Scarlet Dream (15 page)

Another pulse went through the chair and its disconnected parts strewed across the room, and with it the basement lit up once again. Its mildewed walls and the dust bunnies that scarred the concrete floor of the basement became visible in the pulsing light. Feeling paranoia creeping into her thoughts in that eerie, ever-changing light, Brigid peered around the room, confirming that just the two of them were there.

The chair's parts had been placed at deliberate intervals around the room, the headrest here, the side panel there, each one forming a part of the clear pattern that was impossible to ignore once it had been seen. The pattern was a pentagram, a five-pointed star made up of lines so as to form a pentagon in its center. It was a potent symbol in both magic and the subset of magic known as voodoo. The chair with its dozing occupant had been placed in the center of the pentagon.

Brigid eyed the staircase before she put down the bar in her hand, making sure that the door remained closed. Then, with the TP-9 semiautomatic still held loosely in her other hand, she approached the dozing woman as the lights pulsed bright once more.

“Wake up,” Brigid said, keeping her voice low and reassuring. “Wake up now. I believe you're in danger here and I want to help.”

The elderly woman did not wake up. Indeed, she showed no signs of reacting at all to Brigid's whispered plea.

The lights in the cellar dimmed again, and Brigid took another step closer in the darkness, until she was standing right next to the chair. Then she placed her left hand gently upon the woman's shoulder, shook her ever so slightly.

“Wake up,” Brigid whispered, her voice a little louder this time. “Please wake up.”

The woman didn't even flinch; she seemed dead to the world. It was almost as if she was in a coma.

Though she was no expert, Brigid knew a little about magic, enough at least to know that the pentagram symbol being created by the placement of the chair's parts held significance. She stared at the pattern as the lights flickered on and off, wondering if their very specific placement was casting the illusory spell that operated within the house.

 

A
S THE SWORD-WIELDING
guards stalked toward him, Grant noticed something peculiar about them. Their clothes seemed to be made of curling material, and their hair was the same, tight curls like cresting waves. As Grant noticed this, he saw, too, that their graceful movements seemed to follow those curving lines and he
realized at last what it was—he was still in a painting, albeit a new one from where he had begun, and the curls were an affectation of the artist who had drawn it.

“Kill him!” Papa Hurbon repeated as he snatched a mouthful of black grapes from one of his serving wenches.

The first two guards leaped at Grant then, swinging their swords at him, the twelve-inch blades slashing the air. Grant stepped hastily back, and the swords cut the empty air where he had stood a fraction of a second earlier. Then he was leaping forward again, driving his right fist into the jaw of the first guardsman with the force of a pounding jackhammer. The guard went down at the blow, toppling backward to strike the marble floor. Grant ducked his partner's sword as it rushed for his face. Then Grant moved in a short, three-step run, ramming his shoulder hard into the gut of his would-be executioner, knocking the sentry off his feet.

As the sentry landed against a white marble column, the next two guardsmen had moved to take his place, jabbing with their own short swords as Grant weaved agilely between them. The swords flashed in the air, cutting through the same curling arcs as the hair on the guardsmen's heads. Grant dropped, slapping his left palm on the floor and using it as a pivot to swing his legs around and knock both of his new attackers off their feet. The pair of them tripped and slammed against the floor like skittles, but there was no time to finish them. Already the final two guards were bearing down on Grant as he leaped back to his feet.

Grant was a big man, but still tremendously agile. He kept himself in the peak of physical fitness, and his strength was formidable. Being struck full force by Grant was little different from being swatted by a hurtling locomotive.

With grim determination, Grant slapped the next guards
man's sword out of his way, knocking the blade from the man's hand with a savage back-handed blow. Before the astonished guard could react, Grant drove a ram's-head punch into his nose, driving the hard cartilage there into the man's brain with such force that his eyes went bloodred as he collapsed to the floor.

Grant turned, dropping low as the sixth guardsman jabbed his sword at him. Behind the guardsman, three of the fallen guards were recovering, picking themselves up and readying to join the battle once more.

“This is crazy, Hurbon,” Grant shouted as the sentry in front of him swung his sword again. “I just came here to talk.”

Lounging back on his cushioned seat, Hurbon barked a laugh, reaching out for another grape from the serving girl who knelt by him. “Oh, but this is so much fun,” Hurbon insisted, “don't you find,
mon ami?
”

Hurbon grabbed the wrist of his serving wench and pulled her onto the cushion beside him. Grant cursed, turning his full attention back to the scuffle as a flashing blade cleaved the air just by his ear. He could see how the voodoo priest might think this was all just fun and games, but Grant himself was not comfortable with the sinister implications of the scenario they both found themselves in. In Grant's experience, it was rare that illusions were ever used for genuinely positive means.

