New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet

by C. J. Carella

  There was only one apt response to the offer. Damon let the Lurker’s maniacal laughter answer for him.

  They closed in on each other once again, razor blade and inhuman power against skill and desperate intent. When fighting a man with a knife, it was impossible to avoid getting cut. Damon had managed so far only because of Fish’s clumsiness, but sooner or later a slash would drive home.

  So be it, then, if it gained him a chance to end the fight.

  He didn’t try to dodge the next swing. Instead, he parried with his arm in a sweeping motion meant to strike the razor blade on its flat instead of its edge. It didn’t quite work. He felt a line of coldness in his upper arm as the blade cut through his jacket and into the flesh beneath. His move allowed him to grasp Fish’s wrist with his other hand, however. Damon pulled, twisted, and repeatedly drove an elbow into the old man’s face as he wrestled him for the weapon. He could feel a cold fire spreading from the shallow cut on his arm, but he ignored the growing numbness around the wound and continued carrying out his plan.

  Fish would not relinquish his hold on the weapon, and his strength was greater. Damon shifted his grip and drove down the razor blade, still held in the old man’s hand. The weapon bit into the murderer’s thigh, driven by his own strength. Through his grip on the old man’s wrist, Damon felt the blade cut all the way into bone. Black ichor exploded from the wound and steamed up in a cloud of noxious gas. Albert Fish, his gleeful expression replaced by a rictus of agony, screamed wordlessly, his strength ebbing away.

  Damon wrenched the razor blade away from the murderer, getting another cut on his hand along the way; as soon as he had a good grip on its handle he delivered a savage slash onto the howling man’s throat. The screaming ended with sudden finality; the severed head of Albert Fish went spinning off in a splash of black blood, landing not too far from the corpse of his last victim. Damon watched in helpless fascination as a boiling blackness engulfed and consumed both the head and body of the still-twitching corpse until nothing but an oily foulness was left.

  It was done. Now all he had to do was survive long enough to release the children.

  He managed two steps towards the cages before the burning cold reached his chest. He felt something inside him react to the poisonous energy. The taint within welcomed the poison and melded with it. Alien thoughts rushed through Damon’s mind. He saw himself dragging one of the screaming children from a cage and placing him in the circle. He saw himself carrying on with Albert Fish’s grotesque works, surpassing the dead murderer’s every atrocity with his own.

  An old vision returned to him: himself, no longer remotely human, as he became the mad ruler of a mad world. It was a terrible sight, but also a tempting one. It offered a freedom of sorts, freedom to indulge in the rage that had festered inside of him since his dark apotheosis in the trenches, freedom to revel in destruction, to become a god of death…

  Damon found himself lying on the blood-spattered floor of the chamber. He had no memory of falling down, and no idea how long he had lain there. The children’s crying had died down to muted sobbing and sniffling. The cold burning was quickly fading away, much like the memory of a bad dream. His right hand was holding tightly onto something. He forced his clenched fingers to open and saw the Codex. He might not be able to access it fully, despite his best efforts, but the object had somehow given him the strength to survive his brush with the lethal energies of the Outsiders.

  That taint remained, however. If anything, the fight with Albert Fish had helped it grow within him. Damon feared that sooner or later it would consume him. But that was something to worry about later. He had children to return to their parents.

  And after that, a cave to explore, for it was linked to and close to the Power Itself. He might learn much there.

  Face-Off

  New York City, New York, March 17, 2013

  The high-stakes card game was held every Sunday night in the basement of a deli in Brighton Beach. There’d been a couple of guards at the entrance. I’d quietly taken care of them. They would live; they would have likely lived even if my new conscience hadn’t been tagging along, but in either case I was trying my damnedest to not be a killer tonight.

  The six Mafiya bigwigs enjoying their card game and the eight bodyguards standing around looked up when I kicked down the door. As soon as they saw who it was, everybody started going for a gun. Damn few people are ever happy to see me.

