King of Hell (The Shadow Saga)

by Christopher Golden

  "Your friends went to Hell for you?" Squire interrupted.

  Octavian paused, troubled. This topic had always troubled him.

  "Two of them were my friends," he said. "One of them, Meaghan . . . we'd been more than friends. The other two were a woman named Alexandra Nueva, who'd become Meaghan's girlfriend —"

  "Wait, girlfriends as in lesbians? Because this story just got a lot more interesting."

  Octavian sighed, thinking he wanted another glass of scotch. "Squire . . ."

  The hobgoblin frowned. "It's just the way I'm made, amigo. Sorry. Go on. Who was the third one?"

  "That's where this story has been headed all along. See, there was a Vatican sorcerer named Liam Mulkerrin who'd been trapped in Hell, and he'd come back infused with dark magic. They came to Hell to find me, hoping I'd know something about Mulkerrin's time there that would be useful in the fight against him. Alexandra died shortly after they entered Hell. The third member of their party was a vampire called Lazarus."

  "Lazarus as in Lazarus?" Squire asked. "Biblical Lazarus?"

  "You have that story in your world?" Octavian said.

  Squire nodded. "It's not very different from this one. Or at least it wasn't until recently."

  "What happened to change that?" Octavian asked.

  A heavy sorrow seemed to descend upon the hobgoblin. He waved it away but Octavian saw the pain in his eyes.

  "That's a conversation for another day. Point is, it's a parallel Earth. Hell — the various Hells — and some of the others I've come across . . . they're parallel dimensions but not this same world. Not this planet. But my dimension's Earth is a lot like this one. So, yeah . . . Lazarus."

  Octavian hesitated, rotating his empty glass in circles on the arm of the chair, only vaguely aware that he was doing it.

  "The short version is that we left him there."

  Squire went still for a moment. His brows knitted and then he nodded slowly, leaned forward and refilled his scotch glass, and then took a sip. They had nearly reached the bottom of the bottle.

  "This guy came to Hell to help rescue you and you left him there," Squire said, his voice hollow, lacking in nuance. But his distaste was evident in his eyes.

  "We had no choice. Lazarus became trapped in the same crystal megalith where I'd been imprisoned and it looked like it was consuming him. The portal we'd managed to open back to our world was closing. Someone had to get back to stop Mulkerrin."

  "You never went back to check on him?"

  "The Gospel of Shadows was trapped there with him. I knew most of the magic in it by then, but not the secret to traveling to Hell."

  "You said you'd learned it all by heart."

  "Almost all."

  Squire sniffed, the accusatory look remaining in his eyes. "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, Pete."

  "The point is that we left him there. Left the Gospel of Shadows. We went back to Salzburg, Austria, where a bunch of Demon Lords were coming through dimensional tears into our world, and we stopped them. Killed them or drove them back."

  "Go on."

  Octavian studied his eyes. He didn't like the idea that Squire judged him, didn't like the way it made him feel. The hobgoblin hadn't been there. The choices he and Meaghan had made — and Lazarus had made — were the only choices available to them at the time when they'd occurred. Lazarus had known the risks involved as well as the potential rewards. He had helped to save his people and in the process had sacrificed himself.

  "I remember you telling me about the origin of vampires in your world," Octavian said. "Their origins are darker than those in my world, and older. Vampires here — Shadows — are trinity-based creatures: part human, part divine, and part demonic. Shapeshifters unlike anything you've seen —"

  "You might be surprised," Squire said. "I know a guy."

  "The point is this," Octavian went on. "When I came back from Hell I was already about fifteen hundred years old thanks to the time elapsed while I was there. No vampire in this dimension had ever lived that long. At a certain point I entered a sort of . . . let's call it a cocoon state. I evolved. Those three parts of me separated, Squire. I was reborn, in a way, the day I emerged from that cocoon. The divine part of me went on to wherever divinity resides when it is no longer of this Earth. The demonic part became a kind of wraith creature, a shadow-Octavian. It tried to kill me, but I destroyed it. What remained was what you see now. Still a mage, yes, but human. Mortal, or at least not eternal."

