Red Right Hand Page 17

  “No,” I lied.

  “You have not flown or driven from your home in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “I went to work and then to a friend’s apartment, but that’s all.” Lie.

  “Thank you, Miss Moore. That will be all for now.”

  “Wait, what? That’s all you want to know?” Silence echoed. I wasn’t sure he was still there. “Mr. Bronson?”

  “Special Agent Bronson,” he corrected. “There is one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Moore, do you own a sword?”

  39

  I STARED AT the phone in my hand as though it had turned into a poisonous snake. I’d answered No, and Bronson had said, Good-bye, Miss Moore, and hung up.

  He knew.

  I didn’t know how he knew, but he knew I’d been there.

  I looked at the phone. The time read five fifteen. The slaughter at Tyler’s house had happened before dawn. Not much before, maybe about four a.m.

  Nearly thirteen hours ago. Long enough to fly there, kill them, and fly back.

  Panic swept over me, hot and moist, making my skin tingle everywhere it touched. My armpits, my elbows, the backs of my knees: all of them were set alight with a buzzing, electric jolt sensation.

  There’s no record of a flight, because you didn’t fly.

  Relief fell on me, driving me down into the chair I kept by the desk in the corner. A bubble rolled inside my chest. Laughter. Ridiculous, hysterical laughter. It twittered behind my breastbone like a caged hummingbird, trying to take wing and fly free from my voice box. I swallowed it, sniggering instead.

  It was okay. I was going to be okay.

  Daniel moved, his legs sweeping the covers off him to fall and tumble in a bundle to the floor. His head twisted, and he began to murmur.

  Daniel’s going to be okay.

  The moment the thought was complete, he convulsed, jerking off the mattress as if a string had been hooked to his spine and yanked sharply upward. Arms and legs stiff, he vibrated on the bed as though a hundred thousand volts of electricity were coursing through him.

  I grabbed his arm. His skin burned my fingers with fever. “Daniel!” I screamed, trying to wake him, drag him back to this reality.

  His voice stuttered from his throat, jerking past clenched jaw muscles, coming out low and animal-like. Foam boiled through lips pulled thin and tight over his teeth, a symptom of rabid dreams rampaging through him. His skin purpled as he failed to squeeze air into the lungs trapped inside his constricted chest.

  He choked, suffocating on a nightmare. I tried to jam my fingers into his mouth, to pry it apart, but they bounced off his teeth, shut like a portcullis.

  Think. THINK!

  Shoving my hands against his chest, I tried to push him down on the mattress. He was made of case-hardened steel, unmovable, unbendable. Pressing with all of my weight made no difference at all. His face darkened, gallows-black creeping down his neck as arteries throbbed like living things trapped under his skin.

  Desperate panic clawed at my mind. Without thinking, I shoved my hand under the edge of his shirt and touched my Mark to the sweaty, fever hot skin over his heart. The cut lines in my palm lit like a brand against his perspiration, making me cry out. Pushing through the pain, I commanded the magick inside me.

  Show me.

  The steel circlet convulsed around my throat, a cold metal clench that sent shivers up my spine. The magick sputtered to life, flickering inside me, a hand shaking off droplets of water, and my mind’s eye fluttered open. My vision slewed sideways into a weird, grainy tone, as if the room had switched to a cheap black and white film.

  Daniel looked hollow, a near empty chalice, slicksided with the remnants and the dregs of a slow-draining pool of his life force. The energy gathered in the low places of his body. Some of it flowed through our connection, a thin tributary running from his chest into my arm, feeding the magick that connected us. The rest turned in a slow-moving whirlpool, corkscrewing away into a sinister spot nestled by his spine.

  I pulled my hand away, breaking the connection. The real world slapped me in eye-searing color. Leaning over, I grabbed Daniel’s arm and pulled. His body slid a few inches on the sheets. He was too stiff, too heavy. I couldn’t flip him over.

  Changing tactics, I shoved, pushing him off the edge of the bed to roll onto the floor.

