“They’re deaf!” A depression in the sand nearly sent me sprawling. The vurk’s cry thundered across the beach again, sending a fresh blast of adrenaline surging through my veins.
If we reached the asphalt, the vurk wouldn’t follow. Maybe. What the hell did I know? It wasn’t like we had roads on the plains of mu moka. Vurks shied away from civilization—all except this one, which was rampaging on a Long Island beach because I couldn’t catch a gods-be-damned break.
Behind us, the clatter and splinter of plastic loungers raced closer. I didn’t need to look to know the vurk was tunneling through the sand at the speed a man could run. In the deep sand, Cat and I were barely jogging. It would catch us.
Cat stumbled. Her hands shot out to cushion the fall, but momentum carried her forward. I snagged her clawed fingers just as an explosion of tentacles wrapped around her waist and knotted tight. Her razor-edged nails sliced through my fingertips. Dammit, no!
Cat’s hand slipped from my grip.
The vurk reared up, lifting Cat high off her feet. “Ace!”
The more tentacles the vurk threw out, the more Cat twisted and bucked, claws slicing. One fifth the vurk’s size, she couldn’t win.
“Hurzd!” I flung the word, and it instantly rebounded, lashing through my skull like the crack of a whip.
“Do something!” Cat shrieked.
There was nothing nearby but broken loungers. I couldn’t even yank out the vurk’s soul—it didn’t have eyes.
More fleshy, writhing tentacles tangled around Cat’s torso. She kicked and sliced at the fat loops under her arms, but the vurk lifted her higher, lining her up with its gaping mouth.
I needed Alysdair. “Don’t shift, you’ll make it angry.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Hang on. I’ll be right back.”
I was already running for the hotel bar when I heard, “You’re leaving? You son of—” but the vurk’s belly snarls drowned out the rest.
The hotel foyer blurred by. Not bothering with the elevator, I slammed through the stairwell doors and took the steps three at a time.
I had the hotel keycard out and skidded to a stop against my door, jamming the card into its slot. The little light blinked red. I jabbed the card in again. It flashed red-red-red.
“Cukkomd,” I snarled. The door didn’t budge.
I backed up, braced, and kicked the lock. The door sprang open. Scooting low, I snatched Alysdair from beneath the bed. A familiar tingle scattered through my fingers. The sword and I had some making up to do. I hadn’t wielded it since I’d technically killed Thoth. A rampaging vurk was as good a reason as any to put our grievances aside.
I pulled Alysdair free of its scabbard as horrified screams came from the open window. Not good. Screams meant witnesses. Witnesses meant video footage, news reports, cops, and Osiris.
A quick check out the window confirmed tourists were streaming out the hotel lobby into the parking lot. Apparently, vurks didn’t mind public appearances at expensive hotels. Who knew?
Returning to the lobby, I fought against the flow of scattering guests, Alysdair aglow in my hand. The situation was still salvageable—if I could minimize the number of eyewitnesses. But I needed to contain the vurk. And now.
The vurk had wallowed its way into the valet parking bay right outside the all-glass front door. Slower moving on asphalt, its fat body prevented it from wriggling through the revolving doors, but that didn’t stop it from trying, much to the horror of the people trapped inside. This was rapidly turning into one of those “nuke it all from orbit” type of situations. In other words, call in Osiris.
The lobby behind me was clear except for a rent-a-cop trying to manually override the seized door. I sauntered up behind him and eyed the heaving mass of underworld grub through the glass. The five trapped folks banged on the glass, screaming and clawing and begging for help.
Rent-a-cop freed his gun and stepped back, about to shoot the glass out, but then he saw me in my coat. After he’d clocked the sword, he hesitated. Who was more dangerous, the giant worm or the nonchalant guy with a glowing sword?
Before we had time for proper introductions, the vurk slammed its bulk into the doors, cracking the entire wall and setting off the tourists inside the glass carousel.
“Fire top right,” I told the civilian cop. The doors were composed of safety glass, same as a car windshield. A gunshot in the right spot would shatter it into harmless fragments. “Get ready to guide these people to the back and find another exit. No heroics.”
