The inside of the tiny shack was far, far larger than the outside. Room opened onto room inside, the floor soft underfoot with layers of rugs, flowers everywhere, in vases, in pots on windowsills, crackling fires in tiny fireplaces in nearly every room. There must have been thirty or forty women staying there, and each seemed to have her own cozy bedroom with space enough for a little table and chairs. Mary was shown to a room with a bassinet snugged up against a bed piled high with pillows and quilts.
Once she’d settled her few belongings, she was ushered down another set of twisty hallways to a large, open space that was a combination kitchen and eating area. There was an enormous table surrounded by chairs of every description, and a fireplace equipped with metal shelves and hooks at different heights, obviously designed to cook for a crowd.
Standing at the kitchen counter slicing bread and issuing instructions was one of the most beautiful creatures Mary had ever seen. She was tall, well over six feet. Her bare arms were exquisitely muscled and her smile was wide. Her dress was a wonder. It was a simple shift, utilitarian in design, but the fabric was breathtaking, some kind of shimmery silver grey, with a pattern reminiscent of scales. Mary stared at it, but only until she met Laelia’s eyes. They were not human eyes. The pupils were long and narrow like a cat’s, but ever so much wilder and more dangerous.
Mary bowed awkwardly. Laelia strode over and embraced her. She held her arms out for Leo. He eyed her seriously for a moment and reached for her and wriggled to be free. Laelia took him and looked him over carefully. Leo returned the scrutiny in kind. At last they each seemed satisfied, and everyone in the room let go a collective breath they hardly realized they’d been holding. Laelia nodded at Leo decisively, as though something had been silently settled between the two.
Laelia exchanged the barest of respectful nods with the doll and then held out her arm. The sun-bird flew to her. The bird seemed fluttery, almost starstruck. Laelia stroked the brilliant blue head and back and whispered, just loud enough for Mary to hear, “Welcome, little sister. I welcome your light.” The sun-bird made a happy sort of cooing sound and settled back into her normal easy demeanor.
“You are welcome, each of you. Come and sit at our table.” She addressed Mary directly. “You, child, are pursued by an old and dangerous enemy. After making the risks known to all here, those you see gathered are the souls who have accepted your enemy as our own.”
Mary’s face reflected her surprise and gratitude at this revelation.
“Now we must prepare.” Laelia turned and addressed everyone in the room. “Come, all. Break bread with our sisters, and let us make ready for battle.”
From her perch in Anna’s overalls pocket, the motanka doll muttered, Hmmmpf! Drakons.
***
Royal’s first indication that something was nearby was a soft downdraft that fluttered his hair. He froze and stared upwards at the enormous form of a dragon that flew directly over his head. It was huge, far larger than the little four-seater aircraft in which he’d learned basic aviation at a camp when he was sixteen. He couldn’t say for sure in the low light, but its scales appeared to be a silvery grey color, and its talons were enormous, sharp and terrifying.
Royal hissed at the Luger. “You didn’t say anything about dragons.”
The Luger’s demon laughed. Why do you think we brought the verdammt dinosaur gun?
Royal, teeth bared, eyes fierce, had already unslung the .577 T-Rex rifle he was carrying on his back. He’d purchased it the year before for a safari he’d taken to Africa, just before Mary had fallen pregnant. That had been a strange trip, he vaguely recalled. Their guide had been about half unhinged that whole week. There had been some lion attacks in the area and all the locals were spewing some old wives’ tale about ghost lions. The only lion they’d seen the entire time was one grizzled and scarred male, too old to be any sort of a challenge.
They’d been after elephants that week, and he’d taken down a big male.
In point of fact, it hadn’t been Royal’s shot that had brought down the bull elephant. The guide had done that after Royal had shot once with the .577 and had gotten knocked back so hard by its recoil he’d dislocated a shoulder. Royal’s memory of that part of the adventure was vague. The thrill of the hunt, and afterward the enjoyment of the local girl who had tended his shoulder, were much more present in his mind.
