Hellbound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 6)

by J. A. Cipriano

  “You dare ride me?” the pteranodon cried loud enough for my ears to start ringing. His head spun nearly a hundred and eighty degrees to look at me, completely ignoring Jenna.

  She lashed out, slamming the barrel of the gun into Roma the pteranodon’s face. He wobbled sideways, eyes going glassy. I shifted my weight, trying to wrestle the dinosaur to the ground, and as I did, the fucker took to the air.

  Roma arced straight up toward the vaulted ceiling, and I knew exactly what was about to happen. He was going to smash me into ceiling whereupon I’d splatter like a bag of paint. Even worse, I couldn’t let go because the thirty-foot fall would probably kill me.

  “You’re really starting to piss me off!” I cried, calling upon my magic. Only as my tattoos started to flare, golden symbols along the creature’s wings lit up like a signal fire. The magic I’d called up vanished, slipping through my fingers like cobwebs and the sudden lack of it made me feel cold and empty. Fear shot through me. What the hell was I going to do?

  “Yeah, that’s not going to work, Mac,” the pteranodon mocked, banking sharply to drive me into the wall. I threw myself to the side at the last second, and my weight on his left wing sent the creature into a weird spiral, which helped me avoid getting a horrible case of road rash from the stucco.

  We rolled in the air off balance as the creature struggled to right itself. As he did, I hauled myself back up, cinched my knees around its torso like I was riding a bull, and decked Roma in the eye. He screeched in pain as he righted himself, causing me to nearly lose my balance.

  I reached out, grabbing hold of it with one arm and tried to hit him again, but Roma threw his head toward my blow. My knuckles impacted the bony ridge along its skull with an ear-splitting crack. Agony shot threw me. I wasn’t sure if I’d just broken my hand, but it sure as fuck felt like it.

  I gritted my teeth and tried to shove down the pain as we surged toward the ceiling, which was also when I realized the ceiling was covered in three-inch spikes. I hadn’t noticed them from the floor, but holy fuck that was going to hurt.

  I shut my eyes, desperately reaching out for the cat demon, but I couldn’t find her. It was like a chasm separated us, and I instantly knew that while I might be able to cross it given enough time, I couldn’t before I turned into a human pin cushion. Fuck.

  So much for plan A. It was time to go to Plan B. My eyes snapped open as I let go of the dinosaur. The sudden lack of weight on the dinosaur’s back caused Roma to shoot upward into the ceiling. He crashed into the spikes with a loud thud. An earsplitting screech of pain tore from his jaws as he ripped himself free. A snarl tore from his throat as blood rained down around me.

  As I tumbled through the air toward certain doom, I cursed his tough hide. The spikes had mostly bent under the force of the impact. I guessed that made sense since his tough hide had deflected bullets, but it hardly seemed fair.

  Fortunately, now that I wasn’t hugging the monster, my magic started to return. It trickled back into me like I’d just turned on a faucet. Slow at first, but more and more power filled me up with each passing second. It was a good thing too because as much as I wanted to be free of the pteranodon, I did not want to find out what would happen when I hit the ground far below.

  My heart hammered in my chest as Roma zoomed closer, his clawed feet extended toward me like a hawk. I wasn’t sure if it was going to grab me or slice me to ribbons, but I wasn’t waiting around to find out. I raised my hand, gathered all the power I’d regained, and pointed toward the corner in an effort to stop myself from getting splattered across the tile like a dropped egg.

  “Necto!” I cried, and the tattoos on my right arm lit up like a solar flare. Blinding crimson light cascaded off me as a thin tendril of red sinew burst from my palm and hit the ceiling with a thwip. I jerked to a stop so hard my shoulder damned near ripped from the socket.

  “Prepare to die, Mac Brennan!” Roma snarled, altering his dive and aiming straight for me as I hung there like a fleshy piñata.

  “Come get some!” I called back as I braced myself for impact because there was no way to avoid getting hit without dropping to my certain doom. I’d just have to make sure I made the deranged reptile pay for it.

