'Tween Heaven and Hell (16 page)

Nerul’s black eyes swiveled lazily to my partner. “Well,
well, well, the errant son returns.”

Emo’s face darkened with suffused blood but he stood ramrod
straight against Nerul’s glare and didn’t look away.

I, on the other hand, just about fell off the ledge. Whaaat?

Chapter
Fourteen

Off With Their Heads!

Under all the devil sheen, more than words can stress,

Friends it seemed would ever grow, into more…not less.

“I’ll explain later,” Emo told me in a whisper. It seemed
there’d be a lot of ’splainin’ to do later. Emo looked down at King Nerul and
gave a devilish smile. “Your Highness. How good to see you again.”

Nerul laughed. “I see you’ve gained some backbone since last
we met. I’d thought your angel blood would be the end of you.”

Emo shrugged with studied nonchalance, saying, “As I recall,
it wasn’t under the best of circumstances.”

Nerul simply continued to stare at my partner, not choosing
to respond. I saw Emo give a little start of surprise and then stiffen his back
against whatever had startled him. I realized there was much I didn’t know
about my friend and partner and I determined to fill in the holes as soon as we
survived this mess.

“We’ve delivered the message we were hired to deliver,
Nerul,” I said with some irritation, “we’ll just be going now. Unless of course
you want to give us the queen?”

It seemed Nerul found this very funny. He nearly doubled
over with laughter. His masked and cloaked minions also seemed to find it
funny, though I had to wonder if they were just sucking up by laughing when
their king laughed. When they’d stopped I asked, “Do you have a message you
wish me to return to Dialle?”

Nerul gave me a smile that managed to suck all of the heat
out of the air around me. “I could give you a message, lovely Astra, but alas,
you’d be unable to deliver it.” He raised an arm and two cloaked figures
emerged from the shadows behind us. As the first one grabbed me, Emo swung out
with a thick, muscular leg and smashed it into the creature’s gut. The cloaked
figure doubled over briefly but didn’t go down. The mask fell from my
attacker’s face and I saw that it was a she-devil of about middle rank, with
reddened, leather skin and horns, similar to Emo’s. I knew I was dealing with a
creature of intelligence and great strength, but no special powers. I also
realized that Nerul had underestimated us, which gave me great incentive to
show him the error of his ways.

The she-devil’s brief discomfort gave me time enough to wrap
my cross belt around her dense, corded leather neck. As the belt started to
burn a path through her thick, red skin, I was vaguely aware of the struggle
going on beside me and of movement on the floor below our perch. My opponent’s
strength made it necessary for me to concentrate hard on what I was doing. Her
flailing arms swung toward me with stunning speed and force, clipping me on the
chin once and nearly making me lose my grip on the belt. But I’d fought this
battle before, with someone who was faster and stronger than she was, I wasn’t
particularly worried.

Having much experience fighting with Emo, I knew that she
wasn’t going to go down easily. I also suspected that the old knee in the
crotch wouldn’t be nearly as effective with this devil as it was with trusty
old Emo. So I decided I’d need to get her off balance first. Bracing my weight
on one leg as best I could, I swung my other leg into the back of her knees.
Her legs buckled as I slammed into her upper body. She crashed to the floor
with me on top.

As she fought to regain her feet, I risked letting go of the
belt with one hand so that I could grab the vial that hung around my neck. The
angel dust inside the vial would burn a pretty good-sized hole in the nasty
piece of work below me and I planned to aim for her evil black eyes for extra
good measure.

Unfortunately, the she-devil managed to push herself into a
semi-upright position before I could get the vial opened up. With one hand free
and the other holding her upper body and my weight off the ground, she reached
up and dug the belt out of the oozing, bloody track it had cut into her neck
and threw it away. Then, with a speed and agility that surprised even me, she
tucked her head and rolled, pulling me with her so that she landed on top of me
as her body flattened out.

