19.
“I have many plans and many projects,” the Enemy told me. “Many fingers in many pies. This is but one of them. Are you familiar with the myths of the Rex Nemorensis? The sacred king?”
“It’s a fertility rite,” I breathed. Blood trickled down my neck, tickling my shoulder, as Fleiss’s heel dug in. “You crown a ‘king,’ then sacrifice him at the year’s end. Supposed to ensure a bountiful harvest.”
“Indeed. A king who wants for nothing in the year before he goes to his death, blessed with bounty and fortune.” His eyeless gaze shifted to the broken, whimpering man in the wheelchair. “Like a lottery winner. Isn’t the natural cruelty of the universe funny, Cameron? If you hadn’t stopped at the 7-Eleven on your way home that day, if you hadn’t chosen the random numbers you did—one in almost three hundred million odds! If you hadn’t, someone else would be in your position right now. And you’d be living your pointless, mundane life, never touched by the winds of magic.”
Drake, dripping sweat, moved his cracked lips in a silent plea.
“Tonight, we end the reign of the sacred king.” Fleiss pointed to the pyramid. “It’s the thirty-first. Samhain. The end of the harvest season.”
“I realize we’re monkeying with the theme a bit,” the Enemy said, waving a flickering hand. “Aztec ritual, Celtic holiday, Greco-Roman myth cycle…but we like our magic nice and chaotic around here. We’ll go with whatever works. I think you can relate to that.”
“So you stored up all this energy,” I said, “and you’re going to release it all at once. Why? What are you going to do with it?”
He glided to the altar. His sketched-in fingers caressed the obsidian blade.
“This item you so generously stole for me,” he said, “is a Cutting Knife.”
“All knives are cutting knives.”
“Not like this,” he said. “They’re very rare. Very special. And they hold secrets upon secrets. Tonight, this one’s mysteries will be exposed. And I will add a new weapon to my arsenal.”
He began to chant. A slow, sibilant call in some language I’d never heard. His words were feathery, tangled like twine, then musty and leaden. Vowels and consonants brushed one another in ways they were never meant to, the sounds slipping inside one another and coming out twisted. The stone pyramid shuddered and groaned.
“Witness,” Fleiss hissed. She twisted her foot, grinding her heel into my throat.
I witnessed.
Energy rose from the pyramid like wisps of vapor, squirming silver in the air. Worms of raw power, sucked into the four obsidian mirrors. And the mirrors, full to bursting with the souls of the damned, responded. Streamers of smoke coursed from their faces, four black chains that fell upon the knife with a sound like cold water on a red-hot skillet.
Pinioned by the smoke, the knife lifted into the air. It hovered above the altar, shivering, then began to change.
The blade opened. It unfolded down the middle, growing longer but not thinner as its size doubled from nowhere. Again, then again. The obsidian and jade buckled and twisted, opening like the petals of a lethal flower, every change in its configuration making it grow.
“Rise,” Fleiss said to Drake. I turned my head, as much as I could manage, watching in mute horror as his broken feet touched upon the hot stone floor and he pushed himself up from the wheelchair. His face contorted in pain as he stumbled toward the pyramid. No control over his body, a puppet under her control, but fully aware—and feeling every agonizing step. I heard tiny bones snap as he mounted the stairs. His breath came out in labored wheezes.
The Enemy glided to the pillars and lifted the clay flute. He played a trilling, discordant tune, a song devoid of rhythm or sanity but every note placed with absolute precision. Carefully, exactingly mad. And Drake danced. He shuffled, hopping on his blackened feet as he climbed the pyramid, his body jerking in spasms while tears streamed down his sweat-soaked face.
The knife wasn’t a knife anymore. It was a formless mass the size of a jaguar now, leaves of obsidian and jade continuing to unfold, to grow, to lengthen upon the altar as it reeled against the chains of black smoke.
Drake twirled on the steps with his arms flung out to his sides. As the flute trilled, hitting a high note, he leaped in the air. His left ankle snapped as he crashed down on the step. His foot wrenched to one side, a shard of bloody bone jutting out from the bruised and ravaged skin. He shrieked through gritted teeth and continued his ascent.
