City Infernal (26 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: City Infernal
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It crushed Cassie to witness the torture.
Xeke didn’t willingly go to the Constabs,
she realized.
They tortured him for the information....
She would do anything to make the torture stop.
But then, on the screen, the Golems began to remove the rocks, and Xeke groaned in relief. Suddenly a vaguely recognizable face appeared, a narrow face with a monocle in one eye. “Cassie Heydon,” the figure said in a sharp nasally voice. “I am Commissioner of Torture Himmler. I’ll have you know that there is a lofty bounty out on your head. My Constables are hunting you this very moment; they are on every street comer, in every alleyway, and in every subway station. It is impossible for you to escape the city, so let me appeal to your better judgment. As you can see, I have stopped all torture procedures against your friend. If you turn yourself in, I will guarantee your safety as well as the safety of your confederates. You will all be rewarded handsomely—”
“Don’t listen to him, Cassie,” Via said.
The Commissioner continued: “I have also ordered all torture to cease upon
this
person too. It’s someone I believe you know....”
Cassie gasped. The station cut to another studio—another torture chamber. In the dark stone room, a woman hung suspended from shackles.
Lissa.
Cassie’s stomach clenched.
Oh my God, no....
The scene cut back to the Commissioner’s narrow face. “Your sister will also remain safe—
if
you cooperate.”
Xeke’s voice boomed in the background: “Don’t do it, Cassie! Don’t believe him! Get out of the city as fast as—”
A sudden
whack!
and then Xeke’s outburst was silenced.
“Please comply quickly,” the Commissioner suggested. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
A final cut back to Lissa, whose face looked terrified through tresses of black hair. The camera panned down to show what Lissa had been suspended over: a vat full of squirming Razor-Leeches.
“You sick BASTARDS!” Cassie yelled in outrage, and then her aura flashed brighter than ever and—
“Damn!” Via shrieked.
—the television exploded.
Pieces rained down on them. When the cloud of smoke cleared, Cassie stared around in the silence. “Sorry,” she peeped.
“Try to control yourself,” Via said, coughing in the smoke.
“How can I? If I don’t do what they say, they’re going to torture my sister—for
eternity.
And you saw what they were doing to Xeke.”
Via and Hush exchanged more suspicious glances. “I’m still not too confident about Xeke,” Via revealed. “It’s all too convenient. I still think he’s in on it.”
The notion seemed absurd to Cassie. “How can you say that? They were
torturing
him, for God’s sake! We can’t blame him for telling the police about us! He was suffering incredible pain!”
“That’s not even what I’m talking about. They
want
you to think exactly what you’re thinking now—that he’s still on our side. And when you refuse to turn yourself in, what do you want to bet that we’ll run into Xeke somewhere along the line? And he’ll have some jive about how he escaped.”
“That’s crazy,” Cassie objected. “And who said I was
refusing
to turn myself in?”
Via and Hush grinned at each other, Hush laughing silently, Via aloud.
“What’s so funny?”
“Jesus, Cassie. You’re the most naive person I ever met,” Via went on. “You
believe
that guy?”
“Why not? I’ll turn myself in, then we’ll all be safe. He even said we’d be rewarded.”
More laughter. “Cassie, you’d buy tea from Lucrezia Borgia. If you turned yourself in, Lucifer’s Warlocks would put you in an Auric Press in two seconds. They’d squeeze all your Ethereal energy out and transfer it right into a Power Dolmen. That’s why they want you, to use you like a supernatural battery so that Satan and his most powerful demons can be fully incarnated into the Living World. And your sister? They’d drop her into that vat of Razor-Leeches and leave her there for a thousand years, and me and Hush too.”
“Well ...” Cassie had to think. “All right, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll
act
like I’m turning myself in, but then we’ll rescue Lissa and Xeke.”
