Much Ado About Vampires do-10

by Katie MacAlister

  “Go,” Bael said, waving his hand toward the woman, and just like that, she was gone. “As for you . . .”

  Ulfur had half turned toward me, angling himself so his back was to the wall, no doubt to keep anyone from seeing that he had an object stuffed into the back of his jacket.

  I bit my lip, unsure if I should say something, or just let it go. I didn’t condone stealing at all, but . . . my little devil urged me to turn around and walk out of the house, to leave the two men alone, but my conscience wouldn’t let me. It was obvious the strange stone I held must belong to the Englishman, and that meant I had to return it.

  I started toward him with the intention of doing just that when Bael threw wide his arms and, with a voice filled with fury, screamed, “Abi in malam crucem, confer te in exsilium, appropinquabit enim judicium Bael! ”

  “Go to torment, go into banishment, for the judgment of Bael is at hand,” I whispered in translation, and just like that, I was slammed by a wall of power as the floor fell out from beneath my feet.

  A scream was literally ripped from my throat as I plummeted into blackness, but it was a short-lived scream, one that turned to, “Ow! Ow, ow, ow! Jesus wept!” For the second time in a few minutes, I shook stars from my eyes and pushed myself into a sitting position, wincing when my hands, still clutching my things, came into contact with sharp, pointy rocks. “What the hell?”

  “Not Abaddon, no,” a weary voice came from behind me. I got to my knees and looked over a large, craggy boulder that squatted next to me. The man named Ulfur lay facedown on the rocky ground. “Worse. We’re in the Akasha.”

  “How . . . what . . . huh?” I looked around as I got painfully to my feet. We seemed to be on some sort of horrible windswept, rocky moor. Or at least what I thought of as a moor, never having seen one in person. But this place . . . it brought a new level of angst to the word “desolate.” The wind seemed to carry with it the voices of a thousand tormented souls, the ground, stones, and sparse vegetation all the same shade of dusty brown. It was very rocky—not soft, smooth rocks, but sharp, pointed ones that jabbed up out of the earth as if they were straining to escape. “What’s an Akasha ? ”

  Ulfur groaned as he rolled over, brushing himself off as he sat up. “The Akashic Plain, more frequently known as the Akasha, is what mortals think of as limbo. It’s a place of punishment, of permanent banishment, and before you ask, yes, it is possible to leave it, but you have to be summoned out. I think my face is broken.”

  “Limbo? How did we get here? We were in the house.... Ow. What the devil . . .” I tossed my handful of coins, flinching as I pulled a thin sliver of gold from where it had pierced my finger. “Oh, holy Chihuahua, that hurts. Ugh. I broke the rock you stole.”

  “The what?” Ulfur touched his forehead, his fingers pulling away red.

  “The rock you dropped when you crashed into me. The one you stole from that English dude. All the little gold parts are twisted up, and the gray stone is in about a dozen little pieces.”

  He jerked upright at that, one hand scrabbling behind him to find whatever it was he had stuffed beneath his coat. What he pulled out was a flattened goldfish disk, discolored and stained. “The Anima! Oh, no . . .”

  “You know, there’s a limit to how many unbelievable, confusing things I’m willing to entertain in any given hour, and I think this hour has far surpassed that limit. What the heck is an Anima? And why did you steal it? And who was that English guy, why did he feel so wrong, how did we get here, where exactly is this Akasha place, and most importantly of all, how do I get back to the house? ”

  “Those are a lot of questions,” Ulfur said, his shoulders slumping as he touched one torn edge of the flattened gold. “I’m dead. That’s all there is to it. I’m dead. Again.” He looked up at me, and I noticed that he had absolutely black eyes, no difference between iris and pupil. “The Occio is destroyed, as well?”

  “Who knows? I certainly don’t,” I said, giving up and sitting down on the least pointy part of the boulder between us. “I just want to find a first aid kit so I don’t get tetanus or something like that, and then get out of here. Oh, and chocolate wouldn’t hurt, either. I’d take some chocolate.”

  “Let me see,” Ulfur said, stumbling over to where I sat. I held out my hand. “No, not your hand, the Occio.”

