The Daemons were getting so good at reading her thoughts, it was almost impossible to keep them out of her head these days. Sometime soon they would figure out a way to sap and store energy from someone weaker. Then they would begin collecting anyone they encountered with even a spark of psychic ability—which was pretty much every human being on the planet. They would plug that poor soul into one of these organic rechargeable battery things sucking at her forehead right now and then the Horde would have an unlimited energy source.
They would produce so many Daemons so quickly that the world would be overrun before the human race even knew how to arm and protect themselves. Raine couldn’t let that happen. Even if the agony singing through every one of her cells turned her into a raving lunatic in the end, she would cling to sanity for as long as she could and continue to nudge Grimm in the right direction, whether by visiting his dreams or by planting thoughts in his head.
She hated that. Putting thoughts in his head felt weird and wrong. She knew he suspected they weren’t his; he probably knew they were hers, but he wasn’t telling his friend Tryton. When her mind was too weak to project an image for him to see, it was so much easier to just send a thought wave to him, even if it did feel wrong. And he was so receptive, the thoughts just passed between them like love letters.
No. Raine didn’t want to sugarcoat it—she was planting ideas in the poor guy’s head. If he ever found out, he’d probably kill her. The guy was able to rip out a beating heart and show it to you before you died—without reaching into your chest. He just teleported it out of you. She totally didn’t want him to find out what she was up to. But she had to do something with the knowledge she had—inside knowledge from behind enemy lines.
Somehow she had to find a way to turn the tide in their favor. They were the good guys. And right now the Daemons were excited about something, agitated in a way she had never seen before. They were afraid too, anticipating the approach of something awful, something so horrible Raine herself began to feel their fear.
What possible threat, what kind of monster could strike fear into the hearts of these monsters? The Daemons were so afraid that they were hiding the details of their expected visitor from her, but why? What could she do to interrupt their scheming?
Ah.
Maybe she could do something after all. Should she warn Grimm now or wait until she knew more?
Chapter Twelve
Then…
Raine slipped into Grimm’s mind like a shadow passing before the sun. So far as she could tell, he never even knew. She nearly lost control of herself and slipped out again when she looked through his eyes and saw…herself. In hell.
She could hear his thoughts, see what he saw, feel what he felt.
Grimm and his guide found themselves thrust into the heart of ruin. He dropped Lord Daemon’s hand as if it were a serpent and staggered, aghast at the carnage that lay discarded around him. This new terrain was not dissimilar from the other caverns they’d traversed on Earth. But this cavern was immense, of a scope large enough to inspire madness if studied too long.
The ceiling was so high above them that thin clouds hovered in silvery wisps, a warped mockery of the surface world’s weather patterns. Impossible starlight flickered, glittering crudely, and it took a moment’s dazed study for Grimm to realize that the pinpricks of light came from bioluminescent cave worms, massive creatures dangling hundreds of meters from the ceiling. They formed alien constellations in the counterfeit sky.
Miles stretched out in all directions, but through a faintly crimson fog, Grimm could just make out the rising walls of solid, earthen stone on all sides. They were in a sealed dome.
Debris fields formed mounds along the terrain and the smell of rot and decay was overwhelming, on a scale Grimm had never experienced. He approached what appeared to be a misshapen boulder—the closest landmark at hand—and was almost upon it before he saw what it truly was.
Daemons. Everywhere. Incomplete, but not so much that he did not recognize what the lifeless lumps were destined to become. The darkness of the lower atmosphere beneath the glowworms was nearly complete but for the hundreds of thousands of lidless, gaping eyes. Eyes akin to the Shikars’ own—flame and titian—but for the seep of disease and mutation that poisoned them, clouded them and made them aberrant to behold.
The heart of the Horde throbbed and Grimm felt the first stirrings of a mad scream ripping into the already fraying edges of his sanity.
There were so many of them. More than he’d ever thought possible. In all the worlds he’d ever walked, never had he witnessed such a horrific tableau. The eyes, everywhere, so many they were like seeds. Seeds that would soon bloom with stolen life.
