by Karen Chance
Or perhaps not.
John had a second to see the man go down, covered in flames; to see the great, green distraction on the battle field scream and writhe and fall; to see the field itself swirl strangely beneath him.
And then he was falling, too—
Chapter Forty-Three
S traight into hell.
John hit the ground, rolled into a crouch, and stared up wildly—
At the same Shadowland marketplace he’d visited with Dorina. But this time, she was nowhere in sight. Unfortunately, that wasn’t true of the towering monster standing by the fountain in the middle of the square.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Dagon said, the childhood taunt somehow terrifying in his voice, which had always sounded as if three people were speaking at once. There had been a time when John had wondered whether the creature had extra vocal cords or was just possessed. Now, he simply wanted it to stop.
It didn’t stop.
“As you can see, this time I came myself,” Dagon informed him. “Time for round two.”
Bite me, John thought savagely, and stared around, looking for help.
There didn’t appear to be any.
His only advantage was that he had landed behind some crates stacked in front of a shop. It wasn’t much cover and there were no useful distractions, since the square appeared to be utterly deserted. Even the birds were gone, leaving nothing but cold stone, trickling water, and slightly fluttering awnings.
Because this wasn’t hell, John realized. It was the inside of his head, a mental arena made for slaughter, just like the last one. Where he’d demonstrated that he didn’t know how to fight this way!
Fuck!
“You’re supposed to be dead,” he said, using a spell to throw his voice to the other side of the square, trying to buy time.
Dagon whirled, the eruptions framing his spine suddenly fluttering with excitement, because he thought he had him. But the square was small, and the memory didn’t extend far beyond it. It wouldn’t take long for him to realize he’d been duped.
Think! John told himself. What had Dorina said? That it was possible to die here, from having your strength sapped every time you had to heal. To the point that, eventually, you’d expire from exhaustion.
And that helped him how? The last time he and Dagon fought, he’d won because of a surprise attack with magic the demon lord didn’t know, giving him a momentary advantage. Dagon had been dead before he had a chance to counter. But even assuming that John could replicate that here, it wouldn’t be enough.
How long would it take to sap the soul of a former council member, one of the most powerful creatures in existence?
At a guess?
Too long.
“Oh, but I am dead,” Dagon said, the hugely muscled arms spreading out. “You did your work well, son of Rosier. “
The back tentacles came up along with the arms, forming a cowl around the snake-like head. And making him look for all the world like a hooded lizard posturing to appear larger. As if he needed the help, John thought grimly.
“You look healthy enough,” he said, this time throwing his voice at a window on the tallest building to the left. He hoped that Dagon would attack it and give him a few more seconds to think. But, although the huge head turned abruptly in that direction, the creature itself paused, before heading back John’s way again.
And this time, he had company.
“I received some help, no thanks to you,” Dagon said, the different octaves of his voice making him sound like a Greek chorus, all on his own. “You left my body dead and my spirit weakened, to the point that I would have been fodder had I stayed in the hells. I fled to earth to replenish my resources, but when I attacked a woman—a human, a nobody—a knight of the Silver Circle came to her rescue. As weak as I was, I failed to fight him off, and they imprisoned me within their dungeon to await the high council’s pleasure.”
Dagon bared long, yellowed fangs. “I can only assume their pleasure was to leave me to rot, slowly eating myself over the centuries, for they never came.”
“But someone else did,” John said, without throwing his voice this time.
Dagon paused again, and so did the blond at his side. John guessed that he was some sort of mental projection, because he only moved when Dagon did, and always kept his pale blue eyes fixed straight ahead. He looked like a walking mannequin, or a puppet with no visible strings.
Only John had never seen a puppet that made his skin crawl.
“A necromancer with an unusual skill set,” Dagon agreed. “He had a job he needed help with, and offered anything I wanted in return.” The hideous face stretched into what might, very charitably, have been called a grin. “Want to guess what I asked for?”
“My head on a platter?” John said, again not throwing his voice. Except for a thin echo that he let bounce off a wall to the right.
Dagon whirled and stalked over there, leaving his creepy friend behind. John wished he had a friend in the room. He wished that fervently.
“Motherfucker!”
Dagon spun and he and John stared at the newcomer suddenly standing in the middle of the square. One who didn’t look like another puppet, but real and solid and clearly furious. Maybe because he was soaked, with more water running off him than was trickling down the fountain.
Or maybe because he’d just landed in hell.
“Caleb?” John said, in disbelief.
“Fuck!” Caleb said, although John didn’t think he was talking to him. Not with a literal monster leaping for him—
And missing, but not because he was slow. Dagon moved with lightning speed for such a massive beast, but Caleb simply wasn’t there anymore. He’d vanished, between one eyeblink and the next, the way magic simply didn’t allow.
And then he grabbed John from behind, right as Dagon looked up from the building he’d just demolished with his face.
And leapt for them both.
Which would have been fine, except that John couldn’t dematerialize!