  Scrambling, I found him face down on the floor, spine still arched, making his feet hang in the air—but that’s not what I saw, not what my eyes locked on.

  His shirt had ridden up in the fall off the bed, gathering around his chest, under his armpits.

  A fist-sized chunk of tumor blinked up at me from the small of his back.

  40

  THE THING STARED at me, its sulfur-yellow iris leering at me. It pulsed, black veins running into Daniel’s skin, melted and fused to the bottom of the ugly, malignant mass. Prickly waves of angry magick radiated from it.

  Daniel’s muscles gave out in a chain reaction that left him spent and loose on the floor.

  Do something, do something, DO something.

  I slid off the bed and crouched beside him. My hand fell on the Knife of Abraham, sliding it off the table.

  The tumor’s eye widened.

  I shoved my thumb into it.

  The surface was slimy and firm, resisting, fighting the intrusion of my digit, then suddenly bursting around my nail and opening to my knuckle in a squelch of egg yolk, runny and aqueous. My hand became a claw. I dug in and pulled up, stretching the diseased parcel against its mooring. The thing felt rubbery, slick with its own fluid. Daniel made a noise, a grinding, choking moan from the back of his clenched throat.

  Stomach churning, I laid the gleaming edge of the knife on the seam of corrupted flesh. The edges of the lids around my thumb turned sharp, the eyelashes turning into needles. They jabbed my skin, stabbing through to pierce tendon and bone. The eye gnawed at my thumb as I screamed and pulled the knife hard. Flesh parted like water against the razor edge, a brackish jelly leaking from the wound and filling the air with the stench of meat gone spoiled. I yanked on the tumor, hacked with the knife, and peeled the rotten nodule from Daniel’s body.

  As the last tendril split under the knife edge, his jaw unlocked, releasing the howl of suffering held captive in his mouth. Though it only lasted a second, it was the worst sound I had ever heard.

  The tumor acted like a landed fish in my hand, flopping and flapping, trying to slip the hook. Needle-lashes raked my thumb in diabolical acupuncture as the lids chewed and sucked. Dripping jelly hung in strings from the cut end, solidifying, skin forming over their length, turning them into grasping tentacles that wrapped my wrist in clammy wet circles. Stretching and contracting, it tried to pull itself over my hand, the evil essence of the thing trying to bond with me, skin to diseased skin and bone to jelly.

  I don’t think so, you little bastard.

  Magick rushed from below my stomach, from the pit of my pelvis, sweeping in a twisted whirl through my body, a tornado of energy up and out to my hand.

  BURN.

  The remnant of Yar Shogura began to sizzle in my palm.

  I felt no heat, no flame, but my hand began to glow, sunset orange like the electric eye of a stove, and smoke curled off the scrap of elder god as it shook. The purple-gray membrane that covered it like a decomposing sausage began to fissure, miniature flames flickering, licking along its surface in a wildfire chain reaction.

  In seconds it was reduced to a handful of ash.

  I shook it off, wiping my palm on my pants and turning to Daniel.

  He was pale as a ghost, skin so cold tiny wisps of white curled from it to dissipate into the warmth of the room. The patch where I had excised the tumor was raw and bloody, the meat of him exposed to my eyes. I touched him just to make sure he was still breathing.

  He was.

  Barely.

  My heart locked, frozen between one beat and the next.

  No. No, I can’t
lose him. I’ll do anything.

  Anything.

  And I meant it.

  Carefully, as gently as I could, I pressed the symbol on my palm against the bloody patch on his back.

  41

  MAGICK CRACKLED THROUGH every fiber of me, arcing along nerve endings, spitting from cell membrane to cell membrane. It filled me, all of me, swelling my insides shut and turning my bones to heavy, polished alabaster.

  I pushed through it, fighting to clear my head.

  My eyes were closed, and I forced them open. My magick-soaked vision painted Daniel in alien color. I could see through him, as if he’d been transformed into glass. His heart beat in slow, heavy thumps, a wounded animal trying to drag itself away. I could see the blood in his veins lurch with each throb.

  He was dying in tiny ebbs and flows.

