A Kiss Before Doomsday

by Laurence MacNaughton

  Ahead, the trail switched back and forth down the steep slope, presumably leading to some cracked blacktop county road, and then eventually civilization.

  Greyson realized that he’d been here before with Dru, at this exact spot, after they had walked through the netherworld. Her feet had been red and painfully swollen, and he had made her makeshift bandages with folded-up napkins.

  He could picture her sitting barefoot on that boulder, looking up at him with thanks, making some comment about wearing the wrong shoes. But he had been captivated by the beauty of her shy smile, the impish look in her eyes every time she took off her glasses.

  The thought of Dru made his breath catch in his throat. Where was she now? Did she even know he had survived? What private hell had she gone through?

  He had to find her.

  As Hellbringer descended the dirt trail, Greyson reached down to the chrome crank and rolled down the window. A soft June wind whispered through the pine trees and swirled through the car, carrying the tang of a coming storm.

  The galvanized sky finally delivered its downpour as Greyson left the winding mountain roads behind and took the highway toward Denver, where Dru had her crystal shop. The endless curtain of rain obscured the city where it sprawled out beyond the rolling foothills at the edge of the grassy plains.

  As he drove, the engine let out a constant mournful howl. The windshield wipers slapped back and forth. The highway flattened out and ran straight into the city, and the facts settled on him like an uncomfortable weight. He had just come back from the netherworld. What did that mean, exactly?

  Dru would know. She would formulate some kind of potion, do research in some ancient book, or pull a magical crystal out of a drawer. She would be able to verify that he was finally cured. That everything was okay.

  Beside him, the passenger seat was conspicuously empty. Without Dru there beside him, nothing felt right.

  His heart beat faster as he headed toward her shop. After the long drive, his strength felt as if it was returning, but he couldn’t shake a growing uneasiness that something was terribly wrong. The foul taste of danger lurked in the back of his throat, the way it had when the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse pursued them across the desert.

  He wrote it off as nerves, telling himself that he was just worried about what Dru would say. After everything they had been through, after all the danger and destruction they’d overcome in trying to break his curse, he wasn’t one hundred percent sure she’d even want to see him again.

  Something in his jacket pocket prickled his side, like a low-voltage electric shock. He jumped, then quickly fished it out. Much to his surprise, it was a small black rock, a little larger than his thumb. Its polished surface glittered with golden flecks. Dru had given it to him once, telling him that it was protection against evil.

  As he held the rock in his hand, it shocked him badly enough to make him drop it in the passenger seat next to him. It had burned an angry red mark on his palm.

  He wondered what it meant. Did the rock somehow think he was evil? He ran his fingertips over the throbbing skin of his palm as he mulled over that unpleasant possibility.

  Over the next several miles, the uneasy sense of impending danger grew stronger. It made him feel itchy and uncomfortable inside his own skin. The closer he got to Dru’s shop, the more he felt on edge. What bothered him even more was that he didn’t know why.

  Greyson stole furtive glances at the rock, not liking the implications.

  At last, he turned down the alley and parked behind Dru’s shop. Steeling himself for whatever reaction she might give him, Greyson pocketed the black rock, stepped out into the cold rain, and strode toward her door. He wanted nothing more than to sweep her into his arms, feel her brown hair tickle his cheek, see her eyes light up behind her glasses as she smiled up at him.

  But was that how it would happen? Doubt gnawed at him as he walked up the narrow gap between the brick wall of Dru’s shop and the glass windows of the 24-hour liquor store next door.

  With every step he made, his instincts told him to turn back. An angry buzzing swarmed his senses. His eyes burned as if they were on fire.

  Something was terribly wrong.

  He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the warped glass of the liquor store, and it stopped him dead in the cold pouring rain.

  From his reflection, two red-hot eyes glowered back at him.

  He peered closer, blinking away the cooling raindrops that pelted his face. There was no mistaking that diabolical glow. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he whispered.

  He was wrong after all. He wasn’t cured. He was still a monster. A Horseman of the Apocalypse, and that meant he was a danger to everyone around him.

