“If that is your desire, my lord,” Valeria answered as the infernal bond to Malek tugged at her insides, compelling her to want to please him.
“It is my desire,” Malek answered forcefully. “I will continue to send more specimens your way, Valeria. I want you to gather them, allow them to grow, until my need for them arises.”
“As you wish,” she answered on command. Her lack of free will stopped her from saying no. She dreaded how long she would have to wait for the fickle arch-demon to remember his playthings in Maine. It was possible this one’s children would be dead of old age before he came back with a need for his latest toys.
“Don’t sulk,” he snapped, feeling her resignation through their bond. “It won’t be long; I seek to reassert my claim in that area. There is an upstart usurper rankling things up in quiet little Maine. I can’t allow that to continue, but the whelp has important ties to those I would rather not make enemies of. He plays a dangerous game.”
“So you pull a lowly succubus like myself from obscurity,” Valeria asserted, coming to terms with her role in his plan. “Send her to the area with a couple of misfits, and let us take out the trash? If things go south, you are only out a lowly succubus who was acting on her own anyway.”
“They won’t go south, Valeria Furtul DeSuflete,” he commanded with authority. The power of his voice was magnified by the use of her full name. The command wrenched in the core of her being like a hot knife, compelling her. The sheer power of his will knocked the breath out of her and brought beads of sweat to her brow.
“They won’t,” she panted in agreement as her synapses overloaded with a burning sensation. If he but willed it, Malek could ignite her essence, burn away her flesh and bones, and banish her back to the depths of the infernal planes, where she would burn as a cinder for a hundred years or more. She would suffer in a blazing torment until he found need for another expendable whelp and allowed her body to reform. She would not fail him.
“See to it,” Malek said dryly. “Take good care of my new pet. When the time is right, mark her. Now I think it’s time for you to meet her.”
He motioned to the door adjacent to the large one-way viewing glass that led into the room. Valeria took just a second to regain her composure before heading to the door.
“Thank you for this opportunity, my lord,” she said with a slight curtsey before opening the door and walking through to meet her new Baku pup..
Chapter One
The Lost And Forgotten
Xlina’s hand drifted to her face, subconsciously wiping away the thin lines of blood dripping from her nose. The normally pleasant smell of the ocean was masked in the alley by a noxious odor of trash and decay. Her guard was up now, her back against a solid brick wall that showed its age, covered with graffiti and divots. She was tall, five foot nine inches, with an athletic build and long flowing brown hair that danced down her back in the cool autumn night. She dressed the part of a girl on her way home from the local night club, wearing black leather pants with a tight blue halter top. Everything about her feigned mannerisms cried “victim,” alluring bait for the prey she hunted this night. It was a dark night, the hour well past midnight, with no moonlight sneaking between the buildings into the alley, which was only dimly lit by a flickering streetlamp at its north end. The pale, incandescent light cast long shadows down between the two buildings, shadows that were perfect for one wishing to remain concealed.
“Come on out,” she taunted to the darkness with a nod of her head as her fists clenched defensively in front of her. She wouldn’t be caught unaware a second time. “You started this, sleazebag; now let’s get on with it while I’m still young.”
A slender man emerged from the shadows—her assailant. He was wearing a stylish black suit with a deep wine-red shirt, which had allowed him to blend in with the shadows. He certainly didn’t look dangerous with his pallid complexion and a black mustache that curled up at the ends like the villain in an old cartoon. His hair was black, cut short, and mostly obscured by a wide-brimmed black hat sitting at a cockeyed angle on his head. It was his eyes, however, that screamed danger. They were just black orbs; staring at them was like looking into the abyss itself, empty and soulless. He had landed the first blow, striking from the shadows and staggering her with unexpected force for such a lanky man. Her hunch had paid off in spades. The creeper couldn’t resist a young girl.
