by Sara Reinke
“I’m sorry,” Dean said to Sam in the apartment. “How many times do I have to say it? I’m sorry things got so carried away.”
After he’d struck Jason, leaving him dazed and bleeding, Jason had pivoted, eyes wide with surprise. The bottle had broken upon impact with his head, lacerating his scalp, and then Dean had leveled what was left, a jagged ring of razor-edged shards, at his face. Jason had punched him, a reflexive move, an instinctive response that had left Dean out cold on the floor, his front teeth knocked loose, his nose shattered.
“None of that matters,” Bear said. “Not now, not anymore. But it does mean Jason still has prints on file in AFIS.”
“There would be DNA still on record too,” Dean said. “From the autopsy. All you’d need is a strand of hair or an oral swab.”
“Yeah, and an explanation for the state crime lab as to why I need a DNA analysis,” Bear interjected, shaking his head. “This way’s easier.”
He started to walk toward the hallway, but Sam sprang to her feet, sidestepping around Dean and grabbing his arm. “Stop.” When Bear turned to her, his brows furrowed, she met his gaze. “Leave him alone, Bear. At least for tonight. Whoever he is, he’s hurt and scared. That much I believe. Somebody stabbed him. He didn’t make that up and it’s not some part of a con.”
“Sammi, we don’t know where he’s been or what he’s been into all this time,” Bear said. “He might have been beaten up by a dealer or his pimp—”
“He’s not on drugs and he’s not a prostitute,” Sam snapped. “He couldn’t be, he just…” Her voice warbled, nearly breaking. “Please, just leave him alone. Just for tonight. Let him sleep and do whatever you need to in the morning.”
Bear looked at her for a long moment; then Jason saw his posture soften in concession. He reached up, brushing his thick fingers against his niece’s cheek, wiping away her tears. “All right, Sammi. I’ll get his prints before I go to work in the morning. He won’t feel a thing, won’t even know I’m there. I promise.”
She nodded, her lips pressed together in a thin line. “Barton, stop growling,” she said, cutting her eyes toward the dog. “What’s the matter with you today?”
Barton had noticed the thin tendril of shadow that had made its way down the corridor from the bedroom. Now the dog stood squared off against it, hackles bristled once again. As Sam went to its side, grabbing its collar and giving it a rough, remonstrating little shake, Jason drew his hand back and the shadowy line likewise shrank in recoil, slipping down the hallway with liquid-mercury speed, back beneath the edge of the door. As it did, he could no longer see or hear the trio on the other side.
Not that he ever believed he really could, anyway.
Because that’s crazy, he thought, closing his eyes, asleep again almost at once. That’s absolutely nuts.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jason slept again but found no rest, tormented instead by dreams so vivid, they seemed more like memories, no matter how impossible that was.
When he opened his eyes, a barren landscape, like the surface of the moon, swam into focus around him; the bottom of a deep chasm framed on either side by steep, cragged cliffs. Overhead, the sky was a smooth and featureless plane of black. A pale luminescence with no visible point of origin draped about the terrain like moonlight. The air was heavy, icy and still. Jason’s breath framed his face in a hazy, iridescent cloud as he lifted his head, shoving his hands beneath him and struggling to sit up.
Where am I?
The cold penetrated his body almost immediately, seeping through flesh and underlying muscles to nestle deep into his bones. He was naked, his body vulnerable and exposed. He drew his arms around himself in a vain, instinctive attempt to stay warm.
“Welcome to the Netherworlde.”
Startled by the voice, Jason stumbled clumsily around. A man stood him him, tall and lean, with coal-black hair that hung down to the small of his back in a heavy, glossy sheath. His face was vaguely familiar to Jason, and he frowned in sudden, bewildered recognition.
Fucking, fighting, filling beer mugs and failure, the man had said as he’d leaned over Jason in the hospital. That’s all this boy has ever known. And yet, he’ll go on to an eternal reward likely greater than anything you’ll ever enjoy. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?
“Who are you?” Jason whispered.
