Red Right Hand (23 page)

It found my Mark and slammed into me, and Daniel and I became one flesh.

I was overwhelmed. My essence and his slowly revolved around each other, a key turning until the tumblers in the lock set. I fell back, my hand sliding off the now-healed slick spot on his back. Daniel turned in one swift motion, fingers curling around my wrist, catching me before I crashed.

His eyes were bright, glittery, and a brilliant shade of sea-foam green. He gave me his boyish grin, the one that made his dimple so deep you could lose yourself in it. “Thank you … Mistress.”

Oh, damn.

Darkness swirled in the corner of the room, reality bending along curved lines. The Man in Black stepped through the gloom. He looked down at us for a long moment.

“What have you done?”

 

42

T
HE ASPHALT WAS
dirty under our feet, littered with trash and oil and grime. I knew because I looked down at it when we popped through the skein of reality. My own skin burned with fire, and my head spun, but I thought I was getting used to this transdimensional travel.

Daniel pulled away, staggering a few steps until he reached the brick wall of the alley we were in. The sound of him being sick made me turn. His shoulders heaved and jerked.

I turned away to give him privacy.

The Man in Black glared at me, nearly disappearing in the gloom of the alley, black coat rustling uneasily around him. He loomed in the shadows, his brows furrowed, his mouth drawn into a sneer.

He was pissed at me.

Screw him.

He wasn't my favorite person … elder god … whatever … either.

Apparently, when I saved Daniel's life I cut the Man in Black's hold on him. I'd done what I wanted and set him free from the chaos god, which was great, but now he was tied even more tightly to my magick.

I could
feel
him in the corner of my mind. Like a thing you can't quite remember, a specter of consciousness that haunts the hallways of your mind, a memory you can't put down, the wallpaper of your brain that you can't peel off or paint over. It wasn't unpleasant; in fact I found it comforting. Comforting but weird.

Daniel came over, wiping his mouth.

“You okay?”

He nodded. “Better now.”

I studied him. He still looked healthy—a little flushed from throwing up, but okay. Not weak and near collapse like before. My eyes shifted, the muscles behind them twitching as my vision changed and I Saw Daniel through my magick. He still appeared to be full of the gold-infused energy from before. I blinked, and the world came back into focus.

The more I used the magick inside me, the easier it came.

I'd have to be very careful.

Noise wrapped around us, coming in from the alley opening, a hum and buzz of people and vehicles, the hustle and bustle of a metropolis. People stood in a line stretched across the alley between the buildings that rose on either side of us. Only a handful of them looked over at us. Most looked ahead, or down, or were engaged by their phone or other electronic device. Jacked in, constantly connected through social media to people they never saw in real life, they read instant updates about every little thing that happened to distant friends, all the while ignoring people standing less than a foot away.

The blank looks on their faces, even on the few who turned to see what we were doing, reminded me of the people in line at Ashtoreth's hotel.

Daniel leaned in toward me, speaking from the side of his mouth. “Creepy.”

Creepy indeed.

I nodded.

“Do you know what city we're in?” he asked.

I shrugged and looked over at the Man in Black. He said nothing. I looked back at Daniel. “I don't suppose it really matters.”

“No, I guess not.” His eyes slid past me, moving up and over my shoulder to look deeper in the alley. “Hold on.”

He moved away from me, taking four steps and picking up a discarded chunk of rock or metal. His hand covered it almost completely, so I couldn't see what it was. The words to ask what he was doing were on my lips when he pulled his arm back and slung the thing into the alleyway. My eyes tracked it as it flew fast and true toward a low-slung shape crouching beside a Dumpster.

The skinhound.

It jerked back, nimbly dodging Daniel's missile. Whatever he had thrown clanged loudly against the side of the metal Dumpster where the skinhound's head had just been. The devil dog's muzzle cracked in a grin that would have given a rabid jackal the creeps, and it stared at us with its one baleful yellow eye. The other one, the one I had injured, was a stark, empty socket that sat black on its skinless face.

