Hellhound (A Deadtown Novel) (12 page)

Pryce had pulled Bonita through the demon plane to deposit her elsewhere. I remembered what Butterfly had said about Pryce’s visits to a place in the Ordinary. “You said the place smelled musty. Can you remember anything else about it?”

“Pitch-black, like a cave. I never saw it, but I explored every inch. Concrete floor, like I said. Cinder-block walls. When I stood up, I couldn’t reach the ceiling, even on my tiptoes. There was hardly any floor space, though. I couldn’t lie down. When I slept, it was sitting up, my legs stretched out so my toes were up against the far wall and my back wedged into a corner.”

“Did you try the door?” Daniel asked.

“I didn’t even think there
was
a door at first. I screamed and screamed until my voice was gone because I was sure I was sealed into that place. But later, I don’t know how much, the door opened. It slid sideways into the wall, and somebody stood there. You can bet I found my voice for more screaming then. I thought the Devil had come back for me. But it wasn’t him. It was . . . I don’t know what it was. Even in Deadtown, I never seen nothing like it.”

“Please try to describe it, Bonita,” Daniel said. “We can bring in a sketch artist later if that would help.”

Bonita closed her eyes. Whether she was trying to remember or to blot the memory out, I couldn’t tell. “There was some light in the hall, but it was dim and the . . . the thing stood in front of it. And it wore a robe, with the hood pulled up and forward. I tried to back away from it, but the cell was so small. It stepped inside and set down a tray of food and water on the floor—I don’t mind telling you, I was hungry by then. I’m a zombie after all.” She ventured a small smile, which turned almost immediately into a frown. “But I almost lost my appetite at what happened next. As the thing straightened, it pushed back its hood and peered at me. Its face was like a skull covered with old, dried-out skin. And it had fangs. Like a vampire’s, but bigger. That made me start screaming all over again. The thing smiled, and it looked like those fangs grew a mile. Then it turned and left. There was another one in the hall—I saw it. The door slid back into place and I was alone again.”

Daniel and I exchanged a look. Her jailers were Old Ones, members of a race of super-vampires trying to turn their undeath into true immortality. The Old Ones were ruthless; the zombie plague had been their test run, released on thousands of innocent people, of a magically enhanced virus that could “cure” death. Their leader, Colwyn, a fifteen-hundred-year-old former druid, had recently escaped from police custody. If Pryce and the Old Ones were working together, it was the worst kind of bad news.

“Time passed. I ate food when they brought it—two of ’em always came together. I slept. I tried not to think about what would happen to me. And then the Devil came back. All of a sudden, he was just there. He grabbed my arms again, and we entered that other darkness. The noisy, smelly one. But this time, there was light. It flickered, like it was from fires all around, but I never seen no flames.”

“What happened then?”

“The Devil picked me up and threw me on a table. I thought for sure it was flaming-pitchfork time. He never let go of my arms, but he moved around behind my head and held me down from there. I struggled, but it didn’t help. The Devil said, ‘Hurry.’ It took me a second to realize he wasn’t talking to me. There was another man—he looked like the Devil, except he was older and had a beard. This one was a ghost. I could see that weird light flickering right through him.” She swallowed. “And there was . . . there was . . .”

We waited. It was hard, watching Bonita struggle to get past the horror of the memory, but she needed to express it her own way. The bearded guy was obviously the shade of Myrddin, free to detach himself from Pryce in the demon plane. I had a pretty good idea who—or what—Bonita was about to describe, but I didn’t want to put words into her mouth.

“It was horrible.
Horrible.
Huge, like a giant. But so . . . disgusting. It had blue skin all covered with warts, some of them big like tumors. I had to crane my neck back to see its face—and then I wished I hadn’t. The firelight was coming from its eyes. And then it grinned at me. More fire was inside its mouth. It lit up rows of sharp, pointy teeth big as steak knives.”

Difethwr, as I’d expected.

“The giant was a demon, Bonita,” I said.