  “The rock?” I held out my other hand, the one with the bits of twisted gold and broken bits of gray stone.

  He frowned at it, touching one of the pieces with the tip of a finger. “I don’t understand it. This is a Tool of Bael. Why would it be destroyed?”

  “It’s not a tool. It’s like a . . . I don’t know, pendant or something.” I looked around the bleak landscape, wondering what sort of weird being the Englishman was that he could either make me insane or magically teleport me somewhere. “Who’s Bael when he’s at home, anyway? ”

  Ulfur’s black-eyed gaze met mine—he was about to answer my question when he suddenly squinted at me. “You’re . . . glowing.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re glowing. There’s a sort of shadowed glow about you.”

  I held up a hand. “You know what I think? I think we’re both nuts, me because I let myself get caught in weirdness again, and you because you are seeing things.”

  “I’m not seeing things, not in the sense you mean. You’re glowing.”

  “Look, Ulfur—” I stopped in the middle of telling him that there was no way on god’s green earth that I was glowing, when I noticed something odd about him.

  “Hey,” I said, pointing at him. “You’re glowing.”

  He looked down at himself. “This doesn’t make any more sense than the Tools being destroyed. Why would we both glow just because we were banished to the Akasha? ”

  “Yeah, about that,” I said, getting up off my rock to circle him. I’d be damned if he didn’t have a faint blackish glow around him, almost like a corona. “When you say ‘banished,’ what exactly do you mean?”

  “Bael, the premier prince of Abaddon, banished us here. Or rather, he banished me, and you must have gotten caught in his power during the banishment. He spoke some sort of a curse when he did it—”

  “Abi in malam crucem, confer te in exsilium, appropinquabit enim judicium Bael,” I repeated.

  Ulfur’s eyebrows rose.

  “Basically it means go to hell, you’re banished by Bael’s judgment. I went to a Catholic school,” I explained when he looked impressed at my knowledge of Latin. “I can say ‘of the Antichrist’ in ten different languages.”

  “How very . . . useful.”

  “Premier prince? That Englishman was a prince? I figured he must be someone important because you and that big chick were ‘my lording’ him all over the place, but a prince? Wow. I’m going to have to tell Jas that I saw a real prince. He seemed kind of . . . evil . . . for a prince.”

  “He is evil,” Ulfur said, slumping onto my place on the rock. “The title ‘prince’ is an honorific, nothing more. He’s the head demon lord of Abaddon.”

  “Abaddon being . . . ?”

  “Its closest approximation would be hell.”

  I gawked at him, my skin crawling with sudden horror. “That guy was the devil?”

  “No. Not in the mortal sense. Abaddon isn’t what you know of as hell—it’s . . . well, it’s Abaddon. Mortals based their concept of hell on it, just as they based their concept of heaven on the Court of Divine Blood, but they are not the same thing. Abaddon is ruled by seven princes, seven demon lords.”

  “And the Bael guy, the man with the wicked fashion sense and plummy English voice, heads the whole place up?” I tried to stop my brain from squirreling around at the fact that the devil had looked at me, had walked right past me, and had evidently been so pissed at the man before me, I’d gotten swept along in his wrath, but I just couldn’t resolve the idea of Satan and the man in the blue suit.

  “Yes.”

  I breathed deeply for about two minutes, then sa
id, “OK. There’s a guy named Bael, and you stole a couple of pretty things from him. Why, Ulfur, did you steal a couple of pretty things from the man who rules hell?”

  “My master made me.” He looked about as dejected as you could get. My heart went out to him despite the fact that I was now in serious trouble because of him. “I’m a lich. When my master gives me a command, I follow it. I am bound to him.”

  I pursed my lips, wondering if I wanted to know what a lich was. I decided that so long as I had met Satan, I might as well hear everything. “And a lich is what?”

  “I was a spirit. An Ilargi stole my soul, and had me resurrected. When soulless spirits are resurrected, they become liches.”

  “The things you learn when you least expect them,” I said, filing away the lich info. “So this boss of yours told you to steal something from the big mucky-muck of hell? Is he insane, too, or just sadistic?”

