Mad Lizard Mambo

by Rhys Ford

  “Yeah, I think I’ll be okay. I went through my iron shot mostly.” I patted my weapon’s stock. “Malone’s holding my ammo belt, but I’m going to switch with Ryder and take my Glocks back. Damned things did jack shit against those dogs.”

  “Yell if you need me,” she replied as she stepped out of the chamber. “I’m going to see if I can find someplace high enough to see more than the wall in front of my face. Maybe we’ll be lucky and I’ll spot Oscar before he spots us.”

  The place stank of blood magic, or at least that’s what my little lizard brain screamed at me as I studied the nearly empty room. I couldn’t tell if it’d ever been outside of the mountain, but the lack of windows along the back wall led me to believe someone didn’t want to let a lot of light in. Unsidhe symbols wiggled around the edge of the ceiling, elongated curved shapes spelling out words I could almost read. It was maddening, and just as I thought I’d figured something out, the shadows shifted and its meaning was lost to me.

  Six-foot hexagon tiles covered the floor, their edges fitted in so tightly I couldn’t see any grout, but their ceramic glaze held enough of a sheen to reflect the sparkling moss growing along the upper walls. Deep cobalt roofing tiles were stacked up in a corner, an enormous triangular gap in the ceiling opening the chamber up to the outside cavern. Other than the counter and fallen-in roof, the room was empty, but the feeling of something being out there watching haunted me as I walked around.

  “Kai, come see this,” Ryder called out to me. “Definitely fertility rites of some kind are laid into the stone. I should have brought a healer with me to look at this, but pictures should be enough. Once we document everything here, I can take it back and see if we can use any of the ritual.”

  Malone grinned back at me, clearly delighted at the find. They were cute, nearly trembling with excitement and rambling at one another in a string of unrecognizable babble made up of medical phrases and arcane power triggers.

  “This is what Marshall—”

  I wasn’t listening much to Ryder’s drone. Something else tugged at my brain, an oddity in the middle of the devastation of past lives. Staring at the counter, I asked, “How come the wood’s still here?”

  “What?” Malone popped his head up from what he’d been studying, his corn-silk shock of hair standing up nearly straight from his skull. “What wood?”

  “The counter’s got wooden supports.” I pointed to the brackets underneath the stone. “It’s damp in here. That stream kicks up a lot of moisture, and yeah it’s cold, so that’ll hold off decay for a bit, but the wet? That’ll eat through wood like nobody’s business.”

  “What does that have to do with—” Malone started to say, but Ryder cut him off with a sharp clench of his fingers into Malone’s shoulders.

  “It’s pine, I think.” I crouched down to get a better look. “Did they have pine on Underhill?”

  It wasn’t like I went around sniffing at logs and declaring their origin like one of those wine snobs who swished a swallow around in their mouths and droned on about raisins, smoke, and honey. I couldn’t scratch a plank of wood, put the shavings on my tongue, and tell jack shit about the tree it came from, but pine I knew. Mostly because it smelled like a cleaner version of the tree-shaped air fresheners Dempsey used to hang in his truck after he’d eaten at a taqueria.

  If I’d been troubled by the wood before, the blood-speckled grooves on the slab’s edge were more than enough to send alarm bells going off in my head.

  “The wood looks new.” Ryder took up too much space next to me, his shoulders blocking the wash of light from the moss behind us. His fingers ghosted over a bolt through one of the supports, the fastener’s dull matte metal a silvery spot against the pale frame. “These are human made. Someone’s been here. Recently.”

  “Safe bet, I think.” I straightened up and found Malone standing a few feet away from us, a gun shakily gripped in his slender hand. He chewed on his lower lip, worry sending a dark flush through his pale skin. “Well, I’ll be damned. Ryder, next time my gut says to not bring someone along, don’t let me talk myself out of it, okay?”

  “What?” He glanced over his shoulder when I tapped his back, then stood up to stare at Malone. “Robbie? What are you doing?”

  “I think this is called someone screwing us over,” I commented. “Classic, really. Normally it’s a relative or someone with a deep-seated longing for revenge, but in this case, I’ve got nothing. What the hell are you thinking here, Malone? What the hell is so damned important you’re willing to risk me carving you up once I get that gun away from you?”

