Red Right Hand Page 21

  He grew, expanding and swelling, his shark maw swinging wide and vicious. She tried to fight, legs kicking, her hands moving. I could feel her try to use her magick like an echo inside my chest. The Crawling Chaos smiled around his slung-open jaw, arm-thick tongue slithering out, whipping the air. A guttural bark blew Other Charlie’s hair as he laughed at her futile effort.

  Her tears fell, splashing against rows of jagged, jutting enamel.

  Then he shoved her face first down his throat.

  Cthulhu’s hand clamped on my arm, stopping me from running to save her. I jerked hard against his grip, but he kept his fingers closed.

  A small part of my mind noticed they were webbed to the second knuckle.

  “Let me go!”

  “It would do no good.”

  I pulled harder, jerking with all my body weight. “What’s happening?”

  He let go of my arm, and I stumbled. “You were only shown a portion of this future. You were manipulated into using your power to guide reality to this future. Your choices have been tumblers in a lock, one by one falling into place until this future cannot be undone. It is almost too late. This is the reality if you allow the Son of Azathoth to win.”

  I looked at the scene with Other Charlie and the Crawling Chaos. They were perfectly still, time-locked; everything around us was frozen in place. Her legs hung in a mist of blood freeze-framed around the monstrous countenance of Nyarlathotep. It was gruesome and gory, and the fact that I was looking at another version of myself made the horror even more surreal. It scratched at my eyeballs, picking away at the edge of my sanity.

  I turned away, back to Cthulhu. He stood there as if he were innocent, the kindly old guy who would buy you beer but never ever try to feel you up after you drank it. It was a lie, and I recognized it. “Oh, and you want me to throw in with you?”

  He shrugged. “It would be better.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “All I want is a home for my star-spawn. They swim the aeons of space, skirting through the Void without form, without a home. It…” A tear trickled from a watery brown eye. “… pains me to be separated from them.”

  Loss struck me like a fist, blasting into my gut, leaving me scooped out. I felt as though part of me, part of who I am, had been trapped a million miles away, and I couldn’t get to it, couldn’t be whole, would never be whole again.

  I felt like I did when I’d woken up so many years ago.

  Cthulhu moved closer, his webbed hands moving to my arms, gentle this time. “Charlie, you have to understand, he is the Great Destroyer! He is the Ravening Lion. You are food to him and his kind. If he has his way, your world will be a feasting board. All I want is a home for me and mine. My children will come and bring everlasting life to this planet. No more death. No more illness. No more war. Just peace and plenty and an endless, pleasant dream.” His hand swept over his hair, coming away shiny. Before I could flinch, he swiped it across my face. My eyes slammed shut as they were anointed with a thin sheen of oil from an elder god.

  When I opened them, I was flying through space, and I wasn’t human anymore.

  55

  WE HUDDLE CLOSE, but it does no good; the cold still cuts through us, slicing its way to our cores. Bits of dust and debris, detritus from planets smashed long ago into pieces, whiz past, scouring my skin. I am filleted in a thousand micro-tears.

  My brother next to me isn’t as fortunate. He is reduced to a shred of flesh and a cloud of fluid that the ones behind fly through, blinking him away from their single open eyes.

  He is gone.

  One less of us.

  The loss of him is a sharp pain throughout our shared mind.

  We huddle closer.

  Filling in the gap.

  A sun goes nova as we sail by, flaring into a bright purple burst, unleashing gamma rays that cold-scorch the flank of our school.

  I feel their nerve endings burn and curl as if they were my own.

  Hundreds fall away, drifting into space, becoming detritus themselves.

  Flotsam.

  Jetsam.

  Still, we swim on.

  The hole inside me hurts. I need. There is something out there that can heal me.

  I just have to find it.

  We just have to find it.

  Father, help us.

  Please just call us home.

  56

  I’D BEEN TORN from the outskirts of space and flung to the ground like a bird plucked from the sky by the hand of God. Tumbling across the ash-covered ground of the nightmare future, I rolled to a stop. I couldn’t breathe. Fine gray soot filled my nose, coating the inside of my throat, closing it down so air couldn’t squeeze through.

