Red Right Hand (13 page)

The Man in Black waved the knife over the chest of the man in the bed. “Hold him.”

Daniel put his hands on the man's shoulders, pinning him against the mattress. The tumor's eye blinked and rolled, the size of a grapefruit with an egg-yolk iris and a pupil black as an eclipse. Clear aqueous fluid gathered in the corners of folded lids, weeping out with every blink to run and chase down the lumps and pustules that formed the tumor's mass. Waving fibrils ringed around it like eyelashes.

The Man in Black drove his left hand down into the cavity, fingers digging deep into the mass.

He leaned back, pulling. The mass lifted with a wet sucking sound, separating from the walls of its birthing chamber. Nyarlathotep's right hand flashed, red lightning, hacking with the knife. He drove it underneath the thing, the blade slashing through the tendrils anchoring it with a squelch. More dark, brackish fluid gurgled out of them, filling the cavity like dirty dishwater in a used pot. He hacked and slashed until every tendril was severed, spattering himself with sloshing liquid.

Seconds stretched to minutes and felt as if they had stretched to hours by the time he finished. When the last tether had been cut the man on the bed slumped, spindly limbs falling loose beside him. His breathing stopped mid-inhale, dying stillborn in lungs that no longer worked.

“You killed him.”

The Man in Black didn't look up at me. “I told you he was dead before we arrived.” He waved the knife at the machines around us. “None of these measures were taken to keep him alive.” With a jerk of his shoulder he lifted the thing free from its place inside the man. “They were meant to preserve this.”

The mass throbbed, wriggling in his grip. Fluid dripped off it, splashing into the puddle inside the empty shell of the man.

Ploop!

Ploop!

Pah-loop!

Realization dawned on me. “Wait. Are you saying that each of these people has one of those things growing inside them?”

He stepped away, coat swirling around his legs. “They will be different pieces of the whole, but yes, they all have something similar incubating in their bodies.”

“Can we save them?”

His dark, impassive face stared down at me. “We can only save your world.” The knife swept around in his red right hand, indicating the rest of the beds. “These souls are lost.”

“You don't sound upset.”

He shrugged, holding the tumor with its blinking, rolling eye casually in his hand. “Your kind die, Acolyte. You are fragile, delicate, easily broken, and the entire universe is set against you. The only reason you haven't been snuffed from existence itself is your species's tenacious ability to cling to the merest
flicker
of life wherever you find it.”

“You make that sound like a bad thing.”

“Not bad. Merely annoying at times.”

“Why do you keep trying then? Why are you doing all of this if it's futile?”

He shook his head. “I never called your existence futile. Weak as you are, your kind succeeded in locking mine on the other side of the universe. Your ancestors survived the Deluge in a boat made of gopher wood and pitch built by a drunkard who had never seen the ocean! You have walked away from the seduction of nuclear annihilation and conquered the edge of space outside your world.”

He shook the tumor, droplets of fluid spattering the already-wet floor. Leaning over, his voice shifted, rising an octave as he held the tumor like an illustration. “Your kind constantly fouls the plans of beings such as this, a creature so terrible you should wither before it like flowers in a furnace. You fight and you fuck and you carry on with your little lives like a virus the universe cannot shake. You are the
purest
example of chaos I have found in unspeakable eons.” The smile that parted his face was so white it was a shock, gleaming jaggedly under his hawkish nose. His voice held the fervent rasp of a believer. “I am the Crawling Chaos. I claim you as my own, and
none
will have you but me.”

Daniel fell to his knees, hands in the air, his face beatific.

The conviction of the chaos god echoed over the rhythmic pulse of machinery. I stared at him, looked into those sinister black eyes, and in that moment I had only one thought.

This is our savior?

We are totally screwed.

That's when the overhead lights flickered then flared, breaking my stare and crucifying my eyesight.

