The Deadliest Bite

by Jennifer Rardin

  He squeezed my hand. “What if you find you miss it?”

  “I figure Bergman can keep us busy enough to make sure we’re never bored. But this way I can say no to the missions that make my skin crawl. Plus I can make time for my family whenever they need me.” I raised our hands like we were about to shake. “Deal?”

  “You know I would do nearly anything to avoid those serpents. But this I would have done in any case.” He raised my fingers to his lips, kissed them, and said, “Deal.”

  Feeling about fifty pounds and ten years lighter, I said, “I don’t guess anyone brought a mirror?” Silence all around. “Didn’t think so. Well, that whole reflect-the-evil-eye-back-on-the-nasty-gorgon scheme probably never worked in the first place.”

  As the bridge continued to rise from the depths of the Moat and the gorgon led Roldan to its front edge we moved to meet them. Waiting silently at our end of the bridge, hands gripping our swords or rubbing the sweat off on our jeans and then finding a new, more comfortable position on our weapons, we watched the bridge rise to its zenith. Water poured from the jaws, femurs, and shoulder blades of flesh-picked bodies that had been interlocked so tightly that you couldn’t tell where one began and another ended. What you could make out clearly were the moans and groans coming from the souls trapped inside them. And we were supposed to step on these people? Desecrate their skeletons, break their bones under our feet just so we could fight and probably die on top of them?

  Hell yeah! yelled Teen Me. Stop being so melodramatic! They sucked. Now they’re paying. Just get on with it, okay? I have a life to live. It sounds like it’s going to be übercool and I’m going to be so mad if you die before you’re even thirty. Plus we have to pee.

  All excellent points. So when the gorgon and her pet werewolf reached mid-bridge I was ready. I didn’t even flinch when Raoul yelled, “Charge!” like some damn cavalry captain. I just hauled off right along with Vayl, Zell, Helena, Astral, and Lotus, and followed his orders to the letter.

  I’d never fought a gorgon on a bridge made from scum-covered skeletons. As Lotus had predicted, it’s a tricky proposition. First of all, the footing sucks. Also, the footing sucks. Which is what I discovered the first, second, and third times I fell into the water.

  “Fuck!” became my battle cry as I fought beside some of the toughest warriors I’d ever encountered. And for once I wasn’t the biggest potty mouth in the bunch.

  “Take that, you manky bitch!” cried Lotus as Raoul’s sword found an opening, causing the gorgon to spin toward them. Lotus shoved her dagger at the monster’s face with such hope in her eyes that I felt her disappointment in my own heart when she missed wide and nearly went all cementy before Vayl yelled a reminder at the last second for her to avert her eyes.

  “Fuckaroo!” she cried. “That was too fucking close to shitsville for me!”

  “Lotus!” Vayl objected as he dodged a lunging snake and spun aside to make room for Zell to move in low with a stab to the gorgon’s thigh that Helena followed up with a slash at her ribs, which also connected.

  “What?” Lotus demanded, backing off before the gorgon’s nest of hair-snakes could reach out and turn her into a quivering blob of poison-filled organs.

  I sighed as I pulled myself out of the water—again. “I think your language offends,” I explained, having been on the receiving end of that tone many times myself.

  She huffed. “It’s how I talk! It’s how I was raised, for shit’s sake!” I put my hand on Vayl’s arm as he twitched, all his dreams of a wellbred daughter going up in flames when Lotus added, “Speaking of which, let’s take this gorgon down quick, shall we? I’m in dire need of a crapper.”

  “Did my child just say ‘crapper’?’” he asked the world at large.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “But you should look at the bright side of this.”

  “There is a bright side?” he asked incredulously.

  “Of course. At least she’s potty trained.”

  With Roldan pretty much a no-show—he barely noticed he was surrounded and seemed to have no desire to take on his wolf form and jump into the fight—we concentrated on his mistress. While Lotus took wild pokes with her dagger that sometimes landed, the rest of us took turns making the gorgon wish she’d stayed topside chowing on the old wolf’s mortality where she could digest in peace. Looking back, I have to think the battle would’ve gone down in history as a lot more militarily important and politically influential than it ended up being if I’d just kept my mouth shut. But, uh…

  I said, “Roldan, you mangy old mutt. How on Earth did you talk yourself into rolling over for some cobra-haired bitch who wouldn’t give a shit if the moon became a strip mine?”