  Everything was wrong. It had all been for nothing.

  He reeled back from his own reflection and turned to look at Dru’s shop. The windows of the Crystal Connection were boarded up with plywood, wet and lumber-yard musty from the rain. Splinters of wood and shards of broken glass littered the ground, left behind from whatever wreckage had recently been picked up.

  The shop was completely shut down. Destroyed. A hand-lettered Closed sign had been stapled to the plywood, and in the pouring rain, the letters ran like blood.

  His jaw clenched. So far, he had done a pretty bang-up job of ruining her life. And since none of her cures for him had worked, now he was standing outside her door, getting ready to remind her of yet another colossal failure.

  Everything he wanted, everything that was precious to him, was just on the other side of that door. But just standing there in the rain, he could feel the inescapable pressure of the danger he presented to her, and he couldn’t ignore it any longer.

  So many times, Dru had told him that all she wanted was a normal life.

  And he definitely hadn’t come back normal. Was it fair for him to ruin everything for her? Was it even safe for her to be around him again? How long would it be before the Horseman inside him turned him evil again?

  He didn’t know. There was so much he simply didn’t understand, and ironically she was the only one he could ask.

  Every ounce of him needed to open that door. But he didn’t dare. The truth was he didn’t trust himself anymore. He didn’t trust the demon blood inside him. It had almost destroyed the world once. And if it harmed Dru . . .

  That would destroy him.

  Even the gold-flecked black rock was fighting him. He pulled the burning hot crystal out of his pocket, ignoring the pain. Dru had given it to him to protect against danger.

  Now, he was the danger. Which meant that she needed the rock more than he did. To protect her.

  From him.

  Angrily, he shoved the black rock through the mail slot in her door, trusting that she would find it eventually. Then he marched back to Hellbringer, revved the engine, and took off down the alley. He needed to put space between them. He needed time to think.

  He drove off without looking back.

  1

  IF YOU LEAVE

  When the black Lemurian jade crystal came rattling in through her mail slot, it took Dru only seconds to realize what it meant. Greyson was alive.

  She ran out into the rain, heart pounding, just as the black muscle car pulled away. Its slitted red taillights seemed to mock her, as if the speed demon bound into its cold steel gloated as it carried Greyson away.

  Dru charged down the alley through the pounding rain, heedless of the cold puddles splashing beneath her feet. Desperate to catch the man she loved before he slipped away from her forever.

  “Greyson!” she shouted. Had he even noticed her? Maybe in the pouring rain, he couldn’t see her through the car’s low back window.

  She waved her arms overhead, trying to flag him down. Raindrops flew from her sleeves. “Greyson!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Greyson!”

  The icy rain plastered down Dru’s long, curly brown hair and spattered her thick-rimmed glasses, making it almost impossible to see. Making the wet a
lley look nightmarish and surreal.

  But she couldn’t mistake the car: Hellbringer, a long black muscle car possessed by a demon that gave Greyson supernatural powers. She had fought against that demon car, and then alongside it, finally winning it over from the darkness and enlisting its help to save the world.

  And now it was taking Greyson away from her.

  She wouldn’t lose him again. She couldn’t. She chased after him, running for all she was worth.

  At the end of the alley, Hellbringer’s taillights flashed brighter as the car slowed to a stop.

  She couldn’t see Greyson through the car’s dark, rain-spattered windows, but she could imagine his stubbled jaw brightening with a lopsided smile when he saw her. She could practically hear the creak his leather jacket made whenever he got out of the driver’s seat.

  She wanted to ask him where he’d been. Find out how he’d made it back. And tell him, finally, that she loved him.

  But everything inside her shattered as Hellbringer’s tires spun, shrieking on the wet pavement. The black car turned onto the street and rocketed out of sight around the corner, its engine roaring away.

  Shocked, Dru ran to the end of the alley, but Hellbringer was already gone, as if it had never existed. Nothing was left but the sound of its engine throttling away into the falling rain.

