So Mr. Trash Bags had followed instructions and hid with it. Good. “I bet Lucinda grabbed it.”
“Don’t try to fool me. You know very well the Condition doesn’t have the artifact. If Lucinda had gotten her metal hand on it, she would already have tried to kill us all. Last I saw of her, she was very angry.” Then he turned back to the vampire. “As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted, Asag would prefer to have you as a friend rather than an enemy. So he wishes to present a peace offering. A gift, consisting of your life, your freedom, and your grandson.”
I suppressed an inarticulate scream.
“Oh really?” Susan smiled, all fangs and crazy. “And what’s in it for Asag, the world-ending chaos demon?”
“He simply asks that when the time comes, and Stricken and his otherworldly allies call for your aid, you remember the merciful kindness shown to you by Asag, and abandon them.”
It must not have been a very strong alliance because it took Susan all of three seconds to think it over. “Buddy, you got a deal.”
“No!” I shouted.
“My associate will now remove the Quintus curse, and you will be free to go. The child will be given to you at the top of the stairs.” He gestured towards the manor door standing open far above. “My associates will escort you out.”
One of the golems approached Susan, squatted down next to her, and slid his hand between her body and the ground. He pulled out what appeared to be an ancient coin. She immediately sprang up and landed on her feet.
Indignant, she looked like she was thinking about ripping everyone apart.
But Brother Death was too clever for that. “If you wish to take the child home in one piece, you will behave.”
For a moment the vampire hesitated, and there was that odd look of the concerned mother in her eyes as she looked at me. “What’re you going to do with Julie?”
“She’s not part of the package.”
Then she looked towards the lighted doorway across the vast underground space, and I could see her worry. Somewhere in that messed-up head she was doing the math, trying to figure how best to reach her unholy goal of protecting her family.
The marks made it so she couldn’t turn me. Ray on the other hand…
“Fine.” Susan looked back at me, a little sad. “Sorry things couldn’t work out, honey.”
“Don’t hurt him!”
“We’ve got a different definition of hurt. I’m going to love him and raise him right. Once he’s full grown I’ll give him the gift of eternal life. I wish you could understand this is for the best.”
She walked out flanked by two golems she could easily break with a gesture, casting only one look back at me.
Brother Death waited until she was all the way through the plaza—her footsteps echoing hollowly on first cobbles and then packed dirt—and up the steps. Then he waited a while longer, perhaps to make sure she wasn’t listening in.
Once the door was closed, he turned back to me. There was malice in the smile which didn’t quite obscure the abundance of teeth. He gave the impression of rearranging his body, of settling more deeply into the folding chair, like a person getting more comfortable. It wouldn’t be half as creepy, either, if his body didn’t seem to fold and stretch in the wrong places.
“Now you…you are a very special case. You taunted me with the artifact, and then took it away. I try to keep things professional, but that sort of thing offends me on a personal level. Where is it?”
“Go to hell.”
“Last chance.”
“I don’t know where the artifact is. You’re the one with mind control powers. You should be able to tell I don’t know.”
“There are two ways I can possess someone. A gradual, slow invasion of their dreams, a subtle twisting if you will, picking through their thoughts, steering their emotions, breaking down inhibitions. Then I use them as my unwitting servants until I am ready to fully take control… Yet that takes some time and only works on the weak-willed.”
“I’ve been accused of many things, but that hasn’t been on the list.”
“No, it is not. Then there is the more violent, direct approach, where I simply kill your body and then seize control of it. Yet that leaves only an empty husk. And a husk has no memories to steal.” The Adze leaned back on his chair. “You know, you’re not the first Shackleford I’ve encountered in my long life. I met your grandfather many years ago, in the Congo if I recall correctly. He tried to kill me, nearly succeeded too.”
I remembered what Albert Lee had said about that mission. “Sucks it didn’t take.”
“For him especially. Seeing him again after all these years, and finally being able to murder him? Now that was an unexpected bonus.”
