Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series)

by Sara Reinke

  “What’s wrong with you?” Sam planted both hands against his back and shoved him hard enough to nearly knock him over. “My BlackBerry’s on that train. Damn it!”

  She ran down the platform even as the streetcar pulled farther and farther away. When she reached the iron railing, she stopped, staring after the car with her fists balled. “Damn it,” she yelled again. Turning around, she marched smartly back to Jason, shoving her way past other patrons waiting for the next train.

  “My life was on that phone,” she cried, giving him another hearty push. “All of my contractors’ contact information, my email, calendar, address book, everything.” She looked around wildly, red-faced and furious. “This isn’t our stop. I don’t even know where we are! Jason, what were you thinking? Why did you pull me off the train?”

  “There was a man…” Jason began. His eyes traveled over the top of her head and across the street. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Well, fancy meeting you here,” Sitri said as he stepped down from the curb and began to cross the street toward them, his hands tucked in his coat pockets, his pace slow and leisurely, his mouth still curled in that thin, enigmatic smile.

  Sam yelped in surprise as Jason jerked her behind him, then sidestepped to stand protectively in front of her. “Jason, what…?” She hiccupped and then she uttered another soft, startled cry as he reached behind him, pulling out the gun.

  “Stay away from us,” he said, his voice hoarse and shaking as he leveled the business end of the polished stainless-steel Beretta squarely at Sitri’s nose.

  “Jason, what are you doing?” Sam gasped, frightened, pawing at the back of his sweater. “Oh my God, are you crazy? Put that away.”

  “Is that any way to treat an old friend?” Sitri asked, pretending to look wounded. “What, are you going to shoot me? In front of all of these people?” Reaching for his crotch, giving a lewd and demonstrative tug, he added slyly, “And after everything we’ve shared?”

  “Put the gun away,” Sam exclaimed, tugging at Jason more fervently now. “Jason, what are you—”

  Her voice cut off sharply in a scream as a speeding streetcar plowed into Sitri. The sound of the impact was a horrific, heavy thing, a loud thunk that was quickly drowned out by the scream of brakes screeching, metal grinding against metal, wheels locking against the iron bars of the tracks. Sitri bounced and rolled away from the train, and Sam screamed again when he came to a stop nearly at her feet, his face a battered, bloody mess cleaved by a tremendous gaping fissure running from his brow nearly to his chin. His arms and legs rested at unnatural, broken angles, like a rag doll tossed haphazardly into a corner.

  Sam shrieked, staggering back. She was crying, ashen with shock, her eyes round and stunned. “Oh my God!”

  “Come on.” Jason caught her by the hand and dragged her through the crowd, abandoning the platform. He didn’t know where they were going and, at the moment, didn’t give a shit.

  Someplace where Sitri can’t find me, he thought. Someplace safe, if there’s anything like that left.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Now the memories flooded back to Jason, horrifying images of years spent in the Netherworlde, of Sitri keeping him on a leash hooked to the ring on the back of his mask, no better than a dog. In fact, to the amusement of his peers, Sitri had often paraded Jason around exactly like this, forced to crouch and scuttle at Sitri’s side, his spine hunched, his knees bent, his body stripped nude, just like one of the Hounds. He’d raped Jason repeatedly, violently, frequently, always drawing his mind just conscious enough to make him aware of the painful, humiliating violations, but helpless to prevent them.

  Sitri had also enjoyed setting Jason and the Eidolon against other creatures in brutal close combat, always in front of a crowd of caterwauling spectators and always to an uproarious din of shrill, screeching approval. He’d make the Wyrm rouse Jason for these occasions, giving him just enough cognizance to be aware of what was happening to him, in often excruciating, horrifying, shameful detail, but not enough to wrestle any sort of physical control from the Wyrm and resist or fight back.

