Deathbound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Realm Protectors Book 3) Page 21

  “Please,” Boris said.

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “Longer we stand and chit-chat, the narrower our element of surprise gets.”

  “I want the machine,” the Jackal said.

  “Why?” Frank asked, disgusted.

  Boris’ hand found his arm again, and he shook his head.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the Jackal said. “I pissed on it. It’s mine.”

  Frank snorted. “So if I piss on you then you’re mine. If I piss on your wife, is she mine, too?”

  The Jackal’s eyes blazed with anger. He turned and motion to its buddies behind him.

  “No! Wait!” Boris said, then glanced over his shoulder at Frank with eyes that said, Thanks a lot, dummy. “You can have whatever you want,” Boris said, his voice going quiet. “Even this.”

  Frank saw him reach up to his neck where the stone hung, now black as the deepest part of outer space.

  The Jackal’s eyes ballooned. “R-Really? You mean it? You’re not fooling?”

  Frank shuffled closer. The rock seemed to buzz with a sort of intensity he couldn’t place. It was almost as if it was the same material the Shadow Eater’s blades had been made out of. He was entranced. What little light in the sky seemed to be sucked into the rock. A voice came from it, too. A voice he recognized.

  It is not wise. Do not let him give it up, Frank King.

  He was taken back to his bedroom before all of this shit happened, the floating ball of light warning him of the one with the black eyes. Then he was at the beach, the venom draining from his veins like never-ending black ropes.

  “Boris,” Frank said, his voice more shaky than he wanted it to be, “put that away. We need that.” He wasn’t sure why they did, but he was sure they did.

  “No,” Boris said. “We need to get to Harold. We need revenge.”

  Frank reached out a hand and closed it around Boris’ which then closed over the rock. “No, keep this.” Frank removed his hand despite the pull of the black rock. He turned to the Jackal whose eyes were glassy and entranced. “You can have anything else. Or you can rat on us. I don’t care. Kill us, too, if you want.”

  The Jackal shuddered. It was hardly noticeable, but Frank noticed. Then he shook his head, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “No, no, you two keep that rock. It’s death. I don’t want no part of the Void. I’ll just take the machine.” His eyes lost the fear that seemed to hold them wide open, and he snarled. “Now you get out of here before we change our minds. Go on. Get!”

  Frank and Boris didn’t hang around. They left, walking for what seemed like miles or minutes, he wasn’t sure, walking in silence.

  “What is that thing?” Frank asked, pointing to the rock.

  “I-I don’t know, really,” Boris answered. “I’ve been here so long. A woman gave it to me. She came through Ghul one day. She wanted to help us out, she said. Spider didn’t believe her, but I went to her anyway. She said I’d need it. Said it would protect me, and it did, you know, with the flames.” Boris almost sounded ashamed.

  “What did she look like?”

  “She was old, but her eyes were young. And…she seemed to glow.” Boris’ eyes looked off into the distance, like the dark sky was a blank screen for his memories. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Frank nodded. They kept walking. And when they finally saw some semblance of humanity, his mind reeled away from the rock on Boris’ neck.

  They saw smoke, then they saw the Wolves.

  Harold Storm was close by, and so was the end.

  CHAPTER 46

  They set up camp about a mile away from the haunted shack and about three miles from the gates where Beth had entered. Harold didn’t speak of what happened or of what he saw. Part of his mind told him he knew who that old crone was while another part told him he was crazy. Roberta Washington, the great ball of white light he’d met on the shores of the Gloomsville Lake, had the ability to walk between the Realms, and the way that old crone looked at him was the same way she had looked at him in 1977. If that had been Roberta, she looked worse in Hell than she did anywhere else.

  But Harold kept his mouth shut, his Wolves following him with fresh blood on their muzzles.

  Sahara dug a hole in the soil a couple hundred feet off of the dead road they’d traveled.

  Harold had protested. “We don’t need to go the opposite direction, we need to hit them now. Not let them regroup.”

  His voice was lost in the cold wind.

