Scarlet Dream

by James Axler

  In his seat, Papa Hurbon began to chuckle to himself, his busy hands working at the objects he had produced from his leather satchel.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Grant asked.

  “You told me you don’t believe in the path,” Hurbon replied, his eyes still fixed on the round woman as she struggled against some invisible force that seemed to hold her rigidly in place.

  Kane looked at Hurbon, then at Grant. “Voodoo magic?”

  “That’s what I think he’s prattling about,” Grant snarled.

  Hurbon’s hands continued moving, winding the black ribbon around and around until it had almost smothered the larger object he held there. Kane saw now what that thing was: a small doll, crudely sewn from red rags, two crosses of yellow thread used to create its eyes. The doll was a simple representation of a woman, and it looked bloated in its middle, more like a beanbag with legs. Kane realized that the doll bore a passing resemblance to Ellie.

  “You make that just now?” Kane asked.

  “This?” Hurbon replied with a raised eyebrow. “No, this is something I keep around for special occasions, white boy. See, this here represents the loa of love, Maitresse Ezili. Usually I’d use it to call on her when I was performing some love magic, but it seems that today she’s not in such a loving mood, non?”

  Kane looked from the rotund doll in Hurbon’s hands to the portly woman struggling in place against the invisible barrier. “You’re an observant little cuss, aren’t you?” he drawled. “I guess you’re doing this, but how long can you hold her?”

  With the gravity of ritual, Hurbon wound another loop of black ribbon around the little cloth doll in his hand. “Poupée de cire, poupée de son,” he muttered. “It’ll hold her for a little while yet, till she calms down.”

  Standing behind the wheelchair-bound priest, Grant met Kane’s eyes and shook his head. “So, how are things?”

  “Better for the moment,” Kane replied.

  A moment later a small door in the side of the staircase opened and Brigid Baptiste stepped out. She was accompanied by the white-haired woman called Winnie.

  “This is going to take some explaining,” Brigid said as she took in the debris and abject weirdness of the altered vista in front of her.

  Kane smiled. “Ladies first,” he quipped.

  Chapter 16

  In the end, it was Papa Hurbon who helped piece together the situation as the mismatched party gathered in the run-down kitchen.

  “There are many aspects to the loa,” he elaborated as he explained the nature of the voodoo spirit world. “Each loa has different sides, and each plays its role in a particular situation.”

  Kane waited at the doorway to the kitchen, his Sin Eater still in hand, watching as Ellie struggled against her invisible chains. Brigid, Grant and Winnie had taken up positions around the battered old kitchen table, while Hurbon sat in his wheelchair, making occasional windings with his black ribbon around the poupée—or voodoo doll—he held in his pudgy hand.

  “Broadly speaking,” Hurbon continued, “there are two sides to the voodoo spirits, the Rada and the Petro. These sides represent peace and aggression respectfully.”

  “You worship the Petro, right?” Brigid asked, and Hurbon nodded. “When we met before,” Brigid recalled, “I figured you were a Bizango, a follower of the darkest path of voodoo.”

  “A path is only dark until it’s been lit, little peach,” Hurbon admonished Brigid, a little of his old bravado returning as he made another slow loop around the doll with his black ribbon.

  Brigid ignored his comment, feeling her skin crawl with her proximity to this repellent man.

  Kane spoke up from the door, his eyes still fixed on the struggling figure of Ellie. “We met a friend of yours earlier today, Hurbon—delightful lady called Ezili Coeur Noir. Anything you want to tell us?”

  “That mad bitch is nothing but trouble,” Hurbon snarled. “You need to keep away from her. She revels in death.”

  “We noticed,” Grant said, his expression deadpan. “And we think she’s about to do something that’ll bring about the end of all life. Including yours.”

  “Ezili Coeur Noir is the queen of all things dead. She has always been a dangerous loa,” Hurbon acknowledged, “but recently she’s been unhinged. It’s as if once she came back from the stars she lost all her self-control.”

  “‘Came back from the stars’?” Brigid repeated, urging the crippled voodoo priest to elaborate.

  “I found her in the wreckage of her spaceship,” Hurbon explained. “She seemed confused and weak as a newborn kitten. I did what I could for her.”

  Nine months earlier.

  ALARMS WERE SOUNDING in the air like jangling wind chimes and the docking bay was shaking with increasing violence as Tiamat began to rip herself apart. The mothership had gone into a self-destructive spiral that could only end one way—with her obliteration. All around, the slow, heavy tolling of the crystalline notes continued to echo through the vast chamber as the bulkheads sealed themselves in final preparation for the end. Lilitu strode out of the shadows of the chamber, beautiful and horrible all at once, her scaled face blood-streaked and stained with smoke, her right hand now a welter of blood, flayed tissue and bone chips where she had taken a blast. Her crimson scales shimmered beneath sparking bursts of electricity as she strode across the chamber toward where Overlord Enlil’s skimmer waited, the promise of freedom reflecting from its sleek lines.

  Then, as the dark goddess was about to take the skimmer, the elevator door to its left slid open on its groove and five familiar figures came rushing out, moving with such speed one might believe that their heels were aflame. Lilitu stepped back, merging with the shadows, conscious that she was outnumbered by these heavily armed newcomers.

  The Asian woman—Shizuka—was still coughing as she emerged from the elevator car, and the powerful form of her lover, Grant, gave her a friendly shunt as they hurried toward the disk ship that waited in its docking pod. Shizuka, the samurai princess, looked exhausted, her head held low, her clothing torn.

  Behind that pair of humans, the flame-haired Brigid Baptiste was scanning the docking bay left and right, the brutal length of a Copperhead assault subgun held in both hands.

  Beside Brigid came Rhea, the traitorous hybrid who had turned to assist the Cerberus rebels, somehow managing to channel the thoughts of mothership Tiamat in the process. Like all hybrids, Rhea was beautiful, her sylph-like physique closer to that of an adolescent girl than a woman. Hers was a delicate beauty that seemed fragile and ethereal, more so as she stood in front of Brigid’s taller and more shapely form. The hybrid’s pale hair was feathery like down and she was dressed in a one-piece tan coverall.

  Kane brought up the rear, keeping his head down as he sprinted across the hangar bay, feeling dangerously exposed. It was incredible, Lilitu thought. Even here, in what appeared to be relative safety, the man’s finely honed instincts were trying to alert him to the fact that he was being watched; she could see it in his every movement as he hurried toward Enlil’s docked skimmer with his allies.

  The group halted at the disk ship itself, finding it locked. “Now what?” Brigid asked, her breasts heaving against the weave of the shadow suit as she took deep breaths. “How do we get in?”

  Rhea laid her hands against the sensor plate of the hull of the skimmer. The sensor plate was artistically hidden from view yet obvious to any who knew the functionality of the Annunaki craft. On her command a section of the hull parted in a triangular shape, magically appearing like the sun’s rays through a gap in the clouds.

  “Oh,” Brigid said, pushing a wayward lock of hair from her face as a ramp began to extend outward from the skimmer, its glistening surface forming in front of her eyes from smart metal. “It must be keyed to Annunaki genetic material. Right?”

  The traitorous hybrid was hurrying the others up the boarding ramp now, feet clattering on the extended smart metal strip. “Something like that,” Rhea told Brigid
with an enigmatic twinkle in her curiously expressive eyes. “Now we must tarry no longer.”

  Idiot apekin, Lilitu thought as she watched from the shadows at the edge of the hangar. The ship had opened like a blossoming flower because Rhea had pressed its key switch, nothing more sophisticated than that. Organic technology remained, she realized, far beyond anything even the smartest human seemed able to comprehend. Lilitu took a pace forward, her one good hand flipping open a plate on the diagnostic unit that the skimmer was still connected to, jabbing in the override command. The ship would automatically seal if it believed there was no atmosphere for the pilot to exit into; thus it was but the work of a moment to fool the system.

  Behind Rhea, Grant urged the beautiful Shizuka up the ramp, her exhausted form almost collapsing as he helped her through the triangular gap in the hull. Brigid Baptiste followed them inside, with Kane just a few feet behind her.

  Lilitu smiled her cold, reptilian grin as her hand moved away from the emergency override. Alone on the boarding ramp, Kane suddenly found himself facing a smooth wall, the hull sealing before he could join his companions inside the escape ship.

  “Hey!” Kane shouted as he pulled himself up short. “I’m still out here!”

  With the speed of a striking cobra, Lilitu reached out from her hiding place, grasping the back of Kane’s thick hair and yanking him backward with neck-wrenching force. The others could wait, but this one had been a thorn in her side for far too long, ever since her days wearing the body of Baroness Beausoleil.

  To Lilitu’s surprise, the ex-Mag relaxed his body in an exceptional combination of his instinct and training, and she found him racing toward her head-first, like a battering ram.

  With a sneer, Lilitu stepped out of the way of her hurtling foe, detaching her hand from his hair even as he sailed across the hangar floor. Kane crashed into the deck, grunting as his left shoulder smashed into it with incredible force, and he was flung several yards forward before finally skidding to a halt on grazed skin.

  Lilitu moved toward her fallen foe at a dead run, punting the toe of her boot into his stomach even as he struggled to recover. Behind her, the Annunaki goddess knew Kane’s colleagues were watching through the portholes of the sealed skimmer. There was nothing they could do; Kane was hers now. She kicked at him a second time, this boot so hard that the ex-Mag rolled over, slamming into the deck plating with bone-numbing force.

  Yet with that ghastly streak of pluck that humans seemed to possess in the most unlikely of circumstances, Kane pushed himself up on his elbows and glared at her.

  “How’d you get here?” the ex-Mag snarled through clenched teeth.

  Lilitu laughed, admiring his spunk. “I never take the chance of being trapped,” she assured him. “I always have an exit in mind, unlike you, apekin.”

  Beneath her, Kane pathetically attempted a leg sweep, forgetting how interminably fast she was. Lilitu shoved one of her feet down into the base of Kane’s neck, grinding her heel against his throat. She felt the edges of her mouth curling up into a smile. “No,” she told Kane, her voice a hoarse whisper. “You will not escape. I sealed your friends and my traitorous slut of a sister in the ship.”

  Trapped like a bug beneath her heel, Kane struggled uselessly to free himself.

  “Only I can free them,” Lilitu added, thinking of how the override had sealed the skimmer, “and I will not. All of them will die, trapped like vermin. And you, Kane, you will die as all humanity will eventually die—beneath the heel of the Annunaki!” With those words, Lilitu pressed all her weight down on Kane’s throat, either to suffocate him or to snap his worthless neck, whichever came sooner.

  But then, impossibly, Kane shifted his position subtly, and his knee slammed against Lilitu’s thigh, sending driving pain through her nerve ganglia and forcing her to fall with a howl of rage. She landed atop Kane’s struggling form, and immediately attacked his face where it appeared directly in front of her. The stump of her left hand swept at Kane, then her right batted him in the face and cuffed him several times so that he reeled with the disorientation.

  Even then, Kane glared at her with those steely gray eyes as if in accusation, and Lilitu cursed him. Lilitu reached for those penetrating eyes then, her sharp nails outthrust, wrenching the skin from Kane’s face in four deep red streaks even as he turned away to avoid being savagely blinded.

  The two of them thrashed against the decking in some strange mockery of love-making, until Lilitu’s hand found Kane’s throat and began to crush it with all of her incredible strength. Yet even this close to death the human still struggled, driving his fist at Lilitu’s nose. In an instant, she ducked, and Kane’s hand slammed against the cranial spines that decorated her skull like a sadist’s tiara.

  Still, the impact forced Lilitu to regroup, and her grip on her accursed foe’s throat loosened for just a moment. In that instant, she heard Kane gulp down a desperate breath even amid the racket of the alarm’s tolling that sang frantically through the air like wind chimes in a hurricane.

  Something hit the right side of Lilitu’s face then, and she found herself toppling backward, Kane’s left fist pulling away from the punch he had somehow managed to plant on her.

  Lilitu landed awkwardly, her ruined hand beneath her, and she shrieked as the white fire of agony burned along her whole arm. Across the decking, Lilitu could hear footsteps as Kane righted himself and put a little distance between them. It was a wise move, the rational part of her brain realized, for she was far stronger than her opponent.

  Tamping down the pain in her arm, Lilitu pushed herself up from the deck, searching for Kane’s form through the smoke of the shuddering hangar bay. He was watching her, taunting her, it seemed.

  With a howl of agonized triumph, Lilitu urged herself forward, charging toward the insignificant human and ducking beneath his right fist, sidestepping a failed body blow. Then she had him in her grasp, driving him back, until he was slammed bodily against the hull of Enlil’s skimmer where his friends remained trapped. With the brute strength born of fury, Lilitu pounded Kane against the side of the skimmer, forcing the air from his lungs as she tried to crack his ribs. His eyes rolled, losing their focus, she saw, and in that moment Lilitu was sure that she had won.

  But she had not.

  Suddenly, Kane’s arms swung around until his cupped hands slammed against Lilitu’s ears like a thunderclap inside her brain. Lilitu ignored it, pushing Kane hard against the skimmer’s shell once again and driving her crown spines into his chin.

  Impossibly tenacious, the apekin brought his hands around again, meeting with Lilitu’s ears with such an impact that she went momentarily deaf, the sound of the alarm turning into a distant thing as if heard through a body of water. She staggered backward, her grip on Kane loosening as she howled in agony like a wounded animal.

  It was all just a blur then, Lilitu acting on something primal, some deep-rooted instinct to kill whatever stood in her way. They tumbled to the decking of the hangar bay, writhing in each other’s embrace until Lilitu stood over Kane’s form once more, her voice a strangled screech of frustration.

  “You are a fool!” she told Kane. “This is the night you dance to oblivion, screaming for the mercy of Tiamat!”

  In that instant the blur of combat finally righted itself, seeming to slow time down. Two figures were standing behind Lilitu, and she turned as she heard the familiar voice of the first.

  “Scream for it yourself,” Rhea stated emotionlessly, and Lilitu saw the ASP blaster attachment wrapped around her sister’s right wrist. Beside the hybrid woman, Lilitu saw Brigid Baptiste poised with her Copperhead subgun, tracking the Annunaki goddess’s every movement.

  “How were you able to open the seal?” Lilitu demanded, her voice shrill. When Rhea didn’t answer, she realized that the bond of blood between them was even now too deep, that Rhea had escaped the skimmer but she would never turn on her own blood kin. “Come to me, sister,” she said, her arms spreading out to hold her
, perhaps even to crush her.

  Rhea did not move. She merely stood there, a look of disgust forming on her smooth features. “How can anything so beautiful be so evil?” she asked in a horrified whisper.

  Lilitu scoffed at the question. Evil? What was evil? What did morality matter to a goddess? The Annunaki were above such infantile concepts as good and evil. She would explain it to Rhea, make her see the truth of good and evil, how the whole thing was a game, the distinction no more important than the opposing colors on a chess board, good and evil defined only by who made the first move. But as she began to speak, the ASP blaster flashed in Rhea’s hand and an energy bolt zapped out, plowing a hole straight through Lilitu’s chest.

  For a moment Lilitu stood motionless. Blood bubbled over her lips and her beautiful lizard’s eyes rolled up in her skull. And then, finally, Lilitu fell backward, slamming into the deck with a violent shudder, her limbs outspread.

  And that was how Lilitu had died, her blood seeping into the decking of her mothership Tiamat.

  Tiamat was dying, too, in that moment, but the spilled blood of one of her children acted as a strange wake-up call. Even as her bulwarks and decking shook with the aggravated pain of her destruction, Tiamat extended a mother’s caring hand to her daughter, absorbing Lilitu’s corpse into herself even as Kane joined his companions and the skimmer launched from her deck. Patiently Tiamat was engaging the rebirth sequence that had been used just a few years earlier to re-create her children across the planet Earth, the sequence that had allowed the Annunaki to live again.

  Outside, beyond the limits of Tiamat’s dragonlike body, Enlil’s skimmer was rocketing through space, the Cerberus rebels and their hybrid friend installed safely within. It would not be long now, the celestial mother knew, until she lived no more. But still, there was time to re-create beautiful Lilitu, to fix the damage the apekin had done to her precious princess daughter.