  This is the ash of everything I love.

  I scrambled to my feet, coughing and choking.

  Swallowing over and over again, gulping air, I finally managed to catch my breath. I held my chest, trying to keep my heart from pounding out of it.

  Blinking through streaming tears, my eyes found Cthulhu in his human guise.

  He’d fallen to his knees, the Crawling Chaos looming around him with deadly spikes of ebon energy. His face turned toward me, eyes filled with saltwater. He spoke into my mind as the first stabbing talon reached him.

  YOU MUST STOP HIM. I AM TOO WEAK AFTER MY CAPTIVITY.

  “I can’t.” The words hurt coming out.

  YOU MUST.

  His voice pitched up an octave, smoothing out, soothing against my ears.

  THREE TO BREAK THE SEAL.

  THREE TO TURN THE WHEEL.

  THREE TO LOOSE AZATHOTH.

  THREE AND ALL HOPE IS LOST.

  The words meant nothing to me. Azathoth. Azathoth was bad. I knew that, and the fact that he was tied to the Man in Black. Before I could ask what Cthulhu meant, the Crawling Chaos surged, swallowing him into the darkness of his coat. The dark god’s back was to me, the soot-and-ink blackness of the coat struggling to consume the body of Cthulhu. Shapes moved on the surface of the coat, bulging here and there in misshapen forms, the sea god trying to punch his way free. Nyarlathotep’s distorted face loomed above the collar, his hands, red and dark-skinned, both clutching the coat together as it screamed and screamed and screamed in my mind, its voice joining the voice of Cthulhu himself, a duet of glass-edged pain as one drove to consume and one fought to keep from being consumed. The clarion skrill of their agony crushed me to the ground.

  I screamed, joining them.

  Slowly, at a bone-grinding pace, the cries of Cthulhu faded, drifting into oblivion, and the coat fell to a whimpering that I echoed as the Man in Black shuddered and shifted, sliding back into his human skin.

  One last shiver and he snapped back into place.

  Slowly he turned, his dead white chaotic gaze falling on me.

  57

  “CHARLIE, MOVE!”

  Daniel’s arm hooked around my waist, dragging me to the side as a chunk of limestone the size of a small car crashed to the ground where I’d been standing. It exploded in a rain of dust and a shower of white stone. Daniel grunted as a fist-sized chunk slammed into his back so hard I felt it through the other side of his body as he wrapped himself protectively around me.

  The world crashed, falling to pieces.

  Daniel sucked in air and continued to pull me, dragging me away to safety.

  I shook my head, tearing through the confusion of the alternate reality I’d just left like a rotten spider web, and poked my face over his shoulder, looking for the engine of all this destruction.

  The Man in Black swung his red right hand back, flinging globules of crackling magick that bounced along the cavern floor behind him, scorching the limestone black where they landed. His hand clenched in a fist, surrounded by a nimbus of crimson lightning. It flared cornea-searingly bright, flinging the shadow of both elder gods toward us like a falling eclipse. Stark shadows cut the Man in Black’s face into a strobe-lit mask of fury, and the sea god’s back disappeared into the darkness of the ceiling.
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  Cthulhu’s massive webbed hand fell, dropping like an avalanche toward the chaos god. It looked slow, ponderous, because of the sheer mass of it, dropping inches instead of feet at a time. It had so far to fall it seemed to hang suspended in the air.

  Nyarlathotep lunged, flinging the spell in his red right hand.

  It flew, smashing into Cthulhu’s chest like a nuclear missile.

  Magick exploded, filing the cave with a red blast. My eyes slammed shut, but it still seared through my eyelids, spiking pain through them and into the back of my eye sockets. Rocks and dust fell like snow from the concussion of the impact. Silence rushed in as my ears shut from the BOOM!

  I tore my eyes open. I had to see.

  Cthulhu’s chest had been blown open.

  Mold-green skin yawned apart, strange and alien shapes smoking where the crimson magick had scorched them to charcoal. I gagged as a stench blasted over me, smelling like a sewage treatment plant on fire. Daniel jerked the collar of his hoodie up over his face.