With no better option, rent-a-cop fired top right. The glass exploded, and people spilled out of their trap, falling over each other in their haste. The vurk must have felt the vibrations, because its tentacles swarmed in through the door, followed by its tunnel-like mouth. One of those tentacles had knotted around the broken remains of a lounger. But no Cat. When it tried to shove its rippling, desiccated body through, it tore out the doorframe.
“She’d better be alive, you overgrown earthworm.” I reversed my grip on Alysdair and pushed off my back foot, coming in low and fast. The vurk swung its vast head toward the fleeing people. Its long body slithered forward across the polished lobby floor, exposing its flank. I thrust Alysdair toward its flesh and yanked upward, expecting the tapered point to sink into the vurk’s guts, cutting the beast wide open, but Alysdair glanced off as if the grub were made of granite. Momentum carried me forward, and I fell against the vurk’s bark-like skin. Its undulating muscles shifted beneath my shoulder, and its ugly, eyeless head swung around ninety degrees, coming for me. The pincer-tipped tentacles lashed out, whipping and snapping inches from my face.
Iron for skin—great.
I arced Alysdair back, slicing through the lashing tentacles. The vurk let out a gods-awful noise, low and loud enough to rattle the hotel and tremble through my ageless soul, reminding me that neither of us had any right to be here.
More tentacles struck out. I cut them down and pressed in closer, hacking at the wriggling appendages. Up close, the thing’s stench caused my eyes to water and burned like acid on my tongue. When I got within striking distance, the vurk lifted its head high and screeched loud enough for all of Long Island to hear.
It craned over me, its tentacles now thrashing stumps inside its mouth. Blood and mucus rained over me and splashed up the walls and across the floor, turning the lobby into a slaughterhouse of sand and excretions. I officially classified this as a monumental fuck-up.
“This ends now.” I braced Alysdair against the floor, razor-edged tip pointed up. This would either hurt like someone had dropped twenty thousand pounds of worm on me, or it would all be over and I’d be grabbing another beer for the road.
The vurk fell forward, coming in for the kill. Gripping Alysdair in both hands, I crouched and braced for the worst. It hit, the sword sang in my hands, and a blast of hot sand smashed over me.
A sudden numbing stillness flooded in, the type that often lands right after chaos and makes you wonder how you’re still alive.
I blinked sand out of my eyes and coughed, spitting more sand to the side. The vurk had vanished. The lobby looked like a hurricane had blown through, dumping the beach inside the hotel, which was probably the best explanation I could come up with. And there, half buried in the sand, lay Cat.
I dropped to my knees and pressed my fingers to her neck. Her pulse beat against my touch, strong and healthy. “Hey, Cat?”
Any second now the cops would pile in. Someone with a cellphone would snap pictures and upload them to social media. I couldn’t risk the heat. Tucking Alysdair under my arm, I scooped up Cat, threw her over my shoulder, and headed for the stairs.
She murmured something I didn’t catch.
“I got you,” I replied. People would ask questions, but without a vurk carcass, the cops would have a hard time believing a giant worm had crashed into the hotel. I’d probably have to call Osiris up here to charm the witnesses into silence. He could also dislodge a fe
w memories from any security camera operators while here. As for the off-site data centers, Osiris had people who dealt with that. But all that would come later. Right now, all I cared about was getting my crew and me as far from the beach as possible.
Back in my room, a silently fuming Shukra greeted me. Her smile was a deadly slash of red lipstick, and those tumultuous eyes swirled with a touch of purple. She looked like a storm in a pantsuit and was clearly about to launch into a spectacular tirade, until the sight of Cat draped over my shoulder dampened her fury.
“We need to get out of here.” I dumped Cat on the bed and heard the shifter grumble something suspiciously insult-like in my direction. “Go pack your stuff,” I told Shu.
“What happened?”
“A vurk happened.”
Shukra immediately moved to the bedside and placed her hand over Cat’s closed eyes, whispering a few quick words. “She’s unharmed.” Shukra fixed her dark eyes on me. “What by Osiris’s balls is a vurk doing here?”
The accusation was so thick it struck me like a physical blow. Of course a rampaging vurk was my fault.