The little hook to the man’s mouth lifted higher. “My name is Sitri,” he said, affecting a little bow. He was naked, his flesh as pale as marble, almost every square inch of his lean form covered in elaborate, intertwining tattoos. Some kind of grotesque worms, their O-shaped mouths ringed with sharp teeth, had been drawn twisting and tangling down the lengths of his legs. Gigantic spiders splayed their outstretched legs across the plain of his belly, the breadth of his chest. Scarabs followed meandering paths from his shoulders to his elbows. Scorpions and centipedes trailed from here to his wrists.
“What is this place?” Jason asked, shying hesitantly away. “How did I get here?”
“This is the Netherworlde,” the man, Sitri, replied, still smiling, his tone of voice patient, if not somewhat condescending. “I brought you here.”
Fucking, fighting, filling beer mugs and failure. That’s all this boy has ever known.
“Why?” Jason whispered.
Sitri’s smile stretched wide with a dark, wicked sort of glee. “Because you belong to me. This is your home now.”
All at once, the tattoos on his body began to move like something alive or in a cartoon. They slipped and slithered together, worms and spiders, scorpions and scarabs all scuttling about, tracing the contours of Sitri’s musculature, following the lines of his limbs.
Just a dream. Jason shook his head, shying back from the man and his crawling, squirming tattoos. This can’t be real. This is too fucked up. It has to be just a dream.
He stumbled into something low-slung and heavy behind him, something that moved at his clumsy impact, chattering moistly, as if scolding him. Whirling in surprise, Jason recoiled anew to realize they had been surrounded by a throng of hideous creatures. Some looked like massive oversized scorpion, with large claw-like appendages framing numerous tiny featureless black eyes, and heavy tail raised high above each, each taller than a grown man, each capped with a massive hooked stinger.
Others looked human, at least in basic form, their bodies emaciated, their skin discolored and mummified, like meat jerky. Their eyes had been gouged out to leave shriveled, blackened pits and the corners of their fang-rimmed sharklike mouths had been slit open to their ears, leaving ghoulish parodies of smiles.
What are those things?
“They’re called Goblins,” Sitri told him helpfully, as if he could read Jason’s mind, offering a nod toward the scorpions. “The others are called Hounds.” The tattooed worms had reached his face now and swarmed over the shelf of his chin and along his jawline to envelop his eyes, to grope for purchase along his temples and hairline. “And these are Wyrms. You’ve met one of them already.”
At this, Jason remembered the thing that had fallen out of his ear in the alley outside Sully’s during his fight with Nemamiah.
That’s one of you down. Now to send this meat sack of yours and that misbegotten demon back where you both belong.
A sudden blinding pain cut through his ear, staggering him, and he felt a slithering dampness. He cried out hoarsely in terror and disgust, clutching at his head, then cried out again as it fell out of him, the thing Sitri had called a Wyrm, only this one was real, flesh and blood, not tattooed ink set to flesh. When it hit the ground, landing at his feet, it began to wriggle and thrash against the dirt, like a goldfish on a tabletop.
Its body was soft and flaccid, its eyeless head framed by four or five fingerlike extensions, almost like catfish whiskers, and further distinguished by the dime-sized maw of its mouth. Even in the dim light, Jason could see black gums and dozens, if not hundreds, of glittering, glinting, needlelike teeth.
Oh, Christ, was that thing was in
side my ear? he thought. It was. Oh, God, it was inside me, inside my brain!
Blood streamed down the side of Jason’s face in the Wyrm’s wake, then spattered against the ground. The clattering sound of the Goblins’ claws grew even more frenzied at this, and the Hounds flailed their spindly, crooked arms in the air, uttering hoarse screeches like a chorus of disharmonic locusts.
“You ask me, you’d better run,” Sitri told Jason. With a nearly gentle smile, he knelt, holding out his hand to the Wyrm. Jason watched in mesmerized horror as the thing crawled toward him, wriggling onto his fingertips, then using its tentacles and teeth to chew and tear its way back beneath Sitri’s skin.
“Once they smell blood, they get insatiable,” Sitri remarked as the Wyrm burrowed into his palm, then moved, a pulsating bulge like an overripe cyst making its way to his wrist. “And impossible to control.” Glancing up, Sitri dropped him a friendly sort of wink. “Of course, no one asked me.”