  Octavian could practically see the thoughts ticking over in Squire's brain, the puzzle pieces fitting together. Most people assumed the ugly little man must be stupid because of his appearance or his crude manner, but Octavian knew better.

  "How many years has Lazarus been in Hell, now?" Squire asked.

  "More than a decade in our time."

  "And you never went back for him? You could have found a way."

  "We had crisis after crisis. We figured him for dead. I could give you a thousand excuses, but none of them would be good enough. You're right — I could have found a way. I have to live with that . . . and the consequences."

  Squire swirled the scotch around in his glass again, staring at the amber liquid as if its motion were hypnotizing him. The music down in the Black Hart seemed to grow louder. The muffled sound of police sirens could be heard somewhere nearby, moving through nighttime London, just one of many emergencies that would take place in a single evening in the city, and here they were talking about other worlds, other dimensions. Sometimes it seemed so impossible, but Octavian had accepted the impossible so long ago that the moment was lost in the fog of his memory.

  "So, a decade. That's what?" Squire asked. "Two thousand years in Hell-time?"

  Octavian shook his head. "It's not that simple. There's no consistent differential. It might be nine hundred or three thousand. But in any case, it's long enough that he's evolved by now."

  "If he's still alive."

  "Oh, he's alive," Octavian said. "Or at least a part of him is."

  Squire set his glass down without finishing it. Apparently he had lost his taste for scotch, at least for tonight.

  "Now we're getting to it, aren't we?" Squire asked. "The reason you needed me."

  Octavian nodded and forged ahead with the story, explaining how the Vatican sorcerers had managed to create barriers that kept most supernatural creatures away from the human world and how, in their absence, those barriers had deteriorated. He did not speak of Nikki or of Cortez, aware of the time passing by, time he felt he was wasting. Instead he went on to talk of Gaea and her avatar, Keomany, and that in that last moments before all of the vampires and demons had been dragged from the world and banished, he had seen a wraith with the face of Lazarus . . . the ancient vampire's darksoul.

  "What became of it?" Squire asked.

  "Eaten by a ravenous ghost."

  The hobgoblin arched an eyebrow. "You have an interesting world."

  "My dearest friends are in Hell. And though I told myself he must be dead, it's obvious now that Lazarus must still be alive there — the human part of him, anyway. I don't know how his darksoul came to be a part of Hell's effort to invade my world, but now that I know for certain that Lazarus is human and in Hell, I can't leave him there any more than I can my friends who've been taken."

  "You left him there before."

  "I told myself that I might be throwing my life away in Hell and there were people here who needed me . . ."

  "But?" Squire said.

  "There's nobody left in this world who needs me," Octavian said, lifting his gaze. He shook his head. "God, that sounds pitiful. The point is that the worst of the supernatural troubles facing this world are over and done with. The people who need me are in Hell, so I've got to find a way to get there. At this point, you're pretty much my only hope."

  "You're not gonna call me Obi-Wan Kenobi, are you?"

  Octavian set his own scotch glass down. "I'm fairly sure that's never going to happen."


  "What if I said I wouldn't help you unless you did? Unless you said 'Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope?'"

  "I suspect I'd beat the shit out of you."

  Squire grinned. "I did miss you. Partly because I enjoy your company and partly because your life is even more fucked up than mine. I mean, listen to that story you just told me. Is there a story more fucked up than that?"

  "Listen —" Octavian began.

  "You know there aren't a lot of direct entries to Hell. Not even from the Shadowpaths."

  "I know. But I also know you can figure out a way."

  Squire sighed. He closed his eyes, thinking hard, and then shook his head.

  "Fuck. Maybe it's the scotch."

  Octavian gazed at him. "You'll do it?"

  "I don't like it. I've visited a lot of worlds in crisis, parallels where massive supernatural catastrophes are either imminent or have already happened. Worlds where unimaginable fuckin' horrors have taken over. There's just a lot of nasty shit out there these days. Hell's dangerous enough, but the Shadowpaths . . . they used to be fairly safe, but in the last few years there have been more and more things prowling around in there that don't belong."

