'Tween Heaven and Hell (30 page)

I realized that Emo was right, they didn’t need me anymore. They
had somehow forged their own unbreakable bond and what happened next was
completely up to them. I allowed Emo to lead me back through the crowd and back
toward Nerul’s office. Though I experienced a quick jolt of reluctance to enter
that office again and touch that nasty carpet, I knew I needed to get out of
there before the war of all wars began. And Emo knew Nerul’s court much better
than I did.

Emo pushed through the corridor door and we entered the
hated office. It was only dimly lit by the horrendous mural above our heads. At
first I thought the room was empty except for Emo and myself. Then I noticed
that the hair carpet appeared to be especially agitated, swaying disgustingly
under my feet and swiping my bare calves as if it were trying to warn me of
something.

And then, suddenly and horrifically, I knew what was wrong
in that room. My heart plunged into my stomach and I thought I would pass out. Emo
was in that room, but he was
not
standing beside me with falsely glowing
eyes. He was hanging from the far wall on dense, blood-covered chains. His head
drooped to a chest that was ripped to shreds beneath it.

My horrified gaze took in the thick, bubbling puddle of
blood beneath his limp feet. And then I turned to the hooded figure beside me. Who
apparently wasn’t Emo and who was just starting to pull back that cloaking
hood.

The face that emerged made me nostalgic for those carefree
moments when I was on that altar with demon claws rubbing across my cringing
flesh. It made me think longingly of that gargoyle mating Nille had spoken of
so casually. It even made my mother’s idea of how my life should be structured
start to look good.

Nahhh…it wasn’t quite that scary.

Chapter
Twenty-Six

A Battle True

Despair! Our lady clasped a friend and trusted him to
lead,

Only to find a plotting fiend and a loved one who
is…dead?

I turned away from the hated monster that emerged from that
cloak. I ran across the room and grabbed Emo’s face with both hands. As I
pulled his chin off his mangled chest my blood ran into my feet and I thought I
would pass out. His left cheek was pierced through with a platinum knife. The
point of the knife had left Emo’s head just above his neck. It would be a
miracle if his spinal cord hadn’t been severed.

I quickly examined his chest and was relieved to find that
his heart hadn’t been removed. Yet. And he was still breathing. Barely. At
least that was something.

I didn’t even cringe at the sound of Rayanne’s voice behind
me. “We meet for the last time, Tweener Phelps. And this time there is no one
here to save you from me.”

I kept my back turned to her with the greatest effort of
will. My hands quickly moved over Emo’s body, assessing which wounds were life-threatening
and which could wait to be healed until later. I knew I didn’t have much time. As
I’d been standing there his breathing had grown weaker and more strangled. Dark
blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth. I had, maybe, a few minutes to
save him. And there was Rayanne to be dealt with.

Finally I turned to face her with Emo’s blood coating my
hands. I forced back a gasp of surprise when I found myself staring into those
cold, midnight eyes. She was standing mere inches from me. I forced a smile
onto my face which I knew looked less like humor and more like a violent
promise. Hiding my feelings has never been one of my better things. “You’ve
pissed me off for the last time, Evil Barbie. This time I’m kickin’ your
scrawny ass and you’re gonna stay down.”

She laughed. My knees buckled and I went down onto that
nasty carpet. Damn. I didn’t stay down for long, though. With a speed I didn’t
know I possessed I sprang back up and flew at her. Her eyes widened just the
tiniest bit as my hands closed around her throat and pinched her airways
closed. She choked as I jammed my thumbs into the hollow of her throat and
pressed with everything I had. I didn’t know if devils could even be killed
like normal humans, but I was determined to find out. If this didn’t work I’d
just try something else. She’d touched a live wire to my last nerve and I was
going on pure, adrenaline charged pissed off.

Her body went limp in my hands and I heard her laughing
behind me. I turned and could see a shadowy figure standing a few feet away. Apparently
royals could leave their bodies at will. Well that just sucked!

