The Devil's Metal (38 page)

I managed to tear my eyes away from her
hypnotizing gaze and looked to the shore. Sage was only a few yards
away. My brilliant Sage. Somehow, he was here too. He was
shirtless, his chest cut up and bleeding, on his knees in thick red
soil. He was watching me with total agony on his face. I couldn’t
tell if it was for me, for himself, or for everyone else. Half his
band, half his friends, were dead.

Graham was standing behind him, his arms
crossed like a smug bastard, his lower half human, his head was one
that belonged on a demonic worm, with a round toothy hole for a
mouth. I shivered at the image, the inhuman blending of drummer and
demon, the way his mouth dripped black and red splotches of clumpy
blood onto the ground.

Naturally, the GTFOs were all there. Beside
him were Terri, Sparky, and Sonja, all looking like the
life-sucking groupies that they were.

They weren’t alone. As I looked closely
around the tree-lined lake, I saw many bobbing heads in the
water—demonic faces in all shapes and sizes. Red glowing eyes.
Protruding tongues and razor teeth. Weeping skin covered with
maggots.

Something big splashed in the distance—a
dark, undefinable shape under a bright moon. I caught the gleam of
moving scales and an incredible sense of size. I saw the dark
creature moving underneath the water toward me like a stealthy
submarine.

This was Lake Shasta. And though I was close
to shore, I knew I was in the deep end.

“I’m Alva,” the woman said. She took her
hand out of the water and offered it to me. I stared at her like
she was a fucking idiot.

Her uncanny eyes narrowed for a second, and
in that second her hand transformed into a long tentacle. She
swiped it at me and it raked across my chest, pulling away skin
with a hundred tiny, blood-sucking mouths.

I screamed at the pain and she laughed in
retort, her golden eyes flashing into black, empty holes with no
way out. I felt like I was being sucked into them, into a cold,
hellish eternity.

“Let her go!” Sage yelled, his voice
carrying clearly from the muddy shore. “She has nothing to do with
this.”

Alva looked at him dryly, her face
transformed back to normal in an instant. “You asked for her, Sage.
You asked for this.”

“I never asked for you to kill her. I never
asked for anyone to be killed and you know it!”

“Well, you should have been more specific
when you made the deal,” she said, sounding bored. She caught me
staring at her and smiled very, very slowly. Her incisors were as
sharp as shark’s teeth and they cut into the side of her mouth
where the wounds flayed open like torn paper. “Sorry this has to be
so dramatic, Dawn. We like to have fun when no one’s watching. And
part of the fun is killing you in a most terrifying way. Now we
know your mother died some years ago. Slit her wrists and drowned
in the bathtub. We thought that was too cliché for you though.”

“But you can’t do this,” I yelled, trying to
keep the raft level. Water was splashing over the sides, swamping
me. “The bargain’s not even being fulfilled. There’s supposed to be
a published article. I haven’t even finished writing it!”

Alva laughed. “Oh, that doesn’t matter. We
found it on the bus and finished the rest for you. We mailed it to
Barry Kramer today. The fact-checker can’t check facts when the
whole band is dead.”

“You’re not supposed to kill him,” I
sneered. I didn’t know where I was finding the courage. “It’s not
in the code.”

“Screw the code,” Alva sneered back. A
small, revolting worm slid out of her ear and traveled down to her
chest, leaving a black, slimy trail. “The only reason we follow the
code is because we’re made to. But you don’t see one of the Jacobs
around right now, do you?”

“You answer to someone.”

“Yes. His name is Lucifer and I can tell you
that he’s not a fan of the code either. It’s just something we have
to do for that other guy.”

I assumed she meant God. How diplomatic of
him to have a deal with the devil himself.

“Besides,” she continued. “You’re what Sage
asked for. He wanted someone to love. We gave that to him, and now
we’re taking it away, just like we took away every other person. He
got off easy with his wife just leaving, but later we decided it
lacked impact, you know?”

She giggled and splashed around in the
water, treading it playfully, her appearance slowly becoming more
monstrous. “To tell you the truth, Sage has been a fun contract to
fulfill and an even funner one to collect on.”

