Red Moon Demon (Demon Lord) (38 page)

THIRTY-EIGHT

“
When all else fails, tell the truth.”

—
Caine Deathwalker

I swung my right boot against the wood block and shoved
. I didn’t break their grip. Instead we had a tug of war going
on with my arm as the
rope. My
protect
ive shield activated, creating a shell of
red light
that stopped the ax. Undeterred, Ax Girl hauled back and swung again
, her shadow-face oddly bland, untouched by any violent emotions
.
My barrier stood up to the blows, turning them aside.

I changed my tactics, suddenly yielding to the tugging, and skidded over the block, landing between the women who had my arm.

Ax Girl
shifted her attack, chasing me with her weapon’s edge. She swung, slicing through another woman, doing no damage to her shadow substance. The blade found my shield’s new location, slapping off it.

I stood, as the ax came around again. Reaching past my own barrier, I grabbed the shaft of the weapon. It jarred my p
alm, but was now in my control.

I stared Ax Girl in the face and sneered. “What now, bitch?”

The floor shuddered underfoot. The ceiling and walls cracked. Dust drifted down into the air. Pots and pans rattled. A bottle fell off a counter and shattered, sp
lash
ing wine like blood on the tiles. A wooden beam crashed down from the ceiling, booming as it crashed through a table, breaking plates, scattering chairs in fear.

An earthquake?

The floor buckled. Tiled blocks turned edge up, showing the stone underneath. The maw of a basement yawned to swallow me. I leaped from the chopping block to the sink counter which was still attached to an outside wall. In the process, I lost the ax I’d just fought over. Turning, squatting in the big sink, I slammed my left elbow through diamond-paned glass, letting the suit protect me as I cleared
the
window and slid out.

I fell into a rose garden, glad that the whole massive structure wasn’t going to bury me alive. The wall beside me began a slow topple, forcing me to roll. The wall smacked the grass where I’d just been. The level of violence had become dangerous. I think the palace had forgotten I wasn’t supposed to be hurt.

The rose bushes unfurled long thorny whips. The lashes slashed across my suit. I used a forearm to cover my face, and ran across emerald grass that tried to entwine around my feet. I escaped the roses, only to become close-lined by two plum trees locking branches together in my path. My feet flew up. I slapped the grass as my back came down, spreading out the impact of the fall.

A
living
carpet of grass and sod curled over me like a wave, and rolled me
into
tight layers,
without any wiggle room. Bagged up,
breath crushed from my lungs,
I
heard cold terror whispering in the shadows of my mind;
buried alive
… buried alive ..
.
buried alive…
Despair chimed in, telling me that e
ven if the attack ended here, I could well suffocate. And of course, the attack wouldn’t end here. If I were to escape the house, the grounds, there remained an entire moon roused against me
, ready to strike me down for shunning t
he
l
ove of the Red
L
ady
.

Enough is
enough.

My spine felt like it was kinking, as
I fired up every tat on my upper torso
. I
hop
ed
this would disguise the fact
that
my
dragon-lotus tat
was also awakening.
I tried to keep my regular tats to as slow a build as the dragon-lotus tat
,
which was
n’t fast-acting, being a more complex
and powerful spell.

One o
f
two things was going to happen: either the gate back to my world would open,
and I could dampen out the other tats,
or the joint effect
of every
tats going off
would
produce
Dragon
Breath
.
This last
spell
was
one
I seldom used.
Dragon
Breath
was much more
intense
than my
basic fire
spell
, and more exhausting. It
s
cost usually left me wrung out, weak, and too drained for further magic until hours had passed. This
vulnerability
was not good, not with the number of enemies I had.

So … damn hard … to breathe.

I coughed, my throat stung by smoke. Sweat dripped down my face. My lungs filled with lava
and I screamed with what little air I had.

Oh, crap! The Dragon
Breath i
s peaking, and the gate’s not open yet.

Fire licked my body, searing the sod carpet, burning it. Pressure built until every atom felt like
they were
vibrating loose, as if a vast corona of sun-fire were funneling down my throat and exploding my stomach. Like a water balloon, I felt stretched to bursting. I screamed in silence, my bones igniting like phosphorous. Even the darkness of my soul lost its shadows, for a moment.

Then everything ripped loose, and my dragon wings fanned from my back as I expanded to f
il
l the sky, riding the center of a blazing vortex up to where I could grasp the stars with agonized fingers. A
s a
phantom, the stars
slid through the pale mist of my incandescent
hands
.
And then I was falling back to the surface of the red moon, toward a blasted crater
of fused red glass. Steaming
magma pooled where a palace had once loomed proudly
from the cliffs
.

The roiling mists of my body pulled together once more; cooling, hardening, materializing as true flesh once more.

And there under me, a circular hole
widened
in the fabric of space
,
glow
ing
a bloody crimson. The gate to my world.

By the time I reached it, I was back to proper scale
, threading a spinning ring, rising from a spinning ring on the same skyscraper I’d left from. I looked up at the stars and moon. The moon was still red, but an edge of
black
showed that the red was slowly fading.
From the position of the moon,

I judged that only a half hour of local time had passed in my absence.

