'Tween Heaven and Hell (5 page)

The Devil Court seemed bothered by this, which surprised me
a little, since I thought being tortured for eternity was pretty much business
as usual for devils.

“And now, Queen Kaline has been taken. We cannot allow Nerul
to get away with this defilement. He and his entire court must die.”

I know I should have kept my mouth shut but by now you’re
probably beginning to understand me and therefore you know that I didn’t. “So
what’s the problem with your court? It seems Nerul has won all the battles?”

Dialle glanced at me, but he didn’t seem as pissed off as
I’d expected. He actually looked thoughtful.

“Do not assume that we have not taken our share of souls,
little Tweener. Nerul has lost half of his court to us over the last two
hundred years alone. That is why he has taken our queen.”

“Why now? What set him off recently?”

Dialle laughed. “Very perceptive, pretty Tweener. I guess
you could say that we struck him where he would be harmed most. We have his
oldest son under our control.”

I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud. “Well, duhhh!
Did you think he would just sit back and say, ‘Oh well, I guess I’ll have to
make another one’?”

Dialle’s black eyes fixed on my face and I could have sworn
I saw a tongue of flame in each one. But he looked away quickly, as the
she-devil stood. “That is enough, Dialle. She is obviously too coarse and stupid
to serve as intermediary between the courts. As you said, Nerul will dispense
with her as soon as she opens her mouth. I will kill her and we will do it my
way after all.”

Dialle nodded. “Yes, I guess that would be best.”

I couldn’t help it. I
was
a little surprised, I
thought we had that physical attraction thing going. Even if it
was
all
on his side.

The she-devil raised her arms and I steeled myself,
stiffening my legs for the attack. I clasped the cross in my right hand and
wrapped my other hand around the belt of crosses. If I was going down I would
take a few of them with me.

Turns out I didn’t need to show how tough I was just yet.
Dialle reached out a hand and touched her arm just as I felt the first signs of
weakness in my traitorous limbs.

“What about
him
? What do we tell the King?”

She lowered her arms a notch but didn’t take her riveting
black eyes from me. Shrugging she said, “What of him? He refuses to help us,
even for his queen.”

“Yes, he does appear disinterested. But is he?” Dialle’s
voice was a warm caress that made both of us squirm a little. She squirmed less
than me, dammit. “I wouldn’t want his wrath to touch you, my love.”

At last she turned her face to him and met his velvety black
gaze with deep, midnight pools of her own. I watched her body melt toward his,
her arms move around his long, hard body and I found myself licking my own lips
as their bodies merged into a seemingly undivided column of gorgeous devilry.

Where their bodies met, sparks snapped and spat and shot
away from them in streams of pulsing light. The angels pulled away in fear,
straining against the bonds that held them captive to their devils, while every
devil in the room moved toward the sparks as if they were being pulled by an
invisible thread to join in the mating. The court at the table all stood and
moved to encircle the couple, reaching their hands toward the sparks, reveling
in their sting. A low murmur of excitement filled the room and began to grow
until it became a chant.

I wasn’t sure what was going on but I thought this might be
a good time to make my exit. As my mind formed the thought the voice in my head
said,
Go. I will contact you later
.

Although it pissed me off that he kept jumping into my head,
I wasn’t as stupid as they believed me to be and I decided to get the Hades out
of there.

As I backed quickly toward the door, my eyes scanning the
room to make sure no one noticed, I rammed into something very solid and
immediately felt claws digging into my arm. I turned to look into a set of
unintelligent black eyes. Unfortunately for me, the stupid-looking eyes lived
in a very ugly head with long, saliva coated fangs and the ugly head topped off
a very squat, nearly purple red body. I realized immediately that I was not
dealing with great intelligence and that gave me hope that I could get past the
lesser devil without anyone noticing.

I smiled at him and began nodding my head. Like chicken
hypnotism, this tactic works pretty well on the lowest class of devil, because
they have such limited intelligence that they are often reduced to mimicry.
After a moment, the devil’s wide mouth opened in a wet, fangy grin and his
broad head began nodding back at me as I sidestepped his wide body and started
to pull my arm gently from his iron grasp.

