Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (20 page)

He staggered to his feet, floundering across dunes of dirty clothes, stumbling over empty beer cans. The floorboards beneath him shuddered as one of the creature’s enormous legs—steel I-beams and ruptured concrete—smashed into the ground behind him. Metal screeched against metal, plaster grinded against stone, and then it reached for him, sending a lash of electrical conduits splayed like fingers outstretched and groping.

“Jason!” Mei wailed as the wires whipped about him, snapping taut around his throat, cutting his breath abruptly short and tangling about his legs. He crashed to the floor but had only a millisecond to gasp futilely before it hoisted him up, dangling him in the air, then flung him across the room. He slammed into the wall with enough force to crunch the drywall behind him, rattle his skull and knock whatever breath he had left clear out of his lungs. Dazed, he crumpled to the floor in a heap.

“Jason!” Mei cried again as he again felt the floor beneath him thrum.

Shit,
Jason thought, limping to his feet. Leaning heavily against the wall, he stumbled out the bedroom door and into a narrow corridor. “Mei,” he cried. “Get out of here! Run!”

When he staggered into the living room, making a beeline for the apartment’s front door, he heard a loud, booming crash, as if a full-grown brontosaurus had crashed into the wall separating it from the bedroom. A shockwave shuddered through the floor and rippled through the walls, making the overhead light fixtures begin to swing violently back and forth, creaking in their moorings.

“Turn that goddamn music down,” he heard someone shouting, muffled, from the apartment below, followed by a rapping against the floor, as if someone took a broom handle to the ceiling. “I’m tired of all the racket you—”

There was more, but the sudden scraping sound as the living room wall split horizontally down the middle in a widening ragged line drowned it out. It looked like an enormous mouth tearing apart the wall, getting ready to open. Jason backpedaled, groping wildly for the door behind him. It was locked, a brass-plated, double-key dead bolt for which there was no key in sight, and Jason tugged helplessly at the door handle.

He turned and dived wildly for the nearest cover he could find, a flimsy card table laden with more garbage, as the cleft in the wall burst wide, sending a spray of shattered wood, flying nails, plaster chips, electrical outlet boxes and more vomiting across the room. Again, cables, wires and telephone lines came whipping out like frenzied snakes, slapping and writhing, spraying bright coronas of sparks in all directions. Water pipes in the wall splintered too, and frothy torrents of high-velocity spray spewed everywhere.

Jason yelped as a thick gray cable caught him by the ankle, wrapping suddenly, sharply, cutting into his skin. It jerked him out from beneath the table and he clawed for futile purchase against the shag carpeting, pawed at one of the table legs. Again, he was hoisted up into the air, this time dangling upside down, with the length of wire wrapping farther and farther along his leg, like a python twining him into its constricting embrace.

The world beneath him swung crazily back and forth, upside down and around again as he careened back and forth, twisting and struggling to free himself. The creature smashed him into a wall, dunking him almost directly into the heavy geyser rushing from a broken water pipe. Jason choked, sputtered and gagged under the white, churning flow, soaked and nearly drowning before being pulled away again.

He’d forgotten about the gun until it fell out of the back of his pants, tumbling into the large pond that had formed in the middle of the living room rug. He’d forgotten, too, about the Eidolon, until he felt it surge within him, a sudden cold darkness enveloping him. His body felt weightless, smokelike, formless, and in an instant, he found himself out of the wire’s tangled grasp and on his knees, within arm’s length of the gun. He reached for it, snatching it in hand just as he felt more cables slap at him, sliding around his shoulders, groping for purchase around his waist.

Again, it felt as though he melted, becoming something transparent and diaphanous, the pressure and friction of the cables against him disappearing. The living room faded to black before his eyes. As if he’d only blinked, all at once, it was bright again, his body restored and solid once more, and he was back in the bedroom, standing beside the ruined window that had been their point of entry.

“Where…where did you…?” He heard Mei hiccup, and he turned to find her in the closet, crouched on her knees. Her face was ashen, her eyes enormous with terror and shock, and she blinked at him, openmouthed, like a startled fish. “Where did you come from?” she whimpered. “What…what just—”

The creature reappeared in front of them, no less than three feet away, erupting out of the floor in a sudden mountain of splintered wood, fetid clothes and garbage. Mei shrieked, recoiling toward the back of the closet, kicking her feet wildly.