  His vacant gaze, which had been wandering across the landscape like a dreamy painter’s, locked on to mine. “What did you say?” His lips drew back from his unbrushed teeth, and even from ten feet away I could smell the stench of decay blasting out of his throat. It was as much a psychic odor as a physical one, making my brain shrink for cover. And I realized, looking into eyes whose spark had nearly suffocated, that what I scented was the rot of a living soul.

  Vayl explained, “Jasmine likes to needle people into a murderous rage before she kills them. Otherwise she feels it is not a fair fight and the guilt is more difficult for her to bear afterward.”

  Oh. Is that what I do?

  Roldan’s eyes widened. It wasn’t the first time they’d crossed Vayl’s face. But now I could tell he was seeing the vampire for the first time. “Vasil Brâncoveanu,” he hissed. The snakes in the gorgon’s hair echoed him. Only because I was watching closely did I see a fine shudder shake Vayl’s hands in response to the gorgon’s wriggly do. Then he forced himself into stillness as he lowered his head slightly in acknowledgment. Roldan’s boss lady whispered into his ear, and his head turned until he could see Helena standing between Zell and Raoul, her bowie knife dripping with the gorgon’s blood. He held out both hands. “My Helena.”

  He walked to the end of his chain but the gorgon held him back. And I realized this little jaunt to hell must’ve been her idea. What was she gaining from it? More juice from a soul that had shriveled to nearly nothing? The fun of torturing her longtime partner by showing him that he really hadn’t punished Helena after all? Or was she really trying to give him a gift by killing us all for him? I couldn’t tell.

  While I tried to guess her motives, Zell put an arm around Helena’s shoulders and both of them raised their weapons in response to Roldan’s advance. Zell said, “Helena is mine. And I’m hers. That’s how it’s been for over a hundred and fifty years, and that’s how it’s gonna stay.”

  Wow, romance in hell. Who knew? My Inner Bimbo had made it back to the bar, where she’d settled in at her favorite table. Now she raised her hand. Oh, waiter? Bring me a goddamn martini! Extra olives on those little sticky thingies! She drew a picture in the air, holding an imaginary plastic sword with one hand while she pointed to a couple of imaginary olives with the other. How strange that the image she drew in the air was exactly like the nearly-number-eight Roldan had been tracing.

  Before I could make sense of the similarity Roldan spun around, nearly tripping over the chain that bound him as he grabbed his gorgon by the shoulders. “Is this why you brought me here, Sthenno? So you could shred my heart into even smaller pieces than you do every single day?”

  Raoul made a sound, soft enough that it didn’t distract our foes, but loud enough to catch my attention.

  “What is it?” I asked softly.

  “Sthenno isn’t just any gorgon,” he replied. “She’s one of the original three. Her list of crimes is so long there’s a whole bookcase reserved for her in the Hall of Monitors. But what matters most right now is that she’s the mother of Lord Torledge.”

  “Wait. What? The demon who made the Rocenz? That Lord Torledge?”

  “Exactly. And he despised her, Jaz. I mean, we know of at least two separate occasions when he tried to kill her.”

&n
bsp; My brain spun into action. Lord Torledge had crafted the tool I’d defeated Brude with for demon hands, though I’d never been convinced its original purpose was to turn humans into spawn, as Kyphas had attempted with Cole. Or that Torledge had ever imagined humans would be able to reduce demons to their most basic elements with it. As with all magically imbued items, the Rocenz had shown itself to be full of unexpected surprises.

  What had been predictable was the fact that the Rocenz could separate Sthenno from Roldan, and if that happened they’d both die. Especially here, where Sthenno had no other willing soul to host her. This had to have been why Torledge originally designed the tool, so that he could trap his mother and her dinner partner in hell where whoever was carrying the Rocenz at the time would be forced to vanquish her.

