by E.J. Stevens
“If we survive this, you’re going to tell me the real reason you tagged along for this trip,” I said.
Torn flashed me a grin, batting his eyelashes.
“Can’t an ally come along to help?” he said.
“Not when that ally is you,” I said.
“This is no time for discussion,” Ceff said.
I nodded, took one last deep breath, and ran toward the baphomet, yelling and waving my arms. The creature turned hungry eyes my way, saliva dripping from razor sharp teeth. If Torn didn’t follow through with the plan, I was likely to lose my heart real soon.
Leaving my heart in Tech Duinn was not an option. I was not going to end up the title of a country western song.
Ceff ran toward the baphomet in the opposite direction, and the creature spun, red eyes glowing with rage. Apparently, we hadn’t been forgiven for the injuries we’d recently inflicted. That was great for drawing the beast’s focus. Now if only Torn would take advantage of the situation.
It’s all fun and games until someone loses a heart.
The baphomet’s claws were mere inches away from my chest when I ducked and rolled between his legs. I kept my eyes open, terrified of touching the thing’s tail and risking a vision. Sadly, a vision was not the only thing risking my sanity. That tail was not the only thing hanging between the baphomet’s legs.
Forneus always claimed that demons were well endowed. I thought he’d been bragging. Maybe if I’d believed him, I could have avoided getting an up close and personal look at the baphomet’s junk. The fact that the thing was barbed made me glad the creature only wanted to eat our hearts.
“You have only seen him hungry,” Cora said, her spectral form appearing to my right. “When he is sated, he plays with his food.”
Damn the psychic ghost.
“Not helping,” I said through clenched teeth.
With a shudder, I rolled to my feet. Cora had disappeared, but her words rang through my ears, twisting my gut. We needed to take this thing down before it got any ideas.
Once on my feet, I dodged left and right, not wanting to provide a stationary target for the baphomet to focus his rage. Bile rose in my throat as I circled the creature, eyes straining to locate Ceff and Torn in the choking cloud of ash.
A scream had me sprinting past the baphomet. Heart racing, I ducked beneath a leathery wing. Please, please, please let Ceff be okay. In that moment, I swore that if Torn had run off and left us to die, I’d drag his furry ass to Hell with me.
I imagined the worst until I caught sight of Ceff screaming and waving his trident. I smiled as it quickly became apparent that Ceff was only yelling curses, not screaming in pain as I’d feared, in an effort to hold the creature’s attention.
He pointed to something climbing onto the baphomet’s shoulder, and I gasped. The cat sidhe hadn’t abandoned us, after all. Torn had managed to climb up the baphomet’s back, his progress previously hidden from me by large, leathery wings.
“Hey, big guy,” I yelled. “Over here!”
I grabbed a glass vial of holy water and lobbed it at the baphomet. It hit below the belt, not that the demon was wearing one, and from the shrieking I guessed that the vial had released its contents on a particularly sensitive part of the baphomet’s anatomy.
Now it was up to Torn. If broken glass and acid burns between the legs didn’t keep the creature distracted, nothing would.
I held my breath, bracing for a shit storm of retaliation, when Torn popped the cap off a vial with his teeth, and shoved it in the baphomet’s ear. He punched the vial, jamming it further into the ear canal, and launched himself to the ground. He landed on his feet, a feral grin tugging at his lips.
Torn was one scary dude when he wasn’t trying to screw anything that moved. Thankfully, that wasn’t often. If I didn’t see that look on his face again, it would be too soon.
The baphomet thrashed, stretching his chains as he clawed at his head, and I heard the distinct sound of snapping metal. Torn’s smile slipped, and a cold knot of fear gripped my insides.
“Run!” Ceff screamed, grabbing my arm.
I didn’t even try to push him away, or chastise him for touching me. Visions from Ceff’s past were the least of my worries with an enraged baphomet hot on our tail. In fact, we were blasted by heat as wings fanned the flames rising from beneath the creature’s feet.