  Octavian held up a hand, igniting a sphere of green flame on his palm that engulfed his hand and raced up his arm.

  "I can take care of myself," he said.

  "I know that, Pete."

  "You said yourself that you owe me, Squire."

  Squire scowled and stood up. "Fine. Pack up whatever you need and bring what's left of the scotch. We're going to need weapons, and there's another stop we need to make."

  Octavian started to argue, but Squire held up a hand to silence him.

  "I said there aren't a lot of direct entrances. If we want to get in without being captured or slaughtered in the first two minutes, we need to go through one of those, not some back door. We need permission to enter."

  "How are we supposed to get permission?" Octavian demanded.

  Squire grinned.

  "Trust me," he said. "I know a guy."

  Phoenix's World

  Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York, USA

  Phoenix stood in the corridor outside her father's hospital room trying to take some comfort in the kindness of his doctor. Many of the medical personnel she'd met had been pleasant enough but maintained the professional distance that she knew must be necessary to do this sort of job day after day. When patients were always being so uncooperative as to die in your care, she figured defense mechanisms must be important, so she never felt hurt or insulted by that distance. Then there were the ones who had adopted a cold, callous approach, without any attempt at cultivating good bedside manner.

  Her father's doctor, James Song, was a rare breed. Kind and considerate, with eyes full of gentle empathy, he seemed emotionally invested in his patients. Phoenix figured Dr. Song wouldn't last in the medical profession — at least not in oncology, an environment in which he was sure to have patients die with some regularity. All of that death would break him, eventually, and he'd end up in research.

  "He had such strength," Dr. Song said, his brown eyes full of emotion, as if he'd been Joe Cormier's friend instead of his doctor. "I admired him."

  "Thank you," Phoenix said, but the words came out a mumble, spoken by rote.

  Dr. Song said something further. She missed it, somehow, and couldn't put her thoughts together enough to ask him to repeat himself. Sorrow sat heavily upon her chest, squeezing all of the air out of her so that she could barely breathe. Knowing her father had been given a terminal diagnosis and watching him die turned out to be two very separate things. She had thought that she had begun to process what it would mean, that she'd already started to grieve, but now Phoenix realized that was not true at all. Grief still had not seized her, but she could feel it looming over her and it cast a terrible shadow.

  "Miss Cormier?" Dr. Song said.

  Phoenix blinked. "I'm sorry. I kind of feel like I'm not all here. My mind is floating off somewhere. I knew it would hurt, but I didn't expect to feel so . . . empty."

  "Take your time," Dr. Song replied. "Just breathe. If you need someone to talk to, I can recommend a wonderful counselor. It's normal to feel lost when something like this . . ."

  He hesitated and then just nodded, unable to go on. His eyes were damp and Phoenix thought, Don't do it, Doc. Don't you cry on me. You're the doctor. You're not supposed to cry because if you cry then I'm going to totally lose my shit right here. For the first time, she wished he was more like other doctors.

  "Thank you," she said again. The words sounded as hollow as her heart felt.

  Dr. Song glanced toward her father's room, where a nurse had begun to disconnect the professor from his IV drip and the machines that had monitored his vital signs. A pair of orderlies rolled a gurney down the corridor toward them and Phoenix had a sudden vision of what would happen next. They would go into the room, move her father from bed to gurney, and cover him with a white sheet. He'd be wheeled to some staff elevator that would descend to the morgue in the hospital's basement, where he'd be held until she made arrangements for a funeral home to come and get him.

  "No," she said softly, shaking her head.

  "Miss Cormier," Dr. Song said, laying a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Phoenix, let them do their work. You need to rest now, but you'll see him later."

  "See him? I'm never going to see him again."

  "I only meant —"

  Phoenix shook his hand off. "I know what you meant."

  She moved to block the orderlies. "Not yet. Just give me a minute, all right."