I dropped the useless husk of her body and turned to face
her fleshless component. I realized she would have me on the floor again if I
didn’t do something fast. I focused on my power core and drew it forward, using
it, at first, to surround myself with a protective bubble, which I hoped would
repel anything she threw at me.

In the spiritual form, her power was a visible entity. I saw
it emerge from her shadow self and meet up with my own power bubble. The result
was impressive. The point of impact created a lightning bolt of electricity
that throbbed and spat, fighting to be released but trapped at the juncture of
our two powers. I saw her ghostly face register surprise as my power proved to
be the equal of hers. It gave me confidence to hold her off, when I might
otherwise have buckled under the force of it. I closed my eyes and concentrated
on building the power and pushing the spitting bolt of electricity back toward
the evil witch.

I could feel her resistance give as I caught her by surprise
and I gained some ground. Inch by inch the life-eating force moved toward
Rayanne and I could taste her fear on the back of my tongue. I wondered if she
could taste mine.

Somewhere in the back of my consciousness I became aware of
the splintered sound of voices, like static in my head. The static began to
grow in intensity until I started to get distracted by it and Rayanne started
winning the magic war. The lightning bolt surged backward with a roar, landing
just inches from my nose and I had to force my mind closed to the voices that
fought to be heard there. I sensed Dialle in the broken noise and someone else
who felt familiar, but I couldn’t expend the energy to explore that right at
the moment. I had to concentrate. Hard.

I managed to push the fiery wall of power back toward
Rayanne a few precious inches, but unfortunately, my energies were running low.
This power, all too new to me, seemed to have a limit and I wasn’t experienced
enough at dealing with it to work through it. Despite my renewed efforts to
hold her off, Rayanne and her evil power started to close in on me.

Inch by inch the magic-charged electricity moved toward me,
until it burned at the edge of my power, eating it away bit by bit. I felt my
power bubble waver and weaken and I knew I was seconds away from losing the magical
tug of war and eating a death sandwich, heavy on the ionic mayo. Every cell in
my body ached with the effort I was expelling to hold her off. And, to make it
worse, I could feel her gaining strength as I weakened. It was if she was
feeding her power from me, sucking me dry.

That thought brought my eyes open and I realized with a
start that that was exactly what she was doing. As I sent my power out, she was
slowly draining it from me and throwing it back. I realized I would need to
block her somehow and then use every resource I could find to finish her off.

Pulling together every ounce of willpower I had, I stopped
pushing at the lightning bolt that danced and hissed between us, burning a
track in the floor and ceiling of that revolting room. I left the protective
bubble in place to hold it off and threw my power in another direction. Beneath
me, the souls of thousands of Nerul’s enemies lay trapped in the physical
remains of their bodies, which consisted now only of a gathering of hair
fibers, the rest of their physical forms having long since been sent to a cold,
unhappy grave. I realized that if they were enemies of Nerul then they were
friends of mine. What was left of those unfortunate souls waved and throbbed
beneath my feet in helpless agitation because that was what Nerul had planned
for them when he’d trapped their souls in that helpless state. But if I could I
was going to release their souls and allow them to help me defeat the evil
Rayanne.

I dropped my hands to my sides and redirected the power into
the floor. I sent my senses into the horror beneath my feet and concentrated on
melding them with the trapped souls there. Almost immediately a wall of angry,
frustrated voices slammed into me, the voices of thousands of lost souls
clamored and begged me for release. At first, terrified by the intensity of the
onslaught, I fought against the angry voices and tried to push them down, but I
suddenly realized that, rather than trying to force them into a manageable box,
I would have more success letting them rage and using it. So that’s what I did.
I opened myself up to the fury of those released souls and allowed them to flow
through me into that room. In turn, they fed upon my power, taking it with them
as they surged free and amplifying it as they merged into one, incredibly
powerful and pissed off force. The result was catastrophic.

Almost immediately the floor beneath me started to rumble. The
rock beneath the carpet shifted violently, nearly throwing me to the ground. I
fought to regain my balance just as, above my head, the horrifying
representation of Hades shattered and spat billions of shards of glass toward
the ground. I felt the glass bouncing off me and saw it pile up around my feet,
but I was so deeply immersed in channeling that I was numb and felt as if I
stood apart from the physical world around me.

