Demon Demon Burning Bright, Whisperings book four

by Linda Welch

  “Hm,” Gia hummed. “It will have to do.”

  “Fine.” I slammed the helmet on my head and stood next to him. He hiked an eyebrow at me.

  “I’m riding with you. Any objections?” I would rather ride with him than draped along Gia’s back. I could sit upright and keep at least a few inches between us.

  “The length of your body crushed to mine, your arms about me? Far from it.”

  “Crushing will not be involved.”

  Gia shook her head slightly as if bemused as she pushed her bike to the plain, weathered wood door. Following her, Chris winked at me. They paused there, eyeing me expectantly, so I went past them, turned the knob and pushed the door open. It swung in silently.

  The street was miraculously empty at that precise moment. I stood aside and Gia and Chris quickly rolled their bikes through. I followed and closed the door with a gentle push.

  The room seemed smaller with the two bikes in there, and colder. We faced the Gate, entrance to the Way, the same I took to Bel-Athaer, the one which led me to the middle of a Gelpha city.

  With a jog of her head, Gia indicated I should open the Gate. I pulled in a steadying breath. My pulse pounded in my ears, the sound of surf on the shore. Did I really want to go charging off to Bel-Athaer with a Dark Cousin and an egotistical Gelpha?

  Oh well, another shit-crazy thing to add to my list.

  I pushed the door and held it open. Gia went through first, then Chris. On the other side, in the corridor, I let the door close and the soft click sounded final.

  I had to get my stupid imagination under control.

  Gia swung a long, slender leg over the bullet bike and started it up.

  The roar about knocked me back. The Way vibrated. I thought the ceiling would come down. Chris straddled the Harley. He spoke but I couldn’t hear with my hands over my ears. “What?”

  He patted the seat.

  They meant to drive along the Way? They were crazier than me! Sure, the corridor was wide and straight, but one deviation and we’d hit the walls.

  I shook my head. He nodded his. Gia took off with a squeal of rubber.

  Chris engaged the stand and got off the Shovelhead. The roar of Gia’s bike still rattled the corridor as she dwindled in the distance. He took my wrists and pulled my hands away from my ears. “Tiff, you have to get on the bike,” he said, mouth so close his breath washed over my ear.

  “We can’t drive along here!”

  “The only way to travel, Sweetness.” He let go my wrists and mounted the Harley.

  I grumbled to myself, but got behind him. Letting him come along had better be worthwhile. I rested my hands lightly on his shoulders and made sure our bodies didn’t touch. I would rather we had a couple of feet between us, but the seat didn’t allow that.

  He brought the Harley to life, gunned it and started off. Then the devil pulled a wheelie. I squeaked and dug my fingers in his shoulders as I began to slip backward. I’d have punctured flesh if I wore my nails long.

  The wheel thudded down before gravity tore me off the bike. In a death-defying move, I let go his shoulders and spread my palms on his chest, which pulsated beneath my hands. Was he laughing? Smug bastard.

  The passageway became a blur, so I closed my eyes.

  I relaxed after a minute or two. Warmth radiated through me. It seemed I had not felt that special demon heat in an age.

  The bike shot into thin air with no warning. We soared over turf and dirt four feet below, then the front wheel dropped and we hit with a crunch which went through my body from ankles to the top of my head. I clung to Chris as I bucked off the seat; a second later I rammed down so hard I thought I broke my tailbone. Dust burst from the ground and enveloped us. We skidded, the bike keeling over, but Chris wrestled it upright. We slalomed twenty feet before he brought it under control.

  We pulled up beside Gia. She sat up on her bike, removed her helmet and shook her hair to send it flying about her face. Her grinning face.

  The gleam in her eyes, the laughter in them, a flush to her cheeks. She was having way too much fun.

  My arms tightened on Chris as I saw we were mere feet from the uneven rim of a vast, mile-wide gorge.

  He patted my clasped hands. “There there, my Lovely, you’re perfectly safe.” Muscles expanded beneath my fingers as he chortled. “Hold on tight.”

  I couldn’t have held tighter and not cut him in two.

