And then Vayl opened his mouth. From it issued a stream of tiny red crystals that blew off his tongue like frozen fire. And I knew it was the hellspawn’s blood that he’d taken upon entering this realm, transformed into his own personal weapon, pelting the durgoyles into action. They followed the bull at a jump, thirty squeaking, flank-bashing, panicked lemmings headed straight off the cliff. Or, in this case, into the gate.
They crashed into Satan’s doorway with the jaw-clenching sound of breaking bones, screaming wounded, and trampling hooves. Metal groaned. Hinges screeched. On the other side of the river the remnants of the herd milled and fought, as if they were irritated that their neighbors were making them wait to move on. The spiderhounds howled in triumph as their prey made a fatal mistake and wandered too far from her sisters. They pounced, each of them taking her at a different angle. The rest of the herd distanced themselves from her, ignoring her dying screams in the I’m-glad-it-wasn’t-me way of the future victim.
On our side of the river the pile of dead and broken durgoyles grew as the herd continued its mindless assault on the gate. It didn’t give in the middle, where the two doors met. Instead the bottom set of hinges on our side splintered so badly that they fell to pieces at our feet. The durgoyle who’d made the break shoved the gate aside. It swung back and smashed into the bull behind it, tangling in its horns, forcing it to its knees, where it formed a living door prop for the rest of the herd.
I eyed the spiderhounds feasting noisily on their kill. “Should we take them out next, while they’re distracted?” I glanced at Raoul, then at Lotus, not sure which of them could come up with the most dastardly game plan for this particular creature.
Raoul shook his head. “If you can finish your business before they’re done eating, we should be able to slip past them. In this case I agree with Zell. It’s better to avoid a fight than to force one.”
I glanced at Zell, momentarily forgetting that he couldn’t hear our Party Line conversation. He’d been busy glancing over his shoulder. Now he had Helena by the hand and they were moving to cross over. He said, “Whatever you have to do, rush it. They’ll know the gate is breached. People will come to escape. Demons will come to stop them. We’re out of time now.”
“I’m on it.” Without wasting another second I turned one of the dying durgoyles. Feeling like an old-school biblical figure I whispered over it, “Uh, so you’re the sacrifice. If you promise not to gore me, I’ll make this quick and painless.” It fulfilled its side of the bargain, so I did too, watching the relief flit through its brown-onbrown eyes as its blood coated the Rocenz and what remained of its hellish life slipped away.
The two parts of the tool shivered in my hands as indentations appeared beneath my fingers, giving me a better grip for the job ahead of me. I waited for Zell and Helena to slip through the opening in hell’s gate. And then I set the chisel onto its surface.
Less than three weeks before I’d watched Kyphas use this same tool to mark Cole’s name onto her heartstone. Until now I’d never wondered what it had felt like for her to raise the shining silver hammer and bring it down, clang! onto its brother. Now I understood the look of ecstasy I’d seen on her face. Though our motives were as different as heaven and hell, our feelings, as they often had, ran parallel. Power, baby. Fiery energy running up my arms and into my body until I felt like I could touch a dead heart with a single finger and jolt it into action again.
I realized I was grinning as the B took shape on Satan’s gate. The domytr inside my head beat his fists against the walls of his cell so relentlessly that the pain behind my right eye finally shut it down. Half-blind, bleeding from my nose and both my ears now, I laughed aloud as I chiseled the R and then the U. I could feel Brude draw the tattoos that covered his arms and chest together into the armor that had protected him so well against Raoul’s attack back in Scotland. Now I thought of it more as a shroud as I tapped the letter D into hell’s doorway.
Behind me I heard Lotus yell, “Something strange is—watch out! The spiderhounds are… changing! Goddammit, you should never have let them get this close! Why don’t any of you people have guns? Oh my God, they’re not what we thought they were at all!”
Vayl said, “Lotus is right, Jasmine. The spiderhounds are slipping their skins. They may be some other form of spawn we have never seen. Whatever they are, I believe they have tricked us into taking this path in order to regain the Rocenz. Right now they are raising some sort of bridge from the bottom of the Moat.”