“Funner is not a word,” I seethed. Always a
journalist, even to the end.

She shrugged. “You should really choose your
last words more carefully. Perhaps you should tell Sage you love
him. Give him a bit of happiness before we take it away again.”

I looked over at Sage on the shore. His eyes
were conflicted, probably over a million different things. Graham
had a firm grip on both his shoulders with talon-like claws, and
the others were standing close by. He didn’t have a chance in hell
of saving me. They were going to drown me, here and now, and he’d
be powerless to stop it. He’d have to watch it all. I wondered what
happened on the bus, if he had to see the others dead.

“Well, you love him don’t you?” Alva
prodded, annoyed.

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized
I really did love him. I loved him before as one loves their idols.
And I loved him now as a similarly damaged soul. A kindred spirit.
It was a budding love, new and growing, built on attraction, on
trust. I trusted him. I knew he’d try and save me if he could. But
things weren’t looking in his favor.

I would have told him. But it didn’t feel
right. It was a private thing from me to him. The demons didn’t
deserve to hear it.

“Okay, well at least you love her,” Alva
said to Sage. Her voice was deeper now as she slowly changed forms,
more and more wriggling black worms coming out of her skin,
bursting free of her face and neck like out of a rotten apple.

Sage shook his head.

Alva lowered her eyes. They were no longer
gold. There was no longer anything beautiful about her. “You can’t
hide the truth from us. I can sniff it out of you.”

“I’m not hiding anything,” Sage said. His
voice was cold and steady. He looked at me, a full apology brimming
in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Dawn.”

The confusion was a pleasant distraction.
“What?”

“Yes, what?” Alva repeated, her voice
growling.

Sage shrugged. “I...I don’t love her. I
barely know her.”

Alva laughed. It was short and bursting with
uncertainty.

“What do you mean you don’t love her? Of
course you do.”

“I don’t,” Sage said in such a way that I
believed him. “I don’t love you, Dawn, I’m sorry. I like you a lot.
An awful lot. But I don’t love you.”

I heard Alva make a sputtering sound. I
heard the sound of my heart breaking.

Alva’s depthless eyes were on me, reading
the shock on my face. Then they turned into tiny black points and
speared Graham with terrifying intensity. “Graham. You told me he
was in love with her.”

Graham looked flustered and changed back
into human form, his gaping worm mouth shrinking into a hole.
Everyone was looking at him, even Sage.

“What? He is in love with her. I know
it.”

“I’m not,” Sage pleaded.

“Okay, can you guys stop rubbing it in!” I
yelled, even though part of me wanted Sage to continue. The fact
that he didn’t love me was the only thing that was keeping me
alive.

“Graham,” Alva growled. She swam around the
raft until she was between me and the shore and I caught long black
tentacles and flickering tails drifting behind her. “Explain.”

“I..I…,” he looked at everyone, his face
flickering from demon to human like someone flipping channels on a
TV. “Chip. The sound tech. He said he caught them having sex on the
floor. He says he talked to Dawn’s friend and she said she was in
love with him.”

“I don’t give a fuck if Dawn’s in love with
him!” Alva yelled, a ferocious sound that boomed across the lake,
causing the water to ripple. I could hear something large and
terrible surfacing behind me but I didn’t dare look. “She’s not
part of the deal. The deal was we take what Sage loves. Does he
love Dawn or not? Tell me you know this for a fact.”

Graham’s monstrous mouth flapped soundlessly
for a beat or two. “They had sex! They’ve been spending all their
time together! I’ve seen the way he looks at her.”

He was losing the argument and fast. You
could hear it in his tone. For the first time ever, Graham sounded
scared. And whatever scared Graham was bound to terrify me.

Alva’s stare flamed. Her voice rose. “You
know, for a demon, you’re a hell of a romantic, Graham. And a
fucking moron. Love is more than just sex and longing looks.
Fuck…look at all the fucking time we just wasted. Now this isn’t
even part of the contract.”

I had to wonder what a head demon like Alva
knew about love, but I pushed it out of my head and tried to think
of what to do next. With chains that would surely sink me and a
monster somewhere out in the deep, there wasn’t much I could do
except watch and wait.