  “Money, my dear Chimera. Money and the threat of his family dying a terribly long and frighteningly horrible death,” a female voice said from the shadows in the outer hallway.

  An unsidhe woman stepped into the chamber, her lean body framed by the outer archway. She was tall, a slender sylph of pale skin and black leather pants, easing into the space as if she were returning home after a quick jaunt into the upper city. Her eyes were unsidhe copper, a bright bronze despite the blue glow oozing from the walls, and her violet and white hair was cropped tight to her jawline, accentuating the alien-oddness of her sharp, vulpine face.

  I didn’t know who she was, hadn’t laid eyes on her in my entire life, but her hungry grin was mockingly familiar.

  Tucking a strand of gossamer white hair behind her upswept, pointed ear, she smiled at me and said, “Hello, my dear brother. You have no idea how delighted I am to finally meet you.”

  Twenty

  “RIGHT. MY sister.” I kept my hand away from the shotgun I’d slung down my back, but it was only a foot and a quick grab at Ryder’s waistband for my Glock. “You’re older than Valin. Sorry, lady. You’re kind of long in the tooth, but I don’t remember you being around when he was stewing me up. If there’d been a daughter he could scrape an egg out of, I wouldn’t be standing here and he’d have been popping out unsidhe overlords like they were pieces of gum.”

  “Being Tanic’s get is not something to boast about, and being considered his is a liability, of sorts. Then Valin failed to drag you back to where you belong, and Tanic reached out to me. But your existence… complicates things for all of us. It isn’t the healthiest of positions,” she conceded with a tilt of her head. “My Lord Tanic gladly calls me daughter… because his sons have failed him so, so much.”

  “And Ciarla? How’s she connected to you?” I pressed. “Because she met a couple of elfin at the hotel in San Diego, and I’m guessing one of those two was you.”

  “Ah, the sidhe lord’s sister. I hear her children are sidhe, another one of Valin’s failures…. A useful but problematic tool. She probably could be called Tanic’s… whore.” Her smile was hungry again, an arrogant wrap of teeth around her face. “Much like you are to her brother, Ryder.”

  Ryder took a step forward, but I kept him back with a brush of my elbow against his belly. Her eyes narrowed, and she came farther into the room, skirting Malone’s gun. Robbie’s hands were shaking, and I was more worried about the damned traitor accidentally plugging us because he didn’t know what he was doing.

  “You can die just as easily as anything else,” I said, hoping to bluff her out. Damned Malone had my ammo belt on him, and I hadn’t gotten my Glocks back from Ryder. Things were going to shit, and while I had a couple of knives on me, I didn’t like carving someone up. A black dog was one thing, but a person—not my cup of tea.

  “Human?”

  The unsidhe looked worried, and she raised her left hand, crooking her fingers into a claw. I felt a draw of power in the air, and the pull sickened me, dragging serrated threads through my belly.

  “You were supposed to disarm them.”

  “His shotgun’s empty, and I have his ammo belt,” Malone informed her. “There’s another Stalker, but she’s gone out to do recon.”

  “Do I need to send you out to go kill her?” the unsidhe asked pointedly. “Because so far, human, you’ve not done anything other than herd
ed these two against the wall. So little work for so much reward.”

  “I sent Cari back to the truck. I’ve run out of ammo, and her shells don’t fit my shotgun. She probably won’t be back for about an hour.” I noticed Malone made no mention of the Glocks Ryder still had on him, so I matched her smile, wondering how long it would take me to get my hands on one of the guns and possibly kick Malone in the teeth at the same time. “Got to be honest with you, I’m kind of tired of siblings falling out of every tree. Especially since all they seem to want to do is kill me.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to kill you, Ciméara cuid Anbhás,” she purred at me. “I want to remake you.”

  “Aisla?” Malone broke in before I could ask what she meant. “We should just get what we came for so we can get out of here.”

  “We need Oscar, human, and the others. They are retrieving what I need to complete this,” she tsked. “And do not presume you have any say with me. You’ve seen what I will do to people who push me.”

