by G A Chase
“I take it you’re not detecting anything from the demons,” Bart said.
“I’m hurt, wet from being in the swamp, tired, and cold. So yeah. Nothing.”
Much as she didn’t want to admit it, she couldn’t get her mind off the fact that they were locked alone together, naked. He extended his legs as far as his bound wrists would allow then scooted his butt off of the wall. As she watched him struggle toward her, she hoped there weren’t any rough boards to give him splinters in his muscular ass—or worse, an even more sensitive part of his body.
“What are you doing?”
He snuggled against her side. “I can’t do anything about your injuries, dry you off, or give you my energy, but at the very least, I can help warm you up.”
Her body melted against his. She rested her head on his shoulder. “I really fucked things up, didn’t I?”
“I’ve seen better rescues, but then, I’ve also participated in worse. Try to get some rest. Anything we can do to get you back into fighting shape is a good thing.”
Sere couldn’t imagine what alien reality she’d landed in this time. Falling asleep was like playing spin the bottle with hooded suitors. Removing the covering could reveal anything from new incantations of hell to an unimaginable nirvana. Whoever’s life she’d landed in was completely fixated on the half-empty bottle of Jamaican rum. Blech. Who could drink that sweet shit?
“You gonna help me clean up this mess or what?” a voice asked.
The eyes finally pulled away from the caramel-colored luscious liquid to the scantily clad waitress standing in the middle of the busted-up bar. TT? What the hell? I’m in fucking Bart!
“She was really something, don’t you think?” the bartender slurred.
“No. I think she was a scrawny-ass bitch who got into a bar brawl about nothing. Come on, boss. Put the bottle away. We both know you don’t need it.”
“Need, want—what’s the difference?”
Edie leaned the broom against a broken chair, walked up to the bar, and spread her hands on the counter wide enough to highlight her breasts. “You’re better than this. You can have any woman within a hundred miles of this bar. If you doubt me, just say a name, and I’ll bring her here to prove it. That motorcycle-riding witch is not worth it.”
This must be after we first met. I had no idea I’d left such an impression on him, Sere thought.
He set the bottle on the shelf behind the bar. “But not one of them could handle herself in a fight.”
In the bar mirror, Edie stood up straight and put her fists on her hips. “Excuse me. Who just busted Leroy over the head with a beer bottle? I can handle my own—and yours too if you’d give me half a chance.”
He turned around and traced every curve of her well-endowed body with his eyes. “Tempting, Edie. Very tempting. But you remember our agreement. No fucking around with coworkers, and that includes you trying to seduce the boss.”
Edie bent her head back, sending her platinum-blond hair cascading over her bare shoulders and thrusting her breasts forward under her strapless crop top like torpedoes about to fire out of their tubes. “You don’t want me? That’s fine. I’ll go get Riley. You two have been fuck-buddies for as long as I can remember. A night of destroying bedroom furniture usually makes you feel better.”
He grabbed a rag and started sweeping the broken glass from the bar into a large garbage can. “You’ve made your point.”
“She’s not even your type. Skinny, short hair, no boobs to speak of—any other night of the week, you wouldn’t have given her a second glance. Hell, I’d have had to wait on her myself.”
“I said drop it, Edie.”
“Not until you tell me why she has you so spun up. I’ve never before seen you act like some little boy who’s scared of girls.”
He could tell her to fuck off. He wanted to. She was his employee, and though he gave her a lot of leeway due to her popularity with his customers, casting aspersions on his masculinity wasn’t something he could accept. Fuck it, he thought.
“Scared? I don’t think so.” He tossed the rag into a bucket by his feet and unlatched his belt buckle. “Strip naked and bend that round ass over the bar right now, little lady.”
Sere woke up in a cold sweat. Witnessing Bart hammer his cock into his waitress wasn’t her idea of a restful sleep. Once the pair had started going at it, however, it seemed rude to leave. Nothing about the encounter carried any emotion other than a release of frustration. And she’d caught Bart imagining he was fucking her and not the waitress through the haze of endorphins.
She leaned away from his sleeping naked body. A white sticky substance coated her hip where it had come to rest close to his lap. Not how I envisioned our first sexual encounter.
“How do you feel?” he asked while keeping his eyes closed.
Shit. “I thought you were still asleep.”
“I was until you moved off of me.”
Sere flexed her left arm and took a deep breath. All healed. Between the blood transfusion he’d given her and his shirt wrapped under the paranormal bandage when he’d conducted her healing while saving Jennifer, she and Bart must have established a usable connection. To heal her so quickly, the power supply had to be as intense as the man himself.
“Much better after my nap. How about you?”
“I had the strangest dream about when we first met,” he said.
She rubbed her arm against her hip to get rid of the evidence. God, I hope he doesn’t notice. She wanted to get him onto another topic before he fully woke up. “What can we expect from our abductors?”
Bart pulled his body into a tight crouch. “I’m a bit surprised we haven’t seen them yet. Something must have distracted them.”
She could only hope Joe hadn’t gotten himself killed trying to save her. “Give me the tactical rundown of what happened.”
