by Debi Gliori
“BACIIIIIIII,” he howled, catching sight of the telltale line of wicked orange flame glowing round the doorframe of the Ancestors’ Room. He could feel the heat from the other end of the corridor; knew even as he ran toward its source that the best he could hope for now was to join his dead wife, and thus leave their children completely orphaned….
“BACIIIIIII,” he roared, aware of a shadow passing between him and his goal. Then the shadow spoke.
“You might as well save your breath, stupido. Place she’s gone, they don’t have any ears left.”
The brutality of this statement, its crude assessment of the situation, hit Luciano in the center of his chest like a sledgehammer. Lucifer di S’Embowelli Borgia stepped out of the shadows, walking toward him with a sneer on his ugly face as he’d always done when they were children, appearing at the best moment to inflict the maximum damage possible on his little brother. Hardly any surprise that he was here now, gloating while Luciano wept.
“You pathetic little worm,” he observed, strolling toward Luciano, taking the time to savor his triumph. “Don’t tell me you think your tears are gonna put out the flames. Is that how you’re gonna save her, hero? Is that it? You’re gonna snivel all over her?” He was alongside Luciano now, his changeling-bitten nose a cosmetic nightmare of blood and bruising, his yellow eyes alight with malice. “Hey. You may as well face it, Luci-boy. You ain’t gonna be able to live with yourself after this. Think, my heroic brother. You did nothing while your lady-wife burned to death. Or did you? Oh, excuse me. I do apologize. You did do something. You…you cried. She screamed her head off and you…you sniveled and wept like the useless, cowardly—”
“Not another word,” Luciano spat, lunging for his tormentor with one arm outstretched in front of him. “Get. Out. Of. My. Way.”
“Make me.” Lucifer yawned, looking down at his fingernails as if that concluded the matter.
Luciano grabbed Lucifer’s shirtfront, forcing them close enough to feel each other’s breath.
“Oooh, I’m wetting my pants, I’m so scared. Ooooh, little brother, you’re so frightening.” Lucifer made no attempt to escape his brother’s grip, but stared into Luciano’s eyes, his bottom jaw working from side to side until, with no warning, he reared back and spat full into Luciano’s face, simultaneously shoving him so hard that he fell backward and crashed to the floor.
Lucifer’s mocking laughter bounced off the suits of armor downstairs and seemed to echo endlessly in Luciano’s ears as he picked himself up off the floor. Grimacing with disgust, he wiped the spit from his face, observing his own actions as if he’d somehow managed to split himself in two: into Luciano, the ice-cold witness, and Luciano, the man with the red mist rapidly occluding his sight.
Lucifer was striding past the open door to the game room when Luciano caught up with him. A monumental, unstoppable force batted Lucifer through the doorway and into the room, flung him across the carpet, and narrowly missed pitching him headfirst through the glass front of the game cabinet. Lucifer caught a brief glimpse of the hundreds of muddled-up games stacked behind the glass, games he half recognized from childhood—
He’d always cheated. Always. Thing was, it was never as much fun when your opponent was too dumb to realize you were robbing him blind. Luciano was such a knucklehead he never even guessed why he lost every game he played with his big brother. The stupid sap would just stare at the cards, or the board, or his dwindling stock of poker chips, peering at them with his big brown eyes like some sorta dumb animal, so doglike in fact that Lucifer frequently found release in kicking his kid brother until Luciano howled exactly like a dog….
Lucifer was spun round and his face slammed against the wall, his nose making painful contact with the brass dome of the antique light switch. Shove. The lights came on over the billiard table. Another shove from Luciano, more agonizing contact between Lucifer’s tender bitten nose and the unforgiving metal of the light switch, and off went the lights again. Shove, on. Shove, off. In the background, over his own grunts of pain and Luciano’s labored breathing, Lucifer could hear a shuffling sound, as if the jumbled game pieces in the cabinet were stirring in their sleep. Then came a shove vicious enough to make him scream, a high-pitched shriek he’d never before heard coming from his own throat….
