Switchblade Goddess (23 page)

“He’s Randall Shimmer, son of Magus Ian Shimmer.”

I listened as Mother Karen tried several opening incantations on variations of his name, apparently to no avail.

“I’m sorry, it’s just not enough,” she said. “I’m not getting through to anyone.”

My heart sank, and my fever became a leaden heat evaporating what was left of my energy. Well, that was it—I was officially out of ideas.

“Thanks for trying,” I said.

   That night, I sat down on the cot, exhausted. Maybe I could actually sleep tonight. I pulled my boots off and curled up on my side, shivering. Closed my eyes as my guts cramped again, wondered if I had the energy
to go down the hall for more Pepto. I felt suddenly dizzy … and became acutely aware that the cot mattress had turned cold and hard. And small, sharp things were poking me in my shoulder and hips.

I opened my eyes. I was lying on the glass-strewn concrete dungeon floor of my hijacked hellement.

“Mother
fucker
,” I whispered.

“Guess what time it is?” Miko asked behind me. “It’s playtime!”

I lurched up, ready to run for the door even though I knew it had to be locked, but there came a slithering noise and something hard and prickly wrapped around each of my wrists. They were rough hemp ropes, each about as wide as my index fingers. A moment later, the ropes whipped toward the ceiling and I was jerked up like a marionette, my hands bound painfully together directly above me. I was barely able to take the suspension pressure off my wrists by standing on tiptoe.

I was facing Cooper, who once again was shackled to the Saint Andrew’s Cross. There was maybe four feet between us; he wouldn’t meet my gaze. His face was a mask of misery. The cut on his chest was scabbed over, and his lips were chapped around the silken gag. His eyes were deeply shadowed as if he hadn’t slept. He was wearing the same clothes, and I wondered if Miko had kept him trapped there all day and night.

“What did you do to him?” My voice shook.

From somewhere behind me, Miko laughed. “Nothing I haven’t done before.”

She walked out from the shadows to stand between
us, staring down her nose at me, tugging at what I first thought were kid gloves. Why would she wear old-lady gloves and nothing else? And then I saw the fine stitches at the tips, closing the holes where nails had been, and I realized she’d made the gloves from my hand skins.

Feeling sick, I looked away from her, trying again to meet Cooper’s gaze, but he was staring at the floor. My eye fell to his jeans, and I realized the top button was undone, his fly only half zipped. Dried fluids crusted the brass teeth. His underwear was gone.

“What did you do?”
I strained against the ropes, wishing my anger would dispel my fear.

“Nothing I didn’t have permission to do.”

“You didn’t fucking ask
me
!” I snarled, jerking on the ropes with all my weight even though I knew I couldn’t break them. “You didn’t have
my
permission to touch him!”

“Oh, gosh and golly gee, I have scared the horses and upset the apple cart,” she said, putting her gloved hands to her cheeks in mock embarrassment. “And your permission would matter if he were your dog. Your table. Your favorite dildo. But he’s not your property. He has free will, and I have
his
permission. You have nothing to counter that. Nothing even as mundane as a shiny gold ring to claim him as your own.”

I felt myself start blushing. “Fuck you.”

“Oh, and I tremble with anticipation at the thought, but tonight is not the night for that.” She held up her switchblade, the dull yellow dungeon light glinting
off the steel. “There’s the matter of my second blood oath to you. Do you remember what it was?”

I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. “Yes.”

“Say it.” She pointed her knife at Cooper. “
He
doesn’t know, and if you decline, it’s his punishment to bear. He should hear what he’s gotten himself into.”

“What? Hell no.” I heaved on the ropes, desperately trying to get free. “No, no, no—”

“Say it!”

Cooper had raised his head and was finally looking at me now with an expression of questioning fear.

I bit my lip. “She said she’d tear my bones from my living flesh.”

“Meat,” Miko corrected. “Living meat, I said. But it’s the same difference, I suppose.”

She paced between us, twirling the knife between her fingers. “So, which of you gets boned, Jessie? The choice is yours.”

I wanted to weep, but I couldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she was breaking me. “Jesus. Why are you doing this?”