I’d never wanted to kill anyone more. I pulled against the ropes until my wrists bled, but it didn’t do a damned thing.
“You Shacklefords are canny yet unreasonable. Unlike me, you are not honorable in your dealings. So now I’m going to leave you to be tormented by the lamia.”
“Where are your stupid snake vampires?”
“Still devouring the bodies of everyone who died upstairs. We simply dump the corpses down here for disposal. It is very efficient. I’ve given them permission to bleed you, to hurt you in ways you can’t even imagine, but to leave you alive.”
He stood up. The gnome thing picked up the chair and folded it.
“We will speak again when you are ready to tell me where the artifact is.”
Chapter 19
I watched as he and his entourage made their slow and stately progress across the sunken plaza, the plume on Brother Death’s hat bobbing as he walked. Why that costume? I wondered, and then was sure I didn’t want to know. Things of consummate evil tend to be weirdly sentimental. But what they remember…let’s say it’s not a first kiss or a first love.
While Brother Death and his entourage walked up the steps and out of sight, nothing happened. I don’t know what I expected. An explosion of snakes with human faces, perhaps, rushing on me.
But nothing happened. I was left tied to the column. The pair of security golems he’d left behind stood still, watching. They were probably there to alert him when I was ready to talk.
In the vast underground space where every sign was magnified, there was almost no sound. Just a rustle and slither from across the area, and the sound of my breathing. The golems didn’t even have the decency of pretending to breathe. They stood absolutely still, like statues in Armani suits wearing their dark glasses,.
I wondered what they were wired to report, if Brother Death could see through their eye holes, or if they were only coded to activate at the scream declaring I wanted to talk. I wondered if I should say I wanted to talk. If I were untied, I could perhaps…
What? Without a gun or really anything but hands and teeth, how was I supposed to take out golems? But what was the alternative? I didn’t know where the artifact even was. I could feel the loss, a sense of being bereft. It wasn’t real or sane, like my feelings about losing Ray, but it was there all the same, worked upon by the ghost-Guardian’s sermon in my…was it a dream?
So, what did I have to offer?
Maybe, I thought, once the vampire who’d been my mother figured out that I couldn’t get out, maybe once she had Ray secure, she would come back for me.
And then I realized I was hoping for an evil vampire to save me, and I felt like screaming. I felt like screaming anyway. My son. I’d had my son in my arms! I hadn’t been able to keep him.
And now Susan had him.
I let out a scream, a howl of frustration and rage. The golems didn’t even react, which at least told me something. They didn’t react to just anything.
Back in the shadows, I saw a snake tail scuttle back into the deeper dark at my scream. I tried to remember: did they not like loud noises? Well, that was one way to keep them at bay, at least for a little while.
I needed to focus on getting out of here. Maybe the column was rough enough to wear thr
ough the rope, but not fast, and the rope was thick and looped a number of times.
Hell, what did I have but time? Gritting my teeth because rubbing the rope on the column meant rubbing my wrists on the column, I started moving them up and down as much as I could. Frankly it wasn’t much. Maybe a quarter of an inch. It was going to take forever.
Meanwhile…meanwhile, all I had to defend myself was my feet, and I didn’t even have shoes on anymore.
I caught movement from the corner of my eye. At first I thought it was one of those little hairball yippy dogs bounding my way, but then it said, “Cuddle Bunny!”
“Shhhhh.”
“Cuddle Bunny, I is mammal!” Under the furs I’d been wearing earlier, Mr. Trash Bags was in disguise.
He dashed up to me extruding little eyes on stalks that seemed to come from the middle of the now-filthy fur. At least now he was trying to whisper. “Cuddle Bunny must flee. Bad things come.”
Okay. This was more like it. I looked back toward the golems, but they were still staring off into space.
“Snake things. Many teeth, eating!”
“I’m tied up. Can you eat through these ropes?”