The knife, whatever it was now, bucked and rippled. Colors of obsidian and jade muted, the razor-edged stone becoming soft, colors running together. It flung out tendrils that blossomed like fractal explosions.
Drake reached the top of the pyramid and stood before the Enemy. He spun one last time, a pirouette that wrenched his mangled foot until it was turned completely backward. He stood frozen and trembling as the flute played its final note. His jaw wrenched open in a voiceless scream, and his eyes were rolled so far back in his skull I could only see bloodshot white.
The knife had finished its transformation. It thumped against the altar, suddenly still.
It was a woman.
She had olive skin and amber eyes, her body draped in a snowy-white gown that made me think of an ancient Greek tunic. The chains of black smoke held her fast, leashing her ankles and wrists and binding her to the altar stone. She bared her teeth at the Enemy, letting out a yawp of raw outrage.
The Enemy casually untied Drake’s bathrobe. It pooled around his feet, soaking in the blood from his mangled ankle as Drake stood trembling and naked. The flickering shape scooped up the Aztec bowl and a thin knife with a curved, scything blade.
The first cut drew along Drake’s outstretched arm, carving a red line from his shoulder to the inside of his elbow. The Enemy caught his blood as it welled up and began to drool down, pattering into the bowl. Still chanting, his formless words squirming inside my ears, he floated to the altar.
He flipped over the bowl. As the blood splashed across her body, staining her tunic scarlet, the woman threw back her head and howled. It was a scream of unendurable anguish, of someone having their life and their mind torn away, one inch at a time.
“What is he doing to her?” I gasped as he returned to Drake, slicing open his other arm and harvesting more blood.
Fleiss gazed up with a look of pure awe. Beatific.
“Teaching her,” she said. “Taming her. You have to break a wild horse before you can ride it.”
I came to the quiet conclusion that I was probably going to die.
I was outclassed. Outgunned. Cornered by two creatures that might as well have been gods, for all I could do against them.
But if I was going to die, I’d go out on my own terms. Spitting in their faces and, if I could manage it, leaving them with some scars to remember me by. I tallied my resources. Fleiss hadn’t bothered patting me down, didn’t take my cards or the .38 revolver jammed down the back of my belt. No need to: she’d caught my cards the last time we fought, plucking them out of the air and melting them with a glance, and a storm of bullets had barely managed to wound her. Then there was Canton’s wand, strapped to my forearm and useless as a twig.
Come on, Howard, I thought. Any other tricks you want to show me, now would be a damn good time for it.
Another bowl of blood rained down. My stomach clenched, twisted with nausea as the bound woman’s shrieks rang out over the Enemy’s incessant chanting. I had six bullets in the .38. As the Enemy drew his blade along Drake’s quivering, pale chest, I knew exactly how I was going to spend them.
Fleiss was distracted, focused on the spectacle. She didn’t notice me slipping my hand under my back, wriggling the gun loose and curling my fingers around its wobbly grip. She didn’t even look as I took careful aim and steeled myself, preparing for the last fight of my life.
The hammer cracked down and the first bullet punched into her chin, snapping her jawbone and spattering hot black ichor across my face. She stumbled back with a f
urious howl of pain. I jumped to my feet and ran up the pyramid steps, one eye squinted and aiming down the iron sights. My next shot slammed into one of the obsidian mirrors. The stone shattered like cheap glass, billowing down in a cascade of razor-edged shards. Then another, and another, the chains of smoke whiplashing through the air as the vault filled with the sound of breaking glass. The last mirror burst in a glittering torrent. As Fleiss recovered, shaking off her shock, her jaw already reknitting itself and spitting out the crumpled slug, I had just enough time to take my final shot.
The bullet plowed into the Aztec bowl in the Enemy’s hands, covering him in chunks of broken bloodstained jade.
I stood halfway up the pyramid, between Fleiss and the Enemy. I tossed my empty gun aside. It clattered against the stone as the ritual energy sparked, whimpered, and died.
The vault fell silent.
“You…” the Enemy said. “You ruined it. You ruined everything.”
“I’m Daniel Faust.” I shrugged. “It’s kind of what I do. Somebody probably should have warned you.”