The tactic seemed to be working for a moment, but then an
explosion from the front of the room and a burst of louder chanting pulled his
limited attention away from me and the trance snapped.

I braced myself with both legs and quickly swung my right
leg up into his groin. He snarled in pain and let go of my arm to grab the
breached area. I used the momentum of my kick to launch myself over his head
and onto my hands behind him. As he turned to come after me, I sprang away from
the floor and landed in front of the door on my feet again.

He followed me through the door. I was waiting for him just
to one side of it as he lumbered through with a spit-filled snarl. My hand
whipped through the air and the belt of crosses swung around his thick, scaly
red neck. It began burning him as I reached to grab the ends that were crossed
behind his neck and pulled as hard as I could. He howled in terror and pain,
while the hundreds of tiny, platinum crosses seared through his leathery skin
and embedded themselves into the flesh beneath. “To Hades with you, fool. For
God hath tired of you.”

One final cry sounded on the quiet air and I quickly pulled
the belt away from his neck and ran for the Viper. I felt the first tendrils of
cold as I lowered myself into the Viper and screamed, “Secure and climb.”

Although I hadn’t logged any directional information into
the Viper’s information unit, it lifted straight into the air, through the open
door in the ceiling of the warehouse and kept climbing as I began to pray. The
hair on my arms stood up as my fear-thickened fingers jabbed instructions into
the directional panel.

* * * * *

Mx. Deaver was probably waiting for me in that empty church
somewhere in the city. But Hades if I knew where. The Viper had continued to
climb until my stiff fingers managed to pound the address of the Church of the
Twined Hands into the directional information unit but I wasn’t sure it would
even find the church since we didn’t know where the hell we were.

Fortunately for me, the Viper was equipped with a
directional system that didn’t need visual information to function. I felt it
turn sharply and smoothly to my left, which I judged to be south of where we
were and take off on silent wings of air. The screens came up after about ten
minutes and I could see the lighted skyline of Angel City in the distance.

I sighed my relief. Apparently the thing in the warehouse
hadn’t been told to come after me, though it had obviously been waiting for my
return. I had felt the cold, electric presence as I’d jumped into the Viper. I
glanced at my watch and smiled. It was a few minutes before nine. I wouldn’t
even be very late.

The Church of the Twined Hands was in an upscale part of
town that had been an abandoned hellhole until about eighteen months earlier.
That was when the city decided to orchestrate a comeback for the beaten down
area and the mayor had created encouragement, in the form of tax breaks and
low-interest loans, for people to purchase and rehabilitate the battered
buildings.

The renovated area now sported the latest in modern architecture.
The stainless steel and glass structures that predominated on Bridge Street
looked cold and sterile in the bright light of day. At night, with no sunlight
to burnish their sterile faces, they were downright dingy looking.

However, even the street’s older buildings were a magnet for
the wealthy, childless, people who seemed drawn to the area. They apparently
thought the crooked walls and mildewed brick of the rehabbed buildings were
“quaint” and had “personality”. I preferred my living space to be clean and
square. I just thought the Bridge Street area was old and mildewed. It’s all in
how you look at things I guess.

The Church of the Twined Hands was located in a squat, stone
building that sat forlornly in the shadow of the two ten- or twelve-story
buildings of stark stainless steel on either side of it.

In sharp contrast, the church was built of timeworn golden
rock and was only about three stories high, with a tower that rose above the
church, extending another three stories. Its windows were round, in the
architectural style of churches from the early nineteenth century and filled
with golden glass. Like lace on a hemline, gargoyles of various shapes and
sizes banded the entire roofline. Some of the ugly, little creatures had dark,
static eyes and didn’t look like they’d moved in centuries. Some of them,
however, had roving eyes of red fire. Most of the creatures had claws the
length of my hand and teeth that could rip the Viper apart with little effort.
I was glad they slept soundly on their assigned perches that night and prayed
they’d stay that way. Like rats, gargoyles are not my favorite things.