One tentacle stuck to the rope as if tasting it. “Material not digest.”
“Just biting through them is fine. How long?”
“Not meat, bone, or ground. Minutes to take.”
Sure, he’d eat the ears off somebody’s head, but ask him to eat through a nylon rope… I almost snapped at him that now wasn’t the time to be a picky eater, but then something man-sized moved in the shadows where I’d seen the snake tail.
“Go find me something to cut through these ropes. It looks like a bunch of houses fell down here during an earthquake; there’s got to be something.”
He looked at me very intently, then left, moving so fast he almost lost his disguise. I couldn’t tell where he was going, but I could see that my torturers were beginning to venture from the corner.
Mr. Trash Bags came right back. He held up, with a look of great triumph—an egg.
Shoggoths weren’t known for their high IQs, even those who hadn’t been frozen and mostly killed. “No, no, no. Cut. We’ve got to saw, or break it, or something. Cut. Go!”
More shapes were rising from the darkness of the sunken plaza. Bodies low to the ground, they came toward me, slithering. The barely audible sound made all the hairs on my arms stand up. One of them crossed beneath the feeble light.
They truly were horrendous to look at.
According to legends, lamias would often lure men with their charms to places where they could be killed. All I can say is they must be the kind of men who would find a hole in the ground attractive. Either that or there was some illusion at work which could make them look better. If so, that magic didn’t work on women, or they didn’t have it turned on right now, because more were entering the light, and they were ugly.
Imagine a great big snake, dirt-brown to unpleasantly moist black-grey, to patchy moist green—you have the right picture. But when you get to where the snake’s head should be, it starts to widen out and turn into a sort of human torso, still covered in snakeskin. Despite looking reptilian, they had what looked like human breasts. They didn’t have legs, but they certainly had arms, which were too long and ended in claws. Their faces ran the gamut of features that even a Roman mother couldn’t call beautiful, from hatchet noses to no noses at all, to overbroad foreheads to skulls that were downright pointy. And all of them—all of them—had beady little snake eyes and a mouth that more closely resembled a chicken ass than human lips.
And the reason their mouths looked like that—I knew from my training days and one of our teams’ report on an incident in Little Italy in Cleveland—was that inside there wasn’t anything even vaguely resembling a human mouth. Instead, it was like a tunnel, lined with sharp teeth all the way down their gullet.
They could expand their mouths like anacondas, to swallow something twice their size or more. By the time their prey made it through all those teeth, it had been cuisinarted to death.
And while their bites wouldn’t make you into one of them like a vampire, it would inject a weird narcotic poison into your bloodstream.
So if they were supposed to torture me into compliance, this was going to be a long slog of being in pain and not being able to react, and being in pain some more, world without end.
Moments later he was back, carrying a…cat. Which he held up to me hopefully while the stray cat hissed and spit.
“Damn it! Something that’ll cut through rope!”
“Mammal has claws.” Mr. Trash Bags explained.
The instant Mr. Trash Bags let go of the cat, it hit the ground running.
“Nonononono,” I screamed, as I saw the horrors drawing nearer. There were too many, too densely packed to count, but the closest one had her mouth slightly open and was drooling poison down her chest. It wasn’t even so much being tortured. Did I have to be tortured in an unspeakably gross way?
The cat ran straight to the stairs, past the lamias, past the golems, and out of sight. The tiny shoggoth curled one tentacle almost like he was shaking a fist. “Useless mammal!”
“Just go! Find something!”
As the lamias approached, they started making a snickering sound. Maybe it was just their breathing, but it made them seem even more unspeakably nasty. It was weird; as they kept their bodies close to the ground, the snake halves slithered, but they used their arms to crawl. It seemed a weird, disjointed, creepy method of getting around.