Lifeless for now, they didn’t move. The cataract-blurred eyes that glowed everywhere remained unblinking. The bodies were motionless, in every state of decay, some in pieces, some completely whole and humanoid but for the rot and the rime.
Grimm cast his gaze about and saw that countless of the less-broken creatures were stacked and catalogued by the state of their decay, some piled as high as present-day skyscrapers, as evenly ordered as supplies at a lumber yard. It defied logic, the insane scale of it all. Gathered together, here lay the hungry dead that would one day rise and swamp the Earth, just waiting for a breath of life.
The fetid stench was unbearable. The urge to gag overwhelming. Death had an odor all its own, but this was so much worse. This was not the smell of death, but undeath, and the heart, the mind, the will recoiled at such abomination.
“They expect much of her,” Lord Daemon murmured, as if unaware he was speaking aloud. “Such lofty ambitions. I never dreamed…”
“What did you say?” Grimm rasped, throat closing around the poisonous air.
“What you see before you, son, is something far beyond the scope of my imagination.” He blinked slowly, taking it all in. “This is a most impressive hive, the likes of which I never dared amass myself. These many, many dead are all waiting for a spark—and it will take massive energies to revive just one, let alone so many. The existing golems will steal that spark from Raine, and they will in turn feed it to this waiting army, until their number is legion.”
Grimm felt a chill, like an icy finger tracing down the back of his scalp. “She is only one human. How can she be so strong?”
Raine wanted to shy away from the answer but knew she had to hear it.
Daemon cast him a sly glance, his gilded eyes alight with some inner fervency. “Human? I think not, son. Not anymore. Or not entirely so,” he amended in an almost absent manner.
“Stop calling me son!” he snapped. “If not human, then what?” Dread gripped his heart. Was he too late? Had they made her one of them already? “What is she?”
“All right, Traveler.” Daemon’s features settled into a most somber, pensive expression. “She is something none of us have seen before, I fear.”
As they penetrated the domed chamber more deeply, the grisly altar appeared from out of the fine crimson mist as if by a trick of the slanting light. Situated in a growing puddle of liquid on the floor, the tableau, though large, was dwarfed by the scale of the chamber and corpses occupying it. The mist that hung in the air tasted sharp and metallic. It tasted that way because it was comprised of vaporized blood.
Raine shuddered. So did Grimm.
The pool around the stone dais was all blood, shimmering scarlet beneath the faint illumination of the hanging cave worms. Grimm knew at once the blood was hers. Though it tasted old and the cells were dying fast, it held so much life and vitality that there could be no mistaking who it belonged to. Where it came from. And there she lay before him, like Snow White on a bed of stone that was soaked and wet with red. She was still and quiet atop the altar, lifeless.
Grimm was cold with horror and could only take in one detail at a time, but each detail was worse than the one that came before it and he wasn’t certain he had the strength to keep going. He had seen too much already. He wanted to shut his
eyes against the evil that had been done to her.
But for Raine, he would never stop trying. No matter how difficult it was for him to bear witness to this dungeon of torment, it was nothing compared to what he would endure to ensure that she was made safe and whole again.
She was very far from whole. He could see that much plainly.
Her blood was everywhere.
It coated the ground under his feet in an oozing membrane that shone like polished rubies. The blood stained every surface—as if some psychopath had taken up interior decorating—it was splattered here and there in oddly mesmerizing patterns. The crimson splashes spread outward along the cave floor and still more of it dripped down from the edges of the stone bed upon which she lay. Drop by drop, every beat of her heart was feeding the pool around the pedestal base.
The stone that formed her bed was cloudy, like thin milk. And she wore a dazzling blanket of even clearer stone that cupped her sides, arms and legs, a cocoon of rock. Her middle was exposed, a few small inches, and most of her tattered clothing had long ago rotted away, leaving only rags behind. She was little more than a porcelain doll, fragile and emaciated, devoid of all color save crimson.