She squinted at me disbelievingly, as if she were trying to figure out if I’d been smoking a giant crack rock when she wasn’t looking. “What part of the concept of ‘blood oath’ are you unfamiliar with?”

“Not
just
this, I mean
all
this. Everything you’re doing and plan to do.” I was talking fast, half hoping that if I could keep her distracted long enough I could figure out some way of avoiding the torment she’d planned. “C’mon. You’re a goddess now, or close to it … why were you in the ass end of Texas? Why are
you messing with us? Don’t you have anything more … I don’t know, more interesting to do?”

Miko just stared at me, her expression dark, but her knife hand was stilled.

So I continued, wishing my voice was steadier: “You got a soul of your own from your father. I saw the memory—he gave his life to free you from your birth curse. So you don’t have to go around killing people for your mother anymore, right?”

“True. I don’t,” she replied. “Nothing I do is for her.”

“And you stopped killing for a whole decade, right?”

“Yes. I stopped.” Her expression changed, hovering between anger and grim amusement. “I even freed the souls I’d already taken, can you believe it? I turned into
such
a hippie.”

“So why are you doing all this?”

Miko closed her blade and leaned in very close to my right ear.

“You seem to have gotten your sticky little fingers on a lot of my memories, but you missed the most important one,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “If you’re that ever-so-curious, I’ll be glad as April skies to show it to you.”

“Sure.” My voice was sharp with terror. “Show me.”

She pulled off one of her gloves and touched my forehead with her bare hand, and I plunged straight into her past.

I
stood alone on the San Francisco dock watching the sea lions sun their glossy bellies. It was a beautiful morning, and my heart felt light as a butterfly. I’d be able to free two more souls that night, put them back where I’d found them in the Tenderloin. No more bad memories from them, no more hallucinations when the hunger got to me. Thirty more souls after that, and I’d be free of the whole thing. I could do whatever I wanted and it wouldn’t have to be murder.

That was my plan, anyhow.

The meat puppet stalking me was built from a good body, a fit body, and I didn’t hear its quiet footsteps on the boardwalk. It had no thoughts to overhear, no heartbeat, no breath, no sweat-stink. And so I didn’t realize it was just a foot away until I heard the whiff of a hand swinging through air.

I turned in surprise, but the puppet had already stabbed the thick embalming needle into my neck and plunged the contents into my jugular vein. And suddenly my throat, my chest, my heart, my head were on fire. Soon every nerve lit with pain. I fell to my knees on the boards, staring down at my hands, expecting them to be burning from the inside out, but all I caught was a faint glow emanating from my flesh
as my struggling heart pumped the poison through my body. My skin was turning gray, clammy. What was this? Roy had dosed me with arsenic, cyanide, methyl mercury—no mundane poison had ever affected me like this.

I looked up at my assassin, and quickly realized I’d get no answers from it. The puppet was the body of a muscular young man, still wearing the gray tracksuit he’d apparently been killed in, probably just that morning. His hands were blistered and prematurely decayed; a live man would be weeping from the injuries, but his expression was perfectly blank, serene in the way that only the soulless and mindless can be.

“The burn yer feeling is cobalt-60 dissolved in gorgon’s blood,” said a woman behind me. “Yer mum said it might put ye down for a little while. Looks like she was right.”

I managed to turn my head. A coldly beautiful succubus stood a few feet away, staring down at me with ice-white eyes. Two shiny black horns poked out of her thick golden hair. She wore a blue leather bolero jacket over a white satin miniskirt and carried a massive bundle of silver chains draped over her elegant arms.

I tried to speak, but no words would come out.

“Yer probably thinking I’m doing this because ye murdered me boy.” The succubus handed the chains to the meat puppet, and he began to bind me in them tightly from foot to neck. The links bore the symbols of Tsukuyomi, the moon god, and I could feel ancient magic in the metal, imbuing it with a power I could not break.

“But me dear friend the Cardinal made me promise
to give up lying for Lent,” she continued. “Truth is, yer mama hung that luscious bounty out there, and I could hardly resist that, could I?”

“What … bounty?” I managed.

