'Tween Heaven and Hell (22 page)

Strangely enough however, only Mx. Cooper had been killed.
Her newly segmented body had been found behind the club, stuffed into the trash
compactor, but not, as yet, compacted.

I asked Raoul, as carefully as I could since he was already
pissed off at me, if he didn’t think it was strange that she’d been killed and
stuffed in a trash compactor when everyone else had just been bloodied up a bit
in the brawl.

His answer was to level those hard, brown cop’s eyes at me
again and leave. I guess that meant the distinction had, at least, occurred to
him.

* * * * *

Myra shimmered in as I was placing the coffee cups into the
flash cleaner in my food service area. She leaned against the counter as I
worked and smiled at me. Having gotten used, over the years, to her scowling
countenance, this jovial presentation made me distinctly uncomfortable.

I narrowed my green eyes at her and stepped back to give her
the once-over. “Been eatin’ those poor little canaries again, Myra?”

Myra’s laugh reminded me of the sound crystal makes when you
run your fingertip around the rim of a half filled goblet. Coming from her it
pulled the hairs on my arms to attention. “Ok, what’s up?”

Myra shrugged and raised her golden eyebrows, cocking her
head toward the drink valet meaningfully. I sighed and programmed in another
cup of the black nectar. At this rate I was going to have to bill the Big Guy
for refreshment costs.

As the coffee brewed, Myra lowered herself weightlessly into
a chair at my well-used table. Looking at her a thought penetrated my loggy
brain and I had to smile. It had suddenly occurred to me that in the last
twenty-four hours a royal devil, my best human friend, a death detective and an
angel of God had all used that same chair. If wood-look, fire-proof,
non-petroleum-based man-made furniture product could only talk, what a story
that chair could tell its friends.

I handed Myra her coffee and sat down across from her.

She sipped noisily and closed her eyes in pleasure. Then,
before she put me out of my misery she cocked her head at me and gave me that
damned smile again.

“What! You’re really roughin’ up my edges here, angel.”

She laughed. “I was just wondering what you were thinking
when you woke up in your own bed this morning.”

I slapped an open hand against the tabletop. “It was you!”

She nodded, still grinning. I rarely saw her smile, it was a
very pretty smile, but at the moment it was really pissing me off. “I should
have known. Why didn’t you tell me? Do you know what a fool I made of myself
with that…” Suddenly it occurred to me that I might want to put a clamp on it.

Myra’s grin faded. “With who, Astra? Or should I say
what
?”

It was my turn to shrug and grin. “Never mind. So tell me
what happened. How’d you find me at the church? Was I dead?”

Myra wrinkled her brow the way she always does when I talk
about dying. I guess she really does care—a little. “Of course not you stupid
girl. You actually were beginning to heal yourself when we ran that evil woman
off.” Her face changed, became more guarded. “Princess Rayanne really hates
you, Astra. What have you done to her?”

I stood up and went over to the drink valet so she couldn’t
see my face. How was I supposed to tell my angel that Rayanne thought I wanted
to steal her man and take over her chair on the court? In fact, as much as it
made me hate myself, I wasn’t even completely certain I wouldn’t mind doing the
first one of those two things myself. “Hades if I know,” was all I gave her in
answer. I programmed in a cup of coffee I didn’t really want.

I sat back down. Suddenly I realized what she’d said. “Did
you say I was healing myself?”

She nodded, frowning. “Astra, these powers of yours seem to
be growing rapidly. Do you have any idea why?”

I shook my head. “None.” A sudden thought occurred to me.
“Myra. Have you ever heard of a Tweener with these powers before?”

“Only once and she gained her powers very slowly, over time.
She didn’t achieve your level of ability until she was very old, nearly two
hundred years I think. I’ve known you since you were six years old. When your
Aunt Diedre first tried to school you in your powers I thought the woman was
crazy. At that point the only thing you could do was gentle frightened animals
with your mind and move a few lightweight objects around. I guess she knew
something I didn’t.”

“That’s one hell of an understatement.” I thought about this
bit of information from my past for a minute and then had to ask.