Her thick, squat body was a crushing weight on my chest. I
struggled to push her off but didn’t succeed in moving her even a little bit.
My lungs screamed for air and my throat felt as if it had been tied shut with a
thick, unyielding cord. After a couple of minutes of futile struggle, I decided
I needed to have a plan. Making a plan isn’t easy when you have about three
hundred pounds of evil sitting on your chest, but I had to give it that old
institution of higher education try. I really wished I could just kick her in
the nuts.

Although my vision was mostly blocked by the massive
creature on top of me, I saw a shadow pass over us and disappear out of sight.
Suddenly, the she-devil gave a startled grunt and jerked as if she’d been hit.
Then her huge head dropped onto my shoulder. I swung my hands upward in an
attempt to dislodge her head before one of her dangerously sharp horns could
make confetti out of my face. My hands touched something viscous and cool and I
realized I’d grabbed a handful of the nasty stuff that passes for blood in
lesser devils.

Devil blood has a nasty melting effect on normal skin so I
quickly wiped the stuff off on the she-devil’s cloak. I managed to get most of
it off but I could still feel a slight blistering on the tips of my fingers.

Meanwhile, I was starting to feel faint from lack of air.
With some small part of my quickly clouding brain, I realized that Emo was
nearby and was thrashing around with his attackers. Somewhere along the way a
few more devils had joined the fray. Fortunately for me, they seemed to think I
was already dead and none of the cloaked figures were coming to investigate. I
figured if I could manage to survive, I’d have the element of surprise on my
side.

Closing my eyes, I forced myself not to think about my
constricted breathing and concentrated on building the power. It wasn’t easy to
concentrate when I had to fight off the panic of not being able to breathe, but
after a few seconds I felt the first stirrings of the power rising from its
core. I fed the spark until my body began to hum with it. In my ears, the thrum
of power coursing through my body and beginning to build sounded so loud I was
afraid everyone in the room would stop and wonder where it was coming from. But
nobody else seemed to notice or care what was going on in the tiny splat that
was flattened under the unconscious she-devil. Their mistake.

As the power grew, the first thing I concentrated on was
moving the weight from my chest. It took only a few seconds of focused effort
to raise the she-devil up a couple of inches so that I could slide out from
under her. Since she appeared to be either dead or out cold, I let her limp
body drop and looked to Emo.

He was bloodied and battered, but he appeared to be mostly
intact and still fighting. I suddenly wished I could communicate with him
through his mind as I could Dialle’s, but I realized that Emo, as intelligent
as he was, didn’t have the power to accept or respond this way so I didn’t even
try.

Looking around, I quickly assessed the situation. It
appeared that the festivities in the cavern below had broken up and only a few
cloaked figures remained. Both Nerul and Queen Kaline were absent from the
small group that had gathered around the stone table to do whatever disgusting
things satanic figures did around bloody, carnally touched stone tables in
bloody walled caverns.

Since those figures seemed unconcerned with what was going
on above their heads, I ignored them. Returning my focus to my partner, I
realized with a start that Emo was down on his knees and one of his attackers
was standing over him with a long, dripping knife.

At first I thought the blood was Emo’s and that he’d already
been struck, but as he raised his eyes I saw only anger there, no pain and I
knew I still had time to save him, but not much.

His eyes sparked in surprise to find me standing just ten
feet away. I motioned for him to flatten himself out and then screamed as he
threw his body to the floor to pull the attention of the devil force away from
him.

It worked. They forgot all about him and their eyes flew to
me. In fact, to my eternal dismay, the two creatures closest to me turned and
started toward me. I closed my eyes, raised my arms and concentrated hard on
sparking the magic within. Almost immediately I got a sense of a new intensity
to the power I was just learning to harness. This surprised me and briefly, as
I pulled the magic forward, I wondered where the powers were coming from and
how I was gonna learn to deal with them all.

The magic flared out with thick probing fingers and I
realized that as I learned to use it, it was becoming more discriminating. It
danced away from Emo, who still lay flattened on the stone ledge and moved to
surround his attackers as if it had been enticed by their evil natures. I could
almost smell the cold stench of evil as the power touched each of Emo’s
attackers. The devilish crew stood rooted to the spot, watching me as if they
thought I might explode any minute and they didn’t want to miss it when it
happened. They seemed unaware that the power had targeted them.

