Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (23 page)

“Sam.” He caught her face between his hands and pushed her back against the wall. Her breath caught sharply in surprise and she blinked at him, wide-eyed and trembling.

“What are you doing?” she whispered. “Jason, wait. I’m not…”

He cut her off with a kiss, closing his mouth atop hers. She stiffened at first in reflexive surprise, then melted against him with a low moan, her lips relaxing as she leaned toward him, deepening the kiss. Her fingers spread in his hair. The tip of his tongue slid lightly, deliberately against hers and she moaned again.

“Oh, Jason.”

Only it didn’t sound like Sam’s voice, not at all. Bewildered, he looked up, then drew back in dismayed surprise.

“Mei?” Stricken, he immediately released her, stumbling back in stunned, confused recoil. “What are you…? Where is…?” He looked around wildly, but there was no sign of Sam.

“Jason, wait,” Mei said, reaching for him.

“I’m sorry.” He backed clumsily into the far wall, shoving the heels of his hands against his temples, trying to steady the wayward motion of the world around him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mei. I didn’t mean…”

She’s a kid and I was about to rip her clothes off and fuck her right here in the hallway, thinking she was Sam!

“What’s the matter with me?” he whispered.

“Listen to me,” Mei said, and when her hands fell lightly against him, he shrugged her away, forceful and ashamed. “Jason, please. They played a trick on you.” Now her voice was choked with tears. “On both of us.”

The wine.
He tangled his fingers in his hair and swore.
Goddamn it, the wine.

No one else had been drinking it but him and now he knew why.

“I have to get out of here.” He turned and began to shamble away. He had no idea where he was or how to get back to the museum lobby. Behind him was nothing but a twisting, shadowy hallway, a landscape that continued to bob and weave like a capped bottle set adrift on a choppy sea.

He stumbled forward, trying to use the wall to keep his bearings, keep him upright.
I have to get out of here,
he told himself.
I have to get out of this place.

“Jason, please wait,” Mei begged.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He left her there and staggered down the corridor, trying to remember the path they’d taken to get to that point, struggling to retrace his steps. When he found himself in the middle of a chamber of horrors, surrounded on all sides by wax replicas of all kinds of cinematic creatures like Frankenstein, Jason Voorhees, Count Dracula and more, he floundered in a reeling semicircle, blinking in confusion.

Where am I?
He forked his fingers through his hair and tried to clear his mind.
None of this looks familiar. I must’ve made a wrong turn somewhere.

He had only two choices: go back the way he’d come or forge on ahead. Choosing the latter, he limped through a doorway at the far end of the room, entering a diorama of a medieval torture chamber. Here, a replica iron maiden loomed in one corner, along with pillories and stocks, plus a dunking stool and wooden tub, cast-iron thumbscrews and other grim-looking instruments. Along a far wall, racks of spears, manacles, swords, axes and maces dangled on display. A wax figure, tall and hulking, with a black hooded mask and bare chest stood with its arms crossed as it watched another replica, this one with his hands bound behind its back, being raised by ropes and pulleys into the air. As Jason crossed the threshold, it triggered motion-sensitive devices. Multicolored lights began to flash, creating a disorienting, dazzling strobe effect, while prerecorded shrieks and screams blared from hidden overhead speakers.

Jason shied, drawing his hands to his face, trying to see despite the staccato glare of the flashing lights. He stumbled into a length of velvet rope and fell through it, crashing to his knees, knocking over the brass rope stands along with him. Maniacal laughter screeched from the ceiling, and Jason closed his eyes, leaning heavily against a wax dummy as he staggered to his feet. It wasn’t until he was upright again, however wobbly, that he opened his eyes again and found himself face-to-face with one of the mummified creatures from the Netherworlde—a Hound.

Jason cried out, floundering backward, falling all over again, this time onto his ass. The Hound’s lips drew back along the slit of its mouth, the splits in its parchment-like skin ripping farther along the contours of its cheeks toward its ears as it bared its razor-sharp shark’s teeth and hissed audibly.

It was larger than the Hounds he remembered, much larger. Rather than waiflike, this creature was enormous. Barrel-chested and brawny, it towered over the props and wax dummies surrounding it, the shriveled sockets of its eyeless head fixed with unwavering attentiveness on him. Motion in one of the strobe flares caught his gaze and he whipped his eyes to the right in time to see another of the massive creatures, at least a dozen more, in fact, lumbering out from the shadows.