She had expected to find something dangerous within the proximity of Pandora’s night club, and as luck would have it, on her second night of staking out the place, she had. It wasn’t him precisely she was expecting, of course; her divinations lacked that level of specificity. Xlina had seen the creature’s hunting grounds in her dreams. The missing girls from the night club. The dark alleyway. A shadowy assailant. Normal people had nightmares all the time. They tossed and turned, lost a decent night’s sleep perhaps, but the next day they continued with their mundane lives, oblivious to the wider world around them. Perhaps “blissfully ignorant” was a more suitable term?
Xlina Dar’Karrow was not a normal person. Her dreams teemed with nightmares every night and always had for as long as she could remember. She was what her people called a dream eater, a rarity within her Celtic lineage. Japanese lore had called her kind Baku, supernatural beings who could devour nightmares from children. It was a cautionary legend, however; if a Baku was not satisfied with the nightmare, it would continue to feed on the child’s hopes and dreams.
As far as she knew, she had never fed on anything but nightmare energy. It was insurmountably tough combing through the various myths and legends that resulted from humanity’s many encounters with visitors from the Otherworld to determine the truth of a being’s nature. Human accounts of monsters, demons, ghosts, and other strange creatures from beyond the Mist were always mixed with a healthy dose of fear and sensationalism. Like many cultures around the world, the Celts believed in a world beyond their own. In Celtic mythology, this place was called the Otherworld. Whether you called it the Bardo like the Buddhists, the spirit world like the Native Americans, or the Slavic Vyraj, all the cultures and religions of the world shared the common theme, a realm beyond ours, a spirit world. The Christian belief in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory was too simplistic an explanation for her tastes, a cunning ethical trap designed around black-and-white morality for the masses to follow, it had become the majority belief in America and many places around the world. You couldn’t throw a hex down main street without hitting a religious zealot.
Not her, however; she had grown up an outcast daughter in a long line of druids, a fraternal order steeped in Celtic mysticism. Her brother, Arrivan, had assumed the family practice when he had turned thirteen and joined the male dominated Order of Druids, where he was a keeper of the Mist. Arrivan, her father’s pride and joy. It made her want to vomit. Xlina and her sister, however, were incapable of joining the Order. Imagine finding out that all the creatures recounted in hushed whispers around campfires were real, that myth and legend are as inevitable as death and taxes, but due to the equipment between your legs, you get excluded from it all. Perhaps the witches that had fled to America in the 1600s had done so due to their desire to break ways with the fraternal orders of the Old World. Sure, there were the witch trials in Salem, but overall, they had found a better life in America than in the Old World.
She was not a witch, nor was she a druid. Xlina was merely one of the awakened, a human sensitive to the flow of magic in the world. She knew beyond any doubt that beyond the Mist, there was a place unlike our own, for she had been there, to the Otherworld, and she knew full well the dangerous things that would often seep into the human world to feed. Over the ages, they had refined their hunting. With magic aiding them and the ability to cross the Mist to disappear back into the Otherworld, they were the best-kept secret in the human world. Perhaps humans just chose to stay in the dark, or perhaps the institutions and power structures of the human world would come crashing down in an instant if the wider popu
lace knew the truth. No, there were far too many people in positions of wealth and power to allow that to happen. There were even whispers of black ops agencies within the government whose sole function was to conceal the paranormal. Americans were obsessed with the idea of visitors from another world, drumming up alien stories and encounters and clandestine government sites like Area 51, all just a convenient cover for the truth.
The slender man paced anxiously, clearly not expecting the woman before him to shrug off his attack. He couldn’t have known that the energy from her nightmare fed her reserves, lending her strength, power, and resiliency.
“What are you?” he asked slowly, as if he had to concentrate greatly to form every word with his mouth.