The flames weren’t the only things rising.
Cloven feet no longer touched the ground as the baphomet’s wings took advantage of his newfound freedom. I stumbled, watching wide eyed over my shoulder as we ran.
“Ivy?” Ceff asked, examining me for injury while on the move.
“I’m out of holy water,” I said.
I blinked up at him, tears making his face blur. The fog of ash was so thick that I could barely see him shake his head.
“We must run,” he said, tugging on my sleeve.
I hurried to keep pace with him, but he was pureblood fae, not a half-breed like me. He also wasn’t searching the gloom for our friend.
“Torn?” I asked.
“I do not know,” he said, lips in a hard line.
Bile rose once again, and I had to swallow hard to keep from puking. A blast of wind and heat had me looking upward, adding to the urge.
The baphomet, who’d clawed his head so viciously that the bone lay bare on one side, came racing toward us. Now that it was free and its focus was once again on us, there was little hope of escape.
“Don’t stop now, Princess,” Torn said.
Eyes with slit pupils and a lopsided grin appeared a few feet away. I smiled, never so happy to see the cat sidhe, but a frenzied shriek had me following his advice.
We ran, but instead of having our hearts carved from our chest, the hot wind at my back ceased. I glanced to the sky, mouth going dry as realization set in. The baphomet’s wings had stopped beating, and its face was frozen in a rictus of pain.
The holy water had finally reached the creature’s brain, but I wasn’t celebrating. Not when a massive demon was about to plummet to the ground, and we were standing squarely in its drop zone.
“Run!” I screamed.
“Thought that’s what we were already doing, Princess,” Torn said, but he lost his smug look when he realized our predicament.
We ran, muscles burning against the strain, until the ground heaved, knocking us off our feet. The world spun, confusing my sense of up and down until I ended up hitting the ground face first.
I lifted my head and wiped an arm across my face, squinting as my eyes darted back and forth searching for Ceff and Torn. An enormous claw tipped finger was jammed into the ground a few feet from my head, and I scrambled away on my hands and knees. Mab’s bloody bones, that had been close. But had my friends also been so lucky?
“Ceff?” I asked.
My voice squeaked, turning quickly to a ragged cough. I told myself that the tears running down my cheeks were also due to having a face full of ash, but I knew better. I hadn’t been looking for love when I met Ceffyl Dwr. I never dared to imagine a life with someone else to share it with. But now that we were together, and Ceff had popped the question, I couldn’t bear the thought of going on without him.
“Ivy?” Ceff asked. “Are you hurt?”
I spun, a different kind of tears falling from my eyes, as I fell on my butt, grinning like an idiot.
“I think she hit her head,” Torn said. “She looks deranged.”
“Look who’s talking,” I said.
And then I started to laugh hysterically, holding my sides when the laughter turned into a coughing fit. Maybe that fall really did break my brain.
“Ivy?” Ceff asked again, approaching me slowly.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just give me a moment.”
The laughing subsided, making me fully aware of every bruise and aching muscle. I also couldn’t ignore the ash that had managed to get into parts of me I didn’t even know existed.
I ran a tongue over the
grit coating my teeth and grimaced. I was thankful that it wasn’t triggering visions, but there’s nothing pleasant about having the ashes of dead people in your mouth.
“Oberon’s eyes,” I groaned.
I spit, tamping down the anxiety that battled to take over. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I became aware of just how close I’d come to losing myself to an avalanche of visions. If the ashes of dead people covered my skin, and coated the inside of my ears, eyes, and mouth, while I was anywhere but Tech Duinn, I’d be buried by those visions right now.
I placed a hand on my stomach, and took slow, steadying breaths.
“Where the Hell is Cora?” I asked.
I was dimly aware that if the ghost didn’t stick to our bargain, we’d gone through all of this for nothing. Since that was too depressing to think about, I focused on what we needed to do next.