“I knew it! I knew I was in hell. The whole time, from the very first minute I saw the Devil, I prayed and prayed. It’s how I kept from going crazy in that tiny cell. I promised, if I got out, I’d never do anything bad ever again.” She crossed her heart as she said it, as she’d probably done hundreds of times in her cell. But then a look of defeat dimmed her eyes, and again she buried her face in her hands. “And then what happened? I did get out, only to do the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. I tried to kill that lady.” She dropped her hands and leaned forward. “I don’t even know
why
I did that. I don’t know her. I never saw her before tonight. But these voices filled my head. Screaming. It hurt so bad. They kept shrieking, ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill the lady!’ Like a million of them. They didn’t give me a choice.”

Bonita confirmed my suspicions that Pryce was causing zombies to be possessed by the Morfran. But now we were coming to the part I really wanted to know—
how
.

“When did you hear those voices for the first time?” I asked.

“After the bearded ghost cut me.”

“What happened?”

“Like I said, the Devil held me down on that table. He musta put all his weight on my arms.” She rubbed her upper arms like she wanted to erase the feel of it. “Then the other one cut me. Here.” She pulled down the neck of her T-shirt and pointed to her breastbone, marked by a vertical gash about six inches long. “The . . . the demon breathed on it. Fire. God, it hurt. I felt like my whole body was a red-hot coal. The ghost waved his hands over me and he said the same words, over and over again.”

“What words?” I grabbed a spare pencil and a piece of paper from Daniel’s stack. Even if Bonita didn’t remember Myrddin’s chant exactly, Mab might be able to make sense of it. And if we knew his spell, we could figure out a way to undo it.

“I don’t know,” Bonita said. “I didn’t understand the words, but I heard them so many times it’s like they’re written in my brain. They sounded like . . .” She frowned, concentrating. I gripped the pencil.

Bonita screamed. She pushed back her chair and waved her arms crazily.

Three paces from Bonita, where a second before had been nothing but empty space, stood Pryce. He lunged toward the zombie. In a flash, Daniel drew his gun and fired. Black blood spurted from Pryce’s chest, but before his knees even started to buckle, he disappeared. He was back in a wink, his wound healed—not even a spot of blood on his white shirt.

The guard by the door nailed Pryce with a rapid-fire blast of zombie droppers, and the same thing happened. Pryce disappeared before the bullets exploded. But this time, when Pryce reappeared, the Destroyer was with him.

Bonita fell to the floor and scrambled under the table. “No! No! No!” she screamed. I shouted in pain as my demon mark blazed to life. Difethwr leered at me, fire leaping behind its eyes. I couldn’t look away. The guard shot again. The Destroyer absorbed the bullets. If anything, they made its inner fire burn hotter. I felt the burning in my own arm.

The Hellion released my gaze and turned toward the guard. Flames blasted from its eyes, pinning the screaming man to the wall.

Daniel was on his feet, shouting. He fired again, but the Destroyer moved in front of Pryce, shielding him. Its eye flames burned white-hot.

The guard moaned and then went silent. The Destroyer pulled back the flames, releasing him. As the guard slumped to the floor, the Hellion turned toward Daniel.

“Look out!” I yelled.

Daniel ducked under the table. Flames scorched the wall behind where he’d stood a moment before.

“Enough, Difethwr.” Pryce’s voice cut through Bonita’s screams.

The Hellion knocked the table aside.

“I said, ‘Enough’!”

Difethwr, furious, whipped its head around. Flames streamed from its eyes. They raced toward Pryce, halting an inch away from his face. The two of them stood there, deadlocked. Then, inch by inch, the Destroyer reeled back the flames until they were a mere glow in its eye sockets. It growled and turned away.

Pryce straightened the sleeves of his suit jacket. “Hello, cousin,” he said, as though we’d bumped into each other on the street. “Ready to join our side yet?”

“Never.”

Pryce looked surprised. “Haven’t you been doing your homework? Surely the book wouldn’t hide from you the delicious irony of what’s to come.”

My demon mark smoldered as I tried to block out the vision of me attacking a defenseless woman on Boston Common.

“She knows,” the Destroyer said. “We can feel it in her.”

