“Ah.” Ezra clasped his hands together and nodded as though Hades pushing Henry Cotton into a volcano made perfect sense. Then he cast his eyes around the group as if he were looking for something very valuable. “Well, then. We’ve no time to lose. Shall we?”
EIGHTEEN
Dulcie
Knight told us, well, he told Sam, (since he was giving me a wide berth), about Hades. He also told her about the Lokis, and how they were spread all around the “epicenter,” where Meg had holed herself up with the Darkness. That was where the abominations were almost definitely coming from. He described the mountains and the place with the red sky, and said that Casey had almost certainly passed through there on his way to wherever the abomination dragged him.
He further mentioned that Hades said we were running out of time.
All the while, I was busy healing myself after my run-in with the abomination, no thanks to Bram and Quillan who had both stood on the sidelines gawking at me. The stupid thing had donea pretty decent job of trying to tear my arm off. The good part about being so many different supernatural creatures, though, was that I could heal myself even faster than before.
Quillan stayed behind to give the FBI a general heads-up. If hearing a god telling us to get moving failed to convey that the shit was about to hit every fan in Splendor, nothing could have warned them. We intended to deal with the fallout of wrecked buildings and our elusion of federal custody when this was all over. Now was the time for action and bureaucracy was definitely going to interfere with that.
“There are abominations everywhere,” said Knight. We were still standing in the parking lot over the one I’d killed.
“How can you tell?” Sam asked.
“Loki neural network,” he answered, tapping his temple with his index finger. “I can see what they see if I look hard enough.”
“So, you mean they’re in your head?” asked Quillan.
Knight nodded.
Bram tsked and crossed his arms. “What an unfortunate place to be.”
Knight pointedly ignored him. “They’ve got the city covered, but they’re everywhere. In the streets mostly. And a few have gotten bolder, busting into shops and houses. We don’t have any soldiers to spare.”
“Soldiers?” Bram asked incredulously.
Henry shrugged. “I mean, it is an army.”
I was the first to catch what Knight meant. “So we’re on our own.”
He looked at me. His eyes of glacier blue were rimmed with pain which I could feel in the back of my throat. His eyes locked onto me and he nodded once. “We’re on our own.”
###
“We’re here,” said Henry. We stopped running, half of us were panting, and most of us sweating bullets. Henry stood perfectly still, as though we hadn’t just raced across the last twenty blocks, running like escaped convicts. “Are you guys okay?”
“Yeah,” I answered, breathing deeply as I looked up. The building in front of us sat in the middle of an old, largely abandoned suburb. It was promptly evacuated after the earthquakes I’d caused when I tried to kill Sam. Most of the foundations, as well as the fragile plumbing systems that ran through and around them, were hopelessly damaged beyond repair. Basically everybody in the neighborhood collectively decided it was better to move somewhere else. Splendor City Council kept promising to demolish and rebuild the city, but like most of their infrastructure projects, they still hadn’t “gotten around to it.” Even the walls of this house, though many of them still stood, were hanging at weird angles, propping up pieces of roof that was peppered with large holes.
It took me a lot longer than it should have to recognize it.
I almost laughed. Come home, the abomination had uttered.
Home.
This was my house, the place where I lived with mom until she died. I was home.
But Meg did something to it. A gnawing hunger hung like ghosts in the air, and the color of the house was different. The white walls were yellow, the ivy that customarily wreathed its windows was all wilted and mostly black, and the grass was dead. The stairs smelled like blood and the air stunk of rot. The windows were broken, and the door half unhinged.
Meg must have been here a while, and in that time, she’d been very busy. But I guess that should have been obvious.
“Meg’s in there?” asked Knight.
I found I couldn’t meet his eyes. I couldn’t even look at him. The pain I felt when I did was so much that it made it hard to breathe.
“Yeah,” Henry said.
“No question,” I added.
“Her presence is quite strong here,” Ezra agreed. His shoulders rose slowly with a breath he didn’t need to take, like he was bracing himself for whatever unpleasant thing we’d find inside.