The Goblins and Hounds converged at them as if being turned loose from invisible leashes and they surged forward, scuttling and scrambling over the barren, rocky ground.
Seized with sudden terror, Jason backpedaled, stumbling into Sitri, then shoved his way past. He whirled around began to run, tearing off along the path of the narrow valley floor, his feet slapping painfully against the hard, frigid ground. From behind him, Sitri laughed, a disturbingly good-humored sound, someone watching the charming antics of a particularly amusing toddler.
Jason’s breath ballooned about his face with each strained and frantic gasp, and all the while, he could hear the Goblins and Hounds behind him in scraping, clattering, shrieking pursuit. As he whipped around a sharp bend in the chasm channel, he came to a skittering, stumbling halt, faced with the end of the line, literally—a steep cliff at least as tall as a twenty-story building towering above him.
“Oh, Jesus,” he moaned, and then they were upon him, Goblins and Hounds filling the narrow avenue behind him, piling one on top of the other, stopping together in an impenetrable mass.
Jason backpedaled, his heart hammering in terror as he pressed himself against the wall. This can’t be real, he thought. It can’t. I’ve got to be dreaming. Any minute now, I’ll wake up. I might be screaming when I do it, yelling my head off, but I’ll wake up soon. Any minute now.
Movement out of the corner of his eye caught his gaze, and he looked up at the cliff wall on his left in time to see something sliding down the cragged surface in a thin, black stream. It moved like molten taffy, slowly but purposefully down the rocks, pooling in shallow recesses or along small outcroppings, then overflowing and slithering down to the ground.
What’s that? he thought, and then some of the Goblins began to move forward, snapping their claws, stabbing at him with their stingers, forcing him to scuttle sideways.
They’re herding me toward it, he realized in helpless terror. Okay, time to wake up now. Sam, wake me up now, please. Hit me with your elbow, kick me, steal the covers, grab my pillow, grab my balls, —something, anything!
Nothing happened. The Hounds and Goblins continued pressing toward him, forcing him to move. Though he tried to keep away from the black, glittering pool of ichor, dancing clumsily on his tiptoes, when he finally had no choice but to step into it, it felt like his foot had just punched through a thin layer of brittle ice and plunged into an arctic stream.
He uttered a choked, strangled cry, because that sudden, frigid force stripped the strength from his leg and he crashed facedown to the ground. He could feel it engulfing him in an icy sheath, and when he looked back, he found it swallowing his leg, as smooth and fluid as oil or liquid mercury, flowing up to engulf his knee, then his thigh, then up to his hip.
“Jesus Christ,” he cried, trying vainly to kick the ooze off him. He slapped at it and it engulfed his fingers, then his hands and wrists, enveloping his arms, sliding in thick, fast-moving tendrils toward his shoulders and neck.
“Get it off me!” Thrashing now, Jason convulsed against the ground, arching his back and clawing at the ichor. It was like being wrapped in taffy—the more he struggled, the more hopelessly he became entangled. “Get it off me! Get it off—””
His voice cut short in a choked gulp as it reached his head, sliding up over his chin in hundreds of tiny frozen tendrils and whipping into his mouth. He began to retch, clutching at his throat, gagging for choked breath as it slid up his nose, then flooded his throat, filling him from within and engulfing him from without.
When it was over, he huddled against the ground, shuddering, utterly spent, as if the shadow had drained every last measure and reserve of energy he had to spare.
“Hello again.” Sitri squatted, his elbows resting on his knees, and looked down at Jason, still wearing that irrepressible smile. “I see you’ve met my little friend. It’s called an Eidolon. They’re one of the most powerful, voracious entities in all of the Netherworlde. I’ve always wondered what it must be like…to have one ravage you like that…to have it devour you, claim you as its host.”
Jason pawed feebly at his throat. He tried to speak, his voice escaping in a low, tremulous moan.
“They’re drawn to fear,” Sitri said. “Eidolons, I mean. They feed off it. It makes them stronger. The more scared you are, the better.”
He brushed Jason’s hair back from his temple, a nearly tender gesture that left his ear vulnerable and exposed. Jason heard a soft sound, tiny teeth ripping through flesh as the Wyrm that had taken sanctuary in Sitri’s hand began to gnaw its way loose once more.