He still had the gun in his hand. Jason realized this as if snapping out of a reverie. As the creature lunged at him, rudimentary arms fashioned out of clothes and cross-beams outstretched, he raised the pistol, thumbing off the safety in the same, frantic movement. Without even bothering to aim, he pulled the trigger.

The bullet flew wide and Mei screamed again, throwing her hands over her face as an outcropping of broken wood, drywall, concrete and debris shot out of the wall. Thick as a man’s arm and capped with the ragged remnants of a cinderblock, it plowed into Jason like a runaway freight train, knocking him sideways, sending him crashing to the floor. The gun fell from his hand, skittering across the floor, and he crawled after it, straining to reach it, blood pouring from his nose, his ears ringing from the blow.

The creature reconfigured itself again, resuming its humanoid shape. Hunched over and lurching, with no discernablediscernible head or hands, it swung the spindly pendulums of its arms at him in broad, swooshing arcs. Wailing like a fire bell, Mei darted out of the closet, trying to get out of its way and across the room. Her movement attracted its attention, however. It turned and began to follow her, steel legs smashing into the floor, leaving indelible dents splintered into the wood. Mei tripped and fell, landing hard on her belly. When a length of electrical wire snapped out, coiling smartly around her ankle, jerking her backward, she shrieked again, shrill with terror.

“Mei, no!” Jason grabbed the gun. “Let her go, you son of a bitch!”

Clasping the Beretta in both hands, struggling to draw a clean aim, he squeezed the trigger. The slug punched deeply into the segment of drywall comprising the creature’s chest. As it did, it fell apart—glass, steel, plaster, wood and stone—crashing to the floor with a thunderous din. Mei tumbled with it, yelping as she hit the ground, then again as her hands darted over her head to shield herself from the raining debris.

As the last reverberating aftershocks faded, the dust settled in a hissing rain and a strange and heavy silence fell upon the room, broken only by the soft, frightened sounds of Mei mewling and a distant siren, like a police car or ambulance, from somewhere outside. Jason waited for it to come again, still clutching the gun against his palms, swinging the muzzle back and forth to match the darting path of his gaze.

Did I get it?
His heart raced. His breaths escaped in short, staccato gasps. He tasted blood in his mouth, lots of it, and when he turned his head to spit, he glanced down at himself, realizing he was covered in plaster dust.

Did I get it?
he thought again, stumbling to his feet, still keeping the gun trained ahead of him. He laughed, a hoarse, scraping, shaky sound, finally lowering the gun, letting it dangle in one hand. With the other, he forked his fingers through his hair, wincing to feel the caked and crusted grit and dust. “I got it,” he said.

“What was it?” Mei whispered. He reached for her, holding out his hand in beckon, and she rushed to his side, shying against him, her fingers hooking fiercely against the waistband of his jeans. “Oh, God, Jason, what the fuck was that thing?”

The bedroom now boasted an expansive hole in the wall, leading to the living room, that hadn’t been there upon their arrival. It awarded them an unobstructed view of the apartment’s front door so that when it flew open suddenly, unexpectedly, Mei screamed again.

A young man stood in the doorway, his eyes round and stunned, his hand frozen in front of him, a key ring dangling from his fingers. Short and lean, with dark, short-cropped hair frosted white and spiked around his head, he blinked between the disemboweled apartment and the two people standing in the middle of it.

“What’s going on?” he asked, then, after a stupefied moment,
“
“
Mei?”
”

“Oh, shit.” She hiccupped, clutching at Jason. “J-Dog!”

“Hold on.” Jason had wrapped one arm protectively around Mei as the door burst open, and the room suddenly dissolved into shadows. Again, Jason felt the weight of his body dissipating; like a dried leaf adrift on a current of breeze, he floated away. This time, though, Mei went with him. He felt the warm press of her body against him melt away, literally, as if she had been made of wax, slipping from his grasp. It lasted less than a second, these peculiar sensations, and then Jason found himself standing in a narrow alley, his arm still around Mei, the gun still in his hand.

