Night Call (Book 2): Demon Dei (40 page)

Still, I didn’t think any sentence handed down by a judge would be as bad as having his soul tortured in Hell by a Demon Lord with a personal grudge.

I closed my eyes and reached for the seesaw of my psyche. Events of the past eighteen hours combined with no sleep for thirty-six hours meant I was pretty much tapped. The psychic powers were still there, they just wouldn’t pack much of a punch. I didn’t think I’d really need them where we were going—all I foresaw was a lot of violence and name-calling—but I levelled out my Zen seesaw regardless. A calm head never hurt anyone.

Well, except the victims of pre-meditated murder, I guess.

Cool, calm and collected, I went back inside and found Amaya. “Let’s do this wild and crazy thing.”

Amaya blurred into her Lila shape. “Let’s.”

I didn’t bother saying goodbye to Roberts or Erin. They knew what was happening and seeing their disapproving faces would only weigh on one side of the seesaw and I had no extra-happy to balance it with. So human-Amaya and I left in the Monaro, but not before Charles and Sue did a little double take at the awesomely sexy woman I left with, who was not the one I’d arrived with. What do you know? Seems I would have had that extra-happy counterweight after all.

“Where are we going?” I asked Amaya.

“To the jetty at Woody Point.”

“There’s a rift there?”

“A small one, but it’ll do for our purposes.”

I snorted. Seems like the quiet old ‘
Cliffe did have all the features of a big city.

Woody Point was a quaint part of Redcliffe, on the south-east corner of the peninsula. There was a fairly equal combination of older and newer homes, a few boutique shops, a decent pub and a couple of nice restaurants. A new high-rise had just been completed on the water front and I parked in its shadow. We studied the jetty.

“Couple of witnesses,” I noted, pointing out the folk fishing off the old structure.

“I can hide us,” Amaya said.

“Booyah,” I muttered and we got out.

In a split second, Amaya shifted to demon shape and disappeared, then reappeared.

“We’re both invisible now,” she said, stalking toward the jetty. “Keep up or you’ll fall out of the light shield.”

I hurried along, hastily transferring some of the extra paintball rifle cartridges from the knapsack to my pockets as we went. Despite me being able to see them the fishermen didn’t even blink as we passed. Neat. Vampires of a certain age and strength could bend the light around them, blurring their movements, but you could still see them, if you were lucky. This was true invisibility it seemed.

At the end of the jetty, I stopped. Amaya didn’t. She vaulted the railing in a smooth, easy motion and walked on air for another couple of meters.

“It’s here,” she announced, pointing to a spot somewhere between her feet and the gently moving ocean.

I looked and saw nothing.

Amaya crouched and pulled Asmodeus’ feather from her belt. Slowly she lowered it point first toward the water. About a foot above the waves, its tip disappeared.

Pulling it out again, Amaya looked at me. “Once I’ve opened the rift, you’ll have to move quickly. It won’t stay open for long. A couple of seconds at most.”

I nodded. “Then we’ll have a hike to wherever Asmodeus is, right.”

“No. When I call up the power in this feather, it will reach for the same power on the other side. The most concentrated mass of power it can find. It won’t lock onto the other feather I used to get here. We won’t have to find Asmodeus. The feather will do that for us.”

I made a few, completely involuntary noises of understanding while my brain did its best to tip me all the way over into screaming panic. Seems I’d done too good a job of balancing
up the various parts of my psyche. I didn’t run. I just clambered up onto the railing, pulled out the Cougar and paintball rifle and nodded to Amaya.

“Right.” She sounded disappointed at my choice.

Couldn’t blame her really. The sane parts of me were equally disappointed.

Amaya began calling up her power. It hit me like a tidal wave and threatened to upset my seesaw like nothing else yet had. She began to glow a brilliant blue and somewhere far behind me, Mercy stirred. In Amaya’s hand, the black feather glistened like an oil slick. Power in lightning blue, electric purple and neon green rippled along its length, moving up and down, like a conductor building up a charge. As it increased in scintillating waves, so too did the disturbance I felt from Mercy. The link was flooded with energy feedback from the raw demon power. I could feel her, sunk deep into the dark of vampire sleep but struggling to wake up, a cognizant mind trapped in a paralysed body. I knew Erin was there, sitting against the wall outside the cage, my one good kitchen knife in her hand, watching the seemingly inert vampire on the bed. If Erin had had even a touch of psychic ability, she wouldn’t have been so complacent. A storm roiled beneath the calm surface, a manic need to tear, rend, fight, kill. If this went on for much longer, Mercy would wake up and she wouldn’t be polite about it. I hoped Erin had locked the cage door.