  “I don’t understand.” Ryder sounded as confused as I felt. “Why are you here? What was so important for you to kill people—your own men—to reach this place before us?”

  “The pretty monster standing next to you is what I needed here, not you, Lord Ryder, but he would not have been here without you. Without something to lure him to the middle of nowhere. You were easy enough to bait, and by killing you, I weaken San Diego’s Court and sever one of the chimera’s bonds.” Her coppery gaze flicked over me. “But seeing him… hearing him… I see he is tainted. I doubt he’ll be of any further use to Lord Tanic. He’s human now. Stinks of human. Reeks of their words and culture.”

  “You kill because you like it.” I cocked my eyebrow at her. “The kid with the dogs? The one using my name? You sent him after us and then shot him. That was you, right? And what about the poor bastard outside in the city? What did he do to you? How long does Oscar have?”

  “I have no intention of killing Oscar. Or at least not yet,” Aisla corrected me, slithering across the hard floor to get to the counter. “I need him. At least for a little while. And why kill? Oh, my little monster, how does that human saying go? You have to crack eggs to make… whatever it is they make out of eggs. I’m going to have to crack a few eggs to get what I want… and one of them is you.”

  Ryder shifted, edging closer to me, but his attention was on Aisla. I glanced at Malone, mostly to gauge his willingness to shoot us, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. Ryder’d shifted the Glocks around, using his jacket to hide their grips. Twisting his shoulders toward me, Ryder hooked his hand into his pocket, pulling back the leather jacket’s panel and exposing the guns to me.

  Aisla caught the movement, her keen snake eyes fixed on Ryder’s face, but I stepped forward, blocking her view, then asked, “So, Malone, she worth doing this for? You say they’re threatening your family? Like Sarah? Who? Who the hell can they get near that you couldn’t protect?”

  “You heard what they did to Marshall, and she’s been in on this since they first started planning a month ago. She only changed her mind about helping them when she found out they’re going to kill Ryder,” Robbie retorted. “I’m second string, guys. If I didn’t help them out, they were going to kill my aunt and mother. Besides, I need the money. I’m not good at anything. The professor was going to fire me anyway. She wasn’t going to go through with this… handing Kai over to the unsidhe.”

  “And you are fine with it?” Ryder prickled. “After Kai saved your life, how many times? They would have killed you back at Sparky’s and have tried to kill you since. Are you forgetting that?”

  “Maybe he thought it was all near misses so it would look better for him?” I tossed in, turning to keep my eye on Aisla. The unsidhe woman seemed to be paying less and less attention to us, but I knew her kind. Hell, Ryder’s grandmother probably would have cackled gleefully and adopted Aisla on the spot if she thought she could pass the bitch off as sidhe. “Tell you what, Aisla. So far you’ve done nothing to us directly. We just all go our separate ways—no harm, no foul—and no one else gets hurt.”

  “Not quite, brother,” Aisla murmured as she drew a knife out from somewhere on her body. “There’s a small matter of you.”

  My elbow hit Ryder’s arm, and I fought the urge to grin at his clumsy attempt to bring himself close enough for me to grab the guns. “If you think you’re dragging me back to Tanic, you’ve got another think coming to you.”

  “I’ve no intention of dragging you anywhere, Kai.”

  The look she tossed over her shoulder wasn’t a pleasant one. In fact, it made me long for a bath.

  “I just need a little bit of your blood. Okay, maybe a lot of your blood, but since you’ll be dead, I’m sure you won’t mind.”

  I reached for the Glocks just as a pair of ainmhi dubh padded into the thick-walled chamber and came up with two handfuls of loaded gun.

  Ryder sucked in a mouthful of air behind me, and I felt the waves of revulsion pouring off his body in a tide of sharp horror and disbelief. A second later, Robbie Crickets Malone went down in a dead faint, his body hitting the uneven floor with a resounding thump.

  What came through the door was beyond horrific. I had no word for what I saw other than abomination—exactly what everyone with pointed ears called me.

