Corpse Curses

by Jen Ponce

  Sobbing, he shook his head. “I don’t. I’d tell you if I did, I swear, but I don’t.”

  “And that’s why you’re dying hard tonight, you piece of shit.”

  The words finally sank in. I saw it when it happened. His head, already shaking, whipped back and forth. “The Havershaw Kleins are no one to go against. I couldn’t say no. They forced me to do it, I swear.”

  “They ‘forced’ you? Bull fucking shit. You got paid well to cover up the murder of five people because a spoiled rich brat was throwing a temper tantrum for not getting what he wanted.” I wanted to stab him—a lot—but I resisted. He needed to die slow.

  Oscar reached a shaking hand to the medallion around his neck. I grabbed it before he could use it—who knew what kind of power a magus’s amulet held—and dangled it in front of his bloodless face. “What’s this?”

  He shook his head, trying to shrug it off as unimportant, but I saw the way his eyes followed it hungrily.

  I rubbed my bloodstained thumb over the crystal and when I did, it slurped the blood right up.

  Well, wasn’t that interesting?

  “Don’t … do that,” he slurred again, then shrieked when I brought the knife close. I didn’t touch him with it, though. I was looking at that crystal, wondering how a rock could be thirsty like a vampire. As far as I knew, there weren’t any rock vampires around.

  “Why’s it like blood?” I asked, dipping my finger in Oscar’s so I could smear the thing with it. It slurped it all up and looked just as clean as could be when it was done.

  “Don’t!” He made to grab it, but he couldn’t quite raise his hand high enough. He was dying, he was just too delusional to figure that out. He was also sobbing, though I didn’t think he realized it.

  “This is mine. Your death is mine. The story they tell after you’re gone is mine, Oscar. All. Mine.” I tucked the medallion into my pocket and then pressed my knife into his skin above his heart. “Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.” I sawed the blade down, guiding it with the fingers of my other hand as I peeled the skin off his chest in a five by five patch. He howled, quietly, struggled, barely, and stood panting and cursing me with all the strength he had left.

  I held his flesh up to the light. This would be my gift to Poppy, and she could use it to make sure Oscar never showed up in her dreams ever again.

  If I hadn’t had an aversion to touching the penises of assholes, I could have taken skin from there to sell. A lot of limp-dicked magi would pay a pretty penny for powdered dong. Oh, it was against their laws too, but we all knew Conventus magi went slumming in Hell’s Mudroom. Our black-market business was booming.

  I whispered a bubble-up spell to encase the skin and then slid it into my pocket.

  Then I set to work on him in earnest. I sliced off one of his nipples and he screeched—not appreciative in the least that I hadn’t gone for his penis. I took a piece of his cheek. Then a slice from his shoulder. By this time, he was on the ground, feet splayed, blood pooling underneath him. I squatted, far enough away to keep from dipping my toes in his claret. “You’re an animal. You’re a racist bigot who’d rather protect your kind than see justice served. You deserve to die in an alley in a pool of your own blood.”

  “You’ll get caught,” he slurred. “They’ll find you and put you away. Kill. You.”

  I wiped the fillet knife off on his shirt that I’d yanked off his body, then slipped it back into its sheath. “I’m going to let you bleed to death, Oscar. But thanks for the pretty necklace.” I paused, then leaned in because he was whispering something I couldn’t quite make out. “What?”

  “Mine.” He sighed and his eyes slid shut. Soon, his spirit would leave his body and the dark side of me would slurp it up the same way his weird crystal slurped up his blood. Since I had time, I pulled the medallion from my pocket and studied it and the crystal inside.