“Maybe he’s lying,” Graham supposed,
grasping for straws. My heart did a sick little dance at the idea.
But his love would mean death and I wasn’t a fool.

“He’s not. I can tell,” she said through
grinding teeth. The water in the lake began to shake and ripple
like it was being bustled by an underwater earthquake. A thick coat
of black liquid began to bleed out of holes in her body and spread
out across the water’s surface like an oil spill. If I looked close
I could see faces in the oily matter, screaming soundlessly at me,
souls trapped in a never ending hell.

I looked away from the sight. Alava turned
around in the water and aimed her gaze at me. Her eyes looked dead.
“Kill him.”

Everyone on the shore looked at each
other.

She whipped around and screamed, “Kill him!
Not Sage! Graham! Kill Graham! Kill him now! Kill him now!”

Any wonder whether demons could be killed
was gone. Graham shoved Sage to the ground and started to run into
the woods, but Sparky transformed into a black worm with multiple
human-like legs and leaped onto Graham’s back, taking him down. He
thrashed as Sonja and Terri reached for him with their long,
growing fingers. There was a scream and ripping sounds, wet cracks
that rattled across the lake. Sage was on the ground nearby, face
down, covering his ears from the sound. Terri and Sonja stood up, a
bloody limb in each arm. They took the arms and tossed them into
the lake where a dozen tentacles reached out of the dark water,
dragging the limbs under the surface in a feeding frenzy.

The final rip was the loudest. I closed my
eyes just as I saw Sonja holding up Graham’s half human, half demon
head. She brought his face up to hers as if she was going to kiss
it and began to eat it instead. Talk about every rock star’s worst
nightmare.

Alva turned to me, and if she wasn’t a
disgusting, oozing demon, she might have looked sheepish. “Drummers
are the worst.”

“So what do we do with Sage?” Terri yelled.
She kicked Sage in the side and he cried out in pain. “Can we have
our way with him before we kill him?”

I was about to tell her that I would rip her
tiny tits off if she dared lay a hand on him when Alva calmly said,
“We aren’t killing him.”

I started. “What?”

She swam back toward me, looking beautiful
again. “It’s true it’s not in the contract. We don’t
have
to
kill him.”

“You’re letting him live?” I asked
hopefully, not daring to believe it.

She shrugged, drops of oily water rolling
off her shoulders. I could almost hear screaming. “I think he’s got
a lot of talent. He could do better than that silly band.”

I looked over at Sage, not trusting a word
she was saying. Judging from the expression on his face as he
pushed himself off the mud, he felt the same way.

“You,” Alva said sweetly, placing razor
sharp claws along the edges of the raft and gazing wickedly at me,
“aren’t an exception.”

“What?”

“I might get in shit for totally breaking
this contract before it even gets off the ground, but you bother
me. It must be the groupie thing.”

“I’m not a groupie.” I couldn’t help but
protest. My pettiness no longer surprised me.

“Dawn Emerson’s famous last words,” she said
with a smile of black shark teeth. “It’s better than ‘funner’s not
a word.’”

And then she poked her fingers into the
raft.

Sage screamed my name from the shore.

The GTFOs laughed.

The raft popped and hissed and the water
began shaking again, waves growing and rising. The raft was
deflating fast and I was sinking into a black pool of tortured
faces.

Alva smiled and started swimming back to
shore just as Sage was launching himself into the lake. He started
doing an incredibly fast breaststroke toward me, the thick water
barely slowing him down. Alva walked out of the water, stark ass
naked, and sat in the red clay with the demon groupies on either
side of her like they were whale-watching.

Sage got to me fast but not fast enough. The
raft was almost entirely under and I was no longer floating. I
could feel hundreds of slimy hands grabbing me everywhere, trying
to pull me down, the Damned wanting to claim another companion.

Sage grabbed me by my shoulders and held on
tight.

“I’m not letting you go,” he cried
frantically. His face was close to mine and I could see the anguish
in his clear eyes, the green turned silver by the moon.

“It’s okay,” I said, feeling the raft
totally disappear beneath me. My legs began to feel heavy and I was
pulled downward. Whether it was by the chains or the screaming
souls, I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.