I couldn’t have spoken if I wanted to. All my inner girls were running around like disaster victims, some screaming mindlessly, some weeping. Even Granny May was pacing frantically while she bit her fingernails like she hadn’t eaten for a week. I felt Vayl, Zell, Raoul, and Astral arrange themselves behind me, readying themselves for the fight, protecting me from yet another attack. Lotus was just pacing, muttering, swearing at anyone who seemed easily blamed. I didn’t want her to distract me. But when she fell over the cat, I was suddenly grateful, because it reminded me of what Astral had said to me before our descent.
“Don’t look!” I yelled as I continued the work. “They’re not really spiderhounds. I was right! The one with yellow eyes is Roldan! Which means the alpha is his gorgon. So whatever you do, don’t meet her eyes. If you do, you’ll be destroyed!”
“Turn around!” Vayl called as Raoul bellowed, “Face the gate! The alpha’s eyes are transforming into snakes!”
Believe it or not, I was relieved to hear that I was right. Gorgons have this odd code of honor. They’ll kill you, oh yeah, in about three hundred different ways, starting with the whole paralyze-you-withtheir-steely-vision trick. But they will not attack unless you’re facing them. So I knew that as long as my people kept their nerve I could continue cutting the cords that had connected the domytr to me.
Only a few remained, and my inner girls—having received at least a short reprieve from certain death—hacked those free like a bunch of slayers out for a midnight run. When the final connection snapped they cheered as the locks fell from the cell that Teen Me and I had trapped Brude in. The door creaked open to reveal his ghostly form standing in the middle, head down in defeat, arms hanging loose at his sides as he faded into mist. The moment the final droplet disappeared from my mind, a shimmering form began to take shape just on the other side of the gate.
It wasn’t a clean transition, like a beam-me-up-Scotty moment in which the traveler arrives even cleaner and tidier than when he left. As I worked on the E, Brude began to convulse. Wounds appeared on his chest, arms, legs, even his face. Funny. The more he bleeds, the better I feel.
My sight came back first. Then my headache disappeared, along with the bleeding from my ears and nostrils. As I put the final cut into the gate, I felt a satisfaction like an actual weight leaving me, though no physical burden could’ve been as hard or heavy to bear. On the other side of the twisted metal dog, the last image of Brude fell to his knees, so roundly defeated I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him beg for mercy. But he just knelt quietly and waited the three beats it took for his fate to catch up to him.
I pulled the Rocenz away from the gate. Staring proudly at me, he said, “You could have been my queen,” as his skin, his hair, even his eyeballs began to leak fluid like a faulty radiator. As the thick pink liquid flowed into the ground, small beetle-like creatures with barbed tongues and pincers at the ends of their tails scuttled out of their holes to slurp it up, and then to explore the source of their unexpected snack. They swarmed up Brude’s legs while his body steadily shriveled, melting into their mouths like a finely cooked pork roast.
When the creatures reached his chest it got hard to watch. But I reminded myself of what this domytr had put me and mine through. What he’d tried to pull on the Great Taker himself. And what that might’ve meant to the Balance if he’d managed to succeed. I didn’t even blink when the muscles in his jaw failed, his mouth dropped open, and the skin-suckers scurried inside. He didn’t scream long.
I waited until nothing was left of Brude but the elements his body had been made from. Then I reached out to Vayl. “He’s gone,” I whispered.
His hand tightened on mine nearly to the point of pain, clear communication of the depth of his relief. “You are free.”
“Not quite,” said Raoul. “I’ve been watching the gorgon out of the corners of my eyes. She’s raised a bridge.”
Lotus sounded close to hyperventilation when she said, “It’s made out of scum-covered skeletons. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my—” I put my hand on her arm, squeezing hard enough to make her stand still.
I said, “Skeletons with souls trapped inside, Lotus. The souls of people who’d made themselves into doormats in the world just so they could manipulate the strong into doing their dirty work for them. Now they’ve discovered how eternity feels about those who let others trample them just so their families and friends will be forced to shoulder the load.”