Bonita was curled up in a corner. Pryce bent over and closed his hands around her arms. “Thanks for keeping this one safe for me. This evening’s events have been most interesting, and I believe we have much to learn from them. See you in hell, cousin.”

The Destroyer’s rumbling laugh filled the room. Then the Hellion, Pryce, and Bonita—her eyes screwed shut, her voice wailing in despair—all disappeared.

“LET ME GUESS,” DANIEL SAID, AS HE STOOD AND BRUSHED off his clothes. “They went to the demon plane.”

“I’m afraid so.” Poor Bonita, dragged back to hell so Myrddin and Pryce could figure out why and how the Morfran left her body. I didn’t hold out much hope she’d escape a second time.

“Can we go after them?”

I shook my head. “I can perceive the demon plane, but it’s like I’m looking at it through a window. I can’t step into it bodily.” Once, I’d been pulled physically into the demon plane by a Hellion, as Pryce had done to Bonita. I almost hadn’t made it back.

“Damn it!” Daniel kicked the table. Then he bent over the fallen guard, feeling for a pulse. He wouldn’t find one.

As he straightened, his expression grim, someone began working the lock mechanism in the door. The bolts shot back, and it opened to reveal a doorway full of gun barrels.

“Put down your weapons,” Daniel said. “You’re too damn late. What the hell took you so long?”

“Sorry, sir. We had two men monitoring the video. One of ’em tried to contact me over the radio, but then it went to static. I sent Mike in, and Mike came running back yelling the guys in the video room were dead. Both of ’em. And their monitor showed this room empty and the table knocked over. We opened the door soon as we knew.”

“Didn’t you hear—?”

“Daniel,” I interrupted, “it wouldn’t have done any good. There would have been more deaths.”

Daniel glanced at where Pryce had stood and taken several bullets. Spots of black blood marked the wall. Yet Pryce had disappeared into the demon plane and returned good—or bad—as new, in less than a second. “There’s no way to kill him?”

“It would take something like a grenade, blow him to bits before he could pop back to the demon plane and repair the damage. Or else make him vulnerable by severing him from his shadow demon—he can’t enter the demon plane without that connection.” That’s how I’d once defeated Pryce, all too temporarily. Now, however, Pryce was bound to the Destroyer. He could draw on the Hellion’s demonic energy to give himself power and extend his life.

Out in the hallway, a slim man with close-cropped hair exited the stairwell door. He wore a dark suit and hurried over to us. “I got here as soon as I could,” he said to Daniel. “Here’s the phone you requisitioned.”

“Vicky, this is my new partner, Ramón Sandoval,” Daniel said, taking the phone. “Ramón, Vicky Vaughn is our demon expert.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said as we shook hands. His dark brown eyes showed friendliness, not a trace of the hostility that was the calling card of Daniel’s previous partner.

“You, too,” I said. I turned to Daniel. “Not that I was looking forward to seeing his smiling face or anything, but what happened to Detective Foster?”

Ramón laughed, and I liked him for it. Even Daniel let a smile quirk one side of his mouth upward. “He quit. Took an executive position with Humans First.” Humans First was a political action committee pushing an anti-paranormal agenda.

“As a law enforcement liaison,” Ramón added. “They’re welcome to him, as far as I’m concerned.”

“He claimed he’d been considering the move for a while, but I think that being half strangled by a PDH was too much for him.”

“Yeah. Hard to maintain his tougher-than-the-monsters image when word of that got around.” I wanted to join their laughter, but the reference to getting strangled by a zombie made me need to check on Mab. That, and a deep-down, little-girl desire to reassure myself of her love.

“I have to find my aunt,” I said, moving toward the stairwell. I hoped she’d shifted. Not only to heal, but to avoid Pryce and the Destroyer. Pryce had sent those zombies to kill Mab—both of them had gone straight for her. “Kill the lady!” Bonita had said the crows commanded. And according to Butterfly, Pryce needed to get rid of “some lady” to move forward with his plans.

I wasn’t the Lady of the Cerddorion. Mab was.