  They moved on, and now they were here. Though he would not admit it, pride and arrogance already a side effect of being dubbed Electus, Harold needed a rest, and if they took on the armies of Hell, Harold would die before the gate was down.

  Felix settled across from him on a petrified log that looked like it would crumble to the touch. It didn’t. Harold got his own, Sahara sitting next to him. She wiped away a smear of black blood caked on his tattered jeans.

  Octavius’ death was not clean. The Wolves were hungry and they would’ve devoured anything. And they did. Octavius was nothing more than a black stain in the dark dirt. Rags of ripped clothing blew in the wind, his sword destroyed, his soul cast to the Void.

  Felix’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, then his finger pointed forward into the hole Sahara had dug and filled with dead wood and cracked leaves. A burst of white lightning escaped from the finger. Hot fire sputtered in the hole, then crackled, smelling of warmth and, oddly, life.

  “We need to recharge,” Felix said. He looked at the pit. “That’s about the extent of my powers for now.”

  “How?” Harold asked.

  Sahara answered, “Don’t ask. Important thing is that we’re here and you don’t have to do this on your own.”

  But Harold knew he would. That was destiny. That was fate. Electus roughly translated to ‘Chosen One,’ not Chosen Three, not ‘Chosen One and his Band of Friends.’

  “We will help as much as we can,” Felix said. He leaned back away from the warmth, folded his arms over his chest. “But I think Harold will have to destroy him on his own.”

  Sahara shuddered. “He can’t.”

  “He can,” Felix answered, nodding his head solemnly. “I couldn’t. The best I could do was contain him, and look at that. It failed, too.”

  “Who is he?” Harold asked. He leaned back away from the flames, still catching some of the warmth on his skin. Subconsciously, he would not get any closer than he was now. His burnt skin — albeit from a spell — wouldn’t let him.

  “He is a man of great darkness,” Felix said.

  “He was one of us,” Sahara said, eyeing Felix harshly.

  “He was,” Felix said. He stroked his beard and looked longingly toward the tower and the black kingdom of the Dark One. “Long ago, long before you were ever thought of — either of you — these Realms were birthed into Existence, marking the age of sentient life as we know it. It was slow going, of course. Evolution had a hand into where we are now, and we thought we knew everything upon birth. There was three of us. Me, Orkane, and a man named Bezel. We divided up the three Realms between us. At this point, they were all even. There was no clouds for the Realm Protectors, no Hell for the damned souls, no earth for the Mortal children of the Creator. Slowly, earth became populated with beings who could not see, who could not work the magic of the universe. We thought of them as our children — me and Orkane, especially. We loved them. Bezel…not so much. If that man was capable of love then I am not a Wizard.”

  Felix smiled. No one else did.

  He continued, “The first dawn of man was not of the men we see now. They were primal, neanderthal. They killed without knowing the consequences. They were like our case study. We didn’t know why this responsibility was thrusted upon us, but we accepted it, and tried our best to keep things civilized. Mind you, we weren’t sure what that was until the Massacre of Stones. A group of nomads struck out from the main tribe attacked a family in the midst of the night. We had not been watching as
closely as we thought. There was one survivor, and just barely.”

  Harold tightened his hands into a fist, knowing what came next, knowing who was behind it all.

  “Mind you, we didn’t have a Hell yet, not the Hell we sit in now. So we didn’t know where the souls went. They just vanished. They just died…or so we thought. The nomad’s souls didn’t. They remained on the earth. They attacked more people. Orkane and I had to step in much to Bezel’s displeasure. He wanted to see how it played out, said it was a learning experience when really the small population of Mortals we were in charge of were slowly dying off. They would be extinct if Orkane and I hadn’t done anything. We had to cut through Existence. We had to create — ”

  “The Void,” Harold said in a hoarse whisper.

  “Yes, the Void is what they call it. That is where the truly damned go. The worst of the worst. The man and woman who could flay you with their looks. We cut the hole right here in Hell, the emptiest of the three Realms. And we cut it beyond those black gates. Beneath a pit of blackness,” Felix said.