The nearest guard lunged again with his sword and Grant felt the blow graze the armor plate of his heavy coat. As the guardsman pulled back the sword, Grant ducked down and powered a shoulder into him, knocking him with such an almighty blow that there came the loud sound of ribs cracking. The guard scooted backward as Grant drove on, his own feet slamming against the floor as he charged at his foe. The guard struggled to take a
breath as Grant shoved him into the nearest wall with a crash. The wall was decorated with a mosaic that showed the curling, stylized waves of the ocean, and a dozen tiny fleck tiles fell from the picture as Grant smashed his foe against it with bone-jarring force. The guard tried to recover, pulling his sword up to defend himself, but Grant's hand grabbed his wrist, breaking it in a second and turning the sword away. Then Grant drove his knee into the sentry's solar plexus, and the guard doubled over as if wrapped around an iron bar. Pulling the short sword out of the sentry's grip, Grant stepped away and, no longer able to stand, his foe sagged to the floor, drool oozing from his open mouth in an all-too-familiar curling line.

Grant turned, judging the weight of the sword in his hand. Though short, it was a heavy blade, ideal for what he had in mind. Swiftly, Grant switched the short sword so that he held it in a reverse grip, the blade pointing down ward.

Then the three remaining guards were upon him, thrusting their own blades toward him as he darted and dodged their three-sided attack.

As he spun out of the way of the nearest attacker, Grant drove his elbow back, slamming it into the gut of the guardsman who stood behind him. The man let out a blurt of expelled breath, and Grant stabbed behind him with the reversed sword, plunging it between the man's ribs. Grant turned, pulling the blade free, and saw he had been just an inch too high to hit his opponent's heart. Still, the guardsman struggled woozily on his feet as blood oozed over his bare chest.

Then Grant heard a swish through the air as another of the guards swung his blade at the ex-Mag's face. Grant met the blade with his own, pushing it aside with a clang of sparking metal. His opponent stepped back, swishing
the blade through the air left and right in a showy but useless display.

Grant went to meet with the attacker again only to find his progress blocked by the remaining swordsman, striking his blade across Grant's flank. The thick material of his coat and his shadow suit took the impact, and Grant just grunted in irritation as he continued on to meet with the other man, driving the point of his sword upward to penetrate between the man's ribs.

The sentry hollered in agony as the sword cut through his stomach, nicked the spongy tissue of his right lung. Grant reached for the crown of the man's head with his free hand, his fingers entangling in the man's thick hair. Then, with a brutal yank, Grant pulled the man's head forward and down in the direction of the floor, forcing his blade deeper into the man's torso in a gushing geyser of spilling blood.

To Grant's side, the remaining swordsman gasped as his friend was torn apart, and in the distance Grant heard Papa Hurbon's rolling laughter come to an abrupt halt. Grant turned his attention to the remaining guard, fixing him with a no-nonsense stare as he pulled the blood-smeared sword free from his colleague.

“You don't really want any of this, do you, son?” Grant challenged, blood dripping from the sharp edge of his blade.

The guardsman looked at Grant, then at the sword in his hand, then back at Grant. To Grant's surprise, the swordsman ran at him then with a defiant cry, looking more determined—and more fearful—than ever.

As the swordsman reached him, Grant dropped and, timing his blow with precision, drove a punch into the man's hip. Grant's blow hit with such power that the guardsman flipped over himself before hurtling four feet
through the air and slamming down jaw-first against the hard floor.

Ignoring the man's cries of pain that came from behind him, Grant stood, flipping the short sword over in his grip once more so that he held it upright again. Across the room, Papa Hurbon's eyes had gone wide, and he had ceased pawing at the naked slave girl with his pudgy hands. Grant pulled back his arm and threw the sword he had been holding. It flew across the room, end over end, until it embedded itself point first in the cushioned seat between Hurbon's abbreviated legs. The serving girl who had been sitting with Hurbon leaped up and burst into tears, running for the nearest pillar, where she cowered, sobbing loudly. Hurbon visibly gulped as he eyed the sharp blade that had missed him by less than an inch.

“I'm guessing you're about ready to talk now,” Grant stated as he strode across the room toward where Hurbon sat.

Slowly, Hurbon nodded. “Don't think I ever did catch your name, son…” he began.

