Hellforged d-2

by Nancy Holzner

  And I was. Instead of looking like a blood-soaked horror-movie heroine, I was mostly scuffed and dirty, with some cuts here and there. I’d left the wounds from Cysgod’s attack in Uffern.

  Kane folded me into his arms, pulling me against his chest. I felt his heart beat beneath my cheek. But I wasn’t done here. As much as I hated to do it, I broke our embrace. “I have to see what’s happening with Pryce.”

  He nodded and put his arm around me, firmly, like he was never going to let go again. Together we walked to where Pryce lay on the ground. Daniel was there, speaking to two uniformed cops. After a minute they nodded, and Daniel clapped one of them on the shoulder. He turned and saw us approaching.

  “You found her!” He hurried to us as the cops stood guard over Pryce.

  As Daniel got near, Kane growled softly and pulled me closer. Daniel stopped, an eyebrow raised. Then he grinned. Even at night, his blue eyes sparkled.

  “You okay?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “What’s the situation with Pryce?”

  “Alive. His eyes are open, but he’s unresponsive. We’ll know more after we get him to the hospital.” An ambulance pulled up to the cemetery gate. He glanced at it over his shoulder. “I’ll ride with the ambulance. I need to get to Mass General to check on someone, anyway.”

  “Let us know how Norden’s doing,” I said. The guy had been in bad shape before the Morfran slammed into him and knocked over his gurney. I hoped he’d make it. Norden would never be one of my favorite people, but I was rooting for him to pull through.

  “Nord—Oh, yeah. Yes, of course I will.” Daniel twisted around to see the ambulance. “You two don’t need to hang around,” he said. “I vouched for you, said you’d stop by the station tomorrow to make your statements.” Daniel nodded at Kane, businesslike. He shifted his gaze to me. His blue eyes held mine. Something gleamed there, then it was gone. He nodded at me, too. Then he turned and went to the ambulance.

  Kane squeezed my shoulder. “Let’s go home.”

  “In a minute.” I slipped out of his grasp and went, alone, to the place where Difethwr had fallen. On the human plane, there was no visible trace of the dead Hellion, only a faint, unpleasant smell, like the wind blowing the wrong way over a garbage dump.

  Hellforged lay on the ground, glowing faintly silver. I touched its blade. Its vibration thrummed, feeling almost like a welcome. I picked up the dagger and stuck it in my belt. After a moment’s hesitation, I cracked open my senses the tiniest bit to the demon plane. The stench of rotting Hellion made me stagger back, and I slammed my senses shut. The smell receded. Okay, good, I could dip my big toe into Uffern without getting stuck there. Holding my breath, I opened again, fully this time, and Difethwr appeared, lying motionless on the ground. The Hellion was decomposing. Its blue skin, pitted with ragged holes, had turned purple mottled with filthy green, and the body collapsed on itself, like a balloon with a slow leak.

  The Destroyer, destroyed. My mind flashed to my father, writhing on the floor, tormented and killed by this demon’s flames. It’s dead, Dad. After all these years, the Destroyer is dead.

  I closed to the demon plane, and the Hellion disappeared. I drew Hellforged with my left hand and focused on a nearby slate gravestone. I couldn’t make out the name, but the date was 1704. Above the inscription was a carving, a simple line drawing of a winged skull. Flying death. Not exactly HOME SWEET HOME, but an appropriate residence for the Morfran.

  As I traced wide circles above my head, there was very little drag on Hellforged. I circled and circled, mentally calling the Morfran to me, but the amount I sent into the gravestone was less than Pryce had released. I tried again, but this time nothing came. Some of the Morfran had escaped.

  Well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. Mab said there was always some loose Morfran about, causing death and destruction. I’d never be able to catch all of it. Still, it bothered me that I’d let some get away. There was a little more violent, destructive hunger out there in the world now.

  I sheathed Hellforged. Kane came over and stood beside me.

  “Finally,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  He held up his hand and sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”

  I could smell lots of things. Blood—my own and others’—ashes, the lingering stench of demons, the rot of Difethwr’s decay. “Smell what?”

  “Like a grave. An old one.”