  Normally I would have pulled my own gun out and things would have gotten pretty loud. This time, however, I stepped aside and yelled: “Say hello to my little friend!” Christine had asked for that introductory line, for no good reason I could think of.

  My little friend was wearing a gray-and-black bodysuit along with a face-mask, both courtesy of Condor, and her hair was still dyed black. She didn’t look terribly impressive at first glance, but she made up for that with her actions. As soon as I stepped aside, she concentrated and all fourteen Russians were flung against the room’s far wall as if swept up by an industrial-sized broom, and stayed stuck to it, held there by the force of her will. One of them managed to get a shot off before being slammed on the wall, but Christine caught the bullet on her force field. The wall wasn’t big enough to accommodate fourteen people, some of them of considerable girth, so the Russians were stacked two or three deep in some places. For their sake, I hoped none of them had skimped on their deodorant. A couple had gotten banged up pretty good when Christine picked them up and sent them flying. One of them was bleeding profusely from a scalp cut. Christine looked upset at the sight but she didn’t say anything.

  All in all, it’d been the easiest take-down I’d been involved in. Having a Type Three Neo on your side could be damn useful.

  We walked side by side towards the immobilized Russkies. They were squirming and cursing up a storm. “Listen up, assholes!” I shouted, which got them to quiet down. “If you don’t want my friend here to turn up the pressure until you end up as paint on the wall, get ready to answer some questions!” Christine amped up her telekinesis, not quite as much as I would have preferred, but still more than enough to let the Russians get the idea that they were like so many bugs caught between two boards and that she was quite able to figuratively lean on the top board until they were literally squished.

  “What… What do you want to know?” asked one of the guys on the outer layer, a big fat fuck with a shaved head and a goatee. From the jewelry and high-quality prison tattoos, he was pretty high on the Mafyia pecking order.

  I showed him the flier with Christine’s picture, the one that had been distributed among New York’s underworld. “Who is in charge of this? Who wants to find this girl?”

  “Archangel,” Fatso said. Great. Archangel had been the asshole in white who’d gotten Cassandra killed. Unfortunately, I’d chopped his head off with his own flaming sword a couple days ago, so he was a literal dead end. Fucking hell.

  “Who’s Archangel’s boss?”

  “He come from Ukraine,” Fatso answered; his accent and grammar were getting a lot worse. “I don’t know who bosses him. He gives orders. We no ask questions.”

  “How about the creepy guy in the black suit?” Christine asked. “The guy with the weird smile.”

  “Mr. Night,” the Russian said, looking even more scared all of a sudden.

  “Where can we find Mr. Night?” she said, doing her best to sound mean and scary. It came out a little squeaky; she needed a bit of practice. Then again, a squeaky voice and the power to sweep up a roomful of Russians without lifting an eyebrow will get you a lot further than a squeaky voice alone.

  “He comes, he goes, the Devil’s Grandmother knows where he is! I swear! I don’t know where he is!”

  He sounded sincere enough. The ease with which Christine had overpowered his entire gang had left the guy too shaken up to try anything.

  “He’s telling the truth,” Christine confirmed. “He’s scared crap-less, and he’s telling the truth. He’s also not a nice gu
y. None of them are.”

  “Yeah, I could have told you that.”

  She started biting her lips. “I’m getting some more stuff from them. More than emotions. Thoughts. Memories.” She was a telepath, too? Was there no fucking end to what she could do? “Oh my God. Murder. Rape. That one,” she said, pointing to a good-looking fucker with a thing for silk shirts. “He and… little kids.”

  “Get out of their heads,” I told her. “Now.”

  “Okay.” She looked like she was about to vomit, but there was an angry gleam in her eyes I recognized instantly. I didn’t need any powers to tell what she was thinking now. Turn up the telekinetic pressure all the way, and that entire pack of murderers and rapists and pedophiles would turn into paste. She could do it, and why the hell shouldn’t she? It’s not like we could turn them over the police; we had nothing on them. All those assholes needed killing, and she could do it just by wishing it.

