Hellhound (A Deadtown Novel) (6 page)

MY APARTMENT WAS EMPTY—AND QUIET. NO TV BLARED. As I’d thought, Juliet was out hunting. Dad was probably roosting somewhere out in Needham, near Gwen’s house. I kinda wished they were here, staring at the screen and scarfing popcorn, because then I could hang out with them and not do what I knew I had to do.

Strange things were happening. The Morfran was possessing zombies and driving them to acts of violence before consuming them. My father had brought the prophesied white falcon out of the Darklands and into the human world. Even the fact that Deadtown’s zombies had lost their appetites en masse seemed like some kind of omen.

I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to consult the book.

Please,
I thought, not knowing who or what I was beseeching,
not another vision
.

The Book of Utter Darkness
waited on the kitchen table, where it had been since Dad’s last attempt to read it. You’d think it would look innocent, ordinary. An everyday sight. Just a book lying flat on a tabletop.

Not this book. It pulsed with menace—literally—like some kind of force field emanated from it, rippling the air. When I hovered my hand a couple of inches from its cover, icy sparks snapped against my fingertips. The snapping resolved into a rhythm, like a beating heart:
duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM
.

The pulse traveled up my arm—buzzing through my demon mark, then going past my elbow, through my shoulder, down into my chest. It swirled around my heart, as though it were trying to hijack its rhythm.

Duh DUM duh DUM.

I shivered and pulled my hand away. The pulse faded. Feeling ill, I let both hands drop into my lap. I closed my eyes and rested my left hand on my right. The right was cold, stinging with the book’s energy, but the left covered it like a blanket. Warmth dispelled some of the iciness.

I got up and went to the sink, where I grabbed a pair of rubber gloves. Juliet had bought them, not that she’d ever washed a dish in her life—or her undeath, for that matter. She’d seen on TV that the gloves would keep your hands soft and, later, was disgusted to learn they only performed this magical feat in the context of doing housework. She’d tossed them aside and forgotten about them.

But I’d discovered that the gloves were good for something else. They insulated me from
The Book of Utter Darkness
.

I pulled them on. They were hot pink—
not
what you’d call my color—and clumsy. But they let me touch the book without feeling like the damn thing was trying to grab me and pull me into its pages.

Of course, the gloves were also the most likely reason I’d gotten nothing from the book lately. They insulated me from the book’s power—great—yet they probably also broke the psychic connection that let the book transfer information to its reader. I almost didn’t care. The last several visions the book had given me had been horrible and so overwhelming they knocked me out of my chair. Boston in flames. Corpses littering the streets. Demons rampaging—attacking women, children. Smoke. Blood. Screaming. Death, death, and more death. I’d wake up on the floor, curled tight in the fetal position, covering my ears against the shrieks and demonic laughter. For one blessed moment I’d feel relief, like when you wake up from your worst-ever nightmare and realize it was only a dream. But relief fled as I remembered that what the book was showing me was real; it just hadn’t happened yet.

That vision—Hell throwing open its gates, sending an army of demons to destroy the human world—was the final goal of Pryce’s schemes. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t just a vision. It was his plan.

So I had to try. If I could find out how Pryce would turn those horrible visions into reality, I’d have a chance of stopping him.

I stared at my rubbery, neon pink hands. I’d probably have to do this without the gloves. I knew that, and the knowledge made the sick feeling in my stomach expand to fill my whole body. I did not want to touch that book. I’d rather jump into a pit of cobras.

But maybe the gloves didn’t really do anything. The book sometimes remained silent for days or weeks at a time. Maybe it was in one of its sulky moods. I’d try once more with the gloves. If I didn’t get anything, I’d bite the bullet and go bare-handed next time. Tomorrow. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it now.

I reached out and lay my gloved hand on the cover, testing. No pulse. No icy sparks. The sight was absurd—bright pink plastic on the pale leather cover. That cover had been crafted from the skin of some poor human who’d died centuries ago. He’d been flayed alive—the book had made sure to show me that in vivid detail.

Now, though, no visions rose up as I opened to a random page. It didn’t matter where I began. It was impossible to read
The Book of Utter Darkness
like a normal book. For one thing, it was written in the language of Hell—a language forbidden to anyone outside the infernal regions. Google Translate doesn’t do Hellish to English. But even if it could, it wouldn’t have helped, anyway.
The Book of Utter Darkness
was enchanted. It released its secrets when it wished, as it wished. The book taunted anyone who opened it. It teased, it hinted, it tried to trick would-be readers. It didn’t lie, but it fed out bits of information designed to confuse, to nudge toward false conclusions. The book knew I was its enemy, and it wanted a demonic victory every bit as much as Pryce did.