  It was shaped like a triangle, of course. The Lodge loved their triangles. Everything was a hierarchy to them. No equality, only competition and striving for the top. I’d think it would get exhausting, but they didn’t seem to get tired of it. The bottom level of the triangle was the biggest and consisted of the Lodge’s version of law enforcement—the Keepers. From there, a dedicated magus could work his, her, or their way up through the levels to Senior Warden and then Senior Theurge. Both of those top two positions were also the bottom two positions of the next triangle and so on. It was ridiculous how much time and energy the magi put into ascension. The first seven tiers alone took a minimum of seven years to work through and one had to embody the seven principles of the Conventus Lodge to rise to the top: reason over emotion, discipline, duty, power, wisdom, rational virtue, and control. For Oscar to have been a Master Theurge meant he’d been working on ascension for a good fourteen years or more.

  After a quick check for the emergence of Oscar’s death spirit, I pondered what to do with the damned medallion. Part of me wanted to keep it, another part wanted to sell it. It would buy me a shit ton of books, food, boots. Hell, if I found the right buyer, I could cover the rent for my apartment in Hell’s Mudroom for months. Something told me not to sell it, though.

  Remembering the way it drank Oscar’s blood, I pressed my finger hard against one of the medallion’s sharp edges until my blood spilled free. I smeared it across the crystal. Instead of soaking in, it swirled on the surface. The crystal went from reddish-yellow to crimson red and warmed in my palm.

  It was a power object. A strong one. Very strong. I wondered if I could use the magic stored inside. I flung my hand outward, whispering, “Push.” A nearby garbage bin skidded across the alley with a screech of sound. “Quiet!” I barked and the noise cut off abruptly. The garbage bin, big metal thing, smashed silently against a far building.

  Holy shit. How the hell had he stored so much power in such a small crystal? I’d seen some powerful artifacts in my time, but nothing with this kind of punch.

  And wasn’t this kind of magic forbidden? Hadn’t the Lodge declared amulets and talismans illegal? It was uniquely witch magic, but now that I thought on it, many of the magi I knew had medallions like this. Some, they wore around their necks, some on bracelets, some on rings, but almost every single one of them had one. Were they all packing this wild kind of power?

  “What the actual fuck?” Poppy breathed in my ear.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should bring it home with you. We could figure out what it is.”

  I considered it, but I still had to get home and I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure I wouldn’t get caught. “If I was stopped with this in my possession, Poppy …” All our work would end with me in handcuffs.

  She sighed. “You’re right. I hate for you to leave it behind for someone else to find, though.”

  I didn’t want anyone else to have it either, so I placed the medallion on the ground and pulled my hexed knife out again. I brought the pointed hilt down on the crystal as hard as I could.

  The crystal shattered.

  I put my knife away and turned back to Oscar, feeling the pull as his spirit began to slip from his body. It was a beautiful thing, the way it peeled away from his flesh, from his eyes, taking what had made him a living, breathing magus and turning it into a black miasma that rolled like fog from his mouth.

  I leaned close, my nostrils flaring, my mouth watering. It would take away the awful itch, the urge to draw blood. It would drive it away for a time. The harder they died, the more satisfying it was.

  My lips parted …

  “Watch out!”

  Magic screamed. I whipped my head around in time to see a red blur explode from the broken crystal. It shrieked into the air and expanded with a punch of sound that slapped me onto the concrete hard enough to ring my bell. My head swam with pain and panic. My lungs couldn’t remember how to draw breath. I scrabbled to move, to sit up, to do something and then something heavy and heated pressed hard against my chest. Massive paws squished my boobs and then an even
more massive snout lowered until I could see red, glowing eyes.

  A hellhound. I’d only ever heard stories about hounds; I thought they were a myth. Now here was a live one standing on my chest about to eat me and I could do nothing but struggle to breathe.

  A bit of drool dripped on my jacket and I heard the leather sizzle. The growl rumbled through his paws into my body.

  He was going to kill me if I didn’t do something.

  “Korri? Korri! I can’t see you. Something’s interfering with the feed. Korri?”

  Finally, finally I was able to suck a bit of air into my lungs. Once. Twice. When I thought I could talk, I croaked, “Can you get off me, big guy?”