  “Don’t do it. It’s not worth it,” I heard myself say.

  “Do what?”

  “You know what.” Killing is easy, but it comes with a price. I still remember the faces of every asshole I’ve killed. My stepfather. Pedro the Pimp. Giamatti as he plunged to his death. Pasty-faced Archangel. And many, many others. They would all drop by and visit me, late at night or even during the day, in dreams or at random times when I was awake. You learn to live with it, but I didn’t want her to. I did not care if the assholes stuck on the wall lived or died, but I didn’t want her to have their faces etched into her soul for the rest of her life. “Just don’t do it.”

  Christine shuddered and shook her head. “I wasn’t going to… I don’t think I was going to.” She shook her head one more time. “Crap. That sucked. Okay, they don’t know anything useful. I guess we should go.”

  “Just keep them on the wall a while longer, okay?”

  She nodded, and I walked to the table where they’d been holding their game. There was a nice pile of cash on it, mostly in hundreds and fifties. I grabbed all of it and stuck the money in a couple of cloth bags. I always carry a couple of folded cloth bags in my jacket pockets, just in case I happen to stumble on small portable stuff that needs liberating.

  “You’re robbing them?” Christine said.

  “Crime fighting doesn’t pay. Crime does.”

  “Pown and loot. You really should give World of Warcraft a try,” she replied, smiling a little bit.

  “Yeah, maybe I will. I like the live-action version better, though.” I turned back to Fatso. “Hey, Boris, did you know that fuck over there likes little children?” Fatso shook his head. “You might want to look into it. Anyways, we’ll be on our way. Follow us and I’ll kill every last motherfucking one of you.”

  Christine released them from the wall as I shut the door behind us. I heard the thuds of several bodies hitting the floor, along with loud cursing and shouts of pain.

  None of the Russians followed us.

  * * *

  “Stop the car, I’m going to puke!”

  Christine looked much paler than usual. I pulled over and she opened the door, leaned out and was noisily sick. I held her hair and steadied her while she shook and heaved. When it was over, I offered her some napkins from the glove compartment. She wiped her mouth and used another napkin for the tears in her eyes.

  “I did want to kill them all,” she said. “After I saw the stuff they’d done…”

  “I know. I would have. But I like killing assholes. And doing it changes you, and not in a good way. That’s why I stopped you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And since when did you start reading minds?”

  “I don’t, not really. I was using my empathy-thingy on them, and I caught glimpses of stuff beyond emotions. They were angry and scared, so I got angry, scary images. I don’t know if I could go much deeper than that. I went inside John’s head that one time, but that was with the Dreamer basically showing me how, and I’m not exactly sure how I did it last time, and I don’t know if I want to do it again anyway.”

  “Probably for the best. The inside of people’s heads can’t be a nice place to visit.”

  “Yeah, it tots wasn’t. So we ganked a bunch of Russian mobsters, I got to see some really nasty crap, and we got nothing to show for it. Yay.”

  “Well, not exactly nothing.” I pointed at the bags of cash in the rear seat. “Half of that is yours. Your take is probably forty, fifty grand, if my quick count is right.”

  A dead girl whispered in my mind. Halfsies? I ignored her.

  “Fifty thousand dollars? Holy crap, I can almost pay off my student loans!” She opened a bag looked at the money in disbelief. “Of course, I don’t think this money would be any good in my universe, so probably not. Even if the bills were identical, the serial numbers would be duplicates, and I’d have the Secret Service or IRS after me. Probably both.”

  “Worst case, you can use the money in this universe to buy gold or diamonds or whatever and sell that when you get back home,” I told her. I tried not to let the thought of her leaving bother me, but it did, enough that she picked it up with her empathy.

  “I’m sorry. I mean, I do want to go home, if only to let Mom know I’m not dead or in some alien mothership getting probed and stuff. But that doesn’t mean…”

  “Hey, don’t sweat it,” I interrupted her. “Let’s not worry about it right now. Let’s deal with the urgent stuff for now. We can figure out the rest afterwards.”