  The creature opened its mouth and exploded into a cloud of emerald fire, blood, and blackened flesh that splattered me with gore. I wiped my eyes as I hung there covered in warm goo and craned my eyes toward the source of the fire.

  “Hey,” Van said from a trap door in the ceiling above me. Emerald Hellfire rippled around his body as he glared at me from high above. “Long time no see, Mac.”

  8

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked because I couldn’t get over my shock at seeing Van. After all, I’d smashed his skull in with a sledgehammer and seen his soul carried away by Death upon his pale horse. While it made sense he would be in Hell, since he’d been a Cursed like me, it didn’t make a lick of sense as to why he seemed to be helping me.

  Still, there he was half hanging out of the trapdoor in the ceiling above me and looking at me like we’d worked hundreds of jobs together. He was dressed like a member of the SWAT team, complete with machine gun and bulletproof vest, but instead of his vest saying SWAT, it had a large green V emblazoned across it.

  Emerald smoke seeped from the V as he gripped the black paracord line anchored somewhere in the darkness behind him with one black gloved hand and dropped through the ceiling. He zipped downward until he was staring me right in the face and grinned.

  “Where’d you think I’d go?” Van asked, raising an eyebrow at me. If he seemed angry about helping me or seeing me in general, it didn’t show. “Not to Heaven surely.”

  His grin widened in a way that made me think Hell hadn’t been unkind to him. Which made sense, at the end of the day, he had pledged allegiance to the demon prince Vassago. Judging by the way Hell seemed to play out down here, I was willing to bet he was higher up in the food chain than the average miscreant. It didn’t seem quite fair, but at the same time, I didn’t want to complain about it just then.

  I swallowed hard as I glanced from him to the ground below. Sam and Jenna were standing there holding Tommy guns and staring at us like they weren’t sure what to do. It made sense. Neither of them knew who Van was, nor that I’d killed him. For all they knew, the two of us were old friends. Was that why he was acting so cheery? So they wouldn’t shoot first and ask questions later? If it was, he was cleverer than I’d given him credit for.

  “Okay, fair point,” I said, wishing I had something to shoot him with, anyway. I wasn’t sure why he was here, but I doubted it was just to save me. “Why are you here?”

  “To rescue you. Speaking of which…” He offered me his arm. “Grab on to me, Princess. We need to get down and there isn’t a lot of time. The rest of Slade’s buddies are on their way here.”

  I took his arm because I wasn’t sure what else to do, and as I did, he gripped me around the waist hard with his left arm. He was surprisingly strong considering I’d chopped his arm off. As I released my tendril of magic, Van did something with his paracord, and we began to move down toward the floor, the rope zipping quickly through whatever apparatus kept it suspended above the ceiling tile.

  “Why are you rescuing me?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him as we touched ground. Admittedly, I felt a bit better because Jenna was covering him with her Tommy gun. She had a cut above her left eye, but seemed otherwise unaffected by the scuffle with the goons.

  “Because Vassago wants you alive.” Van shrugged, and a shadow played across his face. “He’s pretty much the only thing keeping me from eternal torment at this point, so what he wants, he gets.”

  That sort of made sense. Van had been Vassago’s leading Cursed. I guess, their agreement worked even after death. It was a somewhat sobering thought to think I’d be indebted to the psychotic cat lounging in my skull after I died, but then again, I had no plans on dying for a good while. I’d cross that bridge then.

&nbs
p; “We need to go,” Van said, glancing from me to Sam and back again. “We don’t have a lot of time.” As his eyes settled on Sam, a curious tick affixed his left eye. “We should leave him.” He gestured at Sam with the gun. “Something about him is off.”

  His comment sort of bugged me. For one, while Sam was a bit off, he’d been helping us no questions asked, and had been doing a good job of it. For two, I’d had a death match with Van. Of the two of them, his behavior was the one that was decidedly off.

  “No can do, boss,” I replied, pointing at Sam. “We made a deal.”

  “What’s with you and making deals with every douchebag you come across?” Van glared at me before waving the question away with his gun. “Actually, it’s not my problem.”