Daniel stomped his foot and waved his arms. “Get the hell outta here!”

The skinhound simply crouched lower, nearly disappearing into the shadow of the Dumpster.

The Man in Black raised his red right hand. It sat on the end of his arm, an unlit torch, a treacherous signal fire yet to be struck. His fingers twitched, the middle one touching and then snapping across the thumb in a
SNAP!
that sounded like a lightning strike. The skinhound's face jerked up, its eyes wide as it studied us. After a long moment the Man in Black swept his hand in a dismissive motion. The skinhound turned tail, disappearing into the shadows.

Daniel grunted. “That was the next thing I was going to try.”

I leaned in. “I didn't even see it down there. Why is it here?”

He shrugged. “I don't know, but I saw it back at the hospital too, when we were outside. I was going to shoo it away, but then we did the disappearing trick and I got sidetracked.”

I didn't think we'd seen the last of that thing, but I didn't say it out loud.

The Man in Black began walking toward the front of the alley. He didn't turn to see if we were following him.

Temptation weighed on me to stay there. Let him fight this thing. Why should Daniel and I risk ourselves anymore?
He
was the elder god, not me; let him handle this.

But I started walking.

I needed to make sure, to see this through. I'd come this far, and I knew what would happen if we didn't end this. I'd been given magick, and, dammit, that obligated me to do something with it even if I hated the one I had to help.

Daniel followed me, staying close to my side and just slightly behind. The Aqedah pressed hard against my hip, the flat edge of the black iron blade between my belt and my jeans. The shirt I'd thrown on used to be my dad's and worked as a jacket, so it mostly covered everything, but I still felt tense walking into a group of people with a foot-long magick knife at my side.

Nyarlathotep didn't slow as he approached the people stretched across the alleyway. He walked as if he owned the entire city, coat flaring around him like bat wings. His red right hand pulsed with crimson energy. It left a color trail in my vision, but that could have been my magick making my eyes go weird again. The people stepped aside as he reached them, parting like water. He stepped through, and they shuffled back into place.

Blocking me and Daniel.

I didn't slow, just kept walking. I drew near, and coldness crept up my legs as if I were walking through a chill fog.

I stopped an arm's length from the line. In front of me stood a man in a blazer and a pair of slacks. He looked older than my dad but held himself like someone my age. He slouched casually in line, exuding a cool “I don't give a damn” attitude, fingers moving rapidly around a small touch screen in his hand. He didn't look over at us.

“Excuse me.”

The man's fingers moved. He still stared at the screen he held.

Anger burned. “Let us through.”

He turned his head.

His eyes were dilated, the pupils painting over the irises. His lips parted; the gums inside were stained dark as if he'd just drunk squid ink, teeth gray in their notches. It wasn't a smile, it was a snarl.

Behind me, Daniel said, “Holy shit.”

My hand drifted to the knife under my jacket.

The man stepped aside. His head fell as his eyes swept down to the device in his hand, fingers on the move once more.

“C'mon,” I said to Daniel. I twisted through the narrow opening, not wanting to touch the man with the black gums. I knew deep down that if I did, this would go bad quickly.

And it would be bad soon enough.

 

43

T
HE LINE STRETCHED
down the entire block.

The sidewalk we were on was wide: ten feet or more separated us from a street teeming with cars that flew helter-skelter past, the roar of engines cut only by horns that honked in a discordant symphony. I could see the Man in Black ahead of us, taller than everyone else on the sidewalk. People moved out of his way, crushing against each other as he passed.

One lady darted out of his way and into the street, her fingers pulling hair from her scalp as she ran. Her voice was a loud warble of meaningless babble. A taxi slammed on its brakes, the car's rear rising on its shocks as black smoke boiled from its tires. She didn't notice, just continued to wail as she ran down the lane past us. The cabbie followed behind her, head and arm out the window, screaming curses that were a mix of three languages.

The Man in Black turned the corner, disappearing from my sight.