“Just another pretty face,” she taunted with a smirk before advancing. Her footwork was smooth, sliding her into striking range like a professional boxer, exactly as it had been drilled into her for the past several months. Footwork and timing are a fighter’s advantage. She could hear the voice from her instructor beaten into her over countless hours of rigorous training, all for moments like these. Closing the gap between her and the slender man, she threw with her left, but it was a mere feint designed to elicit a reaction from the creature. He was too confident, having spent too much time stalking hapless women who couldn’t fight back. His arm reactively came up to block a strike that never landed. She pulled short, shifting her weight to her right side and thrusting with all her power toward his chest. Nightmare energy gathered and crackled in raw power around her fist as the agony and torment of the victims from her dreams were released in a powerful blow. His eyes were tracking her left hand and never saw her right, even as it crashed heavily into him. The stored nightmare energy released like a shock wave through his chest. Instead of finding ribs, her blow met a squishy, wet mass.
He recoiled from the blow, staggering a step back with his cartoonish face scrunched awkwardly. It looked like pain, but it was hard to tell. She didn’t think she had hit anything important with that attack, but the release was exactly what she needed. She had felt like hitting something after two nights at Pandora’s fending off college frat boys who were all too friendly and touchy for her tastes. She drove on, advancing to keep pace with the staggered man; she followed now with her left for real. The man’s hands had retreated to cover his chest defensively, predictably, and far too slowly for her polished left cross, which landed squarely on his jaw with a resounding thud. Again, instead of finding a jawbone, it was a sickening thud, like she had punched a bowl of tapioca pudding.
Not giving the man a chance to recover, she turned into her punch with a pivot. She spun and dropped to waist height, flinging the point of her right elbow out as her body completed the revolution and added the force of her spin to her strike while simultaneously dropping her defensively under any counterattack. She connected solidly in what would have been a knockout blow had the man been human. He staggered back another two steps under the power of her strike until he came to rest against the opposite building’s wall. Her attacks had backed him into a corner, a tactic she was hoping would force the man to reveal his nature. A clue, any clue as to what was beneath the glamor concealing his true form would give her an inkling of how to defeat him.
The strange man stood tall once more, seemingly out of place in the alley. A blur of his features washed over him as he shifted his form under his glamor. He was about to attack for real, and Xlina prepared herself. He lunged forward with his right, his lanky hand balled into a fist. It was a clumsy attack, appearing awkward from the moment he threw it. She had little trouble bringing her arm up defensively to parry the strike, but on impact, his arm blew apart into pieces. She was splashed with a mucus-like slime that clung to her hair and coated her flesh. The man’s arm had split into several tentacles; writhing and squirming, they lashed around her parrying arm like a vice. She screamed in pain as the tentacles crushed her arm like a boa constrictor squeezing its prey. Worse yet, the mucus the tentacles secreted burned. Wisps of acrid smoke rose from her entrapped arm, and the smell of searing flesh filled the air.
The man’s lower jaw and mustache burst apart, revealing shorter but no less dangerous tentacles surrounding a maw that looked like a dome-shaped, hooked beak. No doubt about it: This thing was a cephalopod. She had heard stories of their kind, predatory mollusks from beyond the Mist who enjoyed brain matter. They had occult followers in pockets of human civilizations across the globe. They represented the darker things that dwelled beyond the Mist, inhabiting the lower planes. What on earth had brought such a creature to a small town in Maine to hunt?
“Next time I have calamari, I’ll give it your regards,” she spat from behind clenched teeth, lashing forward with a thrust kick designed to put some distance between the awful maw and herself. But the squirming tentacles around her arm tightened on the attack, pulling her close enough to smell the foulness of his breath. It was a combination of rotting death mixed with low tide that turned her stomach. Her bravado and snappy taunts aside, Xlina’s heart raced. This was so much more than a stray ghoul. Cephalopods were solitary predators from the lower plane adept at hunting prey far more intimidating than mere humans. She had even heard stories of a sole Cephalopod feeding on a pack of werewolves. She was in real trouble.