He recognized it, though. He’d made Luciano squeak and squeal like a stuck pig often enough. ’Specially when the pinhead was just a baby and couldn’t rat on him. Those were the best times, him and his kid brother playing the game where he’d loom over the crib in time to catch the look of utter horror as Luciano realized that here was the nightmare, back again. The rush of power he used to feel when he saw the fear in Luciano’s eyes was indescribable, almost better than the feelings he had afterward. Poppa didn’t notice the bruises that sprouted all over Baby Luciano like black flowers; Poppa was too busy trying to keep control of his Mafia empire—besides, real men like Poppa took very little interest in their children until they were old enough to hold a gun…. Not like wussy Luci, who probably spent all his time with his squalling brats because he’d never grown up hims—
Shove.
“AUGHHH.”
“How d’you like being on the receiving end, huh?” Luciano’s breath felt hot on Lucifer’s face; the two brothers tangled in a mass of thrashing, wrangling limbs, a two-headed beast whose struggling shadow fell across the floor. “I said. How. D’you. Like. It?” Luciano demanded. “I hope you’re beginning to be afraid, Lucifer. You bloody well ought to be.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Me? Afraid of you?”
Shove.
“Ah, Lucifer. I’m not going to stop, see? I’m not going to quit on you now. Not now that you’ve killed her. Not now that there’s nothing left for me.”
Shove.
It hurt. It hurt Lucifer far more than anything had ever hurt him before, but he was damned if he’d ever admit it. Not to Luciano. Not ever. Never say quits….
“Say it, you big baby, c’mon, say it. Let me hear you beg.”
“Please, stop. Please, Lucifer, I’ll do anything you want, I’ll give you anything, just stop it. You’re killing me. Lucifer. PLEASE. STOP.”
He couldn’t make out if the sniveling fool was crying, because Luciano was dripping wet from repeated duckings in the bath. One minute the stupid baby had been whipping up a storm of soapsuds; the next he found himself grabbed by the scruff of his scrawny neck and forced underwater. And don’t think Lucifer hadn’t been tempted to keep old Luciano under till the frenzy of thrashing limbs and bubbles had stopped, but that would have meant an end to the game, and it was no fun at all when games ended.
He hoped that Luciano felt the same way. Hoped that his dumb brother wasn’t thinking of playing this one to the death.
“Hey. Luci. Murdering me ain’t gonna bring her baa-AAUGH.”
“Shut it.”
“If they send you to prison, you’ll never get to see your kids grow up.”
“I said, shut it.”
“Awwww, Luciano, weedy little jerks like you get eaten alive in prison. Come on. You’ll get over her. Plenty more where she came fr-AUGHHHH.”
Clotted gargling sounds came from Lucifer’s throat as Luciano dragged him choking and struggling across the room. His spine made contact with the edge of the billiard table, and Lucifer found himself bending backward under the relentless pressure of his brother’s hands. Luciano’s face loomed above him, but what he saw was not a brother he recognized. Even if by some miracle Lucifer had managed to force any words past his throat, Luciano was beyond reason, beyond hearing. The stupid jerk’s eyes were squeezed shut, tears sliding out from under the lids; he was sobbing like the baby he’d always been, his mouth drawn up like a gargoyle’s. Trying to move his head, Lucifer saw movement out of the corner of his eye. At first he couldn’t work out what it was he’d seen; it looked like hundreds of toy soldiers had been laid out across the green baize of the billiard table like some sort of weird war game.
; Then he realized that it wasn’t a war game—wasn’t a game at all. They weren’t toy soldiers, they were real. Real soldiers, who had discovered their life’s true purpose in this final battle. Real living, breathing warriors, who despite their height were no less lethal than their full-size human counterparts. Lucifer had approximately three and a half seconds to consider the vicious points on each and every one of the shrunken warriors’ tiny spears before he was impaled upon them, their wicked tips penetrating skin, muscle, blood vessels, and several of his major organs simultaneously. As his blood leached out across the baize and his sight faded to black, Lucifer saw with utter clarity that, for him, the game was over.
Bless the Bed That I Lie On
Undoubtedly it was the clones tucked inside his shirt that saved Titus and the baby from drowning when the vast wave hit them. Had it been up to him, Titus knew he couldn’t have survived. After all, he’d only learned to swim earlier that year, and under Pandora’s tutelage he could now barely manage a length of the moat, let alone stay afloat in this terrifying open water with a baby tucked in the crook of one arm.
