Switchblade Goddess (13 page)

I dearly wished I could summon my fire to my left hand. Seeing Miko bring her switchblade into my hellement made me wonder if it was possible, but sitting there with the freeze seeping into my brain I couldn’t figure out the trick. I pressed the chilly palm of my left hand to the eyelids frozen over my cold ocularis, hoping it would warm, willing it to warm.

Finally,
finally
, the frost melted and my torpid eye muscles started working again, and I was able to blink. Once. Nothing. Twice. Nothing. Thrice. Nothing.

Not a goddamned thing. I couldn’t see
anything
through my ocularis. Had the cold broken it?

Oh God oh God, c’mon, I’m dying here
. I took a deep, lung-torturing breath and blinked again.

The garden around me changed, and I felt warmth flow back into my body. What had been trees and bushes and flower beds I now saw were people—tens of thousands of people—standing, crouching, lying on the ground. They were all immobilized in glassy chrysalises, their souls red and orange and purple lights burning within, tiny factories generating energy for the devil that’d trapped them. I could see the expressions of the dozen closest to me; they weren’t having pleasant dreams inside their prisons.

Okay, then. I quietly moved off my shield and slung it back on my arm, staring past the souls into the darkness between them, trying to see what might lie there. When Miko had tried to take my soul, she’d mistakenly absorbed the one surviving larval Goad that had still been lurking in my hellement. What did
the little devil look like now? Its mother was a vast, flaccid creature in my boyfriend’s hell, a genuine monster that had grown fat on decades of angst, forcing her prey to relive their personal horrors over and over. But her child had only been in Miko’s hell for a couple of days. It hadn’t had much time to mature to an adult form, but it had over a thousand times more souls to feed from.

So was the young Goad still the small, quick sponge-like larva that had slipped past my blade in Cooper’s hell? Or had it gotten huge and sedentary like its mother? I kept creeping along the path, watching the dark places for movement.

And then as I was scanning a small rocky hill … the whole thing shifted and undulated toward me. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. Crap. My stone eye focused more closely on the “hill,” and I saw it was pocked with hollows and burrows. In some holes, I saw fluttering tentacles I knew it used to taste and smell. In others, I saw circular grinding orifices like the toothy maws of hagfish. And in others shone glossy, deep-black eyes the size of basketballs.

A few days feeding off tens of thousands of souls’ agonies had sped its growth beyond anything I’d imagined. It wasn’t as huge as its momma, but it could still move around, and that made it more dangerous. At least it wasn’t either old enough or big enough to spawn yet. I watched its black eyes, and realized that of course they were all focused on me.

Great. I really
did
have to slay a mountain. Pity I didn’t have a dragon to climb. Or any other allies in here, for that matter.

I sidestepped to the nearest trapped soul. She was
curled like a fetus within her prison, naked. Her features were blurred, distorted further by her agonized expression. She looked to be maybe eighteen or nineteen. Could she be awakened? I rapped on her chrysalis. The glassy surface was granite-solid, unyielding. I hit it again, harder, and she stirred and moaned, but did not open her eyes.

“Hey, wake up!” I called to her, sounding stupidly desperate even to myself. She was a stranger; if I knew anything about her, knew her name at the very least,
maybe
I could pull her out of the trauma she was reliving. But otherwise? I might as well have tried to awaken a marble statue.

The mountainous Goad made another ground-shaking lurch in my direction. Was it genuinely slow, or just trying to trick me into thinking it was too heavy to fly? Its mother was only able to work the illusions of the hell to try to trap me, relying on her swarming children for protection. While most of the brood had been as bright as angry hornets, this particular offspring had already proved it was fairly clever.

I looked around at the trapped souls again, trying to think of a workable attack plan as I searched for anyone familiar. But nobody was recognizable. I didn’t know the faces of the people on Sara’s list; I’d glimpsed her husband once, but he’d been wearing a blindfold, and what I’d seen of his face was pretty ordinary. A lot of guys looked like him; there was little chance of me being able to pick him out through a chrysalis blur. There were maybe a handful of men I’d actually talked to before they fell to Miko. How could I find any of them in here among these thousands?
And what good could any of them do even if I somehow found one of them and freed him before the Goad devoured me or did any of a thousand other horrible things that dangled from the gallows of my imagination?

