A Kiss Before Doomsday

by Laurence MacNaughton

  ALSO BY LAURENCE MACNAUGHTON

  It Happened One Doomsday

  Published 2017 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

  A Kiss Before Doomsday. Copyright © 2017 by Laurence MacNaughton. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover illustrations © Shutterstock

  Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht

  Cover design © Prometheus Books

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Inquiries should be addressed to

  Pyr

  59 John Glenn Drive

  Amherst, New York 14228

  VOICE: 716-691-0133

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: MacNaughton, Laurence, 1975- author.

  Title: A kiss before doomsday / by Laurence MacNaughton.

  Description: Amherst, NY : Pyr, an imprint of Prometheus Books, 2017. | Series: A Dru Jasper novel | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017008439 (print) | LCCN 2017011876 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633882683 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633882676 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Urban Life. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A276 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.A276 K57 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008439

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Cyndi.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Driven Apart

  1: If You Leave

  2: Beneath the Skin

  3: The Dead Ride Fast

  4: Hot Metal and Gasoline

  5: The Damage Done

  6: Things That Make You Go Hmm

  7: Wake the Dead

  8: Kick-Ass Shoes

  9: The Way It Never Was

  10: Hello, Mr. Bones

  11: Strange Kind of Love

  12: Love Is a Battlefield

  13: Found in Translation

  14: If You Were Here

  15: Where the Sky Ends

  16: Never Go Home

  17: The Way Back

  18: Darkness Runs Deep

  19: Who’s That Lady?

  20: Love Me Like a Bomb

  21: Disco and Doomsday

  22: The Red Death

  23: Behind Door Number One

  24: The Clutter of Our Enemies

  25: The Man behind the Mask

  26: Styx and Stones

  27: Everybody Wants to Rule the World

  28: As the World Falls Down

  29: Next to You

  30: Long, Cool Woman

  31: The Wild Side

  32: Back in Black

  33: Never Let Go

  34: How the Gods Kill

  35: Everything Ends

  36: Kiss Them for Me

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  DRIVEN APART

  A dark voice inside Greyson whispered that the end of the world was coming. He awoke on a rocky ledge, sprawled beneath a night sky ablaze with alien stars. Burning comets streaked overhead, leaving behind plumes of oily fire. Above, an unearthly sky shimmered with spiderwebs of ghostly light. Below, a jagged cliff dropped away into eternal darkness.

  The netherworld.

  Bruised and bleeding, Greyson lay on the narrow outcropping, unsure whether he was dead or alive. He stared up at the ethereal lights slashed through with falling stars. Were they the spirits of the departed? Was he among them?

  Part of him wanted to give up, just lie there on the rocks and close his eyes forever. Surrender to his injuries. Slip away into the darkness. But Greyson had never been one to give up.

  Jaw clenched, he tried to ignore the pain as he rolled over. Every part of his body was cut and battered. His muscles felt as if they were on fire. Gritting his teeth, he struggled to his feet and looked around at the dark cliff face. There was no way off this ledge but up.

  Far up.

  Steeling himself, he reached overhead, fingers searching for a handhold in the cold rock. With a grunt, he pulled himself up and found a toehold. Taking a breath, he reached up and did it again. And again.

  It seemed like hours that he scaled the unforgiving cliff, searching for every crevice and jutting rock he could grip. He panted, too winded to give voice to the pain. As he climbed, memories came back to him in broken fragments.

  In the desert, he had tried to save Dru from the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but something had gone wrong. He had lost control, become some kind of a monster. Something nightmarish and inhuman. Something fueled by rage.

  He remembered seeing Dru’s terrified face in the darkness, her long brown hair blowing back in the wind as falling stars plummeted to earth all around them. The anguish in her voice as she called his name. As the monsters closed in around them.

  She had fled.

  Greyson remembered brief glimpses of a high-speed chase. A bone-jarring crash. The car had tumbled end over end. He had been thrown out through the shattered windshield, over the edge of the cliff, where he had hurtled down into the darkness. How far had he fallen?

  Not quite far enough to kill him. But almost.

  What had happened to Dru?

  He had to find out. No matter what it took. He needed to make sure she was safe.

  Just when he couldn’t climb anymore, he reached the top of the cliff and collapsed there, panting, every muscle in his body shaking. That was when he found Hellbringer.

  The demon-possessed black car, a 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona, lay on its side, smashed. Its pointed nose cone was crumpled inward, revealing one dark headlight. It stared at him like the eye socket of a skull.

  Accusatory. Haunted. Lost.

  Greyson turned away, unable to face it. He got to his feet and staggered along the top of the cliff, searching for any sign of Dru. Despite the eternal darkness, the hellish skies overhead shed just enough light to see by.

  There. Footprints in the dark sand. Dru had circled all around Hellbringer, possibly searching for him, and then headed away. He followed the footprints to the dark mouth of a nearby cave. He recognized it. This cave led out the netherworld through a portal to an abandoned mine in the living world.