  Dr. Song gestured for the orderlies to wait. Phoenix nodded gratefully, took a deep breath, and then walked back into her father's hospital room. She wondered how many other patients had died in that same bed in the years since the hospital first opened. How many, for that matter, had died in the entirety of the building in that time. People had been healed here. Cured. Many more, no doubt, than had died. And yet she couldn't help now thinking of the whole place as some kind of death house.

  Professor Joe Cormier's corpse lay uncovered. His body had become so thin and frail and his cheeks sunken and gray that he barely looked himself. Completely still, not even a breath remaining in him, he looked false in the way that the mummies of Pompeii had looked to her when she had traveled there — withered and unreal, some kind of hoax. But this was no hoax.

  "Can you give me a minute, please?" she asked.

  The nurse had been coiling a cable onto a hook on the heart monitor. She flinched and turned, surprised to find that she wasn't alone.

  "Yes, of course," the sturdy, fortyish bleach blond said. "I'll wait outside. Do you want me to cover him up again?"

  Phoenix frowned. Such a strange question. "I don't think he's cold, do you?"

  The nurse might have taken offense at her tone, but instead only gave her a noncommittal smile and started for the door.

  "Oh, this is perfect," a voice said.

  The nurse froze and began to turn. Phoenix thought the voice — high and girlish, almost giddy — must have come from another nurse somewhere in the room. Only when she turned did her eyes confirm what her head had told her; there was nobody else in the room. She stared at her father's face, remembering the warning that had issued from his lips in the voice of a ghost.

  This voice was different. Gleeful and full of malice. And when it came again, though there could be no doubt it came from her father's mouth, his lips did not move. Joe Cormier was dead. He wasn't speaking . . . he was being spoken through.

  "Yes," said the voice. "This will do very nicely."

  "What the hell is that?" the nurse said, her voice barely a whisper. She looked at Phoenix, lower lip trembling and fear in her eyes. "Please tell me that's a trick."

  Phoenix had no reply. This shouldn't be, she thought. Can't be. Her father had spent most of his life channeling the voices of the dead, giving them the opportunity to speak to the people they'd left behind, so if
one of them had slipped in as he lay weak and dying and possessed him long enough to speak through him . . . it had upset her, unnerved her, but it hadn't necessarily shocked her.

  But this . . . he was dead. How could they speak through him now?

  "Get out," Phoenix said, taking a step nearer the bed. The fading daylight beyond the window cast strange shadows on his face. "Get out of him, now!"

  Laughter bubbled up from somewhere inside her father's corpse, growing in volume, rising through the megaphone of his open mouth. Other voices joined with the first and Phoenix felt icy dread run up her spine. Memories of the Uprising rushed into her mind and she wondered if there might be some connection, if the malevolent ghosts who had manipulated her father and the other mediums that day had come back.

  "Stop it," the nurse said, frantic and loud. "How do you stop it?"

  Dr. Song stepped into the room. "Phoenix? Is everything —"

  "Leave him alone!" Phoenix screamed, enraged by this violation of her father and disgusted by her own helplessness.

  Behind her, the laughter had stopped. She turned to stare at the pale scarecrow on the hospital bed, the husk that had once been her father. A low susurrus of whispers came from inside his mouth, a cluster of hushed voices that reminded her of an audience waiting for the show to begin.

  She took another step toward the bed, and one more, straining to make out the words, and then one last voice joined them, this one far from a whisper. Low, rumbling so deeply that she could feel it in her chest. Not the voice of a man or even a ghost. A malignant tumor of a voice.

  "Don't be stupid, girl," it said. "I'd run if I were you."

  Her father's body twitched, then his chest and belly lurched upward as if an electrical current had been shot through it. The nurse began to pray as Dr. Song fled from the room and began shouting about a code, and then simply for help. It occurred to Phoenix, in some tiny place inside her mind where terror and grief had not reached her, that Dr. Song thought her father had somehow come back to life — maybe as himself and maybe as a zombie. But she had seen the dead rise before and it had never looked like this. That voice did not belong to her father.