  “We’re in a three-hundred-year-old cemetery, Kane.”

  “Yes, but—” He broke into a run, toward the spot where the two cops guarded Pryce. I was right behind him. When we got there, I didn’t see anyone.

  Then I looked at the ground.

  The two uniformed cops were bloodless husks—empty, discarded sacks of skin. And Pryce was gone.

  40

  I’D BARELY FALLEN ASLEEP WHEN A BLUE-AND-SILVER MIST churned the darkness. I let the lavender-scented cloud surround me. When it dispersed, there sat Mab in her wing chair by the fireplace. She leaned forward, worry lines etched into her forehead. “Thank heaven you’re all right,” she said. “I’ve been calling every half hour. Tell me what happened.”

  I described everything since I’d left Maenllyd—the Glitch on the plane, falling asleep over the book, the Morfran attack on Tina, the carnage at the concert. “I wasn’t fast enough, Mab. Nine zombies died, probably more. Some are still missing.” Tina was okay. As soon as crows overspread the sky, she dived under the stage and hid there until the screaming stopped. Smart kid.

  “Any death is regrettable, child. But nine as compared to what—nine hundred? More? Followed by untold suffering as Pryce led his Morfran-strengthened demons into the human realm. You did well.”

  I mentally sawed a new notch in the kitchen table at Maenllyd.

  “I don’t think we need to worry about Pryce for the time being. When you cut off Cysgod’s foot, you severed its connection to Pryce. Without his shadow demon, Pryce lacks animation and volition, like a human with no soul. That’s why he became catatonic.” Her voice grew thoughtful. “What does worry me is why the Old Ones spirited him away.”

  The Old Ones again. I asked Mab what she knew about them.

  “I’ve had … dealings with them before. A long time ago.”

  “What are they? Some kind of vampire?” Although all the vampires I’d ever known would rather stake themselves than be that ugly.

  “You could say that the Old Ones are to vampires as vampires are to humans. They use humans for food, but they’re so ancient they require little bodily sustenance. A single human every month or two—drained dry, like those poor policemen—takes care of an Old One’s physical needs. But they gorge on power, and that’s what they drain from vampires.”

  I remembered Clyde’s description of Juliet’s robotic visitor. Wherever Juliet was, I hoped she was far away from any Old Ones.

  “The Old Ones are a small, clannish group,” Mab continued. “They’ve remained hidden for centuries. They see integration of paranormals into human society as a threat to their own power structure. From what you tell me, they’ve quite successfully stopped your young man’s civil rights case.”

  Your young man. When she said it, I became acutely aware, even in sleep, of Kane lying beside me. His strong arm curled around my waist, his warm breath puffed against my naked shoulder. I blushed, hoping Mab wouldn’t notice the blood rise in my face. I’d never had company before when I spoke with her on the dream phone.

  My aunt averted her eyes—was that a smile?—and changed the subject. She told me about Jenkins’s plans for spring planting and how an unexpected busload of tourists had arrived at the Cross and Crow and overrun the village. It felt good to make small talk about normal things, the kinds of topics that come up in a just-saying-hi call.

  Before we disconnected, I asked Mab about something that bothered me. “Pryce was wrong about the prophecy. It wasn’t about reuniting the two lines through the birth of a child; it was about uniting Hellions and the Cerddorion through
my bond with the Destroyer.”

  “Yes, child. I did advise you against glomming onto any one meaning.”

  “But Pryce believed it. That means the book tricked him, too. Why would it do that? They’re on the same side.”

  “Perhaps it didn’t. Pryce has always been arrogant. He may have grown too attached to the meaning he preferred, building up a scaffolding of interpretation to support it. He blinded himself to other possibilities.”

  That made sense. But Mab wasn’t finished. “It may be, however, that the book did trick him. And if that’s the case, we must be alert for something far more sinister than what Pryce planned.”

  More sinister than Uffern overrunning the human world—I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what that might be. Mab said not to worry about it now. “Most likely it was Pryce’s own hubris that misled him. Let it go, child. Don’t try to solve any riddles tonight. We’ll talk again soon.” Her colors rose up, thick and glowing like fog in moonlight. The fog thinned and subsided, and Mab was gone.

