Switchblade Goddess (10 page)

I raised my Mossberg and trained it on the front door of the shack. My hands were quivering; I tried to steady them. If Miko was in full possession of her powers, the shotgun might as well have been a water pistol, but then again there was no way to know how much she’d been weakened by the Goad inside her. I didn’t have her pegged as a masochist, anyhow, and she might not be in a hurry to get a face full of tungsten alloy tactical pellets. Supposing she was still sane enough to see reason, of course. Shit.

“Miko, are you in there?” I shouted, far louder
than necessary, but I was trying to get myself fired up so that maybe I wouldn’t feel so damn scared. “We can help each other, Miko. You want that devil out of you, don’t you? I can help you with that.”

No reply.

I inhaled deeply through my nose, and began to step carefully onto the creaking porch, watching the dark windows. Seeing no movement, no sign of ambush, I pushed the empty screen frame aside with my boot and nudged the front door open with the barrel of my shotgun.

“Miko?” I whispered.

In the dimness, I saw the dusty frame of an old army surplus cot, the olive drab fabric rotted to tatters, and a couple of broken-down lawn chairs decorated with a scattering of old crushed beer cans. An old Marlboro ashtray and a discarded bait bucket lay among the blown-in leaves on the warped, dirty floor. Faded posters of dogs playing poker and some forgotten Playboy Playmate decorated the far wall. Nothing moved. I held my breath, listening for sounds of boards creaking under shifting feet, sounds of someone else’s breathing, but all I could hear was my own pulse pounding in my ears.

I pushed the door open a little wider and stepped inside.

A sudden blur of movement from the shadows, and something grabbed the barrel of the shotgun, yanking me into the shack, jerking my finger on the shotgun’s trigger. The boom nearly deafened me. Miko gave a grunt of pain and released the gun, but she’d already sent me tumbling sideways. I caught a glimpse of her belly torn wide open by the shotgun blast as I went
past her. I fell heavily and slid across the gritty floor. My impact knocked one of the lawn chairs over and sent beer cans clattering, but I didn’t lose my grip on my shotgun.

I barely had time to sit up and rack another cartridge into the chamber before she’d gathered her slippery guts up and expertly packed them back into her body, her flesh sealing below her fingers. I’d never seen any creature be able to heal itself so quickly, not even a werewolf in full lunacy.

“Miko, I can help—” I began, but she screamed and leaped at me, the movement inhumanly fast.

So much for negotiation
, I thought as I swung my shotgun up, managing to catch her hard under her chin with the barrel as she fell upon me. I pulled the trigger. The blast took the left half of her head off, showering me with blood and bits of bone and brains. Snapshot memories of thousands of deaths flashed through my mind in quick succession. I was momentarily dazzled, but they weren’t strong enough to pull me in.

And … she wasn’t stopping. My horror turned to the most abject, shivering terror I’ve ever felt. Making a terrible gargling noise, she swung at me with her left fist as she wrestled me for the shotgun with her right. I ducked her first punch, but her second connected on my right eye with a nasty bone crack and my vision went white with pain.

In that precious second of lost consciousness, I’d let go of my weapon and had gone sprawling on my back. Miko stood above me, holding my shotgun by the barrel, glaring down at me with her one good eye as her blasted-apart head dripped blood down her
naked body. Most of her brains had slithered out of the wet red cavity of her skull and right then I realized that flesh was nothing more than a convenient vessel for whatever she had become. Her own body was as much a meat puppet as those of any of the townspeople she’d possessed. And in her green glare, she promised me unimaginable torment.

“Pal, help!” I shrieked like a five-year-old girl.

His name had barely left my lips when there was the thud of Pal’s forelegs punching through the wall and then a tremendous rending sound as he tore the whole side of the shack away and flung it into the brush and cactus. Pal crouched low and roared at Miko, his long curved canines glinting in the sun.

Hissing, she whipped around and hurled the shotgun at him as if it were a throwing axe. The butt smacked him square between his four eyes and he collapsed like a sack of wet concrete. A clean, perfect knockout.