  I can save him.

  The sure knowledge became a stone in my mind, immovable, irresistible.

  I began to draw energy to me. The room dimmed as I pulled, sinking low in the fabric of the world, making a depression where all the magick around me would pool and soak into me. I was a magnet, a sinkhole, a dwarf star.

  The room darkened further.

  Outside, a bird fell dead from the withering branch ’neath its tiny, clawed feet.

  Multi-legged creatures lodged in the structure of the house stopped moving, a slaughter of microscopic lives.

  It all fed into me, into my magick.

  Inside me the magick roiled. I felt like a pot, overfull and on high heat. The mystical energy in my stomach simmered through my limbs. I had life. I had more life than I knew what to do with, and my head swam with the power.

  I pushed the magick through my Mark.

  It spooled out in a ribbon of pleasure that reached me deeper than just my arm. This was creation. I gave life, and it was glorious. I watched the energy pour from me into Daniel, filling him, making him whole in my eyes.

  Making him real.

  Making him mine.

  Ecstasy rolled through the deepest part of me as our connection grew. Our skinsong sang across time and space. My mind was a lotus flower that opened to his, and I knew him. I could see his life laid like a tapestry before me, the texture of memory woven into who he was: a man of honor, still growing into his own skin but close, so close to the man he would be forever. He had no stain of guile, no taint of deception in him. My eyes followed a golden vein that ran from his heart, a crack of ore in a mountainside. As I watched, it widened, spilling energy into the magick I poured into him. The two mixed. The golden energy began to suffuse through my magick, running along the channel. It hunted, seeking the source of magick.

  It found my Mark and slammed into me, and Daniel and I became one flesh.

  I was overwhelmed. My essence and his slowly revolved around each other, a key turning until the tumblers in the lock set. I fell back, my hand sliding off the now-healed slick spot on his back. Daniel turned in one swift motion, fingers curling around my wrist, catching me before I crashed.

  His eyes were bright, glittery, and a brilliant shade of sea-foam green. He gave me his boyish grin, the one that made his dimple so deep you could lose yourself in it. “Thank you … Mistress.”

  Oh, damn.

  Darkness swirled in the corner of the room, reality bending along curved lines. The Man in Black stepped through the gloom. He looked down at us for a long moment.

  “What have you done?”

  42

  THE ASPHALT WAS dirty under our feet, littered with trash and oil and grime. I knew because I looked down at it when we popped through the skein of reality. My own skin burned with fire, and my head spun, but I thought I was getting used to this transdimensional travel.

  Daniel pulled away, staggering a few steps until he reached the brick wall of the alley we were in. The sound of him being sick made me turn. His shoulders heaved and jerked.

  I turned away to give him privacy.

  The Man in Black glared at me, nearly disappearing in the gloom of the alley, black coat rustling uneasily around him. He loomed in the shadows, his brows furrowed, his mouth drawn into a sneer.

  He was pissed at me.

  Screw him.

  He wasn’t my favorite person … elder god … whatever … either.

  Apparently, when I saved Daniel’s life I cut the Man in Black’s hold on him. I’d done what I wanted and set him free from the chaos god, which was great, but now he was tied even more tightly to my magick.

  I could feel him in the corner of my mind. Like a thing you can’t quite remember, a specter of consciousness that haunts the hallways of your mind, a memory you can’t put down, the wallpaper of your brain that you can’t peel off or paint over. It wasn’t unpleasant; in fact I found it comforting. Comforting but weird.

  Daniel came over, wiping his mouth.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded. “Better now.”

  I studied him. He still looked healthy—a little flushed from throwing up, but okay. Not weak and near collapse like before. My eyes shifted, the muscles behind them twitching as my vision changed and I Saw Daniel through my magick. He still appeared to be full of the gold-infused energy from before. I blinked, and the world came back into focus.

  The more I used the magick inside me, the easier it came.

  I’d have to be very careful.