I’d have given her an innocent look had I remembered what innocent looked like. “The fine beaches and fancy cocktails?”
Shu stabbed a sharp fingernail in my direction, punctuating her words. “You. Lied.”
“Omitted some truths.”
“That didn’t wash five centuries ago, and it doesn’t wash now.”
I’d deliberately taken Shukra out of New York to avoid all this. Well, technically, I’d left New York to avoid all this. Shu didn’t have a choice but to follow. And Cat had followed because she wanted to tag along, and there was no point in telling a cat not to do something. In my hurry, I’d neglected the fact that the problem wasn’t New York; it was me. My plan to “hide” in the Hamptons hadn’t been a plan at all, and it could’ve gotten Cat killed.
With Cat’s murmurs becoming more insistent, I left the sword on the bed, moved to the window, and spotted a trail of blue and white flashing lights moving in from the main stretch of road. Fantastic. All we needed now was the local news crew and we’d have a full house.
This would take some creative omissions.
Were the walls closing in? The White Mountains were close. I’d heard New England was nice this time of year.
“We’re not getting any younger,” Shu growled—literally. She’d been doing more of that lately, as though she’d found some wiggle room in the human prison Osiris had trapped her demon self in.
Half the pantheon wanted me dead. The other half secretly wanted to hire me to kill the other half. Anubis wanted justice. Someone braver than me would walk right up to the God of the Damned and hand himself in. Anubis had made my mother—the Great Devourer—look as mean as a pet lizard. As gods went, he was as hardcore as you could get this side of the sundering, and he had a murderous dislike for anyone who escaped justice. Given my track record, he knew my soul was black as pitch. Only Osiris’s curse had kept him off my back for centuries, but I was now a godkiller—twice, if you believed the rumors. Ammit and Thoth. A trend. And everyone knew it.
The vurk hadn’t gotten here on its own. Someone had sent it. Someone with power. Someone who wouldn’t quit.
Whatever way I looked at it, if I walked back into Duat, I’d be inviting a sentence worse than death down on Shu and me. By the flaxen pallor of Shu’s dark skin, she knew it too. I happened to like living. I couldn’t go back. There had to be another way.
“What are we going to do?” Shu asked, the question pulling me away from the window.
“Same as we’ve been doing for five centuries?”
“Wing it?”
“Exactly.”
Cat grumbled something that sounded a lot like my name, combined with several R-rated expletives. She blinked open her bottle-green eyes and lined her warrior sights on me. “Bastard.”
“Welcome back.” I grabbed my overnight bag and dumped it on the bed beside her.
“What happened back there? That thing … did it eat me?” Sitting up, she pressed a hand against her forehead, disturbing a coat of sand stuck to her face and sprinkling it into her lap. “Sand?”
“It’s difficult to explain.”
“You left.” Cat glowered, and when those sharp eyes locked on their target, there was no escape.
“To get Alysdair.”
She looked at the sword beside her and then back at me. “You ran to this tourist trap without a plan. Had you told me exactly what we were doing here, I could have prepared. I don’t like being unprepared. I should take your damn sword and shove it up your ass.”
“Thanks fah savin’ mah lahf, Ace,” I said, plastering the Boston accent on thick and jagged. “You’re welcome. And it’s not the size of the ego that counts.”
Her glower burned deeper, attempting to combust me from the inside out. She swung her legs off the bed and stood ramrod straight, well inside my personal space. “Leave me in the dark again and I’ll claw out those pretty soul-eater eyes.”
When there’s six feet of angry shifter perfectly capable of making good on her threat standing within gutting distance, it’s a good idea not to mention how, up until a few months ago, she was a spy. I’d only hired her on because she refused to leave.
Besides, nobody could’ve prepared for a vurk. Those beasts don’t leave the underworld. Ever.
I snatched the bag off the bed, swung it over my shoulder, and retrieved the sword. Cat watched me, itching for a fight, and Shu rolled her eyes like she’d seen it all before.
“Chew me out on the road. Whoever was insane enough to send a vurk won’t hesitate to send another one. Time to check out.”
As far as underworld beasts went, the vurk was relatively harmless. There were far more dangerous creatures back home. Something told me we’d be meeting more before this was over.