Rayanne’s shadow form wavered and looked, for a moment as if
it would fade as the room imploded around us. But I reached out with the
enhanced power I now shared with thousands of angry souls and grabbed her
before she could disappear.

Her shadow mouth opened in a silent scream, which from
behind me on the floor, was echoed by her physical form. Fueled by the anger in
the released souls, I tore through Rayanne’s shadow form with razor-like
tentacles of power and ripped her apart. I watched her chest cave inward and
then explode into the room, casting a green haze like smoke into the roiling
air around me.

Almost simultaneously I felt her body rise up off the floor
behind me and I turned, carrying my anger-fueled power rush with me and
smashing it into her before she had time to even move a finger to stop me.

Her face creased in an ugly scowl. She flew away from me and
hit the stone wall with a sickening crunch. Slowly she pushed herself to her
feet and stood, leaning against the wall, which was coming apart behind her in
a spider web pattern that was quickly widening into cracks and spewing
stone-dust into the room in choking waves.

I stood several feet away from her. My legs spread in a
bracing stance and my face impassive. I was aware that my skin had started to
glow with the combined power of a thousand angry souls. The rough material of
the robe whipped around my legs, caught in a frenzied wind that raged around
and through that cavern room, pulling my power with it and causing devastation
everywhere it touched. My long, auburn hair whipped away from me, blown back by
the sucking wind. As I stared at the evil Barbie, I slowly raised my arms to
the sky, feeling the power pulse between my uplifted hands. Seeing her death in
my face, Rayanne cringed back, throwing one hand up in front of her face as if
to block my attack. At that point, even if I’d wanted to I was incapable of
stopping the power. I was a renegade laser train speeding down a mountainside
with no brakes.

Three inhuman steps brought me face to face with her. She
dropped her covering hand and flew at my throat, her long, gleaming white teeth
bared to rip my throat out. I felt her hit me and heard the flesh of my throat
ripping. I was aware of something wet running down my throat and soaking warmly
into the neck of the rough, brown robe, but I felt no pain or fear as she tore
into my throat with those knife-like teeth.

I was like a mindless machine, with no thought for anything
but killing the evil Rayanne. I reached up and pulled her from my throat, holding
her off the floor before my face with a strength I’d never had before. Her lips
and chin were shiny and wet with my blood, but already I could feel the hole
she’d chewed in my throat closing and I knew that somehow I would heal myself. I
smiled at her and finally saw the fear spark in her black eyes. That fear told
me I had won. She was mine.

“Get thee to Hades fool, for God hath tired of you!” My
voice boomed through the room, rising to vibrate against the quickly
disintegrating rock walls. Rising even above the thunderous cacophony that the
disintegration of millions of years of geological architecture wrought in those
underground caverns. It was an inhuman voice, filled with the power of a
thousand long-tortured souls and the combined hatred that had too long lived
within them.

I threw the full force of my power into her, flinging her
like a rag doll thirty feet away to crash against the far wall. Then something
twisted in my heart and, before I even realized I’d had the thought, I’d sent
hundreds of knife-like shards of glass from the shattered mural flying toward
her. She had almost regained her feet when they slammed into her. The magic
driven sheet of shattered glass pummeled her, ripping her flesh away from her
bones and driving what was left of her back into the wall. The shards of glass
hit with such force that, despite their fragility, they were driven cleanly
into the rock at her back, pinning her mangled body to the wall.

I stood there for a moment that was collapsed in time, my
heart pounding terrifyingly in my chest and my breath coming out in gulping
gasps. My body started to tremble uncontrollably as, from somewhere amidst the
jumbled mess that was my thoughts, I extracted the notion that I’d taken a turn
toward my monster side that I would never be able to retrace. This thought
caused me to fall to my knees in sudden, bone-melting weariness. The
subterranean room continued to rumble and collapse around me. As my head
drooped onto my chest I realized that I would soon be buried alive in debris. It
was hard to make myself care.