 

20

B
LINKING AGAINST THE
sensation of ground glass in my eyes I dropped to a crouch, following my training, making myself the smallest target possible. A noise, a crash, the shuffle and thud of many feet spun me on my heel. Things were blurry, my eyes watering as my shocked pupils fought to catch up to the onslaught of now harsh fluorescent light. I found Daniel beside me, feet wide, his hands clenched by his hips. The Man in Black stood where he had before, impassive in his agitated coat.

At the end of the room the two doors had been thrown wide. Four figures stalked toward us. Three of them were nurses, dressed like the guardian who had tried to stop us. They shuddered as they moved, each of them a white shimmy through harsh light that bounced off polished tile and chrome bedrails.

They followed a man dressed in pale green scrubs.

“And so we are welcomed, victims of hospitality
and prey of reception standing meekly in the lair of the beast,” the Man in Black said. I could hear the smile on his face even though I wasn't watching him.

No, my clearing eyeballs were locked on the leader of the procession toward us.

He was handsome.

Stunning.

Gorgeous.

Lithe and golden, he moved in a circle of graceful masculinity. Locks of hair flattered a face of planes and angles sculpted by a master. The look in his eyes said he knew my darkest secrets and would gladly help me indulge the most wicked of them. (Only if I wanted to, and, oh God, did I
want
.) He was temptation personified—no, that wasn't right, he was
sin
personified.

And he took my breath away.

His voice rolled through the room, through me, and something low and deep inside
tightened
with a trill of pleasure that nearly made me moan. I bit it back, held it in. The energy, the magick in my belly curled around itself. The golden man's steps slowed as he spoke. “Lord of Chaos, what has brought you here inside these warded walls?”

The Man in Black blinked into the space in front of me, long coat trailing behind him. He appeared without moving, red right hand held back and low, stark scarlet against unrelieved black. Its skinless fingers still casually held the knife point down. The other hand still held the mass, which had stopped wriggling and now hung from his grip, unmoving. I could see the eye, glazed under slack lids. “My power has brought me here, Priest of Yar Shogura.”

The golden doctor-priest's eyes slid slowly over to me. (Blue, they were blue, the blue of every peaceful day dream I'd ever had.) “I don't think it was
your
power that brought you this far. It appears you have a very”—he paused, as if looking for just the right word—“
lovely
assistant.”

That place deep inside me purred.

The Man in Black stuttered through space, suddenly between me and the golden doctor-priest. The connection between us was cut like a fire dashed with ice water. That deep, low spot inside me went cold and empty, hollow. The magick in me uncurled, flipping from seductive to the low burn of anger it had embodied before.

My head cleared along with the ache behind my navel.

The golden man had made me feel something I'd never felt before, something stolen and destroyed on that night so many years ago. Something that
years
of therapy and living had only let me feel the slightest glimmer of recently.

I looked over at Daniel.

I looked away.

I wasn't ready for this, not yet. Having felt it so real and warm and delicious only for it to be torn away so savagely left me devastated.

Despair clawed at my mind, scrabbling, trying to worm its way in. I
wanted
to sink into it, to let the black wash over me and take me under. I could drop down, fall away, fall apart.

It would be easy.

That was one choice.

If this had happened even a year ago I would have given up; I wouldn't have had the strength to do otherwise.

Now? Here, today?

I
had
to hold it together.

Things were happening. People needed me.

Daniel needed me.

I stood, shaky, but still upright, using my anger as a fuel. Enough of being along for the ride. All night, things had happened
to
me.

No more.

Now, things would happen
because of
me. Right now, I would hold onto the anger.

I could fall apart later.

If I lived through this.

 

21

T
IME HAD PASSED.

Whether seconds or minutes, I didn't know. Trapped in my own emotions, my own trauma, I looked up and saw that everything had changed.

Daniel fought on the other side of the room, an IV stand in his hands, shoving it into the razor-toothed maw of a transformed nurse. The stainless-steel pole clanged against the spinning, slicing, whirlpool of jagged enamel with a horrible racket. The nurse-thing lunged at him, the top of her now-deformed head flapping up and down, bouncing off what used to be shoulders but were now a misshapen hump. Daniel held her off, but she drove him back step by step, closing the distance between them.