She drew a sobbing breath. “I don’t want this.”
“No.”
“It’s not too late?”
“Lotus, you deserve better than this, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“Then act like it!”
She dropped her face into her hands, and I thought she was crying until she began to report on what she was seeing from the corners of her eyes, “The bridge is wide enough for a couple of cars to pass, but the footing will be iffy. It could work to our advantage. Or not. My guess is that as soon as it’s completely clear of the Moat, the gorgon and her slave will start their crossing.”
“Her slave is a werewolf that hasn’t yet changed,” Raoul told her. “He’s moving so slowly you’d almost think he likes his man form better. Also, just so you won’t be surprised, Jaz, the alpha’s nest of spiders is now the gorgon’s necklace of scorpions.”
Zell turned to Helena and sighed. “I’ve never fought a gorgon before, have you, dear?”
“No, but you’ve told me how to kill scorpions and snakes. And surely they can’t be any tougher than strangling a krait.”
“You got yourself a point there. We will just think of her as a nest of nasties and fight her that way.”
Nice to know the cowboy and his immigrant bride had a plan. As for me and my vampire? He smiled down at me. “It looks as if our training is about to pay off, my dear. Shall we make the CIA proud?”
I pulled my sword, so high on my new freedom that I didn’t care if it sounded obnoxious as I said, “It’s a good thing Astral’s here to record this. Now we can put on a show the rookies will be studying for years to come.”
Vayl’s dimple appeared as Zell asked, “Then what are we waiting for?” He glanced at Helena as he pulled a roughly made weapon from the seam of his homespun pants. It looked less like a dagger than like an extra-long bolt with a handle on one end and a handsharpened point on the other. She smiled at him, flipped up the skirt of her dress just long enough to give her access to the bowie knife she had stowed there, then dropped it back down again.
“Why Granny H,” I murmured, gaining raised eyebrows from Vayl and a broad smile from her. “What a big knife you have there.”
She nodded once. “I took it off of the carcass of my first kill. I had to smash his head in with a rock.” She grimaced. “Awful business, that. I wouldn’t recommend it to the easily nauseated.” I caught just a hint of her former accent. Once strongly British, it also had nearly surrendered to the onslaught of hell’s eternal attack. And yet, when she smiled at Zell with that glow of love in her eyes, I couldn’t help but admire her for hanging on to what really mattered.
Granny May had fallen into her front porch chair and found a hand fan from church emblazoned with the words god be praised, and in smaller print, shop your hometown grocer, which she was using to give herself more air as she openly admired our forebear. Well, that explains where we get it from. I guess you can’t beat heredity after all. She stared at the cheap paper set into a balsa wood handle, watching its almost hypnotic back-and-forth movement as she said, almost to herself, Even when your mother spends her whole life trying. I wonder what she couldn’t face. Hmm. I really should look her up sometime. After being dead all these years, maybe she’d finally feel free to tell me.
Raoul’s voice interrupted my inner monologue. “I’m thinking that as soon as the gorgon and her pet are halfway across the bridge we should turn and attack. It’s a fairly wide crossing so that if a couple of us can get behind them, considering that we’ve got them well outnumbered and most of us are skilled fighters, hopefully they’ll see reason and surrender quickly. Is everyone happy with that idea?”
“I’m scared of snakes,” Lotus said in a wavery voice. “But I’ve been in my share of bar fights. In fact, I once shoved a stiletto through a guy’s eye. Purely out of self-defense, I’d like you to know. Just saying—I can hold my own out there.”
I glanced up at Vayl, realizing instantly that he had no idea how to digest this new information about his daughter. Finally he said, “I do not care for snakes either.” And when they traded small grins, he was happy that was the route he’d chosen.
At a nod from him we raised our weapons and spun, steeling ourselves for the battle that lay ahead of us. Among the six of us, seven counting Astral, we must’ve seen it all. And yet we still froze, stunned into paralysis by the scene that lay before us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Sunday, June 17, 11:45 p.m.