  Jason remembered being brought abruptly to consciousness by the Wyrm in the middle of one of these bouts, a vicious, impromptu and apparently rules-free tournament against another man. Like Jason, he was naked. A good half-head taller and fifteen pounds heavier, he wore a different kind of headpiece than Jason, some sort of exotic muzzle that left his face and bald pate exposed but forced his mouth open wide in a perpetual gaping maw. Framed by metal prongs that kept his lips peeled back in a rudimental square, his teeth revealed, the bridle looked painful and ghoulish.

  His nipples had been pierced, as had his penis. His earlobes had been stretched down nearly flush with his chin with plugs as wide in circumference as half dollars. His nose was bleeding; his lips were too, his forehead rived with a deep fissure that left blood smeared down the right side of his face. His eyes were black. Like Jason, he had an Eidolon inside him. He was a Wraith.

  Jason heard himself utter a hoarse, nearly animal-like cry; then he dissipated into the shadow form of the Eidolon, materializing in midair, hovering within a foot of the tall man. Before gravity could overtake him, drag him down to the floor, he swung his fist around and down in a sharp, powerful arc, smashing his knuckles into the man’s already battered nose. He struck hard enough to send searing pain radiating up from his knuckles clear to his shoulder. As he dropped to his feet, he saw his hand was swollen, scraped raw and bruised, the bones in his fingers crunched and broken from what apparently had been repeated, vicious pummeling on his part.

  His opponent toppled to the floor and huddled here, shuddering, wheezing for breath. The crowd, which had closed in around them in a tight circumference, shrieked in sudden shrill approval. The Wyrm turned Jason’s head, made him spit, and when Jason tasted blood in his phlegm, he realized the fallen man had gotten in his fair share of punches too.

  He caught a glimpse down at himself, his body nude, sweat-soaked and blood-smeared. He’d gained at least ten pounds since he remembered stepping outside Sully’s on a cold, rainy night to get some menus out of Sam’s car, and every single one of those pounds appeared to be nothing but lean, strapping muscle. He might have been more impressed with this new, decidedly ripped physique, had it not seemed to come with a nightmarish sentence in hell.

  “Get up,” the Wyrm made him say to the man, only instead of words, it came out of the base of his throat more like some kind of guttural string of grunts. It wasn’t English, not exactly, even though the sounds in his minds were roughly translated as such. Whatever the language, the intent behind it was clear, as was the malice.

  The Wyrm drew his foot back, made him deliver a brutal, powerful punt to the man’s vulnerable midsection, his groin, and the man choked for breath, writhing weakly on the floor.

  “Get up,” Jason said again, his voice, but the Wyrm’s words. “I’m not finished with you. Get on your goddamn feet.”

  But the man didn’t move. He simply lay there, groaning, his hands pawing feebly against the ground as the Wyrm in his head tried to force his exhausted limbs, his spent muscles into motion.

  They’d been fighting with swords at some point, because these lay fallen against the ground, as though lost or discarded in battle. Jason watched himself reach for one now, curling his battered, bloodstained fingers around the thick hilt. He lifted the long, unwieldy blade from the floor and spun it easily in his hand, as if its heft was something fond and familiar to him. When he raised the sword in his fists over his head and looked down at the man, he met his gaze.

  His eyes were no longer black. They were human again, wide so that the whites of his corneas were apparent, filled with terrified, cognizant awareness. He knows, Jason realized in horror. He’s awake too.

  He couldn’t stop the Wyrm from making him plunge the blade down, ramming it through the man’s skull, punching into his brain. When the opposing Wyrm was destroyed, the man was along with it, both of them screaming as the
y melted together like molten wax, turning into a mound of bubbling, churning black ichor that pooled in a widening circumference and stunk like rot.

  “That’s thirteen tonight for me,” he heard Sitri say as the man strode forward. “How many for you, again, Mara?”

  Wrapped in a long, flowing scarlet cloak as if to match his sister’s gown, Sitri looked ghoulishly magnificent. His makeup was thick, black and heavily applied, his thin mouth spread in a broad, triumphant grin. When he closed his hand against the ring on Jason’s mask, he forced him down onto his knees, and the sword, which Jason wanted desperately to ram through Sitri’s stomach, fell from his fingers and clattered to the floor.