If I couldn’t decode its secrets, they’d win.

I shoved such thoughts aside. Breathing slowly, I tried to let my mind go blank. I stared at the incomprehensible jumble of strange letters. The ink was a faded rusty brown, and I had a flash of insight—it had been made with the blood of humans. Many humans. They’d been destroyed to create a book foretelling the destruction of their world.

It was an ugly thought, one that weighed in my gut, hard and cold, as if I’d swallowed a lump of lead. But I put it from my mind. People had suffered and died to make this book, but their tragedies happened long ago. I couldn’t do anything for them now. I was trying to protect others, people who lived and breathed and loved and hoped and walked the Earth now. Those who hadn’t yet come to harm.

My mind settled back to blankness as I made myself stare. The letters blurred, then doubled. I blinked to uncross my eyes. Damn, I wished this thing had an index. Then I could just flip to the back and look up
Zombies, possession of by Morfran
or
Maddox, Pryce, how to thwart his evil plan
. Save a lot of time.

Turning the page sometimes helped. The new set of letters would be equally impossible to read, but sometimes a fresh page would send a flood of understanding into my mind. Or there might be a picture; the book was illustrated, but the illustrations seemed to change and move around at will.

Worth a try. I reached out with a hot-pink-gloved finger.

The page wouldn’t budge.

I licked my finger—the rubber tasted gross, like licking a tire—and tried again. Nothing. I laid my hand flat on the page and slid it, but the page still refused to turn. I tried going back a page. Nope. Neither the right-hand page nor the left would move at all. It was like somebody had glued them down.

Damn it.

I knew what I had to do—not tomorrow, but now. My hands were sweating inside the stupid gloves, anyway. I yanked them off and threw them on the floor, where they lay like two beached pink whales.

“Talk to me, damn you!” I grabbed the page with my bare hand. I yanked it so hard I jerked the book off the table.

The page flipped easily. For a fraction of a second, I stared at another block of reddish-brown letters, my fingers resting on the page I’d turned. Then the book’s energy slammed into me like a lightning bolt. A charge shot up my arm. Fireworks exploded in my demon mark. The room went black, then crimson, and then I was no longer in my kitchen. I wasn’t anywhere at all.

Rage.
The feeling seethed inside me like lava. It surged, filling me—hot, angry pressure building in my head. I wanted to explode. I wanted to smash something, anything, and my arms flailed around in the nothingness, searching for a target. Smoke, hot and yellow and sulfurous, billowed around me. Smoke that emanated from the hellfire blazing inside me.

I coughed, waving both hands through the smoke, swiping it away. As the billows parted, I smelled the coppery scent of blood. Lots of blood.

I stood on Boston Common, but the site looked more like a battlefield than a city park. I sniffed, tracking the source of the blood. On the ground before me lay a man, a human, his intestines spilling out of a gaping wound in his gut. His sightless eyes stared at nothing; his mouth hung open in surprise or horror or maybe just the slackness of death. Blood soaked his clothes and spread in a puddle around him. It reflected the light of nearby flames.

A scream made me look up. A woman in running clothes fled from a demon. She was fast, but the demon was closing in on her. It leapt in huge bounds, shaking the ground with each step.

I gripped the sword I hadn’t realized I was holding and sprinted toward her.

The woman saw me. A flash of hope replaced the panic on her face. She veered toward me, pumping her arms and running harder. The demon followed.

Now.
I raised my sword and charged. The woman gasped as the blade sank into the soft flesh of her belly. It sliced through her organs as easily as it had done to the man I’d killed moments before. I yanked out my sword, and her hands went to the wound, cradling the gleaming pink and gray viscera that slid out. Her eyes registered astonishment, then betrayal as her own blood coated her hands. She moaned and fell to her knees. She toppled over sideways. One soft sigh, one final gush of blood, and her heart stopped forever.

The demon had caught up to us. It snarled at me, baring its long yellow fangs. “That one was mine.”

“You were too slow. Our leader rewards the quick.” I sneered at its hideous face. “Go chase some old lady with a walker. That would be more your speed.”

The demon howled and lunged at me. My sword burst into flame. Demon flesh sizzled as the creature’s clawed hand touched fire. It shrieked and jumped back.

