by Sam Cheever
“I’m not the flavor of the week, your highness, I’m here as a messenger, nothing more.”
He inclined his dark head, moving toward me across the earthen floor. With distaste, I watched his black, satin slippers squish through a river of blood and track across the earth to a spot just below where Emo and I stood. As he turned his face up to me I nearly gasped at its chiseled perfection. His brow was unlined and wide, his nose long and narrow, with just the slightest arch that gave his face a patrician look. His mouth looked soft and slightly wet, the lips full and perfectly shaped. His strong, square jaw was enhanced by just the touch of a beard, which served mainly to enhance his square, masculine features, rather than cover them.
His velvet black eyes were outlined, as if for effect, by the longest, thickest black eyelashes I’d ever seen. My feet began to shuffle of their own volition and my knees squeezed together protectively. When he opened those lush lips and spoke to me in a husky, suggestive voice I found myself getting short of breath. “So give me your message, pretty Astra.”
“I…” I gulped audibly, damn my fickle soul. “I am to tell you that Dialle and Rayanne will trade your son for their queen and that he will be returned in exactly the same condition as she is returned to them.”
Nerul’s perfect face split in a sad smile. “They have less to bargain with. My son is dead, their queen is alive. Are they asking me to kill their queen also?”
I have to admit this logic did render me momentarily speechless. I shook my head stupidly.
I was amazed to find that Emo, who had quickly drifted back into the shadows when Nerul had first turned his eyes on us, now stood beside me again. I was even more amazed when he opened his mouth and spoke. “Your Highness, Prince Nille is alive and well, with his soul intact.”
Nerul’s black eyes swiveled lazily to my partner. “Well, well, well, the errant son returns.”
Emo’s face darkened with suffused blood but he stood ramrod straight against Nerul’s glare and didn’t look away.
I, on the other hand, just about fell off the ledge. Whaaat?
Chapter Fourteen
Off With Their Heads!
Under all the devil sheen, more than words can stress,
Friends it seemed would ever grow, into more…not less.
“I’ll explain later,” Emo told me in a whisper. It seemed there’d be a lot of ’splainin’ to do later. Emo looked down at King Nerul and gave a devilish smile. “Your Highness. How good to see you again.”
Nerul laughed. “I see you’ve gained some backbone since last we met. I’d thought your angel blood would be the end of you.”
Emo shrugged with studied nonchalance, saying, “As I recall, it wasn’t under the best of circumstances.”
Nerul simply continued to stare at my partner, not choosing to respond. I saw Emo give a little start of surprise and then stiffen his back against whatever had startled him. I realized there was much I didn’t know about my friend and partner and I determined to fill in the holes as soon as we survived this mess.
“We’ve delivered the message we were hired to deliver, Nerul,” I said with some irritation, “we’ll just be going now. Unless of course you want to give us the queen?”
It seemed Nerul found this very funny. He nearly doubled over with laughter. His masked and cloaked minions also seemed to find it funny, though I had to wonder if they were just sucking up by laughing when their king laughed. When they’d stopped I asked, “Do you have a message you wish me to return to Dialle?”
Nerul gave me a smile that managed to suck all of the heat out of the air around me. “I could give you a message, lovely Astra, but alas, you’d be unable to deliver it.” He raised an arm and two cloaked figures emerged from the shadows behind us. As the first one grabbed me, Emo swung out with a thick, muscular leg and smashed it into the creature’s gut. The cloaked figure doubled over briefly but didn’t go down. The mask fell from my attacker’s face and I saw that it was a she-devil of about middle rank, with reddened, leather skin and horns, similar to Emo’s. I knew I was dealing with a creature of intelligence and great strength, but no special powers. I also realized that Nerul had underestimated us, which gave me great incentive to show him the error of his ways.