  “Sorry,” I offered with a shrug because I didn’t know what else to say. Van had a point. Part of my problem was I kept making deals to solve a short term problem, and it always wound up kicking me in the ass in the end. I was tired, and wanted to get through this, and at the end of the day, I needed to stop making deals.

  That said, sometimes I wasn’t sure what I could do to stop it. People had a way of showing up to offer help when I needed it, and that help always had to be paid back. It was how the world worked, whether you were tired of it or not.

  “Never mind, just don’t go making any more deals with the local fauna.” Van shook his head before muttering under his breath. “Fucking rank amateur.”

  He began to move, marching back the way we’d come which was exactly the opposite way we needed to go.

  “Um… we still need to kill Asmodai,” I said, and while my voice caused Van to glance at me over his shoulder, he didn’t stop moving.

  “I know, Mac.” He turned back the way he was facing, raised his gun, and put three scarlet bursts into the space beside the entryway. “But Asmodai isn’t here. This is what we call a trap.”

  There was a cry of pain and a fucking gargoyle fell out of nowhere and crashed to the ground in a smoking heap. It tried to reach out toward Van, but as it did, the fiery light in its stone eyes died.

  I’m not sure what stunned me more, the fact that there had been a giant stone golem sneaking up behind us or that we’d walked into a trap. Both seemed like par for the course, and both pissed me off. I did not have time to be waltzing into traps nor dealing with stupid monsters. I wanted to go home, dammit. Wasn’t there a boss I could shoot and then use his corpse to make a portal home or something?

  “Where is he?” Jenna asked, following after Van, which was somewhat annoying because I felt like I should be the leader, even if I had no fucking clue what to do. Still, following Van felt better than following Sam since Van was a known quantity. Sure we’d come to blows before, but if he said Vassago wanted me out, I believed him, and better the devil you know and all that.

  “Well, okay, he’s here, but we can’t get to Asmodai without the key, and I’m guessing you don’t have it.” Van stopped beside the door and tapped his foot anxiously, which was somewhat annoying.

  “Where do we get the key?” I asked, glancing at Sam who shrugged in a way that told me he had no idea there was a key, let alone where it was or how to get it.

  “Dracula,” Van said, his lips curling into a scowl.

  “You mean the Dracula?” I said, but before I could say more, Sam interrupted me.

  “We can’t go to the Belmont.” Sam swallowed hard. “For one it’s across town and firmly in Mammon’s territory, and for two, Drac’s not exactly fond of me.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked, looking from Van to Sam and back again.

  “We are going to the Belmont Casino,” Van said, ignoring Sam’s plight. “I’ve got a way.” He began moving again, evidently unconcerned with Sam’s plight. To be fair, I was unconcerned too. The guy was definitely off, and while I didn’t know Van that well, I knew two things. Vassago was a damned good ally to have, and Van was a professional. Sam was neither of those. Besides, what choice did we have? Fight through this place and get shutout by a demon lock?

  “I’m guessing we can’t just magically open Asmodai’s lock?” I asked as we disappeared into a narrow corridor and stopped before a service door, I hadn’t noticed before. That was the second time that’d happened. It was almost like all the mundane details of the place were designed to make your eyes flit over them like they weren’t there. Then again with all the extraordinarily attractive naked people around, it was a bit harder to pay attention than normal.

  “No,” Van said, pushing the door open to reveal a dank set of stone steps that led down into the darkness. “Your demon might be strong enough to do it, Mac, but I doubt you can call her down here.”

  My blood ran cold. How did he know that? So far, I’d been hoping it was a weird glitch or that she was taking a mini vacation, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was something else? I mean, normally I didn’t exactly see eye to eye with the cat, but at the same time she was really useful in a pinch.

  “How do you know that?” I asked, taking up the rear as we followed him down the stairs. I could see well enough given my Cursed vision’s propensity for darkness, but even still, every step I took made me feel like I was traveling into a lion’s den wearing a steak necklace.

  “It’s simple, really.” He shrugged. “See, I have had millennia to build my bond with Vassago, who is a pretty powerful demon in his own right. Our bond grew stronger when I came down here.” He let out a breath through his teeth. “I can’t feel Vassago at all. So if I can’t, I’m doubting you, who has known your demon only a week or so, can call yours.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, although I couldn’t keep the annoyance out of my voice. He’d gotten me to confirm something he’d only guessed about based on his own situation. I never should have said anything. I was being stupid and careless. Sigh.