  Where the sun hit the far side, trees, shrubs and grass clung to the crumbling sandstone until shadow creeping up from the depths lapped over them. Gia walked to the brink and gazed down. I would not go over there if you paid me. I had no desire to see how deep the gorge plunged.

  The air felt heavy, sullen. Distance turned the terrain to misty, faded colors beyond the gorge.

  I slid sideways off the saddle. “What the hell! Did you know we’d come out here?”

  Gia smirked. “This Gate is nearest our destination. Is something wrong?”

  You evil bitch. “Not a thing.”

  Grinning, Chris stood beside his Harley. I swung on him. “And before you laugh at me again, remember if I throw up it’ll be down your back.”

  He warded me off with upraised hands. “Laugh at you? I would not dream of it, Sweetness.”

  I put one hand on my hip and gave him attitude. “Okay, enough. My name is not sweetness, or lovely, or anything else along those lines.”

  He made a half bow. “As you wish, fair Tiffany.”

  Ooh. I wanted to swat him alongside the head. I fought the impulse; he’d zip out of reach if I tried.

  A windowless, yellow adobe hut with brown-tiled roof and a wood door with heavy hinges squatted behind us. Not an imposing structure, but none of the Gates were. A black paved path the width of a footpath looped from the door and off to our left, paralleling the gorge until it dropped behind lower terrain. The ground rose again far in the distance and a lowlying shadow which could be anything spread over the horizon.

  A vast, undulating plain of yellow grass dotted with foliage-topped buttes stretched behind the hut. The wiry grass and stark terrain reminded me of some areas of Wyoming, except no mountains. The pale sky seemed to go on forever. I’d never seen a sun here, but the daylight had to come from somewhere, didn’t it?

  “I thought we’d come out in a city.”

  “Communities grow around or near active Gates. This Gate was last active, briefly, over two centuries ago,” Gia said. “Come, we should go.”

  Gareth was right, the Cousins could manipulate the Ways, which Gia did to bring us close to Burch Mountain. If the shadow across the horizon was a mountain range, we still had some way to go.

  I had to get out of my vest before I started sweating. I slipped my backpack off. Folded and rolled, the vest just fit inside.

  “Miss Banks!”

  I twitched, turned back to Gia and Chris and slung my pack over my shoulders.

  On the Harley again, I sat back away from Chris. The wind channeled around him as we roared along and I enjoyed the air seeping beneath the visor to bathe my face. The passenger saddle put me a few inches higher than Chris, so I was glad of the visor as protection against bugs. He didn’t have a helmet; he’d get plastered. Or maybe Bel-Athaer didn’t have bugs. I didn’t notice any before, but I wasn’t looking.

  I enjoyed the ride at first, deciding nothing could be better than the feeling of being unencumbered, the thrill of tearing along at high speeds. I imagined perching behind Royal, holding on tight. Would he get a bike if I made the suggestion? What could be better than clinging to Royal’s broad back as we tore along?

  I could think of a few things, but they are private, if you get my meaning.

  We rode for hours until the novelty of driving through Bel-Athaer paled. The monotony of the landscape became wearying. My mind twisted this way and that: Royal, Lawrence, the High House Council, that pickup. Perhaps I’d have survived the river if the Xterra landed right side up and stayed that way, but for some mysterious reas
on known only to Murphy’s Law, autos which go into the Snake tend to land on their roof after tumbling down the bank. Did the driver know that? Did he or she want to kill me, or scare me near to death?

  We were nearer the smudge on the horizon, which resolved into a forest backed by a low mountain range. Not the scarps of my Wasatch Range, but mountains nonetheless. Narrow streams wound through the plain to merge into a broad, shallow river. We were higher now, imperceptibly climbing mile by mile. The gorge had petered out five miles back. The path widened and became a paved road.

  The sky darkened as the hidden sun sank toward the horizon.

  We crested a hill and rocketed down the far side, a long, nearly vertical drop. I didn’t expect that. I clung to Chris again, fingers fisting his T-shirt. The wind caught his whoop and carried it away.

  Christopher Plowman enjoyed my discomfort far too much.

