Mortal Danger

by Eileen Wilks

  “Does that mean what it sounds like?”

  Gan nodded miserably. “She could bring it all down on us. It’d be easy for her.”

  “Good thing she wants me alive, then.”

  “But she’s nuts,” Gan whispered.

  Rule lifted his head and snarled.

  “I’m pretty sure that means ‘shut up,’” Lily said. “Besides, didn’t you say dragons damped magic or sucked it up or something?”

  “Demon magic, yeah, but Xitil’s got goddess stuff in her now! Who knows what that could do? She might be able to—”

  “Shut up, Gan.”

  The demon swallowed and, for a wonder, fell silent.

  Rule laid his head on his paws again, and Lily went back to passing the time the only way she could, by playing her memory game. Where was she?

  Oh, yeah. Water beds. That had sprung to mind earlier, when she’d been sitting by the ocean. Before things went all to hell.

  Waterbeds sounded wonderful. Imagine a bed filled with water … how soft would that be? You had to pump the water in… . Pumps, yes, she remembered pumps. Though the one she saw in her mind’s eye wasn’t for water, but for air. For filling up bicycle tires.

  Had she ridden a bicycle? She felt a touch of excitement. It made sense that she’d remember the kind of pump she knew best, didn’t it? She couldn’t picture a pump for a waterbed at all. Maybe she’d never had a waterbed, but she had owned a bicycle.

  What kind of bicycle? There were racers and …

  Rule’s head shot up. He almost quivered with sudden tension.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  He got to his feet and paced a few steps, looking at the rock overhead, making a whining sound. He looked at her and then at the rocky ceiling. Then he shook his head hard, as if trying to clear it, and whined softly.

  “What is it? Gan, what does he mean?”

  “Nothing.” Gan looked disgusted. “He’s not making any sense.”

  “Rule?” Scared for more than one reason now, she went to kneel beside him. “Are you all right?”

  He whined again, louder and longer, and then looked at the demon.

  “He wants you to tell me!” she cried. “Try. Try hard.”

  Gan rolled her eyes. “It’s nonsense. Something about you being out there and in here, too.”

  Rule yipped. Then he took her wrist between his teeth gently and tugged as he took a step away.

  He wanted her to come with him. She drew a shaky breath and stood. “All right. Are you coming, Gan?”

  Rule immediately trotted into one of the black, black holes. That one was a little roomier than some, at least. Though it probably wouldn’t stay that way.

  “Follow that idiot? He’s lost it. You’d better stay here.”

  She just shook her head and, heart pounding, followed Rule into the darkness.

  THEY wouldn’t have survived their first five minutes in hell if the terrain where they came out had matched Earth’s. They’d left a flat, low bluff. They came out into low, craggy mountains. Mountains where creatures were busy killing each other, while overhead, legend battled with nightmare.

  “I’m running low on ammo,” Cynna called. “I have to reload.”

  “I’ve got you covered,” Lily said. She was hunkered down behind a rocky outcrop. They had no cover overhead, but the aerial battle was a mile behind them now. Just as well. Not only was it dangerous, it was distracting. She’d never thought dragons existed, and to see them flying, fighting … she’d remember that always. And have nightmares about what they fought.

  If she lived long enough to dream, that is.

  Their progress had been halted in this rough pass between two low peaks. Trapped might be the word to describe their situation.

  Crossing itself had been easy. The shimmer in the air had sort of shimmered through her as she stepped through the gate. Then she’d been elsewhere … a dark, nighttime elsewhere, with four man-sized demons standing fifteen feet away, staring at her in obvious shock.

  That’s what had saved her. That, and the training Benedict had insisted on. Two of the demons had recovered from their surprise fast enough to jump at her even as she swung her weapon at them.

  She could testify that bullets did, indeed, work on demons. Especially when sprayed by a semi-automatic rifle. She’d gotten those two. Cynna, coming through right after her, had killed the other two.