  The creatures were unlike any black dog I’d seen before, and I’d skinned enough of the damned things to write a book on their twisted, arcane forms. For one, they were a blush ivory color, iridescent pinks and greens roiling under their marble white skin. On any other creature, the tone would have been enchanting, a unicorn kiss of hues on a snow-bright canvas. They were more simian than canine, sexless, with sloped-back hips and long flat apelike hands and feet with stubby flat nails where ainmhi dubh had claws. Bowed spines angled their backs down, their powerful shoulders and legs thick with patchy spoiled-milk-colored fur, and they loped into the room on all fours, then rose up into a bowlegged, swaggering crouch, their knuckles nearly dragging on the ground as they approached Aisla.

  The larger of the two held something in its powerful jaws, its long sharp teeth cradling the dark object in a gentle bite. The ainmhi dubh dropped back down to its front legs and rubbed against Aisla’s open hand, smearing a line of spittle across her palm. Smiling, she stroked at its blond fur, then ran a fingertip along the ridges on its forehead.

  “As you can see, Chimera, I don’t kill all of my minions,” she remarked softly. “Some of them, like Oscar here, can be quite useful.”

  Time and the unsidhe had not been kind to Oscar Bennett.

  There was a bit left of the man whose picture I’d seen on the Post’s data sheet. The flat planes of his European ancestry were gone, replaced by a mockery of elfin features. His blond hair was now a mane, thin in spots, a dry straw thatch set on his elongated skull, while the skin around his color-daubed violet eyes turned upward, stretched tight with the edges laid over with a heavy lid. The ends of his mouth were pinched in, and the bone along his cheeks and jawline jutted up, creating hard ridges barely contained by his taut skin.

  The man had been turned into a funhouse-mirror pet, a wax-pencil drawing done by a toddler, of a monster dreamed up to live under beds.

  “You’re a flesh-shaper. Like Tanic.” Realization hit me hard, because stupidity makes a mark when it leaves the body. There’d been only one unsidhe lord who was depraved enough, sick enough to sculpt out a person’s form to such a repulsive horror, but from the looks of Oscar Bennett, Tanic now had some stiff competition on that score. “Holy shit, you are his.”

  “You are supposed to heal the body.” Ryder’s horror was thick and bitter, a slice of ume served up with a cup of bile. “Not do… this.”

  “This is how you make an ainmhi dubh, Lord Ryder.” Aisla slid behind Oscar, using him as a shield. “We all start off with a base. The stronger the animal, the stronger the ainmhi dubh, and what greater animal to work with than a human?”

  Oscar spit out what he had in his mouth
and rubbed his muzzle along Aisla’s hip, nearly knocking her off balance with his enthusiastic preening.

  The object was as familiar to me as my own ass. I’d stolen many an egg, usually cold dead in a nest scraped together by a neglectful dragon. There was good money to be made in an unfertilized dragon egg, but like all things, the prettier and bigger, the better. It was flat in color and, while decorative, looked more like something easily purchased at an overpriced faux-import store to decorate an ugly table you still had to assemble when you got home.

  Not the stuff dreams were built on.

  “Nice egg you’ve got there, Aisla. Useless on the open market, but hey, still, a nice egg.” I didn’t know the type of lizard it’d come from, and its lack of color could only mean one thing—it was fertilized. Aisla’s pet human hadn’t dragged a gold mine in with his mutilated mouth. It was a piece of shit taken from an active nest. “You did kind of go overboard making ainmhi dubh just for a game of fetch.”

  Leveling the Glocks, I pointed one at what remained of Oscar and the other at Aisla. The smaller ainmhi dubh wasn’t much of a worry. Unlike Oscar, it seemed confused, weaving then turning about in circles. Its enormous blue eyes were filled with pain. I knew that pain. I intimately knew the torment pouring out of the creature’s—the former human’s—soul. Imprisoned in an anguish with no end in sight, I’d wanted to die. Killing the smaller ainmhi dubh would be a mercy.

  Killing the other two would just be a pleasure.

  “The egg? That is how I am going to make a new you, Chimera. Because much like the ainmhi dubh, something like you needs a base to begin with. That is what is written on these walls, monster. The key to your existence. The words spoken over a sacrifice to create the likes of you.”

  Aisla’s serpentine smile got even wider. My look of surprise must have been hilarious, because Aisla burst out into hearty laughter, Oscar snickering in a hyena chortle as he skulked around her knees.