 

A
T THE TOP
of the staircase, Kane struggled in the grip of Ellie as she used her hold on his Sin Eater to thrash him against the wall. The plasterboard wall disintegrated as Kane hit it, and he let go of his pistol as he rolled through the weakened wall and into the disheveled room beyond.

Two of the fetus-faced women creatures stood in the room, using whips against two men who had been chained to the wall. For a second, Kane lost concentration, and he saw the room as the men saw it, a stylized dungeon draped with rich velvet curtains, in which two women dressed in leathers teased and tortured them.

Kane brushed his finger to his nose as he looked at the bemused clients. “Pay no attention to the man behind
the curtain,” he said before turning back to the gap in the wall, focusing his attention on seeing the real once more.

Ellie came bustling into the room, using the door that stood to the left of the newly created hole in the rotten wall. She was caked in the white dust from the wall plaster, her hair streaked with ghostly white. Kane watched as she brushed the dust from her face and ran her hand through her clumpy hair. Then he saw the final piece of the puzzle, even as the broad woman brushed the dust away. There, along the center line of her crown, a ridge of sharp spines ran through her hair in line with her nose. She wasn't a woman at all—she was one of the Annunaki. And what's more, Kane thought he knew which one:

Lilitu.

Except, of course, that meant that there were two of them.

Two Lilitus. It almost didn't bear thinking about.

Kane girded himself as the broad woman who had called herself Ellie came rushing toward him, one of her meaty fists swinging at his head like a construction ball. Kane had never defeated Lilitu in combat. The last time they had met it had required the intervention of a third party to finish this monstrous foe.

He sidestepped, managing to just barely avoid the woman's incredible blow. Ellie's fist smashed against the wall, loosening a cloud of plaster and splintered wood in its passage.

Well, Kane thought as if in consolation, she sure has the strength of an Annunaki goddess.

Somehow that didn't make him feel better.

From somewhere behind him, Kane heard the cries of the other people in the room, shocked at this intrusion into their depredations.

With exceptional speed that defied the bulk of her frame, the woman grabbed Kane by his left bicep and yanked him close to her. Kane kicked out as he slid across the floor, and the heel of his boot connected with Ellie's lower leg, forcing her to pivot away from him, releasing her grip on his arm.

Kane lurched back in an unbalanced jig, but the fast-
moving woman was already charging at him, her head down. Kane felt the sudden fiery pain in his chest as the woman butted him with the spines atop her head, and he fell backward, crashing into one of the lash mistresses who had been teasing her client to a zenith of sexual frenzy.

Kane's hand snapped out and he grasped the fetuslike creature's whip, shoving her to one side.

As the broad figure of Ellie hurtled toward him once again, Kane snapped the whip, using it to cut across her face with the force of a blade. Ellie cried out something unintelligible as the whip struck her, staggering backward and pawing at her face with her little, pudgy hands.

Kane looked at the half-formed thing from whom he had grabbed the whip, her childlike eyes open in dismay. “Much obliged, ma'am,” he said, tossing the whip back to her. She stood stunned as the whip landed at her feet and skittered across the bare board floor.

Kane was already moving again, running for the gap in the wall that led out onto the staircase balcony. In the false dungeon, Ellie was recovering, a dark stripe across her face bearing mute witness to Kane's attack.

The Cerberus warrior ducked as the woman launched another powerhouse blow at his head, striking with such force that, if it connected, Kane felt sure he'd be nursing a broken neck. He rolled aside as the woman came rushing at him, ducking past her and out through the ragged hole in the wall.

Outside, the corridor seemed to be richly appointed once more, and Kane realized that the struggle with the crazed housemistress was affecting his concentration. If
he didn't end this fast, he'd be sucked back into the illusion of the House Lilandera and he may just never escape it again.

 

G
RANT WAITED
as Papa Hurbon sent his people out of the temple.

“Normally I'd suggest we take a walk,” Hurbon explained, “but given the circumstances…”

Grant shrugged. He had met Hurbon just once before, out in the Louisiana bayou where the man presided over the congregation of his voodoo cult. Hurbon had suffered terribly at the hands of his idol, Ezili Coeur Noir, whose demands had peaked with a sickening display of bloodletting in the form of both of her patron's legs. Grant was unsure whether Hurbon had given his limbs willingly or not, but he had met the man shortly after the second savage amputation and he had not been happy, feeling abandoned and betrayed by his dark goddess.

“What are you doing here?” Grant asked once the dancers, the musicians, the slave girls and those guards that could still walk had left.

“Making the best of a bad situation,” Hurbon said bitterly.

“Is there a way out?” Grant asked.