“Myra.”

“Hmmm?”

“Is there any chance these powers came from my good side?”

My angel cocked her golden head at me and touched my hand.
Her ocean-blue eyes turned sad. “No child. I’ve never heard of an angel with
such powers. We only have the power to heal others and to protect the innocent
from evil. Our powers would never let us destroy to protect ourselves. And I’ve
never seen an angel heal itself. You can use your power to heal others as well
as yourself, Astra.” She pushed the coffee mug around the tabletop thoughtfully
and her frown deepened. “To tell you the truth, Astra, I’m not sure what the
source of your power is. It scares me.”

My gaze jerked to hers. As she said the words I felt her
fear as my own. Or maybe it
was
my own. I’d never seen Myra afraid
before and I’d certainly never heard her express fear of any kind. And now that
I had, it didn’t make me feel any better about my situation.

When Myra left I discovered that I was restless and filled
with nervous energy. It may have been due to the five cups of coffee I’d had
that day already, or it might have been the result of an incredibly unsettling
morning. I knew I should go into the office and prepare for a job I had to do
later in the week, but somehow the idea of sitting behind my desk just didn’t
appeal.

I quickly cleaned up my food service area and then
remembered the cylinder I’d dropped into my coat pocket before DD Raoul had
arrived in Deaver’s office and interrupted me. Maybe I could make some sense of
this whole Prince Nille thing if I went over Deaver’s diary again. There had to
be something in there that would help me. Something I’d missed the first time
through.

Retrieving the cylinder, I sat down in front of my
information unit and slid it into the memory core. “Pull information and
present.”

The unit gave a little chirping sound and the first file
opened on the screen. Much to my surprise, the words that I’d copied from the
screen in American English had been transformed somehow into a script I didn’t
recognize. Squinting at the hieroglyphic type text brought me back to my years
in school studying demonic phonics. I thought I could almost read a couple of
the words. Just as I deciphered the word, “daimon” the file flashed off and
another took its place. This time I had barely focused my eyes on the strange
text before the file again flashed off and was replaced by another.

As the contents of the screen flashed by with increasing
speed, the unit started to emit a low-pitched, monotonic hum, the sounds
merging into words and then phrases and eventually coming out as some kind of
chant. The voice that chanted from the unit was a gravelly screech. Very
not
human.

I tried to tear my eyes away from the screen, which was now
a blur of whirring files that sped past my aching eyeballs at an intimidating
speed. I became dimly aware that, not only could I not look away, but my brain
was beginning to feel mushy and loggy. With a start I realized I had entered a
trance-like state and I didn’t seem to have any control over it.

The gravelly voice reverberated in my ear, still chanting in
the strange language that I now recognized as Hades. It tickled my eardrums
with its thundering force. Like a drug-induced vision, I saw my inner spirit
rise above my body and hang there, like an innocent bystander watching me
struggle with my nonresponsive body. I saw myself sitting there, staring
zombie-like at the whirring screen, completely and helplessly motionless.
Somewhere inside this false, exterior calm my heart was pounding in fear, I
could feel my eyes widening and tearing as they projected the mute terror of my
complete helplessness. I fought the immobility of my body with every fiber of my
being. I struggled to move even the tips of my fingers, locked on the keyboard
of the information unit. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t break the psychic bond
I’d somehow been locked into.

The voice in my head softened and began to alter, a few
grooves at a time, like an old vinyl record that was being played backward in
my aching head. I continued to fight to recapture the use of my hands, my legs,
my head, but it was as if I’d been painted with six inches of cement and baked
in hell.

Sweat poured down my face and under the reverberating audio
playing in my head I could hear myself whimpering with the struggle to break
out of the trance.

Then abruptly the audio stopped. The visual stopped almost
immediately after, as the screen on my intelligence unit faded to black with a
tiny, spark-like blip. I held my breath and wondered what would happen next.