The .577 held three rounds. By the time he brought the gun to bear, the dragon had disappeared off to their right. Royal shouldered the huge weapon and turned slowly, willing the dragon to reappear.
It came from behind, flying silently on enormous scaled wings, breathing a swath of fire twenty feet wide. Royal spun and fired. The report was deafening. The recoil knocked him clean off his feet, dislocated his shoulder and sent him rolling ass-over-teakettle down the hill. The shot went wide, missing the dragon’s body but grazing one wing. She roared, still flaming, and veered away. Royal’s fall downhill resulted in a badly sprained ankle, but it saved him from being completely incinerated.
Get up, dammit. I see someone.
Royal rose to his knees and elbows, singed but still in the game. He knew from experience when this was all over he was going to feel the pain, but for now he was good. The demon’s energy was flowing freely and he felt strong. He looked in the direction the Luger indicated, eyes hard, anticipating some fresh warrior or beast.
It was a girl.
Pay attention, dumme. That is no girl.
Royal scowled. The Luger had told him about the Mavkas, how they were the spirits of girls who had died violent deaths. It had told him they preyed on men, luring them out into the woods like this to get revenge. Frankly, Royal had anticipated something more terrifying than a scantily clad girl sitting in the grass. The dragon had been an exciting start, but this? It was just a fucking girl.
She stood and walked toward him. It was early spring and still chilly, especially with the sun going down, and she wasn’t wearing much, just a little slip of a dress. Royal pushed himself up to his full height and watched her approach, one hand on his knife.
She looked young, but she moved enticingly. There was a swing to her hips and a look in her eyes that Royal was finding increasingly difficult to ignore. The Luger’s spluttering and swearing seemed to fade the closer she got to him. Her eyes were a deep blue, and her hair fell free, just covering her breasts. He could smell her sweetness; his head buzzed with it. Flowers. She had a flower tucked behind one ear.
He had to touch her, needed to touch her. Every inch of him quivered. The scent of her was electric in his brain. He reached out, fingertips brushing her cheek. Royal could barely hear the Luger shouting. It sounded like bees buzzing somewhere in the distance.
The girl curled one hand around the back of his neck and drew his face toward hers. In her other hand she held a handful of freshly picked flowers, delicate things, columbines or something. She held the bouquet between them, inhaled their scent, and looked at him invitingly from behind the petals.
Royal tilted his head toward her, breathed in, and screamed.
It was as if he’d inhaled white-hot barbed wire. His face, his sinuses – everything was on fire. Blood erupted from his eyes and nose. He shoved the girl away with as much strength as he could muster and scrambled away from her, gasping and coughing.
The girl fell back laughing in the grass, and from behind her came another girl, and another. Royal regained his feet. The girls approached him from three sides. Royal had never imagined anything like it. His eyes and nose were still on fire and gushing blood, but he WANTED. He wanted those girls, needed to have them. His cock was rock hard, his hands reaching for them, his shambling steps taking him toward them instead of away.
ROYAL! the Luger screamed.
A burst of light exploded behind his eyes, momentarily clearing his thoughts.
ROYAL! Go! Now! Go toward the lake, there!
Royal turned and through blood-hazed eyes saw where the Luger wanted him to go. He also saw w
hy.
About a hundred yards away, in front of a small, almost perfectly round lake, he saw Mary. His Mary. She was wearing that little house dress he liked, the red one. In her arms was Leo. She had him bundled against the chill, wrapped in some sort of fur-lined wrap.
One of the girls reached him from behind, flowers in hand, and touched his shoulder. He shuddered. Her touch was electric, sensual, intensely arousing, and then the pain slammed into him again, radiating down his shoulder, exploding through his back. He felt like he was being stabbed from the inside with rusty wire.
Royal screamed again and fled away from the girls toward the lake. From the corners of his eyes he could see more and more girls appearing from the trees on either side and behind him. They seemed to be funneling him down toward Mary. They drew close as he ran past. He cringed away from their hands, their flowers, their eyes.
