Green Flame Assassin (Demon Lord series, book 2) (37 page)

TWENTY-SIX

“The scariest place I know is inside my head.”

                               
               —
Caine Deathwalker.

Red skies with golden lighting frozen in place made me grin.  The golden moon on the horizon dripped liquid light onto a mountain bust of the Red Lady.  Her eyes were red-gold disks, spearing me with attention. 

C’mon, give it a rest
.

T
he grass felt good between my toes.  My hands felt oddly heavy.  I looked down at myself.  A golden gauntlet fit on my right hand.  A matching silver one gleamed on the other.  I had no shirt on.  I looked to be wearing a black silk sheet instead of pants.  A gold silk sash wound around my waist, dangling to my knees.  It felt normal, pleasant even.

I turned around and found a door set in an old oak.  I opened the door and went into a sprawling ballroom.  People danced, drinking, laughing into the swirling music.  Most had papier-mâché masks on that were painted, feathered, and jeweled.  The clothing styles came from all time periods, as if this place were a crossroads of sorts.

Edging the ballroom, stone pillars secured other guests in chains.  Several of them had been stripped of puffy white shirts and crimson loincloths which littered the floor.  They bled all kinds of colors so at first I thought they’d simply been painted.  The smell of iron told me different.  I looked closer and saw they were people I’d killed.  It was no wonder they needed so many pillars.

  Multicolored blood dripping down the pillars, onto the captives, made me look up.  There were more prisoners chained high, and more after that as the pillars soared up into distant heights where vultures circled.

I started walking, skirting the crowd.  Eventually, I came to tables of food.  One of which held a giant ice sculpture of a naked woman.  She had the most amazing rack.  It took me a second to recognize Izumi.  I put my hand on one of her frozen thighs.  Multiple pops erupted.  Cracks appeared.  They raced over the sculpture.  It cracked, splintered, and fell apart. 

A smaller version of Izumi was revealed.  Ice wings unfurled from her back as she stretched in new freedom.  Hopping off the table, she gave me a kiss, and flew off, making ice-sculpture flowers sprout from fresh frost where she passed. 

I stopped for a second to let a giant ball of yarn roll in front of me.  Joshua followed, chasing it. 

I raised an eyebrow.

He kept moving. “I am a cat after all.” 

I could see the far reaches of the room now.  A throne loomed there, big enough for a titan or two, but empty.  The masked dancers opened a path for Angie as she walked towards me.   She had her inner-wolf on a leash, walking in front of her.  Passing me, Angie ran her hand over the silver gantlet, immune somehow to its power.  She kissed me halfway on my lips and cheek, and strolled on to Izumi. 

The ballroom and dancers ghosted away, leaving me half circled by jungle in a cup of blue-gray mountains.  This time, the bust of the Red Lady was absent.  A strip of bone-white sand appeared underfoot.  I smelled salt in the air, and heard the crash of waves on breakers behind me.  Cold, foamy water washed across my feet.  I turned and faced a sapphire sea.  A tropical paradise.

Izumi knelt on the sand, her white bikini heroically struggling to contain her bountiful breasts.  Angie and wolf were further down the beach, tossing a Frisbee.   The wolf had good aim, and Angie was damn impressive leaping into the air, catching it with her teeth.

“Hey, knucklehead, you’re blocking my view.”

I turned a bit more to see Old Man reclining in a beach chair, a blue umbrella drink in his hand.  His aqua blue shorts had serpentine runes sprawling on them.  The symbols matched the ancient Atlantean tats
and brands on his skin.  An empty chair waited beside him.  For me, I guessed.  I walked over.  As I sat, a waiter arrived with fresh drinks on his round tray.  I took them both. 

“This is our paradise,” Old Man said.  “You have to go get your own.”  He pointed out in the surf where the breakers were surging.  One section of coral rose to awesome proportions, forming a throne plastered with purple starfish.  “Besides, you’re not off the clock yet.”

I finished both drinks, left the glasses in the sand, and got up.  Facing the coral throne, I noticed that a dotted line of dark green stepping stones now floated on the surface.  I walked toward them.  They were sea tortoises.  They opened beaked mouths and a song spilled out:

Darkness falling, I tip my hat to the sun.

A hammer’s in my chest, life bleeds on the run.