That was when I realized I was no longer the only one in the
room. In microscopic but determined increments, the air around me began to
thicken with cold, gelling around my static body in a clammy, tension-filled
embrace. My ears, which I realized had been ringing in my head since the
chanting had stopped, gradually began to pick up the dark sound of something
heavy and wetly dense shuffling across the floor behind me. I sat there, a
small, sweaty statue in a fake leather desk chair and felt the small hairs on
the back of my neck stand up in response to whatever was coming at me from
behind. Goosebumps filled with horror popped up along the length of both of my
immobile arms and down my useless legs.

With every newly awakened pore in my body I wished I could
turn and see what was about to kill me, but I was hopelessly trapped in my
cement hell. As the thing behind me stopped shuffling and sent out a shuddering
breath that smelled like a garbage dump in Florida in August, I thought about
whimpering but decided it wouldn’t be very manly of me and might even give the
thing behind me an excuse to torture me a while before eating me. Nothing turns
a bully on like whimpering, slobbering fear.

The foul odor of its breath hit the back of my neck and
poured around me. The smell was so putrid and thick that it was difficult to
breathe through it. It painted the inside of my nostrils and formed a nearly
impenetrable plug in my airways. My eyes watered with it but I couldn’t blink.
I really wanted to blink.

The air temperature in my living quarters had dropped to the
point that it could probably preserve my mangled body for weeks once I was
dead, like a self-contained cooling drawer at the morgue. My body shivered
mentally, but outwardly remained completely still. It was a weird sensation but
it made me realize that only my outward movements were locked up, I could still
use my will and my spirit.

The thought was almost enough to make me feel better.
Almost. But then the thing behind me leaned close enough to touch my back and,
breathing its garbage dump breath into the side of my cement face, extended a
long, rough, purple tongue and licked my ear, leaving behind a cold, slimy trail
that dripped, green and oily, onto my right arm. I thought that was really bad.
I mean, it
was
REALLY bad. But then I heard the heavy shuffling sound
again and the thing moved slowly and clumsily to stand in front of me, where I
could see its whole disgusting self with my immobile eyes. It was then that I
really knew what
bad
was. I realized I’d never really done
bad
before. I was doing it now. I felt all of the blood in my body fall to my feet,
where I had no doubt it would be found, still pooling, when the Strange Death
Detectives found my mangled, green-slimed body.

The thing had arms but no legs. Its head merged with its “body”
if you could call it that, without an apparent break in the line of horror that
was its physical makeup. Except, I decided as I peered at it more carefully
from inside my flesh and blood prison, although it had the appearance of being
a very large pulsating snake with tiny, waving arms that ended in claws which
were ridged at the edges like deadly, curved hacksaws, it wasn’t really a
physical creature. It had no real physical density or form.

As I watched, the thing’s shape kept slipping away from it,
morphing into something that jutted out here and dipped in there, like it wasn’t
really sure what it was supposed to look like but was trying really hard to
hold it together nonetheless. Watching its wide, rippling face I saw that its
expression and features were constantly changing, like the screen of an
endlessly running bad movie with a single, repeating theme. I’m gonna eat you,
I’m gonna eat you, I’m gonna eat you.

The monster’s eyes were particularly disturbing. They
flashed at me from within the morphing face, changing color and shape
constantly as if they were the gateway for a collection of lost spirits who
were trying to find a way out of that horrible body. As I watched, a jolt of
electrical power emerged from the carpet under the thing’s base and trailed
upward in curving arcs that caressed its moldering shape. The lights in the
house flickered and weakened and I realized that it was somehow draining the
power from my living quarters and using it to stay in one piece. For several,
whole seconds after I saw the jolt of electrical lightning leave the floor and
enter the thing in front of me, I noticed that it took on a more substantial
quality, as if the electrical power it had sucked from my quarters had given it
the juice it needed to appear real.

I threw out my sensing power and discovered that there was
nothing to sense. No soul. No spirit. Nothing there but a nightmare on trolley
tracks. Driven by electrical power. I also realized that I was looking at the
thing that had been in my office. The thing that had thrown me out of my
window. The thing that had dragged the Viper and me to the devil-filled
warehouse. Dialle’s lovely pet.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!