  Harold noticed how pale and ashy his complexion had gone as if talking of this had made him sick. Sahara next to him shook. Far off the Wolves sat on their haunches, never taking their eyes off of Harold, biding their time until battle.

  “I am not as pure as you would believe, Harold. I may be your father, but technically I am father to all. You do not come from my blood as much as you come from the Creator of this Existence’s blood. Neither do you, Sahara. We were young and inexperienced. We didn’t know Bezel would act like he did. He opened the Void and it had changed him for the worst. I still remember it as if it happened yesterday. His white hair had gone the color of ink. His eyes were bloodshot, hands covered in the red blood of the slain Mortals. He whispered something in a language we didn’t understand. Only later did it become the black tongue of Hell, and only later did we know what he said. I’ve seen it all. I’ve looked into his eyes and I’ve seen it all. Over and over again.

  “He tried to kill us then, and he almost succeeded. The only thing we could’ve done was banish him.”

  “Why not kill him?” Harold asked. The flames were dying now, dark shadows dancing on all of their faces. Far off, the Alpha howled into the cold wind.

  “Could you kill your brother, Harold?”

  Harold didn’t answer.

  “And we were unsure of the consequences — I still am.”

  “What do you mean?” Sahara asked.

  “This Existence was born with the three of us placed in its charge. When Orkane was killed, things started happening, unexplained things — deadly things. Neither of you were around, but I feared for my life then. I feared for the Void.”

  “But Orkane is dead,” Harold said, he patted the sword hanging from his belt. “I have his sword.”

  Felix smiled, a grin lost in the great bush of his beard. “Correct. And before you, Harold, I feared this Existence would go out.” He looked down to the fire pit which was nothing but smoldering ash now. “Like fire, our worlds would go out if the right person was not around to stoke them. You, Harold Storm, are the right person. There is part of Orkane in you, there is part of me in you, and there is part of Bezel in you as well. You are the balance. You are the fuel that will keep this Existence burning. You will be able to do what I could not.”

  Harold looked at him with hard eyes.

  “You will kill Bezel. You will vanquish the darkness, and you will bring forth the light.”

  Sahara shuddered again. The touch of a smile that always seemed to be on her lips was gone, her eyes hollow, hair color dulled.

  Harold gulped. He knew he would have to do that, but hearing it from this powerful being he thought of as his true father solidified it. And not for the first time in Harold Storm’s life was he terrified.

  CHAPTER 47

  The fire bit at her face. She was not used to such warmth, such heat. Beth’s life in Hell — though she wouldn’t call it much of a living sort of life at all — was ice cold. She breathed air that froze her lungs. Down here, that fire had already melted it and she had not even walked down the steps.

  Fear was not something she knew; it was something she had known a long time ago in another life.

  Now, the fear was real, and it brought up memories of her past life. Memories she’d worked so hard to conceal.

  A village. The fire. The men in their white masks of bone. The screams. The killing. The blood.

  She shook her head, and took a deep breath. When she exhaled, she did not see the air in front of her like a burst of smoke.

  Two stone pillars rose high into the sky, except these were curved, like the great husks of a beast or the petrified remains of a monster’s ribcage. Between them were steps that stretched into a crack in the world, a crack that glowed orange and yellow like fireworks in a perfect night sky. Around the edge of the cracks were spikes. They resembled the stingers of giant wasps, creatures born from the Pits themselves.

  Beth moved forward.

  The fear thrummed in her head as if she had taken a tablet of bad acid, causing a monstrous, haunting trip.

  It’s okay, she told herself. Charlie will be here. He will be all right. And my Master. Oh, my Master, too.

  She walked, one foot after the other, hand on the hilt of her Hellblade, though it was a futile gesture. Whatever things were down here would be immune to a weapon such as that. And they would be much worse than the wielder, too.

