A Kiss Before Doomsday

by Laurence MacNaughton

  According to the rumors, anyway.

  Back in the Middle Ages, when demon summoning was much more common, the Wicked Scriptures pretty much topped the list of most banned books you could feature in your library. Just having the book in your possession, it was rumored, was enough to curse you. It would draw evil forces into your life that would eventually warp your mind and your soul in fiendish ways.

  In other words, the thing was a magical weapon. Using it as an office paperweight was kind of like propping up a leg of your coffee table using a land mine.

  The Wicked Scriptures had supposedly all been burned and scattered to the wind centuries ago, in a concerted effort to stamp out demon summoning and related atrocities. As much as Dru detested the idea of burning books, she kind of agreed with the medieval scholars on that call.

  But she had recently learned that this one-of-a-kind book had somehow survived the ages. It had been uncovered in the 1960s by the Harbingers, the radical group of seven fallen sorcerers who had devoted their lives to bringing about doomsday.

  And now it was here. What did that mean?

  She quickly scanned the shelves, looking for other forbidden texts. Perhaps the Formulaes Apocrypha, which was a disturbing study in the nature of primordial destruction. Or the Treatise Maleficarum, practically a Who’s Who for the pits of hell. All of those books collected by the Harbingers had been auctioned off from their mansion in New Mexico.

  Then a memory became crystal clear. The Alpine ibex. She remembered seeing it on the auction list.

  That auction was how Greyson had ended up in possession of Hellbringer. That was how this whole doomsday thing had started. Everything was starting to click into place. Someone had bought the Harbingers estate at auction and brought it all here, underground. Who would do such a thing?

  As she passed by the carved wooden mantelpiece, one of the knickknacks stopped her cold.

  It was a black urn, no bigger than a human skull, its round cap crowned with twelve sharp-looking spikes, like shark teeth. Glossy like wet ink, it shimmered with illustrations inlaid in silver. Spear-wielding armies. Horrific beasts with snapping jaws. Oceans boiling. Stars falling. Heaps of human skeletons.

  Dru swallowed. Her palms tingled.

  This was it. The urn in Salem’s drawing. The one that contained a fragment of the apocalypse scroll. The thing the Harbingers had used to find the scroll in the first place.

  She didn’t dare touch the urn, but she studied it closely, blinking against the uncomfortable contact lenses in her eyes. Every detail matched the drawing she had swiped from Salem’s wall. If this was a forgery, it was extremely convincing.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, she swiped a linen napkin off one of the side tables and used it to carefully grasp the spiked top of the urn. To her surprise, it popped off easily. The seal had already been broken. Mustering up her courage, she peered down inside the urn.

  It was completely empty. Not even a speck of dust. Someone had already taken the fragment.

  In frustration, she banged the lid down and tossed the napkin. That was when she saw the barite rose sitting beside it.

  A beautiful specimen, each round nut-brown petal perfectly formed, like a rose turned to stone. Just like the one Titus had brought to her shop.

  Could all this—the books, the artifacts, the entire nuclear bunker—belong to Titus?

  It struck her again how much he had changed over the years. She couldn’t wrap her head around the transformation she had seen in him, from the scrawny, painfully shy guy in the hoodie to the confident powerhouse with the sophisticated vocabulary. What had he found here, deep down inside the mountain, that had transformed him so completely?

  Titus was the Red Death, Dru realized. He had to be.

  But why did he possess all of these dark artifacts that had once belonged to the Harbingers? Why was he collecting them? What was his ultimate plan? And what was his connection to Greyson?

  What did it all mean?

  Without warning, a voice boomed out behind her, raising goose bumps on her arms. “Hello again, Drusy.”

  25

  THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK

  Knowing there was no escape, Dru faced the booming voice. In the tunnel doorway stood the Red Death. With one graceful move, he stripped off his skull mask.

  His slicked-back ash-blond hair sparkled with glitter from the ballroom. Without his mask, she could now clearly see his slender sideburns and the angles of his face. The way he carried himself, the confidence of his stride, practically radiated power.

