Hellfire (3 page)

But they knew he would be
back.

Had he resurfaced in Sedona?

Alton stared at the trees they
passed and thought about Dax and Eddy and the love between them that seemed to
grow stronger each day. He would be jealous if he didn’t love both of them so
much. Eddy was brave and true, and Dax, a man who had begun as a demon, had
shown more integrity and honor than anyone Alton had ever known in Lemuria. Dax
and Eddy deserved the immortal love they’d found with each other.

So why did that make him think
of Ginny Jones? She was nothing like Eddy Marks.
Nothing at
all.
Ginny was mortal, her life no more than a tiny blip on Alton’s
life’s screen. Plus, she was stubborn and opinionated and had no respect for a
woman’s place—a woman’s role as the helpmate to her man. Not that Eddy was
anything like the Lemurian women Alton had known, either, but she was Dax’s
problem.

Did that make Ginny his?

So long as she was in danger
because of his screwup, Alton figured it must.

The engine revved and the
Jeep’s wheels spun as forward motion ceased. Alton glanced at Ed.

The older man shrugged. “This
is as far as I can go, Alton. You’ll have to hoof it the rest of the way.” He
slipped the gear into neutral but left the engine running. The trail wound
upward from here, climbing through the last of the trees before it crossed
areas of slippery scree, the shattered stones that littered the sides of the
dormant volcano above the tree line.

Alton climbed out of the Jeep.
He checked his scabbard to make certain his sword was secure, grabbed his pack,
and slung it over his shoulder. “Thanks, Ed.” He glanced around, orienting
himself. It took a moment for him to realize where they were. Everything looked
totally different in the light of day.

A harmless pile of rocks lay
beside the road.

Harmless now, but they were
the remnants of the gargoyle that had been the demon king’s
avatar,
the one Eddy had destroyed with her singular act of bravery. She’d saved their
lives—unfortunately, she’d missed the demon’s soul.

Alton shook his head. “Hard to
believe this is the same place where we fought the demon—and almost lost.”

Ed slowly nodded in agreement.
“I’ll admit
,
I’ve never been so scared in my life. For
myself, for my friends—the image of that monster twisting Dax’s body and
throwing him to the ground still wakes me up at night. I never thought I’d see
the boy alive again.” He cleared his throat, wiping a hand over his eyes. “The
truth, though? Mostly, Alton, I was afraid for my daughter. Her bravery
astounds me, even now.”

Alton reached out and shook
Ed’s hand. “We don’t need to worry about Eddy. She’s a lot tougher than she
looks.”

Breaking into laughter, Ed
threw the Jeep into gear. “That she is, son. Now you get. I’m worried about
Ginny. She doesn’t know what we went through here, so she doesn’t have any idea
what she’s up against. You go take care of that girl.” He winked, turned the
Jeep, and headed down the hill.

Alton watched until the Jeep
disappeared into the forest. Then he started the long hike up the hill. The
entire mountain was an energy vortex, but there were only a couple of places
where he could cross into the other dimensions and access the portal that would
take him to Sedona.

Or the one
that leads to Lemuria.

No. He couldn’t think about
home. He’d made his choice when he helped Dax and Eddy escape from their
Lemurian prison cell. He’d walked away from everyone and everything he’d known
and loved his entire life, but he’d chosen for the greater good.

He wondered if his friend
Taron had had any luck convincing the Council of Nine to join the battle
against demonkind. That was Alton’s only hope of ever returning home. Taron
could be persuasive, but were his powers of persuasion a match for the
council’s collective stubbornness?

The sun had moved to the west
by the time Alton paused in front of a mass of tumbled boulders and knew he’d
reached the portal. He wrinkled his nose against the stench of sulfur. There
shouldn’t be any sign of demons here, but their smell was all around him. That
made no sense. He’d closed the portal to Abyss.

Unless
they’d managed to open a new one.

Alton faced the lichen-covered
rock, but before he stepped through, he removed his sword from his scabbard. As
he wrapped his fingers around HellFire’s jeweled hilt, he realized how much the
sword’s sentience had changed things. He no longer felt alone—not when he had
HellFire beside him. Addressing the crystal blade, he asked, “Do you smell
their stench as I do?”

The hilt vibrated in his hand.
“I do,” the sword answered. “I’m ready if you are.”

With a nod, Alton stepped into
the portal, walking through what appeared to be solid rock. The dark cavern he
entered glistened with light from the various gateways leading to other
dimensions: the green and turquoise that led to Atlantis, the gold and silver
that would take him to Eden—and certain death should he attempt to pass into
that hallowed land.

He stared at the gateway to
Eden for a long moment. They’d been the first to recognize the demon invasion
of Earth, the ones to recruit Dax to fight demonkind, yet they remained in
their insular world, unwilling to take part in the battle—and the demon king
had been one of theirs.