  So all Torledge had to do was let the Rocenz be “stolen” and wait for Sthenno to hook herself up with the right partner. Once she’d made the deal with Roldan, and Torledge recognized the Were’s hatred for Vayl, he knew these were finally the perfect circumstances for murder. He just needed to figure out a way to lure them both into his realm. Allowing Roldan to throw Helena into the pit must’ve seemed a brilliant plan, especially after he managed to hook her up with Zell, the only man on the plane who knew how to operate the Rocenz. After that, all he had to do was add Vayl to the mix, but that turned out to be more difficult than it sounded. Enter Brude, who (probably also manipulated by Torledge) formed a partnership with Roldan. Together the two of them pushed Vayl and me closer and closer to the abyss, until we finally had no other choice than to jump, bringing the Rocenz to hell’s gate, Zell Culver to the exact spot where he could be of the most help, Helena between Vayl and Roldan, and Sthenno into a no-win situation. Because, despite knowing all about Lord Torledge’s dirty damned dealings now, there was still no way I was going to let his mother win this battle.

  “Fuck me.”

  “Jasmine!” This time it was Raoul objecting to my choice of words.

  “Sorry, I just think, wherever I look lately, I end up deciding I’m working for the wrong damn people.”

  “We can make good come from it.”

  “You’re Eldhayr. You’re supposed to believe stuff like that.”

  “So are you.”

  I thought about that while I watched Roldan confront his gorgon. He’d been yelling at her for a while. Working himself into a frenzy of spittle-on-the-lip fury because she’d made him witness the love of his life with another man when all the time he’d thought she was in utter misery here. He was outraged that she’d used him so badly over the centuries, leaving his heart-sworn enemy hale and hearty while he had been reduced to little more than a bag of bones under her care.

  When I dared a glance at Sthenno, it was to see her staring at him calmly, a small smile pasted across her paint-me-and-be-instantlyfamous face. Finally two of her snakes sank their fangs into him, one in each shoulder. His knees buckled. She lifted the chain to keep him from falling flat on his face. Watching him shudder as his body tried to say uncle and his soul fought to stay at anchor, she finally pulled him into her embrace, pressing his head between her breasts. It would’ve been a loving gesture in anyone else. But for her it meant convenience, allowing her to reach down his back and claw his shirt up over his shoulders. I winced at the thousands of marks on his back, like unhealed mosquito bites, some of which had turned black and begun to leak a dark, oily fluid that looked like it should never come from a human body.

  Sthenno looked down, giving me a chance to scope out her face, which (if you managed to ignore the snakes) seemed to me to be the perfect combination of high cheekbones and pouty lips that every woman dreams of but only plastic surgery pulls off. Even I felt slightly envious at those perfectly sculpted brows and thick black lashes. Until something pink and worm-like emerged from the inner corners of her meet-their-gaze-and-die eyes.

  They stretched down both sides of her nostrils, over her lips, down her neck, and onto Roldan’s hair. Still stretching, wriggling from her eyes, they moved as if they knew exactly where they were going. And when they reared up, revealing two small, three-fanged mouths, before they buried them in Roldan’s back, I believed they did.

  So this was how Sthenno ate Roldan’s death. Every day she killed him, and then she chowed down. It made sense. She wouldn’t want him to die naturally. What if she wasn’t ready with the utensils at just the right time? Her meal could actually cross over and then she’d be in a world of hurt. Which was just where we needed to put her.

  I whispered to Raoul, “Okay, so we need to use the Rocenz on her. But how? I don’t figure her name on the gate is going to work the same way it did on Brude, even if we could convince Roldan to do it.”

  “No,” said Raoul. “We need her heartstone. Remember the one Kyphas had? It will be locked inside her chest.”

  “Oh, that’ll be easy to snatch.”

  Vayl spoke up. “What is that saying? I like it quite well. Jasmine?”

  I wanted to stick out my bottom lip, but it seemed a little immature to pout in the middle of Satan’s playground. So I just said, “There’s no time like the present.”

  “Yes,” he said with such immense satisfaction that I found myself smiling instead as I watched him blast his way in, swinging his sword right at the wormlike appendages that were just now withdrawing from Roldan’s pockmarked back. But Sthenno’s snakes had been keeping watch while she was busy, and their reach was much longer than he’d anticipated. He jumped back just as a cobra that was bigger around than and twice as long as my arm darted toward him, its jaws open so wide I could see the pink of its throat.