  The hint that something worse than Pryce could be at work, perhaps something involving the shadowy Old Ones, should have kept me tossing and turning for the rest of the night. But when the last wisps of Mab’s colors had blown away, I snuggled against Kane and sank deeply into sleep—blessedly dreamless sleep.

  FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS, I TOOK THINGS EASY. KANE GOT called back to Washington for some strategy meetings. I was glad to see him jump back into the fray. Kane’s never happy unless he’s doing something to save the world. Me? Saving the world’s okay, but afterward I need a break.

  I stayed home and ordered pizza (sometimes the zombie deliveryman even left me more than one slice). I watched Juliet’s movie screen-sized TV. I called my sister, Gwen, who was surprised and pleased to hear from me. She even put the kids on the phone. Gwen invited me out to Needham for one of her famous homemade lasagna dinners. I hope she won’t mind my bringing a werewolf as my date.

  I slept, too—a lot. With Difethwr dead and Pryce out of commission, I was off Mab’s no-dreaming tea. It was wonderful to be back in my own dreamscape. I slept deeply and without images, resting in a soft, tranquil twilight. Not utter darkness. My dreamscape looked a lot better with a night-light on.

  Initial news reports about the concert were confused, inaccurate, and fear-mongering. Stories varied wildly on how many zombies were killed (the actual number was fifteen, including Monster Paul’s bass player and the two cemetery guards), but the dead zombies got less attention than the single norm who died. During the Morfran-induced stampede, a human had been trampled to death. A news camera had captured footage of several zombies who, intoxicated by the smell of human blood, couldn’t resist stopping to chomp on a limb or two.

  What the cameras didn’t capture was the Morfran. Despite hundreds of eyewitness reports of a flock of murderous birds that would’ve made Hitchcock proud, there was no hard evidence. As a spirit, the Morfran couldn’t be filmed without special equipment. So on video, it looked like the zombies had come down with a sudden, vicious case of mass hysteria as they screamed and ran and waved their arms. Self-proclaimed medical experts speculated their behavior was an aftereffect of the plague virus. Anti-PA groups, talk-radio pundits, and some politicians called for immediate expulsion of all zombies from the state.

  I hate publicity—I’d prefer a root canal to a TV interview—but I couldn’t let all that misinformation swirl around unchecked. I resolved to call Lynne Hong and go on the record to set things straight. But I didn’t have to. She’d already scored an interview with Daniel.

  He looked great on-screen. Photogenic, charming, his face serious and his blue eyes calm, he explained that the concert had been the target of a terror attack by a rogue sorcerer. Police had a suspect, Pryce Maddox, and an intensive manhunt was under way to find him. There was even one of those police sketches. That helped; it gave the norms a face to watch out for, a face to blame. Throughout the interview, Daniel painted the zombies as victims of an attack, not monsters run amok. His account was way oversimplified—Pryce wasn’t really a sorcerer, and Daniel didn’t go into demi-demons and ancient prophecies—but he presented the events in terms the norms could understand.

  Daniel was all business as he looked into the camera, but at the end of the interview he turned directly to Lynne Hong, and the look on his face made me suspect that an interview wasn’t the only thing she’d scored from Detective Costello.

  I picked up the phone and called him. “So,” I said, “are you looking for a job now?”

  He laughed. “No, I’m still employed. As soon as the story broke—it hit the Internet yesterday—I got hauled into Hampson’s office. I knew he was going to fire me. I’d made my peace with that. But before he could start chewing me out, the governor’s office called. By the end of the conversation, Hampson looked like he’d sat on a porcupine. Governor Sugden asked him to thank me for getting the facts out.” He laughed. “Thank me—can you imagine?”

  Sugden’s adult daughter was a zombie, so he was sympathetic to PAs. He also knew Hampson very well. The governor publicly praised Daniel for identifying a suspect so fast, making sure Hampson got some of the credit. There was talk of giving both Daniel and Norden public service awards as soon as Norden was released from the hospital. Hampson couldn’t fire Daniel now, not without making himself look bad.