The Goad made a low rumbling noise. “I sssseeee you, mongrellll.”

Well, it knew about as much English as its mother. I met its dark, hundred-eyed gaze, raising my sword and shield. “Great. You see me. What now?”

“Now you run!”

The Goad flattened itself, its spongy blob of a body rippling, and then it released, springing high into the air, sailing fast toward me, fifty tons of oily, ink-black flesh ready to squash me like a blueberry under a rancid side of beef.

Christ on a cracker. Yeah, I ran. Fast as I could, and I’d barely cleared its crush zone when I heard and felt it slamming down to the ground right behind me. I felt a moment of relief, slowed a little, and chanced a glance backward.

Black tentacles were shooting out of the sides of the goad like cannon-fired harpoons from a pirate ship. I tried to run faster, but a tentacle whipped into the back of my thigh, knocking me down. I tried to get some purchase on the damp grass to crawl away but the tentacle slithered tight around my leg and began to drag me back toward the monster.

“Fuckdamnfuck!” I managed to flip myself over as it hauled me over the damp ground, reeling me in like a sport fish. One of those horrible grinding mouths spasmed just above the pore the tentacle was retreating into. Snack time, and I was the chef’s special. I
tucked my shield close to my body and held my sword ready.

There were only seconds left before the tentacle would yank me into the Goad’s maw. I would have only one chance at this. My shield was maybe a little bigger than the circumference of the mouth, maybe—

—a sudden jerk and I was there, the tentacle whipping me up at that looming garbage disposal orifice. I rammed the shield against the undulating teeth. As the mouth twitched, scraping the metal, seeming unsure of what to do with this unexpected resistance, I drove the point of my sword deep into the oily, gritty flesh. Dark ichor that stank of diesel spurted from the wound. It was like cutting into oil-field mud. I carved my blade down hard in an arc around the outer lip of the mouth, trying to sever the muscles controlling the grinding jaws.

It was working. I felt part of the mouth go slack, but tentacles grabbed both my booted feet, pulling them in opposite directions like I was a wishbone the monster wanted to snap. I jerked my blade free from the sucking flesh and slashed the tentacles constricting my feet. They were tough as tire rubber, but I hacked them away.

The Goad was shuddering, shifting, corpulent muscles bunching beneath its foul skin. It was going to try for another jump. Or maybe it was just going to flop over. Either way, it would crush me. I had to find its heart, had to kill it as quickly as possible before it could do the same to me.

I slipped my arm out of the shield still jamming its mouth, took a rib-straining breath, shut my eyes,
then plunged into the cut I’d made, slicing deeper with my sword while I tore at the greasy flesh with my left hand and the toes of my boots. The monster’s inner tissues had a loose, pulpy feel, like the inside of a huge citrus fruit, as if it had been growing so quickly that its meat hadn’t had a chance to fill in and harden. But that lax texture made my task easier. I burrowed into its body, ignoring the stinging ichor, relying on touch and my instincts to tell me how far to go.

The beast roared and writhed. The flesh around me contracted as if it were trying to push me out. But after everything the Goad had done to me, after it had turned me into a cannibal, infected me, tried to kill me, I wasn’t about to stop. Oh hell no. And I was close. I could feel the pulse and heat of its heart, see the red glow of it even through my closed eyelids.

I plunged my left hand through the last membrane into the burning magma auricle, connecting myself to the source of its diabolic power, and the current ran through me, a dark electricity that lit up my every synapse and nerve ending with sparks and shadows of the trapped multitudes’ personal torments. My hand was in flaming agony, but I knew I could bear it. I had been through worse. The Goad’s roar turned to a terrified shriek as I pulled its vile life energy into the reservoir in my hellement.

The beast shuddered in seizures, and its flesh began to fall apart from the inside out, a rotting house of loose meat. The current disconnected as the devil died, and I fell back among the oily charnel rubble, gasping for air, spitting out the Goad’s foul fluids, wiping my eyes clear on my sleeves. My left hand was
a charcoaled mess, but I was too high on adrenaline to feel much pain.