“Wait, first let me give you this.” Daniel held out the cell phone Ramón had brought. “Tonight when I got word of an attack at the airport, I couldn’t get in touch with you. I didn’t know you were in the middle of it. I need to be able to reach you at any hour. So keep this with you and don’t turn it off.”

“You know why I don’t have one of those, right?” Cell phones can’t withstand the energy blast that accompanies a shift. After I’d destroyed three in a single month, I was finished.

“Don’t worry about that. If you blow it up, or even just lose it, let me know immediately and I’ll get you another. We need to stay in close touch.”

He programmed the number into his own phone, then made sure my new phone had his numbers in it. I felt kind of dumb as he showed me the basics of making and answering calls and listening to voice mail—my six-year-old nephew could do all that plus play games—but it wasn’t my fault the technology changed so fast.

I took the phone and stuck it in my back pocket, then went to find Mab.

MAB WAITED FOR ME WHERE I’D LEFT HER, AND KANE SAT beside her. My heart leapt to see him, then sank as the thought hit me how badly I’d let both of them down. I stood in front of them, not knowing what to say. Mab had a feather stuck in her hair. Pigeon, by the look of it. Good choice for shifting in a city. As I plucked it away, I inspected her throat. The bruises were gone. Mab closed her hand around mine and squeezed.

Kane stood abruptly. “Let’s be on our way.”

“I thought you’d gone.”

“I probably should have.” His eyes locked onto mine, then looked away. “I had to make some calls. Let the rally organizers know I’m running late.”

“The rally is still on?”

“Of course. After this . . .” He still wouldn’t look at me as his arm swept across the hall. “We need it more than ever.” He offered his hand to Mab. “Are you ready?”

“Indeed.” She accepted his assistance in standing, and I noticed she was a little wobbly on her feet. Not surprising after a shift, but when I asked if she was all right, she assured me that she was.

And that was all we could manage to say to each other.

Mab took my arm and we followed Kane, who was already pushing her luggage trolley toward the doors, out into the night.

KANE’S BMW CARRIED US ALL BACK TO DEADTOWN: KANE, Mab, me, and the most awkward, uncomfortable silence I’d ever experienced. Mab sat in back, staring out the side window, her hand on the small suitcase beside her. I sat in front, inches from Kane yet feeling like we were on opposite sides of an impenetrable steel wall.

Who knew what the others were thinking? I didn’t want to guess. But for me, most of my thoughts were of the kicking-myself variety. Kicking myself that I hadn’t told Kane about the Night Hag’s offer. That I hadn’t told either of them about Dad. That I’d let Difethwr’s rage take over, to the extent that I was ready to attack my own aunt.

Shit.
The car may have held three passengers, but I was crowded out by remorse and regrets.

“I think it would be wise,” Kane said, speaking to Mab, not me, as we neared Government Center, “to stow your weapons in my office vault, as we discussed earlier. The authorities might let you bring them into Deadtown, but you’ll never get them out again. Not with the situation as it is now.”

“Is there time before your rally?” Mab asked, her gaze never straying from the window. It was just past ten o’clock.

“There is. I don’t take the stage until one.”

“Then I agree.”

Kane steered into the garage on New Sudbury Street where he paid an outrageous monthly fee for his reserved parking space. When he stopped the car, I unbuckled my seat belt and started to open the door.

“Wait here,” he said.

“I was going to help you lug that trunk up to your office.”

“No need. Keep your aunt company. I’ll be right back.” He turned around and peered at Mab. “Before I lock up the trunk, do you need anything out of it?”

“No, thank you. I already have it.”

“Have what?” I asked. “Mab, Kane’s right. Any weapons you bring into Deadtown now won’t get out again.”

“Not a weapon,” Mab said. “The gauntlet.” She still wouldn’t look at me. “Thank you, Mr. Kane. Please do secure my . . . er, cargo.”

Kane nodded and pulled back from the window. A few seconds later, the car’s trunk opened. The whole car shifted as Kane lifted the heavy box. I watched him trudge toward the elevator, Mab’s trunk bowing his broad shoulders. I thought about getting out of the car and helping, whether he wanted me to or not, but I didn’t want to be brushed off again. I slumped in my seat.