  You son of a bitch, he wanted to scream.

  “You’re supposed to have the greatest warriors in the Netherworlde in your service,” Sitri called to Mara. “Yet…my goodness! Here thirteen of them have been defeated, all in less than an hour.”

  You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you! Trapped inside his mind, Jason thrashed and flailed, shrieking at the top of his lungs, while his mouth remained closed, his voice stilled, his body subdued and motionless. Give me half the chance, you sorry bastard, and I’ll kill you!

  These sentiments were apparently echoed by Sitri’s sister, to judge by Mara’s expression as she glared down from her nearby dais but said nothing.

  ****

  Jason hurried Sam away from the crash site on foot, and the sudden arrival of a half dozen police cars, ambulances and fire trucks, all with sirens blazing and lights flashing, helped to mask their own exit. If anyone remembered the young man with the pistol standing at the platform only moments before Sitri had been struck and killed, Jason didn’t plan on sticking around to find out.

  They were somewhere in the lower district of Chinatown, but before Jason could reach an intersection where he could glean any landmarks or determine his bearings, he stopped along the grounds of an old Spanish-styled church dedicated to Saint Rita of Cascia. Here, he sat Sam down against a concrete bench because she was glassy-eyed and trembling, ashen with shock and clearly shaken by what she’d seen.

  “Sam,” he whispered, kneeling in front of her, cupping his hands against her cold, tear-streaked cheeks. “Sam, it’s over now. It’s okay.”

  He said this as much to convince himself as her, because he couldn’t shake the memories from his head or the look in the man’s eyes, Mara’s Wraith, as Jason had readied to ram the sword blade through his head.

  “No.” Sam pulled away from him and shook her head, her bottom lip trembling. “No, it’s not okay. He’s dead now. He’s dead! Did you see his face? It had a crack down the middle and I…I could see…”

  She clapped her hands over her face and shuddered. “I could see his brain,” she wept, muffled against her hands, and Jason knew she wasn’t talking about Sitri. “His head had hit the window and broken open and I…I could see his brain!”

  Her dad. She’s having a flashback about her father.

  “There’s blood on me,” Sam exclaimed, her voice choked with horror and disgust as she looked down at her lap. There was no blood on her jeans that he could see, or on her jacket or shirt, but she brushed her hands against her clothes anyway, swatting quickly, frantically. “Oh, God, there’s blood on me, Jason. I got his blood on me…his blood!”

  “Sam.” He caught her by the hands, trying to draw her gaze. “Listen to me. It’s all right.”

  “But there’s blood on me,” she whimpered, and when he drew her into his arms, she fell against him, her sob-choked breath hot against his neck.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered, stroking his hand against her hair. “It’s going to be okay, Sam. I promise.”

  ****

  By the time they returned to the apartment, she’d calmed down. A little too much, in fact. She unlocked the outer door dead bolt and climbed the stairs behind the building with a sort of mechanical detachment, her expression stoic, her eyes distant. Barton had been happy to see her, bouncing up and down, jostling against her legs and causing her to stumble, but she didn’t pay any attention to the dog, not even when it caught sight of Jason in the apartment doorway and growled.

  “Who was that man?”

  Sam went into the kitchen, and after a moment of silence, Jason jumped, startled by a loud, hollow pop as she cracked open the bottle of celebratory champagne Dean had delivered the night before. Because he’d dropped it on the floor, never a good thing for a carbonated beverage kept sealed and under pressure, the champagne promptly flooded out of the mouth of the bottle in a thick, spurting foam that had spattered all over the linoleum and her shoes.

  She offered him some and he accepted. He never drank much by habit, but at that moment, a drink sounded like as good an idea as any. Sam rinsed out their coffee cups from that morning, filled each to the brim, then took both mugs and bottle with her as she sat down in a chair, draping her legs indelicately over the side.

  “Is he the one who stabbed you?” she asked, officially having drained the first cup and topping off her second. When he still didn’t answer, caught off guard by the questions as he sat across from her on an oversized box, she frowned. “The guy at the platform. The one who was killed. Is he the one who stabbed you night before last, this…Jeremiah?”