Damn them.

He turned and stared at the
portal that would take him home to Lemuria. Now,
were
he to attempt to pass, he feared he risked death as surely as if he tried to
enter Eden’s sanctuary.

Facing Ginny Jones and a whole
passel of demonkind sounded a lot safer.

Alton turned his back on the
gateway to his home world. The one that had once led to Abyss was still sealed
shut. Why, then, did he smell the sulfuric stench of demons? Where was it coming
from?

He held his sword high and
used HellFire’s glowing crystal blade to search along the stone walls. A small
portal, tucked into a nook toward the back of the cavern, shimmered with the
colors of a setting sun.

Sedona,
Arizona.
He recognized the multicolored hues of red rock and blue skies,
but swirling within the portal’s depths he sensed something else.

Demonkind.

Demons had passed this way,
and not so long ago. Were they somehow making their way from Abyss to Sedona,
and then north through the connected vortexes to Mount Shasta? He would have to
ask Eddy and Dax about that.

After he got
to Sedona.

He touched the cell phone Eddy
had tucked into his pocket and wished it worked within the portals, but Eddy’d
explained to him how they needed towers to carry the signal, and there
certainly weren’t any deep inside the volcano’s energy vortex.

Alton took a step toward the
portal, but he caught himself, pausing in midstep as a dark mist slipped
through the multicolored gateway. Silently it flowed along the wall toward the
portal leading outside to the flank of Mount Shasta.

Demon!
This certainly answered part of his question.

His sword vibrated with power.
Alton swung. The crystal blade connected with the black mist. The demon
screeched and burst into flames. Crackling and sizzling, it disappeared in a
puff of smoke.

Only the stench remained.

Alton stared at the spot where
the demon had emerged. A shiver raced along his spine. This one had come
directly from Sedona. His heart gave an unfamiliar lurch with the proof he
couldn’t deny. Ginny was in Sedona—and so were the demons.

Demons
powerful enough to take on living creatures as their personal avatars.
Creatures strong enough to kill.

Holding his sword aloft, Alton
stepped through the portal.

“Who’d you have to call?”

Markus’s question snapped
Ginny out of her convoluted thoughts. “Eddy. I called my friend Eddy Marks.”

“I hope it was important.”
Markus backed out of the parking space he’d taken at the supermarket.
Without Tom.
The vet had insisted on keeping the cat for
observation, which suited Ginny perfectly. Damned cat had really chewed up her
hand. She peeked under the bloody towel and wished she hadn’t looked.

“You were gone so long I had
to take Tom in to see Dr. Buck by myself.”

Ginny scowled at him. Her hand
still hurt like the blazes and not once had Markus thanked her for risking life
and limb to catch his stupid cat. “Well, Tom is your cat, cousin of mine, and I
would really like to get back to the house so I can clean up the mess your
sweetheart
of a cat made of my hand.”

Markus stared straight ahead.
“Aren’t you gonna ask me what the vet said?”

Ginny shook her head. “I
figured you’d tell me if he had any idea what happened.”

Markus curled his lip and made
a snorting noise. “He says they’re all possessed.
Idiot.
I knew he was into crystals and vortexes and all that New Age stuff, but I
thought it was just for show.” He laughed. “He’s dead serious.”

“Possessed?
By
what?
The ghost of Christmas past?”
Ginny
stared out the side window as Markus drove the few blocks home.
Possessed.
It sounded totally
unbelievable, but how else do you explain a cat with four rows of teeth,
glowing red eyes, and a scream like a banshee on meth? A scream that sounded
horribly familiar.

Since her memories of that
crazy night in Evergreen had resurfaced, Ginny’d had the bear’s ear-shattering
scream stuck in her head. A scream that was nothing more than a louder version
of the strange howl coming from Markus’s fat old cat.

Had the bear been possessed?
Had some sort of evil entity turned a concrete statue into a slavering,
screaming killer? Something had made it come to life. She hadn’t imagined the
damned thing, though until her memory had started coming back, she’d thought it
was just a weird nightmare.

But all those animals at the
vet’s—the birds and bunnies, cats and dogs—every last one of them acted unnervingly
similar. Screeching, trying to bite, flashing those rows of sharp teeth, and
staring with glowing eyes.

Possession didn’t sound all
that crazy when you took it in context with what they’d seen today.

With what had attacked her
just a few days ago.

With Tom’s vicious attack this morning.
Damn but
her hand hurt, but then, so did her brain, just thinking along those lines.

Markus turned the car into the
driveway and pulled into the garage. “Okay. So maybe he’s not an idiot.” He
shut off the engine and turned in his seat to stare at her. “How else do you
explain all those animals? They weren’t normal. Birds don’t have teeth. Rabbits
don’t hiss and snarl and screech like that little bunny we saw today.
Something’s making them act crazy. If they’re not possessed, what’s going on?”