Miles of road rumbled beneath the rental’s tires. We drove until the fuel gauge ticked empty and pine trees sprouted through the late morning sun. We couldn’t go back to New York, so I’d taken R91 north with no real destination in mind. If I didn’t know where we were going, it was safe to assume no one else did either.
Shu snored softly in the back, and Cat sat silent and rigid in the passenger seat, radiating contempt. I figured being eaten by a vurk would put anyone in a sour mood. I considered pointing out how she could leave at any time, just to break the silence, but one more smart-ass word from me might turn her feral. Though she was small in her feline form, I didn’t relish the thought of setting all those claws loose in the car.
Ahead, a gas station broke up the monotony of the greenery. I peeled us off the road and stopped behind a sedan parked at the one available pump. I didn’t think gas stops still came this small.
“What are you doing?” Cat snapped, firing off the words like bullets.
“We need gas.”
She eyed the station, head jerking as she scanned every corner, parked car, fuel pump, and store front for potential threats.
“Relax.” The sedan moved on. I rolled our rental up to the pump and cut the engine. “There aren’t any vurks in New Hampshire.”
“Are vurks all we have to worry about?”
I jumped out of the car and closed the door behind me before she could press for an answer. If she knew the true extent of the monsters hankering for my blood, she’d sleep with the light on for the rest of her mortal life, which wouldn’t be long if I didn’t man up and do the decent thing by turning myself in.
Not happening.
There had to be another way.
I filled the tank and ducked inside the store to stock up on snacks for what could turn out to be a long road trip. An old-fashioned bell jingled above the door, and I joined a grand total of two other customers in the store: a guy dressed for hiking, paying for his gas, and someone in a hooded sweater standing near the alcohol.
I can send Cat away, I thought, wrestling with the idea as I sought out the packaged sandwiches, but I already knew
she wouldn’t leave until she was good and ready, and that didn’t appear to be any time soon. I could abandon her—there were worse places than New Hampshire to find yourself stranded—but if she was anything like Bast, she’d be as good a tracker as she was a killer. Besides, those claws of hers were useful. She’d already saved my ass once, convinced I had something to do with her queen’s disappearance. I could use her on my side, until she made good on her threat to claw my eyes out. So ditching her wasn’t a realistic option. I didn’t need another enemy.
I grabbed a few sandwiches and scooped up a couple Hershey bars for Shu on my way to the counter. The hiker at the front was counting out every coin for his bottled water while the cashier waited, dull-eyed and pasty-faced.
I adjusted my armful of snacks as a quiet little female voice spoke up from behind me. “Milton Hershey had two failed businesses before he founded the Lancaster Caramel Company, the results of which you’re holding in your hand.”
Her head was tucked deep inside her hoodie, as though she was trying to keep the world out. I couldn’t accurately place her age and guessed around forty. Her pale blue eyes smiled, even as her thin lips didn’t quite lift from their dour line. She cradled a bottle of wine in the crook of her arm.
“I did not know that,” I told her, wondering when my surly aura had worn off. Most folks knew to avoid me, even if they couldn’t figure out why. The message clearly wasn’t getting through to Hershey’s number one fan.
Her thin shoulders pulled in, shrinking her outline and folding her into a smaller target, but the smile stayed. “Hershey had tickets for the Titanic, but he didn’t travel on the doomed ship. Nobody knows why.” She said it as though she were reciting it from Hershey’s Wikipedia page.
As the hiker finally paid and left with his water, the woman shuffled up behind me.
“You know a lot about Milton Hershey,” I said, setting down the sandwiches for the cashier to ring up.
“The past is a liquid before it becomes solid.” Her chuckle had an underlying sandy rasp. “Like your candy.”
I gave her a second glance, disguising it behind an agreeing nod. Nothing about her hinted at magic—no background resonance that I could pick up on. The occasional twitch and furtive gaze suggested she might be on medication, perhaps of the alcohol kind. Her plight, if she had one, wasn’t my concern. I already had an enraged shifter riding shotgun and an unstable demon sorceress in the backseat.
See No Evil (The Soul Eater Book 3) Page 2