“Go!” I shouted. “Before I kill you as unfit to serve.”

It spat at me, but I waved my sword and the gob of demon phlegm sputtered in the flame. The demon’s wings unfurled and lifted it into the air. After a last growl in my direction, it flew off toward the harbor. A moment later, smoke swallowed its form.

I stepped over the woman’s body and looked around for something else to kill. Something human, preferably, though I didn’t care.

A buzzing in my arm drew my attention to my demon mark. The red scar was moving. It grew and changed its shape. The mark became the face of the Destroyer.

“Well done, shapeshifter,” it said. The face grinned, and the burning inside me shone through its eyes. “Finally thou hast embraced thy destiny.”

WHEN I CAME BACK TO MYSELF, I LAY ON THE KITCHEN floor. Again. Inches from my face an empty rubber glove reached for me like the hand of a dead man. A bright pink dead man.

Shit.
It was the only thought I could muster.
Shit, shit, shit.

I sat up, as achy and stiff as if I’d really just fought a battle. I rubbed the elbow I must have whacked when I fell on the floor. As I did, I glimpsed my demon mark. It took the shape of the grinning Destroyer’s face, as it had in my vision.
No!
I blinked, and the face was gone. The mark looked like it always did—a small red burn scar that puckered the flesh of my forearm. But it felt strange, as though something were stirring there. Some presence, some creature waking after a long sleep. The presence moved under my skin, exploring. With it awakened a feeling I barely knew how to describe. Like a superheated itch, but deep inside where no scratching could relieve it.

I sat on the floor, inhaling deeply and rubbing my forearm, willing the feeling to subside. I focused on the soothing strokes, on making the sensation disappear. It didn’t, but gradually it decreased. The itch dulled and sank deeper. I rubbed and rubbed, making it smaller, until the itch was no bigger than a pinprick. When the feeling stilled enough that I could ignore it, I climbed back into my chair.

The Book of Utter Darkness
lay open on the table. An illustration now stretched across both pages. It was a detailed, hand-painted scene from that appalling vision. There I stood, spattered with blood, the woman I’d murdered lying at my feet. Fires burned on all sides, framing the scene. Above, a flying demon disappeared into the smoke. I held my sword aloft, its flames reaching into the sky and running along the tops of both pages. On my forearm, as vivid and detailed as a tattoo, leered the Destroyer.

A single word formed in my mind, appearing letter by letter as if scrolling across a marquee:
D . . . E . . . S . . . T . . . I . . . N . . . Y
.

No.
Not
my destiny.

I slammed the book shut. I grabbed the gloves and piled them on top, as though those rubber hands would hold the book’s filthy visions inside it. I would
not
let the Destroyer take control. In whatever war was coming, I would
not
fight on the side of Hell.

A word whispered through my mind like the echo of a breeze:
destiny
.

I NEEDED TO TALK TO MAB. MY AUNT HAD ALSO STUDIED
The Book of Utter Darkness
, and her time with it stretched across several centuries. Mab rarely told me about anything she’d gotten from the book. But surely,
surely
if she’d ever had a vision like this one, a vision that showed me slaughtering innocent people and fighting alongside my sworn enemies, she’d warn me. Wouldn’t she?

The book revealed different things to different readers. It was time for both of us to lay out everything we knew. Maybe if we put together all of the puzzle pieces we’d each seen individually, we’d get a clearer picture. Because I sure as hell refused to swallow the vision it was trying to feed me.

There was one problem, though: To talk to Mab, I had to be asleep. My aunt was old school—no cell phone, no landline, and nothing like a computer in her house. The only way to get in touch with her was to use an ancient Cerddorion method of psychic communication. When Gwen and I were kids, we called it the dream phone, using it to keep our conversations going each night after Mom had turned out the lights. Because the dream phone makes use of the parts of the mind that become active when the body is asleep, we could get our rest and keep gossiping together halfway through the night.

Now, sleep seemed about as possible as reassembling those zombies who’d been exploded by the Morfran. For one thing, it was barely two
A.M.
, and I usually didn’t climb into bed until after dawn. Tonight, of course, that wasn’t the real problem. Even with every light in the apartment on, I didn’t dare close my eyes. The moment I did, I saw the shocked betrayal on that woman’s face as I drove my sword into her belly.