As I pulled open the heavy, iron-studded front door of the
church, I thought I caught movement along the roofline and my eyes shot
heavenward even as I threw out my sensing power. As my power came back to me
laden with raw, frigid evil, my hand tightened on the carved, iron handle of
the door and my spine stiffened with fear.

Somewhere out there evil watched me. A deepening sense of
cold filled me as I closed my eyes and concentrated hard on trying to identify
the source of the evil. With the gathering cold, I became aware of the foul
odor of rot, like putrefying flesh on a decaying corpse and I knew that,
whatever it was, I didn’t want to meet up with it.

Just as suddenly as I’d sensed the evil force it
disappeared. I hoped that meant that it had gone away, rather than the all too
possible alternative. Which was that it had somehow sensed my probing power and
had cloaked itself.

I continued into the church and closed the door firmly
behind me. Closing out the darkness and entering a world of warmth and soft,
golden light.

Deaver had promised to meet me in the church office and the
only direction he’d given me was that it was located on the second floor. Looking
around in the semi-darkness, I spied a wide stone staircase built into the wall
just to the right of the entrance. I climbed the stairs to the dimly lit
hallway of the second floor.

As I reached the second floor, I noticed that the staircase
continued to climb into the darkness above and I briefly wondered what secrets
the darkness held there. A cold, musty breeze flowed downward from the shadowed
space above, caressing my skin and pulling my hair back from my face. The
whispery breeze was filled with magic and left me feeling as if I’d like to
keep ascending those stone stairs to see what was waiting for me in the
darkness beyond that muted landing. Shaking my head finally, I turned away very
determinedly and started down the dimly lit hallway. But I decided I would ask
Deaver what lay beyond the second floor when I spoke to him. It might bear
checking out in the near future.

There was only one office space on the floor that appeared
to be occupied and, as I walked toward that well-lighted room, my ears picked
up an unidentifiable clicking noise that seemed to be coming from inside. Aside
from this gentle, unidentified sound, the entire floor felt deserted and was
eerily quiet.

My nose wrinkled in self-defense as I neared the church
office. I quickly realized that the sulfurous odor I was picking up was coated
with another, sickly sweet smell I couldn’t identify. The small hairs on the
back of my neck rose to attention and I fought off a chill of apprehension as I
reached to knock on the doorframe of the open door to announce my presence.

As soon as my eyes entered the room, I realized why I’d felt
death nearby. I also realized what the sickly-sweet odor was I’d been smelling
and was able to identify the clicking noise I’d been hearing.

His body rotating slowly from an antique contraption called
a ceiling fan, which hung above his desk, Deaver smiled gruesomely down at me,
his lips spread wide in a death-induced distortion borne of the last
terror-filled moments of his life.

What was left of his body dripped blood and other, more
disgusting fluids as it twirled gently with the motion of the fan. He was dead,
dead, most certainly dead. And I was too late to help him with his problem.

Oh the clicking noise? Each time Deaver’s naked, mangled
body made the circle around the fan, one unprotected, blood-covered foot ticked
against the metal shade that covered the room’s only window, tapping out an SOS
that nobody had heard.

Against my will my head turned toward the open door behind
me and I realized that, outside, before entering the church my senses had been
true. The evil I’d sensed had been there and from what I was sensing around me,
it had also been in this very room not too long ago.

I cast my sensing power around me like a protective cloak
and reached to grab the knife I’d replenished my thigh sheath with while riding
over in the Viper. I held it out in front of my body with both hands. Then I
moved to the televisual and called the murder in to the Strange Death
Department of the police.

As I spoke to a very disinterested dispatcher, my eyes
continued to scan the room around me and I kept my sensing power up. I was
intensely aware of the tinge of malevolence that burned into the outer edges of
my power, touching me with tiny jolts of electricity as I fought to keep it at
bay. A wicked, bloodthirsty force of some kind had been in that room very
recently, I knew that for sure. What I wasn’t sure of was, had it left?