Gorgons are, first and foremost, death-eaters. They haunt battlefields and burn wards. Nursing homes—not so much. Because they love riding their victims through time, sucking up the soul’s reluctance to move on, like kids at a candy counter. And young souls work so much harder to beat death than old ones. They say gorgons can survive for centuries on the backs of seven-year-olds. The fuckers.
You can’t see them in the world unless they’re about to make a deal. But you might get hints. Maybe you’ll catch them in a stray expression that doesn’t quite fit your husband’s face, or a disturbing personality quirk in your sister that appears suddenly after a nearly tragic accident that the doctors explain as the result of brain damage. It’s not dead brain matter, it’s a gorgon. Sliding up against your sweetheart’s back like the strumpet she was born to be, clutching him so tight he can only breathe when she inhales for them both.
But in hell? Yeah, we could’ve seen her clearly if we’d wanted to spend the rest of eternity as statues. But since we all enjoyed mobility, we caught her in darting glances as she advanced across the bridge, pulling her all-you-can-eat-buffet behind her on a delicate silver chain that must’ve been hidden in his fur when he’d been masquerading as a spiderhound.
Roldan, I thought as I exchanged a shocked glance with Vayl. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
In the world, with the gorgon riding him like a shadow, he’d held himself like the most-wanted villain he was. Gawd, how long had his gaunt, hard-eyed face stared at us from the kill-’em-ifyou-can bulletin board in Pete’s office every time he called us in to assign a new mission? A king among cutthroats and thieves, the Sol of the Valencian Weres had gained so much status with his decimation of NASA’s communication centers in California and Madrid that his following was threatening to become a worldwide cult. Not so shocking to see him touring the netherworld, considering his worst enemy (Vayl) and dearest love (Helena) had managed to find each other again. But as we watched him connected to his parasite by a single thin metal cord, we understood what he’d really become.
“No wonder he didn’t want to take human form,” Lotus said in a hushed whisper. “While he was still a spiderhound the gorgon kept leaning down and hissing into his ear. Slapping him on the back of his head, even flicking at his eyeballs. Nothing. Then she found that chain, yanked it a couple of times, and suddenly he stood up and became… that.”
Now the man he’d been born to become, he shambled behind the gorgon aimlessly, trying to wander off the path until she jerked him back to heel, blood trickling unheeded
from the spot on his neck where the collar had cut into his skin. In wolf form he was a fearsome hook-fanged creature with black claws and fur generously patched in black. That had been one scary monster. The spiderhound form had been even more fearsome. This? This was a skinny old man with sunken eyes and receding gums who kept trying to draw the number eight in the air, and then forgetting how to finish the final loop, forcing him to start all over again. Then I reminded myself. This piece of shit had been responsible for the deaths of Ethan Mreck and my old boss man, Pete. He was going. Fucking. Down.
“The old man I can take. But I’ve never had to battle a gorgon,” Lotus noted nervously. “If Zell and Helena are going for the creepycrawlies, what am I supposed to target?”
We waited for Raoul’s word on the subject since it had been his plan in the first place. “Gorgons are very nearly godlike,” he admitted. “The best we can hope for is to harry her until she finds us too painful to deal with and decides to go play with easier prey. So, Lotus, just try to make her bleed.”
“I’m a lot better with the sword than I used to be,” I said, “but damn, Raoul. Considering her defenses, that’s kind of a thin plan.”
“If you can think of anything heftier, speak up,” he said. We were in such desperate straits he didn’t even sound irritated.
Vayl said, “Why did it have to be snakes? Her hair could have been crawling with rats and I would have gladly faced her a thousand times over.”
I didn’t have to look at him to know his jaw was tight as a vise. I reached for his hand and gripped it. “I’ll make you a deal,” I whispered. “I’ll protect you from those snakes if you agree to get me out of the assassination business.”
He looked at me sharply. “You are finished?”
I looked at him squarely. “I risked my soul for my country. I carried a damn demon around inside me for the good old US of A. I think I’ve done enough, don’t you?”
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