Another round of laughter. “Right. We’re gonna rescue Lissa and Xeke from the Commission of Judicial Torture, the Constabulary’s biggest stronghold. You’d have an easier time busting someone out of a supermax prison. It’s impossible.”
“No it’s not,” Cassie insisted. “I’ll just use my—my—” She pointed to the exploded television. “My projection powers. Anyone who gets in our way, I’ll-I’ ll ... blow up their heads.”
Via and Hush couldn’t stop laughing, which was really beginning to piss Cassie off. “Against Bio-Wizards and Warlocks? They’d eat you for breakfast, Cassie,” Via told her. “And the security troops all wear incantated armor. If you projected against
them,
it would be like shooting paperclips with rubber bands at a cinder-block wall. Believe me, it won’t work.”
Cassie flared, “Then what the hell good are my Etheress powers!”
“You’re an
untrained
Etheress. You don’t even know how to use what you’ve got. You’d have to practice for years before you could take on the Constabulary. It’s an intricate psychic art; you’ve got to train your mind and your spirit. You don’t just walk into Hell one day and start blowing up heads.”
Cassie’s enthusiasm deflated at once. But then Hush got up quickly, whipped out her pencil, and began writing on the wall:
What about an inversion hex?
“That’d be great, Hush,” Via said. “But we’d need a Power Relic, and we don’t have any way to—”
Her sentence stopped as if guillotined. Then her face beamed. “You’re right! With Cassie, we
could
do it!”
“Do what!” Cassie demanded.
Via got up. “We have to go back to your house right away.”
“But how?” Cassie asked the logical question. “The guy on TV said that every Constab in the district is hunting me. They’re even staking out the subway stations. How can we get back to Blackwell Hall without being caught first?”
This time, the glances that Via and Hush exchanged were downright grim. “How do we do this, Hush?” Via asked.
Hush wrote:
draw straws, I guess
“No, I’ll do it,” Via decided.
“You’ll do
what?”
Cassie insisted. Once again she felt like everyone knew what was going on but her.
But before an answer could be made—
tap tap tap
The three of them all looked fretfully to the door. Someone was knocking.
“Hold tight,” Via whispered. “If it was Constabs, they wouldn’t bother knocking.” Then she went to the door, looked out the peephole. “What do you want?”
A gruff male voice replied. “It’s the manager. You breakin’ stuff in here? Open up.”
Via rolled her eyes at the broken television. “Ah, just a little accident. We’ll pay for the damage.”
“Open up,” and then a key could be heard in the lock.
“Damn it!” Via muttered and stepped back. “Everybody be cool, he’s coming into the room.”
The door opened and in walked a fairly normal looking bald man in a suit. He didn’t look happy to begin with, and when he noticed the shattered TV, he looked even
less
happy.
“What the hell are you silly bitches doin’ in here!” he complained rather loudly. “What’s this look like? A pig sty
?
”
“Uh, no, not a pig sty,” Via said. “A whorehouse in Hell.”
“Don’t get smart, missy,” he pointed a finger at her. “You wrecked a perfectly good TV! You know how much those things cost? You think we put ’em here just for you to bust up? Huh? You think televisions grow on trees? Judas J. Priest, that was a
brand new
set.”
“It was a piece of shit. The reception sucked.”
“Oh, so that means you silly bitches can just trash it? You pay up right now—two Brutus Notes—or I call the Constabs. They won’t fuck around with the likes of you—they’ll throw all three of your asses right in the lezzie tank. Then you can spend a couple hundred years being some butch demon’s bitch and munching Troll carpet. See how you silly bitches like that.”
Via looked duped, and Cassie quickly realized the predicament. A fingernail would easily pay for the damage, but if she bit one off in front of him—
He’ll know I’m an Etheress,
Cassie thought.
“Look,” Via faltered, “we don’t have any cash right now but we’ll have some soon. I promise we’ll pay you back. I’ll write you an I.O.U.”
The manager gawped at her. “What am I, an asshole? You silly bitches come in here and trash my motel and I’m supposed to take an
I.O.U?”