  His dark gaze fixed on her, unblinking, as he crossed the room. “I see you’ve discovered my inner sanctum. Please, make yourself at home.” His baritone voice resonated through the open room, coming back in soft echoes.

  “It is impressive.” Dru turned in a slow circle, her frightened brain madly trying to come up with an excuse for being in here. “I had no idea this was all yours.”

  “Of course you did. That’s what brought you in here.” He stripped off his flowing red cape and draped it over the brass fittings of a leathery antique globe, easily the size of a beach ball. The fabric clung to the globe as it settled, making the earth look as though it were bleeding.

  When he stood close to her, her heart beat faster, mostly because all of this added up to something she was afraid to face. She couldn’t look him in the eye and pretend he didn’t scare her.

  It took all of her strength to lift her gaze to his and ask him the one question that was burning inside her.

  “Where is Greyson?”

  Titus seemed puzzled. “I’m sorry, were you expecting . . . ?” He glanced back over his shoulder before facing her again. “It was me in the mask.” He jabbed a red-gloved thumb into his broad chest. “We were dancing?”

  “Yeah, no. I know. I got that. That’s not what—”

  “That was me,” he insisted. Then, with an awkward hint of jealousy, he asked, “Who’s Greyson?”

  Dru blew out a long breath, mentally grinding gears as she tried to reverse her entire line of thinking. “Okay, enough with all of the theatrics.” Dru waved her hands to encompass the soaring shelves of ancient books and cryptic artifacts that surrounded them. “Really impressive theatrics, by the way,” she added grudgingly. “But that’s not the point. I cast a finding spell. And it led me down here. I know that Greyson is somewhere in this mountain. And you’re going to tell me where he is.”

  Titus stared at her for a moment, one eyebrow quirked up. Then he burst into an earnest laugh. “I would if I could. I have only the vaguest idea of who’s here tonight, or where all they might’ve gotten to. You’re the exception to that, of course.”

  “That’s because you led me down here.” She didn’t phrase it as a question.

  “When you put it like that, you make it appear unseemly.” He sounded a little wounded. “I’m just making sure you don’t get lost in here. This fortress is completely overwhelming, miles of tunnels. Utterly enormous. It’s bigger than any sorcerer’s sanctum I’ve ever heard of.” Titus swept his gloved hand in a wide arc to encompass the rest of the mountain. “And it’s all mine. Would you like to see it?”

  “Um, no, not so much.” The words came out of her mouth before she realized that, in fact, this would be the perfect way to look for Greyson. But not with Titus. She had to figure out a way to ditch him and explore on her own.

  “Come on. We can go look for your friend. In fact, we should. Before he gets into any trouble.” Titus crossed the room and reached into a bookshelf. Silently, the entire shelf swung open like a door, and Titus disappeared through the gap.

  “Seriously?” Dru said, regarding the secret door. It seemed a little too obvious. Still, she badly wanted one in the Crystal Connection.

  She wasn’t sure what to do next. One of her personal rules was to never go with a sorcerer to a second location.

  That applied double, she was pretty certain, in any situation that involved, A) a secret underground lair, B) stacks
of apocalypse paraphernalia, C) an old friend stalking you in a skull mask, or D) all of the above.

  Nobody else knew where she was. Even if Rane, Opal, or even Salem did come looking for her, they wouldn’t know how to find the library. Or how to open the secret door in the bookshelf.

  Titus reappeared a moment later, looking concerned. “Not to frighten you, but I have to warn you, there are some uncomfortable and decidedly dangerous areas down here. If your friend has wandered into the wrong place, he could need a hand. We should go find him. Are you coming?”

  She looked Titus up and down, trying to reconcile the guy she once knew—the haunted, furtive, scrawny young guy in the tattered hoodie—with the imposing, red-dressed sorcerer standing before her now.

  Nothing about him added up.

  Even though she didn’t say anything, her hesitation was enough to tip him off. Her distrust of him sat awkwardly out in the open between them.