  “Nemamiah,” Jason corrected gently. “No. He’s not.”

  For his part, he was into his second mug of champagne too, and already, he could feel it affecting him, a slight and not at all unpleasant sensation of light-headedness, a tingling warmth in his gut as each mouthful pooled in his belly.

  “Who was he, then?” she asked.

  “His name was Sitri.”

  “Sitri,” she repeated, and he nodded. “You were scared of him,” she said, and he nodded again. “Why?”

  He couldn’t tell her the truth, not all of it anyway; it was too painful, too humiliating. “He hurt me,” he whispered instead.

  “What did he want with you?”

  He looked down at the floor, the shadow beneath his feet. For the moment, at least, it lay dormant and still, inert and innocuous, like a shadow was supposed to. “I think he wanted to bring me back,” he said at length, his voice quiet.

  Sam’s frown deepened. “Back where?”

  He looked up at her, his mind and tongue loosened from the wine. “I think he wanted me to bring me back to hell.”

  It was a statement so frank and abrupt, it fell heavily in the air between them, nearly leaden. He wanted tell her the truth, trust in her now, because he felt like he was going crazy with so many secrets all to himself, and none of them making any sense.

  She blinked at him for a long moment, her dark eyes round, the cup halfway raised to her mouth. “To hell,” she repeated finally.

  He nodded.

  “Oh, Jason, come on.” She swung her legs back down to the floor, then stood, wobbling momentarily, feeling the effects of the champagne. “Now you’re just making fun of me.”

  “What?”

  “I told you I was going back to church again. You think that’s funny? I found a lot of comfort in that after you were gone. I know you always thought it was a load of crap, but—”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said, wounded.

  “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any merit to it,” Sam finished. “You can think it’s childish and silly if you want to, but I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering what you went through on the night you died, wondering if you’d been in pain, if you’d been scared, all the things I’ve worried for years about my parents. It made me feel better. It brought me some peace to think that maybe, just maybe, you all were in heaven. If not some place with pearly gates and angels and all that crap, then at least some place safe, where you wouldn’t feel scared anymore or hurt or sad.”

  Her voice had grown tearful, but her brows furrowed stubbornly and she didn’t break down this time. “I don’t know where you’ve been,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to you, if you got hooked on drugs or something, maybe that guy wa
s your dealer or…or your pimp…”

  “What?” He shook his head. “No, Sam, that’s—”

  “I don’t know but I can’t help you, Jason, unless you let me. Unless you trust me.”

  He stood, reaching for her. “Sam,” he pleaded. “I do trust you.”

  “Then tell me the truth!” she exclaimed. “Tell me what happened to you. Bear took your fingerprints this morning but he told me they didn’t match up to your records. They didn’t match up to anyone’s records, because you don’t have any. No fingerprints, Jason. Bear told me that’s not possible, not unless they got burned off somehow or surgically changed. Did somebody do that to you? To your fingertips?”

  Jason looked down at his hands. When he didn’t answer, she marched over to him and grabbed him by the sleeve, shaking him roughly. “Tell me what happened to you!”

  He met her gaze plainly, took a deep breath, then jumped in feetfirst and told her the truth, everything from the moment he remembered first waking up in the Netherworlde. He told her about Sitri, the Goblins and Wyrms, the sewage thing in the bathroom downstairs. He told her about Seattle and the gun, the strange marks engraved on each bullet cartridge. He told her about the shadow inside him—the Eidolon—the creeping coldness that seemed to feed on fear, the thing that had apparently changed him inside and out, made him a Wraith.

  “I don’t think anything can hurt us, not for long anyway, unless it has that mark on it, that Celtic knot.” He pushed up the sleeve on his sweater, showing her his forearm. “See? This is where Barton bit me. This morning when I took the bandages off, all the wounds were gone. I don’t think Sitri died when the train hit him. He couldn’t. He’ll wait until he’s healed and then he’ll come after me again. He—”