Terrifying, insensible pain stabbed at Royal, overriding even the demon’s ability to block it out. But there was one thing keeping pace with the agony: anger. He was dead furious. These were fucking girls. They had some sort of magic the Luger hadn’t fucking prepared him for and that was fucked up and fucking wrong and it hurt and this was all Mary’s fucking fault that things were Not Going According To Plan.
The Luger’s low voice cut through his panic briefly. Use the gas.
Royal’s hand clutched at his jacket pocket, fumbling for the canister. There was a light wind at his face – at least that one thing was in his favor. He ripped the tab from the tear gas grenade and tossed it over his shoulder. He ran on, and delighted at the sound of screaming and crying coming from the girls behind him.
The girls up ahead on either side saw the gas and hesitated. Royal let fly one more canister, ran unimpeded the last twenty yards of the gauntlet, and gained the clearing where he had first sighted Mary and Leo. During his wild run, Mary had been busy. She’d placed Leo in some sort of contraption that looked like a floating nest, and had pushed him out into the lake. He was sitting up, still bundled in the furry blanket, contentedly watching his mother on the shoreline. Now Mary stood between them as if guarding the baby from his raging approach.
He raced toward her, knife arm upraised, meaning to tackle her and crush her skull into the rocks that surrounded the lake. Mary stood motionless as he raced toward her, snarling. His fingertips were inches from her throat when he was jerked off his feet and heaved upward.
Huge, sharp claws held of him from shoulders to knees. The dragon. It was back. His rifle shot had torn a ragged hole in one of the beast’s wings, but it hadn’t taken it out.
The dragon landed, balancing on its hind legs and holding Royal firmly in its front talons. It angled downward until Royal’s feet brushed the ground, but did not let him go.
Mary approached with slow but firm steps. Under one arm was tucked the motanka doll. On her shoulder was perched a blue bird that looked remarkably like the one from the painting. Royal wasn’t sure why, amid all the other bizarre and magical things that had populated his world recently, the bird seemed so damned unlikely, but there it was. He stared at it, dazed.
Mary stopped less than a foot away from him. The dragon held his arms tightly pinned, and the shoulder he’d dislocated was starting to become a torment. He’d hardly noticed it before, but now it was throbbing like mad. The big rifle, still on its sling, was pressed into his armpit, the barrel pinned between his back and the beast’s claws. Royal struggled to get his other hand closer to the trigger.
Mary looked at him coldly, piercingly. Royal gathered up the embers of his fury, fueled by the demon still inside him, and sneered at her.
She spat in his face. “You are an evil beast,” she hissed at him. “You sold your soul to a demon. You lied to me, to my mama and papa. You said you would care for me, love me and cherish me, and what did you do? You beat me with tools when your fists grew tired, you blacked my eyes and broke my bones, burned me and raped me and tried to kill my spirit. And what would you do to our son? You created him to be evil, just like you. You brought him into this world so he too could be a tool for your perverted evil games.
“I say to you, no more. I will not allow your evil to destroy me or my son. This is the end, Royal. It is time for you to pay the price for all you have done.”
Royal laughed. “What will you do to me, cunt? Let your pet dragon here have at me? Coward! Bitch! You were a fine fuck for a little while, but I’m done with you. You were – “
The dragon, Laelia, squeezed. There was an audible crack, and suddenly Royal found it difficult to breathe. He cast about in his mind, listening for the Luger, waiting to be told what to do.
All he heard was silence.
Then a light brightened around Mary. It seemed to be coming from the doll in her arms. It grew bright and then brighter, and surrounded her with a shine that almost looked like armor. Cloaked in the brightness, Mary reached in between Laelia’s talons and plucked the Luger from its holster at Royal’s hip.
She held it up for a moment, staring at it as if trying to understand. Her skin, shielded by the doll’s power, never touched the gun’s metal; instead, the gun too was encased by it, surrounded by a casket of light.
Royal felt a strange draining sensation and then a familiar emptiness. The demon was gone from him, and like it always did when it left him, the pain reinstated itself. All the cuts and burns and broken bones screamed to life in the primal lizard part of Royal’s brain. If he’d been able to scream, he would have.