“Eidolons are pretty much raw, primordial energy, so you need a Wyrm to bind them,” Sitri was saying as the first of the Wyrm’s slender tentacles reached out from just beneath the delta of his thumb, groping blindly, eagerly at Jason’s earlobe. “But Wyrms can’t feel fear, so I needed you to call the Eidolon.” Sitri’s smile widened. “And so you have.”
Jason mewled softly in frightened, muffled protest as he felt the Wyrm crawling up into his hair. He tried instinctively to shrug it away, to raise his hand and swat at it, but couldn’t move. It reached the outermost curve of his ear, then slid against his skin, prodding at the opening of his ear canal. He felt its thin fingerlike tentacles slap and grasp against his earlobe, then cried out in horrified, helpless disgust as it forced its way into his ear. He could feel it wriggling inside him, then a searing pain from somewhere deep inside his head.
Help me! He wanted to scream, to claw at his ear, to rip the side of his head open if needed to get the goddamn thing out of his skull. Make it stop! It’s eating its way into my brain!
****
Biting back a cry, Jason sat up in bed, his body glossed with sweat, his eyes wide. For a long, bewildered moment, he had no idea where he was, and when he remembered, the tension drained from his body in a long, heavy sigh.
Just a dream, he thought, forking his fingers through his disheveled hair, pushing it back from his face. Just a dream.
He got up, shuffling slowly toward the adjacent bathroom. Squinting as he turned on the lights, flooding the narrow confines of the room with sudden, blinding glare, he leaned over the sink and cupped his hand beneath the stream of the cold tap. He drank quickly, slurping down handful after handful.
Just a dream, he told himself again, even though it felt real to him, like a memory inside his mind.
He was shivering, his skin ashen, his lips nearly blue with cold. He limped back to the bed and pulled the comforter loose of the mattress, wrapping it around himself. When this still didn’t have any immediate effect, he drew his hands out from beneath the heavy folds and rubbed them together, huffing his breath against them.
It’s freezing in here. He glanced over his shoulder toward the windows. One had been propped open, left ajar. He stood again, went around the bed, then after a few firm shoves, forced the window closed. Parting the slats in the blinds with his fingertips to peer beyond its panes, he saw the cityscape painted in the shadow-draped hues of midnight, broken by the punctuating glare
of streetlights. The bedside lamp had been left on, reflecting an irregular circumference of orange-amber light from over his shoulder.
It was strange to be in the apartment. As he looked around, in his mind, he could still easily picture the things that had once been here and there, things that he still half expected to see.
“It’s not much,” he’d told Sam the first time he’d brought her there, the night of their first date.
I kissed her for the first time that night.
She’d lived in a nice condo at the time but he still hadn’t known it, a posh, contemporary penthouse overlooking the bay, with a doorman in the lobby and bellmen in the elevators. His bedroom had been approximately the size of her walk-in closet, and had he known this, he would have been too ashamed to ever let her set foot in his home.
“It’s great!” She’d immediately gone to the windows. They all stood propped open, no screens, allowing the crisp, cool air outside to filter in. She’d leaned out fearlessly, recklessly, her hands braced against the sill, her eyes closed, her chocolate-colored hair fluttering in the breeze. “I love the view.”
“Yeah.” He’d leaned out with her, but his eyes had been on her, not the horizon. “It’s beautiful.” When she’d glanced at him, he’d felt embarrassed and pointed to redirect her gaze. “If the fog lifts just right, you can see clear over to the Bayside Bridge.”
All at once, she’d climbed up onto the sill and wriggled out onto the rickety, rusted fire escape landing. “Let’s go up on the roof.”
“Sam,” he’d exclaimed in startled protest. He’d never stepped out on the fire escape before, never used it for much of anything except as a spot to set potted plants out to die. He hadn’t even known if it would bear Sam’s slight and insignificant weight, much less his, and watched, wide-eyed and apprehensive, as she started up the ladder.
“Come on,” she said, looking down over her shoulder, her hair windswept in her face, her mouth still spread in that wide, infectious grin. “Quit looking at my ass and get up here.”