“Christfuckdamn!” I reached for the cuff of my opera glove, but before I could free my flames, Miko was on top of me, her knee in my gut and her blood-slick hand closing hard on my throat. I clawed at her fingers, trying to pry them off, and when I saw the glint of the switchblade flicking open in her free hand I knew she had me and she wasn’t going to kill me quickly.

My mind raced like a rabbit from one desperate idea to another. Gouge out her remaining eye? No guarantee that would actually take away her sight. Try to blast the glove off with incendiary ectoplasm? I’d burn myself just as badly as I’d burn her. And
what could burning do to her, anyhow? She was about to carve me up like a holiday turkey and she didn’t even have a working nervous system.

So I slapped my flesh hand on her gory shoulder, closed my eyes, and willed us both into my hellement.

M
iko shoved me hard, sending me tumbling over the bed and into my dresser.

“
Korosu-zo!
How dare you do this to me?” she screamed. Her head was whole again but she was opening her mouth so wide her skull was deforming. She didn’t seem quite real here in my hellement; she looked more like one of those creepy silicone sex dolls you can buy for a couple thousand bucks off the Internet. All the parts for supernatural hotness were still there, but they didn’t add up to the hormone-enslaving whole she wielded in the living world.

Not that she was the least bit interested in seducing me or anyone else at that moment.

“I can help—” I began as I inched toward my sword and shield.

“Fuck your help,” she seethed, trembling with rage, tearing at the flesh of her own forearm with her sharp nails. Red ran down to her wrist. “I swear on my mother’s black blood, I am going to skin you alive, little girl. I am going to tear your bones from your living meat. I am going to fuck you till your brain bleeds.”

And silly me, at the time I thought all that was just talk.

Miko stepped forward, then winced, shuddering, holding her head and doubling over as if she’d been hit with a sudden migraine. My devil was probably rocking her inner world. I took the opportunity to grab my shield, slinging it onto my left arm.

“I’m serious.” I gripped my sword and pointed it at her, but made no move to attack. “I can help you.”

My weapon hand was steady. Being in my own domain had calmed my fears considerably, and now I was focused on my goal: getting the stolen souls out of her safely. If I could destroy her after that, great, but killing her before I’d tried to rescue the innocents inside her was no good at all. And I wasn’t even remotely sure that she was killable anyhow; I blinked through to the ocularis view that had shown me the shadow-devil’s vulnerable heart, and I saw nothing inside Miko’s doll body, just a solid darkness.

But maybe if I fought her hard enough, she’d have second thoughts about laying waste to another isolated town. If I could prevent her from staging another mass murder, that would be almost as good as taking her out of commission entirely, wouldn’t it? A smaller victory, sure, but it would still be a victory.

“We can help each other,” I continued.

She straightened up, slowly, giving me a look that was pure death. “I don’t need help.”

“Sure you do,” I said reasonably. “It’s my devil, and I know how to kill it. I can take it right out of you. And I’m thinking that if
you
knew how to get rid of it on your own, you’d have done it by now, right?”

Boy, did that piss her off. Miko snarled and launched herself at me, and I jumped back, right into the dresser. The mirror rattled against the wall. The room
was way too small to fight her. In an instant I willed away the entire building and we were in the middle of a broad, spacious lawn where my parents’ house would have been in my old neighborhood.

I sidestepped her lunge and gave her a solid thwack with my shield, sending her tumbling across the grass. But she wasn’t down long. She flipped herself over fast as a cat and leaped at me again. I raised my shield to deal her a second blow, but her move was a feint and she punched the tendon bundle on the inside of my right wrist, knocking my sword out of my hand and leaving my whole arm tingling.

She darted after the enchanted sword, snatching it up from the lush grass with her left hand. But the sword didn’t want to be held, at least not by her. Miko’s palm and fingers sizzled on the leather grip. She didn’t let go of the burning weapon and merely smiled at me through clenched white teeth.

“I learned to master pain a long time ago,” she said. “Let’s see how you do with it once I’ve rammed this down your pretty throat.”

She raised the sword toward me, her left hand smoking horribly now, and I realized her switchblade had appeared in her right hand. Oh, crap. How did she do that? She gave the stiletto a casual twirl over the backs of her fingers and into her fist again, like a professional gambler turning a table trick with a poker chip.