“When I got back to the bar, I barely made it off my Ducati. The moment I took off my helmet, something struck me hard on the back of the head. I was gagged and hogtied to the back of my bike before I regained consciousness. When I came to, the leader was holding my evasion knife to my face. He said if I behaved, they wouldn’t kill everyone in my bar. I’ve been around you long enough to know the demon wasn’t bluffing.”
“Joe figured they must have offered the lives of your customers in exchange for your cooperation,” Sere said, deciding that if her mentor was the one distracting the demons, there wasn’t much reason to keep his involvement a secret from Bart.
“I’ll bet he told you to take it easy on the road too, didn’t he? You must have expected a trap. What the hell were you thinking?”
Her irritation helped distract her from the emotional connection she couldn’t shake. “Do you always get in fights with those debriefing you?”
“God, I could use a drink right now.” He closed his eyes and took a few slow, deep breaths. “There were nine of them. So far, the only one who’s said anything is their leader. This is a much more disciplined and organized group than those last idiots. Once they dragged me to this cabin, they stripped me naked. I’m guessing that was to discourage me from escaping as well as to make sure I didn’t have anything I could use. They’ve left me alone until they dumped you in here with me.”
“They probably stripped you so they would be free to come after me.”
“That was my assessment as well. So long as all nine of them were hanging around the cabin, I didn’t stand much of a chance at attacking, but if they intended on only leaving a small guard force, they’d want me as docile as possible.”
Sere twisted her left wrist against the rope. When they had tied her, they must have known about the dislocated shoulder and busted bone. They left just enough play in the rope for the slack line to snag on a nail head. She locked eyes with Bart and nodded toward her back.
He returned her nod and got down on his side.
This is going to be embarrassing. Like I needed more reason to blush. She turned away from him and shifted
her tied wrists and ankles close to his mouth and hands. His hot breath on her butt cheeks made her quiver.
The door burst open before Bart could loosen the knots with his teeth. “I think that’ll about do it for the escape attempt,” the intruder said. “Though I am curious to see what kind of mischief you two would get into once you were free of your bonds.” The demon held a charred shotgun at Sere’s head. She hoped it was the gun from her motorcycle and not one they’d taken off Joe.
“You won’t kill me,” she said. “You’ve had plenty of chances. Even without the magic bullets in that shotgun, all you would have needed to do is lop off my head with one of Bart’s knives.”
He lowered the weapon. “I’m not here to kill you. Not yet at least. For the time being, we need you. Your connection to hell is like a high-voltage power line, and we’re the neon tubes being lit up just by being around you.”
“You have to be fucking kidding me. I’m the reason you can exist here?” Sere began to wish he had shot her. At least then, those she cared about wouldn’t be put at risk.
“That’s the theory. I’d have thought someone on this side would have already figured that out.”
She silently swore at Professor Yates. Either he knew of her connection to the demons and kept it from her, or he wasn’t nearly as smart as he believed. “So if you don’t plan on killing me, why go to all the trouble of enticing me out here?”
“Think of me as hell’s technician. The real genius is back in that realm, working up his experiments. I’m here to conduct the tests.”
In her opinion, there was nothing worse than a demonic science geek. “And you expect me to just go along like some kind of lab rat?”
“Your obvious resistance is why we’ve got you stripped and tied. Like the lab rat, we’re not giving you a choice.”
Sere always had a choice, but challenging him while defenseless didn’t seem the brightest move. “At least let Bart go. He’s not a part of this.”
“Oh, he’s very much a part of this,” the demon said. “You care about him. That emotional connection is what holds you to this life. He’s like the power tower that supports the high-voltage line. We thought it was Jennifer, but it turns out you’re just using her.”
Sere couldn’t turn toward Bart. The demon was right but not entirely. Bart was one of many that she cared about. “What’s the first test your evil master has planned for me?”
The demon ejected one of the shotgun shells and rolled it menacingly between his fingers. “I would have thought that was obvious.” He squeezed one of the pellets out of the casing. “Now, swallow the pill like a good little doppelgirl.” He cocked the weapon and aimed it at Bart. “Or your friend gets the full blast, and unlike you, he can’t regenerate.”
“You’d cut my connection to my real to study the power cable? That doesn’t make any sense. If you are feeding off of me, you’ll just be hurting yourself.” She hoped questioning him might buy a little time. Come on, Joe, get your ass in gear and save us.
“Not the whole connection, just a temporary slice out of a single strand.”
“Don’t do it, Sere.” Bart struggled against his ropes as if anger alone could burn them from his wrists. The move positioned him over the nail head that had been under her ass.
She stared into his eyes. “It’ll be okay. I’ll come back to you.”
35
Chapter 7
Unlike waking up in a dream state in hell, spiraling through the power connection felt like being falling-down drunk. Every part of life that she tried to hang onto slipped through her mental grasp. At least I’m not feeling any bodily disintegration. It’s just my immortal soul that’s in danger.
When the whirlwind of perceptions died down, Sere was inside a small room made of iron walls like the cabin of a submarine. The shelves bolted to the sides were filled with wooden boxes. She pulled her arms around her stomach as the reality of where she stood took hold. “I know this place.”