Raine knew at once that she should step back out of Grimm’s head but she was fascinated both by what she saw through his eyes and by what she felt going on behind them.
How was he here? How had he found her? She had a sense that he had been looking for her for some time. How much time had he spent searching for her? It seemed only a few hours had passed since they had found Niki. But there was a distinct impression here in Grimm’s mind that much, much more time had passed since then. Raine was immediately disoriented and not a little panicked. Was she losing time somewhere?
Why? And more importantly, how? Was the pain becoming too much for her? Was she spending more and more time in the Gray Land, in between worlds, lost in one reality or another, anything to escape this one that hurt her so badly and trapped her so solidly if she let it?
How had Grimm discovered she still lived when Raine had done all she could to steer him clear of her for fear the Daemons would kill him—or worse, capture him as they had her? What other games were at play here that she was unaware of?
As Grimm watched, unblinking in his despair, beads of blood seeped through the pores of her pale skin, like sweat, and dripped down over the stone.
With great effort he forced himself to find her features and was appalled further by what he found. Her head was crowned in the clear rock, her golden hair fused inside of it as it spilled over the sides of the altar. The platinum locks were sculpted into razor-sharp stalactites reaching toward the floor, just above pools of gleaming blood.
Grimm’s feet were leaden. Each step was a struggle, as if the ground sucked his feet downward. The harder he fought to lift them, the harder it was to break the hold. He felt as though he were walking through cement.
He glanced down, realizing he was doing that very thing, and a wild surge of adrenaline electrified him. “What in all the worlds…?” He heard his stunned words, their sound fading unnaturally quick into stillness.
“It is flowstone.”
Raine started and for a moment she was terrified Grimm knew she was there with him. But he gave nothing away. It was Lord Daemon who spoke—she knew him only through the creatures they had created, but it was enough to mark him immediately. She hated him with every fiber of her being.
He was the one the Horde called Creator.
And that was the reason why the Daemons were so edgy, so fearful of late. They knew he was coming and they didn’t know why.
Daemon’s metallic voice, oddly enough, served to ground Grimm, to remind him to hold fast to his rigid discipline. Nothing fazed Daemon. He’d seen it all, and this perversely comforted Grimm for a moment, despite his loathing for the Lord of the Horde. “It generally requires centuries to form structures within the hollows of the Earth,” Daemon elaborated. “But we are obviously dealing with far different environmental conditions here. Her coffin and all the detritus about us took a mere decade to accumulate.”
Raine was stunned. Did he mean to say that she had been here…a decade?
They were walking through liquid stone. It had hardened and covered Raine’s body in a tomb, transforming her glorious hair into a halo of knives, but everywhere else it still had yet to solidify.
Grimm couldn’t bear to see more. But he did. It was unavoidable. And what he found next made him keen low in his throat like a wounded beast, his heart bleeding ash in his chest.
The source of the cave’s flowstone was saliva.
Thick, viscous saliva actively bubbled around vulgar, full lips attached to the center of Raine’s forehead. In a hellish mimicry of a babe feeding at a breast, the lips pulsed and throbbed, and the drool oozed out around the seam it made against Raine’s flesh. Lush noises accompanied each draw inward, turning Grimm’s stomach.
Grimm followed the line of the mouth, looked up—way up into the dark sky—witnessing more frightful details. The profane mouth was only the beginning of the macabre tableau. The lips and mouth narrowed into a long, fleshy protuberance that reached up a hundred feet into the air. A siphon quivered and pulsed like the beating of a deformed heart. It arced up and backward a far distance away from where Raine lay supine, until it grew into the final horror that occupied the grisly throne room.
The mouth continued its lewd, suckling noises, undisturbed by its audience.
Raine had been looking up at that thing for years and even she was stunned by its mass and size.
“So that is how they are storing her energy.” Daemon’s voice betrayed interest and wonder; perhaps even a tinge of envy, which devastated Grimm. “Why didn’t I think of it?”