The creature let loose a feral, high-pitched squeal that hurt her ears as it opened its maw wide and lunged at her. Out of sheer desperation, Xlina kicked again sharply, her heel coming up in a straight line and landing just below the gaping maw of the creature. It shuddered from the blow momentarily, offering all the time she needed to swing with her free arm, aiming with her fingers in a knife hand strike directly into the beast’s eye. It let loose a wail as the black orb gave way to her fingers, her hand knuckle deep in ichor. The creature’s hold on her parrying arm relaxed just enough for her to pull free and allow her a quick retreat down the alley, putting some distance between herself and the cephalopod.
“All that training and what works is the women’s self-defense course from the local YMCA,” she taunted, flicking her parrying arm in an attempt to cast off some of the acidic mucus. Her arm was in rough shape, with quarter-sized circular burns tracking up her flesh. The searing pain tracked down her arm from her elbow resonating in a throbbing numbness in her fingers. She wasn’t sure she could use it again as she brought it weakly to her side. The creature turned its head, bringing her directly in line with its remaining good eye. It was a grotesque visage, with the bottom half of its face split into tentacles and the top half a loosely affixed flap of skin that flapped like a tattered rag in the breeze. With its remaining human hand, the creature unbuttoned its shirt, exposing a quivering mass writhing beneath pale human flesh. It looked like a hundred worms were trying to escape through its belly button.
“Woah now, fella,” Xlina quipped “I’m not that kind of girl.”
A circular pattern beneath the skin suddenly emerged, and the belly button opened in what she imagined the Greek’s legendary whirlpool of Charybdis would look like had it been six inches wide and made of human flesh. A black spray of ink shot forth, covering Xlina, the wall, and half the alley in a thick mist that burned her eyes and lungs. She coughed up the substance, dropping to her knees and retching violently at the tarry taste of the foul ichor. She could hear its footsteps running down the alleyway, its fine shoes clapping on the pavement. She wanted to pursue; she wanted to catch the bastard to make it pay for all those missing girls, but the ink was thick in her lungs and eyes. Her body arched violently as she continued to empty the contents of her stomach in the desolate alley. Only the sticky black residue clinging to her flesh remained as evidence that the creature had been there at all.
Eventually, air returned to her lungs as she coughed and hacked. The taste of the ink in her mouth was bitter, and her left arm stung with dozens of quarter-sized burns. She picked herself up gingerly and made the slow walk down the alley and out into the night street. Covered in black sticky ink, she was relieved to make it down the t
wenty blocks to her apartment without running into any to anyone else at the late hour. Luckily, in small-town Maine, they practically rolled up the streets after dark. Save for the handful of nightclubs like Pandora’s, the nightlife in Portland was dull compared to the larger cities like Boston and New York.
She pulled her key from her tight-fitting leather pants and unlocked the outer door to her apartment complex. It was an old brick building that had once been a courthouse. It had been abandoned by the city and scooped up by a local developer, who had flipped it into an apartment complex of thirteen one-bedroom and studio apartments spread across three floors. It was a classical New England red brick building, with wide hallways and stone tile floors. Her apartment was quaint, and she had fallen in love with it the moment the landlord had shown it to her. Many of the gothic stylings of the nineteenth century courthouse were preserved in the corridors and hallways, which added an eccentric flair to the building that gave it an elegant feel without being tacky. She took the stairs up to the second floor, passing the community laundry room filled with coin-operated washing machines and dryers, which hummed with activity even at this late hour.
“Guess it’s never too late for laundry,” she muttered under her breath as she passed. Her door was at the end of the hallway on the left, and she wanted nothing more than a hot shower and a warm bed at the moment.
“You’re out late,” a sweet voice called from behind her. Xlina turned to see Amber Sedgewick’s head peeking out from the community laundry room. She had a bronzed tan that you could only get from a bottle, with a platinum-blonde hair color only found in the palette of Revlon hair dye. She was sticky sweet in a way that Xlina thought was about as genuine as her tan and hair color.
“Yes. Well, I’m about to turn in,” Xlina replied with a weary smile.
The Infernal Games Page 2