The nearest lamias used their arms to shove themselves upright. The snake parts curled, powerful muscles lifting them so that they could see me better. I got hit with a gagging stench, like the reptile house at the zoo crossed with rotting death. I realized that some of the lamias looked stretched out, tummies bulging, because they’d just got done feasting on the remains of everybody I’d shot upstairs. At least they were a little sluggish after the big dinner.
“Cuddle Bunny!” Mr. Trash Bags came bounding between the monsters, and this time, whatever treasure he’d found was dragging along the rocks behind him, making a metallic clanking noise.
Holy shit. Mr. Trash Bags had found a sword.
This wasn’t some rusty relic that had been lost down here for centuries. It looked new and rather decorative. One of the auction guests had probably been wearing it for the ceremonial flash, or maybe one of the Condition morons had thought it looked cool to bring a sword to a gunfight. I just hoped it was more than decorative and sharp enough to cut thick rope. Who knows? I was just glad to see he’d not brought me another alley cat.
“Yes! Perfect. Cut the ropes!”
The sword was much bigger than Mr. Trash Bags, but shoggoths have a great power-to-weight ratio. He stuck the blade against the pillar and started sawing back and forth, like an angry, furry buzzsaw.
The security golems were still on the stairs. Surely they’d heard Mr. Trash Bags by now, but they’d not sounded an alarm. If Brother Death could see through them, then he knew what was going on. Either he didn’t know, or he found my attempts at escape amusing and didn’t care enough to get involved.
The ropes frayed, then snapped.
“Flee, Cuddle Bunny!”
I rolled away from the pillar, struggling to get my hands free. The lamias slithered my way. Some were moving to the side to encircle me and cut off all avenues of escape. My wrists hurt and my hands tingled from the lack of circulation, but I managed to snatch the sword from Mr. Trash Bags.
A lamia swayed toward me. I slashed the sword hard across the chest. The glistening skin split open, revealing red muscle underneath. The lamia hissed and reared back.
“Let’s go,” I shouted at Mr. Trash Bags as I headed for the stairs.
The lamias swarmed.
I don’t know a damned thing about sword fighting. I had an adopted uncle who was a master at it, who’d tried to teach me stuff when I was little, but it hadn’t stuck. When it came to monster hunting
I’m a fan of shooting them from as far away as possible, and for me, that was really far. Up close and in your face isn’t my style.
But right then I didn’t have a whole lot of choice, so I just started swinging.
A lamia clawed at my face, but I lopped off two of her fingers on the way in. One swept around behind me and got a handful of my already torn dress. I spun the sword around and stabbed her right in the mouth. The blade sunk deep and I yanked it out of her cheek.
But then it was wall-to-wall snake flesh, and I had the terrible realization that the only reason they hadn’t ripped me to shreds was Brother Death had commanded them not to kill me. I slowly turned in a circle and saw that I was completely surrounded by hissing, twisting, snake women reaching for me.
Suddenly there were a bunch of gunshots from above.
All the lamias and I looked up to see that someone was coming down the stairs, blazing away with an automatic rifle at the two security golems. Whoever it was wasn’t much of a shot because he tore through what must have been a 30-round magazine and only hit the golems once or twice each. Still, rifle bullets do a number on hardened clay, so they burst into pieces and fireflies as they tumbled down the stairs.
I used the distraction to my advantage and started chopping at the lamias. I clipped one in the neck and she sprayed blood. I hit the next one in the bulging snake belly hard enough to split her wide open. So wide open in fact that the chewed-up cultist she’d eaten spilled out.
Mr. Trash Bags might not have been big on eating rope, but he had no problem eating lamias. Still cloaked in furs and squeaking his battle cry of “Consume” the little shoggoth bounced across the floor, latched onto a snake tail and attacked.
Claws ripped through my dress but missed my skin. I didn’t have a good angle to stab that one, so instead I punched her in her ugly face with the sword’s hand guard. That one lurched away, but I screamed as her friend’s teeth latched onto my shoulder.
Monster Hunter Guardian (ARC) Page 26