A vision. It was only a vision, sent by a book that hated me and wanted to confuse me. A book, made by demons, that wanted the demons to win. It had given me false visions before—visions not of something that came to pass but of something the book wanted to happen. One of its tricks. If I bought into the idea that the book’s visions were inevitable, it became harder to see other possibilities, harder to find ways to thwart its prophecies.

I knew that. I’d learned to resist accepting such visions and whisperings from the book. But tonight was different. Tonight, I hadn’t simply watched the vision unfold; I’d participated in it. I’d fought on the wrong side—and I’d liked it.

The admission slashed through my gut like a knife, like the way my blade had stabbed those innocent people. I’d liked it. I’d felt free and powerful, with no restraints on my behavior. Free to kill. Free to destroy.

My demon mark itched, and I rubbed it impatiently. I didn’t want that seed of pure rage inside me. I knew now how it felt for the seed to grow and blossom, to fill me with its bitter fruit. I knew how it felt to be nothing more than an extension of the Destroyer.

I inspected the mark. Was it bigger? It looked redder, but that was probably because I couldn’t stop rubbing the damn thing. I went to the bathroom and dug out a tube of aloe vera gel I’d bought last summer, after a romantic weekend on Cape Cod had left me as red as the lobsters Kane and I had eaten at a fancy waterfront restaurant. I squirted out a dollop and massaged it into the spot. Coolness spread across my skin, and the itch receded. It didn’t go away, but it pulled back inside. It was the best I could do for now.

I’d put the gel back in the medicine cabinet and started to close the door when something caught my eye. A bottle of sleeping pills. Normally, sleeping pills didn’t do a thing for me, but these were magically enhanced, the kind I give my clients to make them sleep soundly while I run through their dreams exterminating nightmare demons. I used them myself from time to time when my schedule got so messed up that I couldn’t remember whether I was supposed to sleep during the day or at night. These worked. One pill, and I’d be snoozing away within ten minutes. But wrapped in a warm cocoon of drug-induced, magically enforced sleep, would I be able to use the dream phone? I’d never tried.

Still, there was no chance of talking to Mab while I was sitting bolt upright in a chair, too scared to blink. I poured myself a glass of water, swallowed the pill, and washed it down.

Five minutes later, I lay in my bed, the lights off and the covers pulled up to my chin. I pushed all thoughts from my mind except my aunt and her colors. Each member of my race has a pair of colors, specific to the individual, that you use to call someone on the dream phone. Mab’s were blue—a strong, vibrant cobalt—and bright silver. Sleep lapped at the edges of my consciousness like a calm lake on a summer day. A blue lake, reflecting silvery glints of light.
Blue and silver. Blue and silver.
I slipped into sleep as though diving into that warm lake, surrounded by blue and silver swirls.

I WAS A MERMAID. THE THOUGHT DELIGHTED ME. LONG strands of silvery hair floated around my face in the blue, blue water. I looked at my tail, covered with glimmering scales in an intricate pattern of silver and iridescent blue. Beautiful. I giggled, sending a column of bubbles toward the surface.

Giggling?
questioned an incredulous voice somewhere inside my mind.
You’re not a giggler.

I giggled again for the fun of it and to see the pretty silver bubbles rise. Then I jackknifed my body and streaked away. My powerful tail propelled me through the water. My silver hair streamed behind me like a comet’s trail. I swam and swam through the blue water, loving my speed and strength.

From the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a form swimming beside me. Turning my head, I saw an old woman. How strange. I stopped and floated above the lake’s bottom, inspecting my companion. Mab. It was Mab. But she wasn’t a mermaid like me. Her long black skirt belled around her ankles; two feet stuck out awkwardly past the hem. The sight of my aunt—her short gray hair all wild and floaty around her face, her efforts to retain her dignity by holding her skirt in place—set off another giggling fit. Mab didn’t giggle with me. She didn’t look happy at all. She scowled at me through the giggle-bubbles and pointed toward the water’s surface. Then she swam upward.

I watched her go, her black boots kicking as she ascended. I started to swim away. But something, the flash of my blue-and-silver tail, made me pause. The colors that surrounded me, that
made
me, they belonged to Mab. I was here for Mab; I couldn’t let her go. With a flick of my tail, I followed her.

As soon as my head broke the water’s surface, I became myself again. No mane of silvery hair, no iridescent tail. My legs thrashed for a moment until I remembered how to use them. I treaded water and looked around.

“Over here, child,” Mab’s voice called. She sat on the shore, no more than thirty yards away. I swam toward her in a slow breaststroke. Too slow. But when I dove beneath the water, my mermaid form didn’t return. Pity. Swimming as a mermaid had been like flying. Now, I was reduced to clumsy thrashing.