  “Both. I just don’t understand why the Tools were destroyed. It doesn’t make—” He stopped suddenly, his eyes opening wide, but before he could say anything more, he just blinked out of existence.

  I stared in disbelief at the rock where a second before Ulfur sat, finally gathering my tattered wits together enough to wave my hands through the air, but he didn’t just go out of my vision; he was gone.

  “Well, hell,” I said, my brain giving up at that point and more or less simply curling up into a fetal ball and whimpering softly to itself.

  “Not hell, Akasha,” a woman’s voice corrected me. I turned to see two people approaching, one of whom, at least, I recognized.

  “Diamond!” The relief I felt on seeing her cheerful little blond self was almost overwhelming. Until, that is, I realized that if I was seeing her there, it must mean she had been banished with Ulfur and me. “Oh no, not you, too?”

  “There you are! Margaretta told me that she’d find you, and here we are. Isn’t this exciting, Cora? We’re in the Akasha!”

  I looked from Diamond to the little woman who stood next to her. She was under four feet tall, had a bright, slightly brittle smile on her face, and was holding a pamphlet, which she gave to me.

  “Good morning, and welcome to the Akasha. I am, as your friend said, Margaretta. I’m the greeter here. If you consult the pamphlet, you’ll find in it many useful details about the Akasha, such as what you can expect during your banishment, a history of the notable figures who inhabit these regions, as well as a biography of our Hashmallim of the month. You’ll see that this month we’re featuring Hashmallim.”

  I looked at the pamphlet she shoved into my hands. Sure enough, there was a section titled “Get to Know Your Gaolers,” followed by a subtitle of “Hashmallim of the Month: Hashmallim.” Beneath that was the picture of a large black blob. “Uh . . . what’s a Hashmallim ?”

  “The Hashmallim are the Court of Divine Blood’s police force, and they rule over the Akasha.”

  “You have a policeman of the month here? ” I couldn’t help myself from asking. It all just seemed too bizarre for words.

  “Hashmallim of the month, yes. As you can see, Hashmallim gave a particularly interesting interview regarding the subject of perpetual torment.”

  A question trembled on the tip of my tongue. After a few moments’ struggle, I decided I couldn’t hold it back any longer. “Just out of idle curiosity, what was the previous Hashmallim called?”

  “Last month’s Hashmallim of the month?” Margaretta thought for a few seconds. “That would be Hashmallim.”

  I nodded. It was what I had expected. “They’re all named Hashmallim, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, yes. That is what they are,” the little woman told me earnestly.

  “I’ve always wanted to see one up close, but my grandmother wouldn’t let me,” Diamond said, looking thoughtful for a few seconds before taking my arm. “Oh, Cora, Margaretta says that they’re having a ‘Meet Your Fellow Damned’ breakfast, and I think we should go. You never know who we could meet—Margaretta says the meet and greets are always very popular, so we’ll want to get in right away to get a nice table. That way we can eyeball who’s there. Wouldn’t it be romantic if you had to be banished to the Akasha in order to find your one true love?”

  “You can’t be serious,” I asked her, squeezing the last morsel of disbelief from my emotional center. “Why aren’t you screaming and yelling about being here? Why aren’t you freaking out? Why aren’t you asking what’s going on?”

  She tipped her head to the side. “Why should I freak out? This is a chance in a lifetime, Corazon. Not many people get to actually visit the Akasha.”

  I glanced at the little woman. “The man who was with me, Ulfur, he said something about the only way you can get out of this place is if someone summons you. Is that right?”

  “Yes, it’s right. Although I should note that unless you have some sort of a bond with the Summoner, it’s not easy to remove a member of the Otherworld from the Akasha. It’s policy, you see. Now, you mortals, you’re different.”

  “We are?” My hopes leaped up with a happy little song on their lips. “You mean we can leave?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head and glancing at her watch. “It would hardly be a place of perpetual punishment if you could just walk out, would it? I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to cut this short if I want to see the lich you mentioned before I have to give the welcome speech at the meet-and-greet breakfast. It’ll be held to the south, by the way, in the fifth quadrant, at the lodge level in the Hall of Burning Flesh.”

  “Fifth quadrant?” I asked, watching as Margaretta made a tick mark on a list of names and bustled off. “Hall of Burning Flesh?”