  I rubbed my face with my hand in an effort to soothe the weariness from my temples, but it didn’t help. The only thing that would help would be escape. I just needed to focus on getting back to the real world. At least that place sort of made sense. Here, everything was weird and confusing.

  We continued in silence for a few minutes more, going ever downward while I tried desperately to call upon the cat in my head, but try as I might, I just couldn’t reach her. It was really starting to piss me off. Still, it made me feel better knowing Van couldn’t talk to his demon. I guess misery really does love company.

  Either way, as we moved downward, the air grew hot and dank, carrying with it the edge of swamp. No bugs had shown up, but from the smell of decaying rodent filling the air, I knew it couldn’t be long. Nothing says decay like a cloud of flies after all.

  “We’re here,” Van said, glancing back at us. His chest lit his face up in eerie green light as he gestured toward a solid steel door to his left. Actually, that wasn’t true. It may have been solid steel at one point, but it certainly wasn’t any longer. Now it was rust, rust, and more rust. Cobwebs clung to its surface, making me think no one had been down here in a long time.

  “Um, are you sure?” Jenna asked, staring at the door with a mixture of disgust and fear. “It doesn’t seem like anyone’s used it in a while…”

  “That’s the idea,” Van said, reaching out and twisting the latch on the door. It broke off in his hand, crumbling into red dust. He sighed audibly before pushing on it with his hand.

  The door screeched open on hinges that probably hadn’t ever been oiled and part of me was surprised, they didn’t crumble away too. A warm, fetid breath of air that smelled like the inside of a rancid meat locker hit us full on. It made my spidey sense go berserk just staring at it.

  “Wait, okay guys, I’m not sure why we’re trusting him,” Sam said, staring into the hole. It was so dark inside, I couldn’t see much of anything at all, even with my enhanced night vision, which was likely why Sam’s face had gone ashen. “But that tunnel is bad news.” He glanced at me, fear in his eyes. “I mean, can’t you smell that?”

  Sam’s fear threatened to latc
h onto me, mostly because I hadn’t seen the guy get scared yet. He was now though. Fortunately, before his concern could dig its claws into me, Van started to talk and his words were clear and confident.

  “Which is why Mammon’s guys won’t follow us in,” Van replied, cutting off the argument with a wave of his hand as he stepped through. The emblem on his chest cast flickering green light in front of him as he moved into the darkness. That was good. It meant if something came at us, it’d likely go for him first. Guess I was still a bit of a bastard. Who knew?

  “It’s not a good idea,” Sam said, looking at me to be the sane one. I was inclined to agree with him, but at the same time, I was Mac Brennan, and I wasn’t scared of a fucking tunnel. Maybe the things in the tunnel, but not the tunnel itself. Besides, if Van was willing to go in, so was I. What choice did we have? Stay here and wait for more pteranodons? Screw that.

  “You’re not a good idea,” I replied, pushing past him and stepping into the darkness. Jenna followed behind me, gun ready. The air pressed in all around me, making me feel like the shotgun I’d recovered after the fight with the pteranodon was way less than adequate.

  “This is a bad idea,” Sam reiterated as he stepped through the threshold. The door slammed shut behind him, leaving us in darkness unlike any I had ever experienced. It was so dark, the room actually seemed lighter when I shut my eyes. “I mean, come on, the door just shut behind us on its own.”

  “Not on its own,” said a raspy voice from above us. Horrible grating laughter filled the air. “Not by a long shot.”

  9

  The twelve-foot-long mutant alligator-man clinging to the roof of the sewer began to glow like his body was covered in pink effervescent algae. It was so bright against the backdrop of darkness, I could barely look at the thing. I wasn’t sure if that was part of its whole “attack people in the dark” thing or not, but either way, it was pissing me off. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but one thing was certain. I was going to kill it with extreme prejudice. If it wound up being a friend, I’d send flowers.