I reached out, grabbed Daniel's hand, and began to hurry.

We were in a city. A big one. All the buildings stretched high in the night sky. Lights shone everywhere: streetlights, signs, traffic lights, headlights, even just the ambient light of thousands of windows along buildings lit from the inside. Everything seemed to glow in a thousand colors that blended into a dull, blanched white. Light pollution bounced off everything.

All I could see were the shadows.

They clawed up the sides of buildings and lay in pools underneath everything. I could feel things inside them watching me. Maybe even the shadows themselves had taken on some malevolent sentience, some hostility to human life that made them watch and hate and lie in wait for someone to slip into their trap, to fall prey to their patience.

It would have sounded stupid yesterday.

Tonight I knew it could be true.

Nerves jittering, I moved faster, my steps hurrying into a run. Daniel ran beside me, his hand in mine, unquestioning, following my lead. We pelted toward the corner, pushing through people on the sidewalk.

Rounding the corner, we nearly ran headlong into the Man in Black.

He turned. “Rushing into the maw of the lion, Acolyte? How unlike you.”

“I'm here to finish this.”

“So you are.” The gemstone around his neck pulsed in the shadowed depth of his coat. People stepped around us as we stood in a pool of neon light. The Man in Black's coat fluttered out, tattered tendrils licking the ankles and feet of passersby.

Daniel made a noise in his throat. His hand tugged mine, and I looked over at him. He stared with wide eyes over the Man in Black's head.

I followed his gaze.

We stood in front of a temple dragged from some ancient time and wrapped in bars of neon lights. The stones that formed its bulk were green like jade and cut in odd shapes that shouldn't have fit together but did, held in alien geometry by some arcane masonry. The lines of the building hurt my eyes, dragging my sight in too many directions to follow without discomfort. The roof curved deeply like a Shinto temple of Asia, made of sodium-yellow tiles laid like scales on a lizard's back: overlapping, interlocking, and conjoined. They formed lines that pointed to the heavens, where the peak of the temple disappeared into a murky shadow. Garish tubes of neon light traced every corner, every crease, and every edge, blaring out into the street where we stood. The words
R'yleh Wok 'N' Roll
pulsed across the front in bloodred neon flashes like the ponderous heartbeat of some great beast lying in wait. The line of people we'd run by shuffled and shambled up wide concrete steps that led to a pair of doors yawning open beneath the flashing words.

Lambs to the slaughter.

Daniel spoke. “So that's where we're going?”

The Man in Black nodded, once down then up.

Daniel grunted. “Looks like a sushi joint designed by a nut job.”

The Man in Black turned, looking up at the building. “It is a juncture, a temple folded from lost history.” Dark eyes glittered. “They once served as feasting boards for my kind.”

Daniel's eyebrow rose in an arch. “So we should steer clear of the California roll then?”

 

44

W
E PASSED THROUGH
the entrance by the people lined up to get inside. The doors were tall, made of dark mahogany, and carved in intricate patterns. I looked carefully as we passed, my eye picking out details in the artwork. Human faces melted into one another, forming a cascade of agonized expressions from top to bottom. They'd been carved by the hands of a master, each one as unique as a snowflake, their expressions locked in a moment of despair and anguish.

It made me shiver. I kept walking.

Inside the doors, the lobby ceiling soared away and out of sight. I'd seen the outside of the building, which stood only a story tall. The ceilings should not have disappeared like that.

But they did.

Daniel leaned in. “It's bigger on the inside.”

“Someone should have painted it blue,” I said.

He nodded.

The Man in Black walked until a maître d' in a white jacket stepped in front of him.

Holding a menu in his hand as a stop sign, he looked ridiculous compared to the elder god who stood before him. He was shorter than me and soft in the middle. His pudgy hand clutched the laminated pages of the menu. Lank but glossy black hair hung across his forehead, shadowing almond-shaped eyes. His voice came out lightly accented: a spice, not the meal.

His lips formed words.
“Aa'sahh shaema my'ialalake-um
.
”