The door creaked open in front of us. There was no wind, and no one on the other side who could have pulled it open. Maybe it wasn’t quite closed, or latched wrong, and the floor was slanted enough to let the forces of gravity do its thing. But still, it was creepy.
Cold air poured out of the doorway onto the porch. I tasted something sour in the back of my throat that reached all the way into my stomach, like something was rotting inside there.
We all looked at each other and nodded once, and the people who carried guns were poised and ready to shoot before we went in. What we found made me sick.
The walls were gone. The living room, the kitchen, and a dining room were once divided by soft green walls, but now they were missing. It was just one big, open, broken space. I saw furniture I didn’t recognize: a couch and a hideous matching pink armchair were torn in pieces, their stuffing ripped out and their wooden supports snapped in half. They stuck out like flagless masts on sinking ships. The refrigerator was lying on its side, its door torn clean off, the sterile white light casting long shadows across the floor. The cabinets were open, emptied, and looked as if they were busted apart with sledgehammers. Maybe it was by the fists of newly born monsters still struggling to get the hang of their hodgepodge bodies. The stair railing was half-gone too, and pieces of wood were carelessly strewn up and down the steps lined with torn carpet. Some of them appeared to have been chewed on. Two lightbulbs remained attached to the ceiling fan, one of them flickering weakly, the other humming incessantly with too much electricity.
A shadow was hunched at the end of the room. Muttering softly, and facing the wall, its dark, matted hair tumbled down its back to the floor. The whole house smelled like blood.
Dark lumps were piled all around the hunched figure—bodies, some still whole, some in pieces, but all in various states of decay. Some were creatures I’d never seen before; others were criminals I vaguely remembered arresting years ago for minor indiscretions; while still others were civilians whose faces I recognized from the passports they filed with us before they could travel to and from the Netherworld. I recognized a few people from Meg’s parties: the draconian and werewolf lords who were so excited about retaking the Netherworld from the ANC; and Sebastian, Meg’s vampiric manservant, the one I’d slept with so often when I was under Meg’s glamour and control.
At seeing Sebastian, I felt like I wanted to throw up and a host of memories of a time I wasn’t in control of my body suddenly wafted through my mind like the rotting smell of death.
And then I saw Casey, cold and still on the floor against one wall, dark blood either splattered across his mouth or dribbling out of it, I couldn’t tell. His arms were blue with the glyphs and lines of Siphon magic, and he was struggling to keep whatever Meg did to him from ripping him into pieces.
“She wants his heart,” Bram whispered next to me, quietly enough that only Meg and I could hear. “The mist is inside him, slowly turning him to stone. I do not know how long his government magic can resist and hold it off.”
Beside me, Sam sucked in a breath. She hadn’t heard us, but she saw Casey. Thankfully, she had the presence of mind not to move towards him. Clapping her hands over her mouth, she closed her eyes for a minute, as if she
were trying not to scream. She was trying to get a hold of herself.
I looked at her and nodded, letting her know that it wouldn’t do any of us any good if she lost her shit. We had to do this right. Casey’s life obviously depended on it.
The shadow moved and giggled.
“Dulcie,” Meg said. But she wasn’t speaking to me. She had to know we were here, but the words came out more as a chant, or a prayer, the kind of thing you’d use to fend off evil spirits. “Dulcie, Dulcie, Dulcie…” She swayed back and forth, slouching over something big and grey. She lifted her hand, and a needle and steel thread flashed between her fingers. She gave it a sharp tug and the thread snapped.
“Breathe,” she said. The room got darker, a single light flickered, and the walls creaked and groaned like an old ship.
The thing in her lap gurgled.
A monstrous, silvery head lifted itself off the ground and peered around Meg with black eyes and black teeth. “Sister,” it said. This one had no trouble speaking. Apparently, Meg was getting much better at making them. “Sister is here.”
Meg stiffened and turned slowly to face us. Her smile split her face nearly in half. “Dulcie,” she said as she stood, the abomination standing with her, lumbering to its enormous clawed feet.