Titus had no idea what had happened. Was he even alive? And if so, where on earth was he? He wasn’t in Lochnagargoyle anymore, that much was certain. And if it really was water he was currently flailing in, it was like no water he’d ever encountered. Sure, it was wet, and its salt rimed his mouth, but it didn’t sound like water. From all around came a faint murmur, like the sound made by thousands of hushed voices: the noise of a vast crowd of people all talking very quietly, as if they were in church or…or in a library. Occasionally he would distinguish an individual sound, even make out the odd phrase or foreign word, but for most of the time, all he could hear was a tangle of voices that his ears were unable to decipher. Ahead, he caught occasional glimpses of land he didn’t recognize at all; at least, he thought he could see land, but in the darkness, the most he could see was a distant silhouette. What he couldn’t see was Pandora, and this was terrifying—he was positive she must have been swept away by the same wave that had plucked both him and the baby from the shore. Plucked him, the baby, and…He tried his hardest not to follow that particular thought to its tragic conclusion, but it proved unavoidable. The wave had swallowed them all, including Strega-Nonna, crushing her limp body under the pounding tonnage of more water than he’d seen in his lifetime. Where Nonna might be now was anyone’s guess, but mercifully she wouldn’t be needing her body any longer….
“TIIIIITUUUUUUS!”
Had he heard that? His name, so faint and far away, its syllables part of the wind and the waves. He trod water for a moment, his arms aching with the effort of holding the baby’s face clear of the waves slapping his face, as he strained to hear his name once more. He was tiring, and he knew that he had to find land soon, so he paddled on, the geriatric clones tugging him forward, their weak voices occasionally gasping out the odd insult to keep him going.
“Youth of today…born idle.”
“Call that swimming? I’ve seen faster bricks….”
“Come on, you great lummox. Put some effort into it. D’you think we enjoy towing you ashore? You weigh a ton, you do.”
“Eeeh, when I was your age, I used to swim across the loch every day with my bicycle on my back and my fishing rod between my teeth….”
And then his feet smacked off a rock, closely followed by his knees, and then he heard someone yell “TIIIIIITUUUUUUUSSS!” and he knew that he hadn’t dreamt his sister’s voice, for there she was, fairly dancing across the waves toward him, relief writ large across her face, her skinny arms wrapping around him in a most un-Pandora-like hug.
“Thank heavens you both made it. Come on. I was terrified I’d be stuck here on my own with…with that horrible bloke.” Seeing Titus’s frown, she tried to explain, her words tumbling out one after the other in her haste. “D’you remember that weird guy, the creepy photographer who showed up last summer, the day Mrs. McLachlan vanished? Come on, Titus, think. The same guy who began to appear in all my photos? Yup. I thought you’d remember. Right, him. So I knew I’d seen him again, but I couldn’t put my finger on when or where until now. It was this morning, when we went to the hospital to see Mum and the new baby and I was gazing out of the window and he was there, balanced on crutches, staring inside, staring at us…. The same guy. The same one who ki—who kill—”
She couldn’t go on, and Titus couldn’t finish the sentence for her. It was unthinkable that Strega-Nonna was gone forever. Neither Titus nor Pandora could even begin to imagine StregaSchloss without the old lady. Even though they rarely saw her in her thawed state—the telltale puddle of her melt-water only appeared by the range a few times a year—she was so much a part of their existence that her absence was about to rip a huge hole in the fabric of life at StregaSchloss. The baby stared up into Titus’s face, watching as he blinked several times and looked out to sea, to where a last thin blade of yellow cut the sky in two.
“It’s dark, Pan. Any idea where we are?”
“None whatsoever. All I know is that it’s an island and that we’re stuck here—at least until it gets light. There are a couple of trees and signs of an old campfire. That man—the one I was telling you about—he’s over there, trying to get a fire going. The island’s so small, I don’t think we can avoid him, and besides…I’m freezing.”