  “Sounds like such fun! Are you coming?” Diamond asked, trailing after Margaretta.

  “Er . . . no, I think I’ll pass on the flesh-burning breakfast.”

  “Pfft,” Diamond said, giving me a cheery wave. “This isn’t Abaddon, after all. I’m sure they won’t burn anyone’s flesh at the breakfast. That would be totally unhygienic. See you later!”

  I looked upward, at the sky, as if an answer to all my woes would be written there, but there was nothing but brownish gray sky that led down to the stark, inhospitable landscape. “Could this day get any weirder?”

  No one answered me, for which I was strangely relieved. I decided that if I had a better chance than most at getting out of the (probably quite literally) godforsaken spot, then I’d best be looking around to find that way out.

  I wandered around for what could well have been days. I know it was at least a few hours, because my shoes were beginning to show wear from the sharp rocks. The color of the sky didn’t change, however, and I didn’t seem to find any way out of the rocky-moor area, assuming Margaretta wasn’t full of bull about there being welcome breakfasts in what sounded like the civilized part of the Akasha.

  “I swear I’m going around in circles,” I muttered under my breath as I glared suspiciously at a car-sized boulder vaguely in the shape of a hand flipping the bird. “You look familiar. Right. I’m going to go that way this time.” I moved around the rude rock and came to a dead stop. Lying on the ground snuggled up next to the base of the boulder was a man. At least I thought it was a man.

  “Hey. You OK?” I asked, not wanting to get close, but at the same time wanting to make sure he wasn’t hurt or something. “Mister? Dammit.”

  I crept closer, my skin twitchy as I neared him, the devil in my mind pointing out that it was just last week that I’d watched a horror movie where a body that looked dead actually wasn’t, and had leaped up in a manner guaranteed to cause incontinence in viewers, subsequently ripping the unwary couple who stumbled over it to shreds with long, razorlike claws.

  I checked the guy’s hands, but there didn’t seem to be any signs of claws. As I neared him, I adjusted my image of someone who might need help, to someone who was long past it.

  “Oh, you poor guy.” I squatted down next to his head, taking in his gray skin, and cheeks so sunken, the cheekbo
nes stood out in painful relief. His mouth was a slash of gray the same color as his flesh. He wore what was probably a very expensive weathered black suit coat and pants, but was now covered in the same brown dirt that tinted everything in the Akasha. His hands bore long, sensitive-looking fingers, the sinews that stood out on the backs of his hands lending credence to the fact that he was dead. “Did you die out here all by yourself? I wonder.”

  There were no obvious signs of injury, no blood, no mangled limbs. . . . It was as if he’d simply lain down and died. A strange sense of sorrow filled me at the sight of the man. He looked almost familiar, but as I studied his face, I realized that it must have been a trick of the shadows. Still, I felt an inexplicable, frustrated need to help him. Perhaps there was someone I could call to take care of his remains? Someone who would clean him up and give him a decent burial. I brushed back a lock of hair that lay across his forehead. His hair was dark brown, almost black, sweeping back from the brow down to about ear length. “When you were alive, I bet you were quite the hunk,” I said, gently combing his hair into a semblance of order, wishing I could wash the dirt from his face.

  Without thinking, my fingers trailed down the length of his jaw, his slight stubble rasping softly.

  “Very hunky,” I said, unable to keep from noticing the gently blunted chin, and barest hint of a chin dimple that had he been alive, would have driven me wild. His nose was long and narrow, but with a couple of little bumps in it that most likely owed their existence to acts of violence. “Were you a fighter rather than a lover, then?”

  A brown beetle emerged from under his open shirt, wandering out across his collarbone. I picked it off, lifting up his shirt a little to peer underneath and make sure there were no more insects inside it.

  My fingers traced the curve of a thick pectoral muscle.

  “OK, I’ve changed my mind. You weren’t just hunky—you were mind-numbingly gorgeous. What did you do to end up here? And why did you die?” I sighed, and tidied up his shirt, standing up to look around. “Let me see if I can’t find someone—hey! You! Yes, you! How many yous do you think there are around here?”