Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (33 page)

“I don’t belong to anyone,” Jason seethed, then rammed the blade forward, punching through Sitri’s rib cage from behind, spearing through his heart.

Sitri’s mouth opened and a thin stream of blood suddenly burbled past his lips, spilling down his chin, standing out in stark contrast to his alabaster skin. “You…you can’t…” he croaked. Then his skin and hair, his entire form, began to sag and run like melting tallow.

Sitri screamed, his voice ripping up octaves, growing agonized and shrill. His flesh blackened around the sword’s point of impact as if the steel burned him somehow, a scorched circumference that spread outward, tainting Sitri’s skin, swallowing his tattoos in darkness. The centipedes, scarabs and spiders all tried desperately to escape and Sitri’s flesh heaved and rippled as they squirmed beneath the surface, trying to tear their way free.

Sitri crumpled forward, crashing face-first to the ground. Here, he began to jerk and writhe, no longer shrieking, his voice reduced to an inarticulate, strangled garble of sounds. His fingertips scratched and clawed at the dirt as he convulsed. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and saliva clung to his lips in a thick, rabid froth.

“
Gllluuuuunnnnggghhh!
”
His eyes rolled wildly in their sockets like those of a horse trapped in a barn fire. His face began to blister, large, bubbling pustules that would then split open, spattering first pus, then blood, then as the rest of the skin on his body began to rive open too, a spill of thick, tarlike ooze. The rich, pungent stink of decaying meat sent Jason stumbling back in disgusted recoil.

“
Glllunnngghhh!
” Sitri pawed desperately at him, even as his fingers disintegrated away to the bone, decades worth of rot seemingly occurring within milliseconds. Within moments, there was nothing left of Sitri but a blackened heap of sludge that slowly bubbled down to a thin, curdled foam against the dirt.

Jason waited. They always came back. He’d seen enough horror movies in his lifetime to know that as soon as the hero let his guard down, thinking the psycho with the demonstrated penchant for ax-murdering nubile blonds was killed, he was as good as dead himself.

Because they never stay down,
he thought. Picking the sword up out of the ooze, he used the tip to poke the gelatinous mound that marked Sitri’s remains. At this tentative prodding, the entire thing slopped sideways with a moist splatter. He could see the glint of silver among the black, soupy mess—metal studs and gilded rings, all of Sitri’s piercings with nothing left now to impale.

A long moment passed, then another, then another. Jason didn’t even realize he was holding his breath until he felt the uncomfortable strain of doing so; then he uttered a long, shuddering exhalation, a hoarse, warbling laugh.

Dead.
Jason stumbled back, the sword dropping impotently at his side.
He’s really dead.

“I’ll be goddamned,” he whispered and he laughed again. “I killed the son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Exhausted and hurting, Jason crumpled to his knees, his body caked and dripping with gore, the sword still clenched in his hand. “Back off now,” he whispered, closing his eyes, because the Eidolon still surged inside him, churning like the ocean during a Category Five hurricane. It didn’t want to relinquish control. It wasn’t yet ready and was resisting his best efforts to try. “Come on,” he whispered, forcing his hand to move, his fingers to loosen their viselike grasp on the sword hilt. “You’re all right. Everything’s okay. Back off now.”

He stood, staggering, letting the sword fall to the ground. Keeping a hand pressed to his stomach, he limped over to where Sarea remained sprawled and knocked out on the ground. Leaning over, sucking in a pained breath through his teeth, he lifted her fallen revolver in hand—a massive ..44 Magnum straight out of an old
Dirty Harry
movie.

“Hey.” He kicked her, a tentative nudge with his foot. She groaned, rocking her head from side to side, her brows crimping slightly.

“Hey.” He kicked her again, harder this time, and when her eyes flew open, they were ablaze with crackling, snapping white fire.

“No way.” Jason made a point of drawing the hammer back with his thumb, aiming the target site at the center of her forehead. “Not this time, bitch. You shoot me, I shoot you.
Quid quid quo
and all that.”

After a long, stubborn moment, the fire dampened and her eyes returned to normal. Her gaze cut past him, sweeping the bloody landscape in visible bewilderment and surprise. “Where is—”

“Sitri?” Jason supplied. “Dead. The party’s over. You slept through it all.” He motioned with the gun for her to get up. “Now it’s time to go home.”