“It’s where you were created.”
Sere turned around at the sound of the woman’s voice. Behind her was her hell’s angel, Sanguine Delarosa, granddaughter of hell’s creator and coconspirator in casting Sere’s father into the dimensional dungeon.
Sere didn’t know if she should be happy to see Sanguine, pissed that the woman hadn’t been doing her job of containing the demons, or concerned that the box where she’d been created might also be where she would have her soul permanently removed from her doppelgänger body. The overload of emotions caused her to resort to the logic-based computer-controlled doppelgänger she’d left in life.
“So this is why you haven’t stopped the demon horde?”
Sanguine’s once pure-white wings had turned yellow like the feathers made from old paper. “Nice to see you too. You barely made it through the gate when I was taken. What are you doing back here?”
Sere looked around the cramped room in frustration. “I’m afraid I’m not faring much better than you are. Some demon from this side is playing mad scientist, and I’m the lab rat. He’s been sending groups of doppelgängers across. This latest batch is apparently trying to figure out how I’m connected to hell.” Sere limited how much information she shared. Joe had already chastised her once for almost saying too much in a room controlled by the enemy.
Sanguine pulled down one of the wooden boxes. “I’m not completely oblivious to what’s going on.” She opened it. Inside was the cursed pipe tool Sere had used to cut her wrists nearly two hundred years earlier. “If I hold it long enough, I can get mental flashes of what you’re doing.”
“So the demons think that with you and that thing in here, they can control me?”
Sanguine closed the box and put it back on the shelf. “You just said your troublemaker is a mad scientist. One of the first things he’d do is limit the variables to his experiment.”
Sere suspected the demon technician also wanted her to see the power he was holding over her. With more than one pellet in her, she’d have been stuck in the vault like a magnet to all of the cursed items and her power-supplying angel. “What other good news have you got for me?” she asked sarcastically.
“Whoever is responsible for abducting me and sticking me in this cage had to know of your history. At the time of your creation, all the people in this realm, other than you and I, were mindless doppelgängers copying the actions of their reals.”
A cold chill went up Sere’s back. “What are you thinking?”
“The power leading this assault on us is from the land of the living.”
Sere held her arms even tighter around her stomach. “Someone in life is raising an army of the damned?”
“If they are, they’re doing a pretty piss-poor job of it. You keep sending the demons back the way they came like naughty little children you caught running away from home. You’re going to have to do better than assume someone’s simply out to get you.”
Sere wondered how many demons her adversary would have to send before she understood their plan. “I don’t get it. I can see why the doppelfuckers want to escape hell and take over the lives of their reals. They’re not happy that I’m standing in their way. And the demon technician made no secret of the fact that hell was trying to figure out how I power the escapees. But why would anyone in life care?”
“I asked myself the same question.” Sanguine reached out to touch Sere’s arm, but the hand fell through the empty air of her soul. “All I know is they are specifically after you.”
“You think maybe the loas of the dead convinced someone to do their dirty work?” Sere knew the loa-holes had done something similar in convincing Myles to deal with her father.
“They don’t know you’re among the living. Even if they did, using denizens from another dimension isn’t how they roll.”
Sere knew that the loas of the dead had powerful resources, and so far, at least the voodoo community had been staying out of the demon outbreaks. “That would just leave those close to Aunt Kendell, but if i
t was someone like the professor feeding hell information, they wouldn’t need to be running tests on me. The professor knows pretty much all there is to know about how I’m kept alive.”
“There is one other person who knew more than anyone about how you were created, though.”
The chill in the room seemed to intensify. “You told me years ago that he’s gone, never to return.”
“Myles and Kendell assured me your father’s spirit is resting in the deep waters. I have no reason to doubt them, but Baron Malveaux did create you. He was no dummy. He would have kept records of what he was doing in case there was a problem or to allow him to reproduce his success.” Sanguine motioned around the room. “And none of his journals are among his cursed possessions.”
“Even if the records aren’t in this room, the lab books would still be in hell, not among the living.”
Whoever was directing the demon technician, however, probably had access to the information. Sere felt as if every aspect of her existence had just been laid bare to some creepy stalker. And she feared Sanguine was right—no doppelgänger in hell had the mental capacity to be the one in charge.
“I’m afraid being stuck in this box has its limitations,” Sanguine said. “I’ve had way too much time to think with no ability to test or research my theories. I’m no expert on the paranormal science that keeps you alive, so I wouldn’t even know where to look. Of everyone, I trust Kendell the most, but I’d advise not telling her of my suspicion that someone on the side of the living is responsible until you have more facts. If it is someone close to her, she’d never be able to keep it secret. Whoever is after you would have to have influence both among the living and in hell.”
Sere had never needed Sanguine by her side more than she did at that moment. “How do we get you out of here?”
“I don’t even know where here is. This interdimensional vault was a bugger to break into when the devil held Kendell captive in it. You have bigger problems than freeing me. Now, how do we reverse this experiment they’re running on you?”