Then it happened. The painfully bright light show reached its peak. I saw the waves of colour burst from the end of the incandescent feather and strike the air above the water. As the feather had, the streaks of energy disappeared into the rift and then the world tore apart.

A freaking hole in the fabric of the world appeared. It was black and edged in the green, blue and purple of Asmodeus’ power. Air rushed into it in a momentary gale and then bellowed backwards, bringing with it a foul stench. There was a tortured ringing in my ears, like a hundred primary school kids all blowing wrong notes on their recorders at once.

“Now!” Amaya shouted and dropped into the hole.

Without giving myself the chance to think once, let alone twice, I dived off the jetty and into the rift.

I came down on something very soft. It moved and suddenly I was in the air again. Something caught me across the chest and my trajectory changed. Instead of going up, I went sideways and came down. This time on something hard and painfully unyielding, but all things considered, better than something soft and able to fight back.

I rolled over and took a quick look around. We had landed in some sort of parlour. It was sculptured from marble—or something very much like it—and filled with nooks and crannies of all sizes and shapes. There were a variety of shallow and deep pits in the floor, all of them lined with furs and plump, comfy looking cushions. Coloured, shaded lamps lit the place in hazy, dim light. Lounging about the place were several succubi and incubi, in all the colours of the rainbow, and some in colours I had no name for. While they looked relaxed I could feel the charged atmosphere, the tense anticipation that generally preceded a big ol’ barny. Or perhaps it was just the overwhelming incense that charged the atmosphere. It was heavy, earthy, a little spicy and a lot intoxicating.

Lord of Lust indeed.

And speak of the devil...

“This,” Asmodeus said as he stood in front of his plush throne, “is unexpected.”

In full on corporeal form, Asmodeus looked much as he did in imp-moulded form, or in Karl’s-head form, but there was something extra, something… more about him here. A faint blue sheen played over his body, rippling like sunlight on water. His feathered wings shimmered with green and purple and blue; eyes like deep sapphires cut with diamonds. Yet shadows clung to him, draped from his shoulders like a perfectly tailored cloak. It made you think of warm, dark places and all the sorts of things that happened in warm, dark places; all the naughty things; all the socially taboo things that nevertheless felt so good; all the wicked things; all the bad things you could imagine and in that warm, dark place there would be no consequences other than those agreed upon.

Asmodeus chuckled and that sound set into me, a hook piercing the top layer of skin and pulling me toward him. I stumbled a step forward before I realised what was happening.

“No,” Amaya said.

The single word burst the heady bubble around me. I pulled in a deep breath of the thick, scented air, tasting under the earthy pleasantness a sharp, bitter accent that stung the back of my throat. It cut into my mind like a blade and Asmodeus’ influence fell away.

I stopped before I could take another step, shaking my head clear of the last of fog. The acrid quality of the air bit into my nose, burned on my tongue. I tried to swallow it, but it was back with the next breath I took. It wasn’t part of the incense, but something naturally in the air in this realm, in Hell. Not quite sulphurous but close enough to make the comparison worthwhile. Either way, it put a time limit on my stay. Right now, it was irritating, but much more of it, and I’d probably suffocate. On the plus side, it worked against whatever mojo Asmodeus was trying to spin.

Clear headed—relatively—I focused on the room again. Amaya stood before Asmodeus, her wings half spread in a gesture that struck me as defiant. Head back, eyes blazing, she stared up at her father and Lord, chin definitely stubborn. Asmodeus’ throne was on a dais,
elevated a good three feet above the floor. He looked down at her, mirroring her stance. The darkness around him had deepened while the glimmering lights on his wings had intensified.

“I knew you would return to me,” he said, voice a soft contrast to the hardness of his body language.

“I didn’t come for you,” she snapped. “We’re here for the boy.”

“The boy?” Asmodeus waved a hand at a curtain on the far side of his dais. “This boy?”

The curtain fluttered aside and revealed Rufus.