  I lunged forward and hacked the snake’s head off, which caused Sthenno to scream with pain and rage. She tucked her little soulsuckers back into her eyes and turned them on me, trying to transform me into Jaz-granite. But I avoided her glare as I leaped in for another shot. This time I missed, but hitting hadn’t been my intention. I just wanted to distract her long enough to give Zell and Helena a chance to step up. Which they did. Zell danced past the snakes just long enough to slam his bolt-knife into Sthenno’s side while Helena threw her knife so accurately that she decapitated another snake and still had time to rescue the blade before falling back to stand beside her cowboy.

  We continued to hassle the gorgon, feinting, waiting for mistakes. As a result she, and Roldan, were becoming more and more infuriated. The Were, especially, was bitching out his gorgon like they were an old married couple.

  He said, “Why don’t you just kill them? It’s only my worst enemy and the woman I confessed to you that I could never live without. Right here! In hell! Why don’t you tear them to pieces already?” he demanded.

  I couldn’t get past it. Even in dotty old man form this was the Sol of the Valencian Weres. Why was he just talking? Why hadn’t he made a single attempt to wound one of us? Or better yet, why hadn’t he changed? Even in hell I had to figure he could transform pretty much at will. So why was he stamping his feet like a three-year-old demanding a second piece of cake for dessert?

  Because he wants you to win, whispered Granny May from her seat on the porch. He’s old and tired, worn to the bone from the looks of it. He’s trying to distract her, throw her off her game without seeming to, so you can dig out that heartstone and chisel her name onto it.

  I stared at him thoughtfully. No, not her name, I told my Granny. I don’t think that would work. But the glyph that he was drawing in the air, the almost-number-eight that our Inner Bimbo was retracing when she was demanding her drink before. I pointed to our fast-and-loose girl, who’d leaped to the stage and was now singing along with two other karaoke stars. That, I think, will do it.

  Then what are you waiting for?

  The snakes, there are so many of them, and it seems like for every one we decapitate two more grow in its place. We need, I don’t know, a couple of eagles or something. They eat snakes, don’t they?

  Granny May nodded at me, her eyes wandering over my shoulder to let me know my atten
tion should be moving elsewhere pronto. Eagles I can’t do. But what about those two?

  I turned my head and, though I know I should’ve been pissed, I can admit here at least that I’d never in my life been so glad to see Dave and Cole come darting through the field, taking cover wherever they could find it. Often that meant lying prone while a fence of forearms waved in front of their eyes. Or sliding into the shadow of a row of bodiless legs, their shredded connections screaming silently of chainsaw disasters and land mines.

  “Geyser coming!” Astral said triumphantly.

  “Oh!” Finally I understood her message. Dave and Cole had probably found a way to tap into one of her databases to message me that they were on their way. Only, given the circumstances with the durgoyles, I’d completely misunderstood.

  I allowed myself a second to feel relieved that Cole had survived his solo stint in hell, and to be thankful that he’d given us the time we needed to get to the gate in the first place. Then I whispered the news on the Party Line, and Vayl and Raoul quickly let Lotus, Zell, and Helena in on it. Together we intensified our attacks, doubling up on Sthenno while Roldan screamed his frustration and did absolutely nothing to help.

  Though we managed to avoid the snakes, the gorgon began to fight desperately enough that her claws became impossible to dodge, especially once Dave and Cole left cover. Raoul took the first hit, a slash to the skull right at his hairline that brought the blood gushing so fast he had to back out of the fight to bind it before it blinded him.

  Surprised at how deeply an injury to Raoul pissed me off, I rolled under Sthenno, slicing up into her rib cage as she bent over to intercept me. I was still rolling back out of range when I saw one of the rattlers leap out of her hair. Fuuuuck! The angles were perfect. It would land exactly where I meant to stop. I dug my heels into the ground and reversed myself just as Vayl stepped up, holding his sword up by his ear like a big-league batter. As soon as the snake hit the sweet spot Vayl swung for the bleachers, and it dropped in two pieces by my side.