  Cthulhu fell to his hands and knees. The ground shuddered under my feet. Wings like tattered sails on a sinking ship hung limply off his mountainous back. The tentacles around his mouth dragged through the dust, limp and flaccid, no movement to them at all. Those giant red orbs were shut tight, and his rounded head hung low between massive shoulders.

  The Man in Black leapt, the coat around him pushing him like a springboard into the air. He landed on Cthulhu’s face, just above the nest of tentacles that served as a mouth, and scrambled up him, arms and legs digging into the gigantic sea god’s mottled greenish skin. His coat flared around him, its tendrils becoming spikes and digging in to help pull him up. He looked like a black-carapaced beetle climbing a corpse.

  Maybe he was. Cthulhu had disappeared from my mind. I couldn’t feel him anymore, just the lack of him like a vacuum in my soul.

  The butchered god didn’t move, didn’t even shrug to shake the other elder god off. He just knelt there, head low as the Man in Black scaled his skull. Reaching the top, Nyarlathotep stood triumphant in a maelstrom of swirling darkness, the only color on him the gleam of too-sharp teeth and the lurching crimson pulse of his red right hand.

  Out came his sword, sliding from the depths of the coat. Something inside me slid into place, like a joint going back into socket with a sick, wet POP, and I could feel the pounding of the cries from the coat as it struggled against its wearer.

  Nyarlathotep ignored it.

  Shifting to a crouch, he raised the black-bladed sword over his head.

  A scream lodged in my throat, stuck against my trachea.

  He leapt, spinning delicately like a dancer, blade cutting the air around him.

  The sword fell like lightning, splitting the skull of Cthulhu in a tidal wave of gore.

  “NOOOOOOOOO!” Daniel screamed beside me, too little, too late.

  Black liquid poured across the limestone floor, rushing around stalagmite stumps, knocking over the altar, lifting the bodies of the Sushi Priest and his squid waiters in a dead man’s float.

  The Man in Black grabbed the edge of the sundered skull of his brother god, swinging himself up to perch at the crest of Cthulhu’s head. He leaned into the gap, his arm sinking into the fissure he’d carved, stretching into the gash, disappearing as it rooted around.

  The sensation came down the thin connection between me and Cthulhu, a faint echo of what the sea god experienced. It felt as if my brain was being stirred with a blender that had been set on fire.

  I fell to my knees, soaking to my waist in the tide pool of Cthulhu’s brain juice.

  Daniel grabbed me, lifting me before I could collapse completely and fall face first into the brackish slime.

  Cthulhu’s eye cracked open, just a slit, and our connection jolted across my nerve endings. I felt that gaze bore into my soul.

  STOP HIM BEFORE HE GETS A THIRD.

  The Man in Black gave a cry of triumph and pulled his arm out with a moist schlurp. He lifted a shining crystal that pulsed with energy, roiling from teal to putrid yellow to hot magenta.

  Cthulhu fell, crashing to the ground in a riptide of his own fluid.

  He was gone from my brain.

  58

  THE MAN IN Black stepped off the giant skull of his dead uncle god. He pranced toward us, puddles of gore splish-splashing around his feet. A smile cut his face in half, and he rubbed the crystal on his coat like an apple he planned to take a bite from.

  A mad gleam shone in his eye.

  I stepped closer to Daniel, and he stepped closer to me until our hands found each other. It felt like we were circling the wagons.

  The Man in Black stopped in front of us. He stretched like a cat, arms up, back arched, on his tippy-toes with his head tilted at an odd angle. He moaned as a series of quiet cracks ran in a chain from inside him.

  He dropped down, flat-footed.

  “Well, that was almost too easy.” His eyebrow arched sharply as he looked at me. “It was as if he were distracted.”

  Daniel’s hand tightened on mine. “Why would you say that?”

  “Oh, I do not know, the Lord of R’yleh may have been many things”—his fingers stroked the air as if looking for these things—“dull, single-minded, sentimental…” He ticked them off one by one on his left hand, the human one. “… but he was not a … what is your human word? Oh yes, he was not a bitch, and he should not have gone down like one.”

  “Does it matter how you stopped him?”