Asmodeus may have only taken his soul from the human realm, but it was Rufus chained to the wall, naked, shivering, crying. I guessed Asmodeus had made a body of imps to house Rufus’ soul, and it was a perfect replica, at least as far as I could tell, even down to the burn scars. As I’d thought, the burns stretched from his head, down his neck and shoulder to his arm and all the way to his mangled hand. But they also curved around his skinny, hairless chest, obliterating his nipples, and down to his left hip.

“Rufus,” I whispered and ran toward him.

Asmodeus held up a hand and I slammed into an invisible barrier. Instinctively, I went sideways and came up against another wall. Backwards, another wall. Teeth gritted, I didn’t give Asmodeus the pleasure of seeing me test for the fourth wall.

“I think you will find I have devised a perfect punishment for the boy,” Asmodeus murmured, immensely pleased with himself. “Watch.”

And to my horror, I did.

Rufus’ burn scars faded, leaving pink, fresh, smooth skin that grew to match the rest of his pale body. He had five fingers on his left hand, two ears, a symmetrical jaw. Hair grew on the left side of his head, his chest sprouted a few, sparse curls between his restored pectorals. For a moment, Rufus was whole and normal, but the boy sobbed and struggled, shaking his head.

“No, no, no,” he panted. “I’m sorry. Please, no. No, not again.”

A spark flared at the top of his head and Rufus screamed, his throat torn by the raw panic and pain. The fire crawled across the top of his head, slipping down the left side in slow, deliberate waves, eating away the new hair, melting the skin beneath. The ear blackened and vanished. Flames licked along his jaw and down his neck. Rufus tossed himself against the chains holding him to the wall, pleading for release, for an end. But there was no respite. The flames moved almost leisurely, seeming to caress him, stroke him even as it ate his skin and the boy got an erection. Horror was there in the panic and he slammed his body against the hard wall, smacking his head into the rock, but no matter his efforts, he couldn’t knock himself out and the fire continued down his body, leaving open, steaming wounds in its wake that slowly healed over in painful, tight scars.

By the time his hand was reduced to two fingers and the fire guttered and died on his hip, Rufus was exhausted, hanging limp and whimpering.

I swallowed the bile that had risen in my throat, wishing for the sulphurous toxin in large enough amounts it would sear the scent of roasting meat from my nose. Oh God. How long had I wasted today with waiting for ambulances, taking that insufferable idiot Carson to the airport, going home… All that time dicking around while Rufus was here, suffering this over and over. Things began tipping to the bad end of the seesaw.

“This boy,” Asmodeus spat. “This murderer and thief. He summoned you, my daughter, bound you, forced you to act against your will. Have you come to punish him yourself?”

Amaya looked from the pathetic image of Rufus—who had done all those things to her—to her father and I could see the struggle. Amaymon was a demon and saw nothing wrong in what Asmodeus was doing. It was a harsh, bloody life in Hell. Hurt or be hurt. If you manage to move up a rung, expect to fall three when your enemies catch up to you. Punishment might not fit the crime, but it satisfied the punisher and that was all that mattered.

But. She wasn’t just
Amaymon. She was Amaya as well and it was Amaya who gritted her teeth, who had tears in her eyes. There was nothing humane—nothing human—in what Asmodeus did here. It was torture for the sake of his pleasure, nothing more. This was not punishment. It was damnation.

Amaya couldn’t answer Asmodeus, so I did.

“We’re here to take him home,” I said, my voice rough from the air and effort to suppress the red, blinding need to hurt something. “He’ll be punished for his crimes by his own people.”

Asmodeus cast me a sidelong glance. “For his crimes against your people, you mean. What about his crimes against me? He bound my daughter, made her his slave. He stole my research.”

“Your research?” I asked sarcastically.

“Of course it was my research. I am the master of arithmetic and geometry. It was I who gave Geraldine Anne Davis the solutions to her equations. I solved the riddle. Not her. It was my research and he stole it.”