I heard Fleiss rush me from behind, her feet thundering on the steps. She stopped, frozen, as the Enemy held up his open palm.
“Don’t kill him.” He shook his head, slow. “No. I won’t be goaded into slaying you like this. To unlock my full power, your death has to take place under very specific circumstances. And how fortunate for me that said circumstances fully allow for endless, excruciating, and unimaginable pain.”
The woman on the altar—still panting, her face ashen and gown soaked in sacrificial blood—forced herself to her feet. She looked my way, her amber eyes glowing like candles dancing behind a pair of stained-glass windows.
“Catch me,” she said.
Then she ran at me, flinging herself into the air, doing a swan dive off the top of the pyramid steps.
Her spine snapped in half, her body buckling backward, jackknifing. Her arms broke at the elbows, then her knees, the woman’s body folding in on itself with blinding speed. As she twisted in the air, shrinking with the sound of a hundred crackling bones, her olive skin turned to hardened stone.
The Cutting Knife, transformed back to its original shape, landed in my outstretched palm. My fingers curled around the jade hilt.
“My lord…” Fleiss said, her voice suddenly uncertain.
“You don’t even know how to use that thing,” the Enemy told me. “And it doesn’t have time to teach you. Its magic is sealed, denied to you.”
“Magic?” I turned the dagger in my hand. Firelight glinted off the pitted and glossy blade. “Maybe so, but I gotta tell you, right now, I just want to find out if you can bleed.”
The Cheshire smile grew wide. He snapped out his empty left hand, fingers open.
“If you like,” he said. “Fleiss! To me!”
Ms. Fleiss broke into a run, thundering up the pyramid steps, and leaped. Her grin, as wide and mad as his, caved in as her skull collapsed. Her body buckled, shrinking, flesh turning to tempered steel.
A dagger landed in the Enemy’s hand, thumping against his flickering palm. A trench knife, like something a World War II commando might have carried, with a stained wooden grip.
“I can’t kill you here,” he said, “lest the reliquary stay sealed forever. But nothing says I can’t cut you. Carve you. Reduce you to a screaming, mindless lump of meat.”
My fear and my adrenaline were two warring armies raging in my veins. One force telling me to freeze, to cower, to run and hide, the other telling me to fight for every heartbeat I had left. Adrenaline won. If I was going down, I was going to make him work for it.
A knife fight with a wannabe god? There were worse ways to die. I dropped into a fighting stance, knees bent and limber, my body turned to one side to give him a smaller target. I squared my feet on the pyramid steps. Then I reached out with my empty hand, curled my fingers, and beckoned to him.
“C’mon, then.” My lunatic smile, driven by desperation, was almost wider than his. “Show me what you’ve got.”
20.
The Enemy strode toward me, and suddenly halted.
Cameron Drake got between us. He was a shell of a man, broken, ragged, and bleeding, his weight on one blackened foot while the other hung mutilated from a shattered ankle. But he still blocked the flickering shadow’s path.
“Defiance,” the Enemy murmured, sounding almost perplexed. “We broke you. Bled you. But you still think to stand in my way. Why?”
Drake didn’t have the strength to speak. Only to stand. I found some words to speak for him.
“They say you’ve been to a lot of other worlds,” I called up from the pyramid steps. “Can’t imagine the things you’ve seen. Which is why it’s so funny.”
The Enemy tilted his head, looking past Drake to me. “Funny?”
“Yeah,” I said. “All those years, all those worlds…but if you really don’t know why he’s standing in your way, you don’t know shit about the human race.”
The Enemy considered that. He looked back to Drake. Then to the dagger in his blurry hand.
“Maybe,” he mused, “as a species, you’re simply too collectively stupid to know fear. A reckless and violent breed of mammal which should have rightfully gone extinct by now. Let me rectify that.”
His open palm slapped against Drake’s forehead, fingers clamping tight. The Enemy’s form pulsed and shimmered, rippling with sparks like scratches on a film negative.
“You were twelve years old.”
“I was twelve years old,” Drake echoed, his voice a strained rasp.