  “It matters if my Acolyte has designs to turn against me because of something she was told.”

  My heart stopped beating.

  He knows.

  Daniel tensed, moving just slightly forward, between me and the Man in Black. “They didn’t talk. He didn’t say anything to her, and she didn’t say anything to him.”

  “You know nothing.” Nyarlathotep plucked at a tattered piece on the edge of his coat, capturing it between two red, skinless fingers. He pulled it slowly, tearing it from the rest of the coat in one long, drawn-out rip.

  I felt its pain as a faint echo in my head.

  Laying the strip of coat against the jewel in his hand, he began to wind it around, stretching it as he went. He didn’t look when he spoke, but his words were aimed at me. “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Pulling the strip into a loop, he hung the jewel around his neck beside the one from the Cancer God. They rubbed against each other, the crystalline planes and corners chinking and squeaking in protest. The colors in each of them whipped into a frenzy, rushing toward the other jewel and then darting away, like living, liquid energy trapped in a prism of quartz.

  “Liar, liar pants on fire.” He stopped. “Well, not literally. Not yet.”

  “We fulfilled our part of this deal. Let us walk away now.”

  His tongue clucked the roof of his mouth. “Tut-tut-tut, Acolyte. That was not the bargain struck.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  Dark eyes glowed. He licked his lips. When he opened his mouth his voice had changed. Daniel’s voice came from the Man in Black’s throat. “Name your price, and we’ll pay it.”

  Oh no.

  “I name my price, Daniel Alexander Langford.” The Man in Black’s smile widened, teeth gleaming in the dim luminescence of the cave. “That price is your life.”

  Before I could move, he fell on Daniel in a swirl of black coat. In a blink, they were gone.

  I screamed, the only person left alive in that dank, subterranean pit.

  59

  I HAD TO find them. Seconds ticked by as my mind scrambled for a solution. Seconds Daniel didn’t have. I’d seen the Man in Black kill. Daniel might not even be alive now.

  The thought stabbed through me, dropping me to my knees.

  I needed to find them to save him to stop this to find him to save him. The wish inside me screamed out, desperate to be fulfilled.

  Nothing happened.

  What?

  Horribl
e realization dawned. Daniel was gone. My magick had no fuel. It lay quiet and still inside me. Small. Smaller than it had ever felt since being sparked. I could feel it like a shallow pool deep inside me, a nearly dry well.

  No. No. Not now. Not when I needed it most.

  That I could fail Daniel when he needed me most felt like a knife in my guts.

  Knife.

  Wait.

  My brain turned slowly, rotating around something the Man in Black had said to me earlier.

  When you need your magick it can be activated by touching your Mark with any bodily fluid. Blood is the strongest.

  Shifting the Aqedah to my left hand, I laid the edge of the blade against my wrist. It sat next to the line already there, the scar straight and thin. The surgeon had done a great job sewing it up. Just a thin white line of hard tissue was the only sign that anything had ever happened.

  I used it as a guide.

  Across the street, not down the river.

  Not unless you’re serious.

  The magick knife didn’t drag at all, slipping through my skin as though it were water. Crimson welled in its path, a furrow of my own making filling with my life blood. It spilled down my palm in a thick trickle, following the crease of my lifeline, running toward my Mark.

  It hit the red, raised scar tissue of the Mark, and the magick inside me tried to push itself out of my skin like needle-hairs through every pore.

  The blood pooled in my palm, making a little puddle.

  I closed my eyes, seeing Daniel’s face in my mind. His green eyes, his dimple, the way his hair kept falling into his eyes.

  I kept him there and thought one simple thing.

  Take me to him.

  I felt no pain this time. There was a sharp tug that felt as though my spine were being yanked through my belly button, but no pain. I stumbled forward, stepping from where I had just stood to where I wanted to be in a swoosh of passing reality.

  I left the close, dank darkness of the cave with its mottled stink of limestone and sea-god brain juice and stepped into the cold, clear, open darkness of a moonless night.

  Pinprick stars lay their light upon me, making the world shine. I stood on a hill. There was grass under my feet. The air felt frosty, my breath hanging in a cloud with each exhale. My hand felt warm.