If Raine could have, she would have smote Daemon right then and there.
The siphon led off to the side where, swaddled in shadow, mired in gore, there was a new monster. A mélange of blood, bone, skin and muscle, it had no head. There were no arms or legs, only several dozen odd protuberances, misshapen lumps and growths that shuddered as if part of a giant lung. There were thick, undulating circulatory vessels carrying rich, dark blood through the tissue, pooling at the ends of the extensions so that they looked like tree limbs capped with ripe plums the size of basketballs.
The heaving mass was immense beyond measure. A glacier of throbbing, mindless meat. Its one purpose Grimm could conceive was to store the life it stole from the dreaming woman in the coffin below. What it did with that life, how it converted it to something useful for the Horde, he could not understand—that was the realm of Horde science, the domain of abominable thinking.
But for the mouth suckling at her forehead, Raine’s face was blessedly bare of injury and left unmarked by flowstone. Her features were impossibly serene and she appeared untroubled by the nightmare parasite looming over her.
Hiding inside Grimm’s mind, Raine wondered if her face was as serene when she was not otherwise mentally occupied. There were times when she knew she screamed out loud with her suffering. Times when the pain was so bad she was afraid she was breaking her own teeth from gnashing them too hard. It was so strange to see herself through another’s eyes. Stranger still to see through Grimm’s. He liked her. Maybe as much as she liked him. But how much of his fascination was spawned out of pity? She’d never know. And it wasn’t fair to him for her to learn this way.
“She is vastly more powerful than I ever dared dream.” The words sighed out of Daemon’s lips. His voice was languid, intoxicated. Grimm’s gaze dragged away from the monster leeching at Raine and fell on his companion in shock.
Daemon’s eyes were heavy-lidded. His lips slack and soft with what looked like raw lust. He’d been wrong. Daemon wasn’t calm because he’d seen everything. He was lost in his endless desire for power. And what lay before them was a cache of pure energy, just waiting to be consumed, then wielded to an unholy purpose.
Raine’s energy. Her vitality.
Her life.
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My life. That’s my life.
Grimm could see that Lord Daemon wanted Raine. He coveted her power. He hungered for it, the same as his creations hungered for it. It was the kind of craving that no language had a word adequate enough to describe. It was the force that forever drove Daemon to commit his atrocities. It fueled his monsters to carry on his work even after he had abandoned them centuries ago. It was the reason Raine was enslaved here; the reason for all their present suffering, both human and Shikar.
Daemon desired her. It was naked on his face and he didn’t even bother to hide it. Grimm wanted to kill him for it.
Grimm should have killed him eons ago. For letting all this tragedy come to pass. For not being repulsed by what they were witnessing. For everything he’d ever done, and for all the wrong he’d ever do, Grimm wanted Daemon’s heart on a plate.
Raine felt her own rage feed Grimm’s, unable to do anything about it. She wasn’t even sure she would if she could.
Before he could rethink the consequences of his actions, Grimm had Daemon pinned to the ground, his knees planted on Daemon’s chest with all the weight of an eternity of rage. He was well satisfied to see a look of surprise on the other’s face before his fist struck it clean away. Bones crunched beneath his fist in a gratifying noise that drowned out the feeding monster sucking his woman’s life away. Grimm screamed a wordless war cry and struck again, repeatedly. Skin split across his knuckles but Grimm welcomed the pain, let it temper him and fuse him to the moment.
His woman.
Raine felt as if someone had sucker-punched her. Grimm truly felt that way about her? But why? She was nothing, no one special.
This was his nemesis. Daemon shared the same beloved face as Tryton, but for once that did not make him hesitate. It did not unsettle him. Because for all their similarities, it was their actions that set the twins apart. Tryton was Grimm’s friend and mentor; it was only out of loyalty to him that Grimm had not yet killed this creature—Daemon was nothing to him, while Tryton had practically raised him. Daemon was a serpent, a fiend. He deserved to die a thousand times over.
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