Now he was stalking around the room, his hands up, ranting. “Judas J. Priest! I am just so fuckin’ sick of bein’ taken advantage of by every pimp, hooker, and hustler to walk down the street! I try to be a nice guy, and look what happens. Try to give you whores a decent place where you can make some money, and look what I get for my effort. There
ain’t no way
I’m gettin’ ripped off by a bunch of silly bitches like you!”
Guess he’s having a bad day,
Cassic thought.
But when the man turned around—his back to them—Hush jerked on Via’s sleeve and then scribbled on the wall:
Bi-facer!
Via stared at the man’s back, and then Cassie noticed something too. There seemed to be some strange fold of skin around his neck, showing within the back of his collar.
“Run!” Via yelled, and then the entire room was a frenzy. Three Trolls, seven feet tall and dressed in tidy three-piece suits, had burst into the room, wielding hatchets. Before Cassie could even react, she, Via, and Hush were cornered.
The manager stood before them, chuckling snidely.
“Who the hell are you?” Via demanded.
“You silly bitches sure are dumb. This is too easy, ain’t it, boys?”
The three Trolls chortled and nodded. Then the “manager” placed his hand on his bald head, and his fingers seemed to be pulling the skin up off his scalp.
“Bi-Facer motherfucker,” Via muttered.
The man pulled up on the skin of his scalp and in a moment his face began to move upward, until it was replaced by the other face he’d kept hidden under his collar. The first face hung in a loose flap, and now he was grinning through his
real
face.
“Nicky the Cooker,” Via revealed.
“Had ya going there, didn’t I? When my stoolies on the street spotted you, I about shit my pants. It’s been a long time, Via, and a long time that you and that punk boyfriend of yours have owed me money. Nobody rips off Nicky the Cooker.
Nobody.”
“I can pay you back,” Via stammered. “We just need a little time. I know it sounds like bullshit but it’s true, I swear.”
Nicky laughed out loud, gesturing his crew. “Can you believe the balls on this silly bitch? Huh, boys? She rips me off and now she thinks she can deal her way out!” Then his true face turned dark. “I got a reputation to maintain, and you and that punk embarrassed me. I’m Nicky the Cooker, not some pissant chump you can hoodwink.”
“Let us go. I swear you’ll get your money.”
Nicky just shook his head. “It ain’t even about the money now. Don’t you read the papers? Ain’t you seen the TV? The Constabs got a dragnet out for you, and they already got that punk boyfriend of yours.” His steely eyes darted to Cassie. “That Goldilocks little friend of yours there is an Etheress, and
I’m
gonna get the reward for turning her in.”
“Cassie?” Via said.
Cassie trembled. Her fear was paralyzing her. She tried to project a violent thought at the man but ... nothing came out.
“Uh, Cassie? A little help?”
Cassie tried again.
Nothing.
“But you and that little mute bitch,” Nicky said to Via, “you two don’t count for shit. My boys’ll chop your arms and legs off, then we’ll put the both of ya in a couple of drums. See how you silly bitches like being cooked alive in a sulphur pit for a thousand years.” Nicky crudely rubbed his crotch. “But, ya know what I’m gonna do first? I ain’t had me no nookie in a white—” and then he grabbed Via by the hair and threw her squealing onto the bed. Chuckling, he crawled on top of her, grabbing at her belt—
That’s when Cassie’s fear turned to rage.
The room glowed with silver light—so bright, the three Trolls stepped back, shielding their inhuman eyes. But then, one by one, those same eyes popped out of their sockets. One roared, blindly raising his hatchet, and when Cassie focused her gaze on his arm, the arm flew off before a geyser of ill-colored blood. “Fuckers!” she yelled. She looked at one’s abdomen, and the abdomen popped open, spilling entrails. The third Troll loped sightless about the room. Cassie focused on his waistline and then suddenly the creature was on the floor, cut in half.

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