But not for long. I turned and looked back at my aunt.

“Mab . . .” I began.

“Not now, child. I know you wish to talk, and we shall. But not now. At the moment, I’m tired. The shift healed my injuries, but it required energy I scarcely had. Most of all, I need to think. So please have some patience with an old woman.”

“You’re not old.” My aunt had lived for more than three centuries, but she was the definition of vitality. I didn’t like the tone of defeat in her voice.

Mab didn’t answer, so I pressed forward with what I really wanted to say. “Mab, I’m sorry. Please believe that. Are . . . are things okay between us?” It was a question I’d never expected to have to ask my aunt, but her weariness and her refusal to look at me made me frightened.

Her face still turned toward the window, she waved a hand, then let it drop to her lap. “It’s as I said before, child. The Destroyer has a strong hold on you.” She paused. “Stronger than I’d imagined. That is why I must think now.”

I turned back to stare through the windshield at the concrete wall. We sat in silence until Kane returned.

THE CHECKPOINTS WERE BUSY HEADING INTO DEADTOWN, although I didn’t see a single car coming out. Kane swore under his breath as we joined the end of a line of cars leaving human-controlled Boston.

“Maybe people are coming in for your rally,” I said.

“Or maybe they’ve elevated the code again.”

But when we pulled up to the booth, the restriction level poster still indicated Code Yellow. I wasn’t surprised. The recent attacks had come from zombies, and yellow restrictions kept them in Deadtown. Plus the full moon was almost here, so companies would want werewolf employees to clear their desks before heading off on retreat.

Kane passed our ID cards through the window. Mab still had the forged ID I’d gotten her the last time she was here, and no eyebrows were raised. The guard handed the cards back and raised the barrier, already looking past us to the next car.

A couple of businesses had reopened in the New Combat Zone. The convenience store remained closed, but Conner’s and The Wild Side both had lights on and handwritten
OPEN
signs on their doors. As we passed Creature Comforts, a group of pedestrians pulled open the door. Inside business seemed brisk, not at all like during my last visit. Probably people having a couple of drinks before the rally. I was glad Axel was getting the business.

After we cleared the second checkpoint, it was only a few minutes’ drive through the crowded streets to get to my building. Zombies were everywhere, thronging the sidewalks and spilling into the road. Yet pockets of emptiness surrounded the food carts stationed every few yards, the vendors looking dejected. The zombies still weren’t eating.

With each block, the need grew to say something,
anything
, to Kane. Half a dozen times I turned to him, only to have his name die on my lips at the sight of his fixed stare, his rigid posture. The way he made such a point of
not
looking at me. When he pulled to a stop in front of my building, I still hadn’t managed a word.

“Kane—”

He was already out of the car, opening Mab’s door. I got out and removed her bag, setting it on the sidewalk. “Do you need help with that?” His gray eyes watched me over the roof of the car. At last he’d spoken to me, but his formal voice sounded more like a professional limo driver than my boyfriend.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

He nodded and turned away. Damn it, I couldn’t let him just leave. Not with things like this. As he opened the driver’s side door, I raced around the car and put my hand on his arm. “I know you have to get to the rally, but can you wait a couple of minutes? I need to get Mab upstairs, but I’d like for us to talk.” I’d spent more than enough time avoiding him and ducking conversations. I didn’t want him to leave with bad feelings between us. For once, I was going to face the issue head-on.

If he’d let me.

“Please?” I added.

He tilted back his head, as if the answer was written on the sky. Then he looked at me and nodded. “I’d like that, too.”

My heart surged. “Good. I’ll be right back.”

I picked up Mab’s bag and ushered my aunt inside. I introduced her to the night doorman—a new guy, not Clyde—and told him she’d be staying with us for a while. Upstairs, Mab stretched out on the couch and closed her eyes. “Take your time, child,” she said. “We’ll talk after I’ve rested. You go and make things right with your young man.”

Make things right.
Was that even possible? Maybe not. All I knew was I had to try.