Blood had crusted under her nose from where he’d punched her, smeared all down the side of her cheek and chin. She brushed her fingertips against it now, wincing slightly as she staggered to her feet. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re going to bring me back,” Jason told her. “Back to the city, back to Gabriel’s apartment.” He didn’t know if Gabriel had been involved in this little setup or not, but didn’t really give a damn. “You’re going to do it right now.”

Sarea managed a contemptuous smile as she flipped her hair back from her face. “And why am I going to do that?”

“Because I’m going to shoot your sorry ass if you don’t,” Jason said drily. “Back on the mortal plane, I’ll give you a fighting chance, a full day’s head start, before I hunt you down and plug a bullet through your skull.”

“How generous of you.”

“It’s the least you deserve,” Jason snapped. “Gabriel said you were supposed to be good—like angels, he told me. You were supposed to help me.”

Her thin, icy smile widened. “Gabriel is a fine one to talk,” she said. “Since he’s the reason you’re here to begin with.” When Jason blinked, the aim of the gun wavering, she laughed. “Haven’t you ever wondered how Sitri managed to get a hold of your soul in the first place when it’s a gatekeeper’s responsibility—
Gabriel’s,
in your case—to have delivered you to the Netherworlde?”

Her brow arched with cool contempt. “You ask me, you’ve wound up where you belonged all the while. It’s no surprise to me that the Eidolon bound itself so deeply to you. It sees the same things in your nature that I did the night you died. The two of you were a perfect match.”

“Shut up.” Jason frowned, leveling the gun again, his face flushed with shame and rage. “You don’t know anything about me, so shut up.”

“Don’t you want to know where Gabriel was on the night you died?” Sarea asked sweetly. “While you were lying in the emergency room with a bullet in your skull, he was exactly where you left him tonight, in his little rectory apartment, passed out drunk on his couch. That’s the story of his life, his
after
life, anyway. For the better part of the last two thousand years, he’s been drunk.”

Jason closed the slim margin of space between them in two broad, angry strides, then shoved the barrel of the gun to her temple. “I said shut your mouth.”

“Sometimes an evil deed is a necessary one—isn’t that what he told you?” Sarea looked up at him. “For the good of the mortal plain and all of mankind, that’s what he tells himself anyway, so he can sleep at night, and for once, I’m inclined to believe him.”

She rammed her knee up and into Jason’s crotch, dropping him like a rock. Doubled over and breathless, he crashed to the ground, the gun falling from his hand. Out of all the pain and injury he’d suffered since returning to the Netherworlde, that throbbing, sickening agony pounding through his balls, twisting in his gut, crippling his entire body had to be the worst. He clenched his teeth, biting back a ragged, mewling cry as tears streamed down his cheeks and he clutched between his thighs.

Sarea reached down and retrieved her pistol. “You’re pathetic,” she seethed, pressing the barrel to his head and drawing back the hammer, cocking the gun.

There was a bright burst of light, discernablediscernible even though Jason’s eyes were tightly closed.
I’ve been shot,
he thought, his entire body rigid with frightened anticipation, steeled for the moment of the bullet’s impact and then the oblivion that would be the Outer Realm.

“Sarea, stop,” he heard someone cry out instead, and he risked opening his eyes.

“Gabriel,” he whispered, because somehow, impossibly, the priest was there, gun in hand.

Another man raced behind him, his face not as well known, but still familiar. Jason had seen him before, and in pretty much the same state—surrounded by white light, a crackling corona of energy enveloping him from head to feet, blazing in his eyes like fire.

“Nemamiah!” Sarea gasped, the muzzle of the revolver slipping away from Jason’s head. He took advantage of the momentary confusion to shift into shadow form, dissolving instantaneously. He rematerialized long enough to snatch the gun out of Sarea’s hand, leaving her to yelp in startled fright, and then vanished again, coalescing nearby, the farthest he could manage in his weakened, injured state.

He nearly collapsed again, but righted himself as Gabriel hurried toward him. The priest froze, his footsteps scrabbling to a halt in the dirt when Jason shoved the gun between them, leveling the sight at Gabriel’s nose and folding his finger against the trigger.

“Stay away from me,” he whispered, blood dribbling from his lips. Between the scorpion’s stinger sinking into his lung and the gruesome path Sitri’s sword had carved through his torso, he was in bad shape and knew it. He could feel blood rising in his throat now, a thick and steady flood, and he turned his head, spitting.