The she-devil’s brief discomfort gave me time enough to wrap my cross belt around her dense, corded leather neck. As the belt started to burn a path through her thick, red skin, I was vaguely aware of the struggle going on beside me and of movement on the floor below our perch. My opponent’s strength made it necessary for me to concentrate hard on what I was doing. Her flailing arms swung toward me with stunning speed and force, clipping me on the chin once and nearly making me lose my grip on the belt. But I’d fought this battle before, with someone who was faster and stronger than she was, I wasn’t particularly worried.
Having much experience fighting with Emo, I knew that she wasn’t going to go down easily. I also suspected that the old knee in the crotch wouldn’t be nearly as effective with this devil as it was with trusty old Emo. So I decided I’d need to get her off balance first. Bracing my weight on one leg as best I could, I swung my other leg into the back of her knees. Her legs buckled as I slammed into her upper body. She crashed to the floor with me on top.
As she fought to regain her feet, I risked letting go of the belt with one hand so that I could grab the vial that hung around my neck. The angel dust inside the vial would burn a pretty good-sized hole in the nasty piece of work below me and I planned to aim for her evil black eyes for extra good measure.
Unfortunately, the she-devil managed to push herself into a semi-upright position before I could get the vial opened up. With one hand free and the other holding her upper body and my weight off the ground, she reached up and dug the belt out of the oozing, bloody track it had cut into her neck and threw it away. Then, with a speed and agility that surprised even me, she tucked her head and rolled, pulling me with her so that she landed on top of me as her body flattened out.
Her thick, squat body was a crushing weight on my chest. I struggled to push her off but didn’t succeed in moving her even a little bit. My lungs screamed for air and my throat felt as if it had been tied shut with a thick, unyielding cord. After a couple of minutes of futile struggle, I decided I needed to have a plan. Making a plan isn’t easy when you have about three hundred pounds of evil sitting on your chest, but I had to give it that old institution of higher education try. I really wished I could just kick her in the nuts.
Although my vision was mostly blocked by the massive creature on top of me, I saw a shadow pass over us and disappear out of sight. Suddenly, the she-devil gave a startled grunt and jerked as if she’d been hit. Then her huge head dropped onto my shoulder. I swung my hands upward in an attempt to dislodge her head before one of her dangerously sharp horns could make confetti out of my face. My hands touched something viscous and cool and I realized I’d grabbed a handful of the nasty stuff that passes for blood in lesser devils.
Devil blood has a nasty melting effect on normal skin so I quickly wiped the stuff off on the she-devil’s cloak. I managed to get most of it off but I could still feel a slight blistering on the tips of my fingers.
Meanwhile, I was starting to feel faint from lack of air. With some small part of my quickly clouding brain, I realized that Emo was nearby and was thrashing around with his attackers. Somewhere along the way a few more devils had joined the fray. Fortunately for me, they seemed to think I was already dead and none of the cloaked figures were coming to investigate. I figured if I could manage to survive, I’d have the element of surprise on my side.
Closing my eyes, I forced myself not to think about my constricted breathing and concentrated on building the power. It wasn’t easy to concentrate when I had to fight off the panic of not being able to breathe, but after a few seconds I felt the first stirrings of the power rising from its core. I fed the spark until my body began to hum with it. In my ears, the thrum of power coursing through my body and begin
ning to build sounded so loud I was afraid everyone in the room would stop and wonder where it was coming from. But nobody else seemed to notice or care what was going on in the tiny splat that was flattened under the unconscious she-devil. Their mistake.
As the power grew, the first thing I concentrated on was moving the weight from my chest. It took only a few seconds of focused effort to raise the she-devil up a couple of inches so that I could slide out from under her. Since she appeared to be either dead or out cold, I let her limp body drop and looked to Emo.
He was bloodied and battered, but he appeared to be mostly intact and still fighting. I suddenly wished I could communicate with him through his mind as I could Dialle’s, but I realized that Emo, as intelligent as he was, didn’t have the power to accept or respond this way so I didn’t even try.