  Dru puffed clouds of fog into the chilly air, trying to catch her breath. Down the length of the empty street, nothing else moved but raindrops hitting the puddles.

  Before she’d lost Greyson in the netherworld, he’d been possessed by one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The fact that Hellbringer was back now could mean only one thing: the apocalypse was still unfolding. Doomsday was on the way. And the only way to stop it was to break Greyson’s curse once and for all.

  There was only one thing she could do. Go after him.

  She turned and splashed back down the alley, drawing on her last reserves of energy. Panting, she burst through the back door of her sorcery shop, the Crystal Connection. There was no time to waste.

  If she was going to find Greyson, she needed help.

  “Rane?” she called. “Rane!”

  Dru crossed the cluttered back room, looking for her purse full of magical crystals. She left wet footprints as she squelched around ugly plaid armchairs and squeezed through narrow spaces between bookshelves stacked to the ceiling with ancient leather-bound tomes of magic lore.

  “Rane?”

  Just over six feet tall and rippling with muscle, with a high blonde ponytail and pink workout shorts, Rane would be impossible to miss. But there was no sign of her, even though she’d been in here just minutes before, helping Dru clean up the wreckage of the battle against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In all likelihood, Rane was upstairs rummaging through Dru’s fridge. The woman was constantly hungry.

  Dru reached for the door that led upstairs to her cozy apartment over the shop, but an unsettling noise from up front stopped her.

  “Rane?” Dru turned and headed toward the front of her shop. What was left of it, anyway.

  Since the Four Horsemen had plowed a truck right through the front windows a few days ago, nearly flattening everyone inside, the place was now a boarded-up disaster area. The fluorescent overhead fixtures were destroyed, so now the only light came from a couple of battered table lamps propped up in the far corners. Plus what little rainy-day gloom made it around the edges of the plywood covering the former front windows.

  The lamps illuminated piles of broken bookshelves, scattered crystals, and shattered artifacts. The remains of Dru’s entire livelihood.

  A dark figure rooted through one of the piles, tossing aside handfuls of fragile crystals. As Dru entered, the hunched figure turned, silhouetted by the lamplight.

  Dark, gaunt, wrapped in a long black cloak or maybe a coat. Definitely not Rane.

  Dru looked around for any crystals she could use as a weapon. In the nearest pile of wreckage lay her dagger-shaped wedge of spectrolite, a naturally protective crystal. She grabbed it and charged it with her own magical energy, amping up its protective powers until the crystal glowed from within, casting a breathtaking rainbow of lights around her.

  She held up the crystal and backed away between the waist-high piles of debris. “The shop is closed. For remodeling.” She swiped wet hair out of her face. “A lot of remodeling.”

  Still hunched over, the figure staggered toward her. The lamplight fell across his lean face and long, wavy hair. He had a sort of old-fashioned handsomeness to him, but right now he was obviously in pain. Half-crazed gray eyes peered out through his hair, accentuated by black eyeliner.

  She recognized him immediately, even without his trademark silk top hat, the kind favored by stage magicians. Or circus ringleaders.

  “Salem?” Dru let out a shaky breath and lowered the crystal. “Where’s your hat? I didn’t recognize you. Almost totally zapped you.”

  He dismissed that with an arrogant shrug. “Would’ve been amusing, watching you try. But I have better things to do. Where’s your fuller’s earth?”

  “Seriously? Have you seen this place? I don’t even know where my purse is right now.” She went back to looking for it, frantic to go after Greyson. But how could she? She didn’t have a car.

  Then again, Salem did. “Salem, where did you park? We need to go after someone. Right now.”

  From the look on Salem’s chiseled face, he clearly didn’t believe her. “Kristalo sorcisto helpos,” he growled in the sorcerer tongue. “I thought you got your kicks helping sorcerers in need. Surprise, surprise, when I’m in need, you don’t care.”

  “No, I’m just in a hurry, so—”

  “Busy redecorating?” He looked around with disdain before returning his attention to her, seeming to finally notice the fact that she was soaking wet. “Are you actually chasing someone?”