“Jason.” Gabriel looked confused as he held up his hands. “It’s me. It’s Gabriel.”

“Get away from it, gatekeeper!” Nemamiah had rushed to Sarea’s side, but strode boldly toward Jason now, whipping a gun out of a shoulder holster, a very large silver pistol that he aimed at Jason as he approached.

“Nemamiah, wait,” Gabriel began in protest.

“It delivered Sarea here,” Nemamiah snapped, not averting his furious, blazing eyes from Jason. “It would have given her over to the Nephilim, or worse, to the Outer Realm. Now stand aside and let me shoot it!”

“She brought
me
here,” Jason shouted, limping back in retreat, swinging the gun toward Nemamiah in warning. This did nothing to slow the archangel’s advance. Rather, it only seemed to piss him off further, which only made that hissing, crackling corona of electricity around him all the brighter.

“She brought me here,” Jason cried again, then he and Nemamiah stood nearly toe to toe, with Nemamiah’s pistol less than a centimeter away from his brow, and the ..44 revolver nearly touching Nemamiah’s nose. They were close enough for the ozone charge radiating from Nemamiah’s body to raise the hairs along Jason’s forearms, the nape of his neck.

“She brought me here,” Jason said, locking gazes with Nemamiah. Jason was frightened, terrified, in fact, and could feel the Eidolon, just barely back under some semblance of restraint, wanting to cut loose again, to seize control. “She said this is where I deserved to be. She’d made a deal with Sitri.”

“Liar.” The heavy cleft between Nemamiah’s brows furrowed more deeply. “The Elohim don’t cut deals with the Nephilim. And we don’t judge anyone. It’s not our place.”

“Then how else did I wind up here?” Jason cried. “How the hell else could Sitri have claimed me? You said so yourself. I’m not marked.”

Nemamiah swung to glare at Gabriel. “This boy was killed in your district, on your watch, gatekeeper. You would have been the one to deliver him.”

“I came to collect his soul because Gabriel was drunk,” Sarea said and Gabriel offered nothing but a plaintive, shamed look in response. With a contemptuous snort, she added, “Surprise, surprise. When I arrived at the hospital, I met Sitri. But rather than attack me, he simply asked, ‘Why would you claim him? What has this boy done to distinguish himself and earn eternal reward?’ And when I looked into his mind, I couldn’t find
anything
to explain it! I saw a life wasted, catering to drunks, profiting from the debauchery of others, whoring himself like some kind of wild dog in rut.”

“That’s not ours to decide, Sarea,” Nemamiah said sternly.

“Why not?” Sarea demanded. “Why should our judgment be of any less merit than the Ophanim? We walk among the mortals. Who better to decide if their actions make them worthy?”

Nemamiah lowered his gun as he turned to face her, his eyes wide in surprised disbelief. “The boy is right,” he whispered, sounding aghast. “You traded his soul to Sitri.”

“And I’d do it again, a thousand times,” Sarea snapped balefully. “We’ve seen a million like him come and go, passing beyond the Edge and into whatever lies beyond, mediocrity lauded time and time again. Is a soul to be deemed worthy simply because it lacks sufficient moral turpitude?”

“That’s not ours to decide.” Nemamiah shouted this now as he caught her by the shoulder. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? The universal balance you’ve upset? Have you lost your mind?”

“Get your hand off me!” Sarea shoved him roughly away. He wore his sword from a scabbard at his hip, and as she pushed him, Sarea grabbed the hilt between her hands and jerked it loose from the sheath. Before he could recover from his surprise, stumbling to regain his footing, she thrust the blade between them, the point aiming for his navel.

“Sarea?” Nemamiah stared at her in wide-eyed, stricken surprise. All at once, the fight seemed to drain out of him and he lowered his hands, letting the pistol drop from his fingers to the ground. “What are you doing?”

“Let me kill it,” she said, not lowering the sword. “You weren’t supposed to be here. You were never supposed to know!” Her voice had taken on a ragged, strained tone, like she struggled against tears. “I brought it back here so Sitri could scrape its skull clean, so it wouldn’t remember anything of its mortal life, so that this would be over. Sitri’s gone now. Just let me run it through and end this, once and for all!”

“I can’t do that,” Nemamiah said quietly as he reached out, catching the blade in his hands. He didn’t pull or push at it or try to wrest it away from her. Rather, he held it lightly, as he might have cradled her hand between his own. “You know that.”