  Poppy still hollered in my ear but I ignored her, not wanting to slip and have the hound eat me. I didn’t know if he could understand me, didn’t know if demons spoke my language. Demons and witches had once hung together if the old stories were to be believed, but it hadn’t happened in my lifetime and it didn’t answer the bigger question. Why did a Master Theurge have a demon trapped in a crystal hanging around his neck?

  Demonology was forbidden. Witch covens supposedly used to have patron demons who took care of each member and their family. It had made witches powerful until the magi figured out how to trap and kill our goddess Hecate. Her death had caused chaos in Hell and amongst the witches and soon after, the magi used that chaos to subjugate an entire race of people.

  The hellhound lowered his head even further and clamped his jaws around my neck. I shut my eyes, waiting for him to bite down, waiting for him to snap my neck. I was so totally done for but he didn’t squeeze, just sat there like he was claiming me or something. That drool when it hit me? Didn’t do a damn thing. I expected it to burn but instead it made my skin tingle as it slid, warm and sticky, along my neck to drip to the concrete below me.

  Suddenly, he let me go and leapt away, pushing off on me hard enough to make my breath whoosh from my lungs again. When I could, I scrambled up to a sitting position, but he was long gone.

  “You’re welcome,” I said to the empty alley. Then I remembered and crawled to Oscar’s body. “No. No, no, no. Please don’t be …”

  His death spirit was gone.

  3

  LUX

  I was born to hunt, born to protect. I was not born to live in slavery to the magi.

  I was free.

  I was free and the woman who’d released me was like no witch or magus I’d ever smelled before.

  She smelled like home.

  My home.

  I put my mark on her, wanting to taste her, wanting to know what, exactly, she was, but home called me.

  Two centuries a slave, stuck in that bastard’s crystal, forced to do his bidding. Fed on blood—paltry sustenance for a hellhound—and made to twist his spells, seduce women, hurt his enemies. Every second inside that fucking crystal had been torture, but now I was free.

  I wasted no time sliding into the electric energy that held this world apart from mine. It felt good, the burn, as my form melted away and reassembled. It felt good and I shook my pelt then changed. It didn’t hurt here, to change. Everything there hurt but now I was home.

  Home.

  The red planes I knew and loved were the same. The smell, sulfur and sage, corpse-rot and sandalwood, filled me with joy. The burning red sun, the flaming trees and birds that dripped lava as they flew overhead were the same.

  Except.

  Where were my people? Where were the demons that lived and breathed and fucked and fought? Where were my fellow hounds? My friends, my family.

  Magi would be shocked to know we had such things here. The witches had known, long ago. They had celebrated with us, had worked with us, had been our friends, our companions, and some, our lovers. Now? Hecate was dead. Lilith dead. And we? Served up to the magi like sparkling champagne awaiting their consumption.

  Why had she released me? Why hadn’t she been afraid? Oh, she’d been startled, sure, but afraid? No. And she’d smelled of blood and murder lust.

  She’d smelled so damn good.

  I went home first, but the woodlands and caves where my family lived were empty. Red dust had settled on the hard-won trophies, the skulls of our enemies, our weapons of war. The rock where my mother sat overlooking our people was cleaved in two, as if it couldn’t live without her and had thrown itself off the cliff to save it from the emptiness her absence left behind.

  I roamed the fields where we had frolicked and played as pups, but no one else remained. The air was empty, and my calls went unanswered. I turned back into my hound and ran as far and as fast as I could go, trying to outrun the panic that threatened to seize me. I was alone. Surely I couldn’t be and yet I’d not seen another living demon since I returned.

  They couldn’t have taken us all, the bastards. It wasn’t possible.

  And yet.

  I knew how fast they were growing. I knew they were getting better at sussing out our true names in order to summon us into slavery. How they did it, I’d never been able to glean, but I would find out and make them pay.

  Somehow.