“Wandered off the path, didn’t ye? Stopped following yer mum’s orders, ye have. Mind, if ye were
my
girl, I’d have sorted ye out meself, put ye on the straight and narrow. But I guess she’s got other lads and lassies now she’d rather spend time on, eh? And if she wants to give me twenty kilos of gold bullion to keep ye from troubling her, well, who am I to argue?”

The meat puppet picked me up and carried me to a waiting fishing boat. I stayed belowdecks for four days, visited only by the puppet with daily syringes of strength-sapping cobalt, the flesh of his hands and arms more and more rotted by the strong radiation.

Finally, the boat stopped midocean; I couldn’t tell where we were, but I sensed perilously deep waters beneath the vessel. The meat puppet hauled me up to the deck where two more puppets fastened mundane iron chains threaded through cinder blocks to my feet and neck.

The succubus watched silently as they heaved me over the railing and dropped me into the black water. I sank quickly, a hundred fathoms, a thousand fathoms. Two thousand. Three. Finally I hit the side of the deep-sea trench, slid through the rocks and shells, and came to a resting place.

I lay there helpless, my eardrums and eyeballs fractured by the intense pressure. My flesh regenerated itself and purged the radioactivity from my system after a few days, but I could not break the moon god’s chain. Once my flesh was no longer poisonous, the
crabs and rasping slugs found me, swarming over my face, stripping my skull clean of flesh. The little ones got down my throat and began to slowly devour me from the inside out.

I wanted to cry, but I had no eyes. I wanted to scream, but my lungs and vocal cords were gone. Yet I could not die; my flesh would regrow, slowly and painfully against the crushing coldness, and the carnivorous bottom dwellers would scrape me down to bones the very next day. Prometheus had it easy on his mountaintop compared to me.

The bad memories came, giving me no rest, sending me into terrifying hallucinations there in the darkness. Finally, to give myself a measure of peace I expelled the last of the souls I had taken, leaving them to whatever lay beyond. But without their energy, I was as weak as an infant.

After nine years that felt like nine thousand, the sea creatures suddenly fled, and I felt an immense presence cast its shadow over me. Even down there in the dark, the monster still radiated an absolute absence of light.

It unfurled tentacles like those of a giant squid and caressed my face bones gently with them. I was terrified. This thing was older than my mother, older than Jehovah, older than the rocks I lay helpless upon. It might have been older than the planet itself, seeking the coldness of outer space here in the starless depths.

“Daughter of Izanami,” it told me. “It pains me to see a harvester of such potential languishing here in my domain. Would you like to be free to breathe the air and bask in the sun?”

“I would like that very much,” I thought back to it.
“I can free you,” the ancient god told me. “But in exchange, you must serve me. You must take souls for me. Kill as many of Jehovah’s flock as you can, but I will take any souls you find; keep them however you like. When I am ready I will claim them. Will you do this for me?”

It paused. “If you do not wish to serve me, I think I should eat you to put you out of your misery.”

“I will serve you,” I said.

“If I free you and you fail me, I will not merely drop you in a dark place for safekeeping. I will destroy you utterly, erase every trace and memory that you even existed. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

The ancient god worked at the enchanted chains with its strong tentacles, and before long they fell away from my ragged flesh and bones, and I was floating up, up toward the sun.…

M
iko pulled her hand away from my forehead, and I came out of her memory.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered, shivering from the remembered cold and darkness, the horrible clamminess of the ancient god’s touch.

“So you understand now that I have to keep killing if I want to stay alive.” She pulled her glove back on. “If I free the souls, I lose everything, and they’re doomed just the same.”

“You’re going to hand all those people over to that monster.” My voice shook. “You’ve lied to all of them.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t lied. You don’t understand. If I take enough souls, I can do better than simply defend myself. I can kill Mother. And the God of the Depths, too. The souls inside me will have the best afterlives they could have ever wished for. I just … need a whole lot more of them to guarantee that.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Are you being willfully stupid?” Miko frowned at me. “This is how the game is played, Jessie. It’s no accident the Bible is full of all that lamb imagery—you humans are spiritual livestock. Every living thing
has a soul, but humans have been bred to have the biggest, tastiest ones on the planet. Your ghosts are like prime filets mignons, black truffles. Succulent and filling and every god and devil wants them.”