  After wiping out the small patrol or skirmishers or whatever the hell the first demons had been, they’d been able to advance steadily. Gradually the eerie, blank sky had grown lighter, until now it was about as bright as a stormy day. The visibility had still been lousy, though, when they first reached the pass. Cullen’s nose had saved them.

  There were more demons holding the pass than there had been in the first group. A lot more. A few were man-shaped, but most were four-legged, built like giant economy-size hyenas, but with small arms growing out of their chests. They had jaws that put Rule’s to shame, teeth in rows like a shark’s, and glowing red eyes.

  She’d killed four of the red-eyes. It had taken Cullen’s machine gun, though, to stop the big demon, the one who’d looked like a troll on steroids. He’d just kept coming and coming …

  She shook her head, throwing off that memory. Later she could have nightmares about it. Right now she badly needed a plan.

  The demons were hanging back for the moment, safe on the other side of the pass. The only way forward was single-file through a gap between two enormous boulders.

  They had grenades but no way to get close enough to throw one. The same was true with the rocket launcher. They needed a line of sight to use it. Cullen couldn’t throw fire at them. There was an odd dampening of magic here that both frustrated and intrigued him; nothing he or Cynna had learned about hell mentioned it. He could still call fire, but couldn’t send it—his ability to affect anything with magic fizzled out above five feet from his body.

  They didn’t know how many demons were left. The red-eyes hadn’t given up and wandered off, though. They liked to yell out ideas about what they’d do once they got their teeth on the humans. And she could understand them. Even though they weren’t speaking anything she recognized as a language, she understood every nauseating detail.

  Cullen was on her right, huddled behind the same rocky outcrop. Cynna was several yards off to her left and slightly ahead. She’d made it to a tall, sheered-off bit of mountain and was crouched behind a boulder.

  Lily had known the general direction they had to go, but in this rough terrain there was no such thing as a straight route. Max had found the pass. He claimed he had an instinct for that sort of thing, and she supposed he must. But he’d disappeared after the fighting started.

  She was trying not to think about that.

  “I’m good to go,” Cynna called.

  “Right!” Lily barely resisted the urge to say, Go where? They were pinned down, unable to get past the red-eyed crowd. So far they’d been able to hold the demons back, but—

  “Fire in the hole!” a voice called from above and up ahead.

  Max? What—

  Grenades were one hell of a lot louder in person than on a movie screen. Max threw three of them. Even after all the rocks stopped falling, Lily couldn’t hear a thing.

  Cullen rose to a crouch. She could see his lips moving. Nothing. She pointed at her ears and shook her head. He motioned ahead, patted his chest, and started forward.

  Hard to command the troops when you can’t hear them. But he wasn’t stupid enough to march up to the demons if he didn’t have a good reason to … ah. She heard Max herself now, faintly at first. Then louder.

  “Got ’em all, the bloody boogers! Crash, smash, took ’em all out, rained those rocks down on them!”

  He was jumping up and down on top of one of the enormous boulders. How in the world had he gotten up there?

  Cullen called up to him. “I thought you didn’t like guns?”

  “Hate ’em! But I love explosi
ons. Boom, crash, smash ’em all down!”

  “It was a lovely boom,” Cullen said politely. “But are you quite sure you got all of them?”

  “Am I stupid? Do I dance around up here if there are some left? There’s a couple legs sticking up out of the rubble that are still twitching, but you can shoot ’em as you go by. But, uh …” He stopped jumping. “The pass isn’t exactly stable. More rocks came down than I expected. Maybe we should hurry.”

  Good idea. Lily rose, wary still. Cynna joined her. “Lily, I hate to say this, but if the pass is unstable … are we going to be able to get back if we cross it?”

  Lily wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. They’d been a trifle busy since it grew light enough to see their back trail. Lily wasn’t surprised Cynna hadn’t had a chance to check it out. “Look back,” she said quietly.

  “What do you … oh. Oh, hell.”

  They’d climbed quite a bit. Rocky slopes spread out behind them. And beyond those slopes—beginning to climb them—were demons. Uncountable numbers of demons. And toward the front of that mass, one very large demon. House-size, maybe … if you lived in a three-story house.