  Now, though, now I ran, searching for others who might be able to help me, who might be able to reassure me that I wasn’t all alone in Hell. I ran and ran, the witch who’d freed me still on my mind. She was stuck there, it seemed, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be rid of her, either.

  The fields of riotous green grass were overgrown, their lush red roses wild and tangled. No demons tended them, no sprites pollinated them. The crystal blue lakes, the lava lakes, all were empty, their waves crashing on endless sandy beaches. Once, I thought I saw one of the merfolk splashing in the foam, but when I stopped to stare, I saw nothing but the glimmer of our sun on the breakers and so I ran on. I could have used my magic to fast travel, but I hadn’t been free in so long, all I wanted to do was use the muscles in my body to move however I wanted, to go wherever I wanted.

  I ran toward the center of my piece of Hell, the place where the spirit lights glowed. They told a story of all the demons in Hell. It was a sacred place and when I finally arrived, I was relieved to see that demons still tended the fires outside. The pathway to the temple was lined in pots of green fire, and each pot was once tended by a demon who had volunteered to keep it lit. Now, there were maybe eight pots to one demon, but the fires still burned. I greeted each one and they, in turn, asked me if I knew about others.

  “Have you heard from Inculus?”

  “Is Bardok still trapped?”

  “What about Xezbeth?”

  I did not know, I had not heard, I was sorry. By the time I’d made my way to the mouth of the cave, their pain was draped over me like a hair cloak. They could have entered the cavern to find out about their loved ones, but then they would have given up their duty tending the fire and none of them wanted to let the magi take one more thing away from us.

  I entered the cave, letting the cool air wash over me as my eyes adjusted to the dark. No fires burned in here but the soul lights that sputtered and sparked on the walls farther in. This was the place where every demon who ever lived was recorded, a piece of their magic set forever into the walls and ceiling of the massive cavern ahead. It grew, according to the legends, as more demons were born. Once, it had been but a small room, but centuries and centuries of life had meant the cavern had to expand to record them all.

  I could learn if my family was alive, if they were in the clutches of the magi, or if they’d crossed the great river into the world beyond.

  The passageway leading to the cavern narrowed until it was barely large enough for me to crawl through. When I wormed my way out of it into the big room, I felt as though I had been born again, which was, I supposed, the point. The lights glimmered all around me, thousands and millions of lights, yellows, greens, blues, reds, blacks.

  The blacks were those who had crossed the river and there were a lot of them.

  Hecate’s light, one of the biggest, glimmered black and even though I knew she was gone, it stil
l made me ache inside.

  Lilith’s sputtered between black and red, and none of the demon scholars—when we still had such things—could agree on what it meant. Had she been taken by magi? Torn apart but still alive somewhere, in some form? Dead but not completely?

  Our dark lord’s light glowed blue. He was alive but not in Hell. He’d abandoned us when Lilith died, his heart broken, his spirit broken. I didn’t blame him; we had all felt ripped apart when she vanished.

  Of my family, all but two were red. Taken by the magi. Enslaved. Trapped. Mine glowed bright yellow because I was home. The two family members who were still home were a distant cousin and an ancient aunt who I’d never gotten along with. Still, I thought I might seek them both out, if for no other reason than to see family again.

  So many reds, though. The magi really had run through our numbers. However they were finding our summoning names, they were getting better at it. There had to be close to a million or more red lights scattered across the hundreds of millions of demons.

  I touched Hecate’s light, hoping to gain some insight, hoping to feel her magic once more. When my hand pressed against it, a dark wash of power ran over me and a set of dual-colored eyes swam into my head before vanishing like a puff of smoke. The witch who’d freed me had dual-colored eyes. Was this a warning? A push? I just didn’t know.

  I touched Lilith’s light, but nothing happened; no vision, no warning, nothing. Disappointed, I touched the light of our dark lord, whispering a wish that he would come home and help us right the wrongs, fight for the freedom of our people, but nothing happened then, either.

  We were well and truly on our own.

  Except she’d freed me. Perhaps she could be induced to free more.