied, bewildered shock, he left a trail of footprints clumsily behind him.

“What the…?” he whispered aloud. He turned to the far end of the room where what was surely no more than an hour ago, he and Samantha had been sitting together in a corner booth.

“A regular pair of turtledoves,” Eddie the bartender had teased them good-naturedly from across the room as he’d towel-dried beer mugs. Sam had laughed as Jason had smiled at him, affectionately flipping him the bird.

What happened?
he thought, his confusion shifting rapidly to anxiety and out-and-out fear.
Where did everything—and everyone—go? What happened to me out there?