A woman’s form stepped through the baphomet’s body, trailing a few wide-eyed newly dead. Those two had picked a bad day to end up in Tech Duinn. Not that it’s ever a good day to die.
“I imagine you require the location of the Dark One,” Cora said.
I leveled Cora with a cold stare, and nodded. She waved a hand, and ash swirled, making me blink. When I opened my eyes, a castle had emerged, drawbridge covered moat and all.
Torn whistled, and I swore.
“Follow these three into the castle, and then wait for the Dark One in the main hall,” she said to the other ghosts.
“You aren’t coming with us?” I asked, eyebrows raised. “I thought that was your job.”
Cora smiled, and gestured to the baphomet’s corpse. A slithering sensation worked its way up my spine, and I shivered. Were her teeth always that sharp?
“Not anymore,” she said.
The ghost thrust a hand through the baphomet’s chest, and though her body was spectral, her hand held an enormous heart when she removed it. Cora’s smile widened showing off her very pointy teeth, then unhinged her jaw. I knew what was coming next, but I couldn’t look away.
Cora ate the baphomet’s heart, and licked blood from her now solid looking fingers. As she preened, she flexed her hand, and tossed the axe she’d been holding to the ground.
“I no longer need that,” she said in response to Torn’s questioning look.
She eyed him up and down, as if considering the new possibilities open to her now that she was flesh and blood. Before the two of them acted out any fantasies, I stepped between them.
“We have to get going,” I said. “Duty calls.”
A man appeared to my left, and Cora smiled.
“Yes,” she said, licking her lips. “Yes it does.”
Chapter 19
“Can’t believe Cora just bargained her way into the baphomet’s job,” Torn said with admiration.
The ghost chick had balls all right. Although now that she’d been promoted to Donn’s guardian, I wasn’t so sure what she was anymore. Ghosts aren’t flesh and blood. Just ask the one’s trailing us like lost lambs.
I just hope I wasn’t unwittingly leading them to the slaughter.
Kaye’s books hadn’t said much about Donn, other than the fact that he was the Celtic god of the dead and he often went by the name, Dark One. I half expected a skeletally thin white guy holding a scythe in one hand and wearing a black, hooded cloak. If so, he’d fit the castle that now stood before us.
I’d been right about that at least. The castle loomed from a mountain peak that I could have sworn hadn’t been there when we arrived in Tech Duinn. The place was made of dark stone, though it may have just looked that way due to the ash that coated everything in this god forsaken place. As if to add to the overall dreariness, someone had strung bodies from a gibbet that hung in front of the drawbridge, and carrion birds pecked at something impaled on a pike that rose from one of the castle’s turrets. Dracula certainly would have felt at home here.
I’d have laughed if I didn’t still have a lungful of corpse ash. Instead, I let out a wheezing snort. Ceff raised an eyebrow, and I waved him off.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just so…predictable.”
“Since when is the belly of a whale predictable?” he asked.
“Wait…is that what you see?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said, eyebrows drawing together as he studied my face.
“Look, I’m not crazy,” I said. “I just don’t see a whale. I think we see whatever we expect to see.”
“That explains the harem,” Torn said. “I thought it was too good to be true.”
Ceff’s lip twitched, and I shook my head. I guess we all had different expectations for a death god’s lifestyle. Hopefully, seeing different versions of Donn’s home wouldn’t impede our search for the portal to Faerie.
“At least a castle is likely to have a hearth,” I said. “Come on.”
I started toward the bridge, but stopped when I realized Ceff and Torn weren’t with me. I turned to see them both staring wide-eyed over my shoulder.
“Well I’ll be…that’s just freaky,” Torn said.
“For once, I agree with you,” Ceff said.
“What’s freaky?” I asked, hoping the castle hadn’t sprouted teeth and claws.
“As soon as you said castle, that’s what it became,” Torn said.
“It still smells like whale,” Ceff said, wrinkling his nose.
Okay, that was freaky.
“So long as we’re all seeing the same thing,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck as I turned to examine the castle. “Does it look like something out of a bad horror movie?”