Mary held the Luger up, and then the bird launched itself from her shoulder. It swooped over her hands and gingerly took the gun in its claws. It hovered there for a second, and Mary looked into the dragon’s huge catlike eyes. “Are you sure?”
Laelia’s voice rumbled from the depths of her dragon form. “Yes. He has bidden it be so, and I trust him.”
“But he’s just a baby!”
“This is how it must be,” replied the dragon sternly.
The drakon speaks truth, said the motanka doll soothingly. Fear not, child.
Mary wrapped her arms around the doll. “Very well. Let us finish this.”
Just then, Royal managed to get his thumb hooked on the trigger of the dinosaur gun. Using every last ounce of strength he could force from his hands, he squeezed. The bullet ripped up the dragon’s chest and shoulder. A spray of thick greenish blood spattered upward. The recoil from the weapon forced Royal’s body downwards, and the dragon let him loose to tumble to the ground.
He half fell, half lunged at Mary. His knife, which had been clutched in his other hand the whole time, was propelled toward Mary’s belly. The sun-bird screeched and flapped madly to clear herself of the falling bodies and spraying blood.
Still cloaked in the motanka’s armor, Mary never moved, never wavered. The knife glanced away and fell harmlessly to the ground. The dragon, bleeding, eyes alight with pain, heaved her body closer to Royal and impaled him with a claw. Royal gasped as the curved talon entered through his lower back and exited through his thigh.
There was so much blood. His brain stuttered and tried to connect. Why? There was supposed to be ecstasy… but this time, there was only blood.
The sun-bird flew up and over the lake until it hovered over Leo in his floating nest, Luger still clutched in her claws. Leo reached up and grasped at the gun. The sun-bird dropped it into his hands. Everyone froze in place near the shore and watched, not breathing.
For a moment, the golden light continued to shield the gun, but then a dark mist pressed outward from around the Luger, pushing, stabbing against the light. Leo continued to hold his little hands out, observing as the demon’s magic battled against that of the old goddess within the doll, the Luger floating a few inches above his baby fingers. The baby watched with bright eyes at the play of light and darkness, and then with a sudden swatting movement of his hands, he dismissed the light, and let the dark mist free.
Mary gasped. Royal stared. The light was fading from his eyes, but he fought it. He had to see.
Leo’s face became serene as he watched the darkness dart around him, sniffing at his eyes, his mouth, as if it were looking for a way in. He watched it tolerantly, the way a big old lion will allow a cub to pester it for a little while. The light shifted. The glow of the old goddess’s magic had faded, yet Leo was still surrounded by a golden radiance. It lit his fluff of brown hair, making it look lighter and more golden. It illuminated his eyes, making them seem both tranquil and wise.
The Luger’s spirit gathered itself for one final attack. It dove at the baby’s mouth, intent on possessing him, this child it had manipulated into being.
Leo threw back his little head, took a deep breath, and roared. The sound was as deep as the bedrock and louder than the report from Royal’s preposterous dinosaur gun. It vibrated the water and the stone and the trees.
The waves of sound blasted through the demon’s dark form, pulsing, reverberating, tearing it apart.
The old demon tried desperately to hold itself together, but it was no use. The fog shook and shuddered and spun, and finally it was gone.
Leo allowed the roar to subside, and sat quietly, looking at the now-empty Luger hanging in the air in front of him. After a moment, he gave it a little swat with his baby paw and it shattered into a million darkly shining metal fragments. They dropped, harmless, into the water around his nest.
Mary collapsed, weeping with relief, and Anna and several of the others waded out to grasp Leo’s floating nest and pull it back to shore. Once there, Mary gathered Leo into her arms and held him tightly, stroking his hair and whispering in his ear.
Laelia pulled her talon out of Royal’s lifeless body. She flipped it onto a large stone, away from the women crowding around Mary and Leo. She aimed a blast of fiery breath at his body, and before anyone had time to suggest S’mores, Royal’s body was reduced to ash.
What Goes Around Page 24