  “I see,” he said quietly, studying his boots.

  “Titus, it’s not that I don’t trust you.” Except, of course, that was exactly the problem. She didn’t trust him one bit.

  “You don’t have to explain. I understand.”

  Suddenly, she felt guilty, and she wasn’t even sure why. “Do you, really? You’ve changed so much. I mean, you disappear for years, and then you just show up with a fortress full of apocalypse stuff and throw this massive party that’s actually really weird, and I’m just . . . I’m just worried about you. What’s going on with you? Honestly.”

  He seemed to consider her words carefully. His dark gaze lifted and moved about the room, from one bookshelf to the next. “You’re right, of course,” he said heavily. “I don’t even know where to begin to explain myself.”

  “You don’t have to explain. Just tell me you’re okay, and help me find Greyson.”

  A pained look flashed over his features, but he quickly buried it under a self-confident smile. “It’s true, I have spent an inordinate amount of time collecting and studying the work of the Harbingers. Figuring out exactly what they did, how they set in motion the events leading up to doomsday. On the surface, of course, it must seem insane.”

  “Well, I don’t know about insane, exactly. Because there aren’t any ‘normal’ sorcerers,” Dru said. “But it all kind of depends on why. Why all the dark magic stuff?”

  “Better to know than not.” He shrugged one of his wide shoulders, making the tassels on his gold epaulets shake.

  “Save the world,” Dru said. “Did you mean that?” At his questioning look, she explained. “When we were dancing, you told me that your ambition was to save the world. Did you mean that, honestly?”

  “Absolutely.” He drew in a deep breath through his nostrils, standing straighter and taller. “I believe that’s the entire reason I was put here, on this earth. To save it.” He stated that as a fact, without any trace of arrogance or boasting, which Dru found strangely charming. “And I think the same about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Is it any coincidence that you’re here, now, at this critical juncture? You’re the best at what you do. And that’s what the world needs most at the moment. Perhaps we can even work together.” His dark gaze lit up. “Come on. Let’s go for a drive.”

  “Drive?”

  “You’ll see.” Gently, he took her hand and led her into a downward-sloping tunnel that was littered with bits of broken concrete. With every step, the air turned colder and clammier, but his presence was bright and confident.

  “I should go get my friends,” Dru said over the sound of their footsteps echoing in the tunnel.

  “We can pick them up along the way, if they don’t mind riding in the back.” He indicated a doorless little open-top Jeep painted a flat dark blue with yellow numbers stenciled on the side. The knobby tires had turned brown with age, and the gasoline can strapped to the back looked nearly rusted through.

  Titus turned apologetic. “In my defense, this wasn’t my first choice, but it was already down here, and it is ridiculously useful.” He held out his hand. “Your chariot awaits, darling.”

  Dru shook her head. “Uh-uh. This thing doesn’t even have doors.”

  He quirked up one eyebrow. “And you dressed up to come dance in a sorcerer masquerade in the middle of the night—inside a nuclear bunker—because you prefer to play it safe?” His sarcasm had an almost physical presence.

  She looked deep into his eyes. She could see pride there, and hope, and a hint of amusement. And perhaps the fear of being turned down. But she didn’t sense any dishonesty.

  “I’m going to regret this,” she sighed. Carefully, she gathered her short sequined dress and, with his help, climbed into the rattletrap Jeep. It smelled of old mud and dry-rotted fabric. Tiny white stenciled letters below the grimy windshield proclaimed, MAX SPEED ON BASE 25 MPH.

  Titus came around to the driver’s side and wedged his long body into the tiny flat-cushioned seat. “Trust me. You’ll be fine.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, gritting her teeth. “I do this sort of thing every night.”

  The engine coughed to life, and they trundled away down the dark tunnel.

  26

  STYX AND STONES

  With Titus at the wheel, they puttered through one tunnel intersection after another. In between pools of light from the caged bulbs, the Jeep’s faint yellow headlights swept along curved stone walls strung with power lines and pipes.