She was right, Titus realized. There was hardly any shelter on the island, and the temperature was plummeting. Plus, he imagined that babies weren’t equipped to deal with extremes of temperature, so if he didn’t do something and do it soon, the baby would end up joining Strega-Nonna, and that, he vowed, simply wasn’t going to happen.
Isagoth had managed to get a fire going, but it was only a feeble little flicker that dimmed alarmingly as he balanced more layers of wet twigs over its glowing heart.
“Ignite, dammit,” he commanded, kneeling down and trying to encourage flames by blowing on the embers. Smoke billowed around his head and he retreated, choking, wheezing, and enraged at the island’s failure to provide dry kindling. “The wood’s all wet,” he spat.
“Funny, that,” Titus muttered. “I noticed that about the water too.”
Isagoth’s head whipped round, and he glared into the darkness beyond his fire. “Oh, it’s you two,” he said, turning back to his fire-building. “Joy. You brought that infernal cheese factory along too….”
At the sound of Isagoth’s voice, the baby began to sob. At the sound of the baby, Pandora gave a deep and heartfelt groan and gritted her teeth. Something about the sound of weeping babies made her feel as if her eardrums were being massaged with shards of broken glass while small lions were chewing on what remained of her brain. And just when she imagined that things couldn’t get any worse, the sea gave up its dead, washing Strega-Nonna’s body ashore like driftwood. Pandora had turned away from the baby to face out to sea, and thus she was the first to witness the return of her ancestor. A cry must have escaped from her then, because Isagoth slitted his eyes and stared at her, before following her gaze to a bedraggled bundle of rags and tatters. In one fluid motion, the demon was on his feet and running toward the high-tide mark, bounding across the pebbly shore before Titus and Pandora realized his intention. “Ssso, let’s hope you had the sense to hang on to my stone,” the demon hissed, hauling Strega-Nonna’s body about as if it were of no account whatsoever.
“Stop that!” howled Pandora, revolted by Isagoth’s vulture-like behavior. “Leave her alone, you monster. She’s dead. Doesn’t that give her the right to rest in peace?”
Isagoth ignored her, turning the lifeless body over with his foot and swooping down to prize something from Strega-Nonna’s grasp. Bile rose in Titus’s throat. Even in death, the old lady’s grip was so powerful that Isagoth was forced to break her fingers one by one in order to extract his prize. Frozen with horror, Titus and Pandora clung together, sobbing along with the baby they held between them.
At length the demon stood upright, his legs straddling Stre
ga-Nonna’s remains, his face illuminated with pure, undiluted hatred. It was as if he was growing in maleficence right there in front of them, sprouting like some wicked seed, his mouth opening into a crack that allowed smoke to spill forth from his interior.
“Miiine,” he breathed in a voice straight from Hell. “My ssstone. At laassst MY time is come. BEHOLD, THE NEW ORDER OF THE WORLDS. WELCOME TO HELL.”
Round the island’s high-tide mark, pillars of flame ignited with a roar, leaping up to rim the land with red fire. Overhead, the night peeled back like the lid of a sardine tin to reveal a sky so raw it appeared to bleed. Titus and Pandora saw the land melt and turn to magma at their feet, saw gouts of flame shooting through from beneath the Earth’s fragile crust. Instinctively they made for the sea, dodging erupting columns of flame, screaming in terror as they ran straight through the burning fringes of the island and floundered across its muddy shallows. But where they had expected to find water, there was only sand.
“Where’s the sea gone?” Pandora gasped, spinning round to try and find her bearings. “Where are we?”
Bruised clouds scudded past overhead as, all around them, the land heaved itself aloft, taking the form of dunes, vast cliffs, and massifs, which just as swiftly blew away to re-form in sculpted curves elsewhere. Shapes appeared at their feet, rotted hulks of what might have been vehicles, and in the distance Titus was sure he saw the tumbled remains of buildings, roads, and bridges, their rusted metalwork spanning valleys of dust. The children stumbled and tripped, still running, still in flight from the horrors they had left behind, their breathing ragged as they scaled dunes and sent avalanches of sand cascading down in their wake. They gained a little height and stood panting and breathless on a ridge, but all they could see for miles around was more of the same. Ahead lay endless empty acres, wave upon wave of nothingness stretching off toward the horizon.