Without waiting for an answer,
he got out of the car and slammed the door. Ginny sat in the front seat for a
few minutes, thinking of Tom and the other animals they’d seen at the
veterinarian’s clinic…thinking of the concrete grizzly that had attacked her.

Thinking of
Eddy’s friend Alton.
Why did she know he was the reason she couldn’t
remember anything? Now that she was away from him, the memories were growing
clearer by the moment. She recalled him saving her from the bear, walking with
her, even laughing with her.

Most of all, she remembered
his kiss.

What she couldn’t remember was
why he’d kissed her—or why she’d kissed him and then totally forgotten it. She
hardly knew the man, and Ginny Jones did
not
come on
to strange men.
Not ever.
But she knew one thing for
certain—Alton was the only reason she’d come to Sedona.

None of this made sense, and
Eddy hadn’t been much help, either. She’d merely said to hold tight, that she
was sending someone, but she wouldn’t give Ginny any details about who or why
or what the hell was going on.

Muttering under her breath,
Ginny rewrapped the bloody towel around her hand and followed Markus into the
house.

Covering vast distances via
the vortex might be more disorienting than moving between dimensions, but the
1,030 miles between Mount Shasta in northern California and Bell Rock in
Sedona, Arizona, took less than a minute down a dark tunnel lit only by
HellFire’s crystal light.

Alton entered a cavern very
much like the one he’d just left in Mount Shasta. HellFire quivered in his
grasp. Portals to other worlds glowed against the rock walls. He looked into
one that seethed with shades of red and black. There was something inherently
loathsome about it, something foul.

No doubt about it—this portal
led to Abyss.

HellFire was drawn to the
gateway between Abyss and Sedona like filings to a magnet. The sword’s
vibrations transferred to his hand, his wrist, up his arm. Anger flowed from
the crystal.
A powerful sense of purpose.

This, then, was the demon’s
newest entrance, the one that allowed them access into Earth’s dimension. It
was only a few feet from the portal he’d just crossed through. Obviously the
demons had discovered a new route to Mount Shasta, coming through from Abyss
here in Sedona and switching to the Shasta portal, bypassing the need for the
more direct gate he’d closed between Abyss and Mount Shasta.

HellFire glowed brighter,
stronger. Alton felt the pull increase as the sword tried to reach the portal
to Abyss.
“As you wish, my friend.”
He stepped close
to the swirling gateway and aimed the sword. A burst of power shot down the
length of the blade and the portal suddenly glowed deep red, then orange and
yellow, hotter still, until the rock turned almost white and began to flow and
melt beneath HellFire’s attack.

Within moments, the portal had
melted shut. The sword no longer vibrated. Breathing deeply, Alton lifted the
blade away from the quickly cooling rock. What had been an active portal
between Abyss and Sedona was now nothing more than a smooth black wall of cooling,
melted stone within the Bell Rock vortex.

Alton sheathed his sword,
passed through the Sedona portal, and stepped out on the rocky ground near the
top of Bell Rock. It had been centuries since he’d last been to the Arizona
desert. He’d forgotten just how beautiful it was. The sun was beginning to set
and he stood for a moment, lost in the glory of a desert sunset and the
brilliant reds and golds of the rugged, wind-shaped bluffs. The gentle breeze
seemed to sing to him, a deep hum that resonated within his—

“Where the hell’d you come
from?”

Alton spun to his left and
blinked. Row after row of mostly gray-haired men and women, many of them
wearing loose robes or colorful skirts, sat cross-legged in the dirt.

Well, crap
and nine hells.
He’d materialized out of the solid rock, right into the
middle of a geriatric meditation group.

Straightening to his full
height, Alton pressed his palms
together,
fingers
extended beneath his chin, and bowed his head. His waist-length blond hair,
unbound, flowed over his shoulders like silk and he knew his almost seven feet
of height, aided a bit by his tooled cowboy boots, made him look pretty
impressive to this group of humans.

“I come from within,” he
intoned. He kept his voice unnaturally deep and bowed his head once again.
Then, biting back a powerful urge to laugh, he looked straight ahead and walked
solemnly past the rows of brightly garbed folk.

Popping out of the portal in
the midst of an evening meditation class of aging New Agers hadn’t been an
issue the last time he was here. Of course, it had been a while—
give
or take six hundred years.

He really needed to get out
more.

Still chuckling, Alton found a
well-traveled trail that took him down off the mountain and into a parking
area. The light was beginning to fade. Only a few cars and one old, beat-up,
but artfully decorated bus remained. He figured the bus must be here for the
group he’d surprised up on top.