  He could, however, assign Daniel a new partner. “The guy’s a Hampson stooge and a PA hater,” Daniel told me. “In fact, he’s the one Sykes nailed in Creature Comforts. Now, any time I sneeze Hampson will get a report about it. I’ve got to be careful.”

  That made what I had to say next a little easier. Knowing me had caused Daniel nothing but trouble at work. “Um, Daniel, I should tell you that Kane and I—”

  “Are back together. I know, Vicky. That was pretty obvious the other night.”

  He stopped there, and I didn’t know what else to say. Just as the silence was stretching past uncomfortable into intolerable, Daniel broke it. “Speaking of Kane, I wanted to let you know I’ve been assigned a new case. Homicide in D.C. has asked for our assistance in their investigation of Justice Frederickson’s murder. They think the evidence points here. Not to Kane,” he added quickly.

  “What’s going on?”

  “They’re giving a press conference this afternoon. Juliet’s been named a ‘vampire of interest.’ ”

  “She didn’t do it.”

  “I don’t know if you’re in contact with her,” he said, his voice careful, “and I’m not asking. But she should turn herself in. If she’s innocent, it’s the only way to clear things up. She can ask for me; I’ll make sure she’s treated well.”

  Juliet wasn’t going to waltz into the police station and ask for Daniel, because Juliet wasn’t anywhere near Boston. I knew because I’d received a postcard from her. The picture showed an ancient-looking, half-timbered house with gables along the roof and red flowers blossoming in front. No writing on the back besides my name and address. But only Juliet would send me a postcard of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. The postmark was Brazilian. She was telling me she was okay—or had been when she mailed the card—but was on the move.

  I didn’t tell Daniel. If Juliet was running from the Old Ones, I wasn’t going to complicate things by putting the police on her trail.

  I went online to the Channel 10 website and watched Daniel’s interview again, paying less attention to what he said than to how he looked at Lynne Hong. Definitely something there. I knew, because he’d looked at me the exact same way. An unexpected pang hit me, but I let it go. Maybe Daniel would find something with Lynne that he couldn’t with me. Maybe it’s easier to fall for somebody you can rescue than for someone who’s always rescuing you.

  BY FRIDAY, I WAS TIRED OF ZOMBIE-GNAWED PIZZA AND READY to rejoin the world. As I entered Creature Comforts, inhaling that familiar scent of spilled beer, smoke, and a whiff of blood, I waved to Axel. He nodded and set a bottle of beer on the bar. Then he went back
to terrorizing a wide-eyed female norm.

  “I told you, we don’t do chocolate martinis. We got beer, we got shots. You want dessert, find a bakery.”

  “Try this,” I suggested, showing her the label of my lite beer as I slid onto a stool. “It doesn’t taste like anything. Honest.”

  She scurried back to her table, where her three norm friends waited. They gathered up their purses and, with a few petrified glances back at Axel, they fled.

  “You sure that’s good for business, scaring away the customers?” It was early, but the bar was dead—and I didn’t mean that as a pun. Other than a lone werewolf reading News of the Dead at the far end of the bar, I was the only customer.

  “If I never have to mix another froufrou cocktail, it’s worth it.” Axel went to fiddle with a beer line.

  Business had slumped throughout the New Combat Zone. Zombies needed a permit again to set foot outside the boundaries of Deadtown—even into the Zone—and permits were tougher to get than they’d been in years. All but the most adventurous norms were staying far away from the monsters’ turf. And without norms, you didn’t get vampires. Creature Comforts was back to being a one-man operation. Or a one-whatever-Axel-was operation.

  Down the bar, the werewolf turned a page, rattling his paper, and I glimpsed the headline: “Monster Paul Tour Canceled.” I’d seen the story on PNN. The band had lost its bass player, for one thing. And though Daniel’s interview had done a lot to quell the first wave of norm panic, crazy theories persisted. One of the craziest called Monster Paul’s music satanic, causing listeners to become mindless killing machines. Monster rock might sound like a truckload of cranky babies trying to out-yowl a crate full of angry cats while chimpanzees beat washtubs in the background, but a satanic zombie mind-control plot? Come on.