Tightening my grip on the charred stick Nyarlathotep had given me earlier, I started moving toward Daniel. I didn't know what I would do when I got there, but I had to do something.

The Man in Black crouched on the floor, coat swirling around him like dragon wings. The black-bladed sword thrust from his red right hand and the Knife of Abraham from the other. A cut across his cheekbone yawned open, trickling something that wasn't blood. The other two nurses were sprawled away from him, pulling themselves up from the floor at the doctor-priest's feet.

He stood over them, finger pointed at the Man in Black. “You have come here to die, Haunter of the Dark. I am Mason, High Priest of Yar Shogura the Unquenchable, Whoremonger of the Flesh, Masticate of Iniquity, and he shall give me the power of your destruction.”

The Man in Black rose. “I hope Yar Shogura's next priest is not so talkative.”

“You won't have to listen much longer, Spider God, not after I use your eldritch energy to fuel the transition of my lord into this world.”

Nyarlathotep snarled. “Come and try, fool.”

Mason pulled an amulet from inside his shirt, a gnarl of thorns on a rope that swirled around something oddly shaped and ivory colored. I couldn't tell what it was from my angle and distance. His mouth moved, and sound came from his throat, but it wasn't words and he didn't speak in a human voice. It blatted across the room and I felt it in my chest, like bass at a rock concert. When the sound ended his hand jerked in a gesture and a bolt of hot-pink energy crackled off his fingers.

The Man in Black spun to the left to avoid the blast.

It wasn't aimed at him.

The magick struck the mass, which he'd dropped to the floor at some point. The lump of flesh began to smoke and hiss. It bubbled, gas stretching flesh to thin blisters that burst in plumes of foulness. Its skin pulled like taffy, puddling and lurching. Drawing into itself, it shrank into a protoplasmic knot that lay on the floor, jittering.

It sat like that for a long, drawn-out second.

Then it exploded.

Strings of flesh were flung through the air, slapping across the Man in Black, a net of stretchy, melted cancer. He jumped, trying to get away, but it caught him, the gooey web sticking to him, clogging his movement like a sheet of tar. He fought and struggled, the tumor-trap tightening around him, wrapping him in liquid shackles. It dragged him to the floor. The two deformed nurses descended on him with gnashing teeth, jackals to a fallen lion.

I stopped, torn for a split second between moving toward Daniel or trying to help the Man in Black.

A sharp tingle started at the base of my skull, an itch of warning.

I turned to find Mason, the doctor-priest, stalking toward me.

“Stay back.” I pointed the stick at him.

“Now why in the world would I do that?” His smile
pulled
inside me again. “I would
love
to get to know you better.”

I kept backing away. “I don't think so.”

“You are an Acolyte. I need an Acolyte.” His eyes smoldered. He winked at me. “I swear you would find my yoke so much more …
pleasurable
than the one you wear now.”

The word
pleasurable
echoed off the hollow below my navel, making me want to stop evading and start squirming.

He had screwed with my head.

I shoved the stick in my hand toward him. “Back
off
. Or I'll use this.”

He kept coming.

I tightened my hand around the firebrand. My mind raced, trying to think of how to make it work.

Ignite! Fire! Combust! Flame on! Incendio!

My back hit the wall.

Mason hopped from one foot to the other, capering toward me. “Nowhere else to go, kitten. I shall have you in just a moment.”

I shook the stick frantically.

Work, damn you! Come on!

A thought crashed through my panic. It wasn't my thought; it belonged to the Man in Black, his voice strained but crystal clear in my mind.

Use your Mark.

My Mark? Mason stood only feet away. He'd be on me in a few steps. A dark, cruel look burned in his eyes. I had seen that look before. It didn't matter that it had been on other faces; it was the same, forever burned in my memory. It was the look of a predator who has just found helpless prey.