At the crossroads of doom I gotta change the tune.

A pound of flesh, more like a ton,

Ninety-nine problems, and a bitch ain't one.

Ninety-nine problems, and a bitch ain't one.

I hopped from one tortoise to another, heading out for the throne.  The closer I got, the more it seemed to stretch into the sky.

Pretty big throne for my ass to fill, but what the he
ll!

I stood on the last tortoise, salt spray in the wind dampening my chest and face.  Venus on a half shell, Gloria rose beside me, splendid in her nakedness, her eyes hungry red flames, a bottle of Captain Morgan Rum in her arms.  She licked her lips and smiled, flashing fangs.  She winked.  “Hey sailor, dream here often?”

My erection grew hard as a steel pipe, not the least put off by her nails lengthened into painted claws on the bottle.  Her half shell drifted up to my tortoise.  She reached out with one hand and pulled me over to her shell.  She pressed her boobs into me, rubbing my crotch with the cold bottle.

“Hey, now!” I objected.

Her free hand caressed my chest, and the claw tips dug in.  Four scratches appeared on my chest, dripping blood.  Gloria licked the shallow wounds.  Her blood red eyes burned into my own.  “I want you so bad,” she whispered.

She got tackled off me, as the world blurred into silver mist, then returned with a change of setting.  We were in a large gymnasium.  Steel I beams formed rafters overhead where lights were suspended.  Spongy mats lay underfoot, filling my half of the space.  Across the gym, ignoring us, the Romanian Girls Gymnastics Team were riding gymnastic horses, beating the inanimate beasts with their riding crops.  In place of their usual uniform, the ladies wore thigh-high stockings, black panties, and corsets that laced up front. 

For all the energy they were putting in, no one seemed likely to win the race.

The sounds of grunting and high-pitched squeals drew my attention to Gloria, flat on her back on the mats, Vivian on top of her.  “He’s my fuck toy,” the dhampyr said.  “You keep your mitts off him.”

Gloria pouted.  “But I saw him first.”

A voice whispered in my ear, “You cannot sit upon the throne.”  A woman’s red-nailed hand slid onto my shoulder, turning me to face her.

“Red Lady…”

But she was a shadow, fading to nothing as I watched.  Her words lingered behind her like a restless wind, “The throne is within you.  Your destiny…”

And then the dream became a nightmare as a sea of zombie children thronged me.  Their faces smeared with peanut butter and jelly, grubby fingers clawed at my flesh.  They were dhampyr and human and fey and shape-shifter with wolf and cat ears and tails in evidence.  They cried piteously, “Daddy, Daddy, give me a ride.”

“Give me a ride.”

“Give me a ride.”

“No, me first!”

“Me first!”

And then they were dressed in little Slayer uniforms, armed with knives and aluminum baseball bats.  The knives stabbed.  The bats hit.  Pain drove me to my knees.  Staring up, strangely unable to defend myself, I saw a crescent red moon below the steel I beams.  A rope swing dangled from it, gently swaying.  A man sat there with bloody moonbeams in a jar.  The jar became the dream stone in Mason’s hands.

“Crap, the dream stone,” I said.  “This isn’t my dream.”

“No,” Mason called down.  “It’s mine.  That’s why you’re going to die.”

He stepped off his swing, onto a baby white cloud that drifted down, bringing him in for a better look at my destruction.

My ribs caved in, splinters of bone piercing a lung.  A bat shattered against my head.  Warm blood trickled down my face, dripping off my jaw.  My arm felt broken.  There were stigmata in my shoulders that had opened, gushing blood down my torso.  Knives bit, slashing, tearing.  And somehow, through it all, I couldn’t manage to care, as if my emotions were frozen in Izumi’s ice.

Mason?  But it was a woman I saw running from the White Lotus.  Or was that a dream too?

The dream stone glowed brighter and brighter.  Other Masons rose from the mats, features blurry and smudged, toner on their cheeks like they were bad copies.  They turned from me and walked away.  Each Mason copy had a knife in the back from the little zombie children.  The kids followed the Masons.  A moment later, I lay alone on blood splattered mats.  Vivian and Gloria had vanished. 

But I heard Vivian’s voice, “You need to wake up.  Wake up, Caine.”