I raised my shield and began to back up, trying to think of a new strategy. Once she made her next attack, I could defend against the sword, but she’d slice me to ribbons with her stiletto before I could say “sashimi.” I’d been hurt in here before, hurt badly,
but not mortally. What would happen if she cut my throat, tore out my heart? Would I die? Could she take my soul? Or would my soul be trapped in here forever, my body another puppet for her to use as she pleased? I shuddered to think of the twisted games she would play with Cooper once she had control of my flesh and could pretend to be me.

The portal door was just a few feet away. I could make a run for it—but what then? She’d manifested her switchblade; if she had more time in here by herself, would she start figuring out ways of taking over my hellement? My gut told me the answer was a resounding yes, and she’d do it a lot more quickly than the shadow-devil had. Would she figure a way out and start possessing my body as the Goad had? Jesus. The danger was too great. I couldn’t possibly run; I had to find some way to subdue her.

I knew the jarred traumas were just a few feet behind me. She might have a tremendous tolerance for physical pain, but she didn’t really seem to like it much, either. And what about emotional pain?

Miko lunged at me again, and I braced myself, trying to make my body small behind the shield. She was almost on me when she gave a gasp and fell to her knees. My Goad was giving me another bit of good luck. I jumped backward into the jars and grabbed the nearest at hand; by the feel of it, it was one of Cooper’s mother’s memories: a night of torment at Lake’s cruel hands.

The jar opened with a pop in my shield hand just as Miko recovered and rushed me. I threw the silver liquid right in her eyes. Howling, she dropped her
blades and fell onto the grass, writhing in agony, clawing at her face.

I grabbed another jar—Cooper’s mother’s death—as Miko frantically tried to scrape away the heavy fluid.

“I’ll stop if you agree to my terms,” I shouted at her, loud so my voice would carry through whatever she was hearing in the memory.

Miko snarled something unintelligible—maybe it was Japanese and maybe it was just word salad—but she was getting up again so I threw the contents of the second jar at her, getting more in her mouth this time. She collapsed, retching, twitching in the throes of the relived murder.

“You want more? Really?” I loosened the lid on a third jar: the Warlock getting his throat cut open. I knew
that
one was plenty unpleasant. “I’ve got hundreds of these. Thousands, maybe. I can do this
forever
. But say the word and I’ll stop.”

Miko slowly rose to her knees as she wiped her face off, fat silver droplets tumbling down her neck and cleavage, sticking briefly in her pubic hair before they fell into the blades of grass. Then she raised her hands, palms up in a surrendering gesture. I didn’t believe it, so I flipped the lid off and kept the jar ready.

“Okay, enough.” Her voice was hoarse, and she didn’t take her eyes off the memory in my hand. “What do you want?”

“I’ll kill the Goad inside you, put it out of your misery. But you have to do something for me in return.”

“What?”

“I want you to release the souls you took in Cuchillo.”

Her eerie, beautiful features twisted in anger and indignation. “No!”

“Then we have a problem.” I cocked my arm back, ready to let the next trauma fly.

She flinched. “Wait! Stop. I … I will let any souls leave me,
if
they want to leave. I won’t cast out those that prefer my afterlife.”

I frowned at her. “They’ll have free will to make the choice? And we’ll all be free to go back to the living world, without your interference?”

“Yes, you and they will be free.” Grimacing, she wiped the rest of the memories off her face and scrubbed her hands clean on the grass.

I paused, considering. “I don’t trust you. I need a binding promise. A blood oath.”

Using the sharp nail of her left index finger, she cut an X in the skin above her heart and held her hand over the bleeding cuts. Blood welled between her fingers. “I swear on my own soul that I am standing down to allow Jessie Shimmer into my domain. If she slays the devil plaguing my world, I will allow any souls in my possession to leave with her if they so choose. I will not interfere, and I will allow her and the souls who follow her to reenter the living world unharmed.”

She cleared her throat and looked at me, her expression a mixture of suspicion and disdain. “Does this oath meet with your approval?”

I licked my lips, trying to imagine any loopholes that Miko could use to strangle me. “Promise you won’t try to keep me from killing the devil. Promise
you won’t try to hurt me or Pal when we get back to the living world.”