  The path took us down to a dry gulch. Chunks of rock had tumbled from the bank to the road, which made for an interesting ride as Gia and Chris slalomed to avoid them. We came up out of it before too long.

  The land became hillier and I saw signs of civilization: a broken fence, a derelict shack. Then, off to our right, a fence in good repair, water troughs for livestock, even a few cows in the distance.

  They had cows in Bel-Athaer?

  The land both sides of the path rose in increments until we drove between banks and I could not see much beyond them, the sky and a treetop here and there. And bugs do populate Bel-Athaer, nice big juicy ones. I wouldn’t be able to contain my laughter if bug goop smeared Chris’ face when we stopped.

  Ahead, Gia had stopped on the brow of a hill and sat on her bike looking onward. The Harley spluttered to a stop beside her.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We were above a greenish-brown, bowl-shaped vale and a small community of perhaps three hundred densely clustered buildings, with more fanning from the hub in a sparser pattern. The road we followed led down, and another led away on the other side of town. I spotted what could be a town square, except on the outskirts, not in the center as they are normally.

  “Are we going down there?”

  Gia replied. “It’s market day. We can buy food and ask about somewhere to spend the night.” She flipped up her visor. “You are hungry, aren’t you?”

  Now she mentioned it, I was starving.

  We slowly puttered down the hill.

  Buildings on three sides hemmed a fifty-foot-square area of brown cobblestones, the fourth side open to the small grass field into which we drove and parked behind four poplar. A row of automobiles sat in the field, with more parked in the square. Enticing aromas hung in the still air. Charred meat and grilled onions mingled with the scent of flowers. Gelpha milled about, dress as always eclectic, yet they moved sluggishly and their faces were inanimate, even those who haggled at the cloth-draped stalls with their red, white and yellow striped awnings.

  Houses and shops fronted the square, whitewashed brick, black terra cotta shingles with deep eaves, wood doors and wood-framed windows painted red or brown, dormer windows upstairs; some had bay windows on ground floors. Flowers overflowed pots which hung from the eaves or inside porches and mounded in planters beneath ground floor windows.

  Was what I saw in Bel-Athaer identical to that on Earth, or a kind of facsimile. Did I smell beef and onions? Were the buildings made of brick coated in whitewash?

  When I focused on the nearest small house I saw paint peeled from the window frames and doors, the whitewash was wearing thin, showing shadowy brick beneath. Flowers were wilted and flower borders overgrown. Cobwebs hung in porch corners and the undersides of window sills.

  I felt skittish as I stood at the outskirts of the village and market. No accompanying burr of voices, no children’s laughter. The village gave me a bad feeling.

  Gia turned to Chris. “Go in there and inquire about accommodation for the night. And get us something to eat.”

  So that’s why she agreed to let him come with us. A human and Dark Cousin, we couldn’t be seen, we had to keep the dratted helmets on, but Chris could openly move among the Gelpha.

  I wanted to explore the village and sit down in a restaurant or café, but we would appear odd doing that with our helmets in place. Anyway, we couldn’t eat with our visors down unless we sucked liquid through a straw.

  Chris gave Gia something between a grimace and a small smile and walked into the square, wending between stalls with long, smooth strides.

  Right through a woman who stood on the edge of the field.

  She wore a pink ankle-length dress decorated with cream lace and embroidery on the hem. A long black knitted shawl draped her shoulders and folded over her breasts, baring long white sleeves but hiding most of her red blouse. Her beautiful primrose-yellow hair hung in two braids. She stood very still, gazing at me, or past me to the countryside. Her face seemed familiar, but I’d never seen her before.

  Her frozen face. And the red on her blouse was blood.

  No, I had not seen this woman before, but I’ve seen that expression too many times. I was thankful twilight and the visor hid my face as I let my gaze wander over the square and saw other Gelpha with red blouses, or red shirts. I saw men and women with rope burns scoring their necks. I saw those with cut throats and black powder burns where bullets had punched through skin.

  My hands went to the straps of my backpack and clenched, hard. Hard as the fist which squeezed my heart. I walked from beneath the poplar. Gia’s fingers pinched my wrist and pulled me back.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” She noticed my expression. “You look like a ghost.”