  Noise wrapped around us, coming in from the alley opening, a hum and buzz of people and vehicles, the hustle and bustle of a metropolis. People stood in a line stretched across the alley between the buildings that rose on either side of us. Only a handful of them looked over at us. Most looked ahead, or down, or were engaged by their phone or other electronic device. Jacked in, constantly connected through social media to people they never saw in real life, they read instant updates about every little thing that happened to distant friends, all the while ignoring people standing less than a foot away.

  The blank looks on their faces, even on the few who turned to see what we were doing, reminded me of the people in line at Ashtoreth’s hotel.

  Daniel leaned in toward me, speaking from the side of his mouth. “Creepy.”

  Creepy indeed.

  I nodded.

  “Do you know what city we’re in?” he asked.

  I shrugged and looked over at the Man in Black. He said nothing. I looked back at Daniel. “I don’t suppose it really matters.”

  “No, I guess not.” His eyes slid past me, moving up and over my shoulder to look deeper in the alley. “Hold on.”

  He moved away from me, taking four steps and picking up a discarded chunk of rock or metal. His hand covered it almost completely, so I couldn’t see what it was. The words to ask what he was doing were on my lips when he pulled his arm back and slung the thing into the alleyway. My eyes tracked it as it flew fast and true toward a low-slung shape crouching beside a Dumpster.

  The skinhound.

  It jerked back, nimbly dodging Daniel’s missile. Whatever he had thrown clanged loudly against the side of the metal Dumpster where the skinhound’s head had just been. The devil dog’s muzzle cracked in a grin that would have given a rabid jackal the creeps, and it stared at us with its one baleful yellow eye. The other one, the one I had injured, was a stark, empty socket that sat black on its skinless face.

  Daniel stomped his foot and waved his arms. “Get the hell outta here!”

  The skinhound simply crouched lower, nearly disappearing into the shadow of the Dumpster.

  The Man in Black raised his red right hand. It sat on the end of his arm, an unlit torch, a treacherous signal fire yet to be struck. His fingers twitched, the middle one touching and then snapping across the thumb in a SNAP! that sounded like a lightning strike. The skinhound’s face jerked up, its eyes wide as it studied us. After a long moment the Man in Black swept his hand in a dismissive motion. The skinhound turned tail, disappearing into the shadows.

  Daniel grunted. “That was the next thing I was going to try.”

  I leaned in. �
�I didn’t even see it down there. Why is it here?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, but I saw it back at the hospital too, when we were outside. I was going to shoo it away, but then we did the disappearing trick and I got sidetracked.”

  I didn’t think we’d seen the last of that thing, but I didn’t say it out loud.

  The Man in Black began walking toward the front of the alley. He didn’t turn to see if we were following him.

  Temptation weighed on me to stay there. Let him fight this thing. Why should Daniel and I risk ourselves anymore? He was the elder god, not me; let him handle this.

  But I started walking.

  I needed to make sure, to see this through. I’d come this far, and I knew what would happen if we didn’t end this. I’d been given magick, and, dammit, that obligated me to do something with it even if I hated the one I had to help.

  Daniel followed me, staying close to my side and just slightly behind. The Aqedah pressed hard against my hip, the flat edge of the black iron blade between my belt and my jeans. The shirt I’d thrown on used to be my dad’s and worked as a jacket, so it mostly covered everything, but I still felt tense walking into a group of people with a foot-long magick knife at my side.

  Nyarlathotep didn’t slow as he approached the people stretched across the alleyway. He walked as if he owned the entire city, coat flaring around him like bat wings. His red right hand pulsed with crimson energy. It left a color trail in my vision, but that could have been my magick making my eyes go weird again. The people stepped aside as he reached them, parting like water. He stepped through, and they shuffled back into place.

  Blocking me and Daniel.

  I didn’t slow, just kept walking. I drew near, and coldness crept up my legs as if I were walking through a chill fog.

  I stopped an arm’s length from the line. In front of me stood a man in a blazer and a pair of slacks. He looked older than my dad but held himself like someone my age. He slouched casually in line, exuding a cool “I don’t give a damn” attitude, fingers moving rapidly around a small touch screen in his hand. He didn’t look over at us.