“What? From this?” Hurbon looked affronted. “Now, why would anyone want to get away from this?”

“You know what this is, right?” Grant said. “It's some kind of weird painting brought to life. That doesn't bother you at all?”

Hurbon's face scrunched up in bitterness as he considered Grant's point. “When Ezili Coeur Noir came back she took my other leg and she left me for dead,” he
explained. “She was a sadistic bitch at the best of times, but I loved her. You understand?”

“I'm trying to,” Grant admitted.

“But after that, your woman came—what was her name?”

“Ohio Blue,” Grant said, naming the local trader with whom Cerberus had worked a few times over recent months.

“Yeah, Blue,” Hurbon said. “Pretty blonde thing, seemed a bit soft and fluffy to me, like she thinks she's some kind of princess, but I'd do her anyway.”

“You're a good man,” Grant muttered sarcastically.

“Her people patched me together, but what was I left with? This!” Hurbon gestured to his missing legs. “So when she came back again,” Hurbon continued, his voice calm once more, “how could I resist her call?”

“Who came back?” Grant asked, confused. “Ezili Coeur Noir?”

“Ezili, yes,” Hurbon said. “But it was Maitresse Ezili.” Hurbon watched as Grant scowled in confusion, and realized that the powerfully built ex-Mag was having trouble comprehending. “You never followed the path, did you?”

“You mean, voodoo?” Grant asked. “No, that's admittedly a gap in my education.”

“The spirits take many forms,” Hurbon told him, “different aspects responding to the different needs of their devotees.”

Grant nodded, beginning to see how this might function. Over the past few years he had been forced to build up a working knowledge of the false gods called the Annunaki, and so he was aware of how so-called gods and goddesses took different guises depending on time and place and on which facade they wished to present to their worshippers.

“There is more than one aspect to Ezili,” Hurbon said, “and each has her own field of expertise. Ezili Coeur Noir is her dark and vengeful side, the part of the
loa
that demands revenge on one's enemies, that calls out for blood. That's the crazy bitch who took my legs.”

“But she didn't put you here,” Grant concluded.

“That mad whirlwind of hate? Hell, no! This whole place would be verr-rry different if she had had a hand in it,” Hurbon continued, gesturing around the temple. “You wouldn't want to be here if she'd been a part of that.”

“I don't want to be here anyway,” Grant pointed out miserably.

“My point being,” Papa Hurbon continued, “Maitresse Ezili, she knows only love. She cares for her children, worships life and its continuance.”

As Hurbon twittered on about his idols, Grant recalled something that housemistress Ellie had said when the Cerberus field team had entered the House Lilandera.

“What kind of house is this?” Kane had asked, his voice low and wary.

“A celebration of life,” the dark-skinned woman had replied, smiling her broad smile as she intertwined her fat fingers, their rings glittering in the light cast by the chandelier. “A place where everyone can find a friend, my darling. Just you see.”

“Shit!” Grant spit.

“What is it?” Hurbon asked, astounded at Grant's outburst.

“I think we've been hoodwinked by your goddess,” Grant stated. Ellie, he realized now, was Maitresse Ezili who, in turn, was another face of Lilitu, dark goddess of the Annunaki. “What would happen if someone doesn't want to worship life in the way this Maitresse Ezili prescribed?”

Hurbon shrugged. “That would never happen. I don't imagine she'd take it well.”

“No,” Grant said, speaking his thoughts out loud, “neither do I.”

 

S
TANDING IN THE BASEMENT
of Lilandera, amid the glowing parts of the astrogator's chair, Brigid Baptiste holstered her TP-9 blaster and reached for the northern-most point of the pentagram that had been laid out across the floor. The headrest to the chair sat there, its eerie glow diminishing even as Brigid laid her hands upon it.

“Kane? Grant?” Brigid said, engaging her Commtact link with them. “I'm about to try something. Stand by—things may be about to get a little weird.”

“Make that ‘weirder,'” Grant confirmed over the Comm tact. “And a heads-up before you start—Ellie isn't what she appears to be. I think she's an Annunaki.”

“I'm about three steps ahead of you on that revelation, partner,” Kane explained over the shared link. He sounded distinctly out of breath.

“Everything okay with you, Kane?” Brigid asked, her hands still resting on the headrest.

 

“J
UST FUCKING DANDY
,” Kane snarled in reply to Brigid's query.

At the top of the stairs, Kane tuck-rolled across the rich scarlet carpet and scooped up his Sin Eater handgun where it had been knocked from his grip by Ellie a minute or so earlier. The large-framed woman came crashing through the polished wooden door, bringing half the frame with her in her haste, the brass door handle zipping across the hallway as it broke apart.