  Before Dru could reply, Rane clomped down the stairs and strode into the shop, carrying an open carton of milk in one big hand. With the other hand, she powered down the last of a bag of baby carrots. “Dude. You need to start keeping more protein around this place. It’s shameful. Why are you all wet?” She saw Salem and stopped short, eyes growing big beneath her pink-striped headband, a fat baby carrot clenched between her teeth.

  Salem held Rane’s gaze for a lingering moment. A mixture of resentment and hunger flitted across his lean features.

  Dru glanced from him to Rane and back, scrambling to think of a way to break the suddenly awkward silence. “So, um, you two don’t really talk since . . .” Since they broke up.

  Rane bit down on the carrot with a crunch that sounded like a gunshot. She chewed noisily.

  Dru shook herself back into action. “Salem, look. Shop’s closed, so, we’ll find your stuff later. This is an emergency.” She turned to Rane, who slowly raised the carton of milk to her lips. “The apocalypse is still unfolding. Hellbringer was here. Greyson is alive.”

  At that, Rane choked and spewed milk and bits of carrots across the floor. Coughing, she set down the milk carton and swiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “What?”

  “He’s alive. We have to go after him!” Dru turned to Salem. “Where’s your car? Let’s go!”

  He folded his arms. “Fuller’s earth. I need it.”

  Rane jabbed a wide finger at him. “You need a swift kick in the ass. For running off with that Gypsy tramp-o-matic, what’s-her-name.”

  “Ember,” Dru supplied, instantly wishing she hadn’t.

  At the sound of Ember’s name, Rane’s face became a mask of rage. She stalked toward Salem. “And while we’re on the subject, you want to know what I need?”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” Dru held her hands out like a referee. “None of this matters right now. We’re talking about Greyson, here. He’s alive.”

  Rane grunted in surprise. Slowly, her face transformed from anger to disbelief. “No way, D. You blew up that whole damn bridge with your crystal. In the netherworld, right? Nobo
dy comes back from that.”

  Before Dru could reply, Salem let out a gasp and sagged against a broken bookshelf, holding his side. “Fuller’s earth.” He lifted one skinny arm and snapped his fingers at her. “Chop-chop.”

  Rane turned her palms up. “The hell is fuller’s earth?”

  Quickly, Dru explained. “Once upon a time, fullers were people who cleaned wool. They used absorbent clay to soak up impurities. And mop up spills.” She glanced at the orange-speckled milk puddle congealing on the floor between them and forced herself to ignore it. “They lived happily ever after. Now let’s go.” She took Rane’s muscled arm and steered her toward the door.

  Salem drew in a shaky breath to speak, but he never got the chance. He slumped over and collapsed to the floor with a clatter of falling shelves and breaking glass.

  Rane rolled her eyes. “Oh, here we go with the drama. Seriously? He does this whenever he doesn’t get his way.” She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Get up, dude. We’re not buying it.”

  He didn’t move.

  Dru hesitated. Maybe something really was wrong.

  She hurried over and knelt next to Salem, hoping this was some kind of joke, some dramatic play for sympathy. But when she shook his shoulder, he didn’t respond.

  She rolled him over onto his back. Within the depths of his trench coat, his ruffled silk shirt was slashed with four long gashes that stretched diagonally across his chest. The pale skin underneath bore what appeared to be claw marks.

  Dru bent closer, easing the slashed fabric open to get a better look. The wounds didn’t bleed. They were filled with a black substance, like paint. Or burn marks. And they gave off a foul odor.

  “Ugh. What is that?” Dru wrinkled her nose. She spotted an old brass magnifying glass lying on the floor nearby. Rane followed her gaze and handed it to her.

  The edges of the gashes were ragged and, under closer inspection, appeared to be made up of thousands of tiny, fuzzy black dots that squirmed and grew. “Looks like . . . mildew?” Dru said. “Living mildew?”

  “Not living,” Salem whispered. His eyes opened up to pained slits. His breath rattled in his lungs. “Undead.”