City Infernal (29 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: City Infernal
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It was Xeke’s composite that appeared next on the screen.
“Rewards for this criminal have been doubled. He is believed to be a confederate of the Etheress and her party.”
“More bullshit,” Via whispered.
“To viewers who have just tuned in—war has broken out in Hell. Stay tuned for more updates—”
“The shit’s really flying now,” Via said. She put her arm around Cassie and grinned. “How’s it feel to be famous?”
A final terrifying newsclip showed more of the black knights butchering slews of Ushers in the flaming street. One knight, spattered in demon blood, walked right up to the camera and held up a sign:
ETHERESS! JOIN US IN VICTORY!
(III)
The darkness licked her immaculate pink skin, and so did her ecstacy.
She drooled into the peon’s agape
mouth as she rode him—in the flesh.
He had little for her to take but she took it regardless, unhesitantly, hard and fast, right there at the foot of the stairs. She was a nimble leopard, running down a clumsy moose in the field, taking it for her whimsy.
The act was so refreshing to feel it all for real, not as a subcarnation but genuine flesh on flesh, his real blood so close, her own Hellborn skin sweating along with his as she raped him in his frenzy. Her blood surged, gorging her breasts and nipples, glutting the maximum capacity of every nerve and unearthly blood vessel.
Abstain from fleshly lusts!
she quoted St. Peter in a mocking thought. Her lissome legs clenched, the perfect pink abdomen tightening in feminine ripples. Her bliss hissed out between her teeth like steam from a kettle.
Thy fleshly lusts which war against the soul!
She took him a second time, pulled him atop herself, and wrapped her sleek, pretty legs around his back. Fetid breath gusted into her face, but to the darkling, it was cologne. She crossed her ankles and mused.
I could snap the peon’s spine if I so desired. Let him drag his pitiful self around after me!
Her elegant hands girded the fat throat and squeezed till he choked and his face ballooned.
I could strangle him this very second....
Indeed, now that her spells and machination hexes had made her fully
incarnare,
this voluptuous woman of the Dead could slay the Living. But—
She knew she mustn’t forget her purpose here.
It was a divine purpose, and a sacred one. She mustn’t let her own appetites obscure the crusade she’d been intrusted with.
A final thrust, then—
There. That was good.
When she was done, she shoved him off of her, let his plump and pallid body slap to the floor. He lay there gasping, a fish out of water.
“Goddess,” he croaked up at her, trembling hands reaching out. “Don’t leave me! I am your unworthy servant forever....”
“My servant?” her windswept voice returned. “Then kneel as I anoint thee.”
The peon knelt and bowed his head as she stood and covered him with her abyssal urine.
“Make homage,” she demanded.
It was laughable how the enspelled human frantically hauled his pants up from his ankles and fumbled through his pockets. Eventually he produced a small folding knife. He opened it and held it up to her.
“Good little peon. Now cut your throat to the bone.”
With no reservation, he put the blade to the side of his neck, and just as he began to cut, she said: “Stop. This world would be far better off without a useless sack of flesh such as yourself but... I may need you. Be at my call.”
“Yes, yes! Thank you, my Goddess!”
Now, she thought, looking around with her bottomless eyes.
For the task at hand.
She traipsed to the long room where the humans prepared their meals, examining the strange implements concealed in the many drawers and cupboards.
Her grin faded.
But there were no torches here, no candles or oil lamps or flint.
“Sperm, sweat, spit, and blood,” she whispered the elements of humanity, and then the elements of nature: “Air, water, earth.... But no fire.”
This Deadpass must be destroyed by fire—of this she’d been commanded.
But how?
she wondered, frustrated.
Her ungainly acolyte shuffled to her, preposterously holding his pants up to his waist. “Goddess! Goddess! I’m here!”
“Go away, you useless drone,” she replied, contemplating the predicament. “You should be fed to lions. You should be trussed and cooked on a spit. Do not annoy me further, or you’ll receive far worse.”
“But-but,” he blabbered, “I live to serve you! Is this what you need?”
His fat fingers held up a tiny silver box.
Curious,
she thought and took it.
And what might this worldly trinket be?
The darkling wasn’t quite sure. The box had the strangest word engraved on it. “What does this word mean, peon—” her sleek finger pointed—“this word right here?”
The word was: ZIPPO
(IV)
“Fuckin-A,” Cassie muttered a rare profanity. The newsclips of the rebel war in the city blurred in her mind.
It’s all happening because of me....
“Watch out,” Via said, alarmed. “It’s a Were-Jackal—it can smell us.”
They’d skirted the trail up to a stand of scaled trees. But Cassie could see what Via meant. Some doglike beast was trotting across the scorched soil, heading right for them. A foot-long red tongue hung from a wide lower jaw rimmed by teeth like masonry nails. White foam hung off the jaw in dangling strings.
“Do it,” Via ordered. “Hurry. That thing’ll give us away to the Diviners.”
Cassie, confused, tried to direct her energy. She continued to peer at the animal as it trotted closer. “But—I can’t. It’s a dog. It’d be like killing somebody’s pet.”
“That pet is a Were-Jackal,” Via sternly said. “It’ll eat your liver. If it gets up here, our cover’s blown. The three of us’ll get scarfed down like a bag of Snausages. Then you’ll never get to see your sister again.”
Now Cassie noted the animal’s features. It had something akin to a human head on a jackal’s body. She gritted her teeth and glared at it.
The beast stopped, backed off a few feet. But that was all.
Then it re-commenced its trek up the hill.
“Try it again!” Via insisted. “We don’t have till friggin’ Christmas!”
Cassie let her mind be filled with the most vicious image: the Were-Jackal tearing into them, snarling, its great jaws pulling their innards out like stuffing from a pillow.
Then she glared again—
The beast yelped once, then fell over, its rib cage suddenly crushed by the force of Cassie’s mind. Its eyes popped and its mouth vomited a slew of maggot-ridden blood.
Oh, man. I am really getting sick of this Etheress stuff.
But it was a smidgen of good luck for a change. The beast’s lone yelp hadn’t been heard by the Extipicists.
Cassie, Via, and Hush glanced down the hill’s smoke-misted slope and saw that the pair of attendant demons had lashed their victims to a single pole in the ground. The two human subjects tremored in terror, their body fat quaking. The Extipicists stood aside, perfectly still in their white hoods and cloaks.
Then the demon conscripts began to flense the subjects.
Aw, GROSS!
With great curved blades, the Conscripts began to deftly shear the fat off the chests and bellies of the subjects. The subjects, understandably, screamed to high Heaven. When the fat had been parted and trimmed off, this left the bare abdominal walls, which the demons then sliced into with vigor.
Armfuls of entrails were removed from the rents.
“Come on,” Via urged. “We’ll be back at the Deadpass by the time they get the reading.”
The three of them began to jog up the trail and disappeared into more malformed woods.
“What were they doing?” Cassie asked.
“They throw the guts on the ground and the Extipicists analyze them. It’s an ancient art that goes back to Mesopotamian times, the most accurate form of telling the future,” Via explained. “We’re safe for now and because we’ll be through the Deadpass by the time they make their reading, they won’t know we were ever here. In other words, they won’t be waiting for us when we come back.”
This at least sounded heartening.
They were approaching the Rive, Cassie could sense it now, her Ethereal perceptions ever sharpening. Via blew the tiny flames out on the fingertips of the Hand of Glory. She gave it to Hush. “Here’s your hand back. Put it in your pocket.”
Hush silently mouthed a sarcastic Thanks
a lot!
Cassie went first. She wasn’t afraid this time, she was eager. The Rive sucked against her, bringing its variants of temperature and pressure. The red twilight behind her turned momentarily black. She felt gritty friction against her skin, and suddenly—
Home at last ...
Via and Hush emerged behind her. Now they stood back in the Living World, amid its
normal
forest, and its
normal
moon and night sky.
Just up ahead stood the house, Cassie’s home.
“Wait a minute,” Via said. “Do you see that? What’s—”
But Cassie had already noticed, and she was already running up the hill. In a side window, she spotted the licking orange light.
The house was on fire.
PART THREE
MACHINATIONS
Chapter Thirteen
(I)
Smoke billowed from an open window on the lower level, and when Cassie barged into the house through the side door, the kitchen wall was being rapidly eaten by flame.
“Fire!” she screamed. “Dad! Wake up!”
Smoke stung her eyes. The fire was crackling, crawling noisily up the wall and moving outward. Desperate, she feebly filled a pot with water from the sink and threw it at the flames.
There was just a faint sizzle,
and the fire kept moving.
“Cassie, you’ve got to put this fire out!” Via yelled.
“They
did this!”
Cassie hurled another useless bucket of water. “Who!”
“Lucifer! He sent someone to do this. If the Deadpass burns down, you’ll never be able to get back to the city!”
Unfortunately, there was nothing Via and Hush could do to help; back in the Living World, they were discorporeals.
Or were they?
“There!” Via said. “Cut yourself!”
She was pointing to the set of kitchen knifes in a block holder.
“What?”
“Just nick your hand with a knife, then we’ll be able to help!”
The fire was growing before her eyes; it wouldn’t take long before it consumed the room, and even if she called the fire department right now, there was no way they could get here before the house was gone.
Having no idea what she was doing, she took a steak knife and flinched as she made a half-inch cut on the top of her hand. Via immediately licked some blood off the cut, then so did Hush.
Then they too were hurling buckets of water at the fire.
There was no time to ponder the details. As her friends cycled pots of water from the sink, Cassie rushed into the utility room and returned with a small fire extinguisher. Within a few minutes, the three of them managed to douse the fire.
“We did it!” Via celebrated.
“Damn,” Cassie said. She opened several doors and windows, to vent out the smoke, then sat down on the kitchen table, exhausted. “I thought you were just spirits on this side, can’t touch anything.”
“Blood from an Etheress gives us a temporary incarnation,” Via explained. “But it only lasts for a few minutes.” She held up a pot, and after a few more seconds, it fell through her hand. “But one thing I’m sure of—there’s been a
full
incarnation here tonight.”
Hush tugged on Via’s leather jacket, pointed to the small pouch that hung from her belt.
“Good idea,” Via said. She dug her fingers into the pouch and retrieved a small purplish gemstone. “This is a Delueze Stone. If anyone from Hell has been here, this’ll prove it.” She leaned over, walking slowly around the kitchen, the stone thrust out between her fingers. It was as if she were wielding an ultraviolet light. The stone itself didn’t glow, but the marks on the floor did.
“See? Footprints?”
Cassie squinted down. On the kitchen floor, a line of bare footprints led out. Each print gave off a faint purple glow.

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