It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever done, but I was overjoyed: I’d won. And now Miko had to hold up her end of our bargain. Grinning, I began kicking through the stink to find my shield.

T
he darkness around me lifted as a bright yellow sun swung into the sky. The frozen garden thawed in an instant, and the chrysalises disappeared; in the distance, I saw people appearing on the hills and in the woods. The land around me—well, at least the parts that weren’t covered in rotting Goad—was breathtakingly lovely. Seeing all that beauty drained my adrenaline away, and along with it most of my energy. My body suddenly felt as though it weighed four hundred pounds.

I slung my greasy shield onto my back, staggered out of the devil’s carcass, and stepped onto lush, springy grass. The ground shook, and a rectangular metal box erupted from the soil just a few feet away from me. At first I thought it was some kind of phone booth, but the steely outer skin fell away and I realized it was a shower stall.

“Do what you have to do,” Miko said, giving me a start as she appeared in front of me, “but don’t track ichor all over the place. It kills the flowers.”

She was wearing clothing for a change: a flowing, sleeveless silk gown patterned after darkly veined jade. With the sunlight shining behind her, the dress
didn’t leave a whole lot of her anatomy to the imagination, but it was a passable nod to human modesty.

“There are some families with young children in here,” she said, apparently either catching my thought or reading it in my face, “who objected to my nudity. I am
always
concerned about my subjects’ comfort.”

I snorted. “Yeah, right.”

She smiled at me. “You, my little killer, aren’t one of my subjects. Nor are your friends in the living world. You don’t get to feel the warmth of my compassion until you’ve given yourself to me. Completely. All the souls in here surrendered themselves, body and soul, and now they can reap the everlasting sweet fruits of their most wise choices.”

“Everlasting, yeah … I could tell it’s been just the most awesome place
ever
around here lately,” I shot back.

“My interruption in spiritual service was entirely your fault.” She waved a finger at me in mock admonishment. “Though you do have my thanks for cleaning up your own mess like a good girl.”

Her smile twisted sardonically, and she nodded toward the shower. “Speaking of messes, you should really get yourself rinsed off. Nobody in here is going to go with you as long as you look like some bloodthirsty murderer.”

She paused. “Well, the Zodiac and the Doodler
might
want to come with you. But I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want those gentlemen back in the living world, would you? And they’re
very
energetic playmates; I’d hate to lose them.”

It took me a moment to realize she was talking
about serial killers. “Right. No thanks. I didn’t come here for them.”

I stepped to the shower, set my sword and shield down inside the stall, and shucked off my leather jacket. A sharp, intense pain told me I’d taken some of the charred skin of my left hand off with it. I dropped my jacket, swearing, and stared down at my hand. Part of my palm was missing, and I could see yellowish tendons and bones through the red, ragged patches of cooked tissue.

“It’s just flesh, Jessie.” Miko sounded amused. “I’m not blocking white magic … just heal yourself.”

Awesome. She was allowing spells I couldn’t even use because I’d tainted my spirit with necromancy. I could probably do something about a shallow cut, but not this kind of damage.

“I can’t,” I replied through clenched teeth, feeling angry and embarrassed. “And you know that.”

She laughed. “Look up. There’s burn powder in the cabinet.”

Sure enough, there was a mirrored medicine chest set in the stall above the shower head. I cautiously opened the door. A glass shaker full of some type of anonymous white powder sat on the shelf inside beside a clear squeeze bottle of pink liquid soap.

“Well, go on,” she said. “I swore I wouldn’t interfere in your little quest, and harming you further would count as interference. I promise the powder will help. But if you’d rather stay in agony while you’re here instead of accepting my hospitality, I won’t mind a bit. After all, your hand will heal—
bing!
— just like that, once you get back to the living world, won’t it?”

I could feel myself flushing red with anger and frustration.

“But, oh … I forgot,” she said. “You’re missing that hand entirely, aren’t you? I guess it won’t heal then. Alas.”

Swearing under my breath, I got the powder down and began to shake it on my wounds. To my surprise, the dead flesh began to flake away, healthy tissue growing fast to replace it. In moments my hand was restored.