Kane rolled up onto one knee and crouched at the head of the once-again decorous staircase, leveling the Sin
Eater at the huge woman who was charging toward him like an angry rhinoceros.

“Just do whatever it is you have to do, Baptiste,” Kane instructed as he unleashed a stream of hot lead at the rolling form of Ellie. “And do it quick.”

 

O
NE HAND ON EITHER
side of the headrest, Brigid pulled it up from the floor with just a momentary struggle. It had been embedded into the floor a little, and the sharp point where the headrest had been broken from the chair itself seemed to be caught in a groove in the floor. But after a moment's effort, Brigid yanked it free with such a pull that she toppled backward, landing on her butt.

Sitting on the concrete floor with the chair head in hand, Brigid looked around self-consciously. “I'm really glad no one was here to see that,” she muttered.

As if to put paid to Brigid's lie, a voice piped up just across from where she now sat in a heap. “Are you okay, my dear?” the voice said. It was the elderly woman, the one in the chair who had appeared to be comatose just moments before. The woman was awake.

 

T
HE
S
IN
E
ATER PISTOL
kicked in Kane's hand as he reeled off another swift burst of fire at the approaching figure of Ellie. The bullets struck her shoulder, neck and forehead, and she didn't even seem to slow down, just kept charging at him across the eight-foot gap that remained between them, the bullets bouncing from her skin and hurtling away.

Kane rolled at the last possible instant, over and over as he went down the staircase, protecting his head with his arms. Ellie crashed against the walnut balcony, unleashing a fierce cry of anger and frustration.

Kane bumped down the stairs. When he had begun his
roll, the stairs had been richly carpeted with cheerily perverse figures carved into the walnut banister. By the time he reached the bottom, the banister was a rotten structure with visible evidence of woodworm, and the carpet was gone, in its place just bare floorboards streaked with dirt. There was evidence of a campfire pit at the foot of the staircase, a round, charred patch marring the dirt-streaked floorboards there.

Kane righted himself, standing at the bottom of the battered staircase, pointing his Sin Eater up toward its topmost level where Ellie recovered from striking the banister. Like the bedroom and the corridor he had seen when he had meditated himself into a calming state, Kane saw now that the whole staircase was a shambles. High above Ellie was a gaping hole through which the sky peeked, and Kane saw several holes in the wall where bricks had gone missing.

Brigid's voice came to Kane over the Commtact. “Did it work?” she asked enthusiastically. “Did anything happen?”

“Oh, it happened,” Kane assured her as he watched Ellie recover. “Things are looking mighty different to how you remember them, Baptiste.”

 

B
EWILDERED
, Papa Hurbon stared at Grant as the Grecian temple seemed to fade around them. Suddenly they were in what appeared to be a pantry, cold wind blowing in through a shattered window high up in the room. Still legless, Hurbon was sitting propped in a wheelchair beside a shelf of rotted foodstuffs, a small leather bag of his belongings hanging over the side of the chair like a saddlebag.

“What's going on?” Hurbon asked.

Grant ignored him, turning toward the closed door of
the cool larder. “Brigid, Kane—I think we're in the back of the house, some kind of storeroom running off the kitchen. Could use some backup. Do you copy?”

“Little busy right now,” Brigid replied.

“Ditto that,” Kane added.

Stealthily, Grant moved on silent tread to the pantry door, pushing it open just a crack and peering outside. There was a kitchen out there, dilapidated with evidence of mold and the green shoots of weeds peeking through the tiles that lined the walls. It appeared to be empty.

Grant turned back to Papa Hurbon where the corpulent man sat, trying to take in the unexpected new sights all around him. “Did you do this?” Hurbon demanded, clearly unhappy.

“Man up, Hurbon,” Grant barked at him, reaching around and giving the man's wheelchair a shove toward the door. “It's for the best. You can't live your life in a picture.”

Looking up at him, Hurbon glared. “You have no idea of the forces you're meddling with here, boy,” he snarled.

“No, I don't,” Grant agreed, “but you seem to be something of an expert. Funny how shit works out sometimes, ain't it?”

With that, Grant shoved Papa Hurbon ahead of him into the kitchen, the tires of the wheelchair bumping over the cracked floor tiles as he hurried them across the room toward the hall.

 

B
RIGID STARED
in amazement at the elderly woman in front of her. She was still sitting in the living Annunaki chair, but she was leaning forward and Brigid could see that the chair had ceased to be attached to her with its weird, winding tendrils.