  If she had searched for him after the crash, there was no way she could have seen him all the way down there. Did she even know he was alive?

  He pictured her in happier times, the earnest look in her eyes, behind her dark-rimmed glasses. The integrity in her voice. The slight upturn constantly at the corner of her mouth, as if she wanted to say something funny but was worried it would be highly inappropriate.

  A deep need stirred inside him. To get back to Dru. To make things right. To fix things that would otherwise never be fixed.

  Beneath a night sky gone mad, he staggered over to the ruined hulk of Hellbringer. The moment he touched the car’s hood, a spark jumped between his finger and the steel, connecting them for a split second with a blinding arc of energy.

  He jerked his hand away and made a fist, unsure what had just happened.

  Like burning coals stirred up from the depths of a dead fire, Hellbrin
ger’s headlights began to glow again. Within the cracked, wavy glass, the ruddy glow quickly turned white-hot.

  Greyson held up a wounded hand to ward off the blinding glare. This close, he could practically feel the heat from the lights. Brilliant. Searing. But also purifying. Drawing him back to himself, as if a part of him had been missing and he hadn’t even known it.

  His injured hand, silhouetted in the pure white light, began to heal as he watched. His fingers straightened and strengthened. The swelling shrank away, and the cuts closed, leaving clean, healthy skin.

  He lowered his arm and squinted into the headlights, staring back at Hellbringer where it lay sideways among the boulders.

  When he summoned up his voice, it came out cracked and gravelly. “Hell of a place to park, buddy.”

  The demon car flashed its high beams at him.

  Gathering himself, Greyson planted both hands on Hellbringer’s roof. He had learned from Dru that the speed demon’s presence gave him superhuman strength and endurance. But after the exhausting climb up the cliff face, he wasn’t sure how much strength he had left.

  With a heave that aggravated every complaining muscle in his body, he pushed the car off of its side and back onto its wheels. It landed with a crunch, an eruption of dust, and the rhythmic creaking of steel springs.

  Immediately, Hellbringer’s dented black sheet metal began to straighten and smooth out. The nose cone uncrumpled. The long spoiler wing above the tail squared up and sharpened to a jet-fighter edge. The smashed windows regrew from the edges of the chrome trim. Hellbringer was healing itself, as it had healed him.

  The driver’s door screeched open when he pulled on it. He collapsed into the narrow black seat, exhausted, breaths coming hard in his aching chest. But with each painful breath, he could feel his strength returning. As if Hellbringer’s very presence made him whole again.

  Dru had once explained that his fate was tightly intertwined with the demon car. He never realized just how close that bond really was.

  He tilted the rearview mirror and peered at his reflection. Messed up dark hair that could use a trim. Darker stubble. Scratches and bruises that were fading as he watched. That wasn’t too strange to accept, considering everything else that had happened to him. But it was his eyes that stopped him.

  They were clear and blue. Completely human.

  Not the glowing red eyes of a demon.

  Hope surged inside him. Dru had done everything she could to break his curse. And here was the proof that she had succeeded. He was no longer one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. No longer a threat to everyone around him.

  Now, he was just a regular guy again. Granted, a guy with a demon-possessed muscle car. But at least he was himself again.

  He found his leather jacket on the floorboard, where it had apparently ended up during the crash. He slipped it on, feeling more human by the moment as it warmed against his skin. Beyond the windshield, across the rocky plain, the dark cave waited. It was time to find Dru.

  The old brass keys were already in the ignition. As he pumped the gas and reached for the keys, Hellbringer’s monstrous Hemi engine rumbled itself to life, growling like a wounded animal that refused to die.

  Grimacing, Greyson dropped his hand to the gearshift and shoved it home. The pitch of the hell-powered engine dropped to a guttural growl, and the car crept forward. Its headlights shone across the slate-gray rocks as he drove toward the yawning blackness of the cave mouth.

  The rocky ground was almost completely flat, but for a machine that was built strictly for devouring highway pavement, it might as well have been the surface of the moon. Every rise and dip in the uneven stone banged through the car’s battered chassis.

  Greyson steered carefully into the cave, expecting to have to back out at any moment. But the opening was more than wide enough to accommodate the car.

  The thudding of the exhaust echoed off the uneven walls, and the impenetrable blackness ahead swallowed up the headlight beams.

  This was no ordinary cave, Greyson knew that much. Somewhere inside lay a portal back to the normal world. The last time he was here, when he had traveled through the netherworld with Dru, she had used her crystal magic to open the portal. Without her magic to aid him, Greyson could only hope that Hellbringer’s infernal presence was strong enough to carry them through to the other side.

  Otherwise, this would be a pretty short trip.

  A gusting wind picked up, buffeting the windshield with bits of grit. But the car’s aerodynamic form and tall back wing slipped through the wind like a knife. Hellbringer crept onward, deeper into the cave.