Still, I made it. I got my feet under me and waded to my aunt. She sat on the sand, her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around her shins. Water dripped from her hair and ran down her face in rivulets. Her scowl remained in place. She looked funny, but her expression killed any urge to giggle.

“Are you on some kind of drug?” she asked, her voice cross.

“It’s just a sleeping pill, the kind I give clients.” I conjured a towel and handed it to Mab so she could dry her hair. “Bedtime isn’t for hours, and I needed to talk to you.”

“I’m certain you realize the effects of trying to communicate while under the influence, so I’ll spare you the lecture. Here’s your towel.” She handed me a pizza.

“Oh.” Suddenly the giggles welled up again, and this time I couldn’t suppress them. “Good thing you didn’t rub your hair with this.” The idea of Mab, her hair coated with tomato sauce and draped with strings of cheese, was just too much. I dissolved in a fit of laughter, dropping the pizza. It sprouted four legs and a head and grew a hard green shell, then lumbered into the water. My laughter subsided to hiccups, and I felt a little mournful watching the towel/pizza/turtle go. I was hungry, and that pizza had looked good. A whiff of oregano and garlic hung in the air.

“Enough nonsense,” Mab snapped. Kind of like a turtle, actually. I covered my mouth with both hands to hold the laughter inside. She was still dripping, and the phrase
mad as a wet hen
came to mind. I’d never thought about what it meant before; now I had a very vivid picture to last me for life. I fought the smile that tugged at my mouth. “I’m assuming that you had a reason for contacting me,” she continued. “Unless you’ve taken up recreational drug use—in which case I’ll be on my way.”

“No, Mab, don’t go. I’m sorry. There was a reason, an important one.” I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was. My mind was crowded with mermaid tails and furious wet hens and snapping turtles and towels that turned into pizzas. I stalled while I tried to find the thread that brought me here. “Why are you all wet?” Her scowl deepened. “No, wait. What I mean is . . .” I concentrated, feeling like I was hunting for words in a bowl of alphabet soup. “How come you’re here,
inside
my dream?” Usually, dream-phone conversations took place on neutral ground, a kind of borderland between the participants’ psyches. In a typical dream-phone call, I could see my aunt in her own surroundings (day or night—Mab was the only person I knew who could place and receive calls while awake). In the same way, she could see me in mine. Tonight’s situation was entirely new to me.

“It’s the strength of the magic supplementing the pill you took. It must have been very well spelled. That’s good when you enter a client’s dreamscape, but not so good for this form of communication. The signal of your call came as usual—your colors rose up in a mist—but when I answered I found myself deep underwater, swimming beside a mermaid with your face.” A tiny twitch that might have been a smile tugged at her mouth. “Most unexpected, I assure you. It took me several seconds to regather my wits.”

I wished I could regather mine. I stared at my bare feet, trying to remember why I’d called Mab. I counted my toes.
When I get to ten,
I promised myself,
my mind will clear. Deep breath. Okay, this little piggy went to market . . . that’s one.

I wiggled my toes and moved on to the next one.
This little piggy stayed home . . . two.

My toes seemed to be wiggling of their own accord. I watched, fascinated.
This little piggy had—
My toes turned into pigs. Miniature ones. They remained attached to my feet, but they made a racket with their squealing.

Cool.

“Mab, do you see that?” I pointed at my wriggling, squealing toes. A thought made me snicker. “I’ve heard of pigtails, but not pigtoes.”

“Child.” The sharpness of Mab’s voice silenced the pigs and turned them back into toes. “Look at me.”

I did. She wasn’t wet anymore, but she still looked mad. I lowered my eyes, ashamed of my spaciness.

Mab held my face in her hands. “Look at me,” she repeated. “Look in my eyes.”

All right. I could do that. Mab’s eyes are blue, not amber like mine. In her irises, I could see both the blue and the silver that make up her colors. Pretty. My aunt had been a beautiful woman once upon a time.

A spark flared in Mab’s eyes. I felt a snap, like a tight-stretched rubber band breaking. My gaze locked onto hers. She reeled me into a world of blue and silver. For a moment, I had an image of a mermaid caught on a fishing line, but then all images, all thought exploded in one great blue-and-silver flash.

I blinked, and the colors cleared. I felt my aunt’s cool hands on my cheeks. I blinked again, and her face came into focus.