  They were too far away for Lily to make out exactly what that one, enormous demon looked like, but she could see enough to be glad she couldn’t see more.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Cynna whispered. “Even if we turned back this second …”

  “There’s no going back,” Cullen said grimly as he rejoined them. “They’re already too close to the place we crossed. But the gate’s with Lily. She can open it anywhere.”

  “But …” Cynna glanced at Lily and then set her shoulders. “Right. You’ve got the inflatable raft. If there’s ocean on the other side of the gate, we’ll be okay.”

  Lily felt sick. “You had the raft,” she said quietly. “That’s what was in the backpack I had you leave behind.”

  Cynna’s mouth opened. Closed. She looked ahead, where the dust still hadn’t settled from Max’s grenades. “Well, the annoying little shit just saved our asses, so I guess you made the right decision. But I sure hope you can come up with a Plan B.”

  So did Lily. “Come on. Let’s take the annoying little shit’s advice and hurry.” She started walking, going the only direction she could—forward, one step at a time.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE widest part of the pass was filled with rubble and body parts. Lily tried not to look. Immediately beyond that it narrowed again and they skidded down a steep slope for about twenty feet. The land leveled abruptly, then, as they rounded a low shoulder of mountain, it opened up.

  She stepped out onto a giant-size ledge maybe twelve blocks long and half a block wide. There was grass here, the first she’d seen. Otherwise it was flat, featureless. Beyond it the ground simply ended. Beyond that was the sea.

  The ocean didn’t look right, reflecting that ugly sky, but it smelled right. Lily paused, letting the breeze fill some of the empty places inside.

  But she couldn’t pause long. Rule was close. Only where—?

  Her small troop spread out behind her, looking around as she was. “Where do we go from here?” Cullen asked.

  “Maybe one of us should watch the pass,” Cynna said. “Try to hold it.”

  “Ha! You volunteering?” Max shook his head. “Better if we get rid of it. Boom!” He rubbed his hands together, grinning.

  “No,” Lily said abruptly. “No, we can’t go throwing grenades at the mountain. Rule is …” She started moving, scanning the blocks of stone that cradled the oversize ledge. “He’s there. He’s inside it.”

  The others followed. “Inside?” Cynna said dubiously.

  “A cave or something.” She was moving faster now, her heart pounding. He was so close, so horribly close. They hadn’t brought earth-moving equipment, she thought, halfway to hysterical. They’d never once contemplated what they’d need to remove a few feet of rock. “But he’s moving.”

  “Toward us?”

  “No.” That came out quick and frustrated. “That way.” She gestured at the far end of the ledge, where a tumble of rock blocked them. And started running, as if her feet alone could bridge that last distance, carry her to him in spite of the rock between.

  “Max,” Cullen said, keeping pace beside her.

  “What?” The gnome was huffing slightly as he ran.

  “You’re supposed to have an instinctive feel for rock. How do we get in, or get him out?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Lily barely heard them. Here, he’s here—

  And at the far end of the ledge, a huge, dark wolf stepped out from a crevice in the jumble of stone.

  Maybe she cried his name. Maybe she just screamed it in her head. Her feet moved without her telling them to. She was running, stumbling over the rough ground—and then someone stepped out behind Rule.

  She stepped out. Wearing a dark blue sarong and her token. Rule’s necklace, the missing necklace.

  Lily stopped dead. She reached out one hand—not to touch, but to push the impossible away. She looked into her own eyes from twenty feet away, saw her own face go pale, and heard herself say softly, “My lost parts. All my lost parts. You have them.”

  Then her knees buckled.

  She didn’t faint. Quite. But the next thing she knew was a rough, wet tongue on her face. “Rule.” She touched his muzzle, his shoulder, ran her hand over his ribs. “Rule.”

  “This is beyond weird.”

  That was Cynna. Lily turned her head slowly, hoping not to see … but she still stood there, her face blank. A face not exactly like the one Lily had seen in the mirror a million times, because it wasn’t reversed.