Jason limped to his feet. His hand fumbled against the base of his spine, the waistband of his jeans, for the Beretta, but his eyes widened when he realized it was missing.
It must have fallen out of my pants,
he thought.
But where? The motel room? The dock? The restaurant? It could be anywhere!

He turned, meaning to bolt back the way he’d come, and backpedaled when he saw Sitri standing in the doorway, arms outstretched as if offering an embrace, his thin mouth unfurled in a smile.

“Jason,” he exclaimed, as from overhead, the tinny screams and wails continued. There was no sign of any of the injuries he’d suffered when the streetcar had struck him. “It’s so good to see you again. You never write. You never call. That hurts me, man. It hurts me real bad.”

As he advanced, so, too, did the Hounds, forcing Jason to stumble back toward the center of the room.

“We can do this the easy way”—Sitri reached beneath the flap of his long, black overcoat—“or the hard way. It’s your choice.”

Jason heard the hiss of metal and drew back again, his eyes widening, when Sitri pulled a sword out from a sheath beneath his coat. The strobe light flashed off the long silver blade as Sitri spun the hilt in his hand, turning the weapon in a deft, nearly lazy, sweeping circle.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, his voice deceptively gentle and sincere. Holding out his hand, he stepped toward Jason and smiled. “Please don’t make me.”

“Get away from him!” The loud, frightened cry from the threshold was abruptly drowned out by the sharp, booming report of gunfire. The bullet sailed wild, harmlessly past Sitri’s shoulder, and he and Jason turned nearly in unison, both caught by surprise.

Mei stood at the threshold, Jason’s missing Beretta clasped between shaking hands. “I said get away from him,” she said, but when Sitri bared his teeth and snarled with all the vicious bloodlust of a rabid dog, the sword still clutched in his hand, she shrank back, ashen with fright. Her gaze darted around the room, and she noticed the Hounds, really
seeing
them, for the first time. “Oh, God,” she whimpered, the gun tumbling from her fingers. “What are you? What the hell are you?”

When the Eidolon sensed Mei’s terror—and more specifically, Jason’s emotional response of panic and fright at her sudden and immediate peril—it surged within him like a runaway freight train, a glacial avalanche turned loose and roaring down the side of a mountain, rushing, raging, a massive and indomitable force of nature.

In an instant, his body dissolved into shadow form. Springing from the floor, still diaphanous shape, not substance, he materialized once more and drove his knuckles into Sitri’s face, snapping his cheek to his shoulder with the force of the blow. Caught by surprise, Sitri dropped his sword and Jason reached for it, catching the hilt in hand just as Sitri recovered.

Jason dissipated again, the Eidolon recoiling, and when he coalesced into physical form, he sent Sitri’s blade swinging in a wide, sharp arc. Sitri ducked around the blow, but the edge of the sword sliced through one of the Hounds’ thick necks. Its head fell backward and, with a grinding, ripping sound, fell loose from its shoulders. It staggered back, groping blindly at the open air above the stump.

Again and again, the Eidolon shifted into its spectral form, jerking Jason from one side of the room to the next within a blink of an eye. Again and again as he rematerialized, Jason drove the blade of Sitri’s sword into the Hounds, ramming it through mummified heads and chests, skewering through abdomens and spines. He cleaved through their ranks in a violent frenzy, his mind nearly in a fugue state, his body and the Eidolon moving together, acting and reacting in complete, instinctive tandem.

When he was finished, the chamber of horrors looked like a war zone, the set pieces toppled, crushed and broken, wax dummies lying in dismembered ruins. Everywhere, the bodies of Hounds lay sprawled. One was crumpled at his feet, a Hound still moaning, its fingertips scrabbling weakly against the ground, the top half of its head sheared away by a sword strike. They didn’t bleed; their insides were as withered as the rest, and instead of blood, a fine, dark powder spilled out of their veins.

Gasping for breath, his body sweat-soaked and trembling with exertion, Jason swung the heavy sword between his hands, shifting his grip on the hilt so that the blade pointed down at the floor. Gritting his teeth, uttering a low, hoarse cry, he reared the sword back, then thrust it down again, punching clean through the Hound’s desiccated torso, splintering the floor underneath it with the point of the blade.