I let the power flow until it hit the stone of the walls
around us and then drew it back to wrap it completely around the cloaked
figures standing over Emo. As it took hold, I risked opening my eyes and found
that I could sustain it as I watched it do my bidding.

Nerul’s devils were ripped from their trance as the power
enfolded them. They jumped and screamed as if they’d been touched by angel
blood on a platinum knife. I wrapped the probing force around the whole
terrified group and then pulled it tight, crushing them with icy fingers of
pure, electrically charged power. I could feel their panic as I inserted the
power into them, focusing on finding their core and then pulled outward until
their physical forms gave way and turned to vapor.

With a cry, Emo threw himself away from the screaming,
vaporizing demons and stared at me with awe and unfortunately, terror-filled
eyes.

As the last demon became vapor, I sank to the hard,
strangely warm rock beneath me and let myself slide into oblivion. Too
exhausted to care about the enormity of what I’d done and too weak to do
anything about it.

I jerked awake as my body was lifted off the floor. I tried
to struggle away from the arms that held me effortlessly but quickly realized
that I wasn’t going anywhere. “Back off,” I mumbled as I pulled my exhausted
eyes open and stared into Emo’s eyes. He leaned close to my face and tightened
his arms around me. “Shhhh. I’m going to get you out of here.”

My first inclination was to protest, but my weary body
wouldn’t let me work up the energy to fight his imprisoning grasp and my damned
eyes wouldn’t stay open. I tried to fight it, with every fiber of my body that
was capable of fighting. But five fibers just weren’t enough and my world
started to fade to black again. The last thing I was aware of as I drifted off
was that someone was in my mental drawers again. Damn that good-lookin’ devil
to Hades.
Sleep, lovely Astra. Rest and regain your energies, my princess
.

I mustered up the energy to respond, “Bite me.” Or at least
I think I did, because Emo jumped a bit. And then the world went black.

* * * * *

The next time I woke up I was in my own bed. Sounds from the
other room alerted me to the fact that I wasn’t alone. I pushed myself to my
elbows and groaned. Sharp needles of pain jabbed at me from every conceivable
spot on my body. When I pried my eyes open they stung with even the very dim
light that filled the darkened room. It was definitely going to be a twelve
pain blocker day.

Emo was slaving over the food service provider when I
stumbled in. He nodded toward the main living area and I gratefully sank onto
the nearest padded surface. He handed me a large mug of strong black coffee and
waited while I gulped it down.

When it appeared I was going to live, Emo sat down across
from me and cocked his head, giving me a devilish grin that warmed my battered
heart to its core. I smiled back.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey yourself. I guess we survived?”

“It would appear that we did.”

“How did you get us out?”

Emo’s sweet, red face clouded up. “I’m not sure. I think
they let us go.”

I nodded and instantly regretted it. The contents of my head
bobbled around painfully, crashing into my skull bones with alarming results.
Closing my eyes I didn’t move for several seconds, except to raise the cup to
my lips. “You’re probably right. Which begs the question. Why?”

Emo shrugged. He said nothing for a long couple of minutes
and then, squirming a bit on the divan, he asked the question I’d been
dreading. “Where’d you get royal powers, Astra?”

“Damned if I know.”

He scowled at me. “Come on, partner. I watched you open a
wall and vaporize several lesser devils. I suspect that you are using
telepathic powers too. I think I deserve a better answer than that.”

It was my turn to shrug. “It’s a long story, Emo. I think my
aunt had some of this power too. But my parents wouldn’t let her school me on
it. I suspect she wasn’t even allowed to tell me too much about it but she did
start teaching me how to use it when I was really young. After my parents found
out she stopped working with me and just started watching me like I had two
heads for the rest of her life. Once she died I kind of convinced myself I’d
imagined the whole thing.”

Emo looked thoughtful. Finally he nodded and took a sip from
his steaming mug. “You and I have more in common than you would think, Astra.”