  Without warning, the car slowed down, as if something was pulling them back. As if the netherworld itself had grasped them with invisible claws, preventing their escape. Gradually, they ground to a halt in the dark tunnel.

  An icy spike of adrenaline pierced Greyson. They were stuck. He had to get them out of here, or they would be trapped in the netherworld forever.

  He pulled the parking brake tight to keep them anchored, then floored the long-traveling clutch and fed the gas. The diabolical engine roared, and the white tach needle swung up past 3,000 rpm, but it was no good. The tires let out painful squeaks as the netherworld jerked the car back out of the cave, bit by bit.

  He kept the gas pedal down. The tach swept past 4,000 rpm.

  The invisible forces of the netherworld continued to pull at them like a hungry creature trying to draw them back in. Trying to devour them.

  At 5,000 rpm, the entire car shook. Hellbringer’s deep reserves of infernal power strained to be unleashed. Greyson knew the demon car so well that he could feel the right launch moment approaching, the sweet spot in the bell curve of torque that would break them free.

  But before they reached it, the invisible force of the netherworld yanked them back. It wouldn’t let them go.

  At 6,000 rpm, the wailing engine shuddered through the car, drowning out all other sounds. All other thoughts. There was nothing left except the burning desire to go. Greyson kept the clutch planted, waiting for the precise moment to release. The white needle strained forward.

  “Steady, buddy.” Greyson’s feet ached to move. Still, he held on.

  Now deep in the red zone, the trembling needle fought its way higher. The engine crackled like an endless peal of thunder. Just when he thought the launch moment would never come, he felt it happen.

  Now. Greyson dropped the emergency brake and simultaneously lifted his foot from the clutch.

  Hellbringer blasted all of its horsepower into the rear wheels, dragging a howl of tortured rubber from the tires. Clouds of white smoke curled out of the wheel wells. But the car went nowhere.

  Fear washed over Greyson. Had he miscalculated? Was all of their torque going up in smoke as the tires burned down to molten rubber? Would the netherworld hold them prisoner forever?

  “Go!” he yelled at Hellbringer over the deafening engine noise. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  At his command, the shimmering red glow of hellfire pulsed up around the edges of the long black hood, reflecting off the chrome tie-down pins near the nose. The car’s front end glowed like iron in a hot forge, as if the engine itself had become a boiling cauldron of unholy power.

  The air in front of the windshield shimmered with heat waves. Hellbringer was a car with the heart of a demon. Greyson felt from the gearshift knob a searing connection directly to its infernal power. It pierced through his body like a needle spiking a nerve, connecting to his very essence and making him one with the machine.

  With that, the superheated tires found traction. They bit into the cave floor, breaking the car free of the netherworld’s grip. Hellbringer launched down the tunnel at mind-bending speed.

  Greyson’s head snapped back. The acceleration crushed him into the seat. It took everything he had left to slam through the gears and keep the steering wheel centered as the demon car rocketed toward freedom.

  In the darkness ahead, a pinpo
int of light exploded into a blinding flare of pure whiteness, painfully intense. Greyson squinted against the glare.

  When his vision adjusted, he caught a glimpse of the tunnel walls. They seemed different, somehow. Just as dark, but the texture of the rock had subtly changed. In the blue-hued shadows, the tunnel looked less nightmarish and more real.

  Ahead, the tunnel ended in bright sky. The exit was ringed with jagged wooden planks.

  Hellbringer smashed through the remains of an old wooden blockade hung with skull-and-crossbones danger signs.

  They blasted out of the abandoned mine shaft into broad daylight. Hellbringer’s nose went airborne for a moment, then tipped sharply downward. Greyson’s stomach dropped as they sailed through the air.

  They landed with a tooth-rattling bang on a dry slope broken by craggy brown rocks, wildflowers, and tufted green bushes. Instantly, the car began to skid.

  On instinct, Greyson pumped the brakes, trying to bring them to a controlled stop. But they headed down the steep slope too fast. He steered around boulders and pine trees, power-sliding through the dirt. Tree branches scraped and banged off the car’s long body.

  He got their speed under control just as they burst out of the trees over an old gravel trail that had once been a dirt road. Obviously, no one had driven it for years, and now it was overgrown with hardy grass and cactuses. Greyson brought Hellbringer around in a long, gently slipping curve that landed them safely in the middle of the trail.

  With a sigh of exhaustion, he rolled the car to a stop, and only then took his sweaty hands off the steering wheel.

  “Let’s never do that again,” he said.

  The car defiantly revved its engine, clearly disagreeing with him.

  He took a deep breath. The magical connection to Hellbringer left him drained and shaky. He wanted to get out of the car and walk around, but his legs suddenly felt like lead.

  Around them, ranks of snow-capped peaks rose above the rugged green carpet of pine trees, growing bluer in the distance beneath an overcast afternoon sky the color of zinc-plated steel. After the madness of the netherworld’s alien stars, Greyson relished the familiar, jagged landscape of the Rocky Mountains.