He leaned heavily against the hilt, using the sword to prop himself upright momentarily as he struggled to catch his breath. He felt light-headed with fatigue, disoriented and exhausted. For a long, dazed moment, he couldn’t even remember exactly where he was or what he was doing there. It was as if he’d blacked out, or browned out,
as the case may be, because he had dim recollection of hacking his way through the Hounds. It felt to him now as if he’d watched someone else swinging the sword, as if he’d been an observer of the attacks instead of an active participant in them.

The Eidolon,
he thought, pressing the heel of his hand to his brow.
It took over me.

“Very nice,” he heard Sitri say, and he looked up in surprise, having all but forgotten about him. “You see? All that time, all those years spent whipping you into gladiatorial shape have paid off. Look at you now, magnificent.”

The tall man stood across the room in the doorway. With one hand, he held Mei pinned in a choke hold, his forearm shoved beneath her chin, his hand craned so that he could press his palm against her cheek in a strangely tender gesture. In the other, he held Jason’s pistol, the business end of the nine-millimeter shoved against her temple.

“Jason.” Mei hiccupped, her eyes wide and frightened, her hands pawing feebly, futilely against the strangling press of Sitri’s arm. He was taller than her, so much so that she danced now on her tiptoes, trapped and nearly throttled by him.

“Let her go,” Jason said, grunting as he wrenched the sword loose of the floorboards and fallen Hound, hefting it again in his hands. It seemed heavier now, impossibly so, as if forged from lead. He had no recollection of its weight in his grasp at all when the Eidolon had overpowered him. It had felt weightless to him, nearly an extension of his body, something he was able to maneuver easily, gracefully even. Now it was like trying to lug a full-grown elephant riding piggyback on a sperm whale.

“Would that I could.” Sitri’s brows lifted in mock sympathy. He shifted his grip on Mei, releasing her neck, but still holding her fast, clamping his hand over her mouth. “But I told you, we could do this the hard way or the easy one. You’ve made your choice.”

Mei cried out in muffled fear as he thumbed off the safety with an audible click. She struggled in Sitri’s grasp, her eyes wide and terrified, pinned on Jason.

“No,” Jason cried. “Stop! Don’t hurt her!”

Sitri met his gaze evenly, his brow arched somewhat, almost expectantly.

“Take me,” he said, letting the sword fall with a heavy clang to the floor. “I’m what you want. Here. I won’t fight you anymore. Just let her go.”

Mei shook her head and mewled while Sitri smiled. “There’s a good boy,” he purred. “I thought we’d be able to reach an understanding.”

He glanced down at his chest just something emerged from beneath the collar of his shirt, one of the tattoos that had come to life and ripped free of his flesh. It was a Wyrm. Larger than the one that had been in Jason’s head, this was at least a foot long, the width of his index finger, like the gray, flaccid member of an aged corpse awaiting embalming. Using the whiskerlike tentacles around its head to grip and pull itself along, it wriggled from Sitri’s body over to Mei’s. She moaned, muffled, in wide-eyed terror as it slid against her, following the contours of her breast, belly, hips, then thighs, toward the floor. When it reached the ground, it moved swiftly toward Jason.

“You remember how this works, don’t you?” Sitri asked. He jammed the gun muzzle roughly into Mei’s cheek again. “You fight the Wyrm, you fight me. I’ll blow her skull open. Then I’ll fuck whatever’s left of her on the floor right in front of you.”

As the Wyrm began crawling up his pants leg, tugging against the denim, Jason’s first instinct was to recoil, to knock it away from him, to kick it to the floor and stomp it into a smear, but he forced himself to remain still. Mei began to cry as it reached Jason’s neck, her whimpering sobs stifled by Sitri’s heavy palm. “No,” she pleaded, garbled, shaking her head. “No, Jason. Please!”

Jason felt the Wyrm’s tentacles slip, then grip, against the contours of his ear lobe, anchoring itself to his head. Its bulbous tail twitched eagerly, restlessly beneath the shelf of his chin as it prodded against his ear, ducking into the narrow confines of his ear canal. He could hear it, its gruesome teeth gnashing and chittering in anticipation as it forced itself forward. Mei cried out to him again and he met her desperate, terrified gaze. He gritted his teeth against a scream as the Wyrm began to burrow, wriggling into his ear, and heard Sitri chuckle.