“If bad horror movie castles are shrouded in shadow, decorated with decaying body parts, and perched dramatically on a mountain peak, then yes,” Ceff said.
“I much preferred the harem,” Torn muttered.
We made it onto the drawbridge, up the winding path, and onto Donn’s doorstep without incident. I’d have preferred a fight. My shoulders had crawled up to my ears, my hands hurt from the stranglehold I had on my weapons, and if I didn’t relax soon, I’d likely grind my teeth to dust.
No one can accuse me of being an optimist.
I’d expected some kind of guardian beast to rise up out of the moat. When we made it safely across the bridge without so much as a burble from the inky water, I’d become convinced that the crows would descend to tear at our flesh and peck out our eyes. Even the entrance had taken on an ominous gleam.
That might have had something to do with the gargantuan portcullis. The metal had sharp, pointy tips, not that it needed them. The gate itself could crush our bodies into exploding tubes of meat jelly.
To say I didn’t want to step under that portcullis was an understatement.
“I smell brownies,” Torn said.
“If that’s some kind of euphemism, I might just kill you,” I said through clenched teeth.
“I smell it too,” Ceff said.
“Do you mean brownies, as in fae?” I asked.
“No,” they said in unison.
I frowned, not overly eager to suck in a lung full of corpse ash, but inhaled deeply. My sense of smell wasn’t as good as a pureblood fae, but I had better olfactory skills than a human. I dragged the air across my tongue, and started to salivate.
“Definitely brownies,” I said. “Anyone else thinking trap?”
Only a very sick individual would try to lure us into his lair with evil brownies. Sadly, we didn’t have much choice. We needed to get inside, find Donn’s hearth, and get the hell out of Dodge.
“Do we care?” Torn asked, eyebrows lifting.
“No, I guess we don’t,” I said.
I eyed the portcullis, gripped my blades, and ran. I let out a shaky breath when I made it into the adjoining courtyard without being crushed to death, impaled, or magically vaporized.
Ceff and Torn were close behind, but the ghosts who’d followed us so far, hesitated on the threshold.
“Can we, um, cross over?” one of the women asked.
The o
ther woman bit her lip, stifling a nervous giggle. Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’d already done some crossing over today. Not that I envied their afterlife. I also had no idea what would happen to them when they entered Donn’s castle.
“Maybe you should wait for an invitation from the Dark One himself,” I said.
“That’s good advice.”
The voice came from behind me, and I whirled to see a portly man with rosy cheeks and a white beard. His eyed twinkled, and his lips twitched. If he wasn’t emanating so much power, I’d have suspected he was a life sized garden gnome, or a department store Santa Claus.
Now that was a terrifying thought.
I, for one, didn’t want the Celtic god of the dead coming down my chimney on Christmas Eve. I shivered, suddenly glad our loft didn’t have a fireplace. But speaking of fireplaces…
“Donn?” I asked.
He nodded, and I swallowed hard.
“We’ve helped to deliver these newly dead souls to your door,” I said. “In return, we’d like a look at your hearth.”
Torn snorted, and I resisted the urge to stomp on his foot.
“Then come in,” Donn said, his belly rising up and down as he chuckled. The man was way too jolly for a death god. “You too, newlings.”
Donn waved his hand, and the ghosts shuffled their feet. Ducking their heads, they entered the Dark One’s house single-file. We all followed Donn through an archway that led from the courtyard into a cavernous room that must have been the castle’s Great Hall.
“Go to the kitchen, children, and tell Cook that we’ll be taking our tea in the library,” he said.
Donn pointed to a corridor to our right, and the ghosts hurried off, chattering and gesturing at the castle’s interior. The place was impressive, without a speck of ash marring its gleaming surfaces. After the gloomy plain and shadowy mountainside, I’d expected flickering candlelight, groaning coffins, and cobwebs.
I shook my head. I’d been spending too much time with vampires.