Looking around, I quickly assessed the situation. It appeared that the festivities in the cavern below had broken up and only a few cloaked figures remained. Both Nerul and Queen Kaline were absent from the small group that had gathered around the stone table to do whatever disgusting things satanic figures did around bloody, carnally touched stone tables in bloody walled caverns.
Since those figures seemed unconcerned with what was going on above their heads, I ignored them. Returning my focus to my partner, I realized with a start that Emo was down on his knees and one of his attackers was standing over him with a long, dripping knife.
At first I thought the blood was Emo’s and that he’d already been struck, but as he raised his eyes I saw only anger there, no pain and I knew I still had time to save him, but not much.
His eyes sparked in surprise to find me standing just ten feet away. I motioned for him to flatten himself out and then screamed as he threw his body to the floor to pull the attention of the devil force away from him.
It worked. They forgot all about him and their eyes flew to me. In fact, to my eternal dismay, the two creatures closest to me turned and started toward me. I closed my eyes, raised my arms and concentrated hard on sparking the magic within. Almost immediately I got a sense of a new intensity to the power I was just learning to harness. This surprised me and briefly, as I pulled the magic forward, I wondered where the powers were coming from and how I was gonna learn to deal with them all.
The magic flared out with thick probing fingers and I realized that as I learned to use it, it was becoming more discriminating. It danced away from Emo, who still lay flattened on the stone ledge and moved to surround his attackers as if it had been enticed by their evil natures. I could almost smell the cold stench of evil as the power touched each of Emo’s attackers. The devilish crew stood rooted to the spot, watching me as if they thought I might explode any minute and they didn’t want to miss it when it happened. They seemed unaware that the power had targeted them.
I let the power flow until it hit the stone of the walls around us and then drew it back to wrap it completely around the cloaked figures standing over Emo. As it took hold, I risked opening my eyes and found that I could sustain it as I watched it do my bidding.
Nerul’s devils were ripped from their trance as the power enfolded them. They jumped and screamed as if they’d been touched by angel blood on a platinum knife. I wrapped the probing force around the whole terrified group and then pulled it tight, crushing them with icy fingers of pure, electrically charged power. I could feel their panic as I inserted the power into them, focusing on finding their core and then pulled outward until their physical forms gave way and turned to vapor.
With a cry, Emo threw himself away from the screaming, vaporizing demons and stared at me with awe and unfortunately, terror-filled eyes.
As the last demon became vapor, I sank to the hard, strangely warm rock beneath me and let myself slide into oblivion. Too exhausted to care about the enormity of what I’d done and too weak to do anything about it.
I jerked awake as my body was lifted off the floor. I tried to struggle away from the arms that held me effortlessly but quickly realized that I wasn’t going anywhere. “Back off,” I mumbled as I pulled my exhausted eyes open and stared into Emo’s eyes. He leaned close to my face and tightened his arms around me. “Shhhh. I’m going to get you out of here.”
My first inclination was to protest, but my weary body wouldn’t let me work up the energy to fight his imprisoning grasp and my damned eyes wouldn’t stay open. I tried to fight it, with every fiber of my body that was capable of fighting. But five fibers just weren’t enough and my world started to fade to black again. The last thing I was aware of as I drifted off was that someone was in my mental drawers again. Damn that good-lookin’ devil to Hades. Sleep, lovely Astra. Rest and regain your energies, my princess.
I mustered up the energy to respond, “Bite me.” Or at least I think I did, because Emo jumped a bit. And then the world went black.
* * * * *
The next time I woke up I was in my own bed. Sounds from the other room alerted me to the fact that I wasn’t alone. I pushed myself to my elbows and groaned. Sharp needles of pain jabbed at me from every conceivable spot on my body. When I pried my eyes open they stung with even the very dim light that filled the darkened room. It was definitely going to be a twelve pain blocker day.
Emo was slaving over the food service provider when I stumbled in. He nodded toward the main living area and I gratefully sank onto the nearest padded surface. He handed me a large mug of strong black coffee and waited while I gulped it down.