Maybe he could catch a ride
into town with them…or not. Grinning at the thought of Lemurian royalty hitching
a ride on a dilapidated bus painted with rainbows and flowers, Alton set his
backpack down in the dirt and pulled out the cell phone Eddy had given him.

He carefully followed the
steps Eddy had shown him, found Ginny’s number, and pushed the button to connect
the call. He almost cheered when Ginny answered on the second ring, but he
managed to control himself.

“Is this Virginia Jones?” he
asked.

There was a long silence. Long
enough that Alton wondered if he’d done something wrong.

“Who’s this?”

Nope. That was Ginny. “This is
Alton.
Eddy Marks’s friend.”

“How’d you get my number?”

Definitely
Ginny.

“From Eddy.
Ginny, I’m in Sedona. Is there any way you can come get me?”

“Sedona?
How the hell did you get to Sedona so fast? I just talked to Eddy a couple of
hours ago, and there’s no way you could have come…”

“I’m here, Ginny, and I’ll
explain everything once I see you. I’m in the parking lot at Bell Rock. Do you
know where that is?”

“I’ll be there in fifteen
minutes. And you’d better have some answers for me because I’ve definitely got
questions for you.”

Before he could answer, the
line went dead. Alton stared at the phone for a moment before calling one more
number. Eddy’s voice mail came on. He left a message and wondered where she’d
gone, why she hadn’t answered the phone. Then he tucked the little contraption
in his pocket and leaned against a rock. Folding his arms across his chest, he
waited impatiently for Ginny while the night grew dark around him.

Ginny hated to admit how glad
she’d been to get away from Markus as she drove her little Ford Focus into the
parking lot at Bell Rock. She’d barely seen her aunt and younger cousins all
day, and she had the feeling Aunt Betty was as freaked about her as she was
over the damned cat.

In fact, this whole trip was
turning out just weird.

Then the headlights swept over
a tall, breathtakingly familiar figure, and thoughts of Aunt Betty and Tom
slipped out of her mind. Damn, she’d forgotten how gorgeous Alton was.

Why didn’t she have any old
college friends who looked that hot? She’d not seen his hair hanging loose
before. On any other man, long silvery blond hair hanging all the way to his
waist would look horribly effeminate. On this guy, it was flat-out sexy. Her
fingers practically twitched with the need to run them through the silken
strands.

A twitch she’d damned well
better get under control right now. She knew for a fact she couldn’t trust this
jerk any farther than she could throw him, and as big as he was, she sure as
hell couldn’t throw him very far.

He pushed himself away from
the rock he’d been leaning against and walked toward the car. He had that
long-legged, self-confident saunter that made Ginny’s stomach muscles clench at
the same time it set her nerves on edge. She unlocked the door.

Alton opened the door and
looked inside the little car. “Hello, Ginny,” he said. Then he frowned, tossed
his bag in the back, folded his lanky frame like a pretzel, and slid into the
passenger seat.

Or at least
tried to.

“Hi.” She cleared her throat
and hoped her voice wouldn’t crack again, but the man literally took her breath
even as he pissed her off. “You’ll have to push the seat back.
Little lever down on the side.”

He fumbled with the catch and
shoved the seat back as far as it would go. His knees still stuck up in front
of him, but he managed to get the seat belt fastened and the door closed.

He was too close.
Much too close.
Too tall, too sexy, too
overpowering.
Too…everything.
The combination
scared the crap out of her. She’d never dealt with a guy like him in her life.
“How tall are you, anyway?” She checked the rearview mirror. No one was coming,
so she pulled ahead to the parking lot exit.

“Eddy measured me. I’m six
feet, eight inches tall. But I’m wearing boots. I think they give me a couple
more inches.” He tilted his head and stared at her. “Why? Does it matter?”

“Matter?”
Ginny glanced to her right and then back at the road. “No, it doesn’t matter. I
was just curious.” She shot him another quick glance. He was still just as hot.
“What matters is how you got here so fast. I just talked to Eddy a couple of
hours ago. You haven’t had time to catch a plane, and even if you did, how did
you get to Bell Rock?
Why not a bus station or an airport?”

“What happened to your hand?”
He reached across her front and softly touched the thick bandage wrapped around
her left hand.

“My cousin’s cat bit me.
The one with teeth like something out of a cheap horror movie.”

“Will you be all right?”

Now that was a question she
could answer on a lot of different levels. Sitting so close to him was doing
things to her insides she didn’t want to think about. He got to her on so many
levels she didn’t know where to start. Even the low timbre of his voice seemed
to vibrate deep in her bones.

She reminded herself that same
voice in her head was the reason she’d come to Sedona. She was not going to
trust him, no matter how hot he was. Ginny took a big breath and let it out.
“I’ll be fine, if it doesn’t get infected.”