  “No,” I murmured. “But they are. More than half of them are dead. What happened here?”

  She didn’t answer, so I presumed she didn’t know.

  “We need to get in closer. Come on.”

  “I cannot. Gelpha sense one another – you know that - but I am a blank slate to them. If they don’t see me, they don’t know I am here. But if they focus on me and feel nothing, that in itself will tell them what I am.”

  Mel and Jack went berserk when Gia came to my house to talk about Rio’s disappearance. Thinking she was a dead person encroaching on their territory, they tried to attack her. Later, thoroughly embarrassed, they said she had no essence, she seemed lifeless. I forgot about that till now.

  When Dagka Shan went to the High House, the Gelpha knew someone broke through their security and guess he was a Dark Cousin because they sensed neither Gelpha nor human.

  “But you go ahead if you must,” she continued. “Just be careful, don’t draw attention to yourself.”

  I fumbled at my helmet’s straps.

  Gia pinched me again. “No. Keep it on.”

  I swallowed a yelp and glared at her hand. “Why? Nobody hassled me when I went to the High House.”

  “And I’m sure the High House will be interested to know you’re wandering around Bel-Athaer.”

  She was right.

  I took in the perimeter, trying to find a dead person I could speak to covertly.

  I walked the short distance to the edge of the square and stopped beside a brown sedan. Chris stood at a stall, talking to the stallholder as he pointed at this and that.

  A woman with brown threading her short scarlet hair approached me. Through the visor, I met her big brown eyes.

  Figures in tight-fitting, all-enveloping black clothing walked through a cluster of maybe twenty men and women who stood in the middle of the square. Off to one side, a man-shape covered in blue-white flames stood in the open back of a car very like a Jeep. One of the figures pulled a woman from the crowd by her upper arm and pushed her toward the Jeep with a hand on her back. She stumbled several times and kept glancing around at the fifty or so spectators who lined the square.

  They stopped at the Jeep. She looked up at the towering flame-washed specter, speaking and violently shaking her head. A moment after she stopped speaking, the black figure behind her tangled its fingers in h
er long black hair and forced her head back. Its other hand came up, silver flashed, and she fell away, a crimson torrent pulsing from the seam in her smooth throat in time to her heart’s last beats.

  Minutes passed. The ghoul in black stood motionless, as did the blazing apparition. I stopped breathing. Then a flurry of movement as the black-clad figure bent, seized the dead woman by her ankles and quickly pulled her away to the edge of the square.

  I watched the same scene repeated. Garrotes slipped over heads and around throats. Blunt-barreled pistols were put to foreheads and fired. The villagers waited, motionless, for their turn to speak. Some sobbed, or stood with eyes closed. None ran. Spectators on the perimeter watched with dull eyes. The bodies piled up.

  People toppled, slumped to the ground, graceless, boneless, lives snuffed out in an instant. And not one watcher protested or tried to stop the carnage.

  The vision left me as abruptly as it came. I gasped, drew in a huge gulping breath as I slumped on the car’s trunk.

  It had to be Orcus, the Burning Man.

  Dear god. This creature ordered the death of so many I couldn’t count them. Why? Was he even a man?

  I swallowed what surged up my throat. Swallowed again. I couldn’t keep it down. Another second and I’d throw up. I pressed the back of my hand to my lips and breathed deeply through my nose.

  I rushed back to Gia. When she eyed me inquiringly, I only managed to say, “Yep, dead people, a lot of them.”

  She nodded her chin in Chris’ direction. “Hush. Tell me later.”

  Holding two small brown paper sacks, Chris was in animated conversation with another stallholder. At least he was animated; the stallholder merely watched him and seemed to reply in monosyllables.

  So this was what threatened Lawrence, an apparition, a man of flame who ordered an army of faceless killers. I had to find Royal before Orcus made his move on Lawrence.

  Did the monster watch my house those months ago?

  “I can’t stay here,” I whispered.

  Gia nodded as Chris joined us. “Change of plan. We go on.”