  “Holy shit.” That was a high, squeaky voice, vaguely familiar. And yet another person—creature—stepped out from that crevice. “There’s two of you!”

  A demon. The same small, orange-skinned demon who’d tried to possess her—the one who’d conspired with Harlowe, who’d grabbed her while Harlowe hit her with the staff.

  Lily grabbed her weapon on her way back up.

  Cynna and Cullen already had theirs aimed. But the other Lily moved fast, too. She stepped in front of the demon. “No! She’s—this is Gan. She won’t hurt you.” She looked at Lily, then at the others, and licked her lips—a nervous gesture Lily had been trying for years to break herself of. “You’d like an explanation.”

  Cullen answered for all of them, without lowering his machine gun. “That would be good. Be sure to include what the hell you are.”

  “You know her!” Gan piped up. “She’s Lily Yu!” Then, more subdued: “Of course, I guess the other one is, too.”

  The second Lily sighed. “This may take a while.”

  Lily glanced back at the pass. “Better make it the Reader’s Digest version. We don’t have much time. There’s a war headed this way.”

  SHE felt more lost than ever. She’d followed Rule through darkness to find herself—her other self, the one that possessed everything she’d lost. The self who knew Rule in his other form. Knew him as a man.

  She tried to keep her story short and coherent, but she was distracted by the sight of her face, her body, sitting on Rule’s other side. That woman wasn’t her. Maybe they’d started out as one person, but they weren’t the same, not anymore.

  They were sitting in a rough circle, all of them except the little one—Max—who’d taken a guard position in the rocks where he could watch the pass. At least the others had stopped pointing their guns at her … once Rule insisted. He’d gone up to the man—Cullen—and pawed at the muzzle of his machine gun, growling.

  Gan had translated that time with no problem: Put it down, you ass.

  They were all silent for a long moment when she finished. Finally, the other woman asked quietly, “How long do you think you’ve been here?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t have regular days and nights here. After a while I didn’t think about it that way anymore.” She glanced at Rule. “He’s slept
about twenty times, I think. I don’t know if that means it’s been twenty days.”

  “Twenty.” The other woman didn’t sound happy. She kept stroking Rule, touching him. Lily wanted to push that intruding hand away, but … she swallowed. Rule wanted that touch. She could tell. He wanted both of them with him. To him, they were both Lily.

  It was the other one who knew him from before, though. Who remembered whatever they’d shared on Earth. All he’d shared with her was … hell.

  “We’ve got a problem,” the other Lily said.

  Cullen barked out a laugh. “Never let it be said you don’t use understatement, luv.”

  “I’m talking about the gate. We’ve got too many people to go back through it.”

  “A gate.” Her heartbeat picked up. Of course. They had to get here, didn’t they? They hadn’t all been dragged here by some realm-hopping demon, the way she had been. “You have a way back. We can go back.”

  “We have a small gate,” Cullen said. “And, as Lily—one of you Lily’s—pointed out, that’s a problem. We planned this pretty tightly. If …” He stopped abruptly, looking up.

  She looked up, too. And stood. “It’s Sam!” That huge, winged shape could be no one else.

  The others sprang to their feet, too. Cullen swung the long, hollow tube on his back around and onto his shoulder.

  Do you shoot at everything you see?

  That rocked them. Cullen recovered first. “Around here it seems like a good idea.”

  There are better targets. Sam began a slow, spiraling descent.

  “Don’t shoot at him. Sam’s on our side … sort of.” He’d saved her life, anyway, and killed one of his own kind to do it. She suspected that was mostly because of the insult of another dragon daring to dispose of his property, but still …

  This is most curious. You seem to have connected with the missing half of your soul, but it is embodied.

  “I noticed that,” she said dryly.

  The little demon didn’t do that. I wonder … He was close now, the wind from his wings stirring her hair. Yet you are the one with Ishtar’s token.

  Cullen stared. “You know about the Lady’s token?”