“You were walking along the train tracks. Derry, Pennsylvania, on a warm summer morning. You’d just gotten a Walkman for your birthday. You remember.”
Drake trembled, frozen in his grip. “I remember.”
“You had the music turned up, distracted, thinking about that girl you had a crush on. You didn’t hear the train coming up behind you, around a forested bend.”
“My brother,” Drake whispered, “my brother ran up and pulled me—”
“No.” The Enemy’s fingers tightened. “Your brother was too slow. And the train was traveling at ninety-seven miles an hour when it hit you.”
Drake exploded.
His body burst into a cloud of gore and bone shrapnel, blasting sideways. Torn, ragged viscera splattered across the pyramid steps. Standing in a mist of blood, the Enemy casually stepped over a puddle of unspooled intestine. Then he turned his attention on me as the mist settled at his back.
“You’ve lived a life of danger,” he told me. “How many close calls and near misses have you survived? Events that could have left you scarred, burned, mutilated?”
He held up his hand, fingers outstretched.
“Let’s find a few choice examples along your timeline, shall we? Let’s explore.”
I couldn’t win this one.
The idea of getting in a knife fight with the Enemy had been just crazy enough to work. But battling a creature who could do that with a single touch…everything I knew about magic, everything I’d ever learned, told me what he’d just done was impossible. And yet.
The door to the vault beckoned at my back. I could run, but if the elevator wasn’t waiting for me, or if he was faster than he looked, I’d be cornered. Couldn’t let him touch me. I needed a distraction, something to buy me a few more seconds.
My thoughts went to the knife, the rough jade hilt tight in my clammy grip. Whatever he’d been doing to the woman inside the blade, I’d put it on hold by breaking his toys. And if I died here, he and Fleiss would go right back to torturing her. I couldn’t let—
The wand pulsed against my forearm.
I flexed my wrist. The sheath clicked softly and the wand dropped into my free hand. The world washed out in black and white, static hissing in my ears and giving way to the jangle of a piano playing under a vintage newsreel. Bodiless, I watched Howard Canton on his stage, pulling an endless stream of scarves from his breast pocket. Tied together at the ends,
the scarves became an impossibly long rope that pooled around his polished shoes.
“The Grand Multiplicity,” his tinny voice said, “is, it must be stressed, a pure illusion. Matter cannot be created ex nihilo by the magician. However, with a base enchanted item and clever tradecraft, a few can take on the appearance of many—”
The Enemy’s voice jerked me from the vision, shattering it. The flames in the great brass braziers roared as he pointed at me.
“Canton’s wand. You have Canton’s wand.”
“Apparently I do.”
“That isn’t for you,” he seethed, striding down the pyramid steps. “Give it to me.”
“Wow,” I said. “With an opening like that…”
My deck of cards flew from my breast pocket in a riffling stream, lancing through the air and swarming around the Enemy like a cloud of gnats. Then I brought up the wand, holding it like an orchestra conductor. I felt an invisible hand, cold and gossamer, close over mine. It guided my motions as I drew runes in the air, tracing lines of power with the bone tip of the wand. The runes, arcane sigils I’d never seen in any of my books, sparked and flared aquamarine in my second sight.
Now the cloud of gnats was a tornado, fifty cards becoming a hundred, then two hundred, then a thousand, a pasteboard whirlwind that filled the vault with dancing, spinning chaos and blotted the Enemy from sight.
I turned and ran. Sheathing the wand as I pounded up the endless corridor, overhead bulbs casting dizzy shadows across the bare drywall. The elevator door loomed ahead. And behind me echoed a guttural roar of frustrated rage.
I hammered the elevator button. It chimed, the door sliding open at a molasses pace. I slipped through the second it was wide enough, then punched the button to take me back to the first floor.
At the far end of the hallway, a lightbulb exploded and went dark. Then another. And a third. The Enemy was coming. The elevator door began to crawl shut. I was trapped, cornered in a cage.
He broke into a run. Bulbs shattered in his wake, painting the corridor in darkness as he closed the distance like a lion bounding in to slaughter his prey. I pressed my back to the wall, watching him streak toward me while the elevator door continued its slow, mechanical glide.
Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7) Page 13