  At this point, Dru had no idea which direction the smoke had pointed. So she did her best to memorize the route. She strained her eyes in the darkness, searching for any sign of Greyson, whatever that might be. She didn’t see another soul down any of the tunnels.

  Titus pointed left and right as the Jeep grumbled its way through the maze. “Down that tunnel is the old main control room. Auxiliary control rooms in every wing. The power plant is that direction, the better part of a mile away. There’s even an electric subway system that connects the individual wings. Too cumbersome for my purposes, but I could get it working again if I had to.”

  “Have you explored this entire place?” she asked over the sound of the motor.

  He hesitated. “Not all of it. Not yet. But we can still look for your friend. What’s his name again?”

  “Greyson.” Dru clung tight to a steel handle bolted into the blue-painted dashboard, certain she would be flung out at every turn. “Who built this place? How did you find it?”

  “Once upon a time, our fair government believed the world was about to come to an end, courtesy of the Soviet Union,” he said, with a touch of amusement. “They were right, in a way. Just not about the Soviets.”

  “Was everything like this when you found it, with the lights and everything?”

  He nodded. “Some of it still worked. Most of it didn’t. I had to . . . enlist some help.” The hesitation in his voice told her there was much more to that story, but he didn’t explain.

  He went on about the structure of the bunker and its many levels. As he talked, he waved a red-gloved hand, proudly pointing out details around them. In the passing lights, she studied his angled face. An uncharacteristic enthusiasm lit his features, a boyish joy that was impossible to ignore.

  It was so refreshing to talk to a sorcerer who actually valued her presence. So unlike the torture of constantly dealing with people like Salem or Ember. She could get used to this.

  As the tunnel opened up into a larger chamber, he pulled the Jeep over near the left wall and stopped. “This is truly astonishing.” Without further explanation, he turned off the engine and climbed out, making the Jeep’s springs creak. Cautiously, Dru did the same.

  The floor in the center of the chamber was split by a rectangular pit easily large enough to swallow a city bus. Wet sloshing sounds echoed up from below. Titus walked toward the pit, but Dru hung back.

  “This place gives me the creeps.” Dru turned to peer down the shadowy intersection of tunnels, each one marked by stenciled numbers and letters that were incomprehe
nsible to her.

  Something tickled her hair. She brushed at it, only to realize too late that it was a hairy, thick-bodied spider. With a brief scream, she jumped back. The spider dropped to the ground and scuttled around her feet, only to accidentally meet an untimely end beneath the platform of her sparkling go-go boot as she tried to get away from it.

  Dru froze for a moment, hands clenched, then quickly backed up to the Jeep. Her footsteps echoed in the tunnel. At Titus’s sharp look, she felt embarrassed. After clearing her throat, she said, “Nice place. Really.”

  “It doesn’t need to be nice. It just needs to be functional. Getting this bunker operational again, and getting all of these sorcerers safely inside, it’s been an all-consuming project. The most important accomplishment of my life.”

  Dru leaned against the Jeep. “This party? Tonight?”

  “It’s much more than just a party.” His voice trembled, just a little. “This is a new beginning, for all of us. When I learned about the impending doomsday—the apocalypse scroll, the Four Horsemen, all of it—I knew that I had to get this place working again. So I could gather together the most powerful sorcerers I could find, and give them all someplace safe to stay.”

  “Safe from . . . ?”

  “Doomsday,” he said, as if the answer was obvious.

  “Safe from doomsday?” Dru couldn’t keep the skepticism off her face. “Don’t get me wrong. This place does look pretty secure, so kudos for that. But isn’t doomsday sort of an all-encompassing thing? It’s not like you can just hide underground and wait it out.”

  “Can’t you?” The look in his eyes suggested that he knew something she didn’t. “How do you suppose the Harbingers intended to survive the apocalypse?”

  “Hmm.” Dru shrugged. “I figured they were suicidal. If doomsday rolls around, the world just comes to a fiery end, everybody dies, and that’s it. That’s the end. Right?”