“Wh-what the…?” Mei gasped. She jerked away from him as if he’d burned her, and staggered about in a clumsy, reeling circle, her eyes enormous with disbelief and shock. “What just happened to us?”

Jason looked up, disoriented, drawing the blade of his hand to his brow to block the glare of the sun from over the edge of the building’s roof. It wasn’t the green apartment building in skid row any longer, and of the blown-out third story window, the smashed walls and gaping hole, there were no signs. Nonetheless, he recognized the place and realized where he was, where the Eidolon had brought him. Again.

“Where are we?” Mei asked. “Jason, what is this place?”

“Home,” Jason replied quietly, staring at the back door of what had once been Sully’s Tavern, and the entrance leading up to the apartment above the bar where
long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away
, he had lived. “It’s home.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Look, we made the news,” Mei said as she lay down on her side against the queen-sized motel bed, curling in a fetal ball beneath her blankets, her gaze pinned drowsily on the television.

Jason had brought her to a little motel near the tavern, the place that rented weekly Dean had mentioned only days earlier. It was crappy, but it was shelter, at least for a couple of nights—a room with a TV, telephone and shower.

He’d taken advantage of this last, standing beneath a steaming, stinging spray and scrubbing the silt, grit, grime and blood away from his body.

The Eidolon is getting stronger,
he’d thought as he stood in the shower, staring down at his hand, which, only hours earlier, had been mangled by the window in J-Dog’s apartment. His nose had been broken too, and damn likely his cheekbone from where the creature had punched him with a cinderblock fist. He’d been able to prod experimentally with his tongue against his back teeth and feel a couple of loose molars only hours ago, but now those same teeth were firmly rooted in place once more. His nose wasn’t even particularly sore, and there wasn’t a mark on his face to be seen, now that the blood and muck had been washed off. His hand was likewise nearly good as new. He felt a dull, arthritic sort of ache in the joints as he flexed and unfurled his fingers, but otherwise, they seemed virtually unaffected.

The rest of him had healed, but his shoulder remained a grim, aching mess. He’d downed a pair of the ibuprofen tablets Dr. Delgado had given him to try to dampen the pain, get it back under some semblance of control. The tablets had been in his coat pocket during his fight. They were nearly pulverized, so the best he’d been able to do was dissolve the crumbled powder in a glass of water and knock it back like a shot of tequila.

Curious, he approached the bed, looking over at the TV. Images flashed across the screen of the avocado-green apartment building filmed from the alley. From this vantage, the damage to the third floor was apparent, a rough-hewn, ragged hole where the outer wall had once stood.

Breaking news: Meth lab explodes,
the video caption declared. “Jaime Vincent is wanted by police for suspicion of manufacturing methamphetamines in the apartment,” a reporter said in voice-over as the screen changed again, this time to show a mug shot of J-Dog. “Two years ago, Vincent pled guilty to drug possession charges and was sentenced to three years and three days of probation. Meth labs are dangerous and carry a high risk of explosions due to the volatile chemicals involved in the drug’s production.”

“A meth lab,” Mei murmured, looking somewhat forlorn. She hadn’t asked Jason about what had happened, hadn’t mentioned it at all, in fact, until just that moment, almost as if she was trying desperately to push it out of her mind, forget all about it. “That makes sense. Yeah.” Her eyelids drooped heavily. “Except for your eyes.”

He thought he’d misheard her. “What?”

“Your eyes,” she said, her voice sleepy and slurred. “Today at the apartment, your eyes went black…like there was nothing there…like
you
weren’t there.”

Her words struck him as eerily similar to something Sam had said to him.
For a second, it was like your eyes weren’t even human, like they’d gone black or something.

It’s the Eidolon,
he thought.
When it comes over me, it shows in my eyes.

“You saved my life,” Mei said.

Jason smiled, sitting beside her on the bed. “Now we’re even.”

“Yeah.” Her voice had taken on a sort of slurred, deadpan quality to it, something he hadn’t noticed before stepping into the shower. She seemed sleepy, somewhat dazed.

She’s in shock,
he thought.
And why shouldn’t she be? We were both almost killed by an apartment building today.