Meg was paper-pale and gaunt, horribly haunting in a way that suggested how pretty she might have been before. Veins pulsed and flickered under her skin like dark strips of sputtering neon, black as ink, spilling from the long, bleeding lines on her arms and face. It looked like she’d been scratching herself. Her hands went to her arms and she started smearing the blood with her palms. When they came away, they were black as pitch.
“Sweet Dulcie.” Meg’s words sounded like creaking metal, tinny and difficult to understand. She reached for me with both hands, her palms up, darkness falling from between her fingers like water. There was something wrong about her smile, not to mention, her whole face. Her bones were bent and crooked, as if she broke them and they healed the wrong way.
“You’ve come home,” she said again. “Home.”
“No,” I answered as I lifted my gun and fired. A second too late, I remembered that it wasn’t full of dragon’s blood anymore, but dragon saliva. If it couldn’t kill me, it definitely couldn’t kill a Dark-amped Meg.
The bullet struck her dead center in her forehead, and her head snapped back. She ever so slowly, lifted her head back up. Black blood rolled out from beneath the bullet hole in thin, glistening streams. Her smile was fixed, but her eyes were twitching now, and changing colors, but returning to black all the way through.
“Why…?” She cocked her head. “Would you do that?”
“Shit,” I answered.
Meg looked at the people behind me and seemed to see them for the first time. Her expression shrank from clinical joy to demonic fury. “Oh.” She waved her hand and stared at me, unblinking, but she wasn’t talking to me anymore. “Forgive me,” she said. “They are not ready, but I require your service.”
Of course I had no idea what she was talking about.
Black water and smoke crawled into the living room from the front door, the broken windows, and dripped down the holes in the ceiling, falling and fizzling into smoke. Drop by drop they filled the limp bodies in the room, and the bodies started to move.
Fuck.
the bodies clearly weren’t ready. These bodies were decaying, and whatever Meg did to the abomination I’d just fought with to stave off its decay she definitely hadn’t done to these. They were mostly in one piece and had at least one functioning heart, but there wasn’t much more to say in their favor. Their skin was grey, their stomachs bloated, their eyes yellow and vacant. Jaws hung limply, the nerves that commanded those muscles now rashly degraded beyond use.
Everyone took a small step backwards. Everyone but Knight and me, and we stepped forward, both of us breathtakingly furious.
The bodies that could speak opened their mouths and crooned, “Si…sss…ter…” None of them could completely get the word out.
Meg blinked at me and gestured broadly to her shambling army. “Kill all but your sister,” she said, clearly speaking to them and not to me. “Destroy them.” Her head twitched sharply at an angle and her smile returned full-force.
“Don’t worry, Dulcie,” she said, sweet as ashes and caramel. “Everything will be all right soon.”
Knight was the first to move. He tackled the abomination closest to Meg and they started rolling. Around me, everyone else scattered, taking up positions on the walls or, in Bram’s case, the middle of the room. I heard the sounds of shooting and breaking bones of the poorly animated bodies waddling towards us. The bodies weren’t preserved, and their exaggerated decay made it ridiculously easy for those with extreme strength to pull off their heads—but that was all Bram and Ezra could do unless they wanted to fill the whole house with that awful, cold fire.
Meg turned to Knight, baring her teeth with red eyes.
“Meg,” I said but I never moved.
She paused and turned to me just in time. My fist connected perfectly with her nose.
Anyone else would have broken a hand on her face, but she spent an inordinate amount of time and resources making me beyond powerful. Her bones cracked underneath my fist like papier-mache under a rock. Meg reeled backwards and screamed, putting her hands over her nose. She pulled them away to glare at me and snarl, and I saw a thin, black line trailing out from one nostril.
I closed my eyes, focusing for a second, and endured the cracking and bending in my bones and skin. When I opened them again, I was slightly taller. I could also feel my teeth which were sharper, my canines lengthened. My eyes were bigger and more yellow, casting a faintly sour light onto Meg’s face. I flexed my fingers and felt my nailbeds elongating into claws, which were long and sharp, glinting in the dim illumination. I didn’t go fully werewolf but this was the furthest into the transformation I ever ventured.