The roof top solidified under me
, as the ring of fire vanished away. Beyond weariness, I collapsed to my knees, my hands catching me so my face didn’t smack the concrete. I felt the onyx wings jutting from my back dissolve, spreading a fine black dust into the wind. I wanted to
collapse
and sleep for a week or two. I didn’t need a hero’s parade.

Maybe a case of scotch…
Uh, w
hy is there a small army gathered around me?

I lifted my head and recognition set in.
Black leather and attitude.
These were
the
slayers from the
Aes Sídhe
night club
.
The red moon light gave their clothes a rusty sheen as they moved.
Vivian pushed through their ranks. Someone had loaned her a jacket to cover up the damage she’d taken from Salem and his knife.
By now, her flesh would have knitted, but the blood would still be there, and her previous clothing would still be slashed to ribbons.

She came to
me at
the center of the circle, and stopped so I had a close up view of her knees.
I lifted my head, but not much higher. I spoke into her crotch. “Hey, nice to see you. Come here often?”

“Caine,
you look like shit, but we need to have words. F
irst,
where’s Salem and
our
necklace?”

I
lean
ed back, putting my arms behind me
for support.
“Sad news there. He caught a bullet to
the
brain and didn’t suffer as much as I would have liked.”

She squatted down, presenting me with a
disappointing
view of her tits.
The jacket she’d borrowed was way too large on her for proper definition. S
till
, I
made a point not to look her in the eyes. It wasn’t like I was interested in her as a person, or anything.

“And the necklace?”
she asked.

“I lost it,” I lifted my head to gesture at the red moon, “up there.” I smiled. It was
true, as far as it went
.
I knew that Vivian’s dhampyr hearing could tell from my
heartbeat that I wasn’t lying.

She spoke over her shoulder to Carson, the slayer leader who walked up behind her.
“He’s telling the truth.”

I pressed on,
“Of course if you want to trigger the
next
zombie apocalypse, I
may be able to
get it back for you. How’d you guys get so potent a demon charm anyway?”

Carson moved beside Vivian for a better view of me. He said, “It’s supposed to be the creation of Mordred Pendragon, founder of our order, despite his half-fey blood.”

“Hell, no,” I said. “That thing was forged by a coven of necromancers. It has too much dark power for anything else.”

Vivian nodded at Carson. “He’s telling the truth.”

W
hispers of discontent
went around the
group
as their historical beliefs were prove
n
to be less trust-worthy than they’d thought.

Carson cleared his throat in a threatening manner
, glaring around
. In the following silence, his precise
,
clipped words were clearly audible, “Order in the ranks.”
He looked back to me, then up at the red moon. The fire was washing away. It was back to half
-black
already. Soon, the moon would be normal.
He began to quote from the Bible,
from
Revelations, one of my favorite passages.
“
And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, and the moon became as blood.”

I said,
“Do you really want to know how close we came to the end of the world?”

He shook his head. “Probably not.
Caine, we’re going to be setting up a permanent presence in L.A. You have a problem with that?”

“The fey certainly will. You owe them for a night club, and they never forget a slight.”

“I’ve an answer for that.” He smiled coldly. “Cold iron and genocide. You
’re human, and you
’ve done the
world
a favor, taking out the succubus and Salem.” He looked at Vivian. “And
you’ve
protect
ed
one of our own.”

Vivian glared at me. “I didn’
t need your help, but … thanks.”

That had to have hurt.

Flushing, she spun around and stomped off, pushing out of the ring of slayers.

Carson’s thumb and first finger made an L, forming a make-believe gun. He pointed it at me. “We’re giving you a pass, this time, but the next time you get in o
u
r way…” He let the hammer fall, jerking his hand back as if with recoil.

I got the message.

He turned and headed after Vivian, moving toward the roof
’s
exit
. The slayers closed ranks behind him, following.

I stayed where I was, watching a new shadow approach.

It was Osamu. He didn’t look happy with me.
Join the club
.

He stopped pretty much where Vivian had, staring down at me. His forehead was creased. His hands were in his pocket
s
. He pulled one out and offered it to me.

I reached up and let him pull me to my feet. I swayed slightly.

His clean accent didn’t have any emotio
n to it. “You knocked me out.”

“Yeah.”

“Saved my life.”

“Yeah.”

“I ought to be grateful, I am, only…”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“I wanted to finish, fighting at your side.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“Every man has a right to the death of his choice.”

“Yeah.” I decided he had the right to a heartfelt apology. “Sorry.”

“Okay. Forget it. Do you need help walking? An ambulance
,
perhaps?”

I thought about it for a second. “If we go slow, I probably won’t fall on my face.”

“We’ll go slow.”

“Osamu,” I said.

“Yes, Deathwalker-sama,”

“I feel like getting drunk. Know where I can get my hands on some warm sak
e
?”

He nodded. “I know a place that never closes, but you may not like it.”

“A hole-in-the-wall?”

“A nice place, but in your current state, I doubt if you’re up to a brawl.”

I
frowned. “I don’t tear up every place I drink in. Those rumors are unfounded.”

He looked at me without conviction.

I said, “Okay, the rumors are mostly true. But this time, I only want to drink.”

“I’ll take you there.” He supported me as I staggered toward the roof exit.

“One more thing,” I said.

“Hai?”