  “Okay. Of course, we’ve got a whole lot of Not Much so far.”

  “Hopefully Condor and Kestrel are doing better.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The Twisted Twosome

  New York, New York, March 17, 2013

  The Russian ran full-tilt for the exit, but Kestrel caught up with him in two leaps. She grabbed him by the hair and casually threw him face-first into a wall. His squeals of pain made her smile. Just the way I like it, she thought, chasing down new toys and playing with them. Her mind delivered a brief flashback: herself, lying face down on cold concrete, the smell of her own flesh burning in her nostrils while she screamed in agony. Her smile wavered for a second. It was going to take a while before those images faded away, but they would. She knew all about old nightmares and how time would smooth their rough edges off. Time, and doing unto others the things done unto her.

  “Where are you going, little Russian boy?” she asked her new toy. He was crumpled against the wall, blood and drool dribbling down his chin. He coughed and spat out a couple of broken teeth His eyes weren’t focusing, half-blind with terror. Kestrel couldn’t blame him; what she’d just done to his buddies had been a bit much, even for her tastes. Unfortunately for them, she had some pent-up rage she needed to work out. And unfortunately for this little Russian boy, she wasn’t quite done working it out. She grabbed him by the throat with one hand, grasped one of his ears with the other, and started twisting it off, taking her time. If you did it too quickly the pain wouldn’t be too bad; shock would mute much of it. A slow twist really ramped things up, the gradually increasing agony and the knowledge of what was about to happen would maximize the torment until it skin and cartilage finally ripped and...

  “Kestrel, stop it.”

  Kyle’s voice cut through her joy and drowned it in shame. She knew she’d been bad and she needed to be punished. “Sorry, lover,” she purred, and let go of the Russian, who collapsed back to the ground, rubbing his ear as if trying to reassure himself it was still there.

  “Take it easy, K,” Kyle said as he stepped closer behind her. He looked pale; he must have looked in the other room and seen her handiwork. His fingers reached behind her neck and rubbed her skin; she closed her eyes and shivered. A few moments later, his grip shifted, became a fist around a handful of her hair, and he brutally yanked her head back, forcing a moan through her lips. “We’re not here to play,” he hissed, but the slight tremor in his voice belied his words.

  Kyle had seen what Melanie had done to the three Russians in
the other room. It’d been too much. Nobody deserved to go like that. He’d kept her under control for a good while, but she was slipping back into her old habits. What could he do, though? He hated how much he liked her, but he loved the way she made him feel, like a sweet poison that burned through him and made him feel alive even as it slowly killed him. Love and pain, anger and lust. Around her, he could reveal his hidden self, the urges and desires he’d kept under wraps for so long.

  Kestrel pushed her hips against him. He yanked on her hair again, hard. The Russian watched the byplay from the floor, his terrified eyes showing he understood he was in the presence of something terrible. Kestrel smiled at him again, Condor glared at him over her shoulder, and he flinched from them.

  “She’s in a bad mood, buddy,” Condor said almost apologetically. “Tell me where Khrystafor is hiding, or I’ll leave you two alone.” She grinned at the Russian and slowly licked her lips.

  The Russian talked.

  * * *

  Khrystafor Iwanowski was a Belarusian pimp who operated out of a converted warehouse in Brooklyn. Said warehouse had been Archangel’s base of operations during his search for Christine Dark. As he and Mel surveyed the location from the rooftop of a nearby building, he saw plenty of confirmation the base was still operating. It was late at night but the lights were on and people kept going in and out, many of whom he recognized from rap sheets and wanted posters. No johns or girls were around, just tough-looking men; the warehouse-whorehouse had become a barracks for the Russian mob and its collateral Ukrainian and Belarussian branches.

  Two men were positioned on the warehouse’s roof, armed with sniper rifles. Kyle made sure he and Kestrel were out of their line of sight. He spotted a few men carrying crates just the right size for rifles and other military weapons. It looked as if the gangsters were getting ready to go to war.