“Oh, Dulcie,” Meg said, and she relaxed a little and smiled at me with obvious pride. “Look at you.”
“Look at me,” I agreed. My voice sounded slightly off, like my vocal chords were being fed to a woodchipper.
I waited another second, expecting her to say something else, stalling. It required another god-level skeleton creature to defeat her last time, and now our only trump cards consisted of the werewolf-me and a Loki who could squish the Darkness out of existence. But he was a little busy just then.
So, my intention was to fend Meg off until Knight could pop into the fight and kill her properly. That was assuming her body now worked the same way her stupid shadows did. It was equally feasible that her body just couldn’t die now. Surrendering yourself to a cosmic violation like the Darkness had to have some physical perks, but it didn’t do any good to think about that right now. I decided to let Knight find out after he finished kicking abomination ass.
I had the thought, albeit brief and fleeting, like a flash of static on a television screen, that Knight might die in here. Hades, we all might. We’d danced with a lot of really unlikeable creatures ever since he came traipsing into Splendor all those years ago. However, this was bigger than smuggling potions and more unforgiving than my father. This was a big, angry, sludge monster that wanted the world to end immediately.
Happy thoughts, Dulcie, happy thoughts.
Step one: distract. That shouldn’t be too difficult, considering Meg’s nightmare obsession with me.
“Proud of your little monster?” I asked. Not the best opening line, but it was the first thing that came to my mind.
Meg smiled and took a few shaky steps towards me. She radiated icy cold. I expected my breath to mist in the air as she approached, but either my breath wasn’t warm enough or the cold itself wasn’t real, just another side effect of her proximity to the Dark, a Dementor sucking the life out of everything around it.
“Yes.” She reached up and I let her pet me as I stared at her with huge, unblinking eyes, noticing her face was jaundiced
under the yellow light. The shadows beneath her cheekbones and her jaw were sharp, and her eyes seemed to sink deeply into her skull. The direct light made her gauntness less exaggerated, but she still looked like something you’d uncover in a haunted house after a fire. She was deliberately designed to be terrifying, awe-inspiring, and now she represented a whole cartload of sadness and heartbreak. Like a fighter jet half buried in sand, or a cruise liner at the bottom of the ocean. There were many stories in the deep lines of her face, all of them tragedies.
The abomination screeched behind her and Knight pressed his gun into its throat before he fired. Black water gushed in a fountain from the hole. And for just a split second, it felt like old times. Like it was just Knight and me, battling evil like we’d always done. Just a couple of the good guys kicking the bad guys’ asses.
But then I was brought back to the reality of where we really were and how it wasn’t the good ol’ days anymore.
I spared a look over Meg’s shoulder and found Knight all bloody and black, panting, glowing like a goddamn lightbulb. He dug through its newly inflicted wound, hunting for the heart. The abomination screamed and moaned.
Meg didn’t seem to hear them.
“My sweet child.” She stroked my face.
I shrugged. Keep her eyes on you, keep her eyes on you, I thought.
Her shoulders shook, and she made a thin, whistling sound, a piss-poor impersonation of a laugh. “You are my child.” She lifted her other hand and placed it on my other cheek. “And you are so. Much. More.”
We might have stayed like that for the rest of the fight: me standing there panting, Meg staring imagining me disemboweling every one of her enemies. And it would have been so—if Bram hadn’t body checked her from the side.
###
Immediately, Meg went from insane proud mother to insanely pissed-off creature of the night.
If Bram wanted to ram her at any other time, I don’t think he could have managed it. Meg wasn’t just significantly older than he was (and in possession of all the terrifying vampiric powers she received at the turn of every century), she was also infested with shadows that were bound and determined to keep their worldly anchors on her feet. Now she was staring at me, and totally checked out. So he must have caught her by surprise.
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