  She saw him first, before she saw or noticed anything else. He was tall and thin, wearing the black coat he always wore. It was Charlie. He was stooped, backlit by the glowing embers of the Black Pits. She was so enamored, in fact, that she didn’t notice the tortured screams of the souls behind him, the cries of “Help!”and “Kill meeeee,” either.

  “Charlie,” she said, her voice barely a hoarse whisper. She’d been on the road too long. That damn Realm Protector had gotten to her, or maybe it was the heat baking her icy skin and curling her vocal chords up like a piece of plastic in a fire.

  Charlie turned around.

  Beth felt her knees quiver, threaten to give out. She looked into Charlie’s face, but she did not look into Charlie’s eyes.

  The eyes she looked into, that looked back at her, were eyes of an unspeakable evil. They were not black and harsh, yet gentle like Charlie’s were. No, they were so dark that they were almost nonexistent, and they seemed to suck the light away from the fire burning behind him.

  “Master,” Beth said.

  “Bethy, Bethy, Bethy,” the thing that was not Charlie answered back to her in his best sing-song voice. He walked over in Charlie’s body, his arms outstretched. “It’s been so long since I’ve looked on you with real eyes.”

  He wrapped his arms around Beth, who shuddered at his touch, hoping he had not noticed — but a voice in her head whispered, He notices everything, doesn’t he? She hugged him back, but it was about as pleasant as hugging a corpse. A long, long time ago when the Dark One had been in a body of his own, Beth had served him.

  She did not enjoy it, but what choice did she have? The Void? He might’ve misconstrued these feelings as love when they were only given as a sense of duty.

  “You look great,” he said, then took a step back and waved down at his own body as if showcasing a prize he won at a carnival. “What do you think of mine?” He smiled with Charlie’s teeth, though it didn’t look wholly like Charlie’s smile. There was just the slightest thing off about it, like the position of his jaw or the angle of his lips.

  Beth stifled a shudder.

  “It’s not much,” he said, “but it will do the trick.”

  Beth tried to smile, but failed. “Master — ”

  “I know, you failed.”

  Her eyes flicked open wide. She could not hide the surprise on her face even if she wanted to.

  “It is all right, Bethy.” He pinched her cheek with ice-cold fingers that felt, oddly enough, like fire against her skin. “The Realm Protector has many
friends.”

  “The old man and the redhead.”

  The Dark One nodded. “Felix and Sahara, yes I know of them. I know of them too well.”

  “They’re planning an attack.”

  He snorted, then turned to the Pits. Above the fire was an old guardrail erected at the time the Pits were, now Charlie’s body leaned on it, the stone creaking as he did. Beth sidled up next to him, making sure to keep her distance, whereas if it were actually Charlie, she wouldn’t have cared how close she got.

  She wished it were Charlie, and the sudden realization that she would never see him again — her lover, her best friend, her commander — dawned on her, the feeling weighing heavy on the crumpled black bag that was once her heart.

  “Let them attack. It has been too long since I’ve seen Felix.” He turned to her, smirking. “You know the last time I saw him was when he put me in that terrible prison. I didn’t remember it then — didn’t remember a lot of things actually — but I remember it now.” The smirk disappeared. Flames crackled in front of him, seeming to dim and brighten as he looked her in the face. “Now, I’ll never forget.”

  “The Electus is more powerful than you — I mean, Charlie — gave him credit for.”

  “That is why Charlie is no more. I won’t underestimate him, but I won’t go to him, either. He will have to come to me. I don’t care if we are the last ones standing.”

  “You know him, don’t you?” Beth found herself asking, though she didn’t know why. It was something about his face — Charlie’s face. She could tell when he was hiding something. They’d been “together” for many centuries, and just because another inhabited his body didn’t mean she couldn’t read those features that gave it away. The wrinkled brow. The way the corner of his mouth dropped when he tried to cover up his true feelings with an always-winning smirk.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know him all too well. He was a brother.”

  “You’re going to use that, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am, Beth. He’s too powerful to just kill. We bring him on our side, then think how powerful we could be.”