But he still had a few tricks up his sleeve, including one that had worked the first time he and Dagon had fought. He leapt out of his skin in all directions, a hundred Johns sprinting everywhere. Including the real one heading for an abashed looking Caleb now hiding behind a peddler’s cart.
“Sorry,” Caleb whispered.
“Talk later; run now!”
They ran.
John finally stopped in an alley, although not by choice. Behind him, Dagon was systematically destroying his avatars, and the entire marketplace to boot. But John had nowhere to go, and no way to do it if he did. The scene kept pulsing at the edges, his legs kept threatening to give way, and his stomach kept rolling as if he was still flying about a battlefield on pigeon back!
Which for all he knew, maybe he—
—was, swooping and dodging near one of the triad’s great platforms. He looked around, shocked and confused, as rain doused him, as bullets grazed him, and as lightning shook him, hitting so close that it raised goosebumps on his flesh and sent electric fingers crawling over his skin. The hell?
He was given no time to figure it out. A shadow jumped for him from the back of a speeding vehicle, and he released a spell—without telling himself to do so. A mass of ashes blew away on the wind, whilst below, the madly burning party barge plowed into the platform. It caused the whole thing to lean precariously to one side, sending plunder and people sliding, and the great wooden mass slinging around fast enough to sweep a dozen vehicles from the sky—
“John!” Somebody shook him.
He snapped back to the marketplace, to see Caleb staring at him. “You okay?”
“Do I fucking look okay?” John whispered viciously.
“No.” Caleb glanced around. “Where are we?”
“Inside my head.”
“What?”
John struggled to get his breath back. He was winded, why he didn’t know. Maybe because he was fighting two battles at the same time!
And losing both of them.
“Dagon has been sending assassins . . . to attack me mentally . . . ever since you stopped him from attacking me physically,” he told Caleb.
“I did that?”
“You don’t remember?”
The dark head shook. “I don’t remember much before I hit the harbor, and by then I had more to worry about than—”
“You can’t hide forever, war mage!” Dagon yelled, over the sound of splintering wood. “Come out and face me, or I’ll tear you apart from the inside, the way you once did to me!”
John hesitated, and then started forward, before Caleb caught his arm. “What are you doing?”
“Going out fighting. I’m not going to stand here and let him rip my mind apart!”
“He isn’t ripping anything,” Caleb said, shooting Dagon a look. “He’s nothing but the battery. The real problem is down at the wharf—”
—which was virtually deserted. There was a broad expanse of wet concrete, lashed by rain; wildly crashing waves that overtopped the pilings on the storm-tossed pier, sending foaming fingers running across the planks; and a boiling sky backlit by the pink striations of the phase that surrounded the city, like a perpetual Arora Borealis. And . . . something else.
Something huge.
It looked to be the size of a submarine, but John couldn’t see it clearly because it was almost submerged in the troubled water. Until it oozed some kind of gelatinous appendage up onto land, which pulsed and grew and morphed into the shape of a woman. A beautiful, naked woman with hair the color of pale seaweed and eyes like molten lava.
Which would have been more impressive if she hadn’t still been tethered to that . . . thing . . . by a throbbing umbilical cord!
“John!”
“I’m fine!” John snarled.
Caleb gave him the look that deserved. Neither of them was fine. And they weren’t going to be if he didn’t stay in the here and now!
“What’s down at the wharf?” John said harshly. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about what we found in that cave,” Caleb said, glancing over his shoulder because Dagon was getting closer. “The one you dragged me into in Cornwall, all those years ago.”
John just looked at him. “What?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember! With the salt and the crazy bird thing, and how we fought after it took over my mind and you damned near killed me? I ended up with a broken leg, raving like a lunatic, and you had to lash me to your back while you rock climbed out of there?”
John stared some more. “No?”
“Damn it, John! This is no time to get amnesia!”
John didn’t have amnesia. He had no idea what Caleb was talking about or what he was even doing here. Or if he was real, and not some desperate hallucination his fevered brain had dreamed up because he needed backup!
“You poke me again and I swear,” Caleb said, when John raised a finger. “Listen—”
But John wasn’t listening. John was running, because Dagon’s campaign to turn the marketplace to rubble had just gotten too close for comfort, and it was that or die. Or whatever happened when your mind collapsed from the inside, and he really didn’t want to find out!
Fortunately, there were a few dozen of his doppelgangers still running around, looking as crazed as he probably did. He burst through the rubble following the collapse of the latest building, straight into a mass of them, and Dagon chased the wrong one. And grabbed him, slamming him against a stone wall, over and over and over—
“Why are you just standing there?” Caleb hissed, as John watched his own head burst apart like a melon. Until his friend caught his arm, and they sprinted across the square into Archaeus’ warehouse.
The slimy Goremish elder wasn’t at his counting table, or anywhere in sight. And the cages inside the door were standing open and empty. But something about the place jogged John’s memory, and he grabbed Caleb back.
“What did we find in that cave?”
“I have no idea. But whatever it is, it had a mother, and she’s pissed.”
Just when John had thought something was about to make sense. “What?”
“Look, try to follow me, ‘cause we don’t have a lot of time here. Something weird was holed up in that cave, but keeping a low profile. Taking food but from a large enough area that nobody noticed, or bothered to report it if they did. The creature built up a surplus—that larder we found—‘cause she knew she’d be sidelined for a while—”
“Sidelined?”
“Let me tell this! She knew she’d be sidelined because she was pregnant, and wouldn’t be able to hunt for a while after she had the baby. She intended to hunker down there with it, which she did, but got caught anyway. Maybe she sensed a threat and went out to check on it—I don’t know. I got most of this from her mind while she was yelling at me, and it was fragmented, you know?”
No. John didn’t know. Caleb brushed it away.
“Point is, the Circle stumbled across her and put her in lockdown when nobody claimed her. The demons didn’t want her, and neither did the fey. But somebody else did.”
“The recent raid on Stratford HQ,” John said. “It was after two people?”
“Two creatures, and no. It was after her, because of her mind control abilities. But the guys sent in to liberate her stumbled across Dagon’s ghost or spirit or whatever by accident, and the necromancer running this show realized that he was the missing piece of the puzzle. Your buddy out there—”
“Not my buddy.”
“—shut up—is providing the power to amplify her signal, letting it reach many more people than should be possible. What was done to me in that cave has been done to the Corps, not to mention half the vampires in Hong Kong!”
“I noticed.” John thought for a moment, which would have been easier without the crashing, yelling and general destruction going on outside.
Focus, he told himself harshly, and his grip on Caleb’s arm tightened. “You said her baby was the creature we found in the cave?”
Caleb nodded. “It was left alone when the Circle grabbed mamma, who I guess was knocked out and popped in a pod before she could tell anybody about it. Or maybe she didn’t trust us, I don’t know. But the result was a days’ old kid being left behind to fend for self, which it didn’t know how to do.”
“So, after it ate everything in the larder—”
“It started venturing outside, eating anything—and anyone—it came across, resulting in us getting sent in after it. Weird thing is—” Caleb broke off as most of the fountain came crashing through the wall, letting in a flood of dirty light.
“What’s the weird thing?” John demanded, shaking him.
Caleb turned wide eyes back to him. “I—I can’t remember what happened to it. She kept screaming at me for killing her child. That’s what knocked me the rest of the way out of the enthrallment. I’d been fighting it off, but was still stumbling around in the fog until I got to the wharf and she took the memories from my mind—”
“But not all of them,” John said. Because he did remember something. Vaguely, in fits and starts, but yes. He and Caleb had fought in that cave, and Caleb had ended up with a broken leg—along with a concussion that had left him raving.
As a result, he hadn’t seen what had happened to the creature.
He didn’t know that John had brought it here.
But he had, probably to ask Goremish to identify it, as there weren’t too many creatures the slaver didn’t know. That’s what he’d left at his father’s house, where it had destroyed the wine cellar. And then he’d—
Pain arced across John’s mind, why he didn’t know since it had been empty anyway! He didn’t know what had happened then, or what he’d done with the creature after Archaeus got finished poking it. But he knew one thing.
“She knew I was there ‘cause she’s in my head,” Caleb was saying. “She’s the reason we’re all linked mentally. I could feel
her rage, and something about being the last of her kind, now that we murdered her kid—”
“We’re all linked?”
Caleb nodded. “I’m linked to her, she’s linked to Dagon, and now he’s linked to you, after invading your mind.”
That would explain how he’d been able to see the pier, John thought. He wasn’t seeing it—Caleb was. And passing the image along their strange connection. Which didn’t explain how he was able to see the battlefield, since Caleb wasn’t there, but he’d worry about that later—if there was a later.
“I’m still at the pier physically,” Caleb said, “but you somehow drew me in here—”
“And now I’m sending you back. Here’s what I want you to do.”
Chapter Forty-Four
C aleb vanished, Dagon ripped open the wall, and for the first time all day, John smiled. “Sauce for the goose.”
“What?”
An entire field of rubble, the one Dagon had provided when he tore the market apart, suddenly leapt off the ground. And flew at the demon lord, battering him with everything from pebbles and shards of glass to boulders half as big as he was, one of which sent him staggering. And then falling, when John immediately curved it back around.
And slammed it into his face.
The huge body hit down hard enough to make the remaining rubble jump and dance, and to send John stumbling into a wall. But he stumbled in relief, because this was working. Dorina had needed combat skills to fight in an arena not her own. He didn’t. This was his brain; he controlled the environment here, as he’d demonstrated when he’d accidentally brought Caleb in.
And as he showed once again, when he called for the coup de grace.
Dagon roared and jumped back to his feet, only to pause when the light around them suddenly dimmed. Not because of the heavy dust clouds swirling through the air, but because of the Camazotz, rising up behind him. Not one, but hundreds, their leathery wings so dense that they blocked out the sky.