I shook my head and tsk tsk tsked. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, dude, but Rufus didn’t take the research, whosever it might be rightfully. You see, Gerry woke up to you. She wasn’t dumb enough to trust you completely. She worked out you’d taken over Karl and that you were there for more than the academic glory. Gerry stole your research. Not Rufus. And she destroyed it all, Asmodeus.” Want a cheap adrenaline rush? Try lying to a Demon Lord. I hurtled on before I could see if it worked or not. “You might know all about quantum physics and algebra and stuff, but you ain’t so smart. Thought you could fool Lucifer by making yourself King of my world and yet you couldn’t even pull the wool over the eyes of a couple of humans, one of them an emotionally stunted, self-consumed teenager.” I gave a derisive snort. “Sucks to be you, Ass-holeus.”

Remember the way I goaded leftover-Asmodeus into a fight in Karl’s head? Well, this might be a bit surprising, but this subtle, razor-sharp witticism was aimed for the same result.

Guess what.

I got it.

The invisible walls dropped and Asmodeus, quiet and deadly, sprang for me. The seesaw tipped and everything took on a red tinge at the same instant it all became stark and bright and crystal clear. Behind Asmodeus, the lounging demons burst into furious motion, striking for Amaya—except for one.

As I twisted to face Asmodeus side on, rifle lifting to fire point-blank into his quickly oncoming face, I saw one incubus standing in the far corner of the room, arms crossed, wings folded, surveying the burgeoning chaos with a small, utterly bemused smile.

What the…?

But then Asmodeus was too close for comfort. I fired the rifle early and the balloon hit him in the chest. He barely noticed it. Smoke curled up but that was about it. I dived to the side, rolling and reaching for the bag of sea salt. Black wings snapped out and Asmodeus whipped around so fast I didn’t see it. I just knew he was facing me again, snarling. I aimed a kick for his gut, missed, staggered and accidentally fired into his wing. The paint bit into the delicate feathers, burning them away. Asmodeus howled and I managed to spray a handful of salt into his face. I followed it with an entire cartridge of paintballs. Even as he backed off, hissing, he managed to dodge most of my shots. Still, by the time he got a clue and folded his wings behind him, they had more than a few smoking holes in them.

The rifle clicked dry and I switched to the Cougar. Bullets pounded into Asmodeus with about as much effect as they’d had on Amaya, but he kept backing up and I followed, growling. Deep below the raging, red part of my mind that was presently in the driving seat, I knew it was a trap, but the gleeful berserker didn’t care. He was getting to hurt the bad thing. This was Fun.

Asmodeus reached one of the pits in the floor. He stepped back one last time and stopped. Damaged wings snapped out wide and he gave a deep throated, wordless roar.

Plump, tasselled cushions exploded out of the pit, torn to smithereens as imps—dozens of imps—broke free and raced for me. I shot at them but they were small, fast moving targets and very hard to hit. Several of them rammed me at once and down I went.

I recall saying once ‘imps
schmimps’.

Never again.

The little blighters clawed and bit and struck so fast I couldn’t catch any of them. The thick material of my pants and shirt kept most of their attacks from breaking skin, but my hands suffered. I pushed at them, grabbed at legs and wings, trying to toss them away. Claws and teeth scored my hands and wrists. I could feel them along my legs, scratching and gnashing. Kicking dislodged one or two, but the rest held on like the biggest bastard ticks you ever saw. Blood slicked my hands from open wounds, making holding anything harder. It hurt, too. Deep aching, stinging pain that quickly cramped my fingers and wrists. Made grabbing the dropped Cougar very difficult, but when I had it, and several more imps gnawing on my stomach, I put the barrel against the head of the nearest one and pulled the trigger.

Well. I wanted to pull the trigger, at least. Not a lot happened, despite the urgent commands from my brain. My finger just wouldn’t move. Growling in raging frustration, I settled for beating the little shit over the head with the heavy gun. It squealed and backed off, slashing at me as it went.

Using my arms as blunt force instruments, I managed to clear a few off my chest. Down at my feet, which were starting to feel a bit numb thanks to some lucky shots by the imps, one tiny critter, not much larger than my bare foot, sat on my ankle and meticulously picked at the knotted shoelace of my boot, tongue poked out the side of its mouth in concentration. I threw the Cougar and collected it in the side of the head, knocking it flying. Fucker.

At my knee, another industrious bastard was chewing on a bulging pocket. It broke through the material and its teeth clacked against the plastic of a paintball cartridge. With a grunt of effort, it cracked the cartridge and several paintballs popped in its mouth. Gurgling a terrified scream, the imp fell over backwards, mouth melting under a coating of green paint.