When it appeared I was going to live, Emo sat down across from me and cocked his head, giving me a devilish grin that warmed my battered heart to its core. I smiled back.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself. I guess we survived?”
“It would appear that we did.”
“How did you get us out?”
Emo’s sweet, red face clouded up. “I’m not sure. I think they let us go.”
I nodded and instantly regretted it. The contents of my head bobbled around painfully, crashing into my skull bones with alarming results. Closing my eyes I didn’t move for several seconds, except to raise the cup to my lips. “You’re probably right. Which begs the question. Why?”
Emo shrugged. He said nothing for a long couple of minutes and then, squirming a bit on the divan, he asked the question I’d been dreading. “Where’d you get royal powers, Astra?”
“Damned if I know.”
He scowled at me. “Come on, partner. I watched you open a wall and vaporize several lesser devils. I suspect that you are using telepathic powers too. I think I deserve a better answer than that.”
It was my turn to shrug. “It’s a long story, Emo. I think my aunt had some of this power too. But my parents wouldn’t let her school me on it. I suspect she wasn’t even allowed to tell me too much about it but she did start teaching me how to use it when I was really young. After my parents found out she stopped working with me and just started watching me like I had two heads for the rest of her life. Once she died I kind of convinced myself I’d imagined the whole thing.”
Emo looked thoughtful. Finally he nodded and took a sip from his steaming mug. “You and I have more in common than you would think, Astra.”
I reshuffled my limbs on the soft divan and sighed, bringing the mug to my lips again before I responded. “Like what…exactly?”
He’d been staring into his coffee, but after a short silence, during which I thought he wasn’t going to elaborate, he raised his eyes and stared at me. My eyes began to sting and water and I squeezed them shut again. When I opened them I almost dropped my steaming coffee in my own lap. I let out a bark of fear and pulled myself further back into the divan.
For just a second, not much more, I’d been looking at a stranger on my divan where my friend had been sitting. For just a flash I’d seen a handsome golden face where there had been a sweet, red one. For just a fraction of time I’d seen long, lean limbs and silky black hair that rested on broad, muscular shoulders. For just a mere sliver of time I’d seen a ro
yal devil sitting on my divan where Emo had been.
But then Emo reappeared and the lightning bolt came. My mental drawers were invaded again. Things are not always as they appear, Astra. The words came to me in Emo’s voice, but his lips never moved.
“Well frunk me from here to Hades,” was all I could say.
Chapter Fifteen
True Confessions with a Devilish Flavor
Choices given choices made, will ever show us true,
Friendships given, friendships made, should never run us through.
Emo got up and took the mug from my shaking hands. He carried it into the food service area, more to have something to do I suspected than because he thought I needed more coffee. I just sat there wondering if I was ready for what he was about to tell me. While I waited, I thought I’d try just a little test.
I closed my eyes and my mouth and said his name with only my mind. Emo?
When I opened my eyes again a moment later, he was standing before me, holding the mug out with steady, red, familiar hands. He looked down at me and his eyes were dark, black pools with tears shimmering in them. It hurt me to look into those eyes, but it hurt me even more when he said, Yeah? and his lips didn’t move.
I pushed the breath I’d been holding out of my lungs on a sigh and took the outstretched mug. I couldn’t look up at him. “You’re royal.” It wasn’t a question. He knew that. He just turned away and sat down across from me again.
After a moment of silence he started talking. His story just about broke my heart all the way through.
“My mother was an angel. She gave herself up to spy on Nerul and his renegade court.” He looked at me to gauge my reaction. I wasn’t surprised, I’d known his mother was an angel, I just hadn’t known how special and incredibly brave she’d been. I nodded as I took refuge behind my steaming mug, refusing to meet his dark gaze.
He got up and started to pace, putting the divan he’d been sitting on between us. “She was very successful in her task. For many years Nerul and others took their pleasure with her and whispered their horrible secrets in her